7.See Powdermaker, After Freedom, 43-55; McMillen, Dark Journey, passim; Grossman, Land of Hope, passim. (back to text)
8.Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 113-14; Morant, Mississippi Minister, 43-44; Harris, “Etiquette, Lynching, and Racial Boundaries in Southern History,” 388 ff. For a comprehensive survey of racial violence and lynching throughout Mississippi, see McMillen, Dark Journey, 224-53. (back to text)
9.Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 90. On this process throughout the South see Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long; Litwack, Trouble in Mind; Foner, Reconstruction. (back to text)
10.Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), 70-71. In Ralph Ellison’s novel Invisible Man, the narrator recalls an English professor who had explained, with references to James Joyce and William Butler Yeats, that “[w]e create the race by creating ourselves and then to our great astonishment we will have created something far more important: We will have created a culture” (354). (back to text)
11.Welding, “An Interview with Muddy Waters,” 4-5; Gilkes, “The Black Church as a Therapeutic Community.” For an excellent discussion of the relationship between blues and church cultures, see Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 17-20, 31-32. (back to text)
12.Powdermaker, After Freedom, 143-64; Johnson, Shadow of the Plantation, 33. (back to text)
13.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 2; telephone interview with Brenda Corbett by author (hereafter cited as Corbett Interview (telephone)); RF Interview, 12; interview with Carl Ellan Kelley by author, 2 (hereafter cited as Kelley Interview). (back to text)
14.McMillen, Dark Journey, 302-3; CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 1; Harris, “Etiquette, Lynching, and Racial Boundaries in Southern History,” passim; Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), 71; Archer, Growing Up Black in Rural Mississippi, 19, 25-26. Some twenty million U.S. Army personnel records for soldiers who served between 1912 and 1959 were lost in a fire at the St. Louis branch of the National Archives in 1973. No index exists for the records that survived. The Mississippi State Archives in Jackson has index cards for men who served in the World War I era, but they contain no personal or family data other than names and places of enlistment. Telephone conversation with Ms. Viv Barrett, St. Louis National Archives, by author, October 4, 2000; telephone conversation with reference librarian, Mississippi State Archives, by author, October 4, 2000. (back to text)
15.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 3-4. (back to text)
16.Ibid., 1; interview with Harry Kincaid by author, 4 (hereafter cited as Kincaid Interview). Mr. Kincaid refused to be drawn out in more specific detail. On RF’s reluctance to talk about Willie Walker, see RF Interview, 14; Corbett Interview, 3-4. (back to text)
17.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 1; RF Interview, 15. Office of the Director, United States Bureau of the Census to the Social Security Administration, Re: Clarence LaVaughn Franklin to Erma Franklin, October 26, 1979, Detroit (copy), CLFP, officially attests that in the manuscript schedules for the census in Sunflower County, Mississippi, as of January 1920, Clarence Walker, age four, is listed as a stepson in the family of Henry and Rachel Franklin. (back to text)
18.Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 113-14; Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 29-31. The quotes are from the Vicksburg Evening Post as cited in Mills. (back to text)
19.Evans, Big Road Blues, 169-70, 175-76, 194; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 280-81, 291; Barry, Rising Tide, 101-2; Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 3-4, 245, 252; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 74-76; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fourteenth Census of the United States, 1920, vol. 3, Population, 533-40. For lyrics of “Pea Vine Blues,” see Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 211-12; Palmer, Deep Blues, 53-54; Patton can be heard singing the song on his album King of the Delta Blues. On Patton’s influence on the Delta blues, see Evans, Big Road Blues, 176 ff.; Titon, Early Downhome Blues, passim; Palmer, Deep Blues, 48-92; Pareles, “Pops Staples, Patriarch of the Staples Singers, Dies at 85”; Nager, Memphis Beat, 73; Stephen Calt and Don Kent, liner notes to Patton, King of the Delta Blues. (back to text)
20.King, Blues All Around Me, 17. Robert Palmer wrote in Deep Blues, “Only a man who understands his worth and believes in his freedom sings as if nothing else matters” (75). On the blues in broad perspective, see Ellison, Shadow and Act; Murray, Stomping the Blues; Jones, Blues People. For an important discussion of the relationship within African American culture between sacred and secular music in the 1920s, see Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture.” (back to text)
21.U.S. Bureau of the Census, Negroes in the United States, 1920-1932, 238, 592, 650; Powdermaker, After Freedom, 81-92; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 98-112; Oshinsky, “Worse Than Slavery,” 114-21; Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 7-8. (back to text)
22.Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 21; see also Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 7-9. For a similar sentiment from an Alabama black sharecropper, see Rosengarten, All God’s Dangers, 26-27. (back to text)
23.For evidence of adoption see Office of the Director, United States Bureau of the Census to Social Security Administration, Re: Clarence LaVaughn Franklin to Erma Franklin, October 26, 1979, Detroit (copy), CLFP, which affirms that in the manuscript census for Bolivar County, MS, as of April 1, 1930, Clarence E.[sic] Franklin, age fourteen [sic] is listed as a stepson in the family of Henry and Rachel Franklin; CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 1-2; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 38. For contemporary information on the disastrous state of education for blacks in the county, see Powdermaker, After Freedom, 307-17; for Fannie Lou Hamer’s memories of her parents’ efforts to educate their children, despite the truncated school semester and the fact that “most of the time we didn’t have clothes to wear,” see Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 323; see also Marsh, God’s Long Summer, 11. (back to text)
24.Hamer, “To Praise Our Bridges,” 322-23; Mills, This Little Light of Mine, 11-12; Evans, Big Road Blues, 190-92. On Clarksdale see U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, vol. 3, pt. 1, Population, 1281. (back to text)
25.Grossman, Land of Hope, pt. 1; Evans, Big Road Blues, 193. (back to text)
26.Evans, Big Road Blues, 193; RF Interview, 15. (back to text)
27.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 2-6; U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930, vol. 3, pt. 1, Population, 1282-83; Sillers, History of Bolivar County, Mississippi, 9. (back to text)
28.Rachel Franklin stated that she and her husband owned some forty acres of land in Mississippi, and that may be accurate, but there is no evidence to support it. Her son mentioned his family’s sharecropping and renting and explicitly stated that his stepfather never owned land. See RF Interview, 20; CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 17-18. (back to text)
29.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 4, 6, 18; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 34-35, 37. (back to text)
30.Interview with Reverend Ivory James by author, 2-4 (hereafter cited as James Interview); interview with Cleo Myles by author, 15-16 (hereafter cited as Myles Interview); CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 20. (back to text)
31.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 14-17. On CLF’s preaching in the fields as a boy, see CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 156; RF Interview, 6; Corbett Interview, 14-15; interview with Erma Franklin by author, 6 (hereafter cited as EF Interview). (back to text)
32.Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 202; CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 7-8, 12, 17; Myles Interview, 10-11; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 80-81; Thompson, “Mississippi,” 200-201, n. 17. The reference to Mound Bayou is from J. Egert Allen, “Mississippi—Home of the ‘Sun-Kissed’ Folks,” The Messenger 5, no. 9 (September 1923), as reprinted in Lutz and Ashton, These “Colored” United States, 177. (back to text)
33.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 10, 16; Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), 75-79, 161-62. See Palmer, Deep Blues, 86, for an account of blacks in Cleveland, Mississippi, on a
Saturday in 1930. (back to text)
34.On these images in blues songs see Oliver, The Meaning of the Blues; Jones, Blues People; Palmer, Deep Blues. The history of the automobile in Mississippi, and the development of the state’s highway system during this decade can be followed in Hataway, “The Development of the Mississippi State Highway System,” esp. 286, 294; Weeks, Cleveland, 122-23, 129; Lessig, “‘Out of the Mud,’” 56-59; Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 85-86. (back to text)
2. ATTEMPTING HIS IMAGINATION
1.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 2-3, 10-11; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 38. On the segregated schools in Bolivar County in the 1920s and the 1927 decision of the United States Supreme Court [Gong Lum v. Rice] that upheld the practice, see Kluger, Simple Justice, 120-21. (back to text)
2.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 11; RF Interview, 10-11. (back to text)
3.CLF, Hannah, The Ideal Mother. See Kluger, Simple Justice, chapter 14, for a discussion of psychologist Kenneth Clark’s famous experiments with dolls in determining the impact of segregation on black children in the context of the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education. A contemporary critique of those experiments can be found in Scott, Contempt and Pity, esp. chaps. 6, 7. (back to text)
4.Souvenir Booklet of the 82nd Anniversary and Homecoming of the St. Peter’s Rock Baptist Church, n.p.; St. Paul’s Missionary Church, A Century with Christ, 1. (back to text)
5.Souvenir Booklet of the 82nd Anniversary and Homecoming of the St. Peter’s Rock Baptist Church; untitled typescript (a brief history of St. Peter’s Rock), n.p., PRB; Myles Interview, 18-19; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 31-33. For a discussion of church as “the highlight of the week [because] it was where the music got all over my body and made me wanna jump,” see King, Blues All Around Me, 15-16. King attended the Church of God in Christ, a Sanctified denomination, as a youth in Indianola. (back to text)
6.Myles Interview, 2-5; CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 11; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 26, 29. (back to text)
7.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 22, 26; CLF, “Jesus at Bethesda.” (back to text)
8.Myles Interview, 4, 7-8; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 27-28. For a similar description of an Afro-Baptist service in Florida a decade earlier, see Thurman, With Head and Heart, 18-19. (back to text)
9.Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, 12; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 22. (back to text)
10.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 22, 27-28; Thurman, With Head and Heart, 21. Recalling her Mississippi youth, Margaret Morgan Lawrence wrote in 1975 that “in the crisis of death, adolescence, or when a husband ran away, the black people I know in the urban and rural Mississippi of fifty years ago turned to religion for comfort in the literal sense of the word; that is through religion they ‘joined’ their strength, body, mind, and soul.” Cited in Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 13-14. For a broader discussion of African American religious cosmology, see Mitchell, Black Belief, 125 ff. Fluker, “The Failure of Ethical Leadership,” 11-12, explores the meaning of the oral tradition within a religious framework. (back to text)
11.Martin Luther King Jr., “An Autobiography of Religious Development” (1950), in Carson, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1:361. See also Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth’s account of his “gradual conversion” within family and church communities in Manis, A Fire You Can’t Put Out, 27-28. (back to text)
12.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 27, 29; Myles Interview, 10-11. (back to text)
13.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 12, 13, 14; King, “An Autobiography of Religious Development,” in Carson, The Papers of Martin Luther King, Jr., 1:362. Bluesman John Lee Hooker, who grew up near Clarksdale during the 1920s, remembered a more turbulent message instilled by his ministerial father. “[Y]ou just got to stay in your place,” he said, recalling his father’s tone. “You can’t do that, you can’t do that. I can’t tell you just what he said—this word and that word—but he said, ‘You can not mess with these people.’ He kept pounding it into our heads.” See Murray, Boogie Man, 21-22. (back to text)
14.Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 114. (back to text)
15.King, Blues All Around Me, 51. As a young boy in Georgia, Martin Luther King Sr. also witnessed a lynching that left him with “terrible dreams” and, for a time, a ferocious hatred of whites. See King, Daddy King, 30-31. (back to text)
16.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 28, 38; James Interview, 18-19, 26; Souvenir Booklet of the 82nd Anniversary and Homecoming of the St. Peter’s Rock Baptist Church, n.p.; Thurman, With Head and Heart, 18-19. (back to text)
17.Pops Staples, “Down in Mississippi,” Peace to the Neighborhood. On the change in landowning patterns among Delta blacks, see McMillen, Dark Journey, chap. 4, esp. 113-15; Ownby, American Dreams in Mississippi, 77; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 112, 186; Barry, Rising Tide, 123. Ball is cited in Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 185-86. For a contemporary account of the hard times blacks endured across the South, see Nannie H. Burroughs to Una Roberts Lawrence, July 2, 1934, Washington, DC, URL. (back to text)
18.CLF Interview, October 5, 1977, 17-18. (back to text)
19.In Mississippi in 1936, of a total of 3,638 black churches of all denominations, 2,391 (66 percent) were Baptists; of the 415,182 black Mississippians reported as church members, 322,362 (78 percent) were Baptists. See U.S. Bureau of the Census, Religious Bodies: 1936, 1:83. National figures for denomination can be found in ibid., vol. 2, pt. 1, 144. The National Baptist Convention’s own figures for members in 1940 are broadly consistent with these numbers. See National Baptist Convention, Proceedings of the Sixtieth Annual Session of the National Baptist Convention, 1940, 135. On Reverend Perkins see Myles Interview, 13; James Interview, 2; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 39-40, 42; CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 159; interview with Reverend Benjamin Hooks by author, 13 (hereafter cited as Hooks Interview). Erma Franklin recalls her father discussing Perkins’s “interpretation of the Bible and his willingness to share his spiritual or religious knowledge with my dad. And just the way he carried himself as a minister. And he was one of the ones that encouraged my dad.” See EF Interview, 7. (back to text)
20.RF Interview, 6, 17; CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 156-57. Corroboration of these memories from stories told throughout her childhood can be found in EF Interview, 6; Corbett Interview, 14-15. (back to text)
21.RF Interview, 9, 17; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 39; CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 159-60; Corbett Interview, 13-14. (back to text)
22.RF Interview, 20; CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 39, 40; John 9:1-5 (KJV). (back to text)
23.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 40, 43; CLF Interview, November 15, 1977, 157. In contrast his proud mother thought the sermon was “very good” and remembered that during it she “[s]houted out, you know, when the spirit strike me, I got to shout.” RF Interview, 7. (back to text)
24.Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 281; King, Blues All Around Me, 20-22, 23, 33, 77; Harrell, Varieties of Southern Evangelicism, 241; Welding, “An Interview with Muddy Waters,” 4-5; Myles Interview, 22. The rich mix of sacred and secular blues recorded by Patton between 1929 and 1934 can be heard on Patton, King of the Delta Blues. For an insightful discussion of the social context of the phonograph in the Delta, see Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 281-86. Many blacks from varied social backgrounds staunchly opposed the intermingling of sacred and secular music. See David Evans’s discussion in Big Road Blues, 106-8, and James Interview, passim. In their liner notes to Patton, King of the Delta Blues, Stephen Calt and Don Kent note that “some blues musicians spoke of being wary of performing gospel songs that were counter to the life they were leading. Son House reports Willie Brown was afraid of being struck by lightning if he performed a religious piece. Patton had no problem getting ‘in the spirit’ and often performs with more conviction than other guitar-evangelists.” (back to text)
&nbs
p; 25.Newman, “Entrepreneurs of Profits and Pride,” 207; Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 200, 281-86; Oliver, Songsters and Saints, 140, 145, 160; Wolff et al., You Send Me, 20; Murray, Boogie Man, 24-25; Cobb, The Most Southern Place on Earth, 281. For an important, perceptive analysis of African American music and class affiliations, see Higginbotham, “Rethinking Vernacular Culture.” There was some suspicion of the phonograph, however. Bluesman Jasper Love remembered that in the Delta of the 1920s, “Some black listeners felt that they [phonograph machines] were the white man’s way of spying on blacks in their homes and refused to talk when a record was playing.” Cited in Ferris, Blues from the Delta, 8-9. (back to text)
26.CLF Interview, October 7, 1977, 35-6; CLF Interview, October 12, 1977, 55. CLF’s eldest daughter, Erma, has said of her father’s attitudes toward sacred and secular music, “Yes, he thought that God blessed you with this talent, you know, he didn’t say you had to use it in a certain capacity.” EF Interview, 30. A selection of Gates’s first recorded sermons can be heard on Gates, Complete Recorded Works in Chronological Order. Margaret Morgan Lawrence also recalled that her relatives in Mississippi during the 1920s had an “extensive collection of records for that time and place, a collection that embraced the field from Mamie Smith’s blues to Enrico Caruso.” See Lawrence Lightfoot, Balm in Gilead, 131-32. (back to text)
27.CLF Interview, November 1, 1977, 97-98. See, for example, Blind Lemon Jefferson, “Match Box Blues” (1927) and Roosevelt Sykes, “Skeet and Garret” (1929), which can be found in Taft, Blues Lyric Poetry, 128, 262, respectively. For other examples of the power of folk tales concerning boxers such as Joe Louis, see Remnick, King of the World, 227; interview with Robbie McCoy by author, 6-7 (hereafter cited as McCoy Interview). (back to text)
28.Bo Diddley is quoted in Collis, The Story of Chess Records, 112-13. Pops Staples recalled similar tensions at home as well, see ibid., 53. The range of Patton’s music can be heard on Patton, King of the Delta Blues. For discussions of the interconnection between the blues and religious experience, see Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues, esp. 154-55; McCarthy, “The Afro-American Sermon and the Blues”; Edwards, The World Don’t Owe Me Nothing, passim; Rosenberg, Can These Bones Live? esp. 62; Mitchell, Black Belief, 145-46. Dorsey is quoted in Harris, The Rise of Gospel Blues, 96-97, 98-99. Dorsey as Georgia Tom can he heard backing Ma Rainey on nine 1925 recordings on Ma Rainey, The Paramounts Chronologically; he can be heard with Tampa Red on eight sides recorded between 1928 and 1934 on Tampa Red, The Guitar Wizard. Dickinson is quoted in Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 287. (back to text)
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