A Lighter Shade Of Blue
The blues has always been associated with the black musician. For reasons of common heritage, white performers also sang the blues but we praise them in proportion to the ‘blackness’ in their voice. I have a tape called A Lighter Shade of Blue: White Country Blues 1926-38 which shows that the white singers recorded concurrently with the black blues players. Clayton McMichen performs “Prohibition Blues” complete with yodelling. Black musicians only occasionally yodel; white ones do a lot. Whites tend to sing the blues more clean, yet Larry Hensley’s rendition of “Match Box Blues” sounds very ‘black’. Generally speaking the white blues was more controlled and more sophisticated than black blues, which is more exuberant, less inhibited and happier in tone.
Because music transcends barriers there would have been musical fraternisation between blacks and whites from the beginning. Musical passion and poverty and whisky would draw people together at barbecues and medicine shows. Then again black and white musicians would meet at recording studios during the Twenties and Thirties. I don’t think familiarity with the country blues just came from listening to the radio – many were too poor to own one. Perhaps, as Frank Walker (4) said, it had something to do with proximity:
Right Close
…on the outskirts of a city like Atlanta, you had your colored section, and then you had your white…right close to each other. They passed each other every day, and a little of the spiritualistic type of singing of the colored people worked over into the white hillbilly, and a little of the white hillbilly worked over into what the colored people did.
Black and white music wasn’t parallel; it was integrative.
Black and white musicians mixed in jazz bands too. Jazz guitarist Chet Krolewicz was the only white player in a black band; “I wanted to play with the best,” he said. In order to do this he shared with them the inferior facilities “for coloreds”. (5) A black performer in a white band would be screened off. This is sickening of course but if you’re a good musician you do have a kind of passport; social class and race isn’t a bar if people recognize and respect you as a musician . Thelonious Monk met Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter, a member of the Rothschild family in Paris in 1954. She became a lifelong friend and patron of both Monk and Charlie Parker, hosting jam sessions in her New York suite, putting up with racist taunts about being a “nigger-lover” and getting in trouble with the law over her protégé’s possession of drugs. The New York Times, reporting her death in 1988 stated that she “offered sustenance and care to many musicians who needed help”. (6)
But this is all a world away from the controlled mixing that actually reinforced apartheid at Harlem’s Cotton Club. Even the name was patronizing. The performers were black; the audience drawn from the white social elite. I think about this when I sing my version of “Stormy Weather”, composed by Harold Arlen for the 1933 Cotton Club Review.
Joog, Honky Tonk And Medicine Show
The country blues goes back a long way in recording terms. The women were the pioneers. The first blues record was Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” recorded in 1920. Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, Rosa Henderson, Lucille Bogan and Bessie Smith made their recording debuts in 1923. The first jug bands were recorded in 1924 and in 1925/1926 Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bo Weavil Jackson and Blind Blake all recorded. In 1927 it was Blind Willie McTell and Barbecue Bob followed by Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell in 1928. Their “How Long, How Long Blues” was the most successful blues hit of the year. One of my heroes: Mississippi John Hurt was also recording in Memphis in 1928. Charley Patton made his first recording in 1929 and another of my heroes: Son House recorded in 1930. 1933 saw the first Leadbelly recordings for the Library of Congress followed by his first commercial recordings for A.R.C. in 1935. Robert Johnson didn’t record till 1936 – two years before he died aged 27. (7)
But before that the music would be played live all over the South. Juke joints – joog meant rowdy or disorderly – also called barrel houses, were established at rural crossroads near plantations, sawmills and turpentine camps for the rural work force. Operated by black people for black people, they sold alcohol and provided music such as ragtime and boogie-woogie in the late 1880s and in the 1890s then later, the blues. The guitar would be widely available in the 1890s. There would be dancing and gambling; these were wild places.
Medicine shows were the original “word from our sponsor” combining entertainment: music, magic, flea circuses, jokes, freak shows and storytelling with the sale of dubious remedies. Many black musicians travelled with them to make a living or because the itinerant life suited them. Honky-tonks were the urban version of juke joints but the name also became associated with a type of music related to classic blues in tonal structure but with a stepped-up tempo. These performances were essentially small scale and intimate affairs. The most basic venue for playing music was the street corner and some places became legendary.
The original audience for most country music would be limited to a small number of people from the local area. The use of acoustic instruments would limit the size of audience. A more sinister reason was that groups of black people became targets for the Ku Klux Klan.
Reckless Disposition
The itinerant life of the blues singer was often their only means of survival or it supplemented a meagre income. For a disabled person it would be one of the few things they could do. That’s why there were so many blind musicians: Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie Johnson, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Reverend Gary Davis, Blind Willie McTell, Sonny Terry, Brownie McGhee, Sleepy John Estes – all handicapped by more than their skin colour. Being on the move would suit those in flight from the law or from their family responsibilities or from a broken relationship: recurrent song themes. There’s always a train whistle blowing. Although some blues artists achieved fame and wealth, on the whole it wasn’t a job for the upwardly mobile; it lacked respectability and certainly didn’t have the blessing of the church, and no matter what your skill and fame you couldn’t share a hotel, restaurant or drinking fountain with your white band-mates. On the plus side, though, the movement of musicians from place to place would facilitate cross-fertilization of musical ideas.
You have to remember that the blues gurus in the black and white photos were mostly very young men when they were recorded. They sang protest songs about poverty and the domination of the white man: the punk of its day – though the political comment, like the sexual innuendo, could be obscured by the language. This music originally had a separate classification as “race music” and very few white people listened to it. I’ve performed it for decades – much longer than many of the original musicians who died young and before they had the opportunity or the pressure to adapt, dilute or refine it for a white audience. And although the early and often violent deaths of these musicians are regrettable, their rawness remains uncompromised.
The Oral Tradition
“Two plus two son of a bitch is four.” When their small son started mixing his tables with inappropriate American slang, my friends asked his teacher about it. She told them the children were taught to say, “Two plus two, the sum of which is four.” This story illustrates the strengths and the weaknesses of the oral tradition. What you lose in accuracy you gain in novelty; what you gain in liveliness of language you lose in clarity! Like Chinese Whispers, you never know what will become of the original phrase and this is what I treasure about the country blues: its secrecy and obscurity; its capacity for change and reinterpretation as it passes from one musician to another and from one region to another.
People are surprised that I have learnt the lyrics without seeing them written down. It was a question of listening time and time and time again – but then I worried about wearing out my records! In his introduction to Leadbelly’s Library of Congress Recordings, Lawrence Cohn mentions the difficulties involved in deciphering Leadbelly’s: “broad, thick Texas-Louisiana accent which was punctuated by poor placement of microphone and artist in ma
ny instances and the inferior quality of the surviving disc”. (8) Sometimes the microphone is being moved between guitar and singer and parts of songs are missing because the artist carried on singing whilst the disc was being turned over.
But I’ve enjoyed puzzling over the songs and interpreting them for my audiences. The phrasing is not easy to follow and the language is often unfamiliar; sometimes it’s a question of musical balance or pronunciation. Then there are words and phrases that are code or patois for controversial content. It’s like learning another language and a whole new set of references. For example in the line “Goin’ where the Moonon crosses the Yellow Dog” you’ve got to know that “Yellow Dog” is not a hound but the blues nickname for the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railway, “dog” meaning a local or branch line. I have always interpreted “Moonon” as a poetic description of the long straight rail track, gleaming in the moonlight, which intersected the Yellow Dog. This is only my interpretation; people have written whole theses on the subject of WC Handy’s “Yellow Dog Blues”.
Sexual references are relatively easy to decipher. You’d have to be innocent to think Blind Boy Fuller’s “I Want Some Of Your Pie” is about confectionary. There’s more where that came from: “Let me put my banana in your fruit basket, then I’ll be satisfied”, or “We gonna churn, churn, churn until the butter come” (9) and “If you were a dresser I would pull open your drawers” (10) are all fairly clear! But Mississippi John Hurt’s “I’m Satisfied” is more challenging and it took me ages to interpret it. There was of course a Vaudevillian tradition in suggestive songs which got our own Marie Lloyd in trouble. Other songs are shockingly direct: “Show Me What You’ve Got” by Kansas City Kitty and Georgia Tom is an unambiguous, sexy and teasing song about a raunchy financial transaction. “My Man O’ War” by Lizzie Miles refers to anal sex and you can’t get more straightforward – and confident – than Lucille Bogan’s, “I’ve got something ‘tween my legs’ll make a dead man come” from “Shave ‘em Dry”. Blues singers often made such recordings for the sound engineers’ personal listening. (11)
Moonshine and sex were often the only release from the drudgery of life and a line such as “make me a pallet on the floor” is as much about a place to rest your body as it is about sex.
Gwine Dig A Hole To Put The Devil In
I wish to refute the allegation that the blues is ‘domestic’ when compared with the ‘political’ folk music of people like Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan and Pete Seeger. From casual street-level to institutional level, discrimination against black people was pervasive, abusive and frequently fatal. People could be lynched for the slightest thing. In his excellent book about Blind Willie McTell: Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes, Michael Gray refers to the lynching of Mary Turner in Lowndes County in 1918 for making “unwise remarks”. If you were black you had to watch your words. In this context it was all the more courageous of a musician to be covertly or overtly political. The expression of the suffering of discrimination and poverty is a political act anyway. In his recordings for the Library of Congress, Leadbelly explains that in the line “Gwine dig a hole to put de devil in” (12) the devil is the white boss. Leadbelly’s “Bourgeois Blues” is a condemnation of day-to-day discrimination: “Me and Miss Martha standing upstairs. / The white man says don’t want no niggers up there”. It’s interesting that black performers often used the white man’s terms for them but in claiming the name they were subverting the power. Leadbelly’s reference to the “Scottsboro Boys” in the Library of Congress recording is more directly political:
Now I’ll tell you about in Alabama, must be Jim Crow. If a white woman says something, it must be so, and she can say something about a colored person, if it’s a thousand colored men, they kill all of ‘em just for that one woman; if she ain’t tellin’ the truth it don’t make any difference.
In “Milk Cow Blues” – a Kokomo Arnold song – the loss of a woman is likened to the loss of a milk cow. Perhaps not very flattering to the modern woman and only understood in the rural context of a cow being a wealth-creating asset. You have to get beyond the sexy earthiness to see the economic point.
A world away from mainstream popular music, the blues faced life’s harshness. Blind Willie McTell’s “Reckless Disposition” is about a relationship that has reached crisis point because of a hard-drinking woman. Look at the hinterland of violence and despair in blues lyrics:
To keep her quiet I knocked her teeth out her mouth.(13)
Cocaine for horses an’ not for men/Doctors say it’ll kill you but dey don’ say when/An’ ho, ho, baby take a whiff on me.(14)
When you think she’s in your kitchen, cookin’, she’s got a stranger by the hand.(15)
Rather have my head in alcohol, my body on some railroad track/than have that black bee bite me in my back.(16)
The 1910 jazz classic “Shine” with lyrics by Cecil Mack is a humorous song about a shoe-shine boy. This exuberant song, Vaudevillian in mood, slightly cocky, slightly defiant and life-embracing – you can imagine someone tap-dancing to the rhythmic guitar in my version – is an early black pride song. There are versions by Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong and Ry Cooder. If I play “Shine” then it’s what you call a jazz turnaround: easy if you’ve studied a bit of jazz but if all you know is pop then it’s a whole new set of different chord progressions.
During my third trip to Georgia I remember feeling apprehensive about doing the hundred-year-old lyrics because of audience reaction to what might be considered politically incorrect phrases:
…Oh chocolate drop, that’s me
‘Cause my hair is curly
Just because my teeth are pearly
Just because I always wear a smile
‘Like to dress up in the latest style
‘Cause I’m glad I’m livin’
Takes troubles all with a smile
Just because my color shade
Is different maybe
That’s why they call me “Shine”.
The reaction was generous. It was generous I think because I managed to convey that irrepressible pride.
People And Places
The pinning down of places, events and famous people gives a certain atmosphere to a song. Knowing that “Parchman Farm” is a penitentiary and that “St. James Infirmary Blues” is about a morgue sets the scene and sets the tone. “On the corner of Peach Tree and Vine”: a legendary busking spot in Atlanta where Blind Willie McTell allegedly played, occurs in a few songs. I’ve actually played at Fat Matt’s which is situated there; it felt momentous. To widen his appeal, Leadbelly sang songs about contemporary events such as the Titanic and the Hindenburg disaster, about political leaders such as Franklin D. Roosevelt and Hitler, and about celebrities such as Jean Harlow and Howard Hughes. “Sweet Home Chicago” (17) marks the economic migration of black people – “Ain’t gonna dig no more potatoes/Pull no more corn” (18) – from the rural South to the industrial North.
For a non-American blues musician certain place names are exotic-sounding and poetic or just significant. I always enjoy singing the alliterative line, “I’ve been from Tucson to Tucumcari Tehachapi to Tonapah” in Little Feat’s “Willin’” but it’s very disappointing to find that the Chattanooga Choo Choo no longer runs and that there is otherwise nothing memorable about Chattanooga except the famous big band song popularized by Glenn Miller.
Ownership
The question of the ownership of these early songs is obscure. Originality was claimed but usually not substantiated. Robert Johnson, for instance, has been credited with songs that predated his career: stuff that had been recorded ten years previously, with only one line being different! Blind Willie McTell reworked songs by Sippie Wallace, Bessie Smith and Ivy Smith to produce “Statesboro Blues”. (19) W.C. Handy, an important popularizer of the blues, claimed hundreds but in reality most of these songs and tunes were handed around. As folk songs they belong to everyone.
Blues Compilation
As well as
identifying emotionally and politically with the early black musicians I’ve also admired their mastery of musical techniques that look so simple to the uninitiated. The country blues is surprisingly varied in mood and complexity and there’s such a wide range of feeling too, from the profound spiritual primitivism in Blind Willie Johnson to Blind Blake’s music full of laughter and Skip James on the edge of a weird place. They could make a guitar sound like a piano; they could make a guitar sound like two guitars; they could make a harmonica sound like a train. They didn’t need drums: they could stamp the earth and pound the side of their guitar. They didn’t need other voices – they could answer themselves, converse with the audience or with their guitar. They could create a stage full of characters and set them off into action. Some blues music like Robert Petway’s “Catfish Blues” takes you into rhythm; some, like “Down ‘n’ Out Blues”, into melody with all possible variations in between.
Without realizing it at the time I was exposed early on to all the main strands in country blues music. It was as if the spirit of the blues had created a comprehensive compilation for me: the reverberating spectacle of slide in the convulsive blues of Son House, the melodic complexity of finger-picking in Mississippi John Hurt, gospel influences through Sister Rosetta Tharpe, showy, party-time professionalism from boogie-woogie pianist Roosevelt Sykes and the expression of raw suffering in John Estes. Then the bridge-makers: Jimmy Witherspoon shouting his blues/big band cross-over numbers, Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee entering mainstream popular culture and John Lee Hooker providing the cross-over between blues and rhythm and blues. The music ranged from the earthy and domestic to the religious and existential with many a laugh in between.
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