Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  A source base created at the intersection of individual and group consciousness and that is capable of revealing “everything” is enticing for the historian. Among the vast numbers of records made before 1945 that could be called “blues,” the most useful in understanding the evolution of political and cultural thought among the black southern working class are those recorded by the male musicians who sprang from the plantation districts and black neighborhoods of the South and remained connected to those communities even as they traveled to or moved to the North for professional opportunities. While blues divas such as Bessie Smith released record after record, “the great country blues singers . . . were almost always men,” Amiri Baraka has noted: “Most of the best-known country singers were wanderers, migratory farm workers, or men who went from place to place seeking employment . . . In those times, unless she traveled with her family it was almost impossible for a woman to move about like a man.”21 So men became the primary keepers of the country blues tradition. Huddie Ledbetter, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, and others were what later generations would esteem as “singer-songwriters” who created a lot of their own material and tried to play in unique, individualistic styles to differentiate themselves from other musicians on the scene. “The fact that the country blues is usually a one-man show,” wrote music historian Charles Keil, “also helps to account for the broad variety of vocal tones and ornamentations used by a singer to decrease the monotony of his presentation.”22 Indeed, many of the blues songs were packaged in a familiar form that featured three vocal lines—an initial call, then repeated and followed by an answer—laid over forty-eight beats measured over twelve bars; this form provided a stable musical foundation for often unsettling and dramatic lyrical stories. The bluesmen were entertainment professionals living and working among the audience that came to see them in the jooks and bought their race records, so their musical stories—no matter how seemingly autobiographical—remained relevant to their listeners.

  Finding Meaning in the Blues

  In shaping their own personal point of view, many of the men who became blues musicians took on the role of the outsider, the castaway, the drifter. As the pages that follow demonstrate, much of the Lower Mississippi Valley’s blues lyrical tradition was individualistic and opposed to conformity and social order. The music itself was often dissonant and disharmonious. In Mozart’s Enlightenment-era Vienna, musicians sought to express beauty through order, balance, and harmony. In Charley Patton’s Jim Crow-era Delta, musicians expressed beauty through pain, dissonance, and irony. What a reflection of daily life! Confronting contemporary depictions of black life in films such as The Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer, or commercial products such as Nigger Head Tobacco, and books such as Robert Shufeldt’s The Negro: A Menace to American Civilization (1907), blues musicians offered a black voice to the conversation about race and place in American society. In the beginning of the blues story, that voice developed in and was for the most part confined to the jooks and porches of the plantation districts, but a Great Migration and the advent of recording and broadcasting rapidly increased the southern black voice’s range and volume in mainstream American culture. The blues musicians whose stories are captured on recordings made in the field and in the studio created a rich historical record when so many of their friends, family members, and co-workers could not do likewise. Facing legal and extralegal intimidation, and with high rates of illiteracy and poverty, most southern black workers had little chance to leave the record of their lives in traditional historical documents, and, in Levine’s words, were “rendered historically inarticulate.”23

  The prewar era blues recordings and musicians’ recollections offer an opportunity toward remedying the problem of the historically inarticulate, but this project has proven itself as problematic as it is exciting because ongoing events in race relations have continued to shape historical consciousness about race and racism. The historiography of American slavery provides an instructive example. In the forty years preceding Peter Kolchin’s publication of American Slavery, 1619-1877 in 1993, the American population witnessed a multifaceted civil rights struggle of battles waged in court and in the streets. During the four decades between the Brown v. Board of Education decision (1954) and the Rodney King-Los Angeles riots (1992), students of American slavery saw the emergence of several divergent schools of thought among historians. Debates raged over the relative autonomy of American slaves: Did slaves accommodate to and accept the harsh conditions of forced servitude, scholars wondered, or did slaves actively resist the system, never accepting their poor lot in life? Was it necessarily terrible to be a slave, or did the vibrancy of African American cultural practices and the limited autonomy afforded slaves in “cabin culture” ameliorate the hardships of forced labor? Did white southerners practice slavery to create English or European solidarity, or was slavery simply an economical expedient, given the South’s land and labor environment?

  Various scholars answered all of these questions in the affirmative. While interpretive diversity is generally good for a field of study, Balkanization of this sort also poses a problem for students whose view of the subject may be shaped by one of the monographs that leaves the reader believing that slavery was altogether this or decidedly that. Given the general scholarly integrity of the dissenting views on the so-called peculiar institution, Kolchin realized that a broad, synthetic work on American slavery would acknowledge the veracity of all of these points of view, balance them, and offer a nuanced understanding that an institution as widespread and durable as slavery was both varied and flexible.24

  The history of American blues music, although not as established and aged as the study of American slavery, is now approaching the latter field in popularity and diversity of opinion. Likewise, blues scholarship suffers from many of the same problems with fragmentation as did slavery historiography when Kolchin surveyed the subject in the early 1990s.25 The contemporary student of blues music in American history can find many traditional works on the blues, from work by the collector-folklorist Paul Oliver and his followers to studies by Jeff Todd Titon and his successors, who approach the subject as musicologists. The Oliver camp (including Sam Charters and Frederic Ramsey) became the authoritative accompaniment to the 1960s folk revival. Having read the classics by John Lomax and Newman White, they considered the blues to be an essentially conservative musical tradition, helping the long-oppressed African American population sublimate its anguish and anger in song, not in a communal fashion (as with the spirituals and gospel) but, more tragically, as individual cries of desperation and resignation. In representative works such as Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning (1960), Ramsey’s Been Here and Gone (1960), and Charters’s The Country Blues (1959) and The Poetry of the Blues (1963), these researchers argued that traditional country blues were relatively static and that mass-market commercialism was damaging African Americans’ musical identity: “It seems likely that the future of the blues as the ‘song of the folk,’ as a ‘spontaneous utterance,’ “ wrote Oliver, “is likely to be a brief one.”26 In the next two decades, the Titon mu-sicological camp used lyrical themes and music theory to show that blues musicians were both conservative and creative, adapting their music to reflect their ever-changing experiences during the twentieth century, and provided a more nuanced and technical narrative of the blues than did Oliver and his colleagues.27

  By the turn of the twenty-first century, blues scholars became more narrow and parochial in their studies, often analyzing blues culture through the prism of a particular social phenomenon, such as violence and the prison system (Adam Gussow and Bruce Jackson), feminism (Angela Davis), or religion (Jon Spencer and Julio Finn). Others (Bill McCulloch and Barry Lee Pearson) have made serious efforts to debunk the romanticized blues mythologies—the Faustian tales of Robert Johnson, or those linking him to the crossroads spirit, Legba, for example—that emerged and calcified during the mid-twentieth century. Like many fields, blues scholarship has become
increasingly interdisciplinary, yielding blues narratives manifested in oral history, film, poetry, and visual art that are exciting, even if sometimes discordant with the traditional blues histories of the 1960s. The early writers, as Wald says, “were . . . dealing with not only records but with people, and the degree to which they could impose their personal reactions on what they were hearing was more limited than today’s writers.”28

  In the early twentieth century, two distinct camps formed and dominated the interpretive spectrum of blues historiography, and at least by World War II, these two camps were firmly entrenched. Finding that African Americans in the South had accommodated to Jim Crow, the Smithsonian’s John Lomax heard in the blues the voice of sorrow, hopelessness, and defeat. Far removed from Reconstruction, and preceding the civil rights movement by several decades, Lomax and contemporaries such as Newman White struggled to see the blues (and southern black music in general) as amounting to anything more than a cultural repository for the long African American experience of accepting whites’ social, political, and economic supremacy. Part of their inability to understand the creative genius of southern black music may have stemmed from latent racism in contemporary society, but Lomax and the others may have also suffered from what ethnomusicologist Gerhard Kubik labeled “a Western cognitive problem in the encounter with African American music,” meaning that these “outside” observers lacked what Gussow called “the cultural competency to decode rhythmic patterns of repetition-with-variation as articulate music.”29 Lomax saw little reason for analyzing his evidence and considered folk-song collecting as a primarily preservative endeavor to save folk culture in the wake of urbanism and mass production. His American Ballads and Folksongs (1934, written with his son, Alan)—like most of the folksong publications of the time—appears now as an antiquarian collection of regional tunes that captured the diversity of the American cultural landscape in the pre-World War II years. John Lomax’s presentation to urban audiences of musician Huddie Ledbetter as a country folk oddity revealed this underlying philosophy of folklore studies.30

  Alan Lomax shared his father’s love for folksong hunting as well as the view that black music was essentially conservative, but for the younger Lomax, the tradition preserved was one of protest, pride, and hope—not forlorn desperation. Following his father around southern prisons, levee camps, and work farms, Alan developed an ideological as much as a generational split from his father, preferring Popular Front politics. The younger Lomax regarded the blues as a culture of latent resistance and smoldering resentment; he even encouraged Ledbetter to adopt a new, more radical identity in his song writing and leave behind his folksy routine. Many of Alan’s contemporaries viewed the South in terms of economic relationships—white landowners superimposing racial constructs on top of class structures, forcing the separation of labor and land ownership in a region where agriculture and timber were the main forms of production. Many Leftists of that era hoped that destitute southern blacks could mount a successful uprising over the region’s political, economic, and racial hegemony. Historians depicted blacks as the lumpen proletariat on the verge of revolution, labor activists tried to rally poor blacks (and whites) along socialist lines, and communist lawyers came to the aid of the black defendants in the famed Scottsboro case in Alabama. While Yale anthropologist Hortense Pow-dermaker found resistance to Jim Crow almost exclusively among the upper classes of black society, folklorists such as Benjamin Botkin discovered “in the blues and reels of the worksongs and ‘hollers’ of the Black South” an “expression of social change and culture conflict,” and Hungarian-born Lawrence Gellert, living among black laborers in North Carolina, returned to the campus of Indiana University to write his Negro Songs of Protest (1936).31

  Scholars in later years would reiterate both Lomax positions. In the late 1950s, Charters and Oliver picked up John Lomax’s accommodationist view as they wrote the books that would be the reference tomes for blues revivalists in the mid-1960s. These writers understood that there was little protest in classic blues music because blacks “knew no better environment” and “were primarily concerned with the business of living from day to day, of conforming and making the best of their circumstances” since, as Willie Dixon had said of lynching: “You couldn’t do nothing about these things . . . The black man had to be a complete coward.” For Oliver, blacks had widely accepted white stereotypes, and he called “demonstrably insupportable” any argument that the blues were essentially protest music. Charters agreed wholeheartedly; though the music was born in inequity, the blues did “not try to express an attitude toward the separ-ateness of Negro life in America. Protest is only a small thread in the blues.”32

  On the other side, something akin to Alan Lomax’s Popular Front view manifested among the radical scholars of another working-class movement— the “Black Power” surge of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As slavery scholars such as Eugene Genovese (Roll Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, 1974) were opening the historical community’s eyes to African American cultural creativity and autonomy, blues historians such as Paul Garon suggested that blues lyrics, too, were a “liberating force.” According to black authors James Cone and Amiri Baraka, the necessity of liberation-in-song could be seen in the difficulties of being black in white America—difficulties that were visible in blues music as well as in the smoke rising above America’s black ghettoes during the “long hot summers” of the late 1960s. John Greenway, author of American Folksongs of Protest (1970), wrote that “from the earliest periods of American history the oppressed people forming the broad base of the social and economic pyramid have been singing of their discontent.” Cone, in The Spirituals and the Blues (1970), argued that white authors such as Oliver, Charters, and Ramsey might miss the protest element in the blues because black musicians did not “couch the blues in white categories of protest.” That might be forgivable, Cone added, because “the political significance of the blues is not very impressive to those who have not experienced black servitude,” thus obfuscating what Gussow would later call the “quiet riot” that were the blues.33

  The accommodationists, beginning with John Lomax, were first on the scene—the protest blues camp came later—but each side was in vogue several times throughout the twentieth century. If the blues are to serve as the body of evidence from which to construct a history of working-class blacks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, we must confront two fundamental problems that arise in placing the blues along this axis of accommodation and protest. The first problem derives from the understanding that blues music and blues musicians in fact occupied all points along the spectrum. During his visit to the United States in the early 1890s, Czech composer Antonin Dvorak observed that black music touched the entire range of human emotion, saying of African American songs, “They are pathetic, tender, passionate, melancholy, solemn, religious, bold, merry, gay or what you will.” So flexible and lycanthropic was black music in Dvorak’s reckoning that it attained a musical universal: “There is nothing in the whole range of composition that cannot be supplied with themes from this source.” And certainly a multitude of blues musicians were doing just that, crafting melodies and lyrics from the rich source base that so impressed Dvorak .34 Irony and hardship, satire and misery, humor and resentment, sex and solitude—these diverse and often seemingly opposite themes were the building blocks of a blues culture that was alternatively ribald and subdued. Open revolt was absent, yet the lyrics and notes make clear that southern black laborers maintained a sense of dignity, independence, and, at least, personhood, even though full citizenship was intangible. “Blues song lyrics operate dialecti-cally,” wrote Titon, “to resolve or at least reconcile the conflict between desire and necessity.”35 Resistance existed side by side with acceptance.

  The second major problem in considering the blues as either a culture of accommodation or a culture of resistance is that the content, function, and effect of the blues changed over time. Blues music grew out of African and American t
raditions of oral communication and art, but between the 1910s and 1940s the genre took shape differently in the context of war, economic depression, and migration. Furthermore, many of the musicians who popularized the genre after Handy initiated the craze were out of the scene by World War II, having died or, like Son House, “disappeared,” giving way to new generations of bluesmen who strove for musical and technological innovations, wrote more sophisticated lyrics, and became more professional in most ways, including leaving behind the old vision of the dusty, road-worn bluesman. “Blues isn’t all about some guy sitting on a corner, or a store porch or in a little dingy joint, with overalls on and patches on them,” Little Milton offered, “There’s nothing wrong with coming on stage looking like you’re somebody that’s successful, smelling good, you know—the hygiene thing, the whole bit.” Just recall Muddy Waters’s pompadour hair and silk suits.36

  The spirit of the blues, its technical production even, can be quite straightforward, but the people who created it, and the many uses they put blues to, were hardly simple. Labels such as accommodative, resistant, and authentic often prove confining, and perhaps more confusing than illuminative. And overwor-rying whether this or that particular blues song is a folksong or a commercial corruption is probably best left to colloquial conversation. Deference to the musicians is in order; in response to the folklorists’ definition that folksongs are an anonymous product of the faceless, oral tradition, Mississippi-born musician Big Bill Broonzy offered the following: “I guess all songs is folk songs. I never heard no horse sing ‘em.”37 Lyrics that had been inherited for generations all of a sudden found themselves at the heart of commercial recording hits, which in turn shaped what the folks were playing back on the farm. So the blues musicians were both curators and inventors, archivists and artists. People who lived in the “land of the free” as well as the “land of the tree” (as in lynching) understood the limits of free speech and made frequent use of ironic and coded language, but that did not restrain them from exploring all sorts of real-life acts of independence in their nightlife and the music that provided the soundtrack. The musicians knew how to negotiate Jim Crow life and make the best of it by accepting rather than denying pain.