Throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, the blues matured and became increasingly popular in the black community, both rural and urban. Though white musicians, especially down South, knew about the blues and borrowed ideas from the music, the blues didn’t truly penetrate white music culture until later, when artists such as Jimmie Rodgers incorporated blues into their hillbilly sound.
The turning point for the blues occurred in 1920. Although the phonograph had been around since the late 1870s—the Edison Speaking Phonograph Company had been established by Thomas Edison in New York in 1878, the same year that Emile Berliner patented his “gramophone”—it wasn’t until the turn of the century that entrepreneurs figured out a successful way to market prerecorded music. Columbia Records began selling discs in 1900; three years later the Victor company got into the business. From the outset these companies and others targeted white consumers.
In 1920 a black composer, Perry Bradford, convinced OKeh Records to record a song he had written, “Crazy Blues,” with the singer Mamie Smith, an African-American. Prior to 1920, few in the fledgling recording business thought blacks would buy records. Too poor, they reckoned; even if they did have the money, no one knew whether or not they would spend it on music for the home. Bradford’s idea paid off—handsomely. “Crazy Blues” was reputed to have sold nearly seventy-five thousand copies in the first month of its release. Other companies noticed, and, almost overnight, the “race” record industry was born, based on the success of the first blues record.
“Crazy Blues” wasn’t a pure blues record by today’s standards. It did, though, contain enough blues strains to warrant calling it a blues record. Mamie Smith’s background was vaudeville and cabaret. Based on the success of Smith and “Crazy Blues,” the blues soared in popularity. Other recording companies quickly signed black female singers to make blues records; most of the time the women had backgrounds similar to Smith’s. It wasn’t until a young, Chattanooga-born woman arrived on the scene in 1923 that the blues found its first authentic star. Her name was Bessie Smith.
The first artist to make a blues recording, Mamie Smith cut “Crazy Blues” after its composer, Perry Bradford, got the green light from OKeh Records.
Smith, no relation to Mamie, didn’t just sing the blues—she made you believe the music was the blood running through her veins. A tall, hefty woman, she delivered full-bodied stories of despair and vivid lyrical descriptions of a world where misery was no stranger to the downtrodden. Sung with a voice as big as she was, her blues was profound, and Bessie acquired the title Empress of the Blues. Without question, she was the best and most influential female blues artist of the 1920s, a decade that would become known as the “classic blues era.” Just about every blues woman who followed her, and many jazz and gospel singers, too, was touched by her emotional intensity and consuming delivery.
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey would make music history in the 1920s as well. While the younger Bessie was crowned the blues empress, Rainey was called the Mother of the Blues by her record company (and later also by music historians). Rainey’s blues was raw, earthy, very authentic—a true link to the blues singers, men and women who pioneered the music, and those, like Bessie Smith, who would make blues records and become blues stars in the twenties.
Ma Rainey was backed by the Georgia Band, led by “Georgia Tom” Dorsey (third from left).
Many blues historians figured that Rainey was Smith’s mentor and that everything Ma knew about the blues she taught to Bessie. More recent accounts of the Rainey-Smith connection describe it as “adversarial,” or at least highly competitive. Whatever the case, Smith probably learned some things about singing the blues from Rainey when they toured together in 1912 with the Moses Stokes Company. Rainey was just too convincing a blues singer to ignore. But what made Smith the bigger-selling (and, ultimately, the more accomplished) artist was her range and versatility. Smith also endeared herself to young women, black and white, with her self-assuredness. When she sang “ ‘Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do,” with the lyrics “If I go to church on Sunday/Then just shimmy down on Monday/’Tain’t nobody’s business if I do …”
Smith began her recording career in 1923, the same year Rainey began hers. By this time virtually all of the recording companies of the day were on to “race” records, and talent scouts scampered about looking for black women who could sing the blues. They found none with Smith’s pedigree, but singers like Alberta Hunter, Ida Cox, and Clara Smith (no relation to either Mamie or Bessie), among others, made more than competent blues records. Many of these women didn’t have Smith’s natural talent or the hardened blues edge that Rainey did. Most came from vaudeville and cabaret backgrounds and focused on the blues when it meant better-paying performances and the chance to record.
Bessie Smith recorded for Columbia for ten years, making more than 160 records, often with the likes of first-rate jazzmen such as Louis Armstrong, saxophonist Coleman Hawkins, pianists James P. Johnson and Fletcher Henderson, and clarinetist Buster Bailey. Just about all the records made by classic blueswomen in the 1920s were made with jazz musicians. No musician of note back then considered himself only a “blues” artist. This was the Jazz Age, after all, and the boundaries that historians would use later on to separate blues from jazz didn’t exist in the 1920s. Nightclubs in black sections of northern cities like New York’s Harlem featured jazz bands and blues singers on the same bill. Both blacks and whites listened to it, danced to it, and made it a vital part of the cultural story of the 1920s.
If the classic blues sound was almost exclusively female driven and urban, the country-blues sound that existed at the same time was male dominated and rural. Country-blues artists often performed solo on a street corner. Some of the earliest country-blues recordings occurred after record company talent scouts traveled south to find new sounds. Companies such as OKeh, Paramount, Gennett, and Vocalion all sent scouts to find artists to record on portable equipment set up in hotel rooms, empty warehouses, or wherever there was enough room and quiet to make the recordings. Record companies also recorded country-blues artists in New York, Chicago, and Grafton, Wisconsin, where recording studios existed. Country-blues musicians unaware of this new business of recording would eagerly record and sign away rights for a few dollars. The chance to hear themselves on a Victrola and earn quick money proved irresistible.
Artists such as Papa Charlie Jackson and Daddy Stovepipe were among the handful of male country artists to record in the early 1920s. But it wasn’t until two sightless street musicians—Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake—recorded their songs that country blues made its mark commercially. Though country blues in the 1920s seemed richest in the Mississippi Delta (where, later in the decade, nearly a dozen seminal artists would make some of the most powerful country blues in the pre-World War II period), neither Jefferson nor Blake resided there.
Bessie Smith personified the blues diva.
Blind Blake was one of the blues’ most spectacular guitar players.
Jefferson was a Texas singer/guitar player whose blues repertoire also included robust amounts of hymns and folk standards, plus dance, rag, and pop songs of the day. Despite his handicap, Jefferson’s versatility kept him traveling extensively throughout the South, playing country jukes and small towns, as well as cities. When Paramount began recording him in 1925, Jefferson was a seasoned entertainer and musician who had perfected a blues style culled from more than a decade of playing for tips on street corners.
A number of Jefferson recordings, including “Match Box Blues,” “Black Snake Moan,” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” demonstrate Jefferson’s talent for breaking the rhythm dramatically, answering his own vocals with fingerpicked flourishes. His wide use of improvisational twists and turns made his music interesting and unconventional, while his song lyrics, like those of so many other country-bluesmen of his time, centered on hard times, with double entendres spicing things up. Jefferson’s popularity made him the
best-selling country-blues artist of the 1920s. By the time of his sudden death in Chicago in 1929, he had been traveling with a chauffeur and living more lavishly than just about any other country-blues artist of the time. With a catalogue of more than eighty songs, Jefferson took full advantage of a recording career that lasted only a few years.
Arthur “Blind” Blake came out of the Southeast and began his recording career in 1926. Little is known of his personal life, but musically his blues style told an entirely different story than Jefferson’s, suggesting that country blues in general had matured to such a point by the mid-1920s that different geographic regions yielded different blues styles, all of which contributed to a growing blues catalogue.
An exceptional guitarist, Blind Blake’s syncopated blues numbers featured some of the most elaborate fingerpicking of the period. Blake, as well as other first-generation southeastern blues guitarists, also infused liberal amounts of ragtime-influenced elements into his music, creating a bouncy and bright sound. Lyrically, Blake mixed his themes. In some songs, particularly “Diddie Wa Diddie,” “Skeedle Loo Doo Blues,” and “Come On Boys, Let’s Do That Messin’ Around,” Blake lightened things up with the kind of lyrics that would keep a party going and attract sizable tips. However, in other songs, Blake bit down hard on police brutality (“Police Dog Blues”), lynchings (“Rope Stretching Blues”), and black despair (“Bad Feeling Blues”).
Because he had thin vocals, Blind Blake’s guitar was his primary voice. Blake recorded through most of 1932, with some eighty titles to his credit, many of which remain rag-guitar masterpieces, prompting a whole generation of East Coast blues musicians to be influenced by his style.
The Mississippi Delta’s closest contender for the commercial success garnered by Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake came from Charley Patton. With a gruff, hoarse voice (imagine Tom Waits singing country blues) and an equally rugged guitar style, Patton was the single most influential early Delta bluesman. Distinguished blues writer Robert Palmer put Patton “among the most important musicians twentieth-century America has produced.”
In addition to creating a brand of blues featuring complex rhythms, accented by percussive taps on his guitar, elongated melodies, and a slide-guitar technique that cut a path virtually every other Delta bluesmen had to acknowledge, Patton was also a convincing songwriter, often including in his songs astute social commentary. “Mississippi Boll Weevil Blues” told of the plague of insects that destroyed many Mississippi farms in the early 1900s. Both part one and part two of “High Water Everywhere” describe the great Mississippi River flood of 1927. “Dry Well Blues” is about a Mississippi drought; “Moon Going Down” told of the destruction by fire of a Clarksdale mill. Patton also sang of personal experiences. When he was arrested in the town of Belzoni, he gave his side in “High Sheriff Blues” and “Tom Rushen Blues.” He contemplated leaving Mississippi in “Going to Move to Alabama.”
Early recordings by Patton spelled his first name both as Charley and Charlie; artist Robert Crumb illustrated this anthology of Patton recordings released by Yazoo in 1991.
Charley Patton also lived the life that mythologized the idea of a bluesman. He was a heavy drinker, a carouser, a womanizer, a brawler, once getting his throat slashed in a fight. Mainly Patton clowned around, never giving much thought to getting serious with things other than entertaining people. Living large with little, Patton was known to tear up a juke with performances on guitar that included playing the instrument behind his head or while laying on the floor, or throwing his instrument up in the air, catching it, and resuming playing, never missing a beat.
Despite his popularity in the Delta, Patton didn’t get the chance to record until 1929, when Paramount took the suggestion of talent scout H.C. Speir to cut some sides with the Delta bluesman. Despite Patton’s huge place in early blues history, his record sales never approached those of Jefferson’s or Blake’s. One reason might have been that Pattoris sandpaper voice and unique guitar style didn’t translate as well on record as they did in the juke joint. Or it might have been that Paramount just got to Patton too late.
Like many things in America, the race-record industry came crashing down in late 1929, when the nation said goodbye to prosperity and hello to economic calamity. The Depression killed the Jazz Age and with it the notion that life was one big party. Female blues singers who had become materially comfortable, wearing fancy clothes and acting every part the diva, were soon back living the blues, not just singing them. Nightclubs closed. Theaters featuring revues and vaudeville-styled acts now showed Hollywood films. Performance opportunities disappeared, and recording sessions were scarce. Record sales, even among African-Americans, one of the most loyal music-consumer groups, dropped steadily. There was never any question whether or not the blues would survive. The music, after all, had always dealt with themes of despair and deprivation. It was the most Depression-proof music America had. What was in question was whether the business of the blues would make it through the earliest, most damaging years of the 1930s.
It did, but barely. The classic blues era effectively ended in 1929, although major blues performers such as Bessie Smith continued on. Smith recorded the song “Nobody Knows You When You’re Down and Out” that year, a personal and national reflection of the mood that suddenly covered America. Two years later, Columbia Records ended its nearly decade-long association with Smith, although she did record one more time, in 1933, thanks to the persistence of a young talent scout named John Hammond.
Bessie Smith died in a car crash in Mississippi in 1937. Ma Rainey passed on in 1939. Many of the other classic female blues singers resorted to singing in southern tent shows or small clubs up North, or just faded away as demand for their brand of the blues dried up. America had changed, and so, therefore, must its music. The romping sounds of Dixieland, or Traditional Jazz, as twenties jazz would become known, had evolved into swing and big-band dance music. Blues gave up its “classic” sound, ending the only time the musical form would ever be dominated by women. Down South, country blues remained popular, but many artists lost the chance to record because field trips diminished and record companies were less eager to invest in race recordings. Up North, transplanted bluesmen (and a few women, particularly one known as Memphis Minnie) settled in cities like Chicago and began performing together in combos, which would sow the seeds for the electric-blues-band revolution of the 1950s.
One of the few record companies that had managed to survive the economic crash and that continued to record blues artists in the 1930s was Bluebird, a subsidiary of the Victor label. Producer and talent scout Lester Melrose made it the most significant blues record label in the 1930s. Based in Chicago, Melrose and Bluebird favored artists who came out of country blues but who had the vision to alter their sound to make it more urban and therefore more attractive to black Americans living in northern cities like Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Gary, Indiana. These African-Americans, many of whom had come north in the teens and 1920s looking for better economic opportunities, had been introduced to singers and performers who favored thicker, jazzier musical accompaniment in the form of drums and piano. To them, the sound seemed hotter and more exciting than the sound generated by a singer and a single acoustic guitar, the trademark accompaniment of country blues. Transplanted southern black musicians like Big Bill Broonzy easily made the transition from country to city and ended up some of the era’s most important recording artists.
Broonzy was born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas; he served in the army during World War I, making him more aware of life outside the South and making it more difficult for him to return home to the cotton fields and live as a black sharecropper. In 1920, Broonzy moved north, settling in Chicago, where he set aside his original instrument, the fiddle, and picked up a guitar, learning much by hanging around with blues old-timer Papa Charlie Jackson. Broonzy also learned from a bigger blues stalwart, Tampa Red, whose wife rented rooms in Chicago, mostly to young musicians jus
t off the train from Memphis or Mississippi. Tampa Red, whose real name was Hudson Whittaker, first recorded in 1928, with Paramount and then Vocalion. Overnight, Red grew famous for a duet he had recorded with Georgia Tom Dorsey called “It’s Tight Like That.” The risque number was a big seller, not only because of its bawdy lyrics but also because of Red’s hot guitar licks. One of the seminal songs of the period, it ushered in a blues trend called “hokum” that featured loose rhythms and cleverly penned, ribald lyrics. Red even formed a combo called Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band, which artfully defined the hokum style, after his partner, Georgia Tom Dorsey, moved from secular to sacred music. Dorsey found God after the success of “It’s Tight Like That” and used his musical genius to help create the modern gospel sound. A pianist, songwriter, and shrewd businessman, Dorsey formed the Thomas A. Dorsey Gospel Songs Music Publishing Company, writing hundreds of gospel tunes, including the monumental “Precious Lord.” Over time, Dorsey became known as the Father of Gospel Music, while his old blues partner, Tampa Red, was dubbed the Guitar Wizard.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 3