Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  39. Wright, introduction to Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, xv.

  40. Garon, Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 64.

  41. W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1991), 107.

  42. Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: Da Capo, 1976), 6.

  43. Mark K. Dolan, “Extra! Chicago Defender Race Records Ads Show South from Afar,” Southern Cultures (Fall 2007): 107.

  44. Booker T. Washington, “Atlanta Exposition Address,” Sept. 18, 1895, in Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page and Co., 1919), 219.

  45. Titon, review of Blues and the Poetic Spirit, 130 (my italics). As a form of cultural negation (i.e., poor black southerners’ rejection of the dominant racial and cultural models), blues music exemplified a notion of counterculture drawn from Hegel’s concept of (pro)culture and anticulture, or more aptly put, thesis and antithesis. See Seymour Leventman, “Sociology as Counterculture: The Power of Negative Thinking,” in Leventman, ed., Counterculture and Social Transformation: Essays on Negativistic Themes in Sociological Theory (Springfield, Ill.: Thomas, 1982), 3-18; and Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1960), 129-34. On black nihilism, see Cornell West, Race Matters (New York: Vintage, 1994), 22-27.

  46. David Evans, “Charley Patton: The Conscience of the Delta,” in Robert Sacre, ed., The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton (Liège, Belgium: Presses Universitaires de Liège, 1987), 143; and King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 73. See also Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charley Patton (Newton, N.J.: Rock Chapel Press, 1988).

  47. Leon Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow (New York: Knopf, 1998), xvii.

  48. McMillen, Dark Journey, xv-xvi.

  49. Baraka, Blues People, 96.

  VERSE ONE

  1. Muddy Waters, interview by Alan Lomax, Stovall, Miss., 1941, on Muddy Waters: The Complete Plantation Recordings, Chess/MCA CHD-9344.

  2. Mississippi Sheiks, “Sittin’ On Top of the World,” Okeh 8784 (Shreveport, La., 1930); Big Bill Broonzy, “Worrying You Off of My Mind,” ARC 11606 (New York, 1932); Tampa Red, “Things ‘Bout Coming My Way,” Vocalion 1637 (loc. unavailable, 1931); and Robert Johnson, “Come On in My Kitchen,” Vocalion 03563 (San Antonio, 1936).

  3. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 34; and King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 22, 24.

  4. Charley Patton, “High Water Everywhere, Pts. 1 & 2,” Paramount 12909 (Grafton, Wisc., 1929; and Muddy Waters, “Louisiana Blues,” Chess 1441 (Chicago, 1950).

  5. B. B. King related a revealing story about the shift from singing about “my Lord” to singing about “my baby” in King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 75.

  6. Charters, The Country Blues, xv.

  7. Wald, Escaping the Delta, 32, 65.

  8. Much of the biographical information about Ledbetter in this chapter is drawn from Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell, The Life and Legend of Leadbelly (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 1-4, 26-37, 58-60, 70-85, 97-121.

  9. Zora Neale Hurston, “Characteristics of Negro Expression” (1933) in Caponi, Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin and Slam Dunking, 303.

  10. Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 196, see also 217-18.

  11. Handy, Father of the Blues, 10-11; see also Kirby, The Countercultural South (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 1-4.

  12. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 406.

  13. Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995), 168.

  14. Welding, “Ramblin’ Johnny Shines,” 29.

  15. Huddie Ledbetter, “Shorty George,” transcribed in Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads and Folksongs, 200-201.

  16. Wolfe and Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 1-3.

  17. Louisiana voting figures in Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 225-27, 243-46; quotations in William Cooper Jr. and Thomas Terrill, The American South: A History (New York: Knopf, 1990), 540.

  18. Davis, History of the Blues, 166.

  19. Irene Campbell quoted in Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 217.

  20. Ledbetter recorded many versions of “Fannin Street” from 1934 to 1948, sometimes calling the piece “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town” after Caddo Parish’s sheriff, Tom Hughes; see “Tom Hughes Town,” Library of Congress 236-B-3 (Angola, La., 1934).

  21. Representative material for Blind Lemon Jefferson can be found on two albums, both with excellent historical liner notes; see Blind Lemon Jefferson (Milestone M47022) and Blind Lemon Jefferson: King of the Country Blues (Yazoo L1069). On Jefferson’s personal history, see Samuel Charters, The Bluesmen (New York: Oak Publications, 1967), 175-89. On the development of “East Texas Blues,” see Bruce Bastin, Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast (London: Macmillan, 1986); and Alan Govenar, Meeting the Blues: The Rise of the Texas Sound (Dallas: Taylor, 1988).

  22. Huddie Ledbetter, “Honey, I’m All Out and Down,” Melotone 13326 (New York, 1935).

  23. Wolfe and Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 59-60.

  24. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 270-71. On the Houston riots, see Robert Haynes, A Night of Violence: The Houston Riot of 1917 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1976); and Robert Mullen, Blacks In America’s Wars: The Shift in Attitudes from the Revolutionary War to Vietnam (New York: Monad, 1973), 41-42. On black convict life in segregated southern prisons, see John G. van Duesen, The Black Man in White America (Washington, DC: Associated Publishers, 1944), “The Negro Criminal” 138-57. The convict labor system, in Houston Baker Jr.’s view, fit into a long pattern of white power controlling the black body; see Baker, Turning South Again: Re-thinking Modernism / Re-reading Booker T. (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001).

  25. See Bruce Jackson, ed., Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs from Texas Prisons (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972). Recorded material has been collected on Prison Camp Songs (Ethnic Folkways Library FE4475). On African American use of satire and “aggressive humor,” see William D. Piersen, “A Resistance Too Civilized to Notice,” in Caponi, ed., Signifyin(g), Sanctifyin, and Slam Dunking, 348-70. Lyrics from Son House, “County Farm Blues” (1942), transcribed in Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (New York: Pantheon, 1993), 21.

  26. Louis “Bacon and Porkchop” Houston and Matt Williams, “Walk Straight,” transcribed in Jackson, Wake Up Dead Man: Hard Labor and Southern Blues, 87-90.

  27. Although Ledbetter did not record “Last Monday” in full, he used fragments in “Looky Looky Yonder/Black Betty/Yallow Women’s Door Bells,” Musicraft 503 (New York, 1939), and the lyrics were used much later by Johnny Cash, in “I Got Stripes,” reissued on Hall of Fame Series: Classic Cash, Mercury 834 526-2. Ledbetter first recorded “Midnight Special” for the Lomaxes in July 1934, on their second visit to Angola State Penitentiary. Folk-blues rock band Creedence Clearwater Revival recorded the most notable version of Ledbetter’s “Midnight Special” on the 1969 album Willy and the Poor Boys (Fantasy 8397). Other forms of the song were played throughout Texas and the surrounding states. “Midnight Special” was first recorded in 1926 by McGintey’s Oklahoma Cowboy Band; in 1927, Mississippi Delta bluesman Sam Collins became the first African American to record the song. See Wolfe and Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 273-74.

  28. Ledbetter, “Governor Pat Neff,” quoted in Alan Govenar, Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2008), 92; see also William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 72-73; and Wolfe and Lornell, Life and Legend of Leadbelly, 85-86.

  29. The Lomaxes likewise noted that singers they worked with, including Ledbetter, often psychologically secluded themselves by either adopting the stereotypical jovial attitude or simply concealing any transparently personal or controversial thoughts in their conversations and singing. See Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads and Folksongs, xxxi; and Lomax,
Land Where the Blues Began, x-xi, 472-73. On the “signifying” tradition in African and African American vernacular culture, generally, see Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Samuel Floyd Jr., The Power of Black Music: Interpreting Its History from Africa to the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); and Floyd, “Troping the Blues: From Spirituals to the Concert Hall,” Black Music Research Journal 13 (1993): 31-51.

  30. The recordings from this prison session are housed in the Library of Congress Archive of American Folksong and are reissued on Leadbelly: The Remaining Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 2 (Document DOCD 5592) and Leadbelly: The Remaining Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 3 (Document DOCD 5593). See also Davis, History of the Blues, 166-67; and Nolan Porterfield, Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax, 1867-1948 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 330-31.

  31. See Porterfield, Last Cavalier, 330-31.

  32. Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 269-71.

  33. Huddie Ledbetter, “Bourgeois Blues,” Musicraft 227 (New York, 1939); see also Robert Springer, Authentic Blues: Its History and Its Themes, trans. André Prévos (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), xii.

  34. Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson (New York: Dutton, 1989), 2.

  35. Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, 103.

  36. Memphis Slim quoted in Spencer, Blues and Evil, xxiv.

  37. Bukka White quoted in Evans, Big Road Blues, 43; Muddy Waters quoted in Lomax, Land Where the Blues Began, 410; John Lee Hooker quoted in Gioia, Delta Blues, 37.

  38. Nicholas Lemann, The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How it Changed America (New York: Vintage, 1991), 10. On the physical, social, and economic development of the Delta from river bottomland to cotton plantation monoculture, see James Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 7-28; Robert Brandfon, Cotton Kingdom of the New South: A History of the Yazoo Mississippi Delta from Reconstruction to the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967); John Solomon Otto, The Final Frontiers, 1880-1930: Settling the Southern Bottomlands (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1999); and John C. Willis, Forgotten Time: The Yazoo-Mississippi Delta after the Civil War (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000). More generally, see Gavin Wright, Old South, New South: Revolutions in the Southern Economy since the Civil War (New York: Basic Books, 1986); and the work of historical geographer Charles Aiken, The Cotton Plantation South since the Civil War (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

  39. See James Irwin and Anthony Patrick O’Brien, “Where Have All the Sharecroppers Gone? Black Occupations in Postbellum Mississippi,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 280-97; and Irwin and O’Brien, “Economic Progress in the Postbellum South? African American Incomes in the Mississippi Delta, 1880-1910,” Explorations in Economic History 38 (January 2001): 166-80.

  40. James Roark, Masters without Slaves (New York: Norton, 1977), 108. See also Peter Coclanis, “Introduction [to special issue]: African Americans in Southern Agriculture, 1877-1945,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 135-39. Generally, see Pete Daniel, The Shadow of Slavery: Peonage in the South, 1901-1969 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Although the sharecropping system spread extensively in the waning years of the nineteenth century, the high turnover rate among tenants revealed that planters had failed to immobilize the labor force with revolving debt but instead witnessed fluctuation and instability among their tenants; see J. William Harris, Deep Souths: Delta, Piedmont, and Sea Island Society in the Age of Segregation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), part one.

  41. Baraka, Blues People, 65.

  42. C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1955; citations are to 3rd ed., 1974), 6. An excellent summary of African Americans’ status during the Redeemer, Populist, and disfranchisement movements in the South between 1877 and 1915 is August Meier and Elliot M. Rudwick, From Plantation to Ghetto: An Interpretive History of American Negroes (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), chapter 5, “ ‘Up from Slavery’: The Age of Accommodation,” 156-88. The global context of cotton production and its importance in the social and economic policy-making decisions of American government may be found in Sven Beckert, “Emancipation and Empire: Reconstructing the Worldwide Web of Cotton Production in the Age of the American Civil War,” American Historical Review 109 (December 2004): 1405-38.

  43. Cash, The Mind of the South, 107.

  44. Bukka White, interview in Sing Out 18 (October-November 1968): 45. See also Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 61-81; and Laurie Wilkie, Creating Freedom: Material Culture and African American Identity at Oakley Plantation, Louisiana, 1840-1950 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000), an anthropological case study of black material culture that explores sharecropping blacks’ roles as consumers and producers.

  45. Will Stark quoted in Woods, Development Arrested, 93.

  46. King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 36.

  47. McMillen, Dark Journey, 4.

  48. Wright, Old South, New South, 156-97. See also Jack Bloom, Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 1-58. The political economy drawn upon by Bloom was well explained by economists Lee J. Alston and Joseph P. Ferrie, Southern Paternalism and the American Welfare State: Economics, Politics, and Institutions in the South, 1865-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 1-133.

  49. McMillen, Dark Journey, 5; see also George Ellenberg, “African Americans, Mules, and the Southern Mindscape,” Agricultural History 72 (Spring 1998): 381-98. By the 1890s, race had taken the paramount position in determining southern social relations, replacing a brief period in which it looked as if class, not race, was the prime sociopolitical factor; see, e.g., Patrick G. Williams, “Suffrage Restriction in Post-Reconstruction Texas: Urban Politics and the Specter of the Commune,” Journal of Southern History 68 (February 2002): 31-64. Evidence that race relations and land ownership after 1865 were more fluid in the eastern seaboard states than in the Deep South may be found in Jane Dailey, Before Jim Crow: The Politics of Race in Postemancipation Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); and Richard Paul Fuke, Imperfect Equality: African Americans and the Confines of White Racial Attitudes in Post-Emancipation Maryland (New York: Fordham University Press, 1999).

  50. McMillen, Dark Journey, 6. See also Howard Rabinowitz, Race, Ethnicity, and Urbanization: Selected Essays (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1994), 137-66; and Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 1-21. Scholars across the social sciences likewise have explored the important relationship between physical and social space; see, e.g., Barbara Heath and Amber Bennett, “ ‘The little spots allow’d them’: The Archaeological Study of African-American Yards,” Historical Archaeology 34 (2000): 38-55; Grey Gundaker, ed., Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (Charlot-tesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); and David Delaney, Race, Place, and the Law, 1836-1948 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 93-96.

  51. James Vardaman quoted in Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 223, 246; see also Michael Perman, Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South, 1888-1908 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2001). Many historians have examined racial constructions of black inferiority and white supremacy; some of the most informative sources include Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South, 1890-1940 (New York: Pantheon, 1998), 3-119; Patrick Wolfe, “Land, Labor, and Difference: Elementary Structures of Race,” American Historical Review 106 (June 2001): 866-905; David Brion Davis, “Constructing Race: A Reflection,” William and Mary Quarterly 54 (January 1997): 7-18; and E. Nathaniel Gates, ed., Critical Race Theory: Essays on the Social Co
nstruction and Reproduction of “Race” 4 vols. (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997).

  52. On disfranchisement in Mississippi, see Vernon Lane Wharton, The Negro in Mississippi, 1865-1890 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947), 206-15; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 87-91; and McMillen, Dark Journey, 35-71. On disfranchisement throughout the South, see C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 321-49; and, generally, J. Morgan Kousser, The Shaping of Southern Politics: Suffrage Restriction and the Establishment of the One-Party South, 1880-1910 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1974).

  53. Litwack, Trouble in Mind, 219. Rather than think of Jim Crow voting restrictions as an anomaly, the enfranchisement of African Americans in the wake of the Civil War was more of an aberration within the nineteenth-century context of minority voting rights (see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States [New York: Basic Books, 2000], 79), and lower class whites suffered under the new Mississippi constitution as well. The percentage of registered voters among adult white males dropped from 80.9 in 1868 to 57.7 in 1892 but rebounded to 81.5 percent by 1899. Registered voters among black Mississippians increased throughout the 1890s, peaking at 9.1 percent in 1899, but declined steadily in the twentieth century: only four-tenths of a percent of adult blacks were registered to vote in Mississippi in 1940; see McMillen, Dark Journey, 36; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 342-43; and Sheldon Hackney, Populism to Progressivism in Alabama (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969), 206.

  54. King and Ritz, Blues All Around Me, 52; see also McMillen, Dark Journey, 227, 252. For lynching statistics, see Norton Moses, ed., Lynching and Vigilantism in the United States: An Annotated Bibliography (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1997), xiv-xii; Daniel T. Williams, ed., “The Lynching Records at Tuskegee Institute,” in Eight Negro Bibliographies (New York: Kraus Reprint, 1970), 6-11; and Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here, 18.