Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  Run.

  I wanna run.

  Wanna leave Indianola and the plantation and the busted smokestack behind . . . Just wanna move.

  So I do.

  Grab my guitar. Grab my money—$2.50. And run.

  Before the sun goes down, I’m out on Highway 49. Scared to death but on my way. Don’t know what I’m doing, except for leaving. I ain’t looking back till I get to Memphis.

  Gotta get to Memphis.23

  This kind of story was repeated dozens, if not hundreds, of times across the plantation South as musicians dropped their ploughshares and picked up their guitars.

  Migration, economic displacement, wartime service, and a host of experiences in the 1910s and 1920s provided both challenges and opportunities for those living at the bottom of Jim Crow’s social ladder. In leaving their farms for other farms, southern cities, and the industrial North, southern blacks tapped into post-Emancipation traditions of mobility, but they stretched these traditions far beyond their previous boundaries. Simultaneously, thousands of southern black men participated, in various capacities, in the “War to End All Wars,” fighting for democracy. Migration linked African Americans across regional boundaries, and U.S. involvement in the Great War forged a new relationship, albeit a tenuous one, between southern blacks and the federal government. That government had been largely absent in black southerners’ lives since agents of president-elect Rutherford B. Hayes and Bourbon politicians from the South met in Wormley’s Washington, D.C., hotel to hammer out the Compromise of 1877.

  Mass migration and the worldwide war for democracy wrought discernable changes in the cultural and physical landscape of Afro-Americana as individuals moved about broadening their ambitions and their horizons. During the 1910s and 1920s, new African American communities such as Harlem, Chicago’s Southside, and East St. Louis witnessed the emergence of the “New Negro.” Self-conscious of black cultural (re)birth, northern black intellectuals pursued achievement in the arts, literature, science (social and physical), and music by aspiring “to high culture as opposed to that of the common man, which they hoped to mine for novels, poems, plays, and symphonies.” The confidence gained from these uplifting experiences bolstered African Americans’ hope for “greater and greater things,” thus strengthening the resolve of black leaders like W. E. B. Du Bois and inciting more radical measures of black self-help, such as those espoused by Marcus Garvey.24 Writing from outside the South, Mississippi native and novelist Richard Wright could level explicit criticism at Jim Crow and the culture of white supremacy. Carrying out its American operations from the North’s urban centers, Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association was “actively involved in political struggles for power and was relevant to genuine attempts to liberate blacks from capitalist oppression and to build a new society offering individual freedom, economic security, and equality.”25 But blacks remaining in the Deep South had to temper their actions, as terrorism at the hands of “Judge Lynch” resurged in the wake of World War I.26 Even so, as young workers like King fled the Delta, Hortense Powdermaker sensed a new attitude among the young adults of the small black middle class in Indianola: “The further they get from ignorance, poverty, and the slave tradition, the more they resent and rebel against such a system imposed on them under a democracy.”27

  As migration data bear out, the movement of southern blacks to Chicago, New York, and other cities brought the history of the slave and sharecropper together with the history of black freedom in the North, giving new shape and attitude to African American life. The vibrantly creative and assertive artists of the Harlem Renaissance and people who identified themselves with the “New Negro” emerged as a haute society, different from the artistic and leisure culture of the black working class, which was kinetic and hedonistic, but popular. Poor people more often found sources of racial pride in the heavyweight boxer Jack Johnson or jazz giant Louis Armstrong than William Grant Still, composer of the Afro-American Symphony. Johnson’s defeat of the former champion Jim Jeffries in 1910 became a heroic moment for many black Americans. Johnson’s victory over Jeffries, like Joe Louis’s defeat of Max Schmeling in 1938, took on added significance because of the racial role reversal implicit in the black man’s victory over the white. A singer in North Carolina played with the subversion/reversal theme inspired by Johnson’s victory in a song that lampooned the spiritual classic “Amazing Grace”:

  Amaze an’ Grace, how sweet it sounds,

  Jack Johnson knocked Jim Jeffries down.

  Jim Jeffries jumped up an’ hit Jack on the chin,

  An’ then Jack knocked him down agin.

  The second verse drew on an old, common lyric that usually ended with “all for the white man and none for the nigger” but here was turned upside-down on account of the Johnson victory:

  The Yankees hold the play,

  The white man pulls the trigger;

  But it makes no difference what the white man say,

  The world champion’s still a nigger.28

  These songs and so many others reveal the thoughts and feelings of African American musicians as they and their fellow migrants experimented with the new identities. With music as a means of communication, especially after the advent of recording and radio, southern blacks—even those who remained at home—could share in the common experience of migration. Nathan Irvin Huggins may have been right to argue that lower-class blacks appreciated the novels, plays, and symphonies produced by the Harlem Renaissance, “not al ways because they could read, listen, and understand them, but because the fact that these works were written was a remarkable achievement.”29 Though these works sprouted from the fertile soil of African American folk heritage, the plays, novels, and poems themselves did not enjoy a dynamic interplay with the “folk populations” out of which they grew. On the other hand, blues music served as a touchstone—a collective diary—for blacks in the agricultural districts of the Mississippi Valley. Folks in the cotton hamlets and levee camps could access, contribute to, and draw from the blues as musicians helped their listeners consider and understand the new horizons opening before them.

  The Origins of the Ramblin’ Blues

  Physical and metaphysical acts of mobility pervaded the blues music of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Some bluesmen, such as the artful Robert Johnson, expressed the restlessness of their existence in fantastical terms, as in the now-famous “Hellhound on My Trail”:

  I got to keep moving, I got to keep movin’,

  Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail,

  Hmmm, blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail,

  And the day keeps remindin’ me there’s a hellhound on my trail,

  Hellhound on my trail, hellhound on my trail.30

  In the popular culture of blues enthusiasts, Johnson’s verse about the hellhound is interpreted to reflect the haunting and existential tragedy of southern black life, but it may be only an artful and creative representation of something that is at the same time both more simplistic and more profound—the desire for freedom of movement. Following the 1990 release of the double-CD collection of Johnson’s forty-one Vocalion recordings with producer Don Law, a 1991 interview with Johnny Shines, Johnson’s fellow Mississippi bluesman and occasional travel partner, revealed a peripatetic but altogether un-tragic lifestyle: “Robert liked to travel. You could wake up anytime of night and say ‘Let’s go’ and he was ready. He never asked you where or why or anything. He would get up and get dressed and get ready to go. And I often say, I guess him and I were the first hippies because we didn’t care when, where or how. If we wanted to go someplace, we went. We didn’t care how we went. We’d ride, walk. If you asked us where we were going, we didn’t know. Just anywhere.”31 Haunting or simply thrill seeking, Johnson’s life and lyrics provided his listeners with a symbolic and fantastical way of thinking about their own movement, whether it was for work opportunities, to escape debt, or simply to get out of the Jim Crow South. />
  Johnson’s role model, Son House, chose a less mystical subject than the hellhound for his account of the forces that kept southerners on the move. The Mississippi native profited from connections to already successful musicians. Just as McClennan got plugged into Bluebird Records because of his contact with Broonzy, House joined Charley Patton on the now-famous road trip to Grafton, Wisconsin, for a series of recording sessions with Paramount in the early summer of 1930. Already a year into the Great Depression, House painted a picture of the South as a bleak and increasingly lifeless environment:

  Now the people down south soon will have no home,

  Now the people down south soon will have no home,

  ‘Cause this dry spell has parched all the cotton and corn.

  Certainly, the sharecroppers and other farmers recognized the relationship between environmental catastrophe and economic hardship, and House uses that motif in his second verse, which makes a further connection between economic hard times and romantic woes:

  Pork chops forty cents a pound, cotton’s only ten,

  Pork chops forty cents a pound, cotton’s only ten,

  I don’t keep no women—no, no—not a one of them.

  With nothing to grow, nothing good to eat, and no companionship, the only thing left to do—in typical blues fashion—is to turn away from the path of “honest” work and seek escapism in self-indulgence (which, also in typical blues fashion, happened to be illegal):

  So dry, old boll weevil turn up his toes and die,

  So dry, old boll weevil turn up his toes and die,

  Now ain’t nothin’ to do, bootleg moonshine an’ rye.32

  With his field holler-like vocals, plantation-inspired lyrics, and raw and expressive guitar picking, House truly represented the Delta style on these 1930 recordings. So too, the song’s feeling of resignation; there isn’t much you can do about bad times, House’s lyrics acknowledge, and not much good can come out of it. Even the hated boll weevil has to take a low-down, bluesy hit sometimes. In House’s song, failure to act in the face of tough times means succumbing to the fruitlessness of the land and seeking escape in selling and consuming alcohol. But blues musicians sang about another kind of escape, a kind that they enacted themselves: relocation.

  The spirit of mobility pervaded blues music as we have seen in the lyrics of McClennan and Johnson. Accepting the harsh fate of drought and other economic and social problems in the South reflected the fatalism of the blues, but packing up and leaving a tough situation in search of better circumstances— both romantically and economically—displayed the blues’s hopefulness. This dualism can be seen in the following verse from Peetie Wheatstraw:

  When a woman gets the blues, she hangs her head and cries;

  But when a man gets the blues, he flags a train and rides.33

  That physical movement should pervade African American cultural expression derived from the paramount importance of white control over the black body—a cultural, legal, and economic principle that had taken root nearly three hundred years before the Great Migration.34 Avoiding the general debate on the fundamental aspects of the South’s economy in slavery (and freedom), it can be said generally that landowning white southerners aspired to a manorial system in which the black masses were immobilized and could be coerced or coaxed to supply a source of stable labor. As a result, African Americans during the colonial and antebellum periods maintained in their musical culture their hopes for deliverance from slavery, expressed through reference to biblical parables:

  He delivered Daniel from de lion’s den,

  Jonah from de belly ob de whale,

  And de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace,

  And why not every man?

  With the exception of suicide, revolt, and escape—the latter two often proving suicidal—slaves usually lacked the ability to break out of permanent bondage. The absence of personal agency was represented by a rather noticeable silence in slave music. Slaves’ reliance on deliverance from above—and their seeming inability to command their destinies—indicated the degree to which they had been alienated from their own existence:

  This world is not my home.

  This world is not my home.

  This world’s a howling wilderness,

  This world is not my home.35

  Certainly, slaves wanted to control their own destinies and make their home in this world, and the great dangers faced by slaves who did try to escape was testament to their desire for freedom, as was the freedmen’s behavior during and after the Civil War as liberated slaves took up, refugee-like, with the Union army.36 As African Americans sought literacy in the post-Emancipation South, so too did they exercise their freedom of movement, seeking lost family members and finding homes in new areas of the South. After Reconstruction, black southerners ventured further, settling more numerously in the North and West, including a concerted migration to Kansas in 1879.37 The number of out-migrating southern blacks in the 1890s was more than double the figures for the previous two decades; in all, approximately 341,000 African Americans left the South between the end of Reconstruction and the turn of the century.38

  In the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, most southern African Americans found new homes within the South. In 1870, 90.6 percent of African Americans lived in the South; that figure fell only slightly to 89.7 percent in 1900.39 While blues musicians embodied and celebrated the restlessness among the African Americans remaining in the South, white leadership urged immobility among black laborers. White leaders “everywhere set themselves, before everything else, to the enactment of the famous vagrancy and contract laws,” wrote W. J. Cash—laws that would help white patricians “set their old world whole again by restoring slavery in all but the name.”40 And the imperative to stay put and work was not only imposed on black farmers by white hegemony; Booker T. Washington’s goal of “educational instruction” likewise brought the black body under control. His recommendation of a “clean, thrifty, rural, industrial, plain style” represented, in effect, a regimen of “domesticated immobility” for blacks in the “country districts.”41 Blues music, however, did not celebrate a stoic dependence on and dedication to a plot of land but rather an itch to leave the land. The freedom of mobility—control over one’s body— was as self-affirming as anything, and black southerners enjoyed the economic benefits of moving as part of the ongoing negotiations between black laborers and white landowners.42

  The Mississippi Delta took a spotlight role in the history of black Americans of the Lower Mississippi Valley because the region clearly showcased the economic, demographic, and cultural forces at work in the plantation districts of the Deep South. Residents of the Mississippi Delta in the twentieth century had recent memories of the plantation frontier hacked out of the tangled wilderness of the Mississippi and Yazoo floodplains. In fewer than two decades, private land developers brought forth plantations from the swampy bayous and thick forests of western Mississippi that had provided the city of Vicksburg with its best defense from the invading Union general Grant in 1862 and 1863. Responding to promotions of the Delta as a new garden spot of the South, black and white southerners moved to the region in the last decades of the nineteenth century with high hopes of raising profit-turning crops; the state of Mississippi saw 22,000 more black in-migrants than it lost to out-migration. Through the early years of Jim Crow, however, elite white landowners capitalized on the fertile Delta soil, establishing widespread black sharecropping and reducing African Americans’ civil rights. Simultaneously, blues music emerged among the black laborers in the Delta and similar bottomland plantation districts in the Old Southwest.

  The song that W. C. Handy heard in 1903 in the Mississippi Delta and that inspired him to write blues music revolved around the notion of restlessness and travel. An anonymous young man sang an untitled verse about the crossing of the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad—nicknamed by locals the “Yellow Dog”—and the Southern Line:

  Goin’ where the S
outhern cross’ the Dog.

  Handy remembered this line, and he and his lyricist, Harry Pace, included it in their hit “Yellow Dog Blues” (originally “Yellow Dog Rag,” the change shows Handy’s desire to capitalize on the “blues” brand), performed by Bessie Smith and Fletcher Henderson’s Hot Six in 1925. Smith introduced listeners to Miss Susie Johnson, who lost her man in a railroad runoff. The last line is:

  He’s gone where the Southern cross’ the Yellow Dog.

  This line would be recycled from New York City back to the Delta where Charley Patton picked it up and repeated the refrain, “I’m goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog” several times in his “Green River Blues,” a Paramount recording made in 1929 in Grafton, Wisconsin. Just a few years after that, Big Bill Broonzy recorded a more elaborate rendering of this now-famous railroad crossing at Moorhead, Mississippi, in “The Southern Blues”:

  If my baby didn’t catch the Southern,

  She must’ve caught the Yellow Dog,

  The Southern cross’ the Dog at Moorhead . . .

  In more romantic readings of the blues, some observers interpret the blues’s common references to crossroads as a preoccupation with midnight deals with the devil. But in the context of migration and movement, the junction of the Southern and the Dog rail lines had another meaning; crossroads were gateways to freedom, allowing one to move in any of the four directions. But the song’s emphasis on movement did not end with the singer’s mention of important local means of transportation like the railroads. The lyrics also emphasized the desire to use those railroads and move: