Jim Crow's Counterculture

by R. A. Lawson

  We’ll skin the streak of yellow from this sneaky little fellow,

  And he’ll think a cyclone hit him when he’s through.

  But also lynching:

  We’ll search the highest mountains to the tallest tree,

  To build us a hangin’ post for the evil three.

  We’ll call in all our neighbors, let them know they’re free.

  We’ve gotta slap the dirty little Jap.

  Promoting racial stereotypes of the Japanese or casting them as racial pariahs was one way for black musicians to motivate the home front and direct racism away from themselves and onto an easy target, and the Millinder Orchestra’s performance of “We’re Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap” was a good example of this phenomenon. But this kind of racism was by no means confined to swing bands in New York City; rather, Delta-style musicians used a variety of racially charged lyrics to demonize the enemy across the Pacific.45

  Blues musicians proved they could express themselves with great verve, conjuring up oftentimes violently sadistic imagery in their efforts to dehumanize the Japanese and inspire hatred of them. Perhaps it is not surprising that these musicians drew on their knowledge of hateful race violence in America, where lynch mobs often picked apart a dead body for souvenirs. Lonnie Johnson was one of several Mississippi Delta bluesmen to do so. In the months following Pearl Harbor, Johnson recorded several songs that described a soldier’s words to his love as he departed for the front. “Every Jap I kill, there’ll be peace for yo’ po’ little mind / I know I can’t kill ‘em all, but I’ll give ‘em a heck of a time,” he sang; and, “I’ll soon be back to you / If I can’t bring you a Jap, I’ll bring you back a head or two.”46 Another Mississippian, Willie “61” Blackwell, recorded a song Alan Lomax nonsensically titled “Junian’s, A Jap’s Girl Christmas For His Santa Claus.” Maybe Lomax had trouble with Blackwell’s heavy Delta accent. The title should read, “Junior, A Jap’s Skull For Christmas From Santa Claus.” In the recording session, Blackwell prefaced the song by saying, “I’m just gonna try this number just to see. It’s the onliest one that I’m gonna try . . . But this is one of my recordings, because I’m an American citizen.” Throughout the song, Blackwell juxtaposes his claims to American citizenship with grotesque references to stealing fallen Japanese soldiers’ body parts.

  Goodbye, I’ve got to leave you, I’ve got to fight for America, you, and my boy,

  Well, well, you can look for a Jap’s skull [at] Christmas, ooh, baby, from junior’s Santa Claus.

  Blackwell continued the ghoulish tone in the next verse, singing about sending “junior” a “Jap’s tooth” when he “starts to teethin.’ “ But, all of this was to “honor the land and laws of America” because “his dad [was] going to fight for liberty.” May be two or three summers, yeah, and it may be two or three falls, But if you no more see me, baby, just realize that I went down for America, you, and my boy.47

  Blackwell’s oddly titled song was partly a strong claim to citizenship and partly a sadistic fantasy. Grisly references in the name of patriotism were not limited to itinerant male musicians. Female vocalist Inez Washington, in her 1945 vaudeville version of the popular “Soldier Man Blues,” recorded the line: “I know good Uncle Sam, will send my man back to me / I’ll know he’ll bring me souvenirs, I hope it’s Tojo and Hitler’s ears.” These songs demonstrate that for blues composers and performers, lynching in the South offered some stock imagery for blues lyric writing.48

  Bluesmen and other southern blacks could deride the Japanese enemy with impunity. Whether indicting Japan’s wartime leaders or, more frequently, degrading the Japanese as a people, bluesmen exposed a wartime militancy that was as patriotic as it was racist. Among more affluent and educated blacks in the urban North and the South’s few major cities, one could make an ideological stand against the anti-Japanese rhetoric that swept wartime America. Among the poorer blacks originating from the South’s plantation districts, however, the hope that sacrifices on the battlefield and patriotism on the home front would bring increased rights for black people in postwar society outweighed the counterview that the Japanese were African Americans’ “brethren in oppression.”49 That all the cases of anti-Japanese lyrics within blues music occurred during the war years testifies to the functional aspect of this racism for southern-born blacks. For these musicians and the other black Americans who expressed anti-Japanese racism during the war, the need to unify with the nation in patriotism trumped the formation of any potential common racial identity between “black” and “yellow.”

  Employing racial stereotypes and language was acceptable as long as African Americans directed their words and songs toward the Japanese. Conversely, bluesmen avoided speaking about the German enemy in like terms. During the “race record” era, black recording artists’ work was marketed to black audiences, but the predominately white-owned record labels, and the fact that white consumers had access to the records, forced an atmosphere of self-censorship among the musicians. Germans, as members of the white race, were off limits when it came to blacks’ criticism of America’s enemies, no matter how distasteful the Nazis’ racial rhetoric. The importance of bluesmen’s silence regarding the German people is revealed in recent scholarship detailing the great extent to which German Americans, like their counterparts of Japanese ancestry, were discriminated against by mainstream white America during World War II. German Americans during World War II were not generally subjected to the widespread discrimination they had suffered during the Great War, but records indicate that up to ten thousand German Americans were interned at several detention centers in the eastern and southern United States, adding to the 400,000 German soldiers who spent time in the United States as POWs. And though the “gorilla-Hun” imagery directed at Germans three decades earlier did not resurface in the 1940s, the national print and film media ran a consistent propaganda campaign against Germans throughout the late 1930s and the first half of the 1940s.50 Despite the ethnically charged, anti-German atmosphere, bluesmen avoided negative representations of the Germans as a people, whereas they had no hesitation casting all “Japs” as enemies.

  What bluesmen did record in the 1940s, however, were a number of antiHitler blues. In focusing their attention and hatred on Hitler, not the people he led, black musicians found they could maintain the sort of belligerent patriotism that was being propagated by some of the popular Disney and Warner Brothers war cartoons. Ledbetter recorded a multi-thematic blues in 1942 entitled, “Mr. Hitler.” In the song, Leadbelly starts with an indictment of Hitler’s racism and persecution of the Jews, suggesting that the singer’s social awareness had been broadening since he moved to New York City in the mid-193os.

  Hitler started out in nineteen hundred and thirty-two,

  When he started out, takin’ the homes from the Jews.

  That’s one thing Mr. Hitler did do wrong,

  When he started out, drivin’ them Jews from their homes.

  In the next two verses, Ledbetter’s singing about playhouses and squirrel shooting can not hide the serious undertones of his message.

  He says if God rule in heaven, he’s gonna rule the world,

  But the American people say he will be shot down like a squirrel.

  Mr. Hitler, we gonna tear your playhouse down,

  You been flyin’ mighty high, but you’s on yo’ last go-’round.

  He ain’t no iron, an’ he ain’t no solid rock,

  But we American people say, “Mr. Hitler’s gotta stop!”

  Mr. Hitler, he think he is so keen,

  But the American people say, “He’s the biggest ol’ liar you ever seen.”51

  Here, Ledbetter capitalizes on two important tropes in his treatment of Hitler. Least surprising is his caricature of Hitler as animal- or childlike. More important is the inclusive message of pluralism: Ledbetter repeatedly juxtaposes the unified (and presumably democratic) voice of “we American people” against “Mr. Hitler’s” megalomania, autocracy, a
nd totalitarianism.

  Others adopted a more graphic approach. Before he had turned his ire toward the Japanese in 1942 with “Pearl Harbor Blues,” Doctor Clayton recorded a prewar piano blues presenting his summation of the European leaders who were drawing America into a global conflict. Thumping out a Wheatstraw-like piano rhythm and singing like the “Devil’s Son-in-Law” as well, Clayton begins with his apprehension of returning to a scenario like World War I.

  War is ragin’ in Europe, on the water, land, and in the air,

  Oh, if Uncle Sammy don’t be careful, we’ll all soon be right back over there.

  Evidently, he has learned enough about European fascism to convince him that war is imminent.

  The radios and newspapers, they all force me to believe,

  Yeah, Hitler and Mussolini, they must have the snatchin’ disease.

  Despite the singer’s reference to keeping abreast of the news, the lyrics reveal some confusion over the role of the various European leaders mentioned, seemingly lumping together Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin.

  Ain’t gonna be no peace in Europe, ’til we cut off Hitler’s head,

  Oh, Mussolini have heart failure when he hears Stalin is dead.

  I hope Hitler catch consumption, I mean the gallopin’ kind,

  And Stalin catch the leprosy, Mussolini lose his mind.

  The final verse is not only based on ill will but reveals a sinister and violent fantasy.

  This whole war would soon be over if Uncle Sam would use my plan,

  Ooh, let me sneak into Hitler’s bedroom with my razor in my hand.

  Clayton’s last verse demonstrates how greatly Hitler had been demonized in the American consciousness. So evil was Hitler in the American public view that he was, effectively, no longer human but something nearing an abstraction. It is hard to imagine that Clayton, a black man, could have sung about cutting the throat of any white man other than Hitler. On a commercial recording no less!52

  Clayton’s lyrical threat to murder Hitler, much like bluesmen’s vision of an “American race” and their hatred of the Japanese, exemplify the varied use of racism and racial thinking during the war. In “ ‘41 Blues,” Clayton proved that bluesmen could push their lyrics to new extremes as a result of the war. Previously, bluesmen had avoided criticizing white public figures except local authorities such as county or parish sheriffs, and even then they usually did so in segregated spaces or from recording studios in faraway cities.53 But the hated personage of Hitler was fair game and was portrayed so negatively (either as a buffoon—”the silly little man from Germany”—or a monster) that bluesmen could exploit his image for their own racially charged patriotism. Still, the different methods by which bluesmen represented the German and Japanese enemies in their music demonstrated serious limitations on black speech during the war. By personifying the fascist threat in Hitler the individual rather than Germans as an ethnic or racial group, as black Americans had done with the “yellow menace,” bluesmen were able to be hawkishly patriotic without challenging the racial boundaries that continued to govern both southern segregation and, in large part, mainstream culture throughout the 1940s. Whereas bluesmen could play the “race card” to their advantage regarding the “Japs,” no such allowance was possible concerning white Germans.

  Examining the relationship between the bluesmen’s varied use of racial constructs, the genuine opportunities given African Americans as a result of the war, and the serious obstacles to black civil rights remaining after the war, two interrelated conclusions may be drawn. First, the limitations on black expression and the durability of Jim Crow customs in American society during and after the war point to a familiar end—that blacks’ capacity to effect change and mainstream Americans’ willingness to accept change fell short of blacks’ expectations. Second, blues musicians during the war reinforced their new identities and showed that they would go to great lengths to be patriotic, including becoming racist themselves. These wartime changes were indicative of a larger shift in the countercultural attitude of the southern-born blues musicians, not unlike the changes in work ethic evident in the New Deal-era blues lyrics. In gravitating toward mainstream values and national unity during World War II, black musicians claimed for themselves a place in the democracy and pushed back at Jim Crow society, rejecting second-class citizenship and perpetual poverty.

  From Me to We: The Blues Counterculture’s Evolution from Exclusion to Inclusion

  During World War II, many blues musicians developed their work around the notion that they were rightful participants in mainstream American life. Furthermore, they began to see themselves as part of a larger democratic society and were no longer Richard Wright’s “nameless and illiterate American Negroes in their confused wanderings over the American southland.”54 But Wright knew his subject well, and early blues musicians had expressed emotional detachment from white-dominated society. Internally troubled, most black southern laborers had accepted Jim Crow rule—at least externally in their behavior toward whites—and formed little political protest from within the South during the first four decades of the twentieth century. In the 1940s, much of the pessimism seemingly endemic in the black working class and inherent to the blues genre was replaced by patriotic attachment to mainstream life—manifested, for example, in southern musicians’ racism toward the Japanese after Pearl Harbor. As former folk artists who enjoyed increasing commercial success, wartime blues musicians reflected and shaped public opinion. Staking ever greater claims to citizenship, the musicians’ wartime pluralist call for a unified American society was in subsequent years echoed by black civic leaders from Thurgood Marshall to Martin Luther King Jr., who rejected the parallelism of segregation in favor of equal access and tolerance. While blues musicians wanted access to large audiences, for most black Americans, equal access started with education. During the 1940s, African American enrollment at colleges and universities more than doubled, and the public school integration cases that would culminate in the 1954 Brown decision were working their way through the judicial system. Historians might consider that, in addition to providing evidence of Jim Crow’s cultural endurance, the “Massive Resistance” campaign that erupted as a backlash against integration was precisely so—that is, massive—because southern segregationists sensed a serious threat to permanent black subservience. Despite all of the collected efforts to keep black laborers rooted and servile, blues musicians were able to document, express, and propagate freedom and inclusion in the culture of the black working class.55

  We mark the passage of time by noticing movement and change—the sun traversing the sky, tree leaves turning to fall colors, or the growth of infants to adolescents to adults. Historians also know, however, that much human endeavor is dedicated to preserving tradition and resisting change. This polar tension is an undeniable reality, according to the distinguished historian John Lukacs. Toward the end of a successful career, Lukacs could with authority write, “History and life consist of the coexistence of continuity and change.”56 If we use the years 1890 and 1945 as our points of comparison, what evidence of new lifestyles, identities, and cultural forms—or absence of such changes—do we garner from the lives and work of the South’s bluesmen?

  The ten years between 1935 and 1945 appear to be the most salient in the history of blues music and society. During this period, blues musicians recorded the manifestation of a black collective identity formed by migration, the experience of two major wars, and the social upheaval of major crises such as the Flood of 1927 and the Great Depression. For southern-born blacks in the World War II era, the memory of citizenship under Reconstruction was distant for the elderly and secondhand to anyone under the age of sixty. The generations of bluesmen studied here all were born after Reconstruction and grew up in a social system that largely denied Emancipation, but in the sharecropping South and the urban North, their music showed that these musicians had begun to envision for themselves a more equitable position in American life. In finding more
common ground with a mainstream American culture that increasingly disfavored overt racism, blues musicians continued to operate as countercultural agents in the Jim Crow South, although the message had changed significantly over the years. Charley Patton moaned about the pain of the sharecropping life, Big Bill Broonzy celebrated urban migration, Peetie Wheatstraw lauded the New Deal work programs, and Sonny Boy Williamson celebrated American patriotism during World War II—all of these disparate musicians subverted the Jim Crow culture of white supremacy and black debasement.

  In the decade after World War II, blacks in southern cities initiated the grassroots, church-based movement toward civil rights. As protesters boycotted buses and marched for political rights, black and white musicians such as Jerry Lee Lewis, Chuck Berry, and Elvis Presley reworked the blues into a coun-tercultural form so revolutionary as to be declared a new kind of music: rock and roll. And, if not for record companies’ categories—race records, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, country—Berry and Presley would be joined by Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Ray Charles, Muddy Waters, and others in the pantheon of progenitors of the new genre. As the civil rights movement progressed, the musicians continued to blur the color line of white and black music. Presley’s breakout hit, “Hound Dog,” is an excellent example. The tune was written Tin Pan Alley-style in the early 1950s by white composers Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller, longtime composing partners who had penned more than a few big hits. Big Mama Thornton originally recorded the song in 1952 for the segregated race record market, now known as rhythm and blues, and made it a number-one hit. Crossing over to the new “country” market (which had grown out of western honky-tonk and Appalachian folk music), “Hound Dog” was recorded several times in 1953 by white musical groups, including Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, who passed the song along to Presley in Las Vegas in 1956. In Presley’s hands, the song returned to the charts in both the United States and the United Kingdom, making “Hound Dog” a truly biracial musical phenomenon. Similar things can be said of contemporary musicians such as Berry, who played a rockabilly style usually associated with white performers and whose “Brown-Eyed Handsome Man” was later recorded by Waylon Jennings, who provided the theme music to the Dukes of Hazzard, the 1980s CBS television series about “two good ol’ [white] boys.” The racial mix-ups found in rock and roll were accompanied by new challenges to traditional gender roles and sexual mores, continuing the countercultural trends developed early on in blues music and delighting the white American youth of the mid-twentieth century as they questioned the more conservative beliefs and behaviors prescribed by their authority figures. And during the 1960s, musicians on both sides of the Atlantic drew on the countercultural blues to raise questions about everything from drug use to civil rights, the atomic bomb, the war in Vietnam, and Western monotheism.57