by R. A. Lawson
The conscientious black middle class and the devout church folk had their own prerogatives when it came to overcoming the injustices imposed by Jim Crow life, and the rough lifestyles celebrated and popularized by most blues musicians were not included. It would be wrong to dismiss these critics out-of-hand as being simply naïve, racist, or classist. Much of blues music reinforced these attitudes precisely because the musicians found personal and professional success in singing about the devilry, promiscuousness, licentiousness, and violence that the religious- and civic-minded folks found so repugnant. Even those who made attempts at objective observation, such as African American sociologist Lewis Jones (who was in Mississippi in 1941 and 1942 as a member of a Fisk University-Library of Congress research team that included Alan Lomax and John Work), found that hard work and hard living went hand in hand among blacks in the Lower Mississippi Valley. “They cleared the forests, built levees, traveled on the waters of the Mississippi in skiffs, made bumper crops of cotton, danced, gambled, loved and killed with what seems to have been tremendous zest.”107
Projecting and celebrating sexuality with “tremendous zest” was one of the most salient aspects of blues lyrics and the blues attitude. Robert Johnson’s partner, Johnny Shines, recognized that his colleague’s musicianship “affected most women in a way that I could never understand.” As a result, “a lot of men resented his power or his influence over women-people,” Shines said.108 Johnson’s lyrics played on this masculine hedonism; his “Traveling Riverside Blues,” in which he beseeched the female audience to “squeeze my lemon ’til the juice runs down my leg” was case in point.109 Although Johnson’s tune had an innocuous title, many musicians took free license to use sexual metaphor in titling their tracks, easily betraying the double meaning of sexual euphemisms: “Coffee Grinder Blues,” “Black Snake Blues,” “Jelly Roll Blues,” “Ram Rod Daddy,” “Please Warm My Weiner,” and “Rock Me, Mama.” But lyrics, more than titles, were the perfect vehicle for communicating sexual braggadocio. Big Joe Williams sang,
Black gal, sure lookin’ good,
Oh, black gal, you sure lookin’ good,
Well, you got any place, darlin’ I sure could.
Black gal, sure lookin’ warm,
Oh, black gal, you sure lookin’ warm,
You drive any man ‘way from his happy home.110
William’s cousin, J. D. Short, proved even more open about his sexual hungers. For his first commercial record, Short subverted Christian symbolism in a testosterone-fueled track entitled, “She Got Jordan River in Her Hips,” recorded in 1931.
You got Jordan River in your hips, mama,
Daddy’s screaming to be baptized.
Washboard Sam echoed Short in 1934:
Men’s all crazy about her, she makes them whine and cry,
She’s a river hip mama and they all wanna be baptized.111
Other musicians took a more secular approach, singing about fruit in sexual contexts—a tradition that lasted throughout the twentieth century in blues music. Take Johnson’s lemon-squeezing metaphor, for example, or Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Tennessee Peaches” tune, in which he sang that “the peaches I’m lovin’ . . . don’t grow on no trees.” While many bluesmen wrote individual songs to their loved ones, many more celebrated sex as a trivial, noncommittal act and objectified women’s sexuality.112
As musicians, many bluesmen enjoyed the sexual attentions of their female fans. Working for cash, not farm store credit, bluesmen often tried to sport flashy clothes, jewelry, and even automobiles as material indicators of status and freedom from the agricultural life of poverty. For most bluesmen, the “mojo” worked. B. B. King marveled at the availability of sexual partners once his music career took off. Playing a guitar replaced driving a tractor as King’s prime mode of attracting mates. Bukka White, whom King described as his “big-city cousin,” likewise claimed that playing gigs served him well when it came to the “pretty girls.”113 Huddie Ledbetter’s appetite for sexual liaisons, and the consequences thereof, recurred like familiar themes in the singer’s music and biographies. Shreveport’s Fannin Street brothels were musical and social training grounds to the young Ledbetter. Nearer the Gulf of Mexico, in New Orleans’ Storyville district, Jelly Roll Morton mastered music and sexuality under the tutelage of Crescent City madams such as Mamie Desdoumes. Sexual assertiveness, coupled with one’s mobility, offered the bluesman a shot at ever-important individuality. Consider Muddy Waters’s recording of “Mannish Boy”:
I’m a man! I’m a full grown man!
(female audience) “Yeah!”
I’m a man! I’m a rolling stone!
(female audience) “Yeah!”
I’m a man! I’m a hootchie-cootchie man.
(female audience) “Yeah!”
Sittin’ on the outside, just me and my mate,
I made my move, come up two hours later.114
The enthusiastic response of the female audience testified to the power of blues music’s self-affirmation. Here, the bluesman, regardless of the mainstream society’s appraisal of his condition, is master of his own domain.
In the “black places” where blues were performed, sexuality often mixed with drug use. Again, blues lyrics evidenced both the realities of drug use among blues musicians and patrons as well as the celebratory attitude with which the “blues people” considered their narcotic and alcohol use. Alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and marijuana were all used and abused, celebrated and cursed by blues artists.115 Sam Chatmon, speaking of his half-brother, Charley Patton, recalled the pervasive role of alcohol in the typical musician’s life: “He was a nice guy, but he just loved the bottle—like all the rest of the musicians. He was a great drinker. I never did know him to do no gambling or anything like that . . . , but [he did] drink!”116 Lillie Mae Glover, also known as Memphis Ma Rainey because she was an understudy of the famous Ma Rainey, recalled how the blues star’s drug and alcohol abuse opened doors for the younger singer: “Oh yes, yes, yes. She had me doing a whole lot of her songs . . . because she stayed high all the time, you know. Yeah, she stayed high, and so I’d have to do her songs.”117 Reflective of the musicians’ penchant for boozing it up, countless versions of “Whiskey Blues” circulated, most containing the signature verse:
Now if the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck,
Now if the river was whiskey and I was a diving duck,
I would dive to the bottom, never would come up.118
Others, including Sonny Boy Williamson (the first, not Rice Miller, who also took the moniker “Sonny Boy”) recorded renditions of the crowd favorite, “Sloppy Drunk Blues.” According to Waters, it was rather fitting for Williamson, who “loved whiskey better than he did his work, man.”
I’d rather be sloppy drunk, than anything I know,
You know I’d rather be sloppy drunk, than anything I know,
In another half a pint, mama, you’ll see me go.119
When state and national prohibition laws or poverty prevented them from buying liquor, bluesmen drew on alternatives such as shoe polish, rubbing alcohol, or Sterno, a canned, gelled cooking fuel. Guitarist Tommy Johnson related the torment of imbibing “canned heat” (pronounced “candy”).
Cryin’ canned heat, canned heat, mama, cryin’ Sterno’s killin’ me,
Cryin’ canned heat, mama, Sterno’s killin’ me,
Takes alcorub to make these canned heat blues.
I woke up this morning with canned heat ‘round my bed,
Run here somebody, take these canned heat blues,
Run here somebody and take these canned heat blues.120
The constitutional prohibition on the production of alcohol lasted from 1919 to 1933 (in Mississippi, state prohibition of alcohol lasted until the 1960s), after which Federal Bureau of Narcotics commissioner Henry Anslinger launched a media and legislative campaign against Mexican American and African American marijuana users. Mainstream Americans in the industrial era had come also to stigmatize cocai
ne since the passage of the 1906 Food and Drug Act.121 Almost a decade earlier, in 1898, cocaine “exploded in popularity” among New Orleans’s hard-working stevedores and became a mainstay on the blues scene afterward, as Gussow notes in Seems Like Murder Here: “Certain drugstores . . . were known to sell it to anyone . . . Morphine was still favored by some addicts, while others smoked opium; one bard near the French Market [in New Orleans’ Vieux Carré] apparently stirred either morphine or opium into fusel oil and whiskey . . . [but by] 1900, cocaine had become by far the most common hard drug taken by poorer blacks.”122 During his New York debut performance, Ledbetter unashamedly performed the classic blues, “Take a Whiff on Me,” in which he sang the following verse:
I’se got a nickel, you’s got a dime,
You buy de coke an’ I’ll buy de wine.
Ho, ho, honey, take a whiff on me.
The Memphis Jug Band offered this additional verse in their 1930 recording of the song:
Since cocaine went out of style, you can catch them shooting needles all the while, / Hey, hey, honey, take a whiff on me.
It takes a little coke to give me ease, you can strut your stuff long as you please, / Hey, hey, honey, take a whiff on me.123
Both versions of the song celebrated intoxicants and thumbed their nose at the prohibitive impulse of contemporary mainstream society, not unlike Handy’s audience who kept on barrelhousing in spite of old Mr. Crump and his reformer platform.
Young revelers in the early twentieth-century blues scene could not resist mixing music with intoxication, and the combination of the two became a hallmark of the emergent blues culture. An old-time banjo player from Mississippi, Lucius Smith, mournfully observed the direct connection between music, drunkenness, and violence, especially after the release in 1912 of Handy’s “Memphis Blues.” “Now the blues is a swinging dance, like double together, you know . . . that done ruined the country . . . it done brought about a whole lots of . . . trouble. They started that ‘Memphis [Blues].’ That’s these young folks . . . The blues ain’t nothing but a racket. A whole lot of drunk folks, you know, don’t care for nothing.” As the music migrated to northern cities during and after World War I, the link between the songs and “the sauce” remained strong. Garvin Bushell, jazz-blues clarinetist in Harlem in the 1920s, saw the same effect as had Smith. “Our clientele . . . were mainly Negroes from the South who had migrated. They lived in the 130s, off Fifth Avenue—that was one of the toughest parts of Harlem . . . There were always big fights in the Harlem cabarets in those days. It was during Prohibition, and the stuff people were drinking made the people wild and out of control—they’d fight and shoot and cut and break up the place.”124 All sorts of people become violent when they’ve drunk too much, but among folks who are daily in tenuous social positions where uncertainty and lack of feeling in control prevail, drunkenness can take on an added political identity.
Historians have discovered an interesting link between drunkenness and American idealism. In his study of early nineteenth-century drinking habits, W. J. Rorabaugh found that among the first generation of post-Revolution Americans, communal drinking had the effect of making the citizens of the young republic feel like equals in the group, helping them get used to the new “classless” social order. Furthermore, and of particular relevance to our comparison group of black southerners during Jim Crow, Rorabaugh concluded that getting drunk was a means for anxious Americans facing a “boom and bust” economy to escape their daily worries and that it “also gave them a feeling of independence and liberty.” Rorabaugh continued, “Drinking to the point of intoxication was done by choice, an act of self-will by which a man altered his feelings, escaped from his burdens, and sought perfection in his surroundings. Because drinking was a matter of choice, it increased a man’s sense of autonomy. To be drunk was to be free. The freedom that intoxication symbolized led Americans to feel that imbibing lustily was a fitting way for independent men to celebrate their country’s independence.”125 In the case of the blues people, this kind of excessive drinking would be a celebration of personal if not national independence. And, like the state of intoxication that often accompanied its performance, blues music provided a stage for imagining one’s empowerment.
In the seminal recording of the blues craze, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” she sang about getting violent and shooting a policeman because of all the “bad news.” In Peetie Wheatstraw’s 1936 offering, “Drinking Man Blues,” it was booze that led him to destructive acts, not only attacking a cop but “usurping his identity entirely” in an interesting tale that acknowledges the recklessness of excessive alcohol use and the dire consequences brought on by the user and the authorities. In the song, Wheatstraw claims he “ain’t bad”—”but I just been drinking that stuff.” Dangerously liberating, the booze “will kill you . . . it just won’t quit,” and it can also “get you to the place . . . that you don’t care who you hit.” To prove his point, the last three verses escalate the recklessly violent tone of the song.
I been drinking that stuff, and it went to my head,
I been drinking that stuff, and it went to my head,
It made me hit the baby in the cradle, ooh well, well, and kill my papa dead.
It made me hit the policeman, and knock him off his feet,
It made me hit the policeman, and knock him off his feet,
Taken his pistol and his star, ooh well, well, and walking up and down his beat.
I been drinking that stuff, I been drinking it all my days,
I been drinking that stuff, I been drinking it all my days,
But the judge give me six months, ooh well, well, to change my drinking ways.126
In “Drinking Man Blues,” Wheatstraw acknowledged the power of alcoholism to lead a drunken man to ignore innocence (“it made me hit the baby in the cradle”), respect for elders (“it made me . . . kill my papa dead”), and deference to authority (“it made me hit the policeman”). But like Bukka White’s story in which he was thankful not to have murdered a woman, saving him a long-term prison sentence, or Huddie Ledbetter’s plea for forgiveness from a civil authority instead of a sacred one, Wheatstraw showed in “Drinking Man Blues” that the destructive drunkard may not have to answer to God but certainly will have to face the court system.
Handy, the classically trained “Father of the Blues” understood this dynamic as well and worked it into his lyrics about Memphis’s heavy-drinking, music-loving Beale Street, where “you’ll find that business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.” And the marriage of music and violence was such a strong aspect of the blues culture that it carried on long after the rough and tumble days of the prewar Jim Crow South. In 1960 Howlin’ Wolf cut a version of Chess house composer Willie Dixon’s “Wang Dang Doodle,” a raucous party song that omitted some of the most direct references to murder and death that cropped up in the prewar recordings but whose cast of characters painted a clear picture of the rowdy—and deadly—scene of the jook. In his trademark deep, gritty voice (and with Dixon plucking the bass behind him), Howlin’ Wolf delivered up in the first two verses what was perhaps the most threatening invitation ever extended to an audience to join the party:
Tell Automatic Slim, tell Razor-Totin’ Jim,
Tell Butcher-Knife Totin’ Annie, tell Fast-Talking Fannie,
Ah we gonna pitch a ball, down to that Union Hall,
We gonna romp and tromp ’til midnight,
We gonna fuss and fight ’til daylight,
We gonna pitch a wang-dang-doodle, all night long!
All night long! All night long! All night long!
Tell Kudu-Crawlin’ Red, tell Abyssinian Ned,
Tell ol’ Pistol Pete, everybody gonna meet,
Tonight we need no rest, we’re really gonna throw a mess,
We gonna break out all the windows, we’re gonna kick down all the doors,
We gonna pitch a wang-dang-doodle, all night long!
All night long! All night long! All nigh
t long!127
And while Fast-Talking Fannie and Abyssinian Ned might be fun to hang out with, the presence of Butcher-Knife Totin’ Annie and the other well-armed cats promise that this party will feature equal parts revelry and devilry.
B. B. King took part in a real-life version of Dixon’s wang-dang-doodle in the winter of 1949 in Twist, Arkansas, a hamlet thirty-five miles northwest of Memphis. The scene was a nightclub that was not really a nightclub: “Just a big room in a chilly old house where the owner has set a tall garbage pail in the middle of the floor and half-filled it with kerosene for heat . . . I get to playing and the room gets to rocking . . . I’m up there stoking their fire—the better my beat the bigger my tips—singing some barn-burning Pee Wee Crayton blues and having a ball.” At first, King, as the musician, was the master of the jook. But because of the intense climate he helped to create (and hoped to profit from), a conflict broke out that erupted in chaos.