by R. A. Lawson
Embracing these dualities in blues musical culture resonates with the “double consciousness” W. E. B. Du Bois identified in black American life, but doing so risks making the blues all things at once and perhaps, therefore, nothing at all. This is not to say that the blues cannot help the historian in solving the complex social questions generated by the caste system of the Jim Crow South. On the contrary, if blues historians have agreed on anything, it is that the blues are of paramount importance to African American culture in particular and American popular culture at large. All blues scholars recognize the primacy of blues music to black life under Jim Crow; few would disagree with Charles Keil who four decades ago wrote that “a more detailed analysis of blues lyrics might make it possible . . . to describe with greater insight the changes in male roles within the Negro community as defined by the Negroes . . . within the lower class.” But in giving a voice to their “inarticulate” subjects, blues writers have told drastically different stories: politically driven stories of black Americans accepting or rejecting “their place,” gendered stories of men being existential and women being commercialist, and romantic stories of the authenticity of an acoustic guitar and the impurity of an electric one. Drawing on recent developments in African American cultural studies, however, a new avenue of thinking might be ad-vanced.38 Interpreting blues culture as a counterculture within southern American life allows one to understand that blues musicians were necessarily accepting of prevailing Jim Crow social norms while at the same time hoping to evade or subvert them. “All blues are a lusty, lyrical realism charged with taut sensibility,” concluded Wright. “Was this hope that sprang always phoenix-like from the ashes of frustration something that the Negro absorbed from the oppressive yet optimistic American environment in which he lived and had his being?”39
He Didn’t Make No Crops. He was a Free Man: The Blues Counterculture
The bluesmen of the black southern working class validated and subverted the Jim Crow culture of white supremacy. How did the blues both accommodate and resist? Consider when and where blues music occurred. For the cotton field laborer, the blues could exist at the end of a hard day’s work on a front porch. The blues could exist in a more festive atmosphere of fun and escapism at a Saturday night fish fry or jook joint, the music helping the partygoers release their worries or at least commiserate over them. The blues could exist on weekends amid hard music and hard drugs—stimulants, including cocaine, for the late-night workers such as stevedores, and moonshine and other hard liquor for the weekday workers who needed to blow off some steam. The blues were a stage for “the primacy of passion” and chose “desire over necessity” as Garon put it. Oftentimes, the musicians themselves were edgy—road warriors with drinking and drug problems, running from (or attacking) the jealous husbands who tried to beat, knife or shoot them. But blues gigs did not end in race riots or civil rights marches. As much as the songs may have made fun of whites or complained about work, they were not incendiary, and after the booze had worn off and the notes of the songs had faded away, Sunday was time to atone for one’s own sins—not those of society. Then it was back to work on Monday morning.40
In mainstream consumer and media outlets during the Jim Crow era, especially before World War II, white commercial artists, cartoonists, and filmmakers depicted southern black life as sometimes childish, sometimes licentious, and blues music and the scene associated with it did not challenge this charge of intemperance. Instead, blues songs were ribald and risqué, and the musicians performed in jook joint and club venues that catered to intoxication, promiscuity, and violence, even if the performers themselves did not always dabble in booze, dope, or lovers. However, most of the best did. Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Robert Johnson, for example, embodied the ethic of “sex, drugs, and rock and roll” decades before the phrase was coined. On its face, then, blues culture seemed to confirm all of the white supremacists’ beliefs that blacks were “mudsill,” as astute observer of the South, W. J. Cash, wrote, and thus properly settled into the lowest social stratum.41 But all is not what it seems, especially among people who inherited from ancient tradition and the slavery experience the ability to veil information and feelings in a variety of coded rhythmic, oratory, lyrical, and danced forms of communication. As a longtime underclass, black southerners were prime candidates for forming a countercultural response to Jim Crow law and custom.
Several countercultural aspects of the early blues scene seem particularly important. First, the night clubs and house parties at which blues were played provided an escape from the many authority figures blacks faced in southern society: church leaders, sheriffs, bosses, landlords, and others. And the partygo ers needed to escape to their own social space because blues music’s sound and lyrics ran antithetical to most of what those authorities had to say. Devoted Christians such as Handy’s father thought the blues were sinful, and concerned parents like Huddie Ledbetter’s folks worried about their children entering the nightlife world of liquor, prostitution, and all other sorts of dangers. While some southern whites such as the Lomaxes were interested in and enjoyed working-class black culture, including blues, Jim Crow custom forced most white southerners to regard black music and art in the same low station as they were obliged to regard black people. The harsh sound of early blues music and the bawdiness of its lyrics did little to discourage this view.
The countercultural rejection of mainstream mores was not simply a means of being contrary. As a working-class reaction to Jim Crow, blues songs were quite functional for the poor blacks who produced and enjoyed them. The black intelligentsia had their own ideas—racial uplift through professionalization or practical education—but the generation of bluesmen who came of age after the segregationist conventions of the 1890s and early 1900s had a third way. Not a movement of race progress, but of race survival. “Much is forever being made of the deleterious effects of slavery on the generations of black Americans that followed,” wrote Albert Murray in Stomping the Blues in 1976, “But for some reason, nothing at all is ever made of the possibility that the legacy left by the enslaved ancestors of blues-oriented contemporary U.S. Negroes includes a disposition to confront the most unpromising of circumstances and make the most of what little there is to go on.”42
What little there was to go on was self-efficacy, and here the blues counterculture created an interesting problem for race progress activists such as the NAACP’s Du Bois and Robert Abbott, publisher of the Chicago Defender. Abbott’s editorials encouraged black uplift through morality, industry, and frugality, while Du Bois promoted cultural and capital investment for the black middle class. But their newspapers ran advertisements for blues musicians who sought much more colorful paths to uplift and broadcast to the public drastically different tales of black life. The “lavishly illustrated ads,” observes journalism historian Mark K. Dolan, “told tales of broken love affairs, loneliness, violence, and jail.” Here, commercialism, political consciousness, and folk culture collided. Abbott’s and Du Bois’s jeremiad editorials appeared amid advertisements for Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “ ‘Lectric Chair Blues” and Rube Lacy’s “Mississippi Jailhouse Groan.” The Defender even ran ads for Hound-Head Henry, an African American blackface minstrel who sang hobo songs such as “Freight Train Special”—quite a contrast to Du Bois’s image of the talented tenth! Of course, the great irony is that by spreading tales of black misery and vagrancy, Jefferson, Lacy, Hound-Head Henry, and the other popular musicians whose ads appeared in the papers were seeking goals of individual fame and fortune, not racial uplift for their minority group.43 And in the South, blues records such as these reached far more listeners’ ears than the editorials reached readers’ eyes, shaping the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of thousands of working-class African Americans. Beneath the sensationalist album titles and record advertisements were rich songs that did much more than tell tales of misery. Not a simple, existentialist wail, the blues, but a deeply self-affirming music—a complex social
production revealing the networks of race, gender, geography, economy, and so on, that shaped and gave meaning to African Americans’ lives in the Lower Mississippi Valley.
Black southerners during Jim Crow were forced to be deferential, yet bluesmen projected powerful braggadocio. Black men were often emasculated or condemned as rapacious beasts, yet the bluesmen openly celebrated their sexuality. Plantation sharecropping, levee building, and logging exploited black workers in the Delta, so the musicians tried to abandon manual labor. The bluesmen ventured beyond the pale of Christian morality; with the devilish blues, they embraced their sinfulness. The blues craze first emerged during Prohibition, and booze was the fuel that fired the musicians and their audiences. Race activists encouraged black farmers to “cast down your bucket where you are,” but the bluesmen rarely stayed in one community for long.44 So many of the cultural traits imposed on or ascribed to African Americans in the Lower Mississippi Valley were inverted or signified on in the blues. If the blues celebrated nihilism, it was nihilism in the face of what was, to the black southern mind, a corrupt and valueless social arrangement. Again, Titon: “The blues performance in context is a ritual event in which the singers, musicians, hustlers, listeners, sweet-talkers, dancers, gamblers, and other pleasure-seekers join in a revolt of the passions—highly stylized of course—against the world of work and economy.”45
But the revolt did not remain only a ritual of passion or a state of mind; it became a physical act. In time, the safety-valve effect of purging individual and communal problems through song became a pathway to success and triumph over the limitations placed on working-class black life. The successful bluesman with his flashy clothes, ready cash, fancy V-8 car, and mobile lifestyle served as an open rejection of white segregationists and the black middle-class. “He just left when he got ready, because he didn’t make no crops,” said Charley Patton’s niece of her uncle, “He was a free man.” B. B. King put it simply: “Living off music seemed better than living off the land.”46 Sure, one could say that white landowners handed off their black labor to white record agents who likewise exploited and profited from them (Black Swan Records was the only black-owned label in the prewar era), but growing cotton and felling timber did not get Big Bill Broonzy out of Jim Crow and into Europe for his retirement, nor earn B. B. King a life of fame and fortune. Performing blues music did. By the New Deal and World War II years, as we shall see, blues musicians increasingly used their craft to lay claims to American citizenship. They were not too oppositional or countercultural, one might say, to claim to be part of the larger group, but all we must think of are place-names such as Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham, Selma, and Greensboro to remember how desperate white supremacists were to keep blacks out of the group, even after the pluralism of the Roosevelt era.
Leon Litwack concisely summarized white southerners’ staid resistance to change: “Through the first four decades of the twentieth century, the essential mechanisms, attitudes, and assumptions governing race relations and the subordination of black Southerners remained largely intact. The same patterns of discrimination, segregation, unequal justice, and racial violence persisted.”47 When African American leaders began their successful march toward the attainment of civil rights in the years during and after World War II, they rested their arguments in the courts and their protest in the streets on a claim to American citizenship. Black Americans prepared to march on Washington, D.C., during World War II because, as citizens, they believed they deserved equal access to defense industry jobs and the integration of the military. The appeal to the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education was based in the citizens’ constitutional claim to equal protection under the law. Real change and effective legislation eventually came by the mid-1960s in response to a mass grassroots movement among southern blacks to demand their reenfranchise-ment. Even in the plantation-heavy Lower Mississippi Valley, the concept of citizenship was not as entirely foreign to laboring blacks in the 1950s and 1960s as it had been to the freedmen a century earlier. The blues musicians had inherited, developed, and passed along to black listeners a concept of the political self that had evolved from memories of emancipation and enfranchisement but that had been under siege since the 1890s. By the 1940s, the rebellious and raucous blues counterculture was sheltering, or perhaps incubating, the growing idea among southern blacks that they were citizens—an identity that necessarily meant rejecting the culture of second-class status institutionalized by Jim Crow statutes. Historians familiar with working from written sources have long understood the means by which black leaders promoted civil rights in the first half of the twentieth century, but rigorous studies of the “interior” subjects—”black leisure, health, family life, and musical or religious expression”—as Neil McMil-len wrote, can test whether or not the working-class blacks of the South, like the black intelligentsia, also “reimagine[d] their place in a more democratic society.”48
Transformative events such as the Great Migration, the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II reshaped American race relations, as did the individual blues musicians who documented black American social life during the early- to mid-twentieth century. Demographically, African Americans were becoming more northern and urban, and the national mainstream culture during the pluralist Roosevelt years became more tolerant and less abusive of African American culture and people. As blues music reflected more mainstream values (hard work ethic, support for the war, anti-fascism), the musicians remained a countercultural force in opposition to white racist norms, particularly in the South. The more bluesmen supported the war, praised the president, and hated the Japanese, the more these musicians claimed for themselves a place in the American culture that southern patricians and poor whites alike would deny them. The blues started as a countercultural trope that negatively symbolized black culture vis-à-vis the white power structure but then intersected with the emergent national consumer culture and became a pathway to freedom and inclusion, all the while maintaining its original counterculture stamp. This story of the blues development during the Jim Crow era, then, explores what Amiri Baraka has called the “change within the Negro as far as his relationship with America was concerned. It can be called a psychological realignment, an attempt to reassess the worth of the black man within society as a whole, an attempt to make the American dream work, if it were going to.”49 The evidence in this book suggests that we think of the blues as an attempt at that dream, whether it be of personal liberty or material success—or the happy coincidence of both conditions.
Verse One
To Be Black Is to Be Blue
The Blues Profession and Negotiating the “Black Place” during Jim Crow
I’m goin’ t’ tell ma woman like the Dago told the Jew,
You don’t wan’ me, and honey, I don’ wan’ you.
—”Honey I’m All Out and Down,”
by Huddie Ledbetter, 1935
Learning the Trade
Cultural traditions, naturally, are handed down from elder to younger, decade after decade. This generational transmission of knowledge and skill was particularly strong in the blues musical culture of the early twentieth-century South, where mentoring and learning from one’s influences were important pathways to success. In the rural South, among the male folk musicians on the road or making albums, the cadre including Huddie Ledbetter, Big Bill Broonzy, Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Son House comprised the first generation of blues guitarists to use their musical talent as a ticket to a better life—for some, out of the South or out of the United States altogether. This vanguard of southern bluesmen came of age during the blues craze initiated by W. C. Handy, Baby Seals, and Butler “String Beans” May, and their music—quite regional in flavor in the 1920s—coalesced into a more uniform blues genre during the 1930s under the influence of even more polished and professional musicians such as Robert Johnson and Peetie Wheatstraw. By the 1940s and 1950s, having learned from the records made by their idols like House, T-Bone
Walker, and the masterful Johnson, a new generation of guitarists led by Muddy Waters and B. B. King began to ride the blues to cross-racial and cross-national appeal on their way to great fame and fortune.
Waters’s early musical development, described in a 1941 interview with Alan Lomax on the Stovall Plantation, demonstrated how a folk tune became a commercial product that could be replicated by successive musicians. He had just performed his version of “Country Blues” for Lomax and responded to a number of the folklorist’s questions:
Alan Lomax: I wonder if you’d tell me, if you can remember, ah when it was that you made that blues, Muddy Waters.
Muddy Waters: I made that blues up in ’38.
Lomax: Remember the time, the year, the . . . ?
Waters: I made it up ‘bout the 8th of October in ‘38.
Lomax: Do you remember where you were when you were doin’ your singin’? No, I mean, how it happened? No, I mean, where you were sittin, what you were thinkin’ about?
