Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Many northerners, and even some southerners, got their first taste of black folk music through minstrel shows. The highly rhythmic and often lightly syncopated minstrel songs clearly prepared audiences across the country for the ragtime, blues, and jazz styles that began emerging in the early 1890s. But minstrel shows also introduced music that ultimately filtered back to become a part of the folk musicians’ repertoire; “Turkey in the Straw” and “Buffalo Gals” are two fine examples of fiddle tunes that were introduced by traveling minstrels. Popular songs that have become part of the American consciousness, such as James Bland’s “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny,” were often originally disseminated by way of minstrels and sheet music publication. Ironically, the unofficial anthem of the South, “Dixie,” betrays its minstrel and African American origins.

  Traveling medicine shows proved to be another source of steady income for black and white musicians alike. From 1870s into the era of rock ’n’ roll these shows crisscrossed the United States. They were similar to minstrel shows in some respects, but instead of charging admission they sold medicine, salves, and tonics. While minstrels sold themselves as purveyors of southern black plantation life, medicine shows often played up the Indian theme with their sales of herbal and medicinal products. Medicine shows traveled under names both eye-catching and grandiose: The Great Mac Ian’s Mastodon Medicine Company, The Jack Roach Indian Medicine Show, The Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, and Dr. Lou Turner’s Shaker Medicine Company. Most were operated by alleged doctors who promoted their shows as clean, medically sound, and family oriented. The shows themselves abounded with entertainment: theatrical performances, magicians, ventriloquists, contortionists, trapeze artists, blackface comedians, jugglers, and of course the pitches of the doctors themselves. Important American popular singers/entertainers such as Billy Golden and William Hughes worked medicine shows. Naturally, the door was also open to black folk musicians with a sense of adventure.

  Alabama Minstrel Show Poster (1930s). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

  Black singers found employment as songsters with other types of road shows, too. The nineteenth-century traveling troupes expanded to include tent shows by the turn of the century. The mobile equivalent of vaudeville, tent shows provided audiences with a variety of entertainment for one modest admission fee. Often touring in conjunction with carnivals and circuses, tent shows of the oughts and teens featured some of the singers who went on to be the recording blues stars of the 1920s. One show in particular, the F. S. Wolcott Carnival, toured with a lineup of future impact artists: Bessie Smith, Ethel Waters, Butterbeans and Susie, Ida Cox, and Ma Rainey.

  In addition to offering black musicians steady employment, these shows brought various types of music to audiences across the South. Because of traveling shows rural folks were exposed not only to the familiar minstrel and ragtime songs but also to the ballads and popular songs of the day. You can be certain that the posters announcing the arrival of traveling shows and the advance work of the buskers (entertainers who arrived in advance of the show to advertise it) had an easy time drawing a large opening-night crowd.

  RECORDING THE BLUES

  At the turn of the twentieth century most blacks still lived in the South; however, many others were new arrivals to the urban North. In the years following the close of World War I, the great migration north began as hundreds of thousands of African Americans caught the Dixie Flyer and other trains to New York, Toledo, Chicago, Buffalo, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, and Hartford. They were searching for a new life away from the South, the Ku Klux Klan, humid and oppressive summers, and limited job opportunities.

  The migrating black population did not leave their traditions behind; down-home ways moved northward, too. This relocation diffusion is also illustrated by way of southern foodways. Barbecue restaurants and rib joints quickly appeared and proliferated along the streets of northern “black bottoms.” Moreover, the availability of collard greens and pigs’ feet in grocery stores illustrate these changes. Southern cuisine was celebrated in song as well as in stomachs, perhaps most notably by Bessie Smith in “Gimme a Pigfoot (and a Bottle of Beer).” Such songs signified not only the relationship between food and music but also a strong link with down home.

  These early commercial blues and jazz performers shared another trait, their choice of “royal” names. This flush era of commercial success provided opportunities for local and regional performers to tour and record, some of whom wished to aggrandize their status. Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were billed as the “Empress” and “Queen” of the blues, respectively; they were sometimes accompanied by the likes of New Orleans–born trumpeter “King” Oliver. Such self-importance not only betrays their commercial orientation toward the stage and the promotion it requires but also their pride as a well-recognized member “of the race” and as a purveyor of black music in a racist, segregated society. African American gospel groups often promoted a similar image through names such as the Royal Crown Quartet (Hampton Roads, Virginia), the Five Kings of Harmony (Birmingham, Alabama), and the Majestic Soft Singers (Memphis, Tennessee).

  “Country” blues was the first down-home style documented by the record companies as they explored ways to expand their “race” series and sell product. Ed Andrews, recorded by OKeh in Atlanta in April 1924, became the first country blues artists to record. His performance of “Time Ain’t Gonna Make Me Stay” and “Barrel House Blues” typifies the southeastern blues artists: a relaxed vocal accompanied by a nicely syncopated ragtime-styled guitar.

  This music appealed not only to northern immigrants but also to southern record buyers. Many record buyers came to local furniture stores (where both phonographs and records were sold) to purchase the latest disks or they checked the newspaper advertisements to see about the most recent Paramount, Columbia, and Victor releases. In addition to news and gossip, each weekly issue of the Amsterdam News (New York City), Chicago Defender, or the Norfolk Journal and Guide (Virginia) contained advertisements for the newest race records for the current country blues releases by Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Daddy” Stovepipe, Frank Stokes, “Long Cleve” Reed, and Lonnie Johnson.

  Beginning in the 1920s and continuing for approximately thirty years, blues simultaneously functioned as folk and popular music within the black community. One key to understanding this process is cultural integration, which points out that “folk groups” retain their unique character while remaining part of the larger popular culture. This relationship has resulted in an ongoing dialogue: an interchange in which ideas and innovations move back and forth between folk and popular culture. The result is an integration or coexistence of the two. This is a natural synthesis in a world united by instant communication and easy interregional movement. The “ideal” isolated folk community or folk group no longer exists in the United States today. Nearly everyone is touched by the news, editorials, information, and music brought to us by our computers, radio, and television . . . and has been for decades.

  Before the 1920s blues was primarily a folk music propelled by the oral tradition. W. C. Handy and a handful of others published sheet music in the mid-teens that had furthered interest in the tradition, but the folk blues remained in the realm of African American performers. The media’s sudden explosion intruded into the lives of many people, interesting them in new musical styles. Inside the black community an even greater appetite developed for blues, its inherent popularity enhanced by the attention it received. The status of blues changed because this down-home folk music that people previously associated with the South, beer gardens, and black-bottom dancing quickly became commercial property. People from Boston to Los Angeles could now order recordings of down-home and vaudeville blues performances without ever seeing these performers in person. The absolute need for personal contact with black folk musicians was obliterated.

  One by-product of the increasing popularity of blues during the 1920s was the standardization of the form. Early blues songs were of
varying lengths and did not always follow the same scheme of rhyming in the lyrics. Again, some of the more down-home musicians adhered to their musical sensibilities that had developed over years of playing. Musicians such as Sam Collins, Joe Callicot, or Bo-Weevil Jackson were so heavily steeped in early-twentieth-century rural black vernacular music that they paid little attention to popular trends. They continued to play songs with eleven or thirteen bars, wordless moans, and to markedly speed up during the course of their performances—sometimes as much as 20 percent. By the middle 1920s the blues form—twelve bars, aab verse form—had been standardized by way of sheet music as well as through the recordings of the popular classic female blues singers who almost always adhered to this format. This standardization can largely be attributed to the growing professionalization of blues and, in the case of female vaudeville blues performers, the need for a larger ensemble to follow a more predictable song form.

  “Daddy” Stovepipe. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.

  Innovations occurred more quickly as a result of these alterations in dissemination. The single-string solo work of the innovative popular black blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson’s numerous OKeh recordings touched musicians and listeners alike. Johnson’s music influenced his black recording contemporaries, including such obscure blues musicians as Gene Campbell and George Jefferson. In 1929 Johnson also waxed a stunning series of guitar duets with white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang that are regarded as masterpieces of the genre. Lonnie Johnson’s recordings, along with Texas blues man Blind Lemon Jefferson, clearly foreshadow the postwar blues guitar work of B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Otis Rush, Duane Allman, and others. His guitar playing illustrates how folk music is able to spread beyond regional and racial boundaries to penetrate into popular culture.

  Neither was blues impervious to the impact of popular culture. Some of the hard-core, Deep South, down-home blues recording artists of the 1920s, such as Six Cylinder Smith, Jim Tompkins, Edward Thompson, or Willie Brown, apparently remained untouched by popular trends. Their handful of recordings are “pure” examples of black American folk music; some are considered masterpieces of the genres. But many other blues recording artists whose careers began during the “first wave”—Leroy Carr, Big Bill, Tampa Red—unveiled repertoires that touched upon popular music. Urbane and sophisticated Leroy Carr performed many songs that extended the blues idiom beyond its inherent harmonic language into different song forms. His versions of “Think of Me, Thinking of You,” “Love Hides All Faults,” “Let’s Make Up and Be Friends Again,” or “Longing for My Sugar” owe more to Cole Porter and the Gershwins than they do to down-home blues. In his later career Tampa Red showed a distinct fondness for sentimental ballads, as did Lonnie Johnson.

  Lonnie Johnson, Disc Recording Artist. Courtesy of the Ralph Rinzler Folklife Archives and Collections, Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, Smithsonian Institution.

  Even though blues no longer enjoys a strong support base within the African American community, white-owned record companies continue to produce this music because it sells. But it is consumed more by a white American and international audience. Alligator, a small, independent record company based in Chicago, has built a substantial catalogue by recording electric blues artists. The United Kingdom is home to Document Records, which has reissued the greatest number of blues records from the 1920s and 1930s. Even Japanese-owned Sony, through its Columbia operation in the United States, had a smash blues reissue with its Robert Johnson (no relation to Lonnie Johnson) compact disc set. This set (originally recorded in 1936/7) is the biggest single-selling down-home blues release of the 2000s, most of which no doubt have ended up in the homes of white enthusiasts.

  RECORD COMPANIES AND FOLK MUSIC

  Commercial record companies began seriously recording regional country, blues, and gospel artists simultaneous to radio’s first days. Although cylinder phonograph records had been marketed early in the 1890s, performers of grass-root American music were largely ignored. A meager number of black gospel groups—the Dinwiddie Colored Quartet of Dinwiddie, Virginia; Old South Quartette of Richmond, Virginia; and the Fisk (University) Jubilee Singers—recorded prior to World War I. In 1920 the General Phonograph Company’s OKeh label recorded cabaret singer Mamie Smith performing “Crazy Blues,” which quickly lit the way for blues and other forms of black secular music appearances on disk.

  After a general recording slump in 1921 and 1922, blues, gospel, and country music finally caught the attention of record company officials. Victor took a chance with Texas fiddler Eck Robertson, who was accompanied by Henry Gilliland, in the summer of 1922. His pre-electric recording of the old dance tune “Sallie Goodin’” is widely acknowledged as the first country music recording. But the commercial country music industry really got started in 1923 with Fiddlin’ John Carson, an older musician from Atlanta, Georgia. By 1925 this market enjoyed a steady stream of releases by banjo pickers, string bands, and fiddle/guitar duets. Victor, OKeh, Paramount, Columbia, Brunswick, Vocalion, Gennett, and Black Patti recorded thousands of blues, country, and gospel performances.

  In addition to being distributed across the country and sold in furniture stores, the fragile 78 rpm recordings were also available through mail order. Newspapers and magazines advertised the most recent monthly releases in a series of stylized ads. The companies themselves distinguished between black and white artists by segregating the series. All of the selections by African American artists were issued as part of the “race” catalogue, while the white artists were labeled “old-time,” “hillbilly,” or “country.” For instance, Columbia Records reserved its 13/14,000 series exclusively for black performers, while secular and sacred country music appeared on its 15,000 Old-Time series.

  A & R (Artists & Repertoire) men supervised all of the recording sessions; their aesthetic and commercial sensibilities helped to shape the direction of American music. Ralph Peer, Art Saitherly, and Frank Walker worked with hundreds of musicians, relying upon a network of musicians, local furniture dealers, and even newspaper advertisements to locate talent. Musicians whose records sold well came back to the studios on numerous occasions. The openness of early talent scouting led to the recording of poor-selling and obscure but exceptionally interesting folk music talent like the Weems String Band (Arkansas), Blind Willie Reynolds (Louisiana), and the Memphis Sanctified Singers. While the best-regarded artists generally sold no more than 50,000 copies of a record, these regional lightweights were lucky to sell several hundred copies of one of their disks.

  Although the “hillbilly” and “race” folk traditions were the most widely documented by the commercial record industry, it did not entirely overlook the ethnic or “foreign” market. With the exception of a handful of musicians such as Irish artists like the Flannagan Brothers or Michael Coleman, who recorded extensively and whose disks often sold in the thousands, most ethnic recording artists remained utterly obscure outside of their own communities. The ethnic record market was as highly segmented as the communities in which the first-and second-generation Poles, Finns, Germans, and Ukrainians lived. As early as the turn of the twentieth century Victor, Edison, and Columbia began recording music to serve our large and diverse “foreign-speaking population” that was already being courted by hundreds of specialty daily newspapers that reached millions of people.

  By the time they started selling race records, the companies were already in the market with releases aimed at the ethnic market. As early as 1908 Columbia had began segregating its specialty series by ethnicity, followed by Victor some four years later. They primarily targeted their record series by country, marketing series for nearly every country in central Europe. The companies did not forget the rest of our immigrant population, as they also released selections designated to appeal to the Albanian American, Indian American, and Chinese American audiences. By the late 1920s, the record industry had documented such important styles of unique American ethnic music as Hawaiian meles and klezmer.

  Accor
ding to Dick Spottswood (Ethnic Music on Record), “Most record companies, major and minor, eventually developed ethnic series.” Although Victor and Columbia dominated the entire record industry, even smaller companies such as Banner, Brunswick, Cardinal, Gennett, and Pathe also maintained ethnic series. Some examples include Bluebird B-2000 through B-2092 (Cajun), Columbia 7000-F through 7304-F (Greek), and OKeh 17001 through 17373 (Bohemian).

  Unlike today, the companies were not above serving very small, niche markets. For example, the highly accomplished Finnish singer and fiddler Erik Kivi recorded four selections for Victor in August 1926. These records were issued on their general ethnic 77000–79499 (1923–27) series during a period of unprecedented growth and interest among companies in American vernacular music, yet these two records counted sales in the hundreds. Nonetheless Victor invited him to record three more times (over a three-month period!) in either New York City or Camden, New Jersey, before the Depression sent the industry reeling.

  A & R man and music publisher, Ralph Peer, in the mid-1930s. Courtesy of the Peer-Southern Organization.