Woodward on "Nothing to Prove: Mac Arnold’s Return to the Blues”
From an interview with Stan Woodward recorded by Saddler Taylor and Tom Davenport on September 9, 2015. Edited for Folkstreams by Daniel W. Patterson.
This stand-alone documentary—the last major work of my career—looks into the life and music of Mac Arnold, who was a farmer and bluesman living in Greenville County, South Carolina. He left Greenville in 1967 and went to Chicago to carry his Piedmont blues bass-beat to the clubs frequented by Muddy Waters, Howling Wolf, and other blues greats. Mac is an organic farmer who owns the land his sharecropper father bought from the man he worked for. Mac returned from California in the late 1980’s to take over the farm from his mother, who had grown ill. None of Mac’s ten brothers and sisters wanted to run the farm, but Mac had the red clay of Upstate South Carolina in his blood from childhood, when he would plant with his father.
In the early 1990s a young white harmonica player named Max Hightower, who was enthralled with the blues and had researched its history, was working as a diesel mechanic when a truck drove into his work area for repairs. At the time Max was playing a pirated cassette recorded at a live Muddy Waters performance at a juke joint on Highway 62 near Clarksdale, Mississippi. When he looked up, a man wearing boots and a cowboy hat mimed the bass player for the music and sang the rare song lyrics in time with the cassette. “You know that song?” Max asked. “Know it? I was playing bass on that recording.” Max, in disbelief, said, “Come on, man. Who are you?” “Mac Arnold” was his reply. From that moment on Max pursued Mac, trying to get him to put a blues band together and begin playing locally.
I learned all this when I was asked by a fellow producer to shoot Mac’s concert celebrating the release of his first CD in 2005. It was entitled “Nothing to Prove.” During the break I went backstage carrying my own video camera. I was curious about how Mac came up with the name for his band Plateful of Blues.
I found Mac in the Green Room. I introduced myself and told Mac that I do folklife documentaries and that I wanted know to where he came up with the name for his band. He laughed that classic Mac Arnold laugh and said, “Well, I’ll tell you. I got chased down by Max Hightower, and he and a couple of musicians began to come out to my farm where we jammed. Max was trying to get me to start up a band, and he was persistent. Every time he would bring the band my wife would cook up food from my garden, and after many years the right musicians came together. I got serious about making a return to the blues. So when the time came to decide on a name for the band, we were sitting around the table one evening, and Max said, “Well, home cooking and eating around your table became so ingrained in our playing music together over all these years, I think we ought to call ourselves 'Plate Full O’ Blues.' So that’s how we decided on the name for the band.”
Mac went on to tell me that when he was twelve and had started playing, he would listen to blues music from Chicago over WLAC in Gallatin, Tennessee, and he’d say to himself, “Man, that’s where I wanna be.” He went on to say that he had his own band locally and that “We were pretty good. We get James Brown to come up from Augusta and he played with us, so we were pretty hot in the Greenville area. But one weekend I got money from my uncle and just all of a sudden I took off for Chicago. It was a little late in the game, because rock-and-roll had come along and started to push the blues aside. But there was still a lot of blues being played in small clubs. Then one night I was jammin’ and a guy from Muddy Waters came and heard me, and he came up to me and said, ‘Man, Muddy Waters wants you to come try out for playing bass with him. Will you come over and show him what you could do?’ So I went, and after playing a little Piedmont blues bass beat, he asked me, ‘Where does that sound come from?’ And I told him that where I grew up there was a mixture of country music, gospel, and rhythm-and-blues. Muddy really liked my beat and said, ‘Well, I want you to play bass with me.’”
Mac continued, “Gigs were fewer and fewer for big blues names because the rock and roll musicians were being so heavily promoted. This was an interesting time, because when things got slack and there weren’t as many gigs, Muddy would pack up his Cadillac and put his players in with him, and he would drive the blues highway, Route 64, to the old Juke Joints where he started out. Muddy was well-known by the locals, and we would have a time on those nights.” I learned that Mac had travelled with Muddy all over the country until the gigs just weren’t there anymore. Muddy finally saw the writing on the wall, and he said, “Mac, you’re a very talented man, and I’m gonna recommend you to a young man, Don Cornelius, who’s starting a TV program in Hollywood called ‘Soul Train.’ I’ve recommended you as manager for his floor band.”
At the end of my brief interview I knew that here was a story that could not go undocumented. So I asked if I could follow up with another interview on his farm. He agreed, and this was the footage I used to accompany a grant to the South Carolina Arts Commission that began my three years of travel with Mac and his band, recording every step in his progress as he returned to the blues mainstream. Three grants and three years later, I finished shooting the film with a five-camera shoot of Mac’s fulfillment of his dream: reuniting old Muddy Waters blues sidemen at a three-day blues festival of his own, The Mac Arnold Collards and Cornbread Blues Festival, held for the first time in his hometown of Greenville. The next week I suffered a mild stroke and had to stop shooting and headed to the Mac Arnold Documentary, and that was essentially the last piece that I shot. In 2007 I completed that piece of work. I completed editing this and the last of the “Hallowed Ground” films in 2008. The premier was held at The Handlebar Music Club in Greenville. Mac continued to expand his performances, enjoying popularity across the country and abroad.
