When I was workin’ on the project, I drank my good whiskey, beer, and wine,
But since I got my three-oh-four, these drinks is hard to find.99
Although Wheatstraw and other bluesmen were skeptical of early New Deal programs, by the late 1930s those who chose to record songs about the New Deal had effected an unmistakable and significant transformation in their lyric writing. “Red Cross Blues” and its message of shame and despair were surpassed by the hopefulness, praise, and hard work ethic portrayed in songs about the CWA, PWA, and WPA. By 1940, over 200,000 black Americans were employed on WPA projects, representing a higher percentage of the WPA workforce than the proportion of blacks on the unemployment rolls.100
In addition to communicating their emerging attitudes about work and wages, black southerners, whether they had entered the urban workforce or remained in the sharecropping districts, recorded in their music the evidence of a new relationship between themselves and the national government. Honeyboy Edwards, a part-time bluesman and part-time field hand throughout the Depression years, remembered that Roosevelt’s work programs initiated an upswing in Americans’ economic lives. Recalling the reforms of the mid-1930s, Edwards frankly praised Roosevelt’s efforts: “And after that [the] Depression raised up a little bit . . . It wasn’t gone but you could feel the difference. See, when Roosevelt got in there, he ended that bullshit.”101 Ledbetter’s account was less colorful than Edwards’s, yet equally poignant. Said Ledbetter of FDR: “He was the best man.”102 In their growing affinity for the president, black musicians in the 1930s glossed over many of the administration’s failures to aid black Americans— failures that left many black leaders in the North on ambivalent terms with the White House.103 Roosevelt never attempted to solve all the problems facing poor African Americans, and in some cases, he raised barriers against blacks; yet these shortcomings were lost against the poor black community’s larger belief that Roosevelt was personally responsible for improving economic conditions. For example, when the veterans’ bonus bill was passed over Roosevelt’s veto in 1936, blues musicians responded with a variety of celebratory songs, none of which recorded the details of Roosevelt’s resistance to the measure. To show how happy people were at the bonus being issued, Wheatstraw set his tune “When I Get My Bonus” to the melody of “Sittin’ On Top of the World.” Black musicians were tuned into national events because they affected their personal lives deeply, and blues music demonstrated that they increasingly recognized a relationship between themselves and national leadership.104
During Jim Crow’s early years, black southerners had created a counterculture that resisted the ideology of white supremacy and its brutal social enforcement. From World War I to the early New Deal, southern African Americans contended with a white-dominated society, in their home region and nationally, that enforced customary racial hierarchy. The Great War had left black southerners disappointed, the northern employers and landlords had practiced de facto segregation, and disaster relief efforts in the 1920s and early 1930s were carried out with heavy discrimination. However, during the mid to late 1930s, the national government began to offer the blues people a more accepting ideology and, most important, jobs. Earlier, in the context of white-controlled plantation labor, blues musicians had sung about rejecting their role as workers; during the New Deal era, bluesmen increasingly regarded wage labor as a boon to black workers trying to escape the cycles of debt and dependency.105 Blues music could expand beyond expressing a countercultural and wholly negative image of Jim Crow life in the South and could now include a more positive imagined future in which work, consumption, and stability were valued over vagrancy and avoidance of pain. In other words, the bluesmen who contributed to the political culture of their music in the 1930s began to have an alternative—not only could they seek to subvert and reject Jim Crow but increasingly they could gravitate toward and praise the multicultural nationalism that was building under Roosevelt’s presidency as the nation worked through disasters and wars.
Verse Four
Uncle Sam Called Me
World War II and the Blues Counterculture of Inclusion
So just pack your suitcase, get ready to leave your mate,
You know you got to go, and help save them United States.
—”Training Camp Blues,”
by Roosevelt Sykes, 1941
I Really Heard Myself for the First Time: Muddy Waters’s Wartime Transformation
With the Second New Deal providing relief jobs and the nation’s economy ramping up for war production, more and more African Americans joined their countrymen in digging out of the Great Depression during the late 1930s and early 1940s. Blues, jazz, and other African American music remained very popular in northern and southern towns as citizens began to reestablish their financial security and increase their capacity for nonessential consumption. Nightclubs thrived, records sold, and many amateur blues musicians had the opportunity to become full-fledged professionals. In the mid-1940s, the American Federation of Musicians union enforced a recording ban in the hopes of keeping live performers in business, allowing young musicians such as Muddy Waters to develop their chops on the stage as opposed to in the studio. As the United States geared up for war in Europe and the Pacific, Waters was a tractor operator on the Stovall Plantation just northwest of Clarksdale, Mississippi. In addition to sharecropping, Waters fixed cars, ran small gambling circles, trapped furs, bootlegged liquor, and played the blues. He dearly loved his grandmother, Della Grant, a deeply Christian woman who disapproved of his nightlife ways. Despite his grandmother’s warnings that harmonica and guitar music was sinful and devilish, Waters discovered that the blues could be financially, as well as personally, rewarding. A sharecropper’s portion of the crop value rarely provided a comfortable lifestyle, but Waters’s moonlighting supplemented his income nicely, allowing him to buy a used Ford and run a country-style taxi service to nearby Coahoma County cotton towns. The whiskey, music, and gambling of his Saturday night parties became more popular, and the church ladies rolled their eyes more emphatically. The mixture of Christianity, field labor, music, and weekend escapism that defined Waters’s life also defined African American culture throughout the delta regions of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Several of Waters’s Delta neighbors had become successful recording artists. Waters idolized Son House, whom he saw in person several times, and learned from the few records Robert Johnson was able to produce before his death in 1938. Although his music had a country feel, coming “from the cotton field” as he said, Waters took advantage of innovation, becoming a master of the slide technique and, later, plugging in to amplification. But in the summer of 1941, Waters was still playing acoustically in and around Stovall. He had made one foray to St. Louis where he found he could not yet make it as a musician, so he remained rooted in the Delta, content with the occasional trip to Memphis’s Beale Street.1
Then, in August 1941, Alan Lomax and John Work arrived in Coahoma County, looking for musicians whose styles resembled the late Johnson’s. They came representing a folklore mission jointly sponsored by Fisk University in Nashville and the Library of Congress in Washington. When Lomax and Work arrived in the Delta, Son House directed them to the Stovall Plantation. Waters initially thought they were tax agents come to arrest him, but he quickly came to understand the importance of their visit. The interviews and music that Lomax and Work recorded that day with Waters helped push the young musician to follow in the footsteps of House, Johnson, and other local blues notables who had tried to get beyond the local itinerant circle and make it big. Symbolic, perhaps, was that the first song Waters played for the folklorists was “Country Blues,” a rendition of House’s “Walking Blues,” which had been covered by Johnson as well. The song was testament to Waters’s rural upbringing, and it showed off his Delta blues pedigree. He also recorded “Burr Clover Farm Blues” and “I Be’s Troubled” that day. All in all, his acoustic guitar playing and singing, heavily influenced by House, had country grit
but also displayed his natural talent.
His songs were truly excellent. Lomax was impressed, and Waters gained confidence, though the man recorded in the interview with Lomax was by no means a timid country boy. He clearly and calmly answered all of Lomax’s questions about his songs’ origins, his guitar tuning, and his early influences, and when the time came to play, Waters did his best. In the coming weeks he had a friend write letters to Lomax asking about the status of the recordings and if they would be issued. Lomax chose “I Be’s Troubled” and “Country Blues” to be included on an Archive of American Folk Song five-album set he was compiling. Once he got his copy, Waters was inspired. “I really HEARD myself for the first time. I’d never heard my voice,” Waters told Paul Oliver. “But when Mr. Lomax played me the record I thought, man, this boy can sing the blues.” Years later, Lomax agreed: “Muddy was very much a poor black sharecropper when I met him. In fact, he came to the first session without shoes . . . [but] I think [the recording] made him feel more sure of himself, so that later, when he went to Chicago, he had no doubts that he was as good as anybody around.”2
By the next year, the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and the United States was fully into World War II. Waters was in Memphis getting a now-famous photograph taken. In the portrait, a clean-cut twenty-nine-year-old Waters sits in a light-colored suit, sporting a bold tie. The only hint of his country roots are his “high-water” trousers. Otherwise, the man seated on the bench in the photo is no sharecropper at all, but an up-and-coming professional musician who believed he had the ability to make a good career. It is not an image of a downtrodden, exploited farm hand but of a hopeful, energetic young American seeking success. The most important object in the photograph is his 78 rpm Library of Congress record of “Country Blues” and “I Be’s Troubled.” As a prop, Waters might have chosen his guitar, as Johnson or Ledbetter did in their promotional photographs. But Waters chose his shiny new record, proudly propping up the album on his left thigh, half trophy of past success, half token of future ambition. As it had been for Ledbetter, an old-fashioned field recording with one of the Lomaxes became the key catalyst in Waters’s personal and professional development.3
When Lomax returned to the Stovall Plantation in the summer of 1942, Waters’s repertoire had developed further since their first meeting in August of the previous year. In the first session in 1941, Waters’s music was unmistakably rooted in the cotton fields, but by 1942, his song titles and lyrics demonstrated that he had itchy feet and was ready to leave the Delta behind. In 1942, “I Be Bound to Write to You” and “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone” may have seemed like the expression of a poor country boy’s wanderlust, but with hindsight it is clear that Waters made good on these predictions. Boosted by the confidence gained from the Lomax field recording sessions, Waters moved to the south side of Chicago in 1943, leaving behind ex-wives and children in the Clarksdale area. In the Windy City he found a succession of day jobs—driving delivery trucks, working at a paper mill, making electronic parts—and hung around the buzzing nightclub scene of Maxwell Street. Honeyboy Edwards, traveling partner to Waters’s future harmonica player Little Walter Jacobs, was one of the many musicians playing in blues-loving migrant neighborhoods. “At that time all the steel mills was open . . . People came from the south everywhere to get a job,” recalled Edwards. “And when they come in from work, they wouldn’t go right to bed. They come out there get some breakfast or get them a good drink . . . and listen to us play the blues. And like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, all the people that live out of town would be down on Maxwell Street. They, there were just so many people, you couldn’t walk the streets. You had to turn sideways.”4 On Maxwell Street, Waters rubbed elbows with Big Bill Broonzy and Sonny Boy Williamson and plugged into the Chicago blues scene, networking with band members and collaborators. During the early war years, the AFM recording ban was in effect, so Waters continued to develop without being recorded on disc. Instead, he found plenty of work playing house parties for the many newly arrived Mississippians and other southerners who were starting out on Chicago’s south side. In the noisy and raucous clubs and nightspots, his country style had to change, so he got louder by plugging in and creating a bigger sound with accompaniments—Little Walter Jacobs on harmonica, Otis Spann on piano, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, and Ernest Crawford on bass. So the scene, not the studio, shaped the music of Waters and his companions. In the hard-working, hard-playing Maxwell Street environment, the rural and acoustic sound of the Delta was transformed into the edgy, confident, and adventurous shout of the black working class in the cities. Chicago was Sandburg’s “Big Shoulders” for blacks as much as whites.
In this regard, Waters’s music was powerfully representative of the changes that occurred in blues music, black life, and American society during World War II. After the second session with Lomax in 1942, Waters did not record again until Sunnyland Slim got him in touch with Leonard Chess at Aristocrat in 1947. Waters cut a few country-style songs for Aristocrat, but Chess shelved them. The raw, acoustic sound that Waters and others brought with them out of the Delta lacked the necessary power—electric and amplified—for the postwar blues listening crowd. Waters worked to conjure more of his nightclub sound when he went back into the Aristocrat studios in 1948. This time, he convinced Chess to let him bring his bassist, Crawford, and Waters played with all the energy and edge he had cultivated for his amplified act. He mixed old with new. His electrified slide ripped the air while he belted out lyrics that sounded like modern field hollers. Drawing on experience, he transformed the two songs he played for Lomax during that first plantation session seven years before. “Country Blues” became “Feel Like Goin’ Home,” and “I Be’s Troubled” became “I Can’t Be Satisfied”—a two-sided record labeled Aristocrat 1305 that sold out its three thousand original copies in forty-eight hours in Chicago. The music was relatively unchanged, except the sharp sound of Waters’s guitar and the driving bass line provided by Crawford. Waters’s well-known chorus, “I can’t never be satisfied, and I just can’t keep from cryin’ “ is both motivational and haunting, but other verses illustrate the half-cocked, violent atmosphere that often developed around booze, gambling, and music:
Well I feel like snappin’, pistol in your face,
I’m gonna let some graveyard, Lord, be your resting place.
The release of Aristocrat 1305 marked the beginning of Waters’s successful recording career. Working with his bandmates, he released a number of hit songs in the late 1940s and early 1950s that became standards among the “British invasion” blues rockers of a decade and a half later: “Rolling Stone,” “I Just Wanna Make Love To You,” and “Baby Please Don’t Go.” Waters and company hit a high note in 1951 with their first Billboard R&B Top 10 with the soulful, grinding, “Louisiana Blues,” a song that powerfully rolls along like the roiling torrent of the Father of Waters itself—unstoppable and rhythmic but punctuated by sharp chords, a few strident guitar licks, and a wheezy harmonica.
The Waters tracks recorded early in the war, in 1941 and 1942, represent a young rural musician who had mastered the local folk form. The 1948 releases clearly reflect Waters’s Delta past, but it is clear that he was now in the act of creating a new idiom—one that was band based, not merely individual, and that packed a lot of sound as well as soul, volume as well as depth. As Waters’s biographer, Robert Gordon, wrote: “He’s no longer singing behind a mule or beneath an open sky; he’s a factory worker whose vision of God behind the stars is narrowed by a maze of buildings.”5
In making the transition from Stovall Plantation guitar picker to Chicago’s famous silk-suited, pompadour-wearing, fully electrified king of blues, and in so short a span of years, Waters’s career signified the collective effect of consumerism, farm mechanization, migration, and other forces that threatened the economic and social foundations of Jim Crow life during the Roosevelt era. On the one hand, Waters was an individual example of the widening opportunities availabl
e to African Americans in general and to those in the Lower Mississippi Valley specifically. On the other hand, and despite Waters’s seeming representation of black uplift, his story is also more generalist in nature, and amounts to nothing more than a young American musician seeking the dream of success in the modern, plugged-in world of entertainment. In this case, Waters, like many black southerners, began to have more hope at attaining the “American dream” in the 1940s. While his personal success was evident to him and those who observed him, what might have been less evident was the role he and other musicians played in forcing social change for American blacks, a movement that commenced during the Great Depression and the New Deal years and accelerated during World War II. Blues musicians were not alone in pushing this change; from Hollywood filmmakers (e.g., John Ford and Frank Capra) to social scientists and critics (e.g., Gunnar Myrdal and F. O. Matthiessen), many people were envisioning a more democratic future for the modern world’s first democracy.6
Joe Louis Blues
Blues musicians’ portrayal of new social and political identities among southern-born blacks highlighted one of many areas in which traditional social relationships, already shaken by the effects of the Great Depression and the New Deal, were challenged during World War II. While Allied and Axis forces clashed overseas, minority citizens and women of all backgrounds seized upon the social and economic opportunities brought by wartime production, and the American home front became a more flexible society.7 Roosevelt’s Second New Deal had given blacks hope that segregationists were losing their hold on the executive branch of the federal government.8 Southern blacks who had moved north joined other African Americans in voting en masse for the Democratic Party. Race liberals perceived a rising acceptance of the policy of integration among federal leadership, but in the 1940s, American government was often a local affair. Conservative southern legislators who favored a deferential central government that respected the established racial caste system split with the national Democrats to form the Dixiecrat Party, and, in the plantation districts of the Lower Mississippi Valley, local officials and landowners worked hard to maintain traditional socioeconomic relationships with black labor.9
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