“Drunken Spree,” like “Devil Got My Woman,” was deserving of covetousness: James would eventually rerecord the song in the 1960s, recasting it as a sweet, almost flirtatious ballad, but the 1931 version is an unimpeachable encapsulation of the regret that occasionally accompanies the robust consumption of alcohol. You can practically hear the dehydration in James’s vocals—the humiliation.
I was still agitated from “Drunken Spree” when Whelan played me his favorite country blues record, a song called “Mississippi Bottom Blues” by a particularly obscure performer named Kid Bailey. It was recorded at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis in 1929, in a session for Brunswick Records, a Dubuque, Iowa (and later Chicago)–based label founded in 1916. So far, only one Kid Bailey 78 had been resurrected: “Mississippi Bottom Blues” / “Rowdy Blues” (Brunswick 7114). For years, there were rumors—hissed between collectors—that Bailey may have been a playing partner of Charley Patton’s or, more intriguingly, that “Kid Bailey” was actually a pseudonym for Willie Brown, another blues singer who had confounded and titillated collectors for decades.
According to the company’s surviving ledgers, a guitarist named Willie Brown recorded six songs for Paramount Records in 1930—“Grandma Blues” / “Sorry Blues” (Paramount 13001), “Window Blues” / “Kicking in My Sleep Blues” (Paramount 13099), and “M&O Blues” / “Future Blues” (Paramount 13090), the latter being the only one of Brown’s records presently extant, the others having somehow evaded rediscovery entirely. “Future Blues,” at least, is a masterpiece: “Can’t tell my future, and I can’t tell my past,” Brown growls over a quick, spindly guitar bit. “Lord, it seems like every minute, sure gonna be my last,” he declares, striking the bass string so hard it bounces back off the fret board. It’s that syncopated bass line—smacked into being—that makes “Future Blues” unshakable. Those descending notes somehow convey (precisely, efficiently) the rather unpleasant feeling of being unstuck in time.
Brown’s other records have remained mythical objects, fretted over, imagined. Someone (I suspect John Heneghan) even constructed a Facebook profile in their honor. The page features a rigged-up photo of one of the still-unseen sides, with the words “Kicking in My Sleep Blues” and “Willie Brown” transposed, via Photoshop, onto a black-and-gold Paramount label. When I tried to befriend it—“Friend request sent to The Missing Willie Brown”—my invitation languished unanswered for weeks until, one night, it was mysteriously received.
Besides his partnership with Patton, Brown may or may not have also played second guitar for Robert Johnson—“You can run, you can run, tell my friend Willie Brown,” Johnson keens in “Cross Road Blues”—and Son House. Collectors disagree about exactly what’s going on with the Kid Bailey record: if Bailey was Brown, if there was a second guitar, if the second guitar was Patton, if the second guitar was Brown. “There’s a second guitar in there, I think—maybe Willie Brown, who was kind of a midget. Patton was sort of a short man, too. They were known as the two midgets, and they would play at different barrelhouses,” Whelan said, adjusting his turntable. “And Kid Bailey figures in there somewhere, but nobody seems to be able to find out the real information.” It’s worth noting that Bailey’s “Rowdy Blues” is a very close analog of Brown’s “M&O Blues,” itself a reworking of Patton’s “Pony Blues”—although, of course, the blues just moved like that.
Later, when I was back in New York, I e-mailed around for more details. I knew that there were gaps in our knowledge of early blues history (written accounts of most commercial recording sessions either weren’t kept or didn’t survive), but I hadn’t realized how contentious certain narratives were and the extent to which those mysteries were solved—or at least puzzled over—by collectors. “Well, in MY opinion, it is indeed Willie Brown. Just listen to it and compare the vocals—just about identical to me,” the collector John Tefteller responded. He was an admirer: “The Kid Bailey Brunswick is one of my TOP TEN all time favorite pre-war blues records and I own a mint copy! Now, bear in mind, there is NO proof whatsoever that Kid Bailey and Willie Brown are one and the same. I base my opinion on just listening and comparing voices and playing styles. Others have come to the same conclusion, but we probably will never know for sure, as there is no Brunswick file card for that session and no one alive who was there,” he continued. “Since we only have the one [Willie Brown] Paramount to compare to, I think that when the other two finally surface (and I firmly believe that they will), we can compare those songs to Bailey and again, I bet it’s him.”
King was far less sure; I could practically hear his snort through the computer screen. “Everything that is ‘known’ about Bailey and partner is either based on aural speculation or interviews with [the blues guitarists] Robert Wilkins and Furry Lewis, both of whom were recorded on the same day at the Peabody Hotel in Memphis,” King wrote. “They described Bailey and partner as short, very black men and did not know them,” he continued. “The rumor that was started is that the style of [playing a guitar] ‘up the staff’ in D and the revamping of [Patton’s] ‘Pony Blues’ in C were solely the domain of Patton and Brown, and so therefore these mysterious dudes must be Patton and Brown. I wholeheartedly disagree.
“First, Brown, but especially Patton, were outrageously uninhibited in both their playing and their singing, full of dynamics, bass-string slapping, hollering and bending of the treble strings. These two sides by Kid Bailey and Unknown are exactly not that . . . they are quite subdued and very subtle in the interplay of the guitars,” he continued. “In fact, ‘Mississippi Bottom Blues’ has only one contributing factor by the ‘seconding’ guitar; a sustained, eerie, single note played as a dissonant interval during the first four measures of the I and IV part. If this were Brown and Patton, then it would be them at their most uninspired and timid. Second, plenty of other Jackson and Delta guitarists played ‘up the staff’ and variations of ‘Pony Blues’ including Mattie Delaney, Tommy Johnson, and Ishman Bracey. It was probably just two guys that had worked up clean arrangements of these proto-Delta blues pieces and then were swallowed up by the void,” he finished.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, few collectors were ambivalent on the matter. Dr. David Evans, the director of the Ethnomusicology/Regional Studies doctoral program at the University of Memphis, agreed with Tefteller’s take. Writing in Blues Revue in 1993, Evans admitted he’d once been skeptical, or at least dismissive of the notion: “Many researchers, myself included, asked Son House if he had ever heard of Kid Bailey and played the two pieces for him. The name didn’t ring a bell with Son, but he insisted without wavering that it was the voice of his good friend and partner Willie Brown. Nobody at the time put too much stock in Son’s opinion. The voices sounded different. Brown’s was rough, gravelly, and forced; Bailey’s was lighter and rather airy, suggesting that the nickname ‘Kid’ befit him.” But years of methodical listening had changed Evans’s mind. He now cited a “great number of similarities and musical and lyrical correspondences”—which he outlined in spectacular detail in his essay—as evidence that Brown and Bailey were the same person. He was emphatic.
“One important thing to note is that ‘Bailey’ is capoed up about three frets on the guitar,” he told me in an e-mail. “Assuming he sang the same melodies as he would have sung with the same guitar part un-capoed, his voice would become significantly higher pitched and perhaps lighter in texture (as is actually the case of Bailey compared to what we definitely know of Willie Brown). Presence or absence of alcohol at the recording session could also have been a factor in voice quality. Compare melodies, guitar parts, and vocal rhythmic phrasing, then imagine Willie Brown singing toward the top of his range maybe on a day when he wasn’t so stirred up by alcohol and rowdy buddies in the studio,” he suggested.
My instinct, for what it’s worth, was to agree with King. The two voices sounded similar, but all blues of a certain era hews to idiom, and there was a wildness missing from Bailey’s performance—attributable, perhaps, to the performer�
�s relative sobriety, or to the particular tuning of his guitar. But I liked to think that the ferociousness that animated Brown’s recordings couldn’t be so easily distilled. That it didn’t leave him, not in the sobering light of the Peabody, not on his mother’s porch.
But listening to the record in Whelan’s music room in Key West, its windows shaded by strange and colossal palms, I wasn’t thinking about Brown, or any mysteries not directly contained in Bailey’s delivery—more staid than Brown’s, perhaps, but no less brutal. His voice was clear and resolute, with a tiny quiver that emerged only when he was running low on air. I was already curious about why collectors were so deeply invested in the historical minutiae of certain recordings when the performances themselves were so staggering. It was intriguing to think that Brown and Bailey might be the same guy, but it was also the exact sort of fact I’d mull for a moment or two—because who was Willie Brown, anyway?—and then promptly forget.
I felt both guilty and foolish about that. As a young critic, I’d had to learn the language of criticism: the genres and microgenres, the makes and models of guitars and vintage organs, the allusions to obscure labels and sold-ten-copies compilations. I’d dutifully memorized facts about amplifier settings and pedals and filters and microphones and producers and years of release, even when it felt depressing and hollow, like I was methodically teaching myself exactly how to miss the point. When I wondered whether I just listened differently—whether my experience of music was somehow more emotional, more divorced from its technical circumstances, more about the whole than its pieces—I chastised myself for being arrogant or stupid. (I blanched, in fact, at catching myself using a word as treacly as “emotional.”) And yet: I could love a record more than anything in the world and still not make myself recall its serial number.
That chasm—between a studied response and a gut-borne one—seemed even more palpable in the specific context of prewar blues music, where the hunt for (and especially the subsequent analysis of) the records appeared to run directly counter to the lawless spirit of the work. With a few notable exceptions, blues music was rowdy and social, and its creators led brash, lustful lives. They drank and roamed and had reckless sex and occasionally stabbed each other in the throat. There was something incongruous about sitting in a dimly lit room, meticulously wiping dust and mold off a blues 78 and noting the serial number in an antique log book. Why not dance or sob or get wasted and kick something over? Some collectors, I knew, did exactly that, but for others, the experience of a rare blues record involved a kind of isolated studiousness, which of course was fine—there’s no wrong way to enjoy music, and I understood that certain contextual or biographical details could help crystallize a bigger, richer picture of a song. But I continued to believe that the pathway that allowed human beings to appreciate and require music probably began in a more instinctual place (the heart, the stomach, the nether regions). Context was important, but it was never as essential—or as compelling—to me as the way my entire central nervous system involuntarily convulsed whenever Skip James opened his mouth.
I was beginning to suspect that the collector’s focus on ancient minutiae was a way of mitigating that desire: our relationship with music is intense, but it can be combated, at least in part, by an arsenal of historical truths. In his book Retromania, Simon Reynolds suggests that a proclivity for record collecting and its attendant memorization of facts and figures is “perhaps related to the impulse to master what masters you; containing music within a grid map of systematic knowledge is a form of protection against the loss of self that is music’s greatest gift.” According to Reynolds, because collectors tend to wield such little societal authority, they “become authorities through their taste and cultural expertise.” This both protects them and makes them powerful. (That same desire—to create authority for oneself—is also at the very heart of music criticism. I may have had to learn that behavior, but I was hardly innocent of it myself.)
It was possible, then, that the collector’s concentration on scholarship—on knowing things like whether Kid Bailey and Willie Brown were really one and the same—was actually just a veiled attempt at insulating the entire practice of 78 collecting from unwanted amateurs. Like a wild-eyed grizzly circling her cubs, collectors were protective of their hobby.
What felt incredibly clear to me, though, was how these records worked in their present contexts, what they did for me right now. “Mississippi Bottom Blues” is a sad song about letting people down and then succumbing to their expectations of you—assuming your failures, wearing them like a mask. “I’m going where the water drinks like wine / Where I can be drunk and staggering all the time,” Bailey sings. The most remarkable thing about his delivery is that he doesn’t sound resigned; he sounds free. There is an inertia to his guitar playing, as if to suggest that certain things can’t be stopped or slowed, no matter how hard we try.
/ / Five / /
Suck All the Blossoms and He Leave You an Empty Square
Edison’s Tone Tests, the Wisconsin Chair Company, the Rise and Fall of Paramount Records, Charley Patton, “High Water Everywhere”
“The Phonograph knows more about us than we know ourselves,” Thomas Edison wrote in 1888. “For it retains the memory of many things which we forget, even though we have said them.”
Edison had some prescience regarding his invention’s importance—“It will teach us to be careful what we say,” he warned, “for it imparts to us the gift of listening to ourselves as others might listen to us”—although it’s hard to say whether anyone could have predicted the extent to which it would alter our cultural systems. It took decades for folks to catch up with the repercussions. Music was previously a temporary, lived experience—practiced, perhaps, but extemporaneously rendered. Sound was fleeting. Songs and voices were remembered or they were lost.
On September 17, 1915, Edison Records organized an invitation-only concert in Montclair, New Jersey, booking the contralto Christine Miller, the flautist Harold Lyman, and the violinist Arthur Walsh. It was the first of Edison’s so-called Tone Tests, in which someone placed an Edison Diamond Disc phonograph in the center of a stage and cued a 78. (That night, it was Miller singing “O Rest in the Lord,” an aria from Felix Mendelssohn’s Elijah.) Then Miller (or whomever) would begin performing along with the recording. Periodically, the singer or player would stop moving his or her mouth, or lower the bow. Audiences gasped when they realized they couldn’t tell the difference: a collective breath, snagged. As Greg Milner clarifies in Perfecting Sound Forever, the singers and musicians likely fudged it a bit, imitating the recording rather than trusting it would reflect the live performance, but even that shift felt profound. “From now on,” Milner wrote, “Recordings would not sound like the world; the world would sound like recordings.”
In the 1910s, the Wisconsin Chair Company, a small, Port Washington–based furniture company, began assembling and selling wooden phonograph cabinets under contract from Edison. The production and sale of phonographs was a newly booming industry, and between 1914 and 1916, more than 150 phonograph-related companies formed in the United States, bringing the total up from fourteen to a robust 167 (in 1914 about 540,000 Americans owned a player; by 1919, that number had swelled to over two million). Like many manufacturers of phonograph cabinets, the WCC eventually opted to dip into the still-burgeoning record business, building phonograph machines (under the name Vista) to cram inside its cabinets, then cranking out records to accompany the players.
This wasn’t such a wide leap, strategically speaking. In its early years, the phonograph was promoted almost as a piece of decorative furniture, a showy homage to modernity that could also tie a room together. Phonograph records were sold at furniture stores as accessories; the record shop, as we think of it today, hadn’t yet been conceived. As Paramount historian Stephen Calt wrote in 78 Quarterly volume three, “Record executives could not entertain the notion that people bought phonographs in order to play records . . . it was believed th
at customers bought records for the sake of operating their Victrolas.”
In the summer of 1917, the WCC launched a recording company called the New York Recording Laboratories (the “New York” bit was aspirational; the “laboratories” was a pretentious affect borrowed from Edison) and began releasing 78 rpm records. According to Paramount’s Rise and Fall author Alex van der Tuuk, the NYRL was initially just a way for the company to more effectively push its furniture. Records were an added-value marketing ploy: if you bought a player, the company would toss in five or ten free 78s. Using established studios in New York and Chicago, the Wisconsin-based NYRL released popular cuts by novelty or vaudeville artists like Helen Clark and Arthur Fields and German-language tracks imported from Europe to appease its home state’s considerable German-immigrant population. The recordings were released on a handful of imprints with names like Famous, National, Broadway, Blue Bird, Puritan, and Paramount.
Because records were still something of an afterthought, the WCC didn’t funnel a significant amount of time or money into their production. Bigger, more dedicated labels like Victor, Columbia, and Brunswick paid higher rates and made better-sounding releases, thus drawing greater talent. For the WCC, a 78 was a little like the free plastic umbrella you get when you sign up for a high-interest credit card: not entirely insignificant, but sort of beside the point. Most early Paramount employees knew next to nothing about records or recording; they were chair salesmen. As Calt wrote, “It was this continued reliance on amateurs, more than its accomplishments in producing black music, that made Paramount a unique company.”
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