29 “Kinda like a saw”: Wardlow, “Henry Sims.”
29 “We played juke joints”: Guralnick, Home, p. 66.
29 “My boss really liked that kinda carrying on”: O’Neal and van Singel interview with Muddy Waters.
31 “I loved [Robert Johnson’s] music”: Ibid.
31 “People were crowdin’ ’round him”: Murray, Shots, p. 181.
32 “Memphis, M-E-M-P-H-I-S”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
32 “Robert Nighthawk came to see me”: Palmer, Deep Blues, p. 15.
32 “I got big enough to start playing for the white things”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
33 Silas Green: Muddy discusses the Silas Green show in his Living Blues interview. (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”)
34 “I went to St. Louis”: O’Neal and van Singel interview with Muddy Waters.
3: AUGUST 31, 1941 1941
The 1941 Fisk–Library of Congress Recording Trip: It is often written that the purpose of the 1941 trip was to find Robert Johnson. Lomax, however, had known of the bluesman’s death for at least two years — since the December 23, 1938, “Spirituals to Swing” Concert at Carnegie Hall. There, Lomax’s cohort and friend John Hammond played two Johnson songs from a phonograph onstage as a memorial to the artist so essential to the evening’s narrative — “Walkin’ Blues” and “Preachin’ Blues.”
To boot, Muddy was very nearly not discovered; three weeks before the August Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, Lomax suggested they work in “southwestern Tennessee, which is slightly more stable than the Delta area.” (Lomax, Library of Congress, July 30, 1941.) On August 23, Lomax wrote John Work: “I shall see you the morning of the twenty-fifth, ready, I hope, for our trip to Ripley [Tennessee].” The Mississippi Delta was finally settled on, its population of African Americans being the densest in the nation.
Once they arrived, the recordists were careful to keep their subjects comfortable. When recording, “It was important to keep the machine out of the picture,” Lomax wrote in The Land Where the Blues Began, “so I generally sat between it and the singer and flipped the discs with my back to the turntable. . . . Every side could hold fifteen minutes of sound. This meant long events — church services, games, storytelling, work scenes, extended reminiscences — could be documented. Every time I took one of those big, black, glass-based platters out of its box, I felt that a magical moment was opening up in time. . . . For me the black discs spinning in the Mississippi night, spitting the chip centripetally toward the center of the table, also heralded a new age of writing human history — and so it proved.”
When Muddy was being recorded, Carter Stovall happened to be home from Yale; he saw the strange car on the farm and rode over to investigate. They proceeded with his blessing. According to Lomax’s invoice, the cost of the nineteen-day recording trip in 1941 was $580 ($100 records; $130 per diem, twenty-six days [$5/day]; $200 mileage, 4,000 miles; $150 needles and payment to informants).
For a great sense of the Lomax family’s times, read Benjamin Filene’s Romancing the Folk. He traces their careers from Leadbelly to Bob Dylan. Well written. Check out John Cohen’s CD There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs (Smithsonian Folkways, 2001), on which Lomax performs a soulful “Love My Darling-O.”
A good start for further information on the research of Alan Lomax’s father, John, is Nolan Porterfield’s book Last Cavalier: The Life and Times of John A. Lomax. Another interesting resource is the Library of Congress American Memory Web, which offers online material from the John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip Collection: http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/lohtml/lohome.html.
John Work’s field recordings have never been compiled, but such a project has been under discussion at Revenant Records. These recordings are, in many ways, a missing link in the history of field recordings; they are among the few made by a black recordist of black artists. John Work III died in 1967; he was sixty-five.
35 Fisk Jubilee Singers: Fisk University was founded soon after the Civil War’s end with the purpose of educating freed slaves. The university’s touring chorus, the Fisk Jubilee Singers, was formed around 1871 and found quick public acceptance, raising enough money in America and abroad to build the school’s permanent home. John Work II recorded with them as first tenor and leader in 1909.
36 “I would like very much to have the opportunity”: Work correspondence, Fisk Archives, June 21, 1940.
37 “Everywhere we went”: Lomax correspondence to Jerome B. Wisener, Library of Congress, September 5, 1941.
38 “Burr Clover Blues”: Burr clover was planted in fallow cotton fields to replenish the nitrogen that cotton sapped from the soil; Colonel Stovall had a contract with the Rose Seed Company to plant and grow the seed, giving his farm a second cash crop. “[‘Burr Clover Blues’] is a song of admiration for the fertility of the land on which [Muddy] lives,” Lewis Jones wrote in “The Mississippi Delta,” his unpublished account of the trip, “and incidentally it is a blues inspired by no hard luck, disillusionment, or unrequited love.”
38 “You get more pure thing”: New York Radio interview, May 21, 1966.
38 “Country Blues,” “My Black Mama,” and “Walkin’ Blues”: John Cowley does an in-depth comparison of these three songs in his article “Really the Walkin’ Blues.”
42 “What’s the name of that tuning”: When playing slide guitar, Muddy applied Spanish tuning, also called open G. The tuning is: D G D G B D, low string to high string. Other regionally common tunings Muddy mentions include vestapol tuning (open D: D A D F# A D, low string to high string) and cross-note tuning (open Em [E B E G B E]), which was used by only a few blues artists, notably Bukka White and Skip James.
43 The tension, documented in Lomax’s field notes: Lomax, for example, would soon write about Work: “. . . trying to work out his problems — mostly of incompetence, laziness, and lack of initiative on his part.”
46 Muddy in both the audience and the spotlight: Lomax reports on the next day’s exhaustion in his field notes, following the recording of a baptism service: “By this time we had grown so sleepy, so thirsty, and the mosquitoes so energetic that we had to say good night. The meeting broke up to hear the records, everyone asking anxiously, as usual, where they could buy copies. They were completely delighted by the recordings, laughed and slapped their sides with pleasure over the shouting and moaning.”
46 he couldn’t see a big city in his future: Welding, “An Interview.”
46 The whole encounter took about seven hours: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
50 “Gradually, I began to see Delta culture”: Lomax, Land, p. xiii.
How, in The Land Where the Blues Began, is John Work III represented? He merits one mention, in the preface (p. xii): “The composer John Work agreed to do the musical analyses.”
51 “The fatal error made by many writers”: Work, American Negro Songs, p. 9.
Later in his introduction, on page 38, Work illustrates one of the uses — needs, even — of music in African American society:
The Reverend Israel Golphin tells of his employment with a gang laying railroad tracks in Arkansas because he was a good singer. He had just asked the “boss-man” for work and had been refused. He watched the gang work for a while and noticed that they were in difficulty because the singer or “caller,” as he is sometimes termed, was inexperienced and was timing them wrongly. The men were grumbling. Golphin offered to “call” for them. The gang so appreciated him that they went to the “boss-man” and requested that he be hired — and he was.
4: COUNTRY BLUES 1941–1943
The 1942 Fisk–Library of Congress Recording Trip: The recordists’ return was delayed a couple times. The 1941 cotton harvest proved unusually large and necessitated the first postponement. Wages went from seventy-five cents per hundred pound to two dollars. “Not since 1926 had the wages reached that level. Everybody was in the fields,” Lewis Jones writes
in The Mississippi Delta. “All day white women were driving through the Negro residential district seeking someone who would work for them.” The second delay was a result of the cold weather settling in.
During the delay, Lomax wrote a long and warm letter to Jones in which he described his “attempt to develop a genuine approach to history for radio, and what might possibly be termed a democratic type of propaganda in which a free people has the opportunity to explain for itself in its own terms the nature of its own life.” (Lomax Correspondence, Library of Congress, January 21, 1942.) I thrill to Lomax’s “democratic” ideals, the sense that communication is supposed to be of the people. In a discussion once about his recording “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” he told me, “My story is the discovery of what you can do with a recording machine to democratize communications. Television networks and Hollywood maintain their control by keeping budgets too high to match. They set quality rules which can keep producers of small means off air. This is a way of excluding everybody that doesn’t have big bucks. It turned into a one-way street, from up to down, with receivers that are very inexpensive, and transmitters terribly terribly expensive. It’s an equation of the present communication system. Technically, you can’t get that kind of quality with a documentary, unless you have the cameras on dollies and all the bullshit. That’s what I represent. Oral history was aimed at the general objective of giving ordinary people a voice.”
Honeyboy Edwards remembers Lomax showing up in 1942. “He was driving a brand-new forty-two Hudson Super Six. That’s six cylinder, dark green, never will forget it. He drove up in the yard and my gal’s auntie come out. He got out of the car with a book under his arm — people in the country, a man gets out of a big car, got on a suit — she was scared.”
During the 1942 recordings, “Joe Turner,” sung by Lewis Ford, introduced the subject of old songs. “Son Simms [sic] recalled that the earliest blues were ‘Joe Turner,’ about the long-chain man who took prisoners off to the work camps,” wrote Lomax in The Land Where the Blues Began, “and ‘Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.’ ‘That’s how these women will do you, when you’re off from home,’ said Simms [sic]. ‘They don’t want to get the bed nasty with them and their kid man, so they put some old quilt down on the floor so they can do their business.’ ‘And their good man will never know,’ Lewis chimed in.”
During the 1942 questionnaire, Muddy’s family tells Lomax they’ve been at Stovall nineteen years, which would date their arrival to 1923; however, they were at Stovall in 1920 to answer the census, which suggests they sojourned elsewhere. They tell Lomax they spent a year farming in Arkansas, a town he heard as “Blairsville” but is actually Blytheville. (Muddy’s second cousins lived there; Honeyboy Edwards remembered meeting Muddy on Ash Street there.)
The publication of the Fisk–Library of Congress Coahoma County Study’s findings never saw fruition. John Work completed his manuscript, “consist[ing] of 158 transcriptions of folk songs; a folk sermon found among the Negroes of Coahoma County; a catalogue of the disposition of the records (whether transcribed or not); and a treatise consisting of ten chapters, bibliography, two indexes (general and classified); a biographical appendix; and a preface describing the transcribing process.” (Work correspondence with President of Fisk University Dr. Thomas Jones, Fisk Archives.) It was sent to the Library of Congress and to the president of Fisk, but was misplaced by all parties until discovered during research for this book. Lewis Jones also wrote a treatise, as did his student Samuel Adams, who spent three months doing fieldwork in Coahoma County during 1942.
One concrete result of the Coahoma County Study was a seminar at Fisk for ten students during the spring semester of 1943. It drew from a regional pool of national talent, including Professor Thomas Washington Talley (author of the 1922 study Negro Folk Rhymes, Wise and Otherwise) and Dr. George Pullen Jackson (whose controversial 1943 book, White and Negro Spirituals, emphasized the “European” sources in African American spirituals). Fisk offered nineteen seminars, ranging from “Characteristics of a Folk Culture” to “Dance Music and the Blues,” which covered “Sex and love in the culture. The family pattern and lovemaking conventions. The red-light district.” (“Folk Culture Seminar,” Fisk Archives.) This seminar represented a dramatic change in the focus of African American academia. Previously, Fisk’s focus had been so Eurocentric that lightness of skin tone had long been rumored a prerequisite for admission. John Work’s interest in blues — a music considered not only a low art but also a sin — sparked a cultural reawakening, initiating movement away from Bach and “the classics” and toward the African American tradition.
54 “We did the very first show”: Harvey, “Growing Up with the Blues.”
54 Sonny Boy II: Rice Miller never waxed a record until John Lee Williamson was six feet under God’s brown earth. (He did claim to have recorded in 1929, but the song has never been found.)
In Mississippi, Tom Freeland introduced me to Carl Dugger, an octogenarian from northwest Arkansas. “Out here in the country, we used to walk about eight miles to see Sonny Boy,” Dugger remembered. “Had to pay a nickel to go in. This was back in the nineteen thirties. He had seven or eight harps around his belt, he could put two harps in his mouth at the same time. They put Sonny Boy in jail in the town of Sardis, him and his partner. They played inside all night, let ’em out the next morning, carried them down to a little one-room café. They played around, took up money with a hat, and went on to other places.”
Lockwood and Williamson’s ramblings affected the radio show. “We set some good speed records getting back to the ferry,” Robert Lockwood Jr. told Living Blues. “Sometimes Captain Johnson would wait on us if he knew we were coming, but we missed it a few times and had to sleep in the car until six or seven o’clock before he started again.” (Harvey, “Growing Up.”) KFFA announcers have said they were often concerned they’d give the cue for King Biscuit Time and nothing would happen.
55 “He’d [announce] every spot”: O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”
56 “Sr. Eduardo”: Lomax field notes, Lomax Archives. Further described as “the keen dapper Brazilian sociology student.”
57 “How it come about that [Robert Johnson] played Lemon’s style”: Lomax, Land, pp. 16–17.
57 “General Musical Questionnaire”: This document is on file at the Library of Congress, as is an interesting forerunner. In September of 1941, Lewis Jones made a list of the songs on five jukeboxes in Clarksdale, giving a great sample of what was popular at the time and what was familiar to Muddy; that list is most easily accessible in Tony Russell’s “Clarksdale Piccolo Blues.” Russell notes that the list is overwhelmingly urban. One-fifth of the titles are blues, only two of which are country blues; the remainder of the songs are big bandish and swing. Interestingly, Louis Jordan, Count Basie, and Fats Waller were found on all five jukeboxes.
61 “how long to make twenty dollars”: McKee and Chisenhall, Beale, p. 235.
61 “I carried that record up the corner”: Palmer, “The Delta Sun.”
The mistaken belief that Muddy had his own jukebox may stem from this quote in the O’Neal and van Singel Living Blues interview: “I taken one [record] and put it on my jukebox.” (O’Neal and van Singel, “Muddy Waters.”) “My” jukebox does not refer to one in his home, where, without electricity, it would be useful only as a table, but rather to the jukebox Muddy favored, which was down the road toward Farrell — “before the hill,” according to Magnolia Hunter. That’s where he put his copy of the Library of Congress recording, about which he told Living Blues, “I’d slip and play it, you know — I didn’t want ’em to see me.”
62 “an old cotton picker was asked whether or not the people sang”: Adams, Manuscript, Lomax Archives, p. 51.
62 The machine was ready to take the jobs of men: Agribusiness boomed in the early 1930s. According to Smithsonian historian Pete Daniel, the USDA was excited by the decline of small farmers’ fortunes, because that cleared the
way for the larger farmers to absorb them and to more efficiently use the burgeoning mechanized equipment. Federal policies combined with science and technology to expedite agribusiness. The 1933 Agricultural Adjustment Act, which paid farmers to plow up portions of their crop and evolved into payment to landowners for not planting, further eradicated the need for field hands. (See Daniel, Lost Revolutions.)
63 “two different repertoires”: This quote comes from Lewis Jones’s “The Mississippi Delta”; however, there are sections of Jones’s manuscript that include, verbatim, John Work’s handwritten notes. So I’m surmising that this is Work’s information from his 1943 trip, when he took the picture.
64 “I was doing the same thing”: McKee and Chisenhall interview with Muddy Waters.
64 a suit of clothes and an acoustic Sears Silvertone guitar: Hollie I. West, Washington Post, September 24, 1971, Sec. B.
5: CITY BLUES 1943–1946
Arriving in Chicago: Muddy came north on the Illinois Central Railroad. That link to the North had been established in 1858 as a freight and passenger steamboat line. By 1885 it ran as a railroad from Jackson, Tennessee, to New Orleans. The rail line shifted Mississippi’s development from towns along the river to those along the railway. Clarksdale, previously a nothing town, assumed prominence over Friars Point, which had once been the most important port for trade and travel. The Illinois Central Railroad directly linked the Delta to its terminus in Chicago, connecting the Mississippi farms to the Great Lakes shipping industry. (See Corliss, Main Line of Mid-America.)
Reverend Willie Morganfield, who visited his cousin frequently, said about Chicago, “Chicago, you don’t play in Chicago. You have to be very cautious there. But I walked the street, went where I wanted to go, because I know a little about Chicago.” A. J. Liebling, writer for The New Yorker, spent several months in the city in 1951, and he also learned a little about Chicago, noting the inverse pride citizens had in how bad things were, whether it was civic corruption or the weather. “The contemplation of municipal corruption,” he wrote, “is always gratifying to Chicagoans. They are helpless to do anything about it, but they like to know it is on a big scale.” (Dedmon, Fabulous Chicago, p. 347.)
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