White man was born with a veil over his face,
He seen the trouble ‘fore it taken place;
Nigger was born with rag in his ass,
Never seen trouble till it done pass’d.
The Dirty Dozens
A 1964 United States Department of Commerce report for the Area Redevelopment Administration on Negro-White Differences in Geographic Mobility arrived at conclusions which may seem surprising in the light of the generally accepted notion that the Negro is, if not by nature, as the result of conditioning, rootless, casually wanton and shallow in family and emotional ties.
The report shows the exact opposite: ‘Negroes on the whole seem to have stronger emotional and family ties to their current place of residence than the white population’ and the graphs show almost twice as much movement by white family heads between labour market areas as among Negroes. ‘Negroes with steady jobs,’ it is added, ‘are considerably less likely to move than white workers who are continuously employed.’ Patently the 700,000 Negroes who left the South between 1920 and 1930 were taking that giant step with reluctance, with little of the entrancement by the hobo life that took so many white boys on to the road. ‘Long lonesome roads I have been down,’ says Odum’s ‘black Ulysses’. ‘… hobo always havin’ hard time … Sometimes J goes as a road hustler, from job to job, doing ‘most anything. I am just a man gettin’ over the world.’
I’m a natural born ram’ler an’ it ain’t no lie
… My foot in my han’.
I’m de out-derndest traveller of any man.
The distinctions are thin at this existence level but the Negro hobo had the tougher time: the scope for jobs was smaller, the black face was a more obvious target for the firemen who turned their hoses on the riders on boxcar roofs, and for small town police watchful for vagrants. Gellert writes: The migratory Negro “just a-lookin’ for work” suffers most. A “vag”. No white folks to intercede for him. He falls as easily as small change into the pocket of the constable… It is based on the law of supply and demand for convict labor.’
Railroad look so pretty
Boxcar on the track
Here come two hoboes,
Grip sack on their back.
Oh, babes,
Oh, no-home babes.
Clothes are all torn to pieces,
Shoes are all worn out,
Rolling ‘round an unfriendly world,
Always roaming about.
Where you gwine, you hoboes?
Where you gwine to stay?
Chain gang link is waiting –
Can’t make your getaway.
A natural sequel to that is Langston Hughes’ cuttingly sarcastic Florida Road Workers:
I’m making a road
For the cars
To fly on.
Makin’ a road
Through the palmetto thicket
For light and civilization
To travel on …
Sure,
A road helps all of us!
White folks ride -
An’ I gets to see ‘em ride.
I ain’t never seen nobody
Ride so fine before.
In the South even the Negro’s jungle camp might be segregated, in whatever spot was left on a garbage tip flank after the white hobos had picked over the more salubrious spots. The gulf of antagonism between black and white drifters - not much feeling of being bottom dog brothers - is pointed up again and again in W. H. Davies’s The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp and in his novel Dancing Mad: the internecine robbery and killing on the duneland jungle at St Louis, the razor fight between white hobos and a gang of Negro river rats on a Twain-like boat voyage down the Mississippi.
The weight of total defeat, of indecision approaching stasis, is in the blues. Bumble Bee Slim’s
I had so much trouble, swear my nerves is weakening down
I would swing on a freight train but I’m afraid to leave the ground,
and Son Bond’s
I’m a broken-hearted bachelor, travellin’ through this wide world all alone
It’s the railroad for my pillow, this jungle for my happy home
both contain a desolation not encountered in white hobos’ songs.
The Negro desire to keep his boots in the dust he knows is substantiated by the findings of Frederic Ramsey Jr in his journeys during the 1950s through Alabama and Mississippi ‘following the trace of wandering blues singers’. Ramsey salvaged information about a remote and dying class of serf Negroes whose pattern of life was little different from their forebears in bondage, and with an only slightly increased fluidity.
He found scattered hamlets, sharecroppers’ strips and cane-brake shacks where the home-made entertainment was religious chants, reels and jump-ups for dancing, country brass bands playing tunes remembered from travelling coon and tent shows of a century before, and the most rudimentary blues - all the rapidly drying tributaries which had confluxed into the formation of jazz and the blues as they are known today.
Tom Huff, born in 1871, the son of two slaves, whom Ramsey discovered farming in the Oakmulgee district of Alabama, knew many hoeing and brush-cutting call-and-response songs. He was a rooted country dweller and his conception of travel was the last pilgrimage to the Holy City:
That’s when-a we walk, walk this milky white road …
I’m goin’ to meet my livin’ mother …
Tell her how I made it over my highway …
Necessarily many of these Negroes in isolated, semi-wild country, far from the ‘black-top’ highway, the tarred road which marked civilization, had had to be drifters.
They had ‘cut out and banished away’ under the whip of starvation. They had wandered around working when they could in barrel-stave mills, in packing plants, on the docks at Mobile Bay, in the Mississippi pecan groves, in Louisiana’s sugar fields. Their paths had been through the pine barrens towards the grid of the black-top highways.
Their hopelessness,’ writes Ramsey, ‘began at home, when they tired of cotton-chopping and plowing, day after day, from sunup to sundown. So they left and went to work along the rails with the gandy crews, in sawmill gangs, in backwater levee camps with mule skinners, and mud and sand movers. Pay was low, and the hours were long … they lived on beans and rice. They took it for a while, then moved on. Between camps they stole and begged. If they had met God, they would have asked Him for a bone … the road, which offered adventure, was better than their homes, which offered nothing. Some left with regret, but they left just the same.’
These early drifters carried the blues about and spread the idiom for many toted an instrument or sang, their survival kit. They carried ‘the devil on their back’ - the guitar as seen by the deeply religious - or a banjo to pick, a fiddle, a jug to blow in. ‘The vagrants, easy riders and drifters of a period just past,’ says Ramsey, ‘are hardly ever to be encountered along Southern highways today.’
Yet he did encounter some musical nomads, not so skilled or confident or knowledgeable about city ways of show business as many who made their one or twenty records, and vanished, who sang about their floating life: It’s a long lane that’s got no end or Lord, I’m standin’ here wonderin’ will a matchbox hold my clothes.
They were rural tramps who saw little of the legendary railroad other than the small depots scattered about the Mississippi countryside, where the drowse was shattered by a shock of blackness as a manifest ripped through blaring and thundering, but deserted for most hours of the day.
For all that, even in the emptiest alluvial lands served by feeder lines to the main cotton road - the ‘streaks of rust’ - the railroad touched most, however impersonally, and cut into the imagination: ‘At the edge of wire-grass prairie on the outskirts of Uniontown, Alabama, they could sit on porches and wait for cattle cars to go through and hear the braying of steers riding to markets and slaughterhouses at Demopolis; and at night they could lie in their beds and hear the long, lonesome whistle of the freight as it
came pounding across the prairie from the cotton depots at Selma. From the crossing outside their windows, the whistle blew louder…
‘The people who lived alongside tracks, in the towns and in the fields, could also ride them, walk them, work for them. The railroad touched them all; it created impressions that became part of song and music. Trains were nearly everything … glory trains, little black trains, good morning trains, good-bye trains, midnight specials and South-bound rattlers …
Trains took people home, if they had a home; they took people down a long road, if they were looking for a home. Engines and drive-wheels and whistles, traveling through dark miles in the wakeful hours just before day, created impressions of sound that pulled and twisted at people’s hearts. The roar of a fast freight, high-balling from no known point of departure to no known destination, struck a music in the ears of those who heard it and were left behind.
‘Musicianers played with the rise and fall of sound, mimicking the far-to-near-then-far-again shuffle of the train winding through hills and valleys. They blew its whistles through harmonicas and horns and reed flutes; they thrashed out its coughing and scurrying rhythms across the sound boxes of their guitars.’
There were, as well the songs not created out of the railroads but created for them, those which were an accompaniment to work. Now machines do most of the maintenance work and less track is laid. But for sixty years no tie was tamped, no bed graded, no rail laid or gauged up, no plug engine and rawhide freight train coupled on a peg-leg, or one-track, railway, without songs to bind together the boomer crews into the harmonic beat of the operation. As the gandy dancers bent to gain united leverage with their crows they grunted:
A sack of flour, a bucket of lard
Wonder what makes these sons work so hard
I been on the Morgan, I been on the Branch
I would I had a section, but they wouldn’t ’llow me no chance.
Part-time railroad coal-heaver or points man, or full-time railroad rider, the Negro who got involved with the trains was unlikely ever again to have a permanent home:
Homeless, yes I’m homeless, might as well be dead
Hungry and disgusted, no place to lay my head.
There was a place, the final commitment to the railroad, the bluesman’s valediction:
I’m all alone at midnight and the lamps are burning low
I’m gonna lay my head on some lonesome railroad line
Let that two-nineteen train pacify my min’.
25 Ain’t it hard to stumble when you got no place to fall?
… we must write about our own mud-puddle.
Michael Gold
The Negro wanderer, frightened at the strangeness around him, longing secretly and ambivalently for the prison cell safety of the Southern birthplace he hated, had his situation summed up, with a stoicism and grace beyond bitterness, by some illiterate anonymous poet: Ain’t it hard to stumble when you got no place to fall?
The frustrations of being trapped economically, of being castrated of dignity and worth as a human being, produced this vacillation between optimism and pessimism: the hope that something better could be found up the track inevitably to be punctured by the realization that there was nothing there either.
Yet, although the experience probably differed only in degrees according to the colour of skin, the wraith of the adventurer with a bedroll hitting the cinder trail to elsewhere remains the doppel-ganger of the American who lives a steady and relatively anchored life. The orphic awe and pull is bottled in its most acrid distillation in the blues, and not only the railroad blues.
The blues has always been the Negro’s escape clause in the white man’s coercive agreement with him and has been used to the full. There have been the blues composers whose fantasies vaulted across the steel rails, who sang of how they would ‘get i my airplane, ride all over the world’, or take a trip ‘in my submarine, ride under the deep blue sea’. There has also grown a body of blues about the roads for during the mass migration North in the twenties, and its lessening waves in the Thirties, the highway became an alternative loophole.
The interstate systems were linking, the bus tickets were cheaper than the rail, and there was the occasional possibility of clubbing together for a clapped-out old barouche which might wheeze on as far as the Yankee factory belt. The man so busted that he had to tramp it was, at least, on public property on the roads, out of firing range of the rail constabulary, and now and then a motorist would respond to the jerked thumb.
The geography of many evicted peasant Negroes extended no farther than the unmetalled mule roads through the stump lands and cotton fields of Georgia and Alabama. The railroad tracks and the interstate turnpikes were in themselves an attainment, the steerings toward that imagined viable life across the firmament. Oliver writes: Tor the migrant Negro with his eyes focused on the far horizon the long ribbons of the “odd” numbered highways have a magnetic fascination. Harsh edges unsoftened by wayside vegetation, their stark concrete whiteness causing them to glare cruelly in the unrelenting sun, they guide his steps to the North,’ hard causeways on which ‘countless thousands of flapping soles and bare black feet have made no indentation.’
Tommy McClennan, who lived on Jackson’s outskirts, sang of watching the Greyhound buses lickspittin’ away up Highway 51:
Now here comes that Greyhound, with his tongue stickin’ out on the side
If you buy your ticket, swear ‘fore God and they’ll let you ride
and Lee Brown declared:
Baby, ain’t you ever been to the Greyhound bus depot
Baby, that’s the fastest bus running on Highway 51.
In 1961 an album of the road blues of Big Joe Williams was issued, Blues on Highway 49, a dossier of routing information of the Delta country. Although Highway 45 Blues is about walking ‘with my suitcase in my hand’ on the tall vertical road from Mobile through Mississippi into Tennessee at Corinth, into Illinois at Paducah, and through to Chicago, most of Williams’s blues are not scored for the main roads. 13 Highway and Highway 49 are about back country roads, the first South-East from St Louis through Marion and Harrisburg in Kentucky and into Tennessee, the other from the Northern border of Tennessee down to Nashville. In 13 Highway Williams says ‘I went down in my V8 Ford’, but it is a walking script mostly, as in Poor Beggar: ‘Please don’t turn me from your door’ - he just hopes ‘some crumbs fall from your table’. Still, his summation is the boast: Yes, I been travellin’, boy, I been to the four corners of the world.
The Negro experience has not fundamentally changed. As John A. Williams, a Negro journalist, recently showed in his account of touring America on magazine assignments, the very same roads which for a white motorist may be dreary or entrancing, according to objective scenery and subjective mood, are for the Negro, however respectably dressed and however smart his car, a tense venture: any stop, at a motel, a restaurant, a lavatory, can be loaded with rebuff or worse. Perhaps Bob Dylan’s Highway 61, about that road which runs from Lake Superior down to the Gulf of Mexico, is not as surrealistic as it sounds:
Well, God said to Abraham ‘Kill me a son’
Abe said ‘Man, you must be putting me on …
Where do you want this killing done?’
God said ‘Out on Highway 61.’
Carl Sandburg in his American Songbag sees the escutcheons on the sides of trains as giving ‘cruel desert spaces a friendly look’ but the Negro vagabond especially was unlikely to have his loneliness and loss of bearings eased by those messages from afar; to him:
There’s three trains ready but none ain’t going my way
Well, maybe the sun’ll shine in my back door some day.
Despite the mere shadow of difference between the black and white American rail nomad, the difference has always held, and it is reflected in the songs. The white has had a slightly larger latitude. The Negro blues regarded the railroad with variable emotions, with longing or loathing or admiration, but although he might h
ave swung a hammer on the right-of-way and even in small numbers have been employed on the locomotives, the stance of the bluesman toward the railroad is from a distance: it is just one factor in his plight.
White railroad songs have a stronger bond with the trains. Usually plaintively mournful, it is a mournfulness often brazenly enacted, without the grief which is deep in the bowels of the blues. They are, unfailingly, about being stranded or exiled far from home. They are also dramatized with hobo hyperbole. A rover trudging down the track with tears in his eyes and a letter from home in his pocket, at last snags a ride:
Well, this train I ride on
Is a hundred coaches long
You can hear her whistle blow a million miles
Railroadin’ Man declares:
I rode ten thousand miles of rusted rails
Because my pappy was a railroadin’ man
And I never had no home ‘cept a county jail
… Well, I stole a locomotive just to take a ride
Now there’s a price on my head alive or dead.
For much of its lifetime the blues has been a shut-in racial music, a discussion among a clan of racially and economically separated people, but the blues filtered across the colour line into such white music as this and it found this different outlet through white men on much the same beat but with those few degrees better opportunities. ‘Discovered’ Negro blues singers and musicians may be the idols of the informed white aficionados but, rather as Elvis Presley performed the function of making the raw alcohol of Negro rhythm-and-blues drinkable to a mass public in its rock-and-roll dilution, so at an earlier period was the country blues given pop form by a white man. This shade of the railroad roving life came through most individualistically in the songs of Jimmy Rodgers, a white brakeman from Meridian, Mississippi, who died in 1933.
Rodgers had wide popularity on the country circuit. Probably more than anyone he stimulated the spread of folksy music into the developing radio and wind-up phonograph prologue to mass electronic entertainment. He had a pleasant rich voice employed for the pleasure of millions in the more maudlin rural plaints and yodels.
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