Exploring American Folk Music

by Kip Lornell

  Downhome Blues Hearths and Migration Patterns

  Ef I had ’bout fo’ty-five dollahs

  All in gol’ yas, all in gol’

  I’d be as rich as ol’ man Catah.

  I’m gwine back to South Ca’lina;

  Fah away, yas, fah away.

  I’m gwine see my Esmeraldy.

  I can’t stay, no, I can’t stay.

  (Scarborough 1925, 219)

  Blues are built upon a series of rhymed couplets that speak the “truth” about life, one of the principal reasons why this new music appealed to its listeners. As the musician played the “lowdown” music and sang about mutual concerns, blues promoted a dialogue between the musician and audience. Because the early blues were played at house parties and dances rather than formal concert halls, audiences shouted encouragement and sometimes interacted with musicians by joining in the singing. Dancing, another means of releasing energy and frustration as well as creative movement, quickly became another important ingredient in this dialogue.

  The first blues songs were almost certainly of variable length, probably between ten and fourteen bars. The standardization of the twelve-bar format appeared in sheet music as early as 1912; however, the twelve-bar blues form did not become codified for at least one decade. Early blues musicians often played cycles of whatever bar length suited them. The length of early blues was probably determined by the words being sung. A song like “Poor Boy” was perfectly suited to this new style of music and was likely to be recast in the emerging blues style. Sociologist Howard Odum described this song, which he collected in Georgia circa 1909. This nascent version was sung to the accompaniment of a guitarist playing with a knife and included lyrics echoed by today’s blues persons:

  I’m a po’ boy ’long ways from home,

  Oh, I’m a po’ boy ’long ways from home.

  I wish a ’scursion train would run,

  Carry me back where I cum frum.

  Come here, babe, an’ sit on yo’ papa’s knee.

  Possibly because this version of “Poor Boy” was taken from early fieldwork, this early blues or blueslike song sounds fragmented when compared to later recorded versions. It is likely that the singer himself organized the song this way, punctuating the heartfelt lyrics with ringing slide guitar, and performed the song using an eight-bar format.

  Blues singers demonstrated many musical characteristics that are regional in nature. The early down-home blues styles can be assigned to three general regions: Southwest, mid-South, and Southeast. When singers from these areas migrated outside the hearth areas, they carried their music with them. The preceding musical example illustrates the mid-South or Delta style well.

  MODERN BLUES

  Black popular music began to permutate into new forms. Jazz-influenced singers such as Billy Eckstine, Ella Fitzgerald, Johnny Hartman, and Sarah Vaughn rose to prominence during the middle to late 1940s. Rhythm and blues (R&B, which is more fully discussed in chapter 11) first emerged in the late 1940s: Bull Moose Jackson, Tiny Bradshaw, Johnny Otis, and others were recording for the same independent labels as the gospel singers. Their music was not only popular, but it was based on the blues, which were undergoing another transformation.

  MUSICAL EXAMPLE

  Big Joe Williams lived as an itinerant blues singer and musician until his death in 1982. Born near the turn of the twentieth century, Williams spent his formative years in the Mississippi Delta as a contemporary of the legendary blues singers Charlie Patton and Son House before moving to Chicago in the middle 1930s. His gruff, intense vocals are reminiscent of the field hollers that rang throughout the South during the early twentieth century. Though he kept a trailer in Crawford, Mississippi, in later years Williams rambled throughout the United States and also played concerts in Europe.

  Title “Night Cap Blues”

  Performer Big Joe Williams

  Instruments guitar and voice

  Length 2:56

  Musical Characteristics

  1. The tonality is major and is played in duple (4/4) meter.

  2. Williams sticks to the basic blues form.

  3. His voice and guitar are used as a foil to each other, almost like an internal call and response.

  4. The tempo of the song increases during the performance.

  5. The highly syncopated guitar accompaniment underlies its homophonic texture resulting in a full texture.

  Put on your night cap, woman, I’m gonna buy you an evening gown. (repeat)

  I’m taking you out tomorrow night, baby, and I swear we sure gonna break ’em on down.

  I’m gonna pack my bucket, baby, gonna move back to the piney woods.

  I’m gonna get my bucket baby . . . move back to the woods.

  I’m gonna leave here, darling, ’cause you don’t mean me no good.

  I ain’t never been to Georgia, boys, but the half ain’t never been told. (repeat)

  Tell me them women down there got something sweet, sweet as jelly

  roll.

  (Repeat the first verse.)

  When you raise sweet potatoes, boy, raise you a Nancy Hall.

  If you want a sweet potato, boy, raise a Nancy Hall.

  If you want a good woman, I swear you better marry one long and tall.

  Put on your night cap, baby, I’m gonna buy an evening gown.

  I’m going out Saturday night and I am sure gonna break ’em on down.

  This selection is from Smithsonian Folkways 31004.

  * * *

  Down-home blues continued to be popular in the South and among southerners transplanted to the North. However, the blues that appeared on commercial disks slowly changed during the 1940s as popular music tastes altered. Small ensembles all but supplanted the single artists that so often appeared on records during the 1920s and into the 1930s. The late 1930s recordings by Sonny Boy Williamson (John Lee Williamson), Washboard Sam (Sam Brown), Tampa Red and his Chicago Five, Lonnie Johnson, and others foreshadowed the new trends in commercial blues. The ensembles frequently consisted of a bass, drums (or washboard), guitar, piano, harmonica, or horns. These additional instruments smoothed out many of the harmonic and stylistic idiosyncracies of the folk blues performers, routinizing the music into a more predictable pattern. As commercial record companies learned very well, predictability, albeit spiced with a dash of creativity, is what sells records. The wonderfully individual sounds of Mr. Freddie Spruel, Otto Virgial, and George Clarke all but disappeared following the record industry’s reactivation in 1945. An even more pronounced ensemble sound emerged on records and, to a far lesser degree, over the radio following the end of World War II. In New York City the music centered around the East Coast musicians who had migrated northward: Brownie and Sticks McGhee, Sonny Terry, Larry Dale, and others. Their sound, on record at least, was distinctly “country,” updated somewhat but not truly transformed. In Los Angeles many of the musicians came from Texas in search of work. The R&B sound of Charles Brown and Amos Milburn tended to predominate West Coast commercial blues.

  But the true musical and popular revolution in blues was going on in Chicago. The majority of Chicago’s migrants, from the turn of the century onward, arrived from the mid-South: Arkansas, Mississippi, and western Tennessee. This influx of residents from an area where the blues were deep and well developed combined with the electrification of guitars to create a vital, vibrant sound. At the forefront of this movement were Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield),

  Henry Miles Jug Band, a Louisville jug band that operated during the 1930s into the 1940s. Courtesy of Kip Lornell.

  Howlin’ Wolf (Chester Burnett), Elmore James, and Walter Horton. Each of them arrived in Chicago with highly developed musical skills, full of the fire and emotional rawness that characterized the blues that developed along the Mississippi Delta. These men truly created an important new form by transforming the music of masters such as Charley Patton, Eddie “Son” House, Willie Brown, Will Shade, and Robert Johnson into the roots of rock ’n’
roll.

  The transformation began in the middle 1940s, about the same time as another revolution in black music, be-bop, was capturing the other ear of jazz aficionados. The transitional records of Muddy Waters, Big Joe Williams, and Snooky Pryor with Moody Jones came out in the late 1940s and sounded like Mississippi blues in a modern setting. Around 1951 the revolution hit full force in the form of Muddy Waters’s classic band that included Little Walter Jacobs (harp), Otis Spann (piano), Big Crawford (bass), Jimmy Rodgers (second guitar), and Freddy Below (drums). Their classic Chess records virtually define Chicago blues and document a band at the height of its considerable abilities. The passion and creativity evident on “Forty Days and Forty Nights,” “Standing Around Crying,” “Hootchie Coochie Man,” and “Mannish Boy” are among the landmarks in black American vernacular music. The Chicago style emphasizes the highly dramatic lead voices of amplified guitars and harmonicas supported by the basic rhythm section of bass guitar, piano, and drums. The music was meant to be heard in clubs on the city’s predominately black South and West sides, neighborhood bars where locals came to drink and dance. Bars featuring these bands were the northern equivalent of the juke joint and they proved quite popular. This music was popular on records, too. Small labels such as Chess, Cobra, JOB, and others launched (and perhaps ultimately crashed) their businesses based on the marketability of Chicago blues. The popularity of this music continued through the middle 1950s.

  Other electric blues musicians—B. B. King, Bobby Blue Bland, Little Milton—groomed their performing and recording skills in Memphis before gaining a national following. Their music is not cut in the classic Chicago mode, but rather is influenced by R&B and the gospel sounds of the 1940s and 1950s. Horn sections predominated and this music profoundly influenced soul music and the “Stax sound” that emanated from Memphis during the middle to late 1960s.

  FINAL THOUGHTS

  Black American secular folk music has a complicated history. Older styles of music, particularly blues, still persist. Blues, along with the jug bands from Memphis and Louisville and rural black string bands, represent some of the most interesting examples of regional American folk music. In some general ways string band music and balladry overlap with their Anglo-American counterparts, but their distinctive characteristics have been outlined here. These secular traditions, often in tandem with religious music, have also strongly influenced popular music. The (mostly African American) folk roots of contemporary popular music are fully explored in the penultimate chapter.

  KEY FIGURES AND TERMS

  African American ballad

  Chicago blues

  coon songs

  field holler

  fife and drum bands

  folk blues

  “John Henry”

  Scott Joplin

  juba

  juke joints

  Lead Belly

  Charlie Patton

  ragtime

  songster

  string bands

  track laying

  Muddy Waters

  work song

  SUGGESTED LISTENING

  Carolina Chocolate Drops. Genuine Negro Jig. Music Maker. This 2010 release is the best work, thus far, by this group of three younger and talented African American string band music makers.

  John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. Guitar Man. Flying Fish 470. This guitar/harmonica duo explores their Piedmont Virginia roots in songs like “Police Dog Blues” and “Richmond Blues.”

  Elizabeth Cotten. Freight Train and Other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes. Smithsonian Folkways 4009. A delightful selection of songs by this most gentle guitar and banjo player.

  Lightin’ Hopkins. Lightnin’ Hopkins. Smithsonian Folkways 40019. This nice set captures the Texas blues man in between his period as a recording artist for the black community and the rest of his career as a folk blues performer.

  John Jackson. Blues & Country Dance Tunes From Virginia. Arhoolie 1025. A highly varied selection of tunes by this northern Virginia songster.

  Robert Johnson. The Complete Recordings. Columbia C2K 46222. Forty-one selections by this pivotal figure who recorded these influential recordings in the late 1930s.

  Lead Belly. Lead Belly’s Last Sessions. Smithsonian Folkways 40068. This double compact disc set contains Huddie Leadbetter’s final studio recordings of songs and stories (by Frederic Ramsey and released by Moses Arch) and is but one of many fine recordings by Huddie “Lead Belly” Leadbetter available on this label.

  Mance Lipscomb. Captain, Captain. Arhoolie CD465. Recordings from the 1960s by this talented singer/guitarist, who represents the best of the songsters.

  Martin, Bogan & The Armstrongs. Let’s Give A Party. Flying Fish CD003. Contemporary recordings by a black stringband that toured extensively and recorded several discs in the 1970s, after a decades-long hiatus.

  Bukka White. Sky Songs. Arhoolie CD 323. The Mississippi-born guitarist “pulls” these blues and blues-like songs from the sky, hence the title.

  Sonny Boy Williamson. King Biscuit Time. Arhoolie CD310. Classic small group down-home blues recordings from the early 1950s.

  Various. Angola Prison Worksongs. Arhoolie CD 448. An interesting collection of (mostly) a cappella songs by inmates from this most notorious prison, located in southern Louisiana and recorded in the early 1960s.

  Various. Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia. Smithsonian Folkways 40079. A vital collection that demonstrates the importance of the banjo in African American folk music in the southeastern United States.

  Various. Classic African American Ballads. Smithsonian Folkways SFW40191. From the expected “John Henry” to the more obscure “Luke and Mullen,” compiler Barry Lee Pearson does a nice job in documenting this important subgenre.

  Various. Deep River of Song: Black Appalachia String Bands, Songsters and Hoedowns. Rounder CD 011661182325. This anthology looks at the range of black rural folk music from the hill country of Mississippi up to the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

  Various. Deep River of Song: Black Texicans Balladeers and Songsters of the Texas Frontier. Rounder CD 011661182127. Cowboy songs, American ballads, old-time tunes form the backbone of these recordings, most of which were done in the mid- to late 1930s.

  Various. The Land Where the Blues Began. Rounder CD 682161186122. Recordings from between 1933 and 1959 that feature fife and drums bands, work songs, and blues.

  Various. Alan Lomax: Blues Songbook. Rounder CD 682161186627. A retrospective of the field recordings of blues musicians that began with Lead Belly in 1934 and included the first recordings of Muddy Waters and Fred McDowell.

  Various. Non-Blues Secular Black Music in Virginia. Global Village/BRI-1001. A cross-section of black protest songs, fiddle and banjo tunes, Native American ballads, and country dance instrumentals.

  Various. The Roots of Robert Johnson. Yazoo 1073. A selection of classic Mississippi Delta blues recordings in the 1920s and 1930s.

  Various. Traveling Through the Jungle. Hightone/Testament 2223. A collection of fife and drum band and other related selections recorded in the Mississippi Delta between 1941 and the 1970s.

  Various. Virginia Work Songs. Global Village/BRI 1007. A compilation of work song traditions found across the state, including ship caulking, oyster shucking, track lining, etc.

  SUGGESTED READING

  Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff. Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, Coon Songs, and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Through the lens of contemporary newspapers and other printed sources, the authors investigate musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows in the years before blues and jazz emerged.

  Edward Berlin. Ragtime: A Musical and Cultural History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1980. Of the ragtime studies available, this remains the best concise history.

  Cecelia Conway. African Banjo Echoes in the Appalachian: A Study of Folk Traditions. Knoxv
ille: University of Tennessee Press, 1995. A solid, pioneering look at the role of black American banjo players in North Carolina and Virginia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

  Dena Epstein. Sinful Tunes and Spirituals. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003. The author surveys primary and secondary written sources for information about black folk music prior to Reconstruction in this paperback edition of the 1977 classic.

  David Evans. Big Road Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988. An often fascinating, scholarly study of musical creativity and the transmission of blues in central Mississippi.

  William Ferris. Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Based on his fieldwork in Mississippi in the 1960s and 1970s, Ferris helps lend a sympathetic and insightful voice to these local and often amateur musicians whose life stories and oral histories often make compelling reading.

  Ted Gioia. Work Songs. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. An eclectic and provocative look at the history and development of work songs, which are largely but not entirely an African American phenomenon in the United States.

  Alan Govenar. Lightnin’ Hopkins: His Life and Blues. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press, 2010. Surprisingly, this is the first full-length biography of this important Texas blues-man and it is both very well written and carefully researched.

  Bruce Jackson. Wake Up Dead Man: Afro-American Worksongs From Texas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972. This is an ethnography of the Texas prison system and work songs written in the late 1960s.

  Gerhard Kubik. Africa and the Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. A look at the relationship between (West) African music and the African American blues tradition.

  Kip Lornell and Charles K. Wolfe. The Life and Legend Of Leadbelly. New York: Da Capo Press, 1999. This is a paperback edition of the scholarly biography of perhaps the best-known twentieth-century black folk singer.