Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

  Keppard’s conservatism may sound naïve, but it reflected the suspicion and lack of interest with which the process of recording was regarded before the sales boom of the 1920s. Race was also a constant obstacle. As the leader of a black band, Keppard was affected by the closure in 1917 of the red-light district of New Orleans, known as Storyville, which had previously offered plentiful work to jazz musicians. He was barred from seeking the jobs that were open to the ODJB: fraternity weekends at Ivy League colleges, for example, or a gala dance for the servicemen of the USS Charleston. Racial tension in many American cities mounted as white soldiers returned from Europe to find that their jobs had been ‘stolen’ by African-Americans, and riots ensued from Texas to the nation’s capital in 1919.

  By not transparently offering their audience ‘Negro’ music, the ODJB could be enjoyed for the glorious racket they made. Few who heard their records or watched them perform would have been able to distinguish which elements of their sound were improvised, and which were carefully arranged in advance. Jazz music was, to its earliest white adherents, wild, unpredictable and cacophonous. The ODJB’s competitors, and there were plenty of college bands keen to follow their example, won their reputations by using kitchen utensils as percussion instruments and adopting madcap costumes. First to win a national audience were Earl Fuller’s Famous Jazz Band, whose ‘Slippery Hank’ (1917) reproduced all the external pizzazz of the ODJB, without a hint of their authentically spontaneous ‘jazz’ moments. There was a suspicion that unless performers consciously escalated their novelty appeal, their audience would soon tire of them. One jaded observer noted in 1919, ‘As the popularity of the dance wanes30, the costumes and the music grow louder. A jazz party I attended last night was a picturesque approach to Bedlam. One of the instrumentalists had a weird whistling instrument between his lips, which I was told was Hawaiian; another squeezed a motor hooter.’ Such antics symbolised ‘jazz’ to a public who had no means of comprehending the origins of the music.

  Many of the earliest jazz recordings were based soundly on existing rag tunes, although the transition from one melodic element to the next was often hidden beneath the crash and clamour of drums and horns. Others, in a style that became especially identified with New Orleans, seemed to set up an interlocking pattern of instrumental motifs (riffs, as they would soon be known) and then repeat them with rampant displays of energy. Few observers noticed that a proportion of jazz excursions now took place within a structure which would become one of the most familiar song formats of the entire century: the twelve-bar blues.

  The year 1923 has given us31 – or, more politely, some of us – ‘the Blues’, which possess undoubtedly an interesting, albeit a monotonous, new rhythm … The majority of those whom I have seen dancing it appear to imagine that it is a species of ‘slow-motion’ foxtrot, which my musical ear, such as it is, tells me it cannot be.

  British critic Harry Melville, 1924

  Blues records long ago32 ceased to be issued.

  Gramophone magazine, 1925

  As early as 1904, a ragtime song called ‘One O’ Them Things’ opened not with a four-bar motif, as convention demanded, but with what we would now recognise as a blues chorus of twelve bars. Three years later, the ethnographer Howard Odum carried his explorations of America’s ‘natural’ music into Lafayette County, Mississippi. There, as the blues historian Marybeth Hamilton recounted, ‘he found something curious33: songs made up of a single line, repeated two or three times … [musicians] adapted their songs to suit their mood, and they could stretch them out for what seemed like hours, fusing lines from different tunes to take them straight from one song to another, and sliding a knife or bone along the guitar strings to make the instrument “talk” in response’. So perturbed was Odum by the strangeness of what he heard – described by its creators sometimes as ‘rag times’, sometimes as ‘knife songs’ in honour of what we would now recognise as the bottleneck guitar technique, sometimes as ‘coon songs’ – that he devoted little time to analysing their contents, and eventually destroyed the cylinder recordings he had made, rather than preserving their raw and unsettling contents for posterity. Had those aural documents survived, subsequent scholars of the blues might have lost the pleasure of conjuring up their own creation myths.

  To prove that authenticity is at best a precarious concept when it comes to popular music, the process of translating origins into legends began with the man who has passed into history as the Father or Originator of the Blues. It is W. C. Handy, the son of a comparatively well-to-do African-American preacher, whose statue stands by Beale Street in Memphis, and whose face appeared on a US postage stamp in 1969. It was his name that appeared on the 1912 sheet music for ‘Dallas Blues’, ‘Baby Seals Blues’ and ‘The Memphis Blues’ (also known as ‘Mr Crump’); and he who was credited as the sole author of one of the most revisited tunes of the twentieth century, ‘St Louis Blues’.

  Handy was no more the originator of the blues than were Adam and Eve the parents of all mankind. But a musical tradition so glorious demands a father figure, and Handy fitted the bill. The leader of a small dance band, he struggled for tips at a saloon in Cleveland, Mississippi, watching in amazement as a local trio out-earned him ten to one by playing ‘one of those over-and-over strains34’. In the money, as a good American capitalist, Handy ‘saw the beauty of primitive music … That night a composer was born, an American composer.’ That was one strand of Handy’s chosen myth. The other found him on a railroad platform in Tutwiler, Mississippi, where he heard an itinerant guitar player perform ‘the weirdest music I had ever heard35’ – a groaning lament made up of short verses of just three lines, the first and second identical. By his account, he stored away this memory until he was commissioned to write a campaign song for a Memphis mayoral candidate in 1909. The result was ‘The Memphis Blues’, which won a nationwide audience in 1914 via rag-inspired recordings by both Prince’s Orchestra and the Victor Military Band. Collins and Harlan, always open to novelties from the black community, recorded a vocal rendition the following year.

  ‘The Memphis Blues’ was, according to Handy, ‘A Southern Rag’. Of ‘St Louis Blues’, first publicised as an instrumental by Prince’s Orchestra, he wrote: ‘My aim would be to combine36 ragtime syncopation with a real melody in the spiritual tradition.’ That ‘tradition’ was something he acknowledged as his inspiration, stating quite unashamedly that each of his compositions was based upon a strain or a melody that he had retrieved from his past. There was no hint that he imagined himself founding a musical genre; nor, despite the pathetic fallacy that blues equated with sadness, did he see himself as a prince of melancholy. Quite the opposite: of an early performance of ‘St Louis Blues’, he wrote ‘The dancers seemed electrified37. Something within them came suddenly to life. An instinct that wanted so much to live, to fling its arms and to spread joy, took them by their heels.’

  For the generation who walked backwards through musical history, as they explored the roots of the 1960s rock guitarists, the blues was a signifier of a primal desolation, its origins the cry of a people enslaved and belittled in their homeland. The original audience for the blues, through the ‘classic’ era of the 1920s and beyond, would not have recognised this description; they would probably have laughed, indeed, at how confused the white man could become. In the words of blues historian Albert Murray, ‘The blues as such are synonymous38 with low spirits. Blues music is not. With all its so-called blue notes and overtones of sadness, blues music of its very nature and function is nothing if not a diversion. With all its preoccupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment. Not only is its express purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.’

  Two words leap out of that description as the antithesis to the mythic vision of the blues:
‘contrived’, and ‘entertainment’. The blues, from its gestation, was intended as a commercial music – was fashioned that way, indeed, by W. C. Handy himself. No doubt the true originators of its varied sounds and styles would have a richer, broader tale to relate, but the notion of the blues as the sole property of the haunted troubadour, picking his ragged guitar and keening his misery across the Deep South, is a romantic fiction.

  Other misconceptions have long since been abandoned: that all blues songs are based on the twelve-bar structure which both scared and mystified Howard Odum; and that the archetypal blues singer is a black man with an acoustic guitar. There are musicological ways of understanding and identifying the blues (those ‘blue’, or sometimes ‘worried’, notes, the flattened third and the flattened fifth); and it is certainly true that a large proportion of songs by blues performers follow the twelve-bar grid (allowing for the idiosyncratic timekeeping of such mavericks as John Lee Hooker). But as a quick study of ‘St Louis Blues’ demonstrates, that reassuringly simple pattern is far from being obligatory.

  Neither is the caricature of an African-American guitarist meeting the Devil at a Mississippi crossroads remotely definitive. The commercial blues of the 1920s – later designated the ‘classic blues’, as if to segregate it from what followed – was sung almost entirely by women: by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, pre-eminently, but first by the unrelated Mamie Smith. Like Handy, they also did not believe that they were occupying either a blues ghetto or a future pantheon. Many of them, such as Mamie Smith, came out of the vaudeville tradition, most likely the TOBA variety circuit, the initials standing for Theatre Owners Booking Association, which provided acts for a discretely African-American network of venues (although some artists preferred to believe that TOBA actually meant ‘tough on black asses’). Others were associated with jazz bands, and it was jazz musicians who provided the accompaniment on the vast majority of ‘classic blues’ recordings in the 1920s and beyond. Ask Bessie Smith what she was, and after she’d slapped your face for your cheek and ignorance, she’d have said contemptuously: ‘I’m a jazz singer.’ She and her counterparts would not have wished to be remembered solely for their recordings, which (particularly in the early 1920s) were arranged to reflect the technical limitations of the process. As Bessie’s contemporary Lizzie Miles recalled in 1957, ‘When singing with raucous bands39, I sound like a fish peddler, but that is not true New Orleans music. New Orleans jazz was musical. It had all kinds of pretty fill-ins and figures, beautiful tones and all that. You should have heard the violins … the sweetness of those early jazz violins.’ Her repertoire stretched from what we’d recognise today as the blues to songs in Creole French, though the latter were never represented in her recordings.

  There is one final complication to the accepted story of the blues. Mamie Smith, first of the black ‘classic’ singers to record, entered the studio for the first time in February 1920, at the age of 36; and then again in August, emerging with ‘Crazy Blues’, which sold 75,000 copies in its first month, and kept selling. But Mamie, or indeed any of the other female Smiths who littered the 1920s blues market, did not make the first vocal blues records. Just as the ODJB (or Collins and Harlan, depending on your definitions) were responsible for launching jazz on record, the first blues singers preserved for posterity were also white.

  In August 1916, when most of her contemporaries were capitalising on the American public’s passing infatuation with songs about Hawaii, a 20-year-old vaudeville singer named Marion Harris entered Victor’s recording establishment in New York. ‘I Ain’t Got Nobody Much’ became the ‘plug’ side of her debut recording, and by February 1917 it was one of the biggest-selling discs in America, competing alongside the latest Broadway show tunes. It was not a twelve-bar blues tune, but it was identical in structure and mood to many of the songs which would be accounted as ‘classic blues’. Moreover, Harris slurred her words and held back her phrasing in a manner she can only have learned from watching African-American performers, though she never lapsed for a moment into caricature or comic mimicry. This was as ‘authentic’ a piece of blues as Elvis Presley performing ‘That’s All Right’, or Cream, Led Zeppelin or the Rolling Stones reviving the Robert Johnson songbook, and it predated the ODJB’s first ‘jazz’ record by several months.

  Nor was Marion Harris alone in her unknowing blues crusade, which would spawn such late 1910s hits as ‘Everyone’s Crazy ’Bout the Doggone Blues’ and ‘Take Me to the Land of Jazz’ (Memphis, as it happens), before she reached her pinnacle with a desolate rendition of ‘St Louis Blues’ in 1920. Billy Murray, whose prolific recording career saw him tackle rags, sentimental ballads, a car song (‘In My Merry Oldsmobile’) which predated Chuck Berry’s by exactly half a century, comic duets, Hawaiian hula novelties and the most familiar version of the baseball anthem ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game’, reflected the miseries of the Wartime Prohibition Act with 1919’s ‘The Alcoholic Blues’ – meant for laughs, of course, but a classic blues conception nonetheless. Al Bernard not only attempted ‘St Louis Blues’ a full year before Marion Harris, but belied his Caucasian complexion by singing ‘I’m black as a berry, and for me the gals all fall’ on his 1919 hit, ‘Nigger Blues’. Bernard’s vocals betrayed none of Harris’s familiarity with the vocal hallmarks of the genre, but his adventures into the mildly exotic did yield the first known composition to bear the title, ‘Shake, Rattle and Roll’. And then there was Nora Bayes, whose ‘Regretful Blues’ of 1918 may have misrepresented the genre, but who redeemed herself (bar her ‘blackface’ monologue) with 1920’s ‘Prohibition Blues’.

  Small wonder that black artists did not choose to classify themselves as ‘blues’ singers alone, when the style could so easily be slipped over the vaudeville costumes of their white counterparts. Indeed, it was only the persistence of black songwriter Perry Bradford that enabled the African-American ‘classic blues’ tradition to be born. He had presented his songs to the Okeh Records company, which suggested that they should be given to the cyclonic Russian-born vaudeville star, Sophie Tucker. Instead, Bradford put forward Mamie Smith, having persuaded jazz bandleader George Morrison to lend him some musicians. By Morrison’s account, Mamie was a shabby dresser in a ramshackle, fetid house, so he gave her $150 (far more than she would have earned from the recording session) and ‘I dressed her from the inside out40.’ Once she was established as a star, Mamie Smith affected an altogether more dazzling display, as her near-contemporary Victoria Spivey recalled: ‘Miss Smith walked on that stage41 and I could not breathe for a minute. She threw those big sparkling eyes on us with that lovely smile showing those pearly teeth with a diamond the size of one of her teeth. Then I looked at her dress. Nothing but sequins and rhinestones, plus a velvet cape with fur on it. We all went wild. And then she sang – she tore the house apart. Between numbers while the band was playing she would make a complete change in about a minute, and was back in record time for her next selection. Her full voice filled the entire auditorium without the mikes like we use today. That was singing the blues!’

  After Mamie Smith established that there was money to be made from black women and the blues, the music industry responded as it did when every other new fad or gimmick found an audience: it soaked the market with her peers, competitors and imitators. There were literally dozens of female blues singers making records in the 1920s, until the Depression of 1929 squeezed the trade almost out of existence. The most famous of them, then and now, was Bessie Smith.fn2 She was, in Columbia Records’ words, ‘the best loved of all the Race’s42 great blues singers’ – ‘the Race’ evoking a sense of robust identity amongst those who were accustomed to being dubbed ‘Negroes’ or worse. Bessie Smith and her peers were promoted to the African-American audience, who constituted the vast majority of her buyers, as someone who could understand their lives and voice their emotions, perhaps even take on their sadness as her own. If spiritual music offered consolation, blues represented a defiant refusal to be beaten. ‘You’ll feel
better43’, Okeh boasted of Margaret Johnson, ‘because no one could be so sad and blue as Margaret.’ The same label offered salvation in the form of Victoria Spivey’s voice: ‘Wanna be happy44? Then buy our Blues!’ The song in question was ‘TB Blues’, a chilling account of an illness which was devastating the African-American community during the 1920s.

  As a marketing device, ‘blues’ envisaged a powerfully voiced black woman supported by a jazz band: a style of singing, and also a mood, which would combine to form a musical genre. Bessie, Mamie, Clara and Trixie Smith, Ma Rainey, Johnson, Spivey and the rest were assumed to appeal to a predominantly female audience of ‘the Race’: when Bessie Smith sang ‘Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen’, she provoked recognition on both ethnic and gender grounds. But the great blues-women of the 1920s were also gathering a secret audience of white devotees, of whom the most eloquent was perhaps the American novelist Carl Van Vechten. In 1926, the same year he published an immensely sympathetic novel about black life in Harlem with an ill-fated title, Nigger Heaven, Van Vechten painted a portrait of Columbia Records’ ‘World’s Champion Moaner’, which was so vivid that it bordered upon the garish: ‘Clara Smith’s tones45 uncannily take on the colour of the saxophone; again of the clarinet. Her voice is powerful or melancholy, by turns. It tears the blood from one’s heart. One learns from her that the Negro’s cry to a cruel cupid is as moving and elemental as his cry to God, as expressed in the spirituals.’