Singing in a Strange Land

by Nick Salvatore

  None of this encouraged Clarence to stay. He did not consider his father “a successful farmer” and for himself “couldn’t see any future in farming. . . . I was good at farming, but I didn’t like it after I reached my teenage level and onward.” But leaving was easier said than done. Henry Franklin relied on his stepson, now nearly six feet tall and broad shouldered, to do an adult male’s work on the farm. Clarence’s departure would create additional economic difficulties for his mother and sisters. And what would he do? He was a teenager without specific work skills other than farming. Thus he bided his time, working with his father, unsuccessfully trying to suppress the spits of anger and resentment at his fate.18

  It was in this mood, after almost two years of sporadic tension with his father as he sought to find a way out of these conflicting emotions, that Clarence attended an evening session of the 1931 annual meeting of the Mississippi State Baptist Convention, hosted by St. Peter’s. A division of the National Baptist Convention, the largest African American religious denomination in the nation, the annual meeting drew delegates and preachers from throughout Mississippi. Preaching that night, before a packed crowd, was the legendary president of the state organization, Reverend Benjamin J. Perkins. Perkins was renowned for combining a serious message with a soaring musical delivery as he whooped, or chanted, part of his sermon. Recalled Clarence: “I was standing in the back of the church, with a cap rolled up in my hand,” as Perkins preached “on a passage dealing with Thomas, the disciple Thomas, who doubted the resurrection of Jesus. And his sermon was so vivid and so clear to me, and so impressive, that from that night forward, I really felt that I was called to preach.” But as with his conversion experience, this call was not a sudden, engulfing metamorphosis. Rather, the initial impulse “gradually mounted, became even more intense as time went on.” As this conviction grew in him over a period of months, so too did the tension at home.19

  As he worked the land in the months following Perkins’s sermon, the son must have tried the father sorely. As he plowed, his mother remembered, “he would stop the mule to preach. He couldn’t ever do anything steady. He would stop the mule in the middle of the field and the mule would be eating from one row to another while he’d be preaching.” Clarence also remembered these incidents, as he did his efforts to preach to the birds and other animals. His teenage intensity, a self-absorption that eclipsed all else, might bring a fond, bemused smile to the faces of some in the family, but one can also imagine Henry Franklin’s exasperation as he sought to make a crop with an increasingly distracted stepson.20

  As spring turned into early summer in 1931, the second year of the devastating Depression, Rachel “had been sick for a good while . . . with malaria.” Her son attended services at St. Peter’s one evening. That night, Clarence had a vision, the culmination of the months of thinking, praying, and preaching to various animals since Perkins’s oratory had moved him. “Yes, yes,” Franklin exulted in 1977. “Just in my room, this particular dream I had, that this plank in the wall, and the walls were made of planks, and it seemed that this plank only was on fire, but it didn’t consume the house.” A voice called out from the fire, as his mother remembered the story, telling Clarence “to go preach the gospel to each and every nation.” “I don’t recall exactly the instructions of the voice,” Clarence remarked. “But I do recall having heard a voice.” For the sixteen-year-old, this was the proof, the evidence of divine approval, he had been waiting months to receive. The following morning, as Rachel lay in bed resting, he burst into her room and declared: “I was called to preach last night.” With a commanding enthusiasm, he announced: “I am going to be a preacher and I am going to take care of you.” Armed with his mother’s elation (“I was very happy, very happy . . . that he was going to preach the gospel”), Clarence Franklin confronted his father. “‘Now you a got to turn me loose because I cannot plow a mule and preach the gospel, so you got to let me go,’” the mother remembered the son telling her husband. Faced with the powerful commingling of family dynamics and divine instruction, the unchurched Henry could only say “Alright . . . you make up your own mind what you want to do. If you want to preach, preach.”21

  And preach he did, though the plow remained, too. Later that summer, with his mother beaming from the first row and his sisters, Louise and Aretha, singing the opening hymn with the choir, Clarence Franklin preached his trial sermon at St. Peter’s Rock. He took his text from the New Testament Gospel of John, specifically the verse, “I must work the works of him who sent me, while it is day.” There is no record of the points he made or of the emotions he aroused, but it was an apt text for a beginning preacher. The opening verses of the ninth chapter of John’s gospel have Jesus meeting a Jewish man, blind from birth, on the Sabbath. Jesus explains that the blindness, which is at its core a spiritual blindness, reflects the absence of a redeeming faith that only a belief in Jesus as the Messiah can rectify. Jesus makes a clay of dirt and spittle, anoints the man’s eyes, and restores his sight. Franklin chose as his text the words Jesus spoke to his disciples to explain why traditional strictures against work on the Sabbath had lost their force in light of Jesus’ new revelation. In so doing, Franklin was proclaiming publicly a personal decision to put down the plow and instead “work the works of him who sent me.”22

  “I remember delivering it,” Franklin would later note. “I imagine it wasn’t too well constructed, because I had no training for it. I just spoke about what I felt. . . . I was nervous when I got up before people and began to preach, but after the attempt at delivering the sermon, it was over. Then the people complimented me and encouraged me.” Over the years, before he began to pastor his own churches, St. Peter’s would call him back to preach, occasionally at “preaching rallies” where “four or five of us would get up and do a short sermon.” Franklin carefully studied other preachers: “Because when you would hear other preachers preach, you would try to determine his course, how he would go about to build his sermon.” In part this was to anticipate, to see if you could predict the preacher’s mind in advance of the delivery, a way of testing (and eventually asserting) yourself against a more experienced man. But it also had another aspect: “If you did not anticipate, you would simply watch how the structure of the sermon went about. This is the way you improve yourself.” Franklin’s call to preach, the central experience in his life to date, nourished and provoked his intellectual curiosity at a level unknown in his classroom experience. Here was the boundless sense of the possible every young person can be drawn to, if only they can recognize its first glimmers.23

  As powerful as was his call to preach, Franklin did not lack other options if he was to escape a life consumed by the plow and the hoe. The blues remained enormously popular throughout the Delta in the years between the two world wars. B. B. King explained that as a child, the “blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion. Blues were about feelings.” Nor was King’s appreciation of the blues a generational revolt within the family. His great-aunt Mima (Jemimah) had in her sharecropper’s cabin “a crank-up Victrola, a machine that changed my life.” Aunt Mima loved music, and it was there that King first heard recordings of both gospel preachers and the blues and jazz of Bessie Smith, Mamie Smith, Lonnie Johnson, Ma Rainey, and Duke Ellington. King declared the legend that had bluesman Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil for his extraordinary musical talent “bullshit. I would never trade my godly feelings for anything. And in my mind, no blues artist ever has. . . . I believe all musical talent comes from God as a way to express beauty and human emotion.” Nor was King unique in this. Muddy Waters’s grandmother also had a phonograph on which he first heard both “church songs” and such blues performers as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, and Blind Boy Fuller. As Waters insisted: “As far as music, you get a heck of a sound from the church. . . . I think the best blues singers there are today—even to myself—they came from the church.” Perhaps a quarter of Charley Patton’s recorded songs were religious. Son House, a
nother influential Delta bluesman, alternated between preaching and playing the blues. Even Cleo Myles, the product of a strict upbringing, recalled that in her teens in Cleveland her mother allowed her to listen to jazz or blues “as long as . . . it didn’t take an effect on you.” In short, a devout church member could and did enjoy the music as long as the pleasure did not lead to dancing or sexual experimentation.24

  The explosive growth of the recording industry during the 1920s enabled black Delta families to explore and enjoy a grand variety of musical forms. No longer limited solely to artists who traveled to their towns, black Mississippians greatly expanded their musical sensibilities with the aid of new technology. Between 1914 and 1919, for example, the three companies that manufactured phonographs had increased their sales nationally almost 500 percent. Releases of blues songs and gospel hymns, primarily sold in black America, likewise grew spectacularly during the 1920s, from fifty records in 1921 to some five hundred six years later. Total record sales of gospel and blues, known in the industry as “race records,” topped 10 million in 1927, the equal of the approximate number of blacks in the entire nation. Just as impressive was the growth of recorded sermons. In 1926 only six preachers recorded for commercial labels, although one sold almost 90,000 copies of a single sermon, and religious records far outsold both blues and jazz. Twelve years later, seventy preachers released more than 750 sermons. Prominent among the recorded ministers was Reverend J. M. Gates, pastor of Mount Calvary Church in Atlanta between 1914 and 1941. Gates recorded more than 200 sermons, over a quarter of all released up to 1941, in a distinctive voice that whooped, rasped, and moaned without losing his message. Although not every family owned one, the phonograph became part of the established social pattern of visiting back and forth. Those with a machine shared the music with neighbors and friends; those without nonetheless bought records to play on a friend’s machine. A single record thus vibrated in the minds of many. People like Cleo Myles or Clarence Franklin, neither of whom probably went to the juke joints in 1931, nonetheless could enjoy the music and even discreetly tap a foot to it along with family and friends. Little wonder, then, that many blacks fleeing the rising floodwaters of the Mississippi River in 1927 looked first, after family, to save the phonograph.25

  The Franklins were one of those families with a phonograph, “a wind-up floor model.” And they had records to play on it: “We had religious records, we had blues records.” Clarence specifically recalled gospel recordings and sides by Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, St. Louis’s Roosevelt Sykes, and the Delta’s Tommy Johnson and Charley Patton. He also remembered playing the records of J. M. Gates, especially his famous “Dead Cat on the Line,” a sermon that addressed sexual infidelity and paternity. Like Cleo Myles, he probably did not dance at this point in his life, but he rejected even then the idea that sacred and secular music were in conflict. “Not within me,” he later asserted. “I always liked the blues.” There were, at St. Peter’s Rock, “some church people who didn’t approve it, blues, but they didn’t understand that it was part of their cultural heritage.”26

  This “cultural heritage” was a thick gumbo of musical and spoken words that conveyed both an ethical dimension and, often, a social commentary as well. Franklin, for example, recalled not only the blues but also stories told throughout the cotton fields of the Delta by some “great storytellers” as they hoed and plowed. A favorite involved Jack Johnson, the first modern African American heavyweight boxing champion, and a trip he took from Chicago to St. Louis in his stylish automobile. Caught after a chase by the police for speeding, Johnson accepted the $200 fine and said: “‘Well, take five [hundred], because I’m coming back the same way.’ . . . Well, these black field hands identified with Jack Johnson,” Franklin explained. “They identified hopefully with his success and possibly with their own or the success of their children. And therefore they kept these stories alive.” Franklin may also have added that these black agricultural workers relished as well the flippant dismissal of white authority Johnson’s very success momentarily allowed. In song and story, then, the hurt of a shared oppression found release and even transcendence in the very act of giving it voice.27

  Where Ellas Bates, the future rock-and-roll star Bo Diddley, quipped about his stern Baptist upbringing in McComb, Mississippi—“Baptist people think breathin’ is bad, you know”—Franklin came to understand how the musician and the preacher shared a common tradition and, in a certain manner, a common purpose as well. In Charley Patton’s music, for example, Franklin might enjoy such songs as “Pea Vine Blues” or “Tom Rushen Blues,” the latter about the sheriff in Cleveland, and then listen to the same artist singing “Lord I’m Discouraged” or “Prayer of Death.” Each expression—for the Afro-Baptist sermon was, at root, also a musical experience built as much on rhythm as on scripture—sought to touch the audiences they frequently shared, as Saturday night turned into Sunday morning, to spark a release and a regeneration through the power of words. The nature of the performance in each case elicited similar responses. As Thomas A. Dorsey, the most influential composer and performer of gospel blues in the twentieth century, explained, both gospel and the blues have “the same feeling, a grasping of the heart.” In church, responding to song or sermon, “they holler out, ‘Hallelujah’ or ‘Amen’. . . . In the theater, they holler ‘sing it again’ or ‘do it again’ or something like that.” Dorsey, who before his conversion, as Georgia Tom, had played piano for Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, among other giants of the blues, thought the blues were “as important to a person feeling bad as ‘Nearer My God to Thee.’ I’m not talking about popularity; I’m talking about inside the individual. This moan gets into a person where there is some secret down there that they didn’t bring out. . . . When you cry out, that is something down there that should have come out a long time ago. Whether it’s blues or gospel, there is a vehicle that comes along maybe to take it away or push it away.” Reverend Emmett Dickinson, in his 1930 recording “Is There Harm in Singing the Blues,” sharply criticized those “so-called preachers” who taught that the blues were the devil’s work. “You don’t know the meaning of the blues,” he admonished. “The blues is only an outward voice to that inward feeling.”28

  In an important way, then, Franklin was not forced to make a choice between the church and the surrounding culture that would deny the power of either. Indeed, from the very beginning, he sensed the black sermon’s intimate roots in an oral, black folk tradition that, together with blues, tales, and church music, carried the moral and ethical beliefs of a people across generations. B. B. King experienced this as well, struggling with similar feelings to a different end. “Part of me still yearned to serve in the army of the Lord,” the blues musician remembered of his teenage years in Sunflower County. “But the truth is that I never got the calling. . . . I never heard that voice. If I had, I wouldn’t have argued. But without hearing it, I couldn’t fake it.”29

  Despite his call to preach, Clarence Franklin remained a restless young man. Unable to support himself as a preacher, he had no choice but to continue working the land his family farmed. This did nothing to ease the tension between Clarence and Henry. After a few months Clarence left home—a sudden resolution to a long-simmering friction. His journey was not far, fifteen miles north on Highway 61 to an aunt’s house in Shelby, Mississippi. But brief as it was, it did get him out on his own, onto the road that had so stirred his imagination five years earlier. But working his aunt and uncle’s farm was as deadening to his spirit as working Henry’s land. After a short time, he returned to Cleveland, only to leave again early in 1932, just seventeen, this time as a migrant worker on an extended family trip across the American Midwest.30

  Paid work was scarce in the Delta during the worst of the Depression, and the price of cotton plummeted as national and international markets collapsed. Hurting, the Franklins, the Pittmans, and portions of this extended family took to the road, as did so many others during those years, in search o
f work. Clarence’s paternal uncle led the expedition, and they set out by car for Caruthersville, Missouri. Travel through Memphis gave Clarence his first view of that complex, pulsating city. The journey also marked his first extended exploration of Highway 61 and the world beyond Cashbury’s cotton fields. In Missouri, the group lived in a “tin-top house” and worked cotton; the uncle who led them collected their daily wages and provided for their food and expenses. Clarence recalled getting fired from one job “because occasionally I would just stop the mules and get off the stalk-cutter and go to preaching.”

  That spring, an agent for a tobacco farmer from Fulton, Kentucky, hired the family to work that harvest and drove them there from Missouri, a journey of more than twelve hours, in an open truck without any provisions. (When Clarence’s uncle requested money for food, the white agent laughed.) In Kentucky, the work was hard and the workforce large, culled from migrant workers throughout the South and the Midwest. “All the migrant farm hands lived in tobacco barns, slept on hay,” Clarence remembered. That proximity at both work and leisure exposed him to a wider swath of black America than he had ever before encountered.31

  In Kentucky, as in Missouri, Clarence presented himself forcefully, as a man with a calling:

  I remember one night when I was in Fulton, Kentucky, in the barn where we were living there were many church people involved. And on Sunday nights they would have services. And one night they asked me to preach. I was frightened and I went out in the back and prayed. Looking toward the stars and prayed for God to help me, give me the strength and encouragement that was necessary for the time. And I did pretty good, pretty good.32