by R. A. Lawson
I hear some scuffling, but don’t pay no mind . . . When voices get loud, though, I know something’s wrong. In the thick of the floor, two guys are calling each other names, and, even worse, insulting their mothers. The crowd tries to separate them, but it’s too late. The dudes are fisting it out, throwing each other to the floor, when they knock over the garbage pail filled with kerosene. Boom! Kerosene all over the floor, spreading an incredible river of fire. Flames and screams and panic and running and everyone . . . heading for the only door. Bodies crushed and elbows in faces and folks falling down.128
According to Charles Love, a pre-blues black performer, it seems that the music itself—to say nothing of the regular drinking and drug binges that accompanied blues performances—was the source of late night violence: “Wherever the blues is played, there’s a fight right after. You know the blues apt to get them all bewildered some kind of way, make ‘em wild, they want to fight. They want to dance and fight and everything,” as if the music were a call to express the individual’s power over those around him. And the violence was by no means limited to fist fights but often involved gunplay (another new aspect of working-class black life in the postslavery South). Blues annals are rife with retellings of shootings at parties where blues were played, as in the recollections of Texas bluesman Mance Lipscomb, who considered gun violence an inevitable outcome of blues performances. “What you call a club now, we called em Sattidy Night Dances. Dances all night long . . . Somebody had ta die ever Sattidy night. Somebody gonna git kilt. An I had to git up under the bed ta stay safe. Git ta shootin over my head. Long bout twelve or one o’clock, you hear a gun somewhere, in the house or out of the house: ‘Boom!’ Somebody died.”129 Delta musician James Thomas had some near misses at his Saturday night gigs too, including one near Tchula, Mississippi, where a “fellow went and got some shotguns and came back and started shooting down the house.” The woman who owned the place and had hired Thomas “got her shotgun and went out in the yard and she started shooting back at them.” Thomas took a matter-of-fact lesson from the experience, vowing never to return to Tchula. “There’s danger of getting shot in the face when there’s a lot of people dancing and there’s shooting in the house. You don’t know what’s going to happen. Lots of people got killed like that.”130
As these stories suggest, the blues life was not for the timid, and performers often took drastic measures to defend and save themselves from meeting death at a jook joint. Muddy Water’s friend Jimmy Rogers recalled, “The clubs were very violent . . . After we got into bigger clubs they’d fight, or some guy would get mad with his old lady and they’d fight. Somebody would get cut or get shot.”131 To protect himself in this environment, Waters packed a .25 automatic pistol, a .22 tucked in his shirt pocket, and a .38 in the crease of his car seat. “Everybody [in the band] carried guns,” remembered Paul Oscher, the first white harmonica player in Waters’s band: “It was not uncommon for band members to point guns at each other . . . That’s the only reason why everybody didn’t get killed, because everyone knew everyone else had a gun.”132
Unlike Muddy Waters, who armed himself beforehand, musician Lee Kizart found himself turning his car into an impromptu weapon of self-defense.
I seen a woman git shot one night when I was playing at a jook joint way out in the country. She had just come in from St. Louis and her head fell just about that far from the end of the porch and my car was setting right up by the porch. Just broke her neck. It was a forty-five bullet shot all right enough. It broke her neck and she fell with her head just about that far from the edge of the porch. I was setting down playing and I jumped out the back door and run around to the side of the house. I got in my car and when I cranked up, I like to drove over I don’t know how many folks up under my old racer.133
The bedlam described in Kizart’s and the others’ stories would point to alcohol abuse and lovers’ jealousy as the causes of all of this violence. It is a simple argument that anyone who has stayed too late and drunk too much can relate to—fighting is simply a by-product of too much booze and too much emotion packed into a tight place. And while Rorabaugh’s thoughts on a democratic American idealism of drunkenness may be instructive in exploring the blues as a counterculture in Jim Crow society, the violent aspect of blues culture was not so much counter to, but rather reflective of, the dominant white society. The black southerners who meted out violent justice on their fellow nightlife revelers had been on the receiving end of white violence in many contexts, and Gussow suggests that this social cycle of violence was “an essential, if sometimes destructive, way in which black southern blues people articulated their some-bodiness, insisted on their indelible individuality.”134
Redirected rather than reciprocal violence was the undercurrent of the blues and is not unrelated to the sublimation of anger through song discussed above, as both acts reflected the importance of southern blacks’ coping mechanisms and negotiation skills during the Jim Crow years. When blues musicians used their songs as outlets for violent expression, they often did so in a specific form, identified by Charles Keil, that “shows antagonism” and accentuates the singer’s bravado and virility. The first target of the antagonism could be the bluesman’s instrument itself. The guitar, explained music historian Ted Gioia, is the victim of choice for a Delta musician, “who treats it with tough love, sometimes slapping it in percussive accompaniment, or playing it with a knife of the neck of a broken bottle or some other object trouvé unknown to [classical guitarists] Parkening or Segovia . . . Chords are not so much strummed as torn from the instrument.”135
In addition to the playing style, the lyrics of antagonistic songs were telling, and a verse of this type, according to Keil’s reading, “deflates others’ status [and] defends or asserts [the] self.” Keil cited a Dixon-Waters collaboration—the 1978 track, “I’m Ready”—to illustrate his point:
I got an ax and a pistol on a graveyard framed
That shoots tombstone bullets, that’s wearin’ balls and chains.
I’m drinking T. N. T. I’m smokin’ dynamite.
I hope some screwball start a fight,
Cause I’m ready, ready as anybody can be.
I’m ready for you, I hope you’re ready for me.136
“I’m Ready” was written and recorded after Waters had become an international blues sensation, but the song was reminiscent of the violent past from which Waters and his band mates had emerged where self-affirmation frequently came at the expense of someone else. Such exploitation was a social tool southern blacks had seen employed by their white neighbors during slavery as well as after Emancipation, and it shows up throughout the blues discography. A verse from “Railroad Bill”—based on the life of Morris Slater, a sort of black Robin Hood folk hero of the 1890s—was perhaps a progenitor in the line that eventually led to Waters’s challenge to some “screwball” to start a fight:
Buy me a pistol just as long as my arm,
Kill everybody ever done me harm,
I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill.137
When blues musicians sang of violence as a trope for self-affirmation, they often invoked the Automatic Slims and Razor-Totin’ Jims onto the scene—the so-called Negro “badman” who breaks the social convention of deference and acts as his own master, like the subject of these lyrics from 1904:
I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street;
You may search the wide, wide world, my equal never meet.
I got a razor in my boot, I got a gun with which to shoot;
I’m the toughest, toughest coon that walks the street.138
Or, likewise, the lyrics of “Deep Ellum Blues” inspired by the barrelhousing Dallas neighborhood frequented by Leadbelly in the early years of Jim Crow:
When you go down on Deep Ellum you better tote a .44,
When you go down on Deep Ellum you better tote a .44,
‘Cause when you get mixed up with gangsters,
You ain’t comin’ back to
town no more.
Well it ain’t nobody’s business just what I’m goin’ to do,
Well it ain’t nobody’s business just what I’m goin’ to do,
I might stay here and holler all night,
Long as I can sing the blues.
I’m gonna walk on down this road, get me one more fix and go to bed,
I’m gonna walk on down this road, get me one more fix and go to bed,
And when my baby finds me in the mornin’,
Gonna find the best man she had was dead.139
The lyrics to “Deep Ellum Blues” demonstrate the dangers associated with violence and substance abuse. Also embedded within the song, however, is a defiant individuality on the part of the singer: “Well it ain’t nobody’s business just what I’m goin’ to do.” The consequences of the singer’s actions in “Deep Ellum Blues” seem secondary to the exercise of free will that gave rise to those dangerous consequences. And here is the essence of the blues counterculture: willful disregard of social convention, propriety, and deference in favor of expressing the self, even in self-destructive ways. Recall the anonymous patrons of the Beale Street saloon who inspired Handy’s lyrics in “Memphis Blues”: “We don’t care what Mr. Crump don’t ‘low, we gon’ to bar’l-house anyhow!”140
As a response to the social limitations placed on them and their audiences, blues musicians provided the vocabulary and cultural space for resistance to the dominant social paradigms in the Lower Mississippi Valley, whether those paradigms served southern whites or the more affluent and conservative among the African American population. Blues musicians, with all their distasteful rhetoric, lived in an alternative black culture based in signifying southern white and middle-class black values. Their hollers did not echo “I’m black and I’m proud,” nor even “black is beautiful.” If anything, the blues culture was for those who held little hope for better opportunities, especially in the South where, as Julio Finn wrote, “there were plenty of scared, hungry, helpless black folk just trying to stay alive.” Knowing, and to some degree, accepting, that you occupied the bottom of the socioeconomic barrel was a prerequisite for having the blues. But the music was not only an accommodationist safety valve to release black anger, and the musicians who purveyed it were anything but helpless. As Ledbetter’s story revealed, musicians could play the double-identity game of appeasing white expectations and undermining white authority—often at the same time. As much as blues music demonstrated the tough existence of black life under Jim Crow, the music also became a tool for liberation as musicians like Ledbetter moved north and reimagined their place in American society.141
Until that happened, the blues more or less confirmed the success of white supremacy by maintaining the pathology of the black place, but it was a self-fulfilling pathology, and one that changed over time into something much less destructive and much more constructive, from the “state of mind” to “a physical act,” as Neil McMillen has written. This change happened when blues musicians and black southerners began to vacate the South en masse in the Great Migration, picked up momentum as they moved into more mainstream attitudes about the benefit of a hard work ethic (as they did during the New Deal era), and cemented itself as they adopted the pluralist and patriotic attitudes that marked the World War II era. In short, Jim Crow’s blues counterculture shifted from an attitude of finding self-worth by acknowledging the negative to an attitude of finding self-worth by reaching for the positive. In his study of the blues and southern violence, Gussow fixates on the “psychological preparation” that songs such as Smith’s “Crazy Blues” “offered its black audience to meet the danger” of white mob violence. Mistreat me, Smith declared on behalf of all who dwelled in the presence of her plaintive voice, and I’ll shoot myself a cop, any cop. Nightmarish fears of indiscriminate victimization were countered with a sustaining black fantasy of indiscriminate reprisal. It was a loud fantasy, multiplied by the process of commoditization, blaring out of countless thousands of Victrolas across America.”142
The evidence presented thus far in this study reinforces most of what Gussow has to say here but suggests that he emphasizes the wrong word; loud should not be italicized but rather fantasy. During the Great Migration, Great Depression, and World War II, there was a retreat from this mentality of fantastical imagination. It had not proven a winning mentality. In the South, black resistance had been forced to remain underground, and the blues that celebrated resistance had provided an important survival mechanism for a time. In the long run, though, blues musicians adopted the pluralism of the Roosevelt era, choosing to move toward the mainstream, not away from it, as a response to Jim Crow. The national mood was changing, and the musicians (and the audiences they catered to) changed, too.
Verse Two
Leavin’ the Jim Crow Town
The Great Migration and the Blues’s Broadening Horizon
Shine on harvest moon, harvest moon shine on,
For you will be shinin’ after the days I’m gone.
—”Harvest Moon Blues,”
by Specks McFadden, 1929
A Guitar Was Like a Ticket
Mamie Smith cried that it had been a long run of “bad news” that pushed her over the edge, giving her the “Crazy Blues.” Unlike their enslaved ancestors, southern blacks of Smith’s generation were free to try to escape “bad news” by moving away, and mobility—”ramblin’ “ in blues parlance—has been long recognized as a fundamental theme in blues lyrics and lifestyles. Less than a decade after Smith’s breakout recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues,” the “Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, recorded a definitive version of W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues,” in which she made famous one of the most memorable lines in the blues repertoire:
Feelin’ tomorrow, like I feel today,
Feelin’ tomorrow, life I feel today,
I’ll pack my grip, and make my getaway.1
A short verse that captured the spirit of so many black southerners who began to respond to “bad news” by packing up and moving on, Handy and Smith’s national hit, “St. Louis Blues,” pinned the singer-subject’s discontent on romantic heartbreak. Blues lyrics were always open to metaphorical interpretation, and in the case of “St. Louis Blues,” the heartbreak and desire to move away might also have been a veiled complaint that was both plaintive and empowering—that is, not just romantic loss, but the sad facts of life “as it is” were what drove the singer to want to move on.
It is speculative to argue that Handy’s subject was hitting the road because she had become dissatisfied with Jim Crow life, and most listeners would more readily identify with the literal reading that her sadness stemmed from a lovesick heart. As we will see throughout this chapter, without needing to spin metaphorical explications, there were many recorded blues songs in which singers expounded upon the economic and social shortcomings of life in the South during the 1920s and 1930s and linked their dissatisfaction with their desire to move on. This is not to say that the lyrics, in documenting the motives and experiences of black southerners during the Great Migration, lost their poetic feeling. A good example comes from Mississippi Delta levee camp laborer and jail-breaker Joe Savage who worked with Alan Lomax. Savage recorded a ramblin’ song for Lomax that blamed “bad luck” rather than “bad news,” but in Savage’s lyrics, the use of “bad luck” provides only the thinnest of veils; the built-in injustices of segregated society result in the singer being fed up and taking off. Poverty, poor education, limited civil rights, incarceration, and political exclusion—some of the bedrock realities of many southern blacks’ lives—lay just beneath the rich surface layer of irony:
Got me ‘cused of thieving.
I can’t see a thing.
They got me accused of forgery
And I can’t even write my name.
Bad luck,
Bad luck is killing me.
Boys, I just can’t stand
No more of this third degree.
(sing-speak)<
br />
Now listen here, boys,
I wanna tell you sumpin.
(singing)
They got me accused of taxes,
And I don’t have a lousy dime.
They got me accused of children,
And ain’t nar one of them mine.
Bad luck,
Bad luck is killing me.
Boys, I just can’t stand
No more of this third degree.
(sing-speak)
Boy, now looka here,
I wanna tell you one mo thing.
(singing)
They got me ‘cused of perjury,
I can’t even raise my hand.
They got me ‘cused of murder,
An’ I have never harmed a man.
Bad luck,
Bad luck is killing me.
Boys, I just can’t stand,
No more of this third degree.
I’m gone,
So, baby—so long.2
In his song, Savage, like Handy’s subject in “St. Louis Blues,” is a person who’s been done wrong. But unlike the hubris that undoes characters in Greek tragedy, these blues subjects have done nothing self-aggrandizing to invoke the wrath of the gods; on the contrary, it seems to be predetermined fate that they suffer. And whereas Greek tragic heroes could not escape their doom, the blues people continued to affirm their freedom of movement: “So, baby—so long!” By repeatedly sounding the chord of mobility, and by moving around from gig to gig, blues musicians reminded their audiences of their freedom to move. They were free to move their bodies in dance and free to move their bodies from county to county and state to state.
In the early twentieth century, the powerful forces of American industrialization reshaped the South, the United States, and, eventually, the world. Industrialization was epic in its social, economic, and ecological power, both creating and destroying on a grand scale. In the early decades of the twentieth century, this sea change development in American life began to uproot long-standing southern agrarian communities as the sons and daughters of farmers, domestics, and mechanics headed north to the employment lines of all manner of factories in the industrial cities.3 For the itinerant and semiprofessional bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta and surrounding plantation districts, the mass movement of southern communities provided new opportunities and new possibilities. Generally a restless group, southern musicians in the Great War era moved to new environments and communities where they reworked their traditional music to represent their modern twentieth-century experiences. New Orleans jazz musicians had begun to set this trend. Jelly Roll Morton remained in the Crescent City, but trumpeter and bandleader King Oliver migrated to Chicago. He recorded, reestablished himself in the big money and big fame music market on the shores of Lake Michigan, and opened up venues that protégés such as Louis Armstrong would gain access to and launch from. These mobile musicians helped establish and expand the black vaudeville circuit in the north at clubs like the Pekin (the first northern black club to open) and Vendome in Chicago and the Lincoln and Lafayette in New York. Access to the stages at these clubs meant that small groups and solo acts from the South could tour nationally without having to promote their own performances, and musicians enjoyed the freedom of not having to be signed on to a traveling medicine show or minstrel troupe, such as Wolcott’s Rabbit Foot Show that toured the southern chitlin’ circuit.4 Blues musicians went north for the stages as well as the sound booths, perhaps none more famously than Charley Patton, Son House, Louise Johnson, and Willie Brown when they warmed up on corn liquor and hit the road for their 1930 recording session in Grafton, Wisconsin. The long road trip was an anomaly for Patton and his crew, but their contemporaries and followers—Big Bill Broonzy, Huddie Ledbetter, and others—found musicianship to be a marketable skill that opened doors socially and financially in the North, and they settled in. They had jumped on northbound trains from wooden plank platforms at rail depots in the delta country, and emerged from urban steel, stone, and glass train stations—tributes to modern America in motion—into a fast-paced culture that had an appetite for their form of entertainment. When they moved north, these bearers of southern musical traditions collided headfirst with an emergent national culture that appreciated music and was eagerly embracing new recording technology. As a result, the countercultural blues took on a new aspect—life outside of the Jim Crow South.