If Big Bill Broonzy learned the rudiments of the blues from Papa Charlie Jackson, he picked up the music’s subtleties from Tampa Red. Broonzy jumped into the hokum craze, recording in 1930 with the Famous Hokum Boys, who cut blues party songs rich with rag-flavored strains and jumpy rhythms.
Broonzy recorded right through the Depression years in a variety of settings: solo, duet, combo. He was, perhaps, the most versatile blues artist of the period and one of its best-selling recording artists. Folk blues, country blues, hokum, prototype urban blues—they were all part of his repertoire. With Broonzy, Tampa Red, Memphis Minnie, guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, and piano player Leroy Carr, the thirties urban-blues sound was rich and lively.
Down South, despite the Depression, country blues served its audience equally well. Memphis, with Beale Street as its nerve center, contained the region’s blues heartbeat. Although Memphis lacked its own record company, field recordings were still occasionally done there for the northern record companies, attracting blues musicians harboring the hope of making records like the ones heard on Victrolas in black communities throughout the South,
The Memphis Jug Band, featuring Will Shade
Located on the eastern bank of the Mississippi River and at the northern edge of the Mississippi Delta, just over the Mississippi-Tennessee state line, Memphis became the mid-South’s cotton center in the post-Civil War years. Cotton commerce kept the city busy and flowing with money. A large black population was already in place by the turn of the century, and with Beale Street cooking on Saturday nights, it was no wonder blues musicians flocked to Memphis from the neighboring Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas and from western Tennessee.
Ever since the mid-1920s, when Will Shade’s group, the Memphis Jug Band, recorded for the blues talent scout Ralph Peer in Memphis, part of the city’s blues scene consisted of jug bands, informal groups of musicians, some of which played homemade instruments like the washtub bass and the whiskey jug. Jug bands also featured banjo, harmonica, and fiddle players mixed with, say, a couple of guitarists, and maybe a kazoo player.
Members came and went. Formalized structure was an anathema to jug bands. Playing hokum and hokum-styled blues with a little of this and some of that thrown in for good measure, jug bands were as popular at parties as they were on street corners, and by the mid-1930s they had become an essential part of the Memphis blues scene. Although other cities down South had their own jug bands, no jug-band scene was ever as lively or as good as the one in Memphis. Other popular Memphis-based jug bands that made records included the Beale Street Sheiks and Cannon’s Jug Stampers, with Gus Cannon on banjo.
Memphis also had its share of more traditional blues artists, solo singer/guitarists who wandered the region, worked the corners and alleyways of Beale Street and played parks and parties around town. If they hadn’t been born in Memphis, chances are such blues musicians came from the Mississippi and Arkansas Deltas or rural Tennessee towns. Brownsville, Tennessee, for instance, was the home of bluesmen Sleepy John Estes, Hammie Nixon, and Yank Rachell. Some of these places had small blues scenes of their own, but there was greater opportunity in Memphis, and most blues artists at least passed through the city at one time or another.
Memphis might have been the South’s urban center, but no region possessed the richness or the number of major blues figures of the Mississippi Delta. From the earliest blues origins in the late nineteenth century through the Depression years and even beyond, the Delta was, in a word, bluesland. The region turned out one great blues musician after another mainly because the blues was an indelible part of black life and owned a significant part of its cultural landscape.
Living and working conditions were harsh in Mississippi, giving blues songsters plenty to write about. Music was a real escape; it took black people away from the drudgery of fieldwork, the poverty of their homes, and prejudice that greeted them practically every time they came in contact with a white man or woman. The juke joint, where blues could be heard either blaring out of a Victrola or played live in the corner of the room, became a black oasis, a place where your guard could be let down, your soul bared, and your feelings of despair lost in a haze of music, kinship, and whiskey.
Thus, the surroundings were indeed right for the blues to flourish in the Mississippi Delta, and they did just that. Charley Patton died in 1934, but he was just one of a number of Delta bluesmen who had perfected a blues style and gotten it onto record before the Depression, or just as it hit. Son House, Tommy Johnson, Tommy McClennan, Skip James, and Mississippi John Hurt, all major Delta blues stylists, unveiled the rich diversity of Delta blues with their late 1920s and early 1930s recordings.
If there was an equal to Patton’s blues pedigree, it came from House. He knew Patton, shared a mutual friend in blues guitarist Willie Brown, traveled to Grafton, Wisconsin, in 1930 to record for Paramount Records with them, and worked many of the same Mississippi juke joints and fish fries. Like a few other blues artists from the period, House had always been torn between God’s music and the devil’s, as blues was often called, even in the black community. The saints and sinners that did battle in House’s soul produced some of the most riveting blues of the period. House played guitar with a furious intensity, as if his life depended on it, and he sang with equal conviction. With Son House, the blues possessed an emotional intensity that was not easily replicated.
Skip James owned a similar story. Born into a religious family in Bentonia, Mississippi, James learned to play piano before he picked up the guitar. The blues came easy to James, and in 1930 he was discovered by H.C. Speir, who sent James to Grafton to record on the heels of House, Patton, and Brown. James’ blues sound was like no other. With a falsetto that was at once mysterious, detached, spooky even, James also sang about the inherent conflict between good and evil. Demons and fallen angels floated through James’ songs, as did Jesus. You could feel the torment that James struggled with in his music. One moment he sings “Be Ready When He Comes” or “Jesus Is a Mighty Good Leader,” while in another he describes how he’d “rather be the devil than to be that woman’s man.” Add to all this a compelling and original guitar technique, with its lonely notes, finger-picked and eerie minor chords—quite different than the slashing Delta style of Charley Patton and Son House—and you have in Skip James one of the most artistically significant bluesmen of the period.
There were many other singer/guitarists whose work was critical to the development of Mississippi Delta blues in the late 1920s and 1930s, including Bukka White and Big Joe Williams. Their blues, in addition to the music made by Texas bluesmen such as Blind Willie Johnson, Texas Alexander, and Lead Belly, and those musicians playing blues on the East Coast, following the path cut by Blind Blake—Barbecue Bob, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Boy Fuller—made this the most creatively fruitful period for country blues.
Despite the blues brilliance that came from these artists, none of them achieved the mark or the place in blues history that a skinny singer/guitarist with extraordinarily large hands did. Robert Johnson cut fewer than thirty songs in a recording career composed of just two sessions in two years. Nonetheless, Johnson became the single most important artist of the country-blues period and one of the most important blues artists of all time, although none of this came to fruition during Johnson’s lifetime. In his biography, fact and fiction are blurred, and wrapped around his legacy are many of the myths and themes that helped give the blues its colorful story.
“STONES IN MY PASSWAY”
By Robert Johnson
I got stones in my passway
And my road seem dark as night
I got stones in my passway
And my road seem dark as night
I have pains in my heart
They have taken my appetite.
I have a bird to whistle
And I have a bird to sing
Have a bird to whistle
And I have a bird to sing
I got a woman that I’m lovin’
My enemies have betrayed me
Have overtaken poor Bob at last
My enemies have betrayed me
Have overtaken poor Bob at last
And there’s one thing certain
They have stones all in my pass.
Now you tryin’ to take my life
And all my lovin’ too
You laid a passway for me
Now what are you trying to do
I’m cryin’ please
Please let us be friends
And when you hear me howlin’ in my passway, rider
Please open your door and let me in.
I got three legs to truck on
Boys please don’t block my road
I got three legs to truck on
Boys please don’t block my road
I’ve been feelin’ ashamed ‘bout my rider
Babe I’m booked and I got to go.
Johnson, it was believed by some, got his guitar prowess by selling his soul to the devil at a Mississippi Delta crossroads at midnight. More likely, what happened was that Johnson learned by watching Son House and other early Delta bluesmen, by listening to records, and by practicing with a rare fervor that made him an amazing guitarist—seemingly overnight. Johnson didn’t develop a new country-blues style; instead, he absorbed most everything he heard, blending styles, picking up nuances, remembering lyrics and song themes—in general, synthesizing almost everything consequential about the blues up to that point. In that way, Johnson created the ultimate country-blues style.
Johnson was born in Mississippi in 1911, making him just old enough in the late twenties to take in the sounds and styles of the great Delta bluesmen who played the dances, socials, house parties, and juke joints all around him. He must have had access to a Victrola because strains of Leroy Carr and other non-Delta bluesmen are woven into Johnson’s blues brand, something he could have only learned from their recordings. From Skip James and Tommy Johnson (no relation), he learned to depict in his lyrics the fight against darkness and light, making his music more intriguing. Some of Johnson’s best songs—”Me and the Devil Blues,” “Cross Road Blues,” “Hellhound on My Trail”—detail this never-ending tug-of-war. He also toyed with black hoodoo culture, of which the crossroads, the place where devilish deals were made, figured prominently.
Johnson’s voice wasn’t pretty or weathered; rather, it was whiny, but in a profound way. It ached, it reached out for comfort, it was dark and lonely, it could stop you in your tracks. But Johnson’s guitar playing was even more stunning. No one, not back then, nor today, has been able to fully reproduce Johnson’s gift to phrase guitar notes and chords so that they answered oh-so-artfully the lyrics he sang. The size of his hands may have had something to do with the way he played. Listening to Johnson you often swear two guitarists are playing, not one. His long fingers reached for notes other guitarists could only dream of, while his penchant for slide guitar and “walking” bass riffs gave his style a remarkably rich language of notes, tones, and sounds. No wonder people thought he made a deal with the devil.
Precious little is known about Johnson’s life; only two photos of him exist. He was born illegitimate, married young, lost his wife during childbirth, traveled widely, was shy yet attracted women wherever he went, and did his share of drinking. He first recorded in a San Antonio hotel room in late 1936. In three days he cut sixteen songs—all of them classics. Less than a year later, this time in a Dallas warehouse, he recorded a second, and final, time. Again the results were legendary. Not long after this session, Johnson was allegedly poisoned in Mississippi by a jealous juke joint owner who accused Johnson of flirting with his wife. Johnson was twenty-seven years old.
Dying so young, Johnson never got the chance to know the importance of his music or his life. His records were not big sellers during the Depression, and when he died he was buried in an unmarked grave. But a quarter century later a collection of his songs put out in album form as King of the Delta Blues Singers became one of the most influential blues albums of all time. Everyone from Eric Clapton to Bob Dylan was moved by Johnson’s music.
The country blues of Robert Johnson had to wait until the 1960s before it became more than a mention in the broader span of American pop music. But for other brands of the blues, that wasn’t the case. In New York, Kansas City, Chicago, and other urban areas, the jazz-blues connection that began in the 1920s not only survived the Depression years but actually flourished. In New York, Duke Ellington made the transition from the roaring twenties to the swinging thirties without a misstep. Swing contained more controlled improvisation and more tightly defined melodies and rhythms than ragtime, making the music more quickly accessible. With all its “swinging” rhythms, it filled the dance floor. The swing band was larger than the Dixieland band, often possessing upwards of a dozen and a half members. Such size made it important for musicians to have more predetermined roles. With a band of incredibly talented players and an artistic vision as broad and innovative as any of the great composer/bandleaders in the twentieth century, Ellington wrote compositions and arrangements that were steeped in the blues. His was a sophisticated sound, gorgeous in its movement, texture, and arranged phrasing, yet always harkening back to the blues. Graceful and rich in meaning, Ellington’s songs dressed up the blues with such style and grace that it would have sounded out of place in country-blues juke joints down South, although, thanks to his incessant touring Ellington and his band were indeed known down South.
Swing had many bandleaders and musicians, black and white, who understood the importance of the blues in this new jazz form. But those who worked out of Kansas City truly made the blues the centerpiece of swing. Walter Page’s band, the Blue Devils, was one of the best of the early Kansas City groups that made blues swing hard and hot. Bennie Moten also had a band with strong blues roots.
“DREAM BOOGIE” [1951]
By Langston Hughes
Good morning, daddy!
Ain’t you heard
The boogie-woogie rumble
Of a dream deferred?
Listen closely:
You’ll hear their feet
Beating out and beating out a—
You think
It’s a happy beat?
Listen to it closely:
Ain’t you heard
something underneath
like a—
What did I say?
Sure,
I’m happy!
Take it away!
Hey, pop!
Re-bop!
Mop!
Y-e-a-h!
When Moten died suddenly in 1935, William Basie, best known as Count Basie, picked up where Moten had left off. Born in New Jersey, Basie cut his jazz teeth in Harlem in the 1920s before being stranded in Kansas City. A brilliant piano player, Basie emphasized the blues in Moten’s style, opening up brand-new blues possibilities within the jazz framework. Together with musicians such as saxophonist Lester Young and singer Jimmy Rushing, Basie put Kansas City on the blues map and kept it there.
Chicago also had its share of piano players who brought new ideas to the blues. But in the Windy City, one of the styles to flourish was less connected to swing and big-band jazz and more a primal root of rock & roll. In 1928 a young piano player, Clarence Smith, whose friends called him Pine Top, moved from Pittsburgh, where he’d been working with Ma Rainey and others, to Chicago. Smith had a song, “Pine Top’s Boogie Woogie,” that rocked rent parties in local black neighborhoods and lent the latter part of its title to one of the most exciting piano styles of the century. Boogie-woogie featured a romping rhythm, driving melodies, bass notes that jumped instead of walked, and an overall upbeat mood that could heat up a room and fill up a dance floor in record time.
Quickly, Chicago became a hub for boogie-woogie. Smith, plus boogie-woogie piano stalwarts Albert Ammons, Meade Lux Lewis, and Jimmy Yancey, all resided in the city during boogie-woogie’s early
period; together, they defined the style with their house-rocking sounds.
It wasn’t just jazz that cultivated a relationship to the blues in the 1930s. Although Jimmie Rodgers, a white railroad worker and hillbilly singer, died of tuberculosis in 1933, he had already made his mark by writing a number of prototype country songs with strong blues overtones. Rodgers confirmed that the blues, even in its earliest stages, could be explored successfully by white songwriters and performers. Rodgers grew up poor in Mississippi, where he was early on exposed to the blues. When he started working on the railroad, his blues education continued, prompting him to pen what music historians call some of the earliest country songs—in actuality blues songs written and played by a white man. “Mississippi Delta Blues,” “Long Tall Mama Blues,” and “TB Blues” were just some of the blues songs in Rodgers’ growing repertoire. Rodgers created the “blue yodel” to make his music more distinctive, leading to one of his nicknames, the Blue Yodeler. (Rodgers had a knack for landing nicknames; he was also called the Singing Brakeman and the Father of Country Music.)
Blues strains even began appearing in the music of George Gershwin, one of America’s most distinguished composers. Gershwin’s instrumental composition “Rhapsody in Blue” (1924) became an instant classic in the American music lexicon, and although his opera “Porgy and Bess” (1935) wasn’t directly about the blues, it bore blues themes. Charles Ives and Aaron Copland were among the American classical composers who spoke of the influence blues and other American vernacular music forms had on their own music. In literature, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison brought the blues into their poetry, prose, and essays.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 4