Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  I’m gonna do like a Chinaman . . . go and get some hop,

  Get myself a gun . . . and shoot myself a cop.

  Here, we see the will to do violence to whites in a song recorded only one year after the Red Summer of 1919, in which race riots erupted in American cities. This fragment also reveals the connection between drug use and violence (more on that later). But the second line—the final line of the song in fact—supports the point made in this study:

  I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news, now I’ve got the crazy blues.

  “If the crazy blues are the despairs bred by a seemingly unending barrage of racial ‘bad news,’ “ Gussow writes, “they are also the black subject’s determination to contest that bad news—as Mamie has just revealed in the couplet that precedes this line—by picking up a gun and shooting at what most oppresses.”84 Certainly, one could claim that this song, so widely publicized and listened to by white and black alike (though it was marketed to blacks as the seminal “race record” album) negates the argument presented here, but such a case would not only ignore the veiled and coded nature of African American blues lyrics, it would also deny that a song could mean different things to different people.

  The meaning of a particular song is dependent on the listener’s personal experience (e.g., the song a couple hears on their first date has a special meaning to them and not to other listeners), and black listeners could read between the lines in ways the white audience might not. Consider the songs written by W. C. Handy in the 1910s. Again, the musician/historian Gussow: “A central paradox of Father of the Blues lies here, in Handy’s strategic willingness as minstrel, songwriter, and bandleader to wear the mask of the ‘reliable,’ the submissive and trustworthy Negro—his willingness, above all, to provide campaign music for white southern politicians, including Mississippi demagogue James Vardaman and Memphis boss E. H. Crump—while simultaneously engaging in overt and coded racial revolt against the ‘hard conditions’ southern life imposed on him.”85 What Gussow was referring to becomes clear in the lyrics of Handy’s “Memphis Blues,” also known as “Mr. Crump,” which Handy wrote as a campaign tune for the reform ticket (i.e., segregationist) mayoral candidate in Memphis in 1912. Handy knew that reformers such as Crump were “about as palatable to Beale Street voters as castor oil,” but the tune—”a weird melody in much the same mood as the one that had been strummed on the guitar at Tutwiler”—was catchy, and the patrons of Pee-Wee’s saloon on Beale Street began making up their own impromptu verses to go along with the instrumentals. Catching the mood and wanting to appease his audience (as we have seen blues musicians were always keen to do), Handy penned lyrics for the song that would have had an ironic, humorous meaning to the black residents and revelers on Beale Street who heard them.

  Mr. Crump won’t ‘low no easy riders here,

  Mr. Crump won’t ‘low no easy riders here,

  We don’t care what Mr. Crump don’t ‘low,

  We gon’ to bar’l-house anyhow—

  Mr. Crump can go and catch hisself some air!

  “Luckily for us,” Handy wrote in his memoir, “Mr. Crump himself didn’t hear us singing these words,” and the song was released on record sans the Crump name as “Memphis Blues.” “It did the business, too,” Handy wrote. “Folks went wild about it. No doubt Mr. Crump would have gone wild too, in quite a different way, had he been permitted to hear the words. But he didn’t go with the band, so he never heard the song that many like to think whisked him into office . . . That of course, was neither here nor there. We were hired to beat the drum and blow the horn for Mr. Crump, and that we did—in our own way”86 This insistence on doing things “in our own way” was elemental to blues musical performance, if not always musical recordings. “The most vital sense in which the blues singers act as ‘reporters’ is the way they become reporters of the mental processes,” wrote blues historian Paul Garon: “Not so much the social or economic conditions of black life in America, but the effects of these conditions on the mind are expressed in the blues. Thus what the songs contain may be ‘reflections’ of reality, but they might also contain images projected with the purpose of overcoming reality.” Is this a description of accommodation or resistance? Mississippi historian Neil McMillen has claimed that violence may be a “state of mind as much as a physical act,” and Gussow argues that “existential revolt, which is to say affirmation in the face of romantic despair, is [a] . . . vital component of the blues response.” In this regard, blues was accommodative to Jim Crow, because rather than openly challenge segregation and disfranchise-ment, the blues musicians gave their black listeners a veiled way to cope with discrimination and to shape their own identities that allowed for individualism, merit, and self-efficacy—all things that Jim Crow custom sought to wrest from the hands of black southerners. Over time, therefore, the blues musicians were planting the seeds of collective resistance—seeds that would come to sprout in the 1940s and 1950s—by maintaining a cultural coping mechanism and passing down an effective means of valuing the self amid a dominant culture that demanded self-effacing and deferential behavior.87

  I’d Rather Be Sloppy Drunk: Sex, Drugs, and Violence in the Blues Counterculture

  How was this coping mechanism maintained? In order to survive, blues musicians had to strike a balance between their prescribed roles as social inferiors and their need to find self-worth and efficacy in their popular culture. Music, sex, drinking, and violence—these interconnected elements defined Robert Johnson’s last days. In July 1938, Johnson, having successfully put out “Terraplane Blues” and a few other songs through Vocalion, was hired to perform a couple of Saturday night gigs at the Three Forks jook joint outside Greenwood. There he began an illicit affair with the proprietor’s wife. During his second weekend gig at Three Forks, it seems that the bar owner spiked Johnson’s whiskey with poison, causing the bluesman to become terribly ill. He died a fortnight later of complications from the poisoning, cutting short a promising career. But there is more to Johnson’s murder than the nexus of sex, drugs, and murder. Think of the three actors here. They all sought to impose their will on others and to demonstrate their power: Johnson, by stealing the sexual attentions of another man’s wife, the adulterous woman by choosing a sexual partner other than her husband, and the husband by killing the man he felt had stolen from him. The tale of Johnson’s murder is a dark tragedy but also a powerful story of individual agency within the confines of segregated society.88

  Indeed, in the Jim Crow South, to be black was to be blue, and, like diaries in song, the blues recorded the insults and the injuries suffered by African Americans as individuals and as a race—injuries done to them by whites as well as injuries they imposed on themselves. But the blues culture was not a simple vocalized reaction to the civil injustices of life in the Lower Mississippi Valley. There may be much truth to Frantz Fanon’s claim that “without oppression and without racism you have no blues,” that complete liberation of the African peoples of the world “would sound the knell of great Negro music.”89 However, a counterculture is comprised of more than the sum of its oppositional parts. “The Blues cannot be reduced to a reaction against what white people do and have done; rather they would be more accurately conceived of as a positive form that affirms and preserves Afro-American culture,” wrote blues historian Ortiz Walker.90 Out of blues artists’ retorts to Jim Crow life grew “a broadly based cultural movement”—amounting to not so much “an ethos of revolt,” as blues chronicler William Barlow wrote, as an attitude of black cultural pride and cultural identity in the face of second class status in the political and economic arenas. Or, as Alan Lomax opined of the blues: “The tales and songs return again and again to a few themes—to the grievous and laughable ironies in the lives of an outcast people who were unfairly denied the rewards of an economy they helped build. One black response to this ironic fact was to create the blues—the first satirical song form in the English language . . . It is heartening that both the style an
d inner content of this new genre are bold symbols of an independent and irrepressible culture.”91

  Contemporary white observers such as Lomax and John Hammond often seemed to understand and appreciate the blues for its musical value and character but seldom realized the degree to which the blues represented a specific attitude among African Americans.92 That attitude could also be considered a worldview or lifestyle. Our conception of the relationship between the blues as a musical form and the blues as an identity or attitude is enriched by political economist Jacques Attali who became interested in the role of controlled, organized sound in a society’s intellectual development. In Noise: The Political Economy of Music, Attali first determined that musical sound, like language or architecture, is a tool for the ordering of societal hierarchies and, second, that musicians and their music play an integral role in a people’s carrying out of their cultural narrative:

  The musician, like music, is ambiguous. He plays a double game. He is simultaneously musicus and cantor, reproducer and prophet. If an outcast, he sees society in a political light. If accepted, he is its historian, the reflection of its deepest values. He speaks of society and he speaks against it. . . . Simultaneously a separator and an integrator.

  Musician, priest, and officiant were in fact a single function among ancient peoples. Poet laureate of power, herald of freedom—the musician is at the same time within society, which protects, purchases, and finances him, and outside it, when he threatens it with his visions. Courtier and revolutionary: for those who care to hear the irony beneath the praise, his stage presence conceals a break.93

  Perhaps one of America’s great twentieth-century musical artists, Duke Ellington, implied the same sentiment when he said that the musician must be “both in it and above it.” In practice, blues music accomplished this duality. Poor black southerners, and the more radical among their affluent counterparts, embraced the blues culture, at times favoring the blues’s “sinfulness” over other, more wholesome mores. If the blues were indeed an attitude, then that attitude carried a stigma in the eyes of those who fancied themselves the blues musicians’ social and economic “betters.”94

  Country and Delta blues music initially organized around themes of masculine hedonism, restless mobility, and trickster antiauthoritarianism. Southern black musicians developed the blues as a counterculture embodying “sinful” themes—the blues culture suggested roles counter to those prescribed to blacks by southern whites, while at the same time seeming to reinforce whites’ conceptions of blacks as slothful and amoral. As McMillen succinctly wrote, “the black Mississippians’ ‘place,’ as whites defined it, was always more behavioral than spatial in nature.” This understanding was adopted in the North where whites were encountering southern black culture in the form of ragtime and jazz. National cultural leaders “had envisioned the country’s musical life ‘maturing’ along the supposedly well-ordered lines of European musical academicism,” explained Edward Berlin in Ragtime, but instead “witnessed the intrusion of a music that stemmed not from Europe but from Africa, a music that represented to them not the civilization and spiritual nobility of European art but its very anti-thesis—the sensual depravity of African savagery, embodied in the despised American Negro.”95

  Interestingly, white supremacists were not the only group who thought blues distasteful; the predominant themes of blues music also distinguished its performers and listeners from the more affluent, conservative, and Christian members of southern black society. Entrepreneurial blacks of the small economic and social middle class regarded the music and its fans irksome at best and dangerous at worst. Sexy and sexist, raunchy and raw—blues music posed a serious threat to middle-class cultural and civic goals, and many well-churched Protestant blacks believed the blues to be “devil songs.” The sexual under- and overtones, sinful messages, allusions to Satan, minor chords, and the intervallic “blue” notes forbidden in sacred music seemed to be proof enough. The critics did not have to dig deep to find this evidence; in a widely advertised 1929 hit song, “Black and Evil Blues,” Alice Moore was hollerin’ that “I’m black and I’m evil . . . The lord has cursed me.” Noting the blues’s lack of godliness, Richard Wright determined that the blues were singularly secular; “the theme of spirituality, of other-worldliness is banned.”96 Spirituality was not actually “banned” from blues lyrics; in fact, there was plenty of spiritualism, but it most often took the form of gris-gris black magic, trickster spirits, and voodoo. Black writers Julio Finn and Jon Spencer later tried to correct the “secular-only” misassump-tions about the blues, suggesting that African American cosmology differed from predominant Christian worldviews. The black spiritual world was not confined to a simple good-versus-evil binary, they asserted, and atheism could be as religious a conviction as theism.97 So in the end, Wright had understated the spiritual consciousness within the blues, but he was right when he asserted that the blues had in main derived from blacks’ secular and earthly experiences: “If the plantations’ house slaves were somewhat remote from Christianity, the field slaves were almost completely beyond the pale. And it was from them and their descendants that the devil songs called the blues came—that confounding triptych of the convict, the migrant, the rambler, the steel driver, the ditch digger, the roustabout, the pimp, the prostitute, the urban or rural illiterate outsider.”98 Later scholars such as Joel Williamson echoed Wright’s sentiments, calling the blues “the cry of the cast-out black, ultimately alone and lonely, after one world was lost and before another was found.”99

  Perhaps Williamson, like Wright before him, was guilty of overstatement, for the bluesmen were rarely alone; most often they had their instruments in their hands. And though harmonicas, banjos, and pianos were common weapons of choice, the guitar was well suited for informal, folksy performances and became the bluesmen’s prime instrument and performed roles far beyond musical accompaniment. “Their instruments became confidants, bully pulpits, and mock symbols of success,” writes historian Mark K. Dolan, and with these, black guitarists created music that was bawdy, bluesy, and wildly popular.100 The guitar had been for decades a particular nuisance to devout Christian families that felt that music needed to be church related. W. C. Handy’s father—a preacher— became irate upon his son’s purchase of a guitar: “ ‘A box,’ he gasped, while my mother stood frozen. ‘A guitar! One of the devil’s playthings. Take it away. Take it away, I tell you. Get it out of your hands. Whatever possessed you to bring a sinful thing like that into our Christian home? Take it back where it came from. You hear? Get!’ “101 Oh, the ironies of fate! If this conversation did in fact happen, Handy’s father could have little known that his son would later initiate a blues craze that saw many a musician alternately don the robe of a preacher and the guitar strap of a bluesman.

  One of the first and most famous to do so was Son House. His “Preachin Blues,” recorded in 1930 for Paramount, exemplified the blues’s irreverent and satirical spirit:

  Oh, I’m gonna get me religion, I’m gonna join the Baptist church,

  Oh, I’m gonna get me religion, I’m gonna join the Baptist church,

  I’m gonna be a Baptist preacher, and I sure won’t have to work.102

  Eleven years later, back in the jook joint—this time Klack’s Store in Lake Cormorant, Mississippi—House again thumbed his nose at the church faithful in his 1941 cover of Johnson’s “Walking Blues.” Making House’s ridicule all the more noteworthy was the singer’s choice to replace some of the late Johnson’s original lyrics (which were relatively muted and tame) with his own, more disturbed and devilish verses about voodoo, loneliness, estrangement, losing one’s mind, and the blues’s “low-down shakin’ chill.” The jook joint revelers would be hard pressed to deflect the churchgoers’ label of “the devil’s music” when blues lyrics such as House’s regularly played around with voodoo supernaturalism and sexual overtones:

  Ooh, I’m goin’ to the gypsy now to have my fortune told,

  I feel somebod
y’s stealin’ my jelly roll.

  I’m goin’ to the gypsy to have my fortune told,

  ‘Cause I believe somebody is tryin’ to steal my jelly roll.103

  With lyrics such as these in their throats and note-bending guitars in their hands, House and the other blues musicians ensured disfavor among their well-churched neighbors. The black bourgeois also saw the blues as a barrier to the efforts of racial integration.

  In 1937, Yale psychologist John Dollard observed steadfast resistance among middle-class blacks to the perceived immorality, sexual or otherwise, of their lower-class neighbors. “The attempt of the middle class to mark itself off from the pilloried lower-class Negroes seems constant,” remarked Dollard.104 Three decades later, Amiri Baraka concurred, writing in the stark language of the Black Power era: “The middle-class churches were always pushing for the complete assimilation of the Negro into white America,” Baraka explained. “It was the growing black middle class who believed that the best way to survive in America would be to disappear completely, leaving no trace at all that there had ever been an Africa, or a slavery, or even, finally, a black man. This was the only way, they thought, to be citizens.”105 To this add the assertion that the white people middle-class blacks were hoping to emulate did not organize musical sounds in the same ways laboring African Americans traditionally had, so music sounded different and performed a different role for the middle-class than for the poor. In many ways less abstract than the western European symphonic and chamber music held in high esteem by middle-class blacks, the blues derived from more pragmatic roots. The agricultural work and other manual labor that characterized black poverty were sources of musical creativity, as in the field hollers. To Western-trained ears, black music lacked a civilizing effect. The Defender’s “fastidious entertainment editor,” Chicago bandleader Dave Peyton, warned readers to stay away from “what he considered primitive music of the levees and fields now played on city streets.” Henry Pace of Black Swan Records used the ad pages of the NAACP’s the Crisis to challenge black consumers to aspire to higher tastes and to dispel the charge that “Colored people don’t want classic music!” The text beneath that chastising headline read: “If you—the person reading this advertisement—earnestly want to Do Something for Negro Music, Go to your Record Dealer and ask for the Better Class of Records by Colored Artists.” The “Better Class” included operatic arias and a selection of vocal, piano, and violin solos.106