Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  “Red Cross Blues” would soon proliferate among blues musicians of urban and rural traditions and become one of the most widely circulated topical blues songs of the pre-World War II era. Beginning with Roland’s barrelhouse and down-home blues versions of the song, “Red Cross Blues” gained popularity among musicians because of the immediacy of its subject, not necessarily the catchiness or style of the tune. Within a month of Roland’s New York session, other artists in other cities were recording songs bearing the title “Red Cross Blues.” In Chicago, the St. Louis-based pianist, Walter Davis, recorded a “Red Cross Blues” for the Bluebird label. Davis stuck with the traditional AAB lyric form popular in the Mississippi Valley but showed off his St. Louis credentials by laying down percussive, barrelhouse piano rhythms for his version of the song. In an early verse, Davis includes a symbolic line about the American melting pot, singing, “Uncle Sam’s flag is painted, painted red, white, and blue,” but most of Davis’s song is not symbolic at all. Rather, his approach is plainly reminiscent of Blind Lemon Jefferson’s musical account of the Flood of 1927: “Papa says to the children, ‘Backwater has left us all alone.’ “ Davis offers, “The Red Cross has cut us off, man, and left us all alone.” Four months later, Davis was back in the studio recording a sequel to “Red Cross Blues.” In Mamie Smith-like fashion, he encapsulates a whole lot of bad experiences, bad news, and solitude into a few short lines and the resounding two-word phrase, “bad luck”:

  I believe to myself, I am just a bad luck man,

  I believe to myself, I am just a bad luck man,

  The Red Cross is helping everybody, and don’t give me a helping hand.

  Whereas Broonzy’s song, produced long after the Depression, draws attention to racial discrimination in hiring, Davis’s verses recorded during the Depression stay much more in line with traditional Delta blues lyrics, which tend to make the singer-subject and his experiences the focal point of the song. Like other blues musicians, he muses whether the Depression has brought an end to his personal experiment of life in the urban North.

  I believe I’ll go back south, tell me cotton will be a good price next year,

  I believe I’ll go back south, tell me cotton will be a good price next year,

  I might as well be gone, because I ain’t doin’ no good ‘round here.

  Though technically not the same song, Davis’s “Red Cross Blues” has all the overwhelming feelings of failure and skepticism that mark the Roland original.85

  Many Deep South blues musicians followed Davis’s lead, recording and rerecording “Red Cross Blues” and its derivatives during the remaining years of the New Deal era. Unlike Davis, who took only the title and spirit of the song, many of those who came after used chord progressions and lyrics more closely derived from Roland’s original, but each performer imbued the song with regional and personal styles. Library of Congress field recordings in east Texas and Louisiana in the mid-193os revealed that Roland’s “Red Cross Blues” had become a popular cover among amateur country bluesmen. During their trip to prison farms and work camps in the summer of 1934, the Lomaxes encountered blues musicians whose repertoires included many widely circulated songs. For example, some musicians mimicked and paid homage to Jefferson’s “Jack o’ Diamonds,” a local favorite that had become a national hit. One such guitarist to do so was Pete Harris, a little-known musician from eastern Texas. He also made a field recording titled “The Red Cross Store” for the Lomaxes. Harris played reels, ballads, blues, and “cakewalks” (guitar and vocal songs suitable for country dancing). For this song, Harris chose a raw, twangy guitar accompaniment that combined with the portable recording equipment to make his version the most down-home-sounding rendition of the Red Cross songs.86

  It was on the same trip that the Lomaxes sought out convict Huddie Ledbet-ter at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola. Within a year of meeting the Lomaxes, Ledbetter was a free man and commenced to performing more of his repertoire. Among several Jefferson tunes and the widely circulated “Shorty George,” he also included Roland’s “Red Cross Blues” set to his deep, rich twelve-string guitar. By the time Ledbetter recorded the song commercially for Bluebird Records in 1940, he had honed the song into an easy-flowing blues featuring technically precise guitar picking. In this regard, Ledbetter’s musical interpretation of the Roland classic differed greatly from that by his fellow north Louisiana native, Speckled Red (Rufus Perryman), the southern barrelhouse pianist who influenced many urban bluesmen from St. Louis to Memphis. Speckled Red recorded a version of the song for Bluebird two years before Led-better, in 1938. He took the song back to its urban roots with Roland and Bogan, recording it as a boogie-woogie with the new title, “Welfare Store Blues.”87

  In 1940, Sonny Boy Williamson recorded a popular version of the song, using Perryman’s title. Williamson’s 1940 recording replicated the themes—and many of the lyrics—in Roland’s original. First, he draws a contrast between the male figure who wanted to avoid standing in bread lines and the female figure who understood domestic necessity.

  Now me and my baby, we talked last night, and we talked for nearly an hour.

  She wants me to go down to that welfare store, and get a sack of that welfare flour.

  The second verse, like many contemporary black lyrics, grumbles about white paternalism and black dependency.

  Now you need to get you some real white man, you know, to sign your little note.

  They’ll give you a pair of them keen-toed shoes, and one of those pinch-backed soldier coats.

  Next came the irony and sarcasm that had always been central in blues lyrics but had become the dominant mood of blues singers during the Great Depression.

  President Roosevelt said them welfare people gonna treat everybody right,

  Says they give you a can of them beans, and a can or two of them old tripe.

  Finally, coming full circle, the male singer repeats his aversion to standing in bread lines, confirming Hopkins’s suspicion that the dole emasculated and shamed the men who were forced to accept government handouts.

  But I told her no, baby, and I sure don’t want to go,

  I said I’ll do anything in the world for ya, but I don’t want to go down to that welfare store.88

  Although each variation included some unique lyrics or creative musical effects—Williamson preferred barrelhouse piano and drums to accompany his vocals and harmonica tremolos—the numerous recordings of “Red Cross Blues” show that blues musicians latched on to a popular image of the Great Depression and, in quite blues-like fashion, tailored it to their own expressive or commercial purposes. True enough, blues musicians commonly shared their material (either through firsthand collaboration or listening to each other’s recordings), but few songs made it into the recorded repertoire of such a diverse body of blues musicians, and few so quickly as did “Red Cross Blues.” Whether the same song in name only, or direct spin-offs of Roland’s original lyrics, this body of material showed that poverty, the relief effort, and personal humiliation had become strongly associated in the popular culture of African Americans by the mid-193os.

  Although the Roosevelt administration made modest attempts to aid southern blacks, the former sharecroppers and laid-off industrial workers among whom bluesmen lived had great cause for unhappiness by 1935, two years into the New Deal. Bluesman Jasper Love remembered poor wages and poorer smokes: “You couldn’t git a can of Prince Albert tobacco. Fifty cents a day on the levee. The women was leaving the mens and couldn’t git nowhere. No bus running.” The New Deal had been little help. “That was the time of the NRA or something like that,” Love recalled.89 In 1935 and 1936, the NRA and AAA were phased out, bringing an end to what had been for southern African Americans less of a “new deal,” and more of “an old deal, a raw deal.”90 Guitarist and fiddler Carl Martin, a native Virginian who had relocated to Chicago, had witnessed two years of the New Deal and was still waiting for something “new.”

  Now everybody’s cryi
n’, “let’s have a new deal,”

  Relief station’s closin’ down, I know just how you feel.

  Everybody’s cryin’, “let’s have a new deal,”

  ‘Cause I got to make a livin’, if I have to rob and steal.

  Martin’s other verses likewise confirm Hopkins’s theory that the inactivity of welfare worked a debilitating effect on the unemployed.

  Now I’m gettin’ mighty tired of standing around,

  Ain’t makin’ a dime, just wearin’ my shoe soles down.

  Everybody’s cryin’, “let’s have a new deal,”

  ‘Cause I got to make a livin, if I have to rob and steal.

  And, later in the song:

  Now I ain’t made a dime since they closed down the mill,

  Now I’m sittin’ here waitin’ on that brand new deal.

  Everybody’s cryin’, “let’s have a new deal,”

  ‘Cause I got to make a livin, if I have to rob and steal.91

  Depression, discontent, and desperation marked the early New Deal-era blues lyrics, and the regional and musical diversity of the recorded songs demonstrates the widespread nature of poor Americans’ economic struggles. Taken at face value, the blues cited above are significant in that they demonstrate the uncomfortable relationship between southern black Americans and the early New Deal administration. Of course, historians are not dependent on the blues to arrive at the conclusion that poor black Americans were hard hit by the Depression and found little relief from the early government response programs. What the musical evidence does reveal that welfare rolls and other sources do not, however, was that a cultural change was taking place among the blues community. Whereas early musicians associated physical labor with subordination to white authority, the blues artists of the Depression era had come to understand labor as a conduit to buying power, personal independence, and social status. This contextual shift within blues music certainly was born of southern blacks’ increased entrance into the industrial workplace in the North and South, but new attitudes about work and welfare in the 1930s likewise highlighted a shared identity of resistance to black dependence in a white-dominated society. Although the New Deal’s initial efforts fell short of providing significant help to blacks, the Roosevelt administration’s mantra of a “hand up, not a hand out,” resembled the pro-work, antiwelfare attitudes increasingly reflected by blues musicians as the Depression progressed. Southern blacks in the 1930s would have been hard-pressed to recall a previous white national leader whose ideology seemed to converge with their own. Many southern migrants began to join the growing black vote in northern cities. In 1936, 75 percent of African Americans who voted cast ballots for Roosevelt and other Democratic candidates, especially in Chicago, where Arthur Mitchell became the first black Democrat voted into the House of Representatives.92 Equally telling were the hundreds of African American families that expressed an even deeper cultural affinity for the First Family by naming their newborns after the Roosevelts. If bluesmen had accurately reflected in their music a desire for work, not relief, then they would be pleased by what the Second New Deal had to offer them.

  Work, Wages, and the Blues

  Prohibition ended in 1933, reenergizing the nightclubs and jook joints so important to recording artists and semiprofessional blues musicians. But would music fans have enough cash to go to a bar or buy a record? Beginning in the mid-193os, two large-scale New Deal organizations, the Public Works Administration (PWA) and it successor, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), gave millions of unemployed Americans the chance to work by constructing thousands of school buildings, hospitals, municipal facilities, and other public venues nationwide.93 The PWA was initiated as the Civil Works Administration in 1933 under the directorship of Harold Ickes, and Roosevelt authorized the WPA in January 1935 with Hopkins as its chief administrator. The PWA and the WPA provided the jobs African Americans were looking for, and the leadership of Ickes and Hopkins ensured that blacks would face less discrimination within the ranks of their organizations than they had in other New Deal programs. In May 1935, FDR further mandated nondiscriminatory WPA recruitment practices with Executive Order 7046. Broonzy began to feel better about the World War I experience that had left him bitter; not only did he receive his bonus during the mid-193os, but his veteran status ensured him a decent job. “WPA, PWA, CWA, all of these was work projects for men and women. Me and my manager was both on the WPA together,” recalled Broonzy. “It was easy for us to get a job on the WPA,” he said, “because we had been in the army in 1918 and they called us old veterans. All old veterans had no trouble getting on the WPA.” Not long after the inception of the CWA and its successor programs, black musicians began to incorporate the works projects into their music, demonstrating the breadth of these programs and their importance to black laboring communities. Roland, on his second New York trip in 1934, sang about the benefit of government jobs and nine-dollar-a-week wages in “CWA Blues.” That same year, in San Antonio, Houston-based barrelhouse pianist Joe Pullum recorded a different song bearing the same title, and thus began a new wave of shared material that contrasted the value of paid work versus the shame of standing in breadlines.94

  Public works wages allowed blacks to free themselves from both the white-controlled sharecropping life and dependency on welfare relief. Even though the works projects operating in the South allocated significant resources to the improvement of white facilities while doing little for black schools and other venues, the project wages were much higher than relief payments.95 In Chicago in 1936, Jimmie Gordon recorded, “Don’t Take Away My PWA.” A clever lyricist, Gordon describes a cause-effect relationship between his PWA job, “where the job ain’t hard and the boss ain’t mean,” and his support for FDR’s “alphabet soup.” He sings about Roosevelt in a personal way:

  Lord, Mr. President, listen to what I’m goin’ to say,

  Lord, Mr. President, listen to what I’m goin’ to say,

  You can take away all the alphabet, but please leave that PWA.

  And portrayed personal empowerment through the franchise:

  I went to the poll and voted, I know I voted the right way,

  I went to the poll and voted, I know I voted the right way,

  Now I’m prayin’ to you, Mr. President, please keep that PWA.96

  The works projects replaced the unemployed workers’ dependence on emergency relief with a new dependence on government jobs, but the psychological effect was evident. Whereas Barbecue Bob Hicks had ridiculed those who supported Hoover in 1928, Gordon praised the new president who had seemingly turned things around. In both cases, the lyrics show an increasing political awareness on the part of blues musicians and their audiences.

  Despite the newfound political tone in song lyrics during the New Deal, many blues musicians continued to craft stories that treated contemporary subjects using traditional tropes and codes, projecting the benefits of the PWA and WPA jobs through the prisms of sexual life and social status. Whereas the dole had created among bluesmen a feeling of emasculation—Scott singing that women “don’t want no Red Cross man,” for example—government jobs restored their masculinity and earned positive recognition from the opposite sex. Casey Bill Weldon, for example, sang about a woman wanting her lover to give up gambling for an honest job on the works project in “Casey Bill’s New WPA” (1937): “She said, ‘I’m leavin’ you now daddy’ / ‘I’m goin’ to find me a man that’s workin’ for that WPA.’“ “Yeah,” responds Weldon’s narrator, “I got to get me a job on that WPA.”97

  The bluesman who was most outspoken about the works projects was Wheatstraw, who in 1937 began to record a succession of blues that he referred to as “workin’ on the project.” His first two efforts, “Working On the Project” and “New Working On the Project,” were unremarkable songs. They employ his standard piano rhythm and tempo, and the lyrics mostly communicate the singer’s desire for higher wages and more frequent paydays.98 However, in a 1938 recording session in New York
City, Wheatstraw described the painful event of receiving one’s 304 form, or pink slip, in a song titled “304 Blues.” Maintaining contemporary trends, he equates getting kicked off “the project” with lost manhood and, like Weldon, indicates that women are more attracted to men who have steady work.

  I was workin’ on the project, three or four months ago,

  I was workin’ on the project, three or four months ago,

  But since I got my three-oh-four, ooh well, well, my baby don’t want me no more.

  When I was workin’ on the project, womens was no object to me,

  When I was workin’ on the project, womens was no object to me,

  But since I got my three-oh-four, well well, not a one of them can I see.

  Without work, other good times come to an end as well. If female companionship can no longer comfort the singer during his unemployment, neither can the bottle:

  When I was workin’ on the project, I drank my good whiskey, beer, and wine,