Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  But musicians such as Patton and Johnson did not talk only to their guitars and vice versa; they talked to, and with, their audiences. The personal nature of the blues was not meant only for the expression of the artist; it was also to be shared—on a deeply personal level—with those who listened to the music night after night, weekend after weekend, suggesting a return to the communal nature of black music during slavery times. Despite the importance of Emancipation, the ancient African traditions of oral communication that had survived over two centuries remained important to the descendants of slaves. Lawrence Levine suggested that the orally communicated culture, like quilt making, agrarian techniques, and other material cultures, displayed a remarkable capacity for preserving traditions: “Black slaves engaged in widespread musical exchanges and cross-culturation with the whites among whom they lived, yet throughout the centuries of slavery . . . their song style, with its overriding antiphony, its group nature, its pervasive functionality, its improvisational character, its strong relationship in performance to dance and bodily movement and expression, remained closer to the musical styles and performances of West Africa and the Afro-American music of the West Indies and South America than to the musical style of Western Europe.” This “pervasive functionality” noted by Levine sprang from what Alan Lomax called African American singers’ and dancers’ “aesthetic conquest of their environment in the New World” and served well an uprooted people forced into subservience. Stripped of individuality, slaves shared a collective consciousness, if perhaps unselfconsciously, in a vocal culture that encouraged group participation, call-and-response exchange, and improvisational verbal creativity.66

  The taboo on slave literacy complemented traditional West African oral traditions, further cementing music and storytelling as the prime vehicles of black cultural communication in the South. Mississippi-born autobiographer Chalmers Archer Jr. recalled, “We knew that these musicians were masters of the downhome blues tradition . . . I realized, later, that those gatherings communicated our values and history, our good and bad times, and gave us a real sense of community.”67 No less a blues performer than B. B. King agreed wholeheartedly, remembering the blues of his childhood in Indianola as a sort of community message board: “Each Monday and Wednesday in our little neighborhood— there was nothin’ else to do but sing—we would go from house to house singin’. Monday night maybe we would go to my house and Wednesday night we’d go to yours. And probably even Friday night because there wasn’t much to do. And it seemed like it kept us kind of close together. That was another part of the blues that’s sorta like the church social workers. In other words, they kind of keep you up with everything that’s happening.”68 Rube Lacy, a blues artist active in the 1920s, supposed that the blues represented a “generalized kind of truth.” “Sometimes I’d suppose as it happened to me in order to hit somebody else, ‘cause everything that happened to one person has at some time or other happened to another one. If not, it will. You make the blues maybe hitting after someone else, and all the same time it’s hitting you too. Some place it’s gonna hit you.” While Lacy’s description was somewhat abstract, about how the blues can “hit” you like it “hits” someone else, bluesman J. D. Short added that the lyrics that a musician chose were just as important in shaping the context for the music. “What I think about that makes the blues really good is when a fellow writes a blues and then writes it with a feeling, with great harmony, and there’s so many true words in the blues, of things that have happened to so many people, and that’s why it makes the feeling in the blues.” Blues were a collective form of celebrating, or alternatively, commiserating; bluesmen sang of their sad existence, and from this, wrote Paul Oliver in 1960, “his listener took heart for he shared his predicaments and his fortunes and was reassured” that “they were common to them both.”69

  Blues music differed from previous black folk music in that, while largely based on the oral culture fostered under slavery, the genre maintained among African Americans the individual sense of freedom won with Emancipation. Blues music’s confluence of the more distant slave past with the immediate memory of freedom cemented the relationship between the shared oral culture and the free individual spirit. The shared cultural space between performer and listener became the mating ground of southern blacks’ communal and individual minds, creating something like a Jungian collective consciousness. In this space both musician and listener “talked back” to Jim Crow.

  But what kind of “back talk” was this? Certainly a limited variety. Yes, there were the Negro “badmen” of the Lower Mississippi Valley who roughed up their black neighbors and occasionally lashed out violently at whites, too, but the life of a “badman” was a precarious one. Blues guitarist Eddie Boyd offered a story that demonstrates the risks that came with black-on-white violence. While working the farms of eastern Arkansas, Boyd got into an argument with his boss, George Crumble. Boyd explained how his (anti-)work ethic led to violent confrontation:

  When those guys would see old George Crumble and his horse coming, they was scared to say “here come the rider.” Well I didn’t take no notice, ‘cause I was gonna work at a certain pace, ‘cause I didn’t want to work anyway! . . . I said, “I’m working as fast as I intend to work, and if you don’t like this man, you pay me off right now.” Know what he told me? . . . “I tell you, you’s a bad influence” . . . And what I did was froze every bone in his body, ‘cause he raised his leg, and he got a forty-five on his hip; anyway, I hit him in the back with the hayfork, right in his crocker bone to paralyze him.

  Boyd then swam the dangerously wide and turbulent Mississippi River and became a fugitive in Tennessee, escaping punishment for his transgression. In short, Boyd had to flee. Had Boyd not acted and been shot by Crumble, it is hard to imagine that the bossman would have likewise had to flee the scene to avoid punishment.70

  A more shockingly violent story emerged from New Orleans in July 1900. Shortly after the widely publicized lynching of Sam Hose in Georgia—a horrific mob murder in which the victim’s charred body parts were sold throughout Atlanta as souvenirs—a black New Orleans resident, Robert Charles, single-handedly went on a vengeance campaign of Nat Turner-like proportions. Charles was reportedly “beside himself with fury” upon hearing of the gruesome death of Hose, and he called on his fellow African Americans to take up arms to strike back at their white oppressors. Around this time he joined a “back to Africa” emigration group, further evidence of his alienation from the society of the New South. On a summer evening in 1900, he got into a shouting match with New Orleans policemen and shot, and was shot by, his antagonists. Wounded, Charles retreated to his room where he held off a would-be lynch mob with his Winchester repeating rifle. From his windowsill, he shot twenty-seven white men, killing seven of them, including four police officers. In the end there were over ten thousand angry assailants in the mob, which set fire to Charles’ building to flush him out. As he fled he was shot and dragged into the street; he died as his body was riddled with bullets. For four days afterward, white mobs patrolled the streets of the Crescent City and killed dozens of black residents while injuring many more and destroying black-owned properties. Charles’s act of violence in response to white violence led to a bloody aftermath that swept up many innocent bystanders.71

  “Badmen” like Charles and Boyd could neither break the social order nor maintain their existence as rogues within the South. They either had to disappear, as in Boyd’s case, or be destroyed, as in Charles’s. No wonder cases of black-on-white violence remained rare during the Jim Crow period. “If we ask questions we are cussed,” noted a Delta sharecropper, “and if we raise up we are shot.” Bluesman Poppa Jazz recalled, “In those days it was, ‘Kill a mule, buy another. Kill a nigger, hire another.’ They had to have a license to kill everything but a nigger. We was always in season.” As Willie Dixon said, “You couldn’t do nothing about these things . . . The black man had to be a complete coward.”72 For most southern blacks, the sa
fe thing to do was to accommodate white supremacist behavior and avoid at all costs the label of “uppity nigger.” “I began to fear white people,” recalled author Richard Wright, “to go out of my way rather than confront them.” Black youngsters in the Jim Crow era could seek education but were warned to avoid extracurricular activities that touched on civil rights. “Please don’t send any more of that stuff here,” Anne Moody’s mother pleaded upon receiving a package from the Mississippi NAACP. “I don’t want nothing to happen to us here. If you keep that up, you will never be able to come home again.”73 Family elders often warned youngsters of the dangers of crossing white people, in effect teaching them their place in the Jim Crow system. The story of Charlie Holcombe’s family is illustrative. Holcombe, like so many southern farmers, could not escape the land-labor system of sharecropping. He had, with rare exception, lived by his grandfather’s creed: “Son, a catfish is a lot like a nigger. As long as he is in his mudhole, he is all right, but when he gits out he is in for a passel of trouble. You ‘member dat, and you won’t have no trouble wid folks when you grows up.” Charlie’s son, Willie, successfully pursued a college education. That, according to Charlie, was “when de trouble started.” Ambitious and assertive, Willie died at the hands of a white man in a dispute over cotton prices. Holcombe mourned his son’s death: “I got to thinkin’ ‘bout what gran’pappy said ‘bout de catfish . . . [Willie] had stepped outen his place when he got dat eddycation. If I’d kept him here on de farm he woulda been all right.”74 Similarly, Huddie Ledbetter and Charley Patton’s families begged them to stay close to home and shun the itinerant musician’s life, a lifestyle that challenged social norms in both the white and black communities.

  Despite Dixon’s claim, there was something blacks could do about these things—they could sing and play the blues. Forced segregation around the turn of the century afforded blacks the opportunity to eke out a space for collective cultural autonomy rather than assimilation. Within blues music we see black southerners’ recognition that they had been relegated to second-class status after Bourbon “redemption” and “progressive” segregation; we see the will to reject the dictums of Jim Crow segregation while acknowledging that there was little they could do to overhaul the social system at large. But this will had to be nurtured in the separate, black social spaces created by twentieth-century segregation, not unlike the cabin culture created by the slaves in previous centuries.

  While the blues’s descendant, rock and roll, was based on the intersection of whites and blacks in mainstream cultural space—think Elvis Presley or Chuck Berry—the traditional country blues grew out of almost exclusively “black places.”75 In the plantation countryside, sharecroppers like McKinley Morgan-field (not yet famous as “Muddy Waters”) hosted Saturday night fish fries and blues parties on the farm: “They would have the parties just where they lived at,” said Waters. “They would put the beds outside and have the whole little room to do their little dancing in. They’d pull up a cotton house [a covered trailer used during harvest] and that’s their little gambling shed. And they made lamps with coal oil. Take the plow line that they plows the mule with, stick it in a bottle, put a little wet on top and light it, had lamps hanging all around like that.” Because Clarksdale had a midnight curfew, these sharecropper-shacks-by-day, jook-joints-by-night were important to Waters’s neighbors. “You’d find that house by the lights shining in the trees . . . You’d get about a quarter mile from that house and you hear the piano and the guitar thumping,” said Honeyboy Edwards, “you start to running then.”76 But “black places” were not exclusive to the countryside; the New South had witnessed a marked increase in the urbanization and institution-building capacity of the black population as well. In neighborhoods such as Dallas’s Deep Ellum, New Orleans’s Storyville, Vicksburg’s Catfish Row, and on avenues such as Leadbelly’s Fannin Street in Shreveport or Memphis’s famous Beale Street (actually, Beale Avenue), the blues could be heard wherever working-class black southerners congregated to collectively mourn the tragedy of life, yet still find humor, release, and self-efficacy despite their troubles. In his Delta hometown of Indianola, a young B. B. King peeped through slat-boards to look inside a jook known as Jones Night Spot. He was awed by what he saw there: “Women in tight dresses of red and yellow and baby-blue dancing with men all decked out in big suits and ties and wide-brimmed hats. Must be three or four hundred people jammed in there. Folks were dancing in the street, even before they walked into the club.” Inspired by the nightlife the Delta towns had to offer, King soon after left the Delta and made for Memphis to join his cousin, Bukka White, already a successful blues musician.77

  Memphis had been dubbed the “murder capital of America,” and the Beale Street pool halls were serviced by an all-night mortuary service provided by the funeral home down the street. Still, WDIA’s longtime disc jockey, Rufus Thomas, knew the draw of “Black America’s Main Street” outweighed its dangers. In an expressive radio voice, he recalled, “Beale Street was a heaven for the black man. He’d come up from the Delta, and got to Beale Street. Don’t owe nobody nothing. It was heaven, it was heaven to these people who came up—all black—but, I told a white fella on Beale Street one night, I said, ‘if you were black for one Saturday night on Beale Street, you never would want to be white anymo.’ “78 Thomas’s last comment—that a white person would trade their race for the black experience on Beale—highlights the excitement of these black places and the importance of this form of escapism to folks who otherwise led very tough lives. “It was exciting seeing so many people crowded on the streets. So much activity, so much life, so many sounds,” B. B. King agreed. “Beale Street did look like heaven to me.”79

  Here, among one’s fellow sharecroppers, stevedores, domestics, loggers, and roustabouts, the blues musicians took the realities of white-controlled places and then talked about them with relative freedom. The prevalence of work-related blues is testament to this point. Alger “Texas” Alexander, a prewar Dallas-based singer teamed up with guitarist Lonnie Johnson to record a number of tracks, including field-holler tunes titled “Section Gang Blues,” “Levee Camp Moan,” and “Penitentiary Moan Blues”—all derived from the most infamous locales of white-controlled black labor: the railroad bed, the levee bank, and the prison farm.80

  While most black laborers avoided the kind of violent response to white authority that Eddie Boyd chose—after all, King fled to Memphis because he had caused damage to his boss’s tractor and wanted to avoid punishment—singing could help deflect black anger toward whites. Big Bill Broonzy confided to Alan Lomax that a lot of folks chose this safer route to blow off some steam. “I’ve known guys that wanted to cuss out the boss and was afraid to go to his face and tell him what he wanted to tell him, and I’ve heard them sing those things— sing words, you know, back to the boss—say things to the mule, make like the mule stepped on his foot—say, ‘Get off my foot, goddamn it!’ and he meant he was talking to the boss. ‘You son-of-a-bitch,’ he say, ‘stay off my foot!’ and such things as that.” Redirection of the kind explained by Broonzy was an accommodation to Jim Crow’s realities, yes, but by no means a full acquiescence. Another of Lomax’s informants, Peter “Memphis Slim” Chatmon, considered blues to be “a kind of revenge.” The bluesman “couldn’t speak up to the cap’n and the boss, but he still had to work, so it give him the blues, so he sang it—he was signifying and getting his revenge through songs.” Unable to protest his position by political means, and constantly threatened with severe consequences for insubordination, the “American black man sublimated his anger in song and story,” according to blues historian Edna Edet.81 An interesting example of a bluesman redirecting anger into musical form came from King’s cousin, Bukka White, who once wrote a song about a woman “to keep from killing her, you know.” He had caught her kissing another man, pointed a .38 pistol in her face, but ended up shooting downwards, and the “shot tore the toe off her . . . And I writ this record up in her name, to keep
from killing her, you know.” At this stage in the story, it would seem White was living up to Edet’s point about black men sublimating anger in song. But White went on to reveal another important aspect of the shooting event. “They still like to send me to the penitentiary,” White said of the Mississippi authorities, “and if I hadn’t the sense I had, I being young, I be in the pen now, ‘cause they can give you like where you won’t never get out.” Here it became clear that White’s thankfulness for his youthful wisdom in that crucial moment stemmed less from avoiding the murder itself and more from avoiding the white-controlled justice system.82

  Sometimes the sublimation of resentment and anger happened outside of white-controlled cultural space or was at least veiled from whites (only a few detected that their black neighbors maintained “a secret and alien . . . inner life”), as revealed in the lyrics of “Me and My Captain,” a song recorded by folklorist Lawrence Gellert in the 1930s:

  Got one mind for white folks to see,

  ‘Nother for what I know is me,

  He don’t know, he don’t know my mind.83

  Songs like these were what Gussow calls blues musicians’ means of “speaking back to, and maintaining psychic health in the face of, an ongoing threat of lynching,” but unlike the more obscure folksongs collected by Gellert, some of the “talk back” songs were right out in the open. Gussow in particular points to Mamie Smith’s famous recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues,” released in 1920, as evidence of this “speaking back.” Gussow analyzes the song to prove his argument that blues music exposed different kinds of black violence, but two lines in “Crazy Blues” are especially important for the present study. Threatening retributive violence like Robert Charles’s attack against white New Orleanians in the wake of the Sam Hose lynching, Smith sang the following: