by R. A. Lawson
Before the civil rights movement got into full swing and rock and roll took off in the late 1950s, African American blues musicians had been for some time reimagining the “black place” in America. Intellectual historians have long understood how African American leadership came to spread the message of equal rights, and we are accustomed to thinking of the civil rights movement in terms of black institutions such as the NAACP and, later, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference or Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Record companies, too, were important civil rights institutions, and Paramount, Decca, Bluebird, Vocalion, and the other popular blues labels became the vehicles for the musicians’ expression of new identities. Blues music during the war, like its descendant rock and roll and the civil rights movement itself, pushed society to accept within its bounds new people and new ideas. In pushing to be included in the promise of American life, black southerners initiated a period in which they sought to redefine American citizenship once again, as had both Reconstruction Republicans and Jim Crow segregationists before them.58
In the case of the poor black southerners living under Jim Crow, we need to explore people’s cultural lives to understand their political identities. Certainly, African American southerners before World War II could not exercise their political voice in a democratic fashion. Although so many were apolitical, black southerners nevertheless possessed a political will and, more importantly, remained important constituents in the political structure of the Jim Crow South and America at large. Having no vote, black southerners expressed their political identity in the forms of personal behavior and culture—speech, ethics, recreation, and so forth. In musical culture, we discern political culture and in so doing we can construct a vibrant narrative of southern blacks’ relationship to Jim Crow. Southern blacks used blues culture first and foremost as a means of individual and collective expression, and the blues format was flexible enough to operate as a template for accommodation and resistance. Being one of the South’s blues people required both social exercises.
Reconstruction did so little to unify the culture of the former slaves with the culture of the former slave owners that Jim Crow politicians a generation later did their best to legislate the former slaves and their descendants out of civil existence. Blacks were forced into near peonage by means of economic exploitation and social oppression. From this position of second-class citizenship, African Americans from the Jim Crow South’s most repressive region, the Lower Mississippi Valley, created a musical culture that inverted and satirized many of the principles and practices of white supremacy, all the while acknowledging the brutal consequences of living on the subjugated side of those practices. World War I became a bitter reminder of failed hopes. Yet many black southerners remained dedicated to resisting Jim Crow social rule, and they began to move en masse from the rural South to ever-growing industrial cities. As a result of urban migration and New Deal relief programs, former sharecroppers developed new attitudes about labor, and World War II gave African Americans the opportunity to rethink their racial identity despite a military that remained segregated at war’s end and a national government that allowed discrimination in the administration of GI benefits.59 All the same, the bluesmen who once scared church folk with tales of the devil at the crossroads found themselves in April 1945 crying out praise to their fallen father, the Hyde Park “aristocrat” Franklin Roosevelt. The bluesmen had undergone quite a transformation: a “me”-centered musical form increasingly reflected the collective identity “we.” Around the turn of the century, the bluesmen were Handy’s rag-clad “lean, loose-jointed Negro” at the rail station in Tutwiler and the “long-legged chocolate boy” that led a local band in Cleveland, Mississippi. By the end of World War II, the bluesmen were like Ledbetter, Wheatstraw, and Broonzy—urbane, politically aware, and very professional in their music making. The African American audiences for which they performed their music, rooted in the Jim Crow South, had undergone quite a transformation as well.60
There was no unified black culture or community in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. African Americans in all sections of the country experienced discrimination during the Jim Crow era, but people sought diverse ways and means to alleviate their pains. Many of the more affluent African Americans worked within mainstream white culture by pursuing higher education. From that point, one could attempt to assimilate to white society— often a painful accommodative process in which the black man or woman could never truly attain acceptance—or one could mount some measure of protest through means familiar to the white majority: newspaper editorials, scholarly articles, and political agitation. Other African Americans, particularly in the South, embraced Christian ideology and the belief in otherworldly deliverance from the suffering of life in the caste system. For the Lower Mississippi Valley’s black musicians and those who participated in the blues culture of jook joints, barn dances, and nightclubs, the coping tactics of assimilation and Christian salvation were not the tools of choice when it came to negotiating the social terrain of the Jim Crow South. The boundaries of the South’s caste system were too rigid, and the harsh realities of economic exploitation too powerful, to escape or disregard. The music and cultural attitudes southern blacks employed to cope with Jim Crow can not be easily sorted into categories of protest or accommodation. As the musicians and musical selections discussed in the pages above demonstrate, however, these coping measures served as means of both resisting and accepting social segregation and political exclusion. In addition to these functions, the blues also provided an outlet for frustration and pain, as well as a forum for individual self-expression and self-affirmation. Partly by intent, and partly by chance, by the 1940s the southern blues had intersected with the larger mainstream American consumer culture and broadened the social horizons of the musicians and listeners as they moved to cities and dreamed new dreams. But even as the bluesmen revealed these new experiences and hopes and their sound was remade by electrification, their music retained its countercultural core.
This story began with August Wilson describing the blues as both “brutal and beautiful, and at crucial odds with the larger world that contained it and preyed and pressed it from every conceivable angle.”61 Dissonant and ironic, sometimes duplicitous, but always soulful, the blues were born of and fed off the fission of segregation. And as Jacques Attali has explained, musicians of all nations—not only those that experience apartheid—maintain a bifurcated relationship with their communities, experiencing both familiar intimacy and distant banishment. Keepers of sacred knowledge as well as explorers on the cultural frontier, blues musicians drew inspiration from the aspirations and frustrations of “the folk,” and returned to the people not just a commodity, or “black music,” but one of the most powerful cultural forces of the “American Century”—consoling, empowering, and entertaining people the world over. After all, when publisher Henry Luce coined that famous phrase in 1941, he was not merely proclaiming an era in history, he was challenging Americans to form “a humanitarian army” to do the “mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind.”62 What a humanitarian effort indeed, giving the beauty of the blues to the people of the world.
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams;
World-losers and world-forsakers,
On whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers
Of the world for ever, it seems.63
Discography
Listed below are the recording session dates and names of the original labels associated with musical recordings cited throughout this work. I have based my original transcriptions on these recordings. Because many of the original recordings are hard to obtain, more recent CD and LP reissues are listed here. Compositions are listed chronologically by session date under the names of featured artists. For further information, see the com
prehensive blues discographies by Dixon and Godrich (1997) and Sonnier (1994).
ALEXANDER, ALGER “TEXAS”
“Section Gang Blues” and “Levee Camp Moan Blues,” Okeh, New York, 1927. Alger “Texas” Alexander: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1927-1928, Document MBCD 2001.
“Penitentiary Moan Blues,” Okeh, New York, 1928. Alger “Texas” Alexander: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2:1928-1930, Document MBCD 2002.
ARNOLD, KOKOMO
“Kokomo Blues,” Decca, Chicago, 1934. Kokomo Arnold: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1930-1935, Document DOCD 5037.
ARTHUR, BLIND BLAKE
“Detroit Bound Blues,” Paramount, Chicago, 1928. Blind Blake: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2:1927-1928, Document DOCD 5025.
BLACKWELL, WILLIE “61”
“Junian’s, A Jap’s Girl Christmas For His Santa Claus,” Library of Congress, West Memphis, Ark., 1942. Blues, Blues Christmas 1925-1955, Document DOCD 2209.
BLUNT, ERNEST (FLORIDA KID)
“Hitler Blues,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1940. Rare 1930s and ‘40s Blues, vol. 3:1937-1948, Document DOCD 5427.
BOGAN, LUCILLE (BESSIE JACKSON)
“Red Cross Man,” Banner, New York, 1933. Lucille Bogan (Bessie Jackson): Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2:1930-1933, Document BDCD 6037.
BRADY, AVERY
“Let Me Drive Your Ford” and “Uncle Sam’s Own Ship,” Testament, Chicago, 1963. The Sound of the Delta, Testament Records 5012.
BROONZY, BIG BILL
“Worrying You Off of My Mind,” American Record Co., New York, 1932. Big Bill Broonzy: Good Time Tonight, Columbia CK 46219.
“The Southern Blues,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1935. Big Bill Broonzy: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3:1934-1935, Document DOCD 5052.
“Going Back to Arkansas,” Vocalion, Chicago, 1935. Big Bill Broonzy: Good Time Tonight, Columbia CK 46219.
“Unemployment Stomp,” Vocalion, Chicago, 1938. Big Bill Broonzy: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 7:1937-1938, Document DOCD 5129.
CAMPBELL, BOB
“Starvation Farm Blues,” Vocalion, New York, 1934. Rare County Blues, vol. 2:1929-1943, Document DOCD 5641.
CLAYTON, DOCTOR PETER
“ ’41 Blues,” Okeh, Chicago, 1941. Doctor (Peter) Clayton: Complete Recorded Works, 1935-1942, Document DOCD 5179.
“Pearl Harbor Blues,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1942. Doctor (Peter) Clayton: Complete Recorded Works, 1935-1942, Document DOCD 5179.
COLEY, KID
“War Dream Blues,” Victor, Louisville, 1931. Clifford Hayes and the Louisville Jug Bands: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 4:1929-1931, RST JPCD 1504-2.
DARBY, BLIND TEDDY
“Meat and Bread Blues (Relief Blues),” Vocalion, Chicago, 1935. Blind Teddy Darby: Complete Recorded Works, 1929-1937, Document BDCD 6042.
DAVENPORT, CHARLES “COW COW”
“Jim Crow Blues,” Paramount, Chicago, 1929. Cow Cow Davenport: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1925-1929, Document DOCD 5141.
DAVIS, WALTER
“Red Cross Blues” and “Red Cross Blues, Pt. 2,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1933. Walter Davis: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1933-1935, Document DOCD 5281.
“Cotton Farm Blues,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1939. Walter Davis: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 5:1933-1952, Document DOCD 5285.
DUPREE, CHAMPION JACK
“FDR Blues,” Joe Davis, New York, 1945. Champion Jack Dupree (and Brownie McGhee): The Gamblin Man, 1940-1947, EPM 159192.
EDWARDS, FRANK
“We Got To Get Together,” Okeh, Chicago, 1941. Country Blues Collector’s Items, vol. 2: 1930-1941, Document DOCD 5426.
ESTES, SLEEPY JOHN
“Diving Duck Blues,” Bluebird, Memphis, 1929. Sleepy John Estes: Brownsville Blues, Wolf Blues Classics BC003.
“Government Money,” Decca, New York, 1937. Sleepy John Estes: Brownsville Blues, Wolf Blues Classics BC003.
EZELL, BUSTER “BUZZ”
“Hitler and Roosevelt,” Library of Congress, Fort Valley, Ga., 1943. Field Recordings, vol. 2: North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, and Arkansas, 1926-43, Document DOCD 5576.
GAITHER, LITTLE BILL
“Champion Joe Louis Blues” (with Honey Hill), Decca, New York, 1938. Little Bill Gaither: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3:1938-1939, Document DOCD 5253.
“Army Bound Blues,” Decca, Chicago, 1939. Little Bill Gaither: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 4:1939, Document DOCD 5254.
“Uncle Sam Called the Roll,” Okeh, Chicago, 1941. Little Bill Gaither: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 5:1940-1941, Document DOCD 5255.
GORDON, JIMMIE
“Don’t Take Away My PWA,” Decca, Chicago, 1936. Jimmie Gordon: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1934-1936, Document DOCD 5648.
GUTHRIE, WOODY
“Goin’ Down the Road,” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1940. Woody Guthrie: Early Masters, Tradition TCD 1017.
HARRIS, PETE
“The Red Cross Store,” Library of Congress, Richmond, Tex., 1934. Texas Field Recordings: 1934-1939, Document DOCD 5231.
HICKS, ROBERT “BARBECUE BOB”
“Mississippi Heavy Water Blues,” Columbia, New York, 1927. Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks): Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2:1928-1929, Document DOCD 5047.
“We Sure Got Hard Times Now,” Columbia, Atlanta, 1930. Barbecue Bob (Robert Hicks): Complete Recorded Works, vol. 3:1929-1930, Document DOCD 5048.
HOUSE, SON
“Dry Spell Blues (part one)” and “Preachin’ Blues (part one),” Paramount, Grafton, Wisc., 1930. Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Son House, Columbia CK 90485.
“Walking Blues,” Library of Congress, Lake Cormorant, Miss., 1941. Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: Son House, Columbia CK 90485.
“American Defense,” Library of Congress, Robinsonville, Miss., 1942. King of the Delta Blues, Fuel 2000 Records 615112.
HOWLIN’ WOLF (CHESTER BURNETT)
“Wang Dang Doodle,” Chess, Chicago, 1960. Howlin’ Wolf: His Best, Chess MCD 09375.
JAMES, NEHEMIAH “SKIP”
“Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues,” Paramount, Grafton, Wisc., 1931. Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues, Yazoo YZO 2075.
JEFFERSON, BLIND LEMON
“Rising High Water Blues,” Paramount, Chicago, 1927. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Milestone M47022.
JENKINS, HEZEKIAH
“The Panic Is On,” Columbia, New York, 1931. Blues and Jazz Obscurities: 1923-1931, Document DOCD 5481.
JOHNSON, BLIND WILLIE
“When the War Was On,” Columbia, New Orleans, 1929. Yonder Come The Blues, Document DOCD 32-20-1.
JOHNSON, LONNIE
“Hard Times Ain’t Gone Nowhere,” Decca, Chicago, 1937. Lonnie Johnson: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1937-40, Document BDCD 6024.
“Baby, Remember Me” and “The Last Call,” Bluebird, Chicago, 1942. Lonnie Johnson: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 2,1940-1942, Document BDCD 6025.
JOHNSON, ROBERT
“Come On In My Kitchen” and “Sweet Home Chicago,” Vocalion, San Antonio, 1936. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, Columbia C2K46222.
“Hellhound On My Trail,” “Me and the Devil Blues,” and “Traveling Riverside Blues,” Vocalion, Dallas, 1937. Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, Columbia C2K46222.
JOHNSON, TOMMY
“Canned Heat Blues,” Victor, 1928. Tommy Johnson: Canned Heat, 1928-1929, Document DOCD 5001.
JONES, CURTIS
“Highway 51,” Vocalion, Chicago, 1938. Curtis Jones: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1: 1937-1938, Document DOCD 5296.
LEDBETTER, HUDDIE (LEADBELLY)
“Tom Hughes Town,” Library of Congress, Angola, La., 1934. Leadbelly: The Remaining ARC and Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 1:1934-1935, Document DOCD 5591.
“Midnight Special,” Library of Congress, Angola, La., 1934. Leadbelly: The Remaining Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 2:1935, Document DOCD 5592.
“Honey, I’m All Out and Down,” Melotone,
New York, 1935. Leadbelly: The Remaining Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 4:1935-1938, Document DOCD 5594.
“Scottsboro Boys,” Library of Congress, New York, 1938. Leadbelly: The Remaining Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 5:1938-1942, Document DOCD 5595.
“Bourgeois Blues,” “Looky Looky Yonder/Black Betty/Yallow Women’s Door Bells,” and “Gallis Pole,” Musicraft, New York, 1939. Leadbelly: In the Shadow of the Gallows Pole, Tradition TCD 1018.
“The Roosevelt Song,” Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., 1940. Let it Shine On Me: The Library of Congress Recordings, vol. 3, Rounder CDROUN-1046.
“Red Cross Store Blues,” Bluebird, New York, 1940. Leadbelly: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 1:1939-1947, Document DOCD 5226.
“Mr. Hitler,” Library of Congress, New York, 1942. Leadbelly: Complete Recorded Works, vol. 4:1944, Document DOCD 5310.
MARTIN, CARL
“Joe Louis Blues” and “Let’s Have A New Deal,” Decca, Chicago, 1935. Carl Martin and Willie “61” Blackwell: Complete Recordings, Document DOCD 5229.
“High Water Flood Blues” and “I’m Gonna Have My Fun (When I Get My Bonus),” Chess, Chicago, 1936. Carl Martin and Willie “61” Blackwell: Complete Recordings, Document DOCD 5229.
