by R. A. Lawson
Hard times were nothing new to the South’s African Americans, and poverty had been a primordial condition in the emergence of blues culture. If anything, bluesmen were well prepared to reflect the melancholy of the impoverished. Lonnie Johnson employed ironic humor in his “Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere,” observing that for many African Americans, the Depression was nothing new.
People is ravin’ ‘bout hard times, tell me what it’s all about,
People is hollerin’ ‘bout hard times, tell me what’s it all about,
Hard times don’t worry me, I was broke when they first started out.
People is ravin’ ‘bout hard times, I don’t know why they should,
People is ravin’ ‘bout hard times, I don’t know why they should,
If some people was like me, they didn’t have no money when times was good.39
When he cut this track for Decca Records, Johnson had been a professional recording artist for over a decade, but many of his sharecropping and factory-working listeners could identify with his lyrics. Historian Harvard Sitkoff, in his description of life during the “panic crash,” wrote that “a specter of starvation haunted black America”—as Depression-era Piedmont bluesman Carl Martin attested when he sang, “Now I woke up this mornin’, doggone my soul / My flour barrel was empty, well, I didn’t have no coal.”40 Bluesmen faced economic hardships particular to their trade as well. Not only had the crash devastated musicians’ rural sharecropper and urban laborer clientele, but the recording industry had dried up, too. Industry-wide record sales fell from over $100 million in 1927 to a mere $6 million in 1933. Whereas the average race record sold approximately ten thousand copies in the mid-1920s, the figure plummeted to around four hundred in 1932. Executives pared down their artist rosters to lower overhead costs. In 1931, major labels began to drop their race series from their catalogs, and as the Depression wore on, companies folded or were bought out by competitors. By 1933, race record production had dwindled to a trickle.41
The universality of the Depression—a bluesman encountered its effects whether in the Delta or in Chicago—gave rise to an increase in topical song writing. Many of the songs that made it to disc before the big shutdown among recording companies reveal the musicians’ overwhelmed response to the dire economic situation.42 As they had with the recent war, migration, and flood, black musicians shared their individual feelings and thoughts about the Depression on the public message board that was the blues. Musicians first attempted to depict the frenzied element of the Depression; one of the earliest blues recordings that reflected the Great Depression’s effects was Hezekiah Jenkins’s “The Panic is On” (1931). Jenkins opens the refrain, singing with urgency: “Doggone, I mean the panic is on!” He cries:
Can’t get no work, can’t draw no pay,
Unemployment gettin’ worser every day.
Nothing to eat, no place to sleep,
All night long, folks walkin’ the street.
Whereas Jenkins appeared indignant, other bluesmen simply sounded depressed. Delta-born Skip James had moved to the state capital of Jackson to find better conditions and recording gigs. In 1931 at Paramount Records, James covered portions of Son House’s “Dry Spell Blues” (recorded at Paramount the year before), giving the song the acerbic title, “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues.” The first verse finds that “times is harder than ever been before,” and that “people are drifting from door to door / Can’t find no haven, I don’t care where they go.” Like Jenkins in “The Panic is On,” James describes destitution and homelessness among the Depression’s economic victims. Additionally, James captures the totality of the national collapse by showing it as an indiscriminate force of destruction that touches all, even those who had been successful in the Roaring Twenties. “If you thought you had money, you better be sure,” sings James, “ ‘cause these hard times will drive you from door to door.”43
The theme of vagrancy emerged over and over again in the blues recordings of 1931, each repetition adding to the ever-growing musical narrative of the tragedy. In “Depression Blues,” Chicago newcomer Tampa Red describes a nomadic, exiled existence: “I’ve begged and borrowed, till my friends don’t want me ‘round / I’ll take Old Man Depression, and leave this no good town.” His contemporary, Charlie Spand, echoes the “begged and borrowed” line in yet another 1931 recording, “Hard Time Blues.” “Lord, I walked and walked, but I cannot find a job,” sings Spand, “Lord I can’t ‘ford borrow no money, and I sure don’t want to rob.” Each point of Spand’s triangle—employment, indebtedness, and crime—seems out of his grasp, either materially or morally. Instead, he has arrived at a sad epiphany:
Everybody’s cryin’ “depression,” I just found out what it means,
Everybody’s cryin’ “depression,” I just found out what it means,
It means a man ain’t got no money, he can’t buy no bacon and greens.44
Each of these songs recorded in 1931—”The Panic is On,” “Hard Time Killing Floor Blues,” “Depression Blues,” and “Hard Time Blues”—presented early signs that the Great Depression would force powerful changes in Americans’ cultural values. In singing about “folks walkin’ the street,” and drifting “from door to door,” Jenkins, James, and the other musicians upheld the old blues tradition of singing about ramblin’. During the Depression, however, songs such as these inverted the traditional image of mobility. Perhaps Richard Wright was thinking of these Depression-era race records when he wrote that blues tunes were “starkly brutal, haunting folk songs created by millions of nameless and illiterate American Negroes in their confused wanderings over the American southland and in their intrusion into the northern American industrial cities.” In migrating around the plantation South, to the South’s cities, and to the urban North, black southerners had regarded the ability to move as a fruit of freedom. Now movement became a sign of vagrancy and helplessness.45
Wheatstraw joined the chorus of blues musicians bemoaning the Depression and being depressed about having to wander around in search of refuge. The passage of time had allowed Wheatstraw to be comedic and sarcastic about tough subjects such as the 1927 flood. The economic and social troubles stemming from the 1929 stock crash, however, still loomed over the country—and Wheatstraw—a decade later. In 1938, Wheatstraw and his producers were still interested in putting out records that captured the tragedy of chronic vagrancy during the hard times. Played in his typical piano-heavy style, with Lonnie Johnson providing a high, thin guitar accompaniment, Wheatstraw’s “Road Tramp Blues,” is such a song.
I have walked a lonesome road, ’til my feet is too sore to walk,
I have walked a lonesome road, ’til my feet is too sore to walk,
I have begged scraps from the people, ooh well, well, until my tongue is too stiff to talk.
Instead of merely constructing a musical image of humiliation and destitution, Wheatstraw sings with the regretful, penitent tongue of a redemption-seeking sinner, like a drunk who awakes after a bender and promises never to touch liquor again.
When I get off of my troubles, I’m gonna bank my money down,
When I get off of my troubles, I’m gonna bank my money down,
And change my way of livin’, ooh well, well, so I won’t have to tramp around.46
Common in the Depression-era blues songs are a variety of euphemisms including “the panic,” “my troubles,” and “hard times.” These euphemisms signal a general reluctance on the part of recording artists to demonize individuals such as bosses or landlords who may have hurt them or their friends. The bluesmen’s choice of words reflects their acknowledgment of the vastness of the economic malaise, which seemed to escape personification or embodiment in anyone more tangible than Tampa Red’s fictive “Old Man Depression.” This sort of generalization has led blues historians Sam Charters and Paul Oliver, among others, to think of the blues as a popular music that was meant to be shared and universal. Artists usually passed over specific references for gene
ral themes, codes, and shared imagery.
But there was one individual who was vilified in early Depression-era blues lyrics: President Hoover. Sometimes the attacks were covert, as artists inserted references, sometimes nonspecific, into more traditional lyrics bemoaning hard times. Barbecue Bob Hicks chose to indirectly jab at Hoover in “We Sure Got Hard Times Now” (1930). Apropos to his name, the singer begins by pointing out the scarcity of pork products.
Lard and bacon, gone to a dollar a pound,
Lard and bacon, gone to a dollar a pound,
Cotton have started to sellin’, but it keeps goin’ down and down.
In the next verse, Hicks stops short of naming Hoover as the source of his troubles, but his meaning is clear as he chides those who would have supported Hoover in the last election.
Just before election, you’s talking how you was going to vote,
Just before election, you’s talking how you was going to vote,
And after election was over, your head down like a billy goat.47
Other bluesmen increasingly blamed Hoover for the material shortcomings suffered during the Depression. Poor Americans could no longer afford Camels, Chesterfields, Lucky Strikes, and other manufactured cigarettes, so they were forced to smoke a much lower grade of ground-up tobacco, called Golden Grain. Brownie McGhee recorded a noncommercial track blaming the president for bad smokes: “Now you know, that man who was in, President Hoover was his name . . .” McGhee sang, “He took me off-a Camel cigarettes, and put me on Golden Grain.” The “grain” part of the name came from the fact that after good, leafy tobacco was separated and packed, what remained was a dry, flaky, dusty grain that was hard to roll and of poor smoking quality. Years later, Buddy Moss added some sarcasm and bitter humor to his version of the song. “Our father, who art in Washington, Hoover will be his name,” sang Moss, “took me off my good Chesterfield, and stuck me on Golden Grain.”48 From early veiled references to more explicit uses of Hoover’s name, African American musicians tended to add the president to their ever-growing list of problems. That these musicians should find Hoover a blues-worthy subject is perhaps not surprising, but the Depression-era blues records also demonstrated the powerful use of symbolism and trope to express important communal and individual experiences, such as the reversal of the meaning of mobility and travel. The use of the president’s name to describe American shantytowns—”Hoovervilles”—was another example of powerful symbolism. Capturing the feelings of resentment among the homeless in these makeshift communities and personifying the source of that collective shame, the term Hooverville was widely used by blues musicians and other poor Americans who had to live in tin, scrap-wood, and canvas shacks during the Great Depression.
Wheatstraw’s Depression-era hometown, East St. Louis, was near the site of one of America’s largest Hoovervilles, located south of the city near the riverside railroad yards. Its industry and local agriculture devastated, St. Louis suffered the crash and stagnant economy more acutely than most cities. Unemployment in the Gateway City was twice the national level. In 1933, as the financial crisis bottomed out, one of Wheatstraw’s guitarist friends, Mississippi native J. D. Short, penned and performed “It’s Hard Time.” Several years before the crash, Short had come to St. Louis to work in a metal foundry while developing his musical career during his off hours. In simple narration, Short spins a tale that millions of laid-off American workers would find familiar: “I went down to the fact’ry where I worked three years or more,” he sings, “And the bossman tol’ me, ‘Man, I ain’t hirin’ here no more.’ “ Additionally, Short was one of the first musicians to use the term Hooverville in a song.
Now we have a little city, that we calls down in Hooverville,
Now we have a little city, that we calls down in Hooverville,
Times have got so hard, people ain’t got no place to live.49
Short and his musical colleagues had intimate knowledge of the St. Louis Hooverville, as he was among a growing community of amateur and professional musicians who kept the homeless entertained. “Lotta blues happenin’ out there along the river back then, right there in them tents and shacks,” remembered Big Joe Williams, a St. Louis resident in the 1930s. Several years before he and Wheatstraw teamed up to open the St. Louis Club nightspot, Williams helped make a nightclub of sorts in the Hooverville. “Oh yeah, see they’d have a honky-tonk right out there with the hobos and po’ peoples . . . have moonshine and maybe some folks be gamblin’ . . . Always be blues musicians out there driftin’ in and out.” In recalling his time in St. Louis during the Depression, Williams opined that blues music offered some happiness to those who had little to hope for. “Everyone liked to crowd us bluesmen,” said Williams, because “blues used to make the peoples feel happy for a little while anyway.” “Those were real hard times back then,” he continued. “No jobs around . . . nobody got homes . . . livin’ took some doin.”50
The name Hooverville drew attention to the failure of national leadership, but nowhere was the failure more obvious than at a shantytown just miles from the White House. In May 1932, on the eastern side of Washington, D.C., along the banks of the Anacostia River, World War I veterans and their families set up a Hooverville in which to stay while demanding payment of the veterans’ bonus funds provided by the Adjusted Compensation Act of 1924. As a temporary home to twenty thousand impoverished people, the Washington Hooverville was the largest in the nation and a microcosm of the desperate poverty and political confusion that plagued the country. Whereas they had been segregated in Europe, veterans of different races and ethnicities now banded together in poverty—a faint hint of class solidarity among white and black Americans. The squatter-protesters called themselves the Bonus Expeditionary Force (BEF), a play on the formal name of America’s military effort in Europe, and they employed the witty slogan “Cheered in ‘17, Jeered in ‘32” because Hoover strongly opposed the early payment of the bonus funds. The Senate defeated a measure to expedite bonus money payments; however, Hoover was not uncaring. As he had with the flood relief victims five years before, Hoover provided the veterans with aid such as clothing and medical supplies. Yet again, Hoover’s modest demeanor allowed his benevolent deeds to be overshadowed by his conservative rhetoric and choices. First, he denounced the BEF as a communist uprising. Not yet the familiar specter it was to become later in cold-war American political discourse, communism had already threatened established economic and racial patterns in the South, most conspicuously when communist lawyers had adopted the publicized cause of the nine black men on trial for rape in Scottsboro, Alabama.51 Second, Hoover ordered General Douglas MacArthur to clear the BEF camp, but despite orders to ensure the safety of the squatters, MacArthur sent in cavalry, tanks, and infantry, driving protesters away with tear gas and drawn sabers. The army torched the shantytown as they proceeded, and the homeless veterans suffered several casualties. Although MacArthur had overstepped his authority in razing the camp, Hoover took the blame. The newspaper photos of U.S. Army troops attacking veterans needed little added commentary.52
While Hoovervilles like the one Williams described near St. Louis may have replicated common patterns of segregation, the BEF Hooverville was integrated. The fact remained that millions of Americans of all backgrounds were devastated during the Great Depression, and those living near the margin of survival could not afford to respect racial custom in all matters as they had before 1929.53 Hoover’s degree of responsibility in the plight of southern blacks, war veterans, and other groups of Americans can be debated. Unquestionable, however, was his accelerated fall from public favor. The stage was cleared for the Democrats to return to the White House after a twelve-year absence. African Americans would have little impact on the presidential election in 1932, but southern blacks—whether living in the St. Louis Hooverville or marching in the BEF or sticking it out in the Delta—were as eager as any Americans for relief.
An Old Deal, A Raw Deal
With the country in economic
shambles and the nation’s social solvency tested, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strong, hopeful message inspired despondent citizens with the promise of recovery. Roosevelt invoked Abraham Lincoln’s name, hoping to steal the mantle of liberation from his political rivals.54 If the Republican Party had ceased to be the party of Lincoln, however, the Democrats were still the party of Jim Crow, and there were very few black Democrats in the early 1930s.55 Furthermore, Roosevelt had attached himself to the political leadership of the white South. As a part-time resident of Georgia and a builder of coalitions with partisan colleagues in Dixie, Roosevelt the New Yorker found himself at ease in either section of the country.56 He swept forty-two states in 1932, including the entire South, indicating strong support along party lines among voting southern whites. Roosevelt’s partnerships with demagogic southern legislators such as Arkansas’s Joe Robinson may have represented nothing more than political pragmatism, but those associations—coupled with his tendency to deal with people in terms of class, not race or ethnicity—seemed evidence to many black citizens that Roosevelt would offer little hope in the drive for race reform.57 Correspondingly, returns from the black voting population indicated a significant level of distrust at the onset of Roosevelt’s presidency.58 Most southern blacks did not vote, and northern blacks were not supportive of Roosevelt in 1932. Therefore, the Democratic Party had little reason to pursue racially liberal policies, whereas a conservative position on race potentially won the support of hundreds of thousands of white voters in the South and the North. For example, Roosevelt never sponsored a federal antilynching law despite increasingly loud calls from black leaders that something be done to address racial violence.