Waters: Fixin’ a puncture on my car. And I’d been mistreated by a girl and it just looked like it run in my mind to sing that song.
Lomax: Tell me the, tell me a little of the story of it, if you don’t mind? I mean if it’s not too personal, I mean I wanna know the facts on how you felt and why you felt the way you did, that’s a very beautiful song.
Waters: Well, I just felt blue, and the song came into my mind and come to me just like that song and I start to singin’ and went on.
Lomax: Well, when you ah, do you, do you, know is that tune, the tune from any other blues that you know?
Waters: Well, yes, it’s been some blues played like that.
Lomax: What, what tune, other blues do you remember, are like that same tune?
Waters: Well, this song come from the cotton field and the boy went, put the record out, Robert Johnson, he put it out, “Walking Blues.”
Lomax: What was the title he put it out under?
Waters: He put it out, the name of “Walking Blues.”
Lomax: Uh-huh, did you know the tune before you heard it on the record?
Waters: Yes, sir, I knew the tune before I heard it on the record.
Lomax: Uh-huh, who’d you learn it from?
Waters: I learned it from Son House.1
Here was the black musical conservatism and penchant for mimicry noted by Alan’s father, John Lomax, in the 1930s and Elijah Wald seven decades later. Consider the melody of “Sittin’ On Top of the World,” a song popularized by the Jackson-based Mississippi Sheiks string band in 1930 but that went on to shape over two dozen later recordings, such as Broonzy’s “Worryin’ You Off of My Mind,” Tampa Red’s “Things ‘Bout Coming My Way,” and Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.”2 Likewise, the cycle of “Black Snake” songs that began in 1926 with Victoria Spivey’s “Black Snake Blues,” which was quickly covered by vaudevillian Martha Copeland and followed by Spivey’s fellow Texan, Jefferson, with “That Black Snake Moan.” Within a year there were ten “Black Snake” songs, mostly recorded by blues divas but also by jazz giant King Oliver. The craze included a piano-player roll (with lyrics provided so folks at home could sing along) issued by pianist Lew Johnson. Jefferson rerecorded his original (on another label), then teamed up with pianist George Perkins for a similar track, “Black Snake Dream Blues.” A year and a half later, Spivey responded by joining guitarist Lonnie Johnson to record “New Black Snake Blues,” and Jefferson offered a final salvo with “That Black Snake Moan Number 2.” People were listening. B. B. King’s Aunt Mina had a collection of Jefferson’s records, and when he listened to Blind Lemon moan on his records, King recalled, “I moaned along with him.” Jefferson and Johnson were King’s heroes, and they powerfully influenced the young musician from Indianola, Mississippi: “I’m here to testify that my two biggest idols,” King wrote in his autobiography, were “guys I flat-out tried to copy.”3
Blues musicians were, of course, not completely conservative and imitative; innovation led to change over time, not only in the technical aspects of the music—electrification and all the possibilities that came with it, for example—but also in the lyrics. We can note the interesting shift from concrete and specific “here and now” pieces such as the raw, guitar-slapping, foot-stomping blues from the country, such as Patton’s “High Water Everywhere” (1929), to Muddy Waters’s “Louisiana Blues” (1951), an electrified tune that blends reality with abstract fantasy. In Patton’s rustic, driven blues, Mississippi locales came alive as he sang about the experience of the Flood of 1927, setting the scene as it was in the Delta communities of Sumner, Greenville, Rosedale, Leland, and others. Twenty years later, Waters referred to a real place—the state of Louisiana—but conjured it as a place that is “behind the sun,” connoting not only the sweltering heat that characterizes the Bayou State from March to September every year but also adding a mystic, otherworldly quality to it. Whereas Patton’s blues were meant to be sold to southern black listeners—folks who may have witnessed the flood firsthand—Waters’s blues were intended for a much wider audience (which included white record-buyers as well) who may have never heard of the specific towns and hamlets so well known to Patton and his fans. Despite their keen understanding of what their respective audiences wanted to hear, Patton and Waters drew on a folk tradition but were not themselves truly folk musicians, as they listened and responded to the commercial hits that had come before them.4
Analyzing and understanding how the countercultural blues helped these musicians attain economic success, physical mobility, and personal freedom requires thinking beyond the diametric accommodation-resistance debate. Plotting the activities of these musicians on a linear spectrum between total acceptance of and total resistance to Jim Crow’s constraints is less helpful than imagining a circle in which those who held economic, social, and political power occupied the center and those who were excluded and ostracized (such as black plantation laborers) floated around on the outside of the circle, looking in.
Furthermore, thinking of the blues as a cultural product of outsiders that could be observed by others helps us recognize that the music does not have to be put into a bracket, as Little Brother Montgomery noted. Rather, a blues song, or the blues in general, can be perceived to have multiple meanings (degenerative, comical, inspirational, depressive), each dependent on the perspective of the creator and the observer. For example, southern black audiences enjoyed Huddie Ledbetter’s performances as pop music, whereas whites sometimes considered his act as a “step’n’fetchit” routine—an impression Ledbetter often encouraged. Even individuals in the same family could interpret blues music to mean different things. What was nostalgic and antiquarian to John Lomax was radical and inspirational to his son Alan. Little wonder that Ledbetter recorded country blues reminiscent of field hollers (“Green Corn,” “Whoa, Back, Buck!”) for the elder Lomax, while the singer produced polished satires representing the consciousness of the proletariat (“Bourgeois Blues”) for the leftist-leaning Alan. These varied meanings grew out of the shape-shifting tendencies in blues culture. Handy drew on a vernacular music tradition that was often reshaped to fit the times, in general, or, more specifically, time—as in time of day or time of the week. Many, including Richard Wright, thought that the secular and sacred veins of black music were quite separate, but there were many cases of blues musicians turned preachers, and vice versa, and it was only a slight maneuver to shift from singing about “my baby” on Saturday to singing about “my Jesus” on Sunday.5 Even when you are singing about your “baby,” who treats you so mean, you might actually be singing about the boss-man, who you cannot talk back to directly. Appreciating the lycanthropic nature of the blues helps resolve cultural production versus reception problems and paradoxes; in other words, defining blues as commodity and blues as social expression are by no means mutually exclusive.
Because history is the study of people, not things, our study of the prewar blues invariably brings us into contact with multidimensional figures who did not always fit the scholarly model of “the bluesman,” especially since the genre and those who played it had not yet been canonized by outside observers. Also, as Samuel Charters noted in 1959, those definitions were created by writers who “tended to select certain artists out of [southern black culture] who, generally, came closest to a white concept of what a blues artist should be.”6 With this in mind, it becomes increasingly difficult to identify musicians who only played blues songs fitting the twelve-bar, AAB-lyrical model. Broonzy, especially after he moved to Chicago, played a lot of tunes such as “Goin’ Back to Arkansas” that could easily be labeled as jazz numbers. Johnson recorded songs such as “Red Hots” that are hard to define in any genre (but certainly are not “blues”). Most of these early “blues musicians” easily slid over into gospel songs; consider Patton’s popular recording of “I Shall Not Be Moved.” Wald summarizes Blind Lemon Jefferson’s repertoire: “While advertisements often described Jefferson as ‘down home,’ and hi
s records certainly appealed to a regional market, he was not in any way a nostalgia act . . . He could play other styles, from gospel to ragtime, but the twelve-bar blues was where he felt most at home.” “If I could record what ever I want to play,” claimed Little Brother Montgomery, a popular prewar bluesman, “I would have recorded some great numbers. Ballads and things like that.”7 These musicians lived in the “blues world,” even if their music was not exclusively blues; they sought to be dynamic crowd-pleasers, not existential artists, and few represent the confluence of creative genius with popular appeal better than Leadbelly.
The Murderous Minstrel Comes to Manhattan
On Friday, January 4, 1935, songster Huddie Ledbetter made a major public appearance at a special luncheon meeting of the New York chapter of the Texas-Exes alumni association at New York City’s midtown Hotel Montclair. Well-known folklorist John Lomax—cofounder of the Texas-Exes—and his son, Alan, brought Ledbetter to perform his authentic southern songs for the audience. University of Texas alums were surprised when the luncheon room filled with news reporters and photographers, all happy to pay the seventy-five-cent admission to see the Lomax’s “colored chauffeur” from Louisiana play his blues, work camp, and prison songs. In the midst of the Great Depression, here was a man from northern Louisiana and eastern Texas, representing to urbane New Yorkers the raw and tragic existence of life in the Dust Bowl. To the white audience in New York, Ledbetter’s highly anticipated performance guaranteed an interesting experience as well as a bit of nostalgia for their Texas homeland.8
It would be an interesting experience for Ledbetter, too. Ledbetter and other southern musicians carried the blues out of the plantation districts and black neighborhoods of the Old Southwest where it originated, and although he was already an accomplished musician, he was as yet unfamiliar to white urban audiences. Ledbetter, learning music from friends, relatives, and strangers, was influenced by the rhythms of tedious gang labor on prison farms and cotton plantations. These polyrhythms, ancient syncopated sounds carried by Yoruba and Bantu people from western Africa, had survived the terrorizing Middle Passage across the Atlantic and the long dark night of slavery (an institution that was more brutal than it was peculiar) despite slave owners’ bans on drums and other instruments. Ledbetter’s call and response vocal patterns—so common in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century black music—were Senegalese and Malian field holler transplants that had thrived in the farming culture of black southerners. While in the countryside, his typical venues included barn dances and fish fries—short Saturday night escapes from the drudgery of field labor or logging camps. There he might play older blues and folksy tunes for his dancing audience, set to peppy rhythms strummed out on his twelve-string guitar. But this country musician was drawn to cities, and he often played to alcohol-soaked patrons in jook joints in rough and tumble establishments on Shreveport’s Fannin Street or in Dallas’s Deep Ellum neighborhood. In the jooks, defined by Zora Neale Hurston as “Negro pleasure house[s],” or “bawdy house[s]” where “men and women dance, drink, and gamble,” Ledbetter pleased his audiences with hipper barrelhouse dancing tunes or newer, more polished blues songs with flashy guitar accompaniments.9 No matter the location, Ledbetter’s music was performed in a world populated by jealous lovers and rowdy drunkards. Men and women, tired from heavy labor under the southern sun or in hot warehouses, gathered for music and escape. The poorest drank Sterno and home-stilled moonshine; the luckier drank whiskey or dabbled with whatever else—marijuana, cocaine, opium—might be available. Violence was common in the blues world, where the “possibility of deadly confrontation with jealous girlfriends, jealous husbands, overexcited jook patrons, back-alley criminals, and even one’s fellow musicians . . . hovered in the cultural air, a constant threat.” Ledbetter’s contemporaries, Broonzy and Montgomery, told sensational stories about callous men coming into jooks and gambling houses and shooting one of the patrons only to stand on the dying body so they could get a better view of the craps tables!10
Those outside the vernacular black music world regarded this culture with extreme distaste. To most white southerners, black music was at best “a parlor accomplishment, not . . . a means of . . . support,” and was at worst the evidence of the general moral depravity of their African American neighbors. To the small middle class of the black South, minstrelsy and the other secular black musical traditions that had given rise to the blues were shameful cultural expressions of their community’s “lower sorts”; musicians, Handy’s teacher had remonstrated, “were idlers, dissipated characters, whisky drinkers and rounders.” In the eyes of the faithful churchgoers, the blues were devil’s music, made all the more objectionable because the musicians sometimes paraded gospel tunes between their sinful reels or, worse, twisted spirituals into voodoo-like blues. “I’d rather see you in a hearse.” Handy’s father told him: “I’d rather follow you to the graveyard than hear that you had become a musician.” Subversive and marginalized, the blues counterculture afforded poor southern blacks some autonomy while simultaneously providing segregationist whites with the moral justification for their social dominance by reflecting, and often celebrating, the dark and criminal side of poor black life in the South.11
In contrast, Ledbetter’s white audience in New York thought themselves on the cutting edge of all the greatness modernity had to offer, having just witnessed the completion of both the Chrysler and Empire State buildings a few years before the ex-convict guitarist arrived. For the New Yorkers, imagining the songster before them in his native atmosphere was an attraction to the performance. Ledbetter’s home in the cotton country of Louisiana evoked in the New Yorkers’ minds visions of the Dust Bowl’s economic and environmental ruin, of farmers poorer than the dirt they tilled, of a region that had been, until recently, something of a wild western frontier presided over by the maverick Huey P. Long. But Ledbetter’s personal “blues” history, more than his home region, shaped his appeal to the audience in New York. He was an example of the dangerous “New Negro, footloose and restive, undisciplined by slavery, unschooled in the obsequiousness and demeanor whites expected of black men and women.”12 Popularly known by the intimidating moniker, Leadbelly, Ledbetter had a long history with the law. His first stint in prison came in Texas after being convicted of assault in autumn 1915. He escaped the work farm in Harrison County and began a new life under the alias Walter Boyd, but he shot and murdered another man in 1917 and was sentenced to jail for life. In a bizarre string of events, Ledbetter won his freedom by singing a song to the governor of Texas in 1924, and then, six years later, was again incarcerated at Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana. When John and Alan Lomax visited Angola in 1934 to record prison songs, Ledbetter recorded another “pardon song” for the Louisiana governor, and the musician was freed again. He then took up with the Lomaxes, agreeing to be John’s chauffeur, and moved with them to New York, where Ledbetter was arrested once more.
When the Lomaxes presented Ledbetter to their New York audience, they consciously constructed Leadbelly’s image out of his rural, southern past. Many northerners had seen Paul Muni’s recent film portrayal of the harrowing existence of men on southern chain gangs, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932); now voyeuristic New Yorkers could witness a real former prisoner in action. The Herald Tribune announced Leadbelly’s arrival in the “Big Apple” with the headline “Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes Between Homicides”; Life magazine’s headline read, “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.” Reflecting his earlier work with folksong preservation, John Lomax was offering an authentic representative of the oppressed southern black folk. Leadbelly, Lomax maintained, “plays and sings with sincerity . . . His music is real music.”13
To buttress their claim that Leadbelly was the “real thing,” the Lomaxes carefully crafted his stage appearance. Despite the singer’s own honed sense of fashion—he self-identified as a restless, flashy ladies’ man—and his new high-class acquaintances amon
g New York philanthropists and Harlem club notables such as Cab Calloway, the Lomaxes dressed Ledbetter in farm laborer’s garb. In the spotlight at the Hotel Montclair, Huddie Ledbetter appeared as Leadbelly, a middle-aged man strapped with strong muscles as a result of years of work camp labor and working off a hangover from a night on the town in Harlem. Ledbetter’s wardrobe could have been taken from a bygone blackface minstrel show. He wore a rough blue work shirt over a yellow undershirt and old-fashioned high-bib overalls. Around his neck he wore a red bandana— which was to become a trademark accessory—and a wide-brimmed farmer’s straw hat sat atop his head. His notably rural dress was decidedly unfashionable in the sixth year of the Depression, but the image served the Lomaxes’ aim of presenting a crude, authentic folk artifact. Reporters wanted to see this “murderous minstrel” up close but not too close; they had heard the rumors of how Ledbetter had, in a drunken rage, attacked white bystanders at a Salvation Army meeting in Louisiana. Leadbelly was the stereotypical southern black “badman”: womanizer, murderer, escaped convict, wandering singer.
Leadbelly’s performance gave the audience of Texas-Exes and newsmen what they had expected and in many ways played to common stereotypes of black minstrelsy. Leadbelly awed the reporters as they strained to make out his heavy cotton-country accent. The singer belted out his verses in a loud voice, accompanying himself on a beat-up, green twelve-string guitar held together by wires and string. He worked in a variety of songs, trying to pinpoint his audience’s desire so he could continue to please, as a good live entertainer does. “When you went into a place,” bluesman Johnny Shines asserted, “you’d hit on different numbers till you find out what they really liked, and whatsoever they liked, that’s what you played.”14 Accordingly, Ledbetter sang work songs such as “Bring Me Li’l’ Water, Silvy” and “Whoa, Back, Buck!” a song about the commands shouted to field mules. He worked in old blues tunes such as “All Out and Down” and the classic party song about cocaine snorting, “Take a Whiff on Me.” One of Ledbetter’s favorite songs at the time was “Shorty George,” and he also performed it for the Texas-Exes. The “Shorty George” was a train near a Texas prison farm that brought visitors—often an inmate’s wife or lover— to the compound, and Ledbetter’s blues about the Shorty George was a frank depiction of the isolation of convict life. It was also layered with dual gender roles for women; in the first verse, the departure of women represented sexual abandonment of the men, and in the second verse, Leadbelly (in rather Victorian fashion) suggested that masculine criminality stemmed from the absence of the civilizing effect of the mother/teacher figure:
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