by R. A. Lawson
Jim Crow’s Counterculture
Making the Modern South
David Goldfield, Series Editor
Jim Crow’s Counterculture
The Blues and
Black Southerners
1890-1945
R. A. Lawson
Published by Louisiana State University Press
Copyright © 2010 by Louisiana State University Press
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
FIRST PRINTING
Designer: Mandy McDonald Scallan
Typefaces: Minion Pro, text; Twang and Scala Sans, display
Printer and binder: Thomson-Shore, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lawson, R. A., 1974-
Jim Crow’s counterculture : the blues and Black southerners, 1890-1945 / R.A. Lawson.
p. cm. — (Making the modern South)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8071-3680-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Blues (Music) —Southern States—History and criticism. 2. African Americans— Southern States—Social conditions—20th century. I. Title.
ML3521.L38 2010
781.6430975’09041—dc22
2010009319
The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.
To all the folks who speak as if they’re singing, dress as if they’re a painting, and generally live life as a poem.
Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political.
—Jacques Attali, Bruits: Essai sur l’économie politique de la musique
Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments
Sound check
Call and Response: The Blues of Accommodation, the Blues of Resistance
Verse One
To Be Black Is to Be Blue: The Blues Profession and Negotiating the “Black Place” during Jim Crow
Verse Two
Leavin’ the Jim Crow Town: The Great Migration and the Blues’s Broadening Horizon
Break
Jim Crow’s War for Democracy: The Blues People and World War I
Verse Three
Workin’ on the Project: The Blues of the Great Flood and Great Depression
Verse Four
Uncle Sam Called Me: World War II and the Blues Counterculture of Inclusion
Discography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations follow page 115
Preface and Acknowledgments
I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing ‘em.
—Big Bill Broonzy, interview in Time, 1962
And I guess all history is folk history.
I grew up in a musical family in which several generations had already, by the time of my birth, devoted at least a significant portion of their lives to music. My grandfather was a clarinetist in the “Big Band” era, and several of my uncles likewise were jazz musicians. Cousins of all ages pursued musical endeavors to various degrees, and my brother has made his career with the violin. My parents’ home was one in which making and listening to music were parts of daily life—even our Boston terrier plunked his paws on the piano keys—and I tried my hand at the cornet, guitar, clarinet, and even the fiddle. We listened to plenty of jazz when I was growing up, and I recall one occasion when my uncle, a saxophonist, brought over a jazz album of particular interest. While I have forgotten the artist’s name, I do distinctly remember my uncle reading a curious question from the album’s liner notes: “Which is more painful,” this artist asked, “to have your skin slowly abraded from your flesh or to have it suddenly ripped off all at once?” What? I knew then that there was something “up” with jazz, and that moment began to lead me into a lifetime search to understand our national musical heritage. Writing Jim Crow’s Counterculture marks a significant step in that journey.
While many historians, folklorists, and musicologists have examined the blues for most of the music’s history, this study seeks to weave together findings from various disciplines with new primary research that (hopefully) results in an insightful, engaging, and gratifying narrative of the black American experience during the Jim Crow era. Investigating blues music reveals the story of people who were very expressive in their musical lives but left little record in traditional historical sources. The result is a new understanding of the counterculture that was the blues: a shared music that preached a message of personal freedom in a cultural environment so repressive that the expression had to be performed behind a veil—a constant dance between acceptance and resistance.
W. E. B. Du Bois called this dance the “double consciousness” of black folk, and it is just one of many dualities within blues history. For example, the progenitors of blues music were innovative artists, but thousands of later musicians expressed themselves in modes created by the likes of W. C. Handy and Charley Patton; individuals made up the society but the society made the individuals. Likewise, the blues culture sprang from a unique culture in the Lower Mississippi Valley just over one hundred years ago, but as the twentieth century wore on, the blues craze caught on from Chicago to Copenhagen and beyond. Human beings are a diverse bunch, but some of our experiences and feelings seem universal. The dualism of the blues reminds us that paradox is a key element of the human condition, that the best of times can indeed be the worst of times.
In this book I have sought to tell the story of the blues counterculture’s emergence in the early Jim Crow South and to explore the lives of the musicians who developed the art form in its first four decades. In so doing, I hope to break away from the “black culture as accommodation” versus the “black culture as resistance” debate by showing that the blues, subtle and complex, performed in both ways for southern African Americans as they navigated the myriad obstacles presented by segregation and disfranchisement. A secondary goal is to help readers more fully understand and appreciate the nearly four centuries of West African heritage in American life. It is clear that much of modern American language, technology, religion, architecture, and a whole host of other cultural aspects sprang from the nation’s European roots. But in much of popular culture, especially musical culture, Americans are African.
This study chronicles a significant cultural change that took place among African Americans between the rise of Jim Crow society in the 1890s and the end of World War II—a change that can be heard in the songs and words of the black musicians of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Derived from the good-timing music of southern workers and popularized by commercially aspirant musicians such as Handy, early blues were countercultural in several ways. Blues musicians—especially the men—preached an antiwork ethic and peddled a culture of individual escapism and hedonism, often by portraying values and behaviors that reflected the same debased culture of sex, drugs, and violence that whites ascribed to blacks. These musicians drew on traditions of southern black music such as call and response form or signifyin’ lyricism to create the blues, but these new songs were by no means timeless cries of the folk past. Rather, the blues were conceived, inherited, and reshaped by aspiring professional musicians who saw music as a countercultural escape from economic and social subservience.
Major historical developments began to change the Jim Crow South and thus the attitudes of the working class blacks who labored in that society. The Great Migration, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and two World Wars shaped a new consciousness among southern blacks as they moved north, fought overseas, and
sought gainful employment. The “me”-centered mentality of the blues increasingly became “we” centered as the musicians began to praise hard work, national unity, and patriotism. The first generation of bluesmen who often had been at odds with white-dominated American culture gave way to a Roosevelt-era generation of pluralist musicians who regenerated the blues’ countercultural impulse by leaning toward that which the Jim Crow segregationists would deny them: a fuller identity of American citizenship.
Of course, I did not realize any of this when I dove into the research for this book. The desire to know the blues more deeply came to me during my college years at LSU as a result of hanging out at Tabby Thomas’s Blues Box and Heritage Hall on North Boulevard in Baton Rouge. The club was a place where whites and blacks grooved to the tunes of blues musicians from up and down the Mississippi Valley, and a loaded revolver next to the cash register reminded the patrons to keep their acts together. The nights at Tabby’s and a few of the jook joints near Rampart Street in New Orleans started my love affair with the blues, but the idea that blues music revealed the history of African American political consciousness first came to me while listening to an obscure recording by Arthur Weston, “Uncle Sam Called Me,” on Testament Records’ compilation, the Sound of the Delta. So, when I headed north to Nashville to pursue graduate studies at Vanderbilt, I knew I wanted to explore the political blues.
Most of the research for this study was done in Oxford (Miss.), Memphis, and Nashville. The Tower Records across the street from Vanderbilt was particularly helpful. When I first began this project, I made a research trip to the Blues Archive at Ole Miss. One day I stopped by Square Books in downtown Oxford and picked up copies of Lawrence Levine’s Black Culture and Black Consciousness and Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning. These two books still sit on my desk within easy reach, and while my own findings often diverge from these luminaries’, I am ever thankful to these authors for their work and the guidance it has provided me.
Naturally, the writing of this book required the support of many people along the way. Sincere thanks to Meredith Veldman and Charles Royster of the history department at LSU. Professor Royster cautioned me against becoming an historian—”Don’t do it, unless you can’t think of any other profession that would satisfy you.” Professor Veldman encouraged me to move away from written sources and to try to my hand at writing music history. At Vanderbilt, my dissertation advisor, Don Doyle, made sure that when I told my story of the blues, it would be a story with meaning. Larry Griffin, my second reader, provided useful critiques of my work as I struggled with getting across my belief that blues music was in fact a counterculture in the Jim Crow South.
Charles Reagan Wilson showed early interest in the manuscript, and David Goldfield chose to include it in the LSU series, Making the Modern South. At LSU Press Rand Dotson has helped me in many ways, not least by getting Adam Gussow to review my manuscript several times, which has made this book much better than it otherwise would have been. I am likewise indebted to Julia Ridley Smith for her skillful work in the editing process.
I also want to thank Marjorie Spruill and Robert Llewellyn, Dean emeritus of Rhodes College, for setting up the Vanderbilt-Rhodes faculty exchange that got me to Memphis, where I first began teaching the history of the blues course that has helped me shape and refine my thinking about the subject. My department chair at Dean College, Marsha Nourse, in addition to being a great friend, has been a valuable mentor.
I lost several wonderful supporters during the course of the writing of this book. My dear colleague, Jim Lengel, passed away while we were in graduate school together, and my father died just as I was starting to draft the chapters. Jim was my intellectual partner in crime, and my father made sure I kept pursuing my professional goals. “I don’t usually tell you what to do,” my father said when I revealed to him that I wanted to drop out of grad school to open a night club with my friends, “but if you don’t stay in school, you’re making a big mistake.” The spirits of these two men motivated me through many sleepless nights of writing and revision, and my thanks to them are outweighed by the regret that they will never get to read Jim Crow’s Counterculture. Still with me are my brother and my mother, two people whose love has been constant and unconditional. My mother has always encouraged me to follow my restless feet where they would take me, and my brother—seven years my senior—has been the perfect blend of mentor and friend, helping me dream up ambitions worthy of pursuing. And, of course, there have been many dear friends along the way who have sustained me and given me great joy during the years I worked on this book—their presence in these pages is evident to me, if no one else.
Now, let’s head off to the banks of the Mississippi River and find out what the blues can tell us about the history of America in the first half of the twentieth century.
Jim Crow’s Counterculture
Sound Check
Call and Response
The Blues of Accommodation, the Blues of Resistance
Got one mind for white folks to see,
‘Nother for what I know is me,
He don’t know, he don’t know my mind.
—”Me and My Captain,”
transcribed by Lawrence Gellert, 1936
The Origins of the Blues Profession
While female blues stars such as Gertrude “Ma” Rainey and Bessie Smith were box office and record catalog hits, playing in big-audience venues with large instrumental ensembles, lesser-known male musicians traveled up and down the Mississippi Valley attempting to escape sharecropping and hoping to “make it” as professional musicians. Once obscure but now famous, many of these musicians were semiprofessional, itinerant songsters who hopped box cars, guitars strapped to their backs, carrying telegraphed invitations from talent scouts beckoning them to a recording session in Richmond, Indiana, or Grafton, Wisconsin. Into recording microphones they strummed and sang their stories for the audience of southern black workers—cash-strapped, voteless sharecroppers, stevedores, domestics, levee-camp workers, and loggers. Recording their various renditions of blues, these musicians created a culture that, in the mind of playwright August Wilson, was “brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.”1 The musical and lyrical creations of blues artists reflected the uncomfortable social position of their working-class black audience, and blues musicians created, told, and retold stories that were culturally oppositional— opposed to white supremacy, Christian forbearance, and bourgeois pragmatism and propriety.
These messenger-musicians were themselves countercultural not only in their often licentious and restless lifestyles but also in their ability to communicate publicly through veiled and coded language, drawing on techniques nurtured by their enslaved ancestors as well as West African oral traditions that were far, far more ancient. Like the griots who traveled the savannah kingdoms of the Sahel recounting royal history, the blues musicians crisscrossed the Jim Crow South, but the social space that allowed them to create their music was afforded them by the very segregation that enforced their second-class status. Whereas their female counterparts won commercial success and cross-racial acclaim up North by making hits out of W. C. Handy and Perry Bradford tunes, the southern male blues artists were relegated to more modest commercial venues—small batch releases on race record labels and gigs at house parties and jook joints. But in these smaller, more private spaces, they were relatively free to express themselves; the southern bluesmen’s ability to ridicule, subvert, oppose, and begrudge Jim Crow society was possible because they were confined to segregated spaces (in society and in the music market), and maintaining their ability to reject and ridicule their surroundings was predicated on their implicit acceptance of their place as outsiders. An odd situation when a community’s spokespersons position themselves as derelicts and rebels, as did many of the blues musicians, but such was the case when segregation, disfranchisement, and economic exploitation barred
southern blacks from public free speech. Their voices barred from the town hall, the newspaper office, and the jury bench, southern blacks were forced to protest in ways unrecognizable to whites, even if such defiance, in the words of Mississippi historian Neil McMillen, had to be “as much a state of mind as a physical act.”2
But studying “a state of mind” could be like navigating a labyrinthine bayou, and we should first establish our place on terra firma. First, a broad claim: Music, even when played for commercial reasons, can be expressive of community as well as individual thought and tendencies, especially when that music emerges from a strong oral-musical folk tradition, as was the case with the blues. In his 1963 work, Blues People, Amiri Baraka (then LeRoi Jones), proposed, “It seems possible to me that some kind of graph could be set up using samplings of Negro music proper to whatever moment of the Negro’s social history was selected, and that in each grouping of songs a certain frequency of reference could pretty well determine his social, economic, and psychological states at that particular period.” While no “kind of graph” is presented here, this book is dedicated to Baraka’s wider proposition that black music reveals a broad range of social thought and that blues specifically, despite “the relative formalization of secular Negro music,” remained “an extremely personal music.”3 To make an attempt at that proposition, the blues recordings made by southern-born blues musicians during the first half of the twentieth century provide the source base for this study of African American individuals and communities.
Many casual observers conjure images of a blues world centered squarely in the fifteen or so counties in northwest Mississippi that make up the Delta. The once-dense bayou-crossed tangles of junglelike bottomland forest in 1863 proved an impassable barrier for General Grant’s invading Army of the Tennessee. After the war, however, the Delta became the garden spot of the New South and allowed a rebirth of the grand planters and plantations, this time worked by the descendants of slaves. But a quick glance at a topographic map shows the arbitrariness of “the Delta.” The same geographic patterns and lay of the land—that is, alluvial floodplain with rich soil—is found on both banks, from New Orleans north to St. Louis, and the same socioeconomy grew throughout the Lower Mississippi Valley. That socioeconomy, according to Richard Wright, created a landscape of “saw mills, cotton-gins, lumber camps, levee-banks, floods, swamps, jails, highways, trains, buses, tools, depressed states of mind, voyages, accidents, and various forms of violence.”4 But the alluvial lowlands of Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, including the Delta, are not the complete picture. During the Jim Crow era, in fact, the blues world is best conceived as having been a great three-channeled pipeline moving material, people, ideas, and sounds from New Orleans and the plantation districts of the Lower Mississippi Valley in the South to Chicago and other industrial, urban communities in the North. The three channels were the Illinois Central Railroad, Highways 51 and 61, and the Mississippi River.