by R. A. Lawson
Is this a story of class, gender, or race? Not exactly. The blues were not really about class because not all poor Americans faced racial intimidation and segregation as did southern blacks, and furthermore, the poor were not the only ones to feel the blues. As postwar bluesman Little Milton Campbell recalled to researcher Elijah Wald in 1996, “You know, rich women leave rich men as well. Educated men, educated women leave each other.”5 We are not looking a strictly gendered subject (though most of the evidence in this study comes from men) because blues songs were performed by, told stories about, and were listened to by men and women. It’s not about race because, although the blues were shaped indelibly by artists experiencing “black America,” blues were not representative of the black bourgeoisie, nor were they wholly representative of black Christian society or the black educational traditions (e.g. Tuskegee Institute). The blues were not about an age group—like, say, acid rock for the youth of the 1960s— because even though blues originally came about as something of a youth craze, the scene had from the beginning been one in which mentoring of the young by the old, passing down musical traditions, was central. Rather, we are looking at professionals (sometimes fairly inexperienced)—people whose job it was to provide music to folks who often lived on farm store credit but who liked to go out, spend freely, and let off steam on the occasions when they did have cash.6 Whereas church musicians focused on the otherworldly and the afterlife, blues musicians protected and passed down the legends, biography, and history of the Africans in America. Like the griots of old, the blues musicians were the keepers of the people’s culture.
The story of the profession of blues musician must begin in West Africa. Even if American musicians themselves had no living memory of the African past, it was still there, as bluesman Corey Harris discovered on a trip to Mali: “The roots are so deep they cast no shadow at all.”7 The West African musical traditions that were treasured and maintained during the long dark night of slavery reveal an amazing story of cultural survival. The Middle Passage and the several centuries of slavery in America were like a cultural threshold over which very little could be taken. The Ibo, Mende, Yoruba, Bantu, and other Africans who became African Americans lost elements of their technology, history, religion, and more when they were taken from their homelands. With oral and written means of communication restricted (e.g., the common bans on drums and teaching of literacy), African men and women in bondage still managed to preserve essential, defining, and meaningful traditions from West African music even as they were acculturated to new names, languages, religions, foodways, economic realities, and so forth. Throughout the nations of western Africa, traditional music features polyrhythmic or layered beats, call and response (and improvisational) lyrics, and use of stringed and wind instruments—all elements that survived into twentieth-century black music in America. The syncopated and driving beats, known by the 1920s as “hot rhythms,” were especially important because they were identified by black musicians as valuable tools of group identification and by white supremacists as evidence of African primalism.8
That West African musical traditions were preserved throughout the experience of slavery and became an important influence on the development of the blues draws attention to the functionality and flexibility of West African music. Like certain African linguistic and culinary traditions that became part of American culture, music was part of everyday activities of work and leisure and was adaptable to changing social and economic conditions from the colonial period to Reconstruction and beyond. Whether applied to work songs or slave spirituals or freedmen’s reels and rags, syncopated rhythms and call and response lyrics were useful musical tools for almost any working-class African American, not only those who made professions as musicians.
By the early 1900s, millions of African Americans—spread out over dozens of states but commonly experiencing the rising tide of segregation and disfranchisement—had inherited those musical traditions. In the annals of the early blues, there are several accounts of the first appearance of blues music. Musicians Mamie Desdoumes, Jelly Roll Morton, W. C. Handy, and Ma Rainey all cited the birth of the blues at roughly the same time, 1900 to 1903, but they placed their first encounters with blues music in communities throughout a wide expanse of the Lower Mississippi Valley (Louisiana, Mississippi, and Missouri) and neighboring Alabama. How was this possible? Perhaps these informants embellished the facts to make a more interesting story, or perhaps they used blues as a generic term for kinds of music that were in fact very different from one another. Or, the reports were accurate and meant that the country blues, at least in prototype form, was emerging more or less simultaneously in several places. Such a coincidence was possible because there was a sort of fun-timing music (called by Handy the “happy-go-lucky songs of the Southern Negro”) being played by African Americans on Saturday nights in farming communities across many plantation districts of the South. It was played on stringed instruments and harmonicas that were easily transportable, and it was quickly being adapted in southern cities’ black neighborhoods, where musicians introduced the driving beats on piano and called it barrelhousing.9 This was not a genre by any means but rather a varied music created by a diverse group of black musicians in communities across the South, and it included the influence of southern white musicians who had been preserving the Celtic music traditions introduced in previous centuries by upcountry Scots-Irish settlers.
And this music was no timeless utterance of the faceless folk; the blues style did not arrive in the twentieth century as an inherited tradition of the slave or even post-Emancipation past. Instead, it was a creation of the early twentieth century, when folk tradition encountered new instrumentation and modern commercial horizons. “When the people were slaves,” recalled bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards, “they’d holler ‘cause it make the day go ‘long and they wouldn’t worry about what they were doing, and that’s what the blues come from.” He continued: “Then in the twenties, like, they named it the blues, with Mama Rainey and all, Ida Cox, Bessie Smith, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Lonnie Johnson. Before that come out, they just played a lot of ragtime stuff, like my father used to play. He played guitar and violin, and he played like, ‘John Henry fell dead with the hammer in his hand,’ ‘Stagolee,’ and ‘Spoonful,’ that kind of stuff.”10 The folks that produced the version of the black southern country music that led to the national craze and long-term love affair with the blues were the itinerant musicians, such as Edwards, who played country dances and jook joints in the Lower Mississippi Valley, specifically the Mississippi Delta.
What sounds were these jook joint revelers craving? Jazz pianist and roots musician Ted Gioia offers a rich description. “Simplicity and starkness are defining qualities of the Delta idiom, especially in the choice of instruments and how they are played,” Gioia writes in Delta Blues: The Life and Times of the Mississippi Masters Who Revolutionized American Music. “A single instrument . . . mostly stands self-sufficient, cradled by the singer,” he continues; the “guitar— inexpensive, portable, suitable for dances or street corners or isolated music-making—was perfectly adapted to the needs and limitations of the people who made this music.” Perhaps depending on whether one was in a cotton town or among the plantation cabins, “once in a while, a piano or a fiddle enters . . . [but] the guitar is the undisputed king of the Delta.” And the rough music would be forcibly drawn from the guitar. Musicians percussively slapped the instrument’s body, cut notes from the strings with deadly tools such as knives and broken bottle necks, ripped chords from the strings by hardened fingertips—”clusters of notes,” writes Gioia, “drawn from a pentatonic scale, or colored with wry dissonances—a willy-nilly school of harmony . . . Harmonic variety is not a virtue here; sometimes a single chord, with just a few modifications, suffices for an entire song, a throbbing texture of sound, insistent and unrelenting. Often compositions are built around a simple riff [think Howlin’ Wolf’s “Spoonfull,” Muddy’s “Rolling Stone,” or Son House’s
“Preachin’ Blues”], a repeated figure, perhaps only a few notes that serve as an anchor, compass, and engine room, all put together, for a blues performance.” Then Gioia identifies the blues magic that has served artists from Charley Patton to Robert Johnson to Led Zeppelin and beyond: “Melodies are no more ornate than the harmonies, a wail or a growl counting for as much as a coloratura. At times the voice seems to want to blend into the guitar, and the guitar aspires to be a voice—one completing a phrase started by the other. This is strange, wonderful music, no less peculiar for having eventually achieved lasting appeal and commercial success.” In concluding this vivid description of the blues’s sound, Gioia, writing in 2008, echoes W. C. Handy’s description a century before of vernacular Delta guitar- and vocal techniques he had heard.11
For it was during his long travels across the plantation districts of Mississippi that Handy heard the music that was being played in the farming communities as well as the logging camps and the levee camps. Handy spent a now-famous evening in 1903 at the train depot in Tutwiler, listening to a “lean, loose-jointed Negro” playing “the weirdest music” he had ever heard. That evening put the sound in his ear that led the classically trained conductor/composer to imagine a modern popular music that derived from long-standing southern black traditions. In the fall of 1912, nearly a decade after that important encounter with black country music, Handy penned “The Memphis Blues.” Two years later he followed up with “St. Louis Blues” and then really franchised the idiom with “Yellow Dog Blues” (specifically inspired by the Tutwiler incident) and “Beale Street Blues.”12
Handy’s popular blues, especially “Beale Street Blues,” established the pleasure-pain principle in the genre by drawing on working-class realism and humor for lyrics.
You’ll see pretty browns in beautiful gowns,
You’ll see tailor-mades and hand-me-downs,
You’ll meet honest men, and pick-pockets skilled,
You’ll find that business never closes ’til somebody gets killed.
If Beale Street could talk, if Beale Street could talk,
Married men would have to take their beds and walk,
Except one or two who never drink booze,
And the blind man on the corner who sings the Beale Street Blues.13
Though musically and lyrically more sophisticated than the “roots” music that inspired it, Handy’s formulation of the blues was no delicacy of haute culture—it was popular and easily adaptable. He drew on a complex and rich folk tradition to create a fixed form. It was as if he had tasted hundreds of gumbo recipes and then wrote one great gumbo recipe that everyone could learn from and adjust according to their own personal, family, and community tastes. Once Handy had derived the blues from the people, he released his new blues for the people to replicate and expound upon, blending with the musicians on the southern vaudeville and chitlin’ circuits—folks who had “come directly ‘from the field to the stage.’ “ Performers like Baby Seals, Butler “String Beans” May, Johnnie Woods and Little Henry, Willie and Lulu Too Sweet, and Laura Smith—were, in the words of blues historians Lynn Abbott and Doug Serhoff, “some of the first ‘blue diamonds in the rough’ to rise above the anonymous street corners, barrelhouses, jook joints, railroad depots, and one-room country shacks.” This kind of regional prominence was enjoyed by blues guitarist and vocalist Tommy Johnson in the 1920s. According to fellow musician Houston Stackhouse, Johnson had become a Delta celebrity: “Peopled walk five or six or ten miles to hear him, if they heard he was gon’ be in town . . . They’d say, ‘Tommy Johnson’s in town! Got to go hear Tommy!’ Yeah, he’d draw a crowd, man.”14
And this music had legs. Again, blues historian Ted Gioia: “The Delta may have inspired this music, but it couldn’t hold on to it. And though W. C. Handy may not have been the true father of the blues . . . he did inaugurate a time-honored blues tradition that would be emulated by almost every later Delta artist who achieved a degree of fame and fortune.”15 Handy and his contemporaries Seals and “String Beans” had heard and performed enough southern black vernacular music to write commercial pieces that would have wide appeal among the working-class black audience, even as they began to leave the rural South for new opportunities in the industrial North during World War I. Handy himself left the South as soon as his finances allowed, but the musical form he left behind had caught on: “Now, when you get back on the farms and places like that,” remembered bluesman Johnny Shines, “you didn’t have to play nothing but the blues. You could play the same number all night, as far as that’s concerned.”16
At first, Handy’s and the others’ blues were all issued on sheet music, so Tin Pan Alley had the first crack at creating blues-as-genre, but the form was further fixed by the early recording artists (beginning with the Victor Military Band’s 1914 cut of “Memphis Blues” and most famously with Mamie Smith’s 1920 recording of Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues”). The blues became even more accessible for the people as it resonated from private pianos, guitars, and victrolas. By the 1940s, new radio stations such as WLAC in Nashville and WDIA in Memphis were springing up across the South and finding the commercial value in broadcasting black music.
The sheet music, recordings, and radio broadcasts sent forth from the music industry a vast wave of conformity that swept across the variegated landscape of black music as guitar pickers and piano plunkers played Handy’s and Bradford’s songs night after night for eager crowds. This early blues scene was, in recent historian Wald’s view, “bedeviled by formulas, conservatism, and mediocrity, just like any later pop scene. Bessie Smith and Leroy Carr, as much as Elvis, the Beatles, or Britney Spears, were quickly followed by a horde of sound-alike imitators churning out repetitive variations on their hits.” Musicians tried to capitalize on the fame of others, so Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was followed by Lil-lie Mae Glover, also known as “Memphis Ma” Rainey, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson was mimicked by Rice Miller, usually known as “Sonny Boy” Williamson II. Although Miller was an accomplished entertainer in his own right, “many of these imitators,” Wald concludes, “were not great creative artists, but that was irrelevant at the time . . . It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed.”17 “Formulas, conservatism, and mediocrity” limited some of the creative potential of the blues market, but these bedevilments did not cloud the music’s meaning or stifle the performers’ relationship with the audience. “The recording industry may indeed have commercialized a folk art by standardizing format, cleaning up lyrics, and featuring women singers,” observed Daphne Duval Harrison in Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, “What counts is that the audience for the recordings accepted and endorsed them as blues . . . The performer was aware that her audience knew the music as well as she and would actively participate with singing, clapping, dancing and shouts of approval.”18
As professional entertainers, these musicians were in some ways the precursors to jukeboxes—singing out the tunes as the audience called them—and some of them were true musical artists in the African American tradition. They picked up on the twelve-bar, AAB-structure of Handy’s blues and adapted the form to their own lyrics, musical styles, and regional preferences, especially as record executives and talent scouts begged for originality. “They didn’t want you bringin’ no [sheet] music up in there either,” remembered musician Little Brother Montgomery. “They wanted original things, from you . . . They’d tell you, ‘Well, we can read all that music and stuff.’ “ This stance opened the door for the musicians to bring in their own creativity: “The Negro market not only existed,” wrote black music historian Lawrence Levine, “it was able to impose its own taste upon businessmen who ran the record companies and who understood the music they were recording imperfectly enough so they extended a great deal of freedom to the singers they were recording. Son House, who recorded for Paramount records, told [researcher] J
ohn Fahey that the recording engineers exercised no control over what he recorded and the same was true of Charley Patton, Louise Johnson, and Willie Brown . . .”19 The blues of the Jim Crow era, then, would be produced by aspiring professional musicians who tried to differentiate themselves from others by their individual interpretations of the shared folk traditions of southern black music as well as the hip, contemporary model offered by Handy and his cohort of composers. In sum, the tradition was malleable both musically and lyrically, and by the Jim Crow era had become associated with the harmonica (made widely available by Sears & Roebuck catalog sales) as well as the piano (regularly available in the clubs that made up the chitlin’ circuit). Blues lyrics had become quite effective at expressing collective realities in heart-breaking individual tales—the story of a people told from one person’s point-of-view. “Thing about the blues is that blues are simple,” wrote B. B. King in his autobiography, Blues All Around Me. “You sing one line; you repeat that line; and then rhyme your third line with the first two. They call it the twelve bar blues ‘cause each of those lines is four bars. That’s it. In that basic form, though, you can cram a lifetime of stories ‘bout the woes and wonders of early love. Everything fits into the blues.”20
