Diggin, diggin’, diggin’ in Kentucky
Diggin’ in Tennessee; diggin’ in North Carolina
Diggin’ in France.25
An Ambivalent Patriotism
We see many fewer war-related blues songs than songs about the Great Migration, which makes it harder to extrapolate about blacks’ military experience from these sources. The musical evidence left by black southerners participating in the war suggested that many of them had eye-opening experiences, even if they did not feel completely welcome in the effort.26 Although black songsters readily vilified Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm—leader of the infamous “Hun” hordes and probably the only white person blacks could openly demonize— the tone of their music was not overtly patriotic. John Jacob Niles, a white air service pilot with the American Expeditionary Force, kept a war music diary in which he transcribed the ballads, blues, and other songs he heard among American soldiers in France. Upon his return to America, he compiled them in a volume named Singing Soldiers. Niles’s black subjects regularly incorporated the physical and psychological realities of the war into their music, but rarely did they sing of the war as the route to “racial uplift,” as did the black newspapers at home. More common were songs that revealed individual liberation, such as the following fragment from a popular black soldier song celebrating France’s societal tolerance:
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
Mademoiselle from Armentiers, parlez-vous,
I’d like to git a sip
O’ what you got restin’ on your hip—
Inky Dinky, parlez-vous.27
Employing familiar sexual codes, black soldier-musicians performing “Mademoiselle from Armentiers”—as the song was widely known—conveyed to southern black men the quite peculiar experience of socializing with white French women. Many of the songs Niles transcribed, like “Mademoiselle from Armentiers,” reinforced these soldiers’ masculinity and sense of individual self-worth, despite General Pershing’s orders that they remain in their “place.”
Since the American military leadership seemed determined to keep black servicemen from experiencing patriotic pride, musicians reflected a fairly individualistic point of view. A verse from “Soldier Man Blues,” transcribed by Niles from a blues singer he encountered among the black troops in France, illustrates this point. The anonymous singer questioned the war: Was it truly to make the world better for all? Individual imperatives trumped any notion of the collective weal.
I got the soldier man sadness, the soldier man blues,
I want to do what I want and I want to do it when I choose.
And:
I’d rather be pimpin’ fer one-eyed Kate, and do a first-class job at a cut-price rate,
Than tote a gun in this man’s war, er drive a noisy motor-cycle side car.28
More than just the grumblings of a doughboy, “Soldier Man Blues” tapped into common attitudes about resisting working for “the man.”
Songs written from the home front were likewise less than enthusiastic about celebrating the war for democracy. Kid Coley, a river-town bluesman from the Ohio Valley, complained of shortages at home in his song, “War Dream Blues.” Willie Johnson, blinded by his stepmother at the age of seven, experienced the war at home in Texas. Johnson split his time between preaching and playing music, developing a unique style that matched virtuosic blues guitar with lyrics inspired by spirituals. After the war he took a bold step by recording “When the War Was On,” a fast-paced balladlike song in which he growls out the lyrics in his typical fashion. Blind Willie Johnson’s satire on President Wilson and complaints about rationing represented rare, open discontent with the war, complicating what appears otherwise to be a patriotic song. The first two verses establish a collective mentality:
Everybody, well, when the war was on,
Everybody, well, when the war was on,
Everybody, well, when the war was on,
Well, they registered everybody, when the war was on.
Well, it’s just about a few years, and some months ago,
United States come and voted for war.
Sammy called the men from the East and the West:
“Get ready boys, we got to do our best.”
Singing that the “United States . . . voted for war,” Johnson suggested perhaps that the collective action described in the first verse—”they registered everybody”—represented a democratic consensus among Americans, and the feeling invoked in the second verse—”from the East and the West”—is national and unifying. But in the same line and thereafter, Johnson imposes his southern regional understanding on the international conflict, personalizing the U.S. military as “Sammy,” a symbolic bossman figure in the employ of the plantation owner (manifested as Wilson).
Well, President Wilson, sittin’ on his throne,
Makin’ laws for everyone.
Didn’t call the black man, to lay by the white,
[guitar replaces lyrics].
The subtle irony and coded language of his first two verses is painfully exposed in the third; Johnson demonstrates masterful technique in employing early blues countercultural tropes. Johnson’s omission of the verse’s last line not only provides evidence of musicians’ self-censorship in recording sessions, it is also a marker of the limits of black speech and a clue pointing to the importance of the audience in blues performance: Who was listening? The artist could control the lyrics at the moment of performance when the music was live but lost that control once the music was etched into a disc. It’s not clear how Johnson usually ended this verse in front of live audiences, but one might guess that it was provocative to the extent that Johnson did not want it recorded and heard by just anybody. In the absence of Johnson’s singing voice, we might imagine a fairly scathing indictment of the war, the president, or American race relations in general.
But Johnson’s tone is documentary, not polemical. The remainder of the song returns to the unifying themes of the first verses, praising American success—”boy’s whupped them German, home at last”—and celebrating U.S. military strength: “Uncle Sammy had the greatest share of muscle and man.” He shows how everyone had to follow the same restrictions, including rationing.
Yes, you measure your boiler, measure your wheat,
Half a pound of sugar per person a week.
Folks didn’t like it, they blamed Uncle Sam,
Have got to save the sugar for the boys in France.
Here, Johnson acknowledges the frustrations and material sacrifice made by people on the home front—”they blamed Uncle Sam”—but it appears that Johnson legitimizes both the frustrations of civilians and the government’s need for the sacrifice.
Tax getting heavy, have to pay,
Help the boys, over across the sea.
Mud and water up to their knees,
Faced the Kaiser for you and me.29
Johnson’s “When the War Was On” attempted to run the gamut of domestic wartime experiences, from patriotic pride to individual inconvenience and distrust. In some ways, then, the song was racially generic, and Johnson was like so many other folk musicians working the war experience into the oral history record of America. But Johnson’s self-censorship and the recording’s implication that the war replicated the power structure of the plantation South shows that the musician was aware that social commentary needed to be veiled and that black patriotism was a touchy subject in American public discourse in the 1920s.
After the war, segregationists ordered black veterans to maintain social protocol and warned that new ideas about race would prove deadly to the individual and the body politic. “We have all the room in the world for what we know as N-I-G-G-E-R-S,” announced Mississippi Governor Theodore Bilbo regarding the return of black veterans, “but none whatsoever for ‘colored . . . gentlemen.’ “ Echoing his Mississippi comrade, James Vardaman delivered to his fellow U.S. senators the following appeal, recalling to social conservatives the racial turmoil of the Civil War and Reconstr
uction: “We are threatened in America with the deleterious effects of the ‘melting pot’ of war, the merging of races, and the enforced equality and solidarity of citizenship. [Equality for black soldiers] is monstrous and shows how brutalizing is war and stupefying its influences.”30
The politicians’ fiery rhetoric was repeated among the people. Back home in rural Mississippi, Broonzy realized that his service drew nothing but contempt from his white neighbors.
So I got off the train at this place—had a nice uniform and everything and I met a white fellow that was knowing me before I went in the army and so he told me, “Listen, boy,” he says, “now you been in the army?” I told him, “Yeah.” He says, “How did you like it?” I said, “It’s okay.” He says, “Well, you ain’t in the army now.” Says, “And those clothes you got there,” says, “you can take um off and get you some overalls,” says, “because there’s no nigger gonna walk around here with no Uncle Sam’s uniform on, see, up and down these streets.” Says, “Because you’ve got to get back to work.”31
Broonzy’s acquaintance invoked customary white control over the black body for its labor by requiring Broonzy to abandon his patriotic military dress for work clothes that reinforced the black man’s identity as a laborer, not a defender of the nation.
Broonzy’s contemporary, Chalmers Archer, had a tough homecoming in Mississippi as well. Self-identifying as a “war hero from France,” Archer was told by his white officers “that they would show us we were back in Mississippi now and not some goddamn celebrities in a goddamn ticker tape parade in New York.”32 The threats hurled by southern politicians, military men, and civilians were not empty. The uniform, for southern black veterans, became something of a bull’s-eye for lynch mobs. Beyond the state-sanctioned execution of the Houston rioters, vigilante violence toward black veterans became a brutal reminder that African Americans should not take to heart the nation’s war for democracy. Ninety-six African Americans were lynched on the home front during the war. In 1919, the year many of the soldiers returned home, ten African American veterans were lynched, and at least four of them were murdered while wearing their U.S. armed forces uniforms.33 The federal government took no action in these cases. Despite the lofty idealism to be found in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” and plans for the League of Nations, the president understood the basic political calculus of the Jim Crow era: whites voted in large numbers and blacks did not. Wilson’s credibility among white southerners as a racial conservative helped the president secure southern support for the nation’s first major military struggle (excluding the Spanish-American War) since the South’s own war for independence. After Armistice Day, when representatives at the Versailles Peace Conference “fought to include a statement denouncing racism in the League of Nations charter,” Wilson “orchestrated” the defeat of any such language.34
Blind Willie Johnson and other blues musicians left rich evidence revealing their experiences during the war, but there were far fewer war-themed recordings than recordings about the Great Migration. In past years, blues scholars might have argued that the paucity of songs about the war comes as no surprise, given the bluesmen’s aversion to topical blues and preference for timeless, existential themes. On the other hand, musicologists might note that the war, unlike the continuing Great Migration, ended before the spread of recording technology. Given that bluesmen recorded plenty of songs about political subjects, and considering the proliferation of blues music before and without widespread recording, the small attention given World War I in blues music also suggests ambivalence on the part of the musicians. As was the case in so many aspects of southern black life, expectations outran actual change, and in the years after the war—when recording technology became widely available—there was little that was positive, or even noteworthy, to remember and sing about the Great War.
Racial uplift largely remained an internal development within individuals and the black communities of America; mainstream society showed little change of attitude toward the black minority. Black Americans during World War I only had the power to change their own minds and few others. A prominent black educator, Baldwin Dansby, would later argue that African Americans participating in the Great War provided the necessary momentum to launch a broader civil rights movement in the mid-twentieth century: “It got started with [the black serviceman’s] return . . . He got the idea in World War I that he was a citizen, fighting for the country just as anyone else.”35 Perhaps Dansby’s view seems overdrawn when juxtaposed to the more ambivalent evidence left by black musicians. Black expectations overreached the black community’s ability to effect social or political change, and African Americans’ hopes clearly outdistanced the white majority’s willingness to accept change.
But the blues, and African American music in general, was not only the tale of how racist whites controlled and limited aspiring blacks in America. The music and the musicians also created their own identities and destinies, and perhaps this explains much of the attractiveness and power of black music in the early twentieth century. After all, Broonzy left the South and made a career for himself, and, in the process, he helped many other musicians find new homes and new opportunities in the North. Broonzy’s music became increasingly jazzy and instrumental, as he discovered that his bandmates could make trumpets, clarinets, pianos, and saxophones “talk” just as he and other Delta musicians had been making guitars “talk” for years. This instrumental talk, since it had no words, was free—unrestrained by societal, industry, or self-censorship. It offered the kind of expressive freedom that Johnson found elusive in “When the War Was On” and that was celebrated by young jazz musicians such as Charlie “Yardbird” Parker, John Coltrane, and Miles Davis, who were inspired by scat-singing masters the likes of Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald.
Photographs of Broonzy in the postwar years do not show a degraded “colored boy” but a proud, ambitious, and most importantly, hopeful man. He holds his guitar like a metaphorical ticket to freedom from the subservient life Jim Crow laws laid out for him. Perhaps because of wartime experiences, perhaps because of the confidence gained from migration, perhaps because of the joy derived from music—whatever the reason—Broonzy and others like him changed their lives for the better in the decades following the Great War. In 1938, Broonzy was called to perform in New York’s famed Carnegie Hall for John Hammond’s Spirituals to Swing concert, and he spent the last seven years of his life as a well-loved musician frequently touring western Europe. The photographs of Broonzy, Huddie Ledbetter, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and dozens of other bluesmen illustrate the same principle. Amid the pain, degradation, and suffering of black life under Jim Crow, there was still pride, hope, and joy. The blues were a powerful vehicle for the expression thereof.
Verse Three
Workin’ on the Project
The Blues of the Great Flood and Great Depression
But I told her no, baby, and I sure don’t want to go,
I said I’ll do anything in the world for ya, but I don’t want to go down to that welfare store.
—”Welfare Store Blues,”
by Sonny Boy Williamson, 1940
The Devil’s Son-In-Law
Peetie Wheatstraw (1902-41), the Tennessee-born, Arkansas-raised bluesman bearing the brash moniker “The Devil’s Son-In-Law,” was a prolific recording artist. He belonged to a generation of blues musicians that grew up in the Jim Crow South before the Great War and would frequently visit or permanently move to the North by the 1920s and 1930s. Although Wheatstraw is not as well known as fellow southern émigrés Richard Wright and Zora Neale Hurston, who became important figures in the Harlem Renaissance, the bluesman and his contemporaries were among the most influential southern vernacular artists of their time. This generation of bluesmen bore witness to some of the most disastrous events of early twentieth-century America, including the Great Flood of 1927 and the Great Depression. A few of his recordings, such as “Sinking Sun Blues,” belied his rural southern upb
ringing, but in song after song, from “Third Street’s Going Down” to “Cake Alley,” Wheatstraw demonstrated his increasing urbanity. He gave up the guitar picking of his itinerant youth and switched over to the more citified instrument of the piano. As an urban musician, Wheatstraw needed a loud, percussive sound that could be heard over the talking and shouting patrons crowding dark and dingy nightclubs—before electrification, an acoustic guitar did not stand a chance in these noisy environments. In nearly all of his post-1932 music, Wheatstraw could be heard pounding out plodding, laid-back piano rhythms, using basically one melody over and over, almost always inserting his trademark howl, “Ooh well, well!” in the third line of each verse. His lyrics fell generally into four categories: (1) male-female relationships; (2) urban life, especially crime; (3) devilment and evil; and (4) the Great Depression and the New Deal. Wheatstraw was unwaveringly irreverent in his coded songs about gambling, prostitution, and tantalizingly sinful behavior, thus maintaining a strong chord of the blues’s countercultural, southern roots. Musically, his song book was relatively repetitive and much of his recorded work bordered on the monotonous, but this repetition made his piano and vocal style one of the most recognizable sounds in the blues, like B. B. King’s sweet-and-sour high-pitched guitar and brassy instrumental accompaniments or Muddy Waters’s band’s bone-shaking mixture of forceful vocals, braying harmonica tremolos, driving drum beats, and piercing slide guitar.
Wheatstraw and the other popular Mississippi Valley musicians of his era— Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams, Casey Bill Weldon, Kokomo Arnold, and Skip James, to name a few—carried their music out of their southern homeland and into northern black culture. Or, rather, their music carried them. The quick rise of the race record industry in the Roaring Twenties made it a breakout decade for many of these musicians.1 Mostly ambivalent toward and often disdainful of field work, bluesmen in the 1920s and 1930s became more detached from their parents’ generation and the dream of land ownership and agricultural production. Instead, they hoped for more exciting consumer culture experiences. Automobiles were a hit among blues musicians, giving them freedom of mobility and showing off their material success. Waters drove a used 1934 Ford; in 1934, Huddie Ledbetter was chauffeuring the Lomaxes around New York and Washington, D.C. Waters, from the younger generation of blues-men, wanted to use cars to show off individual independence, not to replicate old patterns of white patriarchy. “I went so wild and crazy and dumb in my car,” recalled Waters, “My grandmother said I’m going to kill myself.” The freedom musicians and their friends experienced in automobiles led to songs like “V-8 Ford,” “Let Me Drive Your Ford,” and many others. In addition to cars, blues musicians purchased and sang about fancy clothes, jewelry, and other luxuries, as did Wheatstraw in the aptly titled “Mr. Livinggood”:
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