One thing is for certain, though: He wasn’t a tragedy. House’s protege Robert Johnson sang about coming to the crossroads, but it was House who drew the map that led him there. House, in his music and in his life, brought together the sacred and the profane; he found the musical moment where Saturday night meets Sunday morning. House’s lyrics, which were personal and emotional, made the blues about more than suffering, more than celebration—he imbued the form with an introspective quality, exploring the torments of the soul without choosing sides or making easy judgment. “Ain’t no heaven, ain’t no burning hell/Where I’m going when I die, can’t nobody tell,” House sang in “My Black Mama.” Many churchmen and bluesmen saw the world in black and white; Son House sang in shades of blue—dark, rich, varied hues that could capture the range of human experience. “I wish I had me a heaven of my own,” he sang in “Preachin’ the Blues.” House got a little piece of paradise every time he played his guitar.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING:
Son House, The Original Delta Blues (Columbia/Legacy, 1998). The definition of the form.
Robert Johnson, King of the Delta Blues (Columbia/Legacy, 1997). Every song on this set is a masterpiece.
Various Artists, Roots of Robert Johnson (Yazoo, 1990). A survey of the artists who blazed a trail for Johnson.
Various Artists, Son House and the Great Delta Blues Singers (Document, 1994). A rough, intriguing collection of early blues songs.
The White Stripes, Der Stijl Original Recording Remastered (V2/BMG, 2002). This alternative-rock duo’s cover of Son House’s “Death Letter” injects new life into the blues.
THE BLUES AVANT-GARDE BY LUC SANTE
The country blues was a form of music created by the children and grandchildren of slaves, in settings that ranged narrowly from plantations to small towns, in some of the most remote, least modern, and least cosmopolitan areas of the Deep South. Because of this, latter-day listeners with a glancing acquaintance, even if they do not consider the music to be “primitive,” often suppose it to be traditional, folkloric, a craft more than an art in everything but its emotional content. But the blues was radical in its very manifestation—as much an expression of modernism as anything hatched in Paris or Berlin or New York—and its individual practitioners included explorers working in the far reaches of the form, experimenting with harmony, rhythm, structure, voice, stance, and arrangement. These early-twentieth-century adventurers could properly be considered avant-garde, especially in the context of the period, when radical experimentation flourished in every city and in every art form. But all were unschooled, many were illiterate, many were itinerant—they worked under a daunting set of disadvantages—and their exchange of ideas occurred strictly by word of mouth.
We know nothing about how the blues came to be, only that it was first noted just after 1900, in the vicinity of the lower course of the Mississippi River, and that the sophisticated observers who noted it—W.C. Handy, Ma Rainey, and Jelly Roll Morton, all found it strange, haunting, startling. It was something more than an evolutionary development of earlier African-American music. Something had happened very suddenly a moment of discovery, a “paradigm shift”—but everything else about it is a mystery. Making matters even more needlessly mysterious is the fact that the first blues was not recorded until 1920 (Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”), the first country blues roughly five years later. On the scale of folklore, a quarter-century is a blink, but on the scale of modernism, it is an eon. In that same twenty-five years (1903-1928), for example, Cubism came and went. It would now be difficult to gauge the paintings of 1926 without some knowledge of those of 1913 and 1922—it would be like coming into a heated conversation well into its third hour and trying to determine by inference what had transpired before one’s arrival. So it is with the blues.
Given the hit-or-miss nature of the recording industry’s coverage of the country blues between 1924 or so and the early 1930s, when most recording was curtailed by the Depression, the range of what did come down to us is startling. We have recordings by the most popular and ambitious artists, of course, but much else is due to chance alone. We can assume, then, there is an equivalent number of significant artists who were excluded by the same process of chance. What you would expect from the documentation of a widespread phenomenon of musical ferment in a fairly circumscribed time frame is something geometric and hierarchical: a row of major influences succeeded by increasing ranks of derivative followers, with a handful of eccentrics on the fringes. Instead, the blues of the period, if mapped on a grid, would look like many disparate clumps—separated by spaces—of a vast jigsaw puzzle. The alternative possibility, no less real, is that the quotient of originality ran disproportionately high.
By the time Charley Patton was recorded, in 1929, he had been playing for a good twenty years.
He was a celebrity in the Mississippi Delta, probably more for his antic stage presence than for his music per se. That music, however, was of astonishing complexity and formal daring. Not only did he achieve the sound of a small band by playing lead, rhythm, and bass lines on his guitar all at once but he cut and folded songs into other songs, made collages of fragments, took on a dizzying variety of personae in his lyrics (“A Spoonful Blues” has a different narrator in every line), and, from the evidence of a pair of unissued alternate takes, seldom played a song the same way twice. His recorded work represents the equivalent of a midcareer retrospective—two decades’ worth of experimentation, still in progress, alas cut short by his death in 1934.
Patton was a star, and his influence would only become more noticeable over subsequent decades—he was king of the Delta blues. Of quite a different profile, though, was Joe Holmes, an itinerant from Louisiana who went by the name of King Solomon Hill. Only four sides are known by him (a third record has recently been discovered but not yet made public), and they are among the strangest in the blues. The beat of “The Gone Dead Train,” for example, varies constantly—each vocal line is of a different length, as are the guitar fills—and the whole thing constantly threatens to break down into formlessness. But it has its own logic, at once musical (the changes of the fills effectively correspond to those of the vocals without merely echoing them) and conversational; or maybe the word would be poetic—his metric anarchy, startling in popular song, evokes the kind of unscannable but audibly dynamic music you find in the most rigorous free verse. And Holmes was a hobo. You almost have to believe in providence to account for his being admitted into a recording facility.
Holmes is perhaps an extreme case, an individualist who came from no identifiable school and left no immediate progeny. But originality in the early blues is often highly subjective. The originality of Blind Lemon Jefferson is sometimes overlooked, maybe because of the physical deterioration of his recordings, but much more on account of his massive influence: He was indisputably the most popular of the early rural bluesmen. On the other hand, the man who worked the corner across from him in Dallas’ Deep Ellum was Blind Willie Johnson, who has been far less-often copied and remains evergreen. His wordless moan on “Dark Was the Night” sounds like nothing else in music, period. As for Johnson’s trademark guttural rasp, who can even say, at this remove, whether he originated the sound or transmitted an element of a tradition of which we have no other trace? We can be fairly certain that nobody but the extraordinarily delicate gospel bluesman Washington Phillips played the dulceola—a massive, harplike thing that’s been referred to as a “plucked piano”—since no other recordings of it are known. We can be reasonably sure that no recorded blues player employed “Spanish” tuning, capoed to a different absolute key in every one of his eight recordings, quite like the Alabama street singer Buddy Boy Hawkins. We can search in vain for anyone employing the surrealist lyrical imagery of Funny Papa Smith.
But then, we don’t know who their friends and rivals and teachers were, either. Nevertheless, it is far less likely that these men had forgotten doubles than that there were many such self-determined e
xplorers of sound and sense who were working within the physical conventions of traditional, premodem popular music but who must have been aware that they were contributing to the invention of something wildly new.
THE LEVEE-CAMP HOLLER
By Alan Lomax
[From The Land Where the Blues Began, 1993]
In spite of [certain] villainies, levee work was attractive to the men of the Delta. Years of plowing had given them the skills required to get work out of a mule team in any weather. On the river, payday came once every week or two, rather than once a year, and in a month a man could pocket more gambling and drinking money than he might earn in a season on the farm. Split away from their little home places and families, these itinerant muleskinners knew the pain of alienation and anomie, yet they enjoyed the freedom of roaming from job to job and woman to woman. If they had to knuckle under to a bullying boss, then they could take out their anger on their weaker fellows. Meantime, they were creating their own culture of racy lingo, humor, tall tale, custom, and song, in which their sociable and ebullient African temperaments could flower. The swampland and the sordid streets of their tent cities became the stage for new acts in the African-American drama, where they could test their manhood, cement their friendships, and enlarge their collective culture. They sang multiple melodies until their mules—all of whom had nicknames—joined in the chorus, sometimes grew so excited that they literally worked themselves to death.
In the thirties, when my father, John A. Lomax, and I were recording across the South, levee camps existed not only along the Mississippi but also on the White River in Arkansas, the Red River in Louisiana, the Brazos and Trinity rivers in Texas, and a score of lesser streams in the vast alluvial plains of the lower South. In these swampy lowlands, indeed wherever land was to be drained, foundations laid, or dirt moved, the black muleskinner appeared with his scoop pulled by a team of lusty mules, and the high lonesome levee song would soon rise in the air.
Got up in the mornin, so doggone soon,
So doggone soon,
I couldn see nothin, good podner,
But the stars and moon—
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, but the stars and moon.
The singer is explaining why he’s late to work, but like a good worker, he also complains about working conditions in an outfit where all the mules have sore shoulders. The humane law forbade working a mule with a bad shoulder, forcing the animal to grind an open sore against its stiff leather collar. Most outfits disregarded this law, and its constant and flagrant violation became the subject of the muleskinner’s perennial complaint.
Well, I looked all over the whole corral,
The whole corral,
And I couldn find a mule, good podner,
With his shoulder well—
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, with his shoulder well.
We found this song not only in the Mississippi Valley and the flood plains to the west into Texas, but in every other Southern state as well. Lately, I have looked up all these non-Mississippi levee-holler variants, and every one of them was sung by a Mississippian on his travels or by someone who had learned it from somebody from the Delta.
Charles Peabody, a young archeologist working a site in the Delta, was the first to report on the levee-camp holler. In his journal of 1903 he comments on the difficulty of describing the strange songs his muleskinners were singing:
As to the autochthonous music, unaccompanied,
it is hard to give an exact account. Our best
model for the study of this was a diligent Negro
living near called by our men “Five Dollars”
(suggestive of craps), and by us “Haman’s Man,”
from his persistent following from sunrise to
sunset of the mule of that name. These fifteen
hours he filled with words and music. Hymns
alternated with quite fearful oaths addressed to
Haman. Other directions intoned to him melted
into strains of apparently genuine African music,
sometimes with words, sometimes without. Long
phrases there were without apparent measured
rhythm, singularly hard to copy in notes. When
such sung by him and by others could be
reduced to form, a few motives were made to
appear, and these copied out were usually quite
simple, based for the most part on the major or
minor triad. The long, lonely sing-song of the
fields was quite distinct from anything else,
though the singer was skilful [sic] in gliding from
hymn-motive to those of the native chant.
Peabody also transcribed the free-flowing melody Haman sang, and there is no question that it contains the cadences peculiar to the levee-camp holler that my father and I so frequently recorded all across the Deep South during the thirties and forties.
The levee-camp holler therefore seems definitely to be Delta or at least Western in provenance. In fact, repeated recording trips into the area revealed the existence of an extensive genre of songs, called hollers, in the Delta region. For example, every black prisoner in the penitentiary, we discovered, had a holler that was, in effect, his personal musical signature. Heard at a distance, another prisoner could say, “Listen at old so-and-so. Don’t he sound lonesome this morning.”
Alan Lomax recording the Pratcher brothers (Miles and Bob) in Como, Mississippi, in 1959
All these hollers share a set of distinctive features. They are solos, slow in tempo, free in rhythm (as opposed to the gang work songs), composed of long, gliding, ornamented, and melismatic phrases, given a melancholy character by minor intervals as well as by blued or bent tones, sounding like sobs or moans or keening or pain-filled cries, even when they were performed with such bravura that they resounded across the fields. Because they were seldom sung except on the job, even the aficionados of black music have little acquaintance with this wondrous recitative-like vocalizing through which black labor voiced the tragic horror of their condition. “Cap’n, doncha do me like you do po Shine/Drove him so hard till he went stone blind.”
The style of these solo, unaccompanied, idiosyncratic, melancholic hollers runs directly counter to the mainstream of black song in the South and generally round the Caribbean, where song is for the most part on-beat, brisk, merry, sensuous, integrated, choralizing, and accompanied, if not by drums or some other instrument, at least by hand clapping and/or foot stomping. Most black song, both post-and antebellum, even when its mood is somber and serious when the song begins, usually picks up tempo and is transformed into music that can be danced to before it has been sung to a conclusion. Indeed, the bulk of black song, unlike that of Europe, which is usually lyrical, can be danced to—in the case of work songs, making work into a sort of dance.
Major exceptions to this rule are two: the long-meter hymns and the work hollers of the Delta and the lowland Southwest. Both these forms came into prominence at the time of the decay of the plantation collectivity and the emergence of individualized effort as the main source of survival for Delta blacks. Both mark a sharp stylistic turn away from the on-beat collective song style of most earlier African-American genres and the adoption of a highly individualized solo attack. The favorite long-meter hymn is an ego-oriented appeal for help from God: “Lord, in my trouble I stretch my hand to thee,/Lord, in my trouble no other help I know.”
The usual levee-camp holler is a personal appeal to Mister Cholly, the white boss who hires, fires, pays, or doesn’t pay him: “Mister Cholly, Mister Cholly, just gimme my time./Gwan, old bully, you are time behind.”
It was in the Delta that blacks entered the levee and land-clearing crews, often forcibly organized, and became for the first time anonymous units of labor instead of being owned by somebody or belonging on some plantation and to an extended family. In this new condition they could see themselves being used up and flung aside, often actually worked to death, alongside the mules they drove. In th
e earlier plantation situation, under slavery and later on as renters or field hands, they still had some feeling of identification with the bosses they worked for and the place they lived. These relationships were usually attenuated in the levee camps and on the penal farms. There, “a nigger wasn’t worth as much as a mule.” In most societies the individual can look to organized authority as in some sense beneficient or protective, can ask for mercy and help in times of distress and expect to receive it. But increasingly, the laborers of the Deep South, floating from camp to camp, often from prison to prison, came to feel that they had nowhere to turn.
“If it ain’t about what’s real, what’s happenin’ right now, it ain’t the blues.”—Chris Thomas King
There was, as usual in black tradition, a musical response. It came in the sudden emergence of the lonesome holler, and later the blues, notable among all human works of art for their profound despair. They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South. In creating these new, critical genres, American blacks called upon ancient African resources, for complaints of this very type existed in the traditions of African kingdoms. Indeed, our Cantometric survey has found very similar songs in Northwest Africa and the Lake States, among the Wolof and the Watusi, for example. A broader look finds that such ornamented, unaccompanied singing is commonplace in the kingdoms and empires of North Africa, of the southern Mediterranean, and of the Middle East. It seems, in fact, that this song type, which we might call the high, lonesome complaint, is one undercurrent of music in the whole of civilized Eurasia—the ancient world of caste, empire, exploited peasantry, harem-bound women, and absolute power-from the Far East to Ireland. A related and ultimately derivative string-accompanied solo style is also present in this same region. It turns up in West Africa, and in the Americas gave rise to the blues.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 11