Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  In nineteen hundred and twenty-three, when the judge taken my liberty away from me,

  In nineteen hundred and twenty-three, when the judge taken my liberty away from me,

  Say my wife come, wringing her hands and crying, “Lord, have mercy on that man of mine.”

  But then Ledbetter shifted the song into something of a ballad, a form the musicianer was quite familiar with as a cotton country native. The second verse established his worthiness, with Ledbetter positioning himself in the role of an obedient court entertainer, singing to Neff: “I am your servant, compose this song.” The last verse was Ledbetter’s appeal for mercy, but the entreaty was made not to the lord, as his wife cries in the first verse. Rather, Ledbetter had to plea to a more immediate authority—the state governor:

  Please, honorable governor, be good and kind,

  If I don’t get a pardon, will you cut my time?

  If I had you, Governor Neff, like you got me,

  Wake up in the morning, I’d set you free.

  For rhyme’s sake, and to make a better impression, Ledbetter altered the date of his conviction and left concealed the reasons behind his incarceration, focusing the song instead on his lost liberty and his wife’s emotional injury. Governor Neff was evidently impressed with Ledbetter’s ability and sympathetic to his plight. Although he had been elected on a reform platform and had promised to eliminate pardon buying—he only issued five pardons in his tenure as governor—Neff promised Ledbetter that he would issue him a pardon before he left office, and he made good on his pledge on January 16, 1925. Ledbetter was once again a free man.28

  Ledbetter’s Sugarland performance demonstrated the blues medium to be no simple, one-purpose tool for resistance or accommodation. In winning his freedom with his music, Ledbetter made manifest the personal and cultural effects of both humility and pride that shaped what W. E. B. Du Bois labeled the “double consciousness” of African Americans. He humbled himself by adopting the personality traits middle- and upper-class whites wanted to project onto blacks. His dancing and shuffling convinced his white onlookers he was amiable and servile. To the governor and white onlookers, Ledbetter was rewarded for posturing himself as subservient, not hostile. On the other hand, that single performance for the governor proved Ledbetter’s individual power of agency through signifying the old, African epistemological tool of troping cultural material and experiencing things at multiple levels of existence simultaneously. Neff and his staff may have looked down on Leadbelly for his minstrelsy, but he could know privately that he was playing them as much as he was playing his guitar. His music empowered him where other black inmates were powerless. By relying on the skill that had kept him from a life of sharecropping, Ledbetter had convinced state officials to release him from one of the darkest holes of the Jim Crow prison system.29

  After his pardon, Ledbetter ended his long, tumultuous stay in Texas and returned to his native northwestern Louisiana. He resumed his musical profession but after several years found himself in jeopardy again. At a Mooringsport Salvation Army band performance in 1930, Ledbetter got into an argument with a white man, Dick Ellet, that resulted in a knife fight. Ledbetter wounded Ellet and was immediately arrested. If not for the efforts of the local police, Ledbetter likely would have been lynched. After a swift, one-day trial, Ledbetter was convicted of assault with intent to murder and sentenced to six to ten years of hard labor at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola—a facility every bit as rough (and perhaps more so) than Sugarland. This time, there were no escape attempts, and Ledbetter sought his release through legal channels by applying for a sentence commutation.

  When John Lomax and his eighteen-year-old son, Alan, made their second trip to Angola in the summer of 1934, they were eager to record Ledbetter’s material. The Lomaxes represented the Library of Congress’s newly established Archive of American Folksong and were song hunting for their compendium, American Ballads and Folksongs. John felt that prisons sheltered the “uncon-taminated” folk song material he sought, “reasoning that men serving long sentences and therefore unexposed to recent commercial recordings were ideal sources for older Negro songs.” The Lomaxes had met Ledbetter in a visit to the prison the previous year, and this time they spent a whole day with the singer, recording notable tunes including “Midnight Special,” “Good Night, Irene,” and “Blind Lemon Blues”—a tribute to Ledbetter’s late colleague that had made it big in the race record industry. At some point during the session, Ledbetter sang a pardon song similar to the one he created for Pat Neff, but this one was directed at O. K. Allen, U.S. senator Huey Long’s successor in the Louisiana governor’s office.30 The Lomaxes took the recording to Governor Allen in Baton Rouge later that night, but Allen was in a meeting with the senator, so the disc was left with a secretary. Within a month, Ledbetter was released from Angola, and blues enthusiasts have since celebrated Ledbetter as the singer who convinced two southern governors to let him go. Although the Lomaxes always claimed to have played a part in Ledbetter’s case, a review of the evidence suggests that the timing of the singer’s release from Angola was coincidental. Prison officials maintained that he was not pardoned but released on the common policy of “good time served.”31 More important than the mechanisms behind Ledbetter’s return to freedom was the relationship Ledbetter developed with the Lomaxes. For reasons suiting both parties—Ledbetter wanted to get away from Louisiana and John Lomax liked the idea of having a resident repository of authentic folk songs—the Lomaxes hired Ledbetter as their chauffeur. Ledbetter and the elder Lomax often argued, but traveling with the Lomaxes provided personal and expressive freedoms the musician could not have enjoyed if he stayed in the South.

  For most of the remainder of his life, Ledbetter lived in New York City when he was not traveling with the Lomaxes on research trips. During the late 1930s, while communist lawyers argued the Scottsboro case in Alabama, Ledbetter became involved in New York’s socialist scene. Alan Lomax was drawn to communist ideology as a result of the extensive travels to the South’s work camps and prison farms in his youth, and soon he had Ledbetter in touch with Popular Front leaders, radical authors, and folksong activists. Author Richard Wright, a recent émigré to the city, befriended Ledbetter, as did folk singers Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger. He joined an unemployed persons group, the Worker’s Alliance, but Ledbetter was not accustomed to using his music as a form of overt protest. In the Depression-wracked 1930s, though, many of the musicians around him began to take a more acerbic tone with their songwriting.

  Ledbetter’s association with political radicals of the proletarian folk revival later led many influential blues historians to dismiss him as an anomaly not representative of blues culture in the South; his figure is minimized in important studies of blues culture such as Sam Charter’s The Country Blues, David Evan’s Big Road Blues, and Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning. To authors who believed that the protest element in the blues was “demonstrably insupportable,” the post-Angola Ledbetter appeared corrupted and separated from his “uncon-taminated” folk roots as he became conversant in the lingo of the New York Left. Any songs Ledbetter wrote that were critical of Jim Crow’s restrictions on black life must have been “incited” by ideologue record executives, Oliver wrote.32 But Ledbetter’s most publicized song about social consciousness, “Bourgeois Blues,” sprang directly from discrimination he experienced in the nation’s capital during his visit there in 1937. Ledbetter and his second wife, Martha, accompanied Lomax to Washington, D.C., to record some of his material for the Library of Congress, but they found racial obstacles around every corner, as he and Martha were denied lodging and meals in public establishments. One of their friends, embittered about the extent of Jim Crow in the nation’s capital, joked that Washington was a “bourgeois town.” Ledbetter quickly developed a blues-derived tune from his friend’s jest, conflated class constructs with racial constructs, and set his Leftist lyrics to the following chorus: “Lawd, it’s a bourgeois town, got t
he bourgeois blues, baby, gonna spread the news all around.” The “news” he was spreading was that “everywhere we go the people would turn us down”:

  Me and Martha, we was standin’ upstairs, I heard a white man yell, “I don’t want no niggers up there.”

  After another verse in which he plainly stated, “I don’t want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie,” Ledbetter took the capital city to task:

  Them white folks in Washington, they know how, chuck a colored man a nickel just to see him bow.

  Tell all the colored folks, listen to me, don’t try to find no home in Washington, D.C.

  Cause it’s a bourgeois town, ooh, a bourgeois town,

  I got the bourgeois blues, and I’m still gonna spread the news.

  “Bourgeois Blues,” with its obvious anti-Jim Crow theme, was exactly the kind of song blues scholars such as Robert Springer considered “peripheral” to any serious study of black popular music. To exclude songs such as “Bourgeois Blues,” however, obscures the real changes experienced by southern blacks during that era. With his indictment of Jim Crow practices set in Marxist language, Ledbetter displayed a new sense of his relationship to the society at large. The singer seemed impotent to combat the discrimination he suffered, yet the song itself served to communicate a sense of injustice—a sense that could be shared with the traditional market of black consumers of race records, as well as his new class-conscious white audience in the Northeast.33

  The Lomaxes went to prisons to record musicians like Ledbetter because they did not want to document professional compositions the likes of Handy’s or Bradford’s sung by Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey; rather, they wanted to catch the Charley Pattons and Blind Lemons of the Delta South before they made it to Wisconsin or Illinois to record. However, the Lomaxes may have overdrawn the line between commercial success and folk consciousness. Neither an anomaly nor a product of radical record executives, “Bourgeois Blues” was rooted in Ledbetter’s experience of being an African American in the South. “Bourgeois Blues,” like “Shorty George,” “Last Monday,” and “Governor Pat Neff,” all communicated the social consciousness of the singer. Taken collectively, these songs tell the story of Huddie Ledbetter—a man who was raised in inequity, developed troublesome behaviors, and found himself time and again in the brutal prison system but who used his music to attain the personal and expressive freedom necessary to convey his own sense of Jim Crow’s injustices. Ledbetter’s music was not wholly protest, but neither did it demonstrate an acceptance of his role as a black southerner in a white South. Rather, the music revealed that the individual will and spirit he exhibited while a convict survived imprisonment and degradation. Despite the Lomaxes’ and others’ willingness to define Ledbet-ter as a beleaguered folk singer or proletarian dissident, his music was evidence that this sharecropper’s son had maintained from his early adult years a sense of self-worth that drove him to seek liberty in the face of Jim Crow. Within the restrictive and punitive society of the South, blues music’s ability to accommodate and resist made powerful negotiators of both the art and the artists.

  As we have seen, very few musicians fit the model of the “existential wander ing bluesman” who exclusively plied twelve-bar, AAB blues, and Leadbelly is more aptly labeled a “songster” than a “bluesman.”34 But his was certainly a blues life, and it was representative of the lives of many fellow musicians who made their living in the prewar era: He left the South, played the “double-game” of accommodation and resistance, became more political in his consciousness and song-writing, and often found himself surrounded by sex, drugs, and violence. Many of Ledbetter’s fellow musicians in the Jim Crow era shared this counter-cultural lifestyle, which developed as a response to powerful oppressive forces exerted on black southerners in the social and political arenas.

  I Believe Someone’s Tryin’ to Steal My Jelly Roll: Segregation and Disfranchisement

  Around the turn of the twentieth century, the white demagogues’ arguments in favor of segregation stemmed from their conception of African Americans as a savage race incapable of developing social institutions and, in the paternalists’ minds, needing the civilizing benefit of white control. Whereas Henry Ford and others argued that European immigrants could be assimilated in the great melting pot, many American whites expected that blacks would be permanently different. European immigrants could anglicize their names, dress like the native born, and develop American accents, but the permanence of skin color defined African Americans as a perpetual “other” in the minds of their white neighbors.

  Segregation, disfranchisement, and “Judge Lynch” fostered a blues counterculture grounded in irrevocable dissatisfaction with the mainstream culture of white supremacy and black otherness. “To be black is to be blue,” wrote theologian James Cone, “Leadbelly is right: ‘All Negroes like the blues . . . because they was born with the blues.’ “ The truth, for Cone, was in the lyrics:

  If de blues was whiskey,

  I’d be drunk all de time.

  If de blues was money,

  I’d be a millioneer.35

  Poet Amiri Baraka likewise called African Americans a “blues people”; living in a white-dominated society, any black person who had grown to adulthood would have learned the feeling of the blues. There is little difference between the academicians’ claims and bluesman Memphis Slim’s statement that, “I think all black people can sing the blues more or less.”36 Where did this inclination come from? Can we identify the genesis of the southern black tendency toward blues expression? If bluesman Bukka White was to be believed, the blues started “back across them fields, you know, under them old trees, under them old log houses, you know . . . It didn’t start in no city, now. Don’t never get that wrong. It started right behind one of them mules or one of them log houses, one of them log camps or the levee camp. That’s where the blues sprung from.” Or, in the straightforward words of Muddy Waters, blues “came from the cotton field.” John Lee Hooker had a more specific geography in mind when he opined on the blues’s genesis: “I know why the best blues artists come from Mississippi. Because it’s the worst state. You have the blues all right if you’re down in Mississippi.”37

  The blues counterculture was initially a product of the late nineteenth-century racial dynamic in the states of the Lower Mississippi Valley. By no means a long-standing stronghold of slavery, much of the Old Southwest was developed for cotton agriculture in the few years just prior to the Civil War. During Reconstruction, areas such as northern Louisiana and the Mississippi Delta only recently had been plantation frontiers, but the sense among local landowning whites that economic control of the black labor force was of paramount importance had taken root quite fully in the waning years of slavery. As Nicholas Lemann writes, the Delta was “a purposive country, the purpose being to grow cotton.”38 In the wake of Confederate defeat, blacks in the Lower Mississippi Valley, like their peers throughout the South, staked out claims to freedom and projected a vision of their future “laden with possibility.” Buttressed by an unprecedented sense of hope that they could reorder the postbellum South, blacks sought opportunities to gain “what they had seen whites enjoy—the vote, schools, churches, legal marriages, judicial equity, and the chance not only to work their own plots of land but to retain the rewards of their labor.” Freed-men such as Wes Ledbetter, Leadbelly’s father, found the capacity for southern change under Reconstruction to be limited and the dream of land ownership to be more elusive than originally anticipated.39 As historian James Roark has stated, “Emancipation confronted planters with a problem their deepest convictions told them was impossible to resolve—the management of staple-producing plantations employing free black labor.”40 “No slave song need speak about the slave’s lack of money,” Amiri Baraka noted, but the blues musicians would incessantly wail about hard times.41

  Meanwhile, the global cotton market enticed the federal government and southern cotton-growing states to stabilize black labor for the sake of agricultural pro
duction. These social and economic concerns outweighed the liberal ideology of Emancipation, and historians have come to understand the construction of the Jim Crow South as the institutional (re)imposition of a white supremacist worldview and, to some extent, customary interracial behavior patterns extant before 1890. As C. Vann Woodward argued in his seminal work, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, “The phase that began in 1877 was inaugurated by the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, the abandonment of the Negro as a ward of the nation, the giving up of the attempt to guarantee the freedman his civil and political equality, and the acquiescence of the rest of the country in the South’s demand that the whole problem be left to the disposition of the dominant Southern white people.”42 Perhaps Reconstruction had in some way altered the general mindset of the South, W. J. Cash mused in 1941, but “it was still a world in which the first social principle of the old was preserved virtually intact: a world in which the Negro was still ‘mud-sill,’ and in which a white man, any white man, was in some sense a master.”43