by R. A. Lawson
72. Humphrey, “Urban Blues,” 166-67; and Wald, Escaping the Delta, 41.
73. Robert Johnson, “Sweet Home Chicago,” Vocalion 03601 (San Antonio, 1936). See also Kokomo Arnold, “Kokomo Blues,” Decca 7026 (Chicago, 1934).
74. Bob Campbell, “Starvation Farm Blues,” Vocalion 02798 (New York, 1934).
75. Peetie Wheatstraw (vocals), with Lil’ Armstrong (piano), Sid Catlett (drums), and Jonah Jones (trumpet), “Chicago Mill Blues,” Decca Records 7788 (New York, 1940).
76. The consolidation of poor African American neighborhoods and resulting social difficulties has received continuing scholarly attention; see, for example, Chicago Commission on Race Relations, The Negro in Chicago; and Detroit Bureau of Governmental Research, Inc., “Negro Housing in Detroit in the 1920s,” in the Mayor’s Inter-racial Committee, The Negro in Detroit (Detroit, 1926), 1-2, 21-24; St. Clair Drake and Horace Clayton, Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1945); Gilbert Osofsky, Harlem: The Making of a Ghetto: Negro New York, 1890-1930 (New York: Harper and Row, 1966); Spear, Black Chicago; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940-1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Charles Abrams, Forbidden Neighbors: A Study of Prejudice in Housing (New York: Harper and Bros., 1955); and Otis Duncan and Beverly Duncan, The Negro Population in Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
77. Broonzy and Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues, 56-57.
78. On the rise of the KKK in Indiana, see Leonard Moore, Citizen Klansmen: The Ku Klux Klan in Indiana, 1921-1928 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991); William Lutholtz, Grand Dragon: D.C. Stephenson and the Ku Klux Klan in Indiana (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 1991); and Richard Tucker, The Dragon and the Cross: The Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in Middle America (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1991). On the rise of “sundown towns” in the Midwest, see James Loewen, Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), esp. chapter 9, “Enforcement,” 227-79.
79. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 126; and Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 50. On the St. Louis riot, as well as the Chicago riot, see Elliot M. Rudwick, Race Riot in East St. Louis, July 2, 1917 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1964). Generally, see Christopher Capozolla, “The Only Badge Needed is Your Patriotic Fervor: Vigilance, Coercion, and the Law in World War I America,” Journal of American History 88 (March 2002): 1374-77.
80. Sherman, The Negro and the City, 126-33. See also William M. Tuttle Jr., Race Riot: Chicago in the Red Summer of 1919 (New York: Atheneum, 1972); and Spear, Black Chicago, 214-22.
81. See McMillen, Dark Journey, 273, n. 408.
82. Sylvester Palmer, “Broke Man Blues,” Columbia 14525-D (Chicago, 1929); Lillie Mae Glover (Memphis Ma Rainey) quoted in Hay and Davidson, Goin’ Back to Sweet Memphis, 42; and Michael Bane, White Boy Singin’ the Blues: The Black Roots of White Rock (New York: Da Capo, 1982), 66. Michelle Tate quoted in Loewen, Sundown Towns, 227.
83. Big Bill and the Memphis Five, “Going Back to Arkansas,” previously unissued original recording on Vocalion (Chicago, 1935). The Memphis Five group included Big Bill Broonzy (vocals), “Mr. Sheiks” (trumpet), Buster Bennet (alto sax), Blind John Davis (piano), unknown (guitar), Wilbur Ware (string bass). See also Roosevelt Sykes, “Southern Blues,” Victor 22-0056 (Chicago, 1948); Thomas Jefferson, “Query XIX,” in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) in Merrill D. Peterson, ed., The Portable Thomas Jefferson (New York: Penguin, 1975), 217; and Thomas Wolfe, You Can’t Go Home Again (New York: Harper and Bros., 1940).
84. See Eldridge and Thomas, Population Redistribution and Economic Growth, table 1.27.
85. Historian Chad Berry uses the term “divided heart” to describe the tensions internal to white southern migrants to the North, but the concept applies equally well to black southerners; see Chad Berry, Southern Migrants, Northern Exiles (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 7.
86. The membership of the Chicago NAACP began to reflect the cross-section of the city’s black population only in the 1940s; see Christopher Robert Reed, The Chicago NAACP and the Rise of Black Professional Leadership, 1910-1966 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997).
87. The C. Eric Lincoln Series on the Black Experience includes a work that places the Great Migration among the Civil War and the civil rights movement as the most important events in the history of African Americans; see Milton C. Sernett, Bound for the Promised Land: African American Religion and the Great Migration (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997).
88. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, 18-19.
BREAK
1. Widely cited among military histories of the Great War is Edward Coffman, The War to End All Wars: The American Military Experience in World War I (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968). Covering the home front is David M. Kennedy, Over Here: The First World War and American Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). More narrow studies of the war’s meaning to Americans include Ronald Schaffer, America in the Great War: The Rise of the War Welfare State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Ellis W. Hawley, The Great War and the Search for Modern Order (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979).
2. On W. E. B. Du Bois’s advocacy for black support of the war, see Mark Ellis, “ ‘Closing Ranks’ and ‘Seeking Honors’: W. E. B. Du Bois in World War I,” Journal of American History 79 (June 1992): 96-124; Foner, Story of American Freedom, 172-75; and Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 109-10. On the “Brownsville Raid” of 1906, see Marvin Fletcher, The Black Soldier and Officer in the United States Army, 1891-1917 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1974), 119-52; and John D. Weaver, The Brownsville Raid (New York: Norton, 1970).
3. Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 8. During the Vietnam War, African American and military historians such as Mullen reexamined the role of black soldiers in America’s military past. Heightened racial awareness and the racial inequity of the Vietnam-era draft may have stimulated historians’ interest in the relationship between African Americans and the U.S. military. Observers commonly accepted the service-equals-citizenship formula. Richard Stillman, writing in 1968, argued that African Americans desired “the patriotic, heroic, and social rewards derived from service in the armed forces.” A year later, Richard Dalfiume wrote that “the Negro has sought to participate in America’s wars in the hope that his sacrifices would bring the reward of increased rights”; Richard Stillman II, Integration of the Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces (New York: Praeger, 1968), 1. See also Richard Dalfiume, Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces: Fighting on Two Fronts, 1939-1953 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1969), 2; and Ira Berlin, ed., The Black Military Experience (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
4. McMillen, Dark Journey, 316.
5. Foner, Story of American Freedom, 174; Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 46.
6. Dalfiume, Desegregation of the U.S. Armed Forces, 2.
7. Letter, Major General Tasker H. Bliss, Assistant to the Chief of Staff, to General Robert K. Evans, April 4, 1917, in Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents, vol. 4, Segregation Entrenched, 1917-1940 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1977), 3-5. On Vardaman’s derision of black soldiers, see Jeanette Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance, 1917-1918,” 1351. General southern skepticism of national policies during World War I is covered in Harris, Deep Souths, 222-23.
8. Anthony Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Militant Interventionism in the South,” Journal of Southern History 65 (November 1999): 806-7, quote p. 806. For sectional differences on national defense bills, see Alfred O. Hero Jr., The Southerner and World Affairs (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1965), 4-7; and Dewey Grantham, The Life and Death of the Solid South: A Political History (Lexington: University Pres
s of Kentucky, 1988), 114-15.
9. Walter Hinkel, “ ‘Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination’: Citizenship, Dependency, and Conscription in the South,” Journal of Southern History 66 (November 2000): 767. For figures on black registration and enlistment, see also Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 46; John Whiteclay Chambers II, To Raise An Army: The Draft Comes to Modern America (New York: Free Press, 1987), 225; Arthur Barbeau and Florette Henri, The Unknown Soldiers: Black American Troops in World War I (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1974), 36; and James Men-nell, “African Americans and the Selective Service Act of 1917,” Journal of Negro History 84 (Summer 1999): 275-87.
10. William J. Trotter quoted in Foner, Story of American Freedom, 173. On the debate within black leadership to support or oppose the war, see William Jordan, “ ‘The Damnable Dilemma’: African-American Accommodation and Protest during World War I,” Journal of American History 81 (March 1995): 1562-83; Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 109-10; and Theodore Kornweibel Jr., “Apathy and Dissent: Black America’s Negative Responses to World War I,” South Atlantic Quarterly 80 (Summer 1981): 322-38.
11. Historian Jeanette Keith argues that poor black and white inductees resisted the draft in many cases, resorting to the “classic weapons of the weak: evasion, prevarication, and foot dragging” (“The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance,” 1356-57).
12. Gerald Shenk, “Race, Manhood, and Manpower: Mobilizing Rural Georgia for World War I,” Georgia Historical Quarterly 81 (Fall 1997): 622-23.
13. Hinkel, “Justice and the Highest Kind of Equality Require Discrimination,” 749-80, figures on 767; see also Keith, “The Politics of Southern Draft Resistance,” 1345-55.
14. Letter from Georgia planters quoted in Shenk, “Race, Manhood, and Manpower,” 647. Shenk argued that Edward Said was correct in interpreting messages such as the planters’ letter as a colo nizer’s efforts to “commodify” their colonized labor force; see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 167-68. On “work or fight” provisions, see McMillen, Dark Journey, 305; and Shenk, “Race, Manhood, and Manpower,” 640-53.
15. Chalmers Archer Sr. quoted in Archer, Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi, 24-25.
16. Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began, 433.
17. Among the more celebratory accounts of black service during the war was Robert Greene, Black Defenders of America, 1775-1973: A Reference and Pictorial History (Chicago: Johnson Publishing, 1974), 171-73. Greene’s pictures of black soldiers in World War I focus on decorative parade stances and marching, whereas Jesse Johnson, A Pictorial History of Black Soldiers in the United States (1619-1969) (Hampton, Va.: Hampton Institute, 1970), 36-42, includes several photos of black soldiers engaged in ditch digging and equipment loading, as well as a few shots of boxing matches at a black army camp.
18. On the use of African American soldiers for supply and labor purposes, see Stillman, Integration of the Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces, chapter 2, “The Historical Context,” 7-21; Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 48; and MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, 4:xxxiii.
19. Big Bill Broonzy quoted in Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began, 435, 434. Jack Foner documented discrimination leveled at black enlistees and officers from both the public and the defense department, including the creation of segregated military graveyards; see Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 111-26.
20. “Report of the Official Investigation of the Houston Riot, 23 August 1917, involving the 24th Infantry,” Memorandum, from Colonel G. C. Gross to Commanding General, Southern Department, September 13, 1917, in Morris J. MacGregor and Bernard C. Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces: Basic Documents, vol. 3, Freedom and Jim Crow, 1865-1917 (Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources Inc., 1977), 376-78, quote p. 377.
21. Letter, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker to President Woodrow Wilson, August 22, 1918, in MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, 3:399-405.
22. McMillen, Dark Journey, 30-31.
23. Headquarters, 92nd Division, AEF, General Orders No. 40, December 26, 1918, reprinted in MacGregor and Nalty, eds., Blacks in the United States Armed Forces, 4:280-81. Included in MacGregor and Nalty’s collection are “Documents of War,” edited by Du Bois for publication in The Crisis. French citizens and soldiers were to avoid condoning African American soldiers interacting with French women or to congratulate or to treat as equal black Americans in the presence of white Americans. The directive was aimed to avoid giving offense to white American allies. See also Stillman, Integration of the Negro in the U.S. Armed Forces, 12-21.
24. On the several citations received by African American servicemen during World War I, see U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense, “Integration and the Negro Officer in the Armed Forces of the United States of America” (Washington, D.C.: Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, 1962), 4; Johnson, Pictorial History of Black Soldiers, 36; and Greene, Black Defenders of America, 171-73.
25. John Jacob Niles, Singing Soldiers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1927), 30. Niles, a white Kentuckian, applauded the musical talents of his fellow soldiers and maintained that black music played a helpful role in the American war effort.
26. Topical blues expert Guido van Rijn cited two 1930s-era recordings by bluesmen who served in France: John “Big Nig” Bray, “Trench Blues” (Morgan City, La., 1934), and “Kingfish” Bill Tomlin, “Army Blues,” Paramount 13034 (Grafton, Wisc., 1930); van Rijn, Roosevelt’s Blues: African American Blues and Gospel Songs on FDR (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997), 214, n. 12-13.
27. “Mademoiselle from Armentiers,” transcribed in Niles, Singing Soldiers, 63-64.
28. “Soldier Man Blues,” anonymous blues artist, transcribed in Niles, Singing Soldiers, 93-94.
29. Blind Willie Johnson, “When the War Was On,” Columbia 14545-D (New Orleans, 1929), and Kid Coley, “War Dream Blues,” Victor 23369 (Louisville, 1931). See also Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues, 177-78; and Cohn, Nothing But the Blues, 118-24.
30. Theodore Bilbo quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 305-6. James Vardaman quoted in Gaughan, “Woodrow Wilson and the Rise of Militant Interventionism in the South,” 800-801; but see also William F. Holmes, The White Chief: James Kimble Vardaman (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 339-58.
31. Big Bill Broonzy quoted in Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began, 435.
32. Archer, Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi, 26.
33. Foner, Blacks and the Military in American History, 126; Mullen, Blacks in America’s Wars, 46.
34. Michael Krenn, review of Marc Gallicchio, The African American Encounter with Japan and China, American Historical Review 106 (October 2001): 1402.
35. B. Baldwin Dansby, oral history from Mississippi Department of Archives and History, quoted in McMillen, Dark Journey, 303.
VERSE THREE
1. The race record phenomenon accounted for an explosion in popularity of downhome blues material following the vaudeville and jazz-blues, which had been popularized through sheet music sales a decade earlier; see Otto and Burns, “Tough Times,” 27.
2. Muddy Waters quoted in Gordon, Can’t Be Satisfied, 26. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Mr. Livinggood,” Decca 7879 (Chicago, 1941). Automobile themes remained strong in the blues after World War II. One of the great Cadillac blues is Charles Waterford, “L. A. Blues,” Capitol 40132 (Los Angeles, 1947), but see also Avery Brady, “Let Me Drive Your Ford,” Testament 2209 (Chicago, 1963). On African American consumerism in the South, see Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, chapter 3, “You Don’t Want Nothing: Goods, Plantation Labor, and the Meanings of Freedom, 1865-1920s,” 61-81; and chapter 6, “Goods, Migration, and the Blues, 1920s-1950s,” 110-29.
3. On the importance of phonographs to poor black families, see Robert Hemenway, “Zora Neale Hurston and the Eatonville Anthropology,” in Arna Bontemps, ed., Harlem Renaissance R
emembered (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1972), 20; and Richard M. Sterner et al., The Negro’s Share: A Study of Income, Housing and Public Assistance (New York: Harper and Bros., 1943), 157-59. On the emergence of the American recording industry in the 1920s and 1930s, see Robert Kraft, Stage to Studio: Musicians and the Sound Revolution, 1890-1950 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 1-33, 59-97.
4. Howard Odum and Guy Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926; citations are to repr. ed., New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 34. See also Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness, 225-26; and Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 10-11.
5. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Sinking Sun Blues,” Decca 7578 (New York, 1939).
6. Robert Johnson, “Hellhound On My Trail,” Vocalion 03623 (Dallas, 1937), and “Me and the Devil Blues,” Vocalion 04108 (Dallas, 1937).
7. Peetie Wheatstraw, “Devilment Blues,” Decca 7422 (Chicago, 1937).
8. A certified copy of Johnson’s “Record of Death” indicates he died on August 16, 1938. The most credible account of the events surrounding Johnson’s death can be found in McCulloch and Pearson, Robert Johnson, 9-10.
9. Peetie Wheatstraw and Lonnie Johnson, “Cake Alley,” Decca 7441 (New York, 1938), and “What More Can A Man Do?” Decca 7479 (New York, 1938).
10. Birth years for Broonzy and Jefferson are drawn from Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues, 38, 166.
11. John B. Kirby, Black Americans in the Roosevelt Era: Liberalism and Race (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1980), chapter 1, “Prelude to the Thirties: The Struggle for Survival,” 3-12; and Harvard Sitkoff, A New Deal for Blacks: The Emergence of Civil Rights as a National Issue, vol. 1, The Depression Decade (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 33.
12. See W. W. Waters and William White, BEF: The Whole Story of the Bonus Army (New York: John Day Co., 1933), 284-88.
13. Louis Hébert, Annual Report of the State Engineer to the Legislature of the State of Louisiana (Baton Rouge, 1859), quoted in George Pabis, “Delaying the Deluge: The Engineering Debate over Flood Control on the Lower Mississippi River, 1846-1861,” Journal of Southern History 64 (August 1998): 421-54, quotation on p. 421.