Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  On big parties I drop money on the flo’,

  On big parties I drop money on the flo’,

  And leave it for the sweeper, and walk on out the do’.

  I buy my baby a silk dress every day,

  I buy my baby, silk dress every day,

  She’d wear it one time, ooh-well-well, then she’ll just throw it away.

  Songs like Wheatstraw’s “Mr. Livinggood” connected financial success to romantic conquest and painted a glorious picture of life off the plantations, effectively abandoning the agricultural, “cast down your bucket” work ethic promoted by Booker T. Washington. Instead, these blues musicians grasped at the modern lifestyle of free movement and material affluence enjoyed by so many contemporary Americans.2

  Three interdependent, sea-change developments—the Great War, dynamic growth in the agricultural and industrial sectors, and mass migration to cities— created a social climate that fostered the growth of these new, urbane identities in African American culture in the 1920s. Riding the wave of migration and urbanization, Harlem Renaissance artists, composers, playwrights, novelists, scientists, and poets advertised the dawn of a new era of African American history. Innovation, creativity, and dynamism marked the African American music of the 1920s as Jelly Roll Morton, Louis Armstrong, Fletcher Henderson, and others enticed their listeners with hot rhythms and sweet melodies. In jazz, African Americans found an artistic idiom for expressing freedom and mobility, as well as melancholy. Jazz musicians, like their peers in the blues world (the two groups of musicians often intermixed), vitally expressed the growing pains and pleasures of emergent African American communities in the nation’s cities. Like their jazz counterparts, blues musicians enjoyed a heyday of popularity as they left behind Delta locales like the Stovall Plantation and Dockery Farms in favor of recording venues in Wisconsin, Illinois, Indiana, and New York. Whereas blues musicians before World War I could be found playing at barn dances and jook joints throughout the plantation South, in the 1920s the successful musician was increasingly called north to ply his trade for a recording machine and a paycheck, not live audiences and homemade booze. By 1926, the three largest companies issuing blues records were selling between five and six million albums annually, and phonographs were proliferating throughout the nation. Even in the cash-strapped farm districts of the Lower Mississippi Valley, records and record players were high-priority consumer goods among poor black families, and local and northern newspapers ran advertisements for mailordering race records.3 The high sales of these records show that whether they resided in Chicago’s South Side or Mississippi’s Delta region, black Americans in the 1920s increasingly participated in a consumption-driven culture. Even the lowest of the low on the socioeconomic ladder enjoyed some of the material benefits of the booming 1920s.4

  Never before had the blues musicians of the plantation South benefited from so many opportunities to play and record. Before he was known throughout the Mississippi Valley, the musician named Peetie Wheatstraw was a sharecropper named William Bunch. He grew up in Cotton Plant, a tenant farming community in the western floodplain of the Mississippi River in eastern Arkansas. There he learned Delta-style guitar picking and the twelve-bar, three-line (AAB) blues. Like many aspiring bluesmen, he hit the road as an itinerant musician, and his “Sinking Sun Blues” offers a glimpse into his traveling days.

  By then the sun had turned now, the whole world red,

  By then the sun had turned the whole world red,

  Poor me didn’t have no place, ooh well, well, now to lay my worried head.

  Darkness fell upon me and I couldn’t hear a sound,

  Darkness fell upon me and I couldn’t hear a sound,

  I let fate be my pillow, ooh well, well, my bed be on the ground.5

  Not satisfied with the life of an itinerant rural bluesman, Wheatstraw followed the millions of African Americans heading to towns and cities. Sometime in his early twenties he arrived in St. Louis with a new moniker and a self-promoting, devilish musical persona. Titling himself the “Devil’s Son-In-Law” and the “High Sheriff from Hell”—names that became popular record titles— Wheatstraw built his fame in the late 1920s and 1930s in part by sensationalizing the dark legacy of African spirituality and the dark side of African American life. Of course, the former Mr. Bunch was not alone in this endeavor. Several hundred miles downriver from Wheatstraw’s St. Louis, Robert Johnson entertained Delta jook joint audiences with similar tales of “hellhounds on [his] trail” and “walkin’ side-by-side” with the devil, though their references to evil and the devil probably had more to do with metaphors for domestic and social violence than actual necromancy and “black arts.”6 Wheatstraw and Johnson success fully marketed evil and darkness in their music for rural Americans, in much the same way other musicians sold the sexuality and licentiousness of jazz to audiences in the big cities. These two bedeviled bluesmen met in Chicago in late 1937 during Johnson’s excursion to the North with Johnny Shines. In November of that year, Wheatstraw recorded “Devilment Blues,” a song about adultery, violence, and death:

  Listen here baby, you got devilment on your mind,

  Listen here baby, you got devilment on your mind,

  If you don’t change your ways, oh well well, you might die before your time.

  I know baby, you’re doin’ the best you can,

  I know baby, you’re doin’ the best you can,

  Aah, you a married woman, oh well, well, but you have your outside man.7

  Less than a year after Wheatstraw’s recording of the song, Johnson lay dead near Greenwood, Mississippi, poisoned by a lover’s jealous husband.8

  In keeping metaphorical company with Satan and by conveying the realities of love and lust, violence and death among poor blacks in the jook joint and nightclub scenes, Wheatstraw and Johnson tapped the same cultural and spiritual well in shaping their blues motifs. But their musical careers and personal experiences varied greatly. Johnson’s popularity remained confined to the sharecropping regions of the Lower Mississippi Valley, particularly the Delta. Until the last year of his life, Johnson’s travels were limited to that section of the Deep South. Johnson had always feigned a certain urbaneness—which was part of what created his popularity among sharecropping African Americans—but he made forays into the North’s cities only late in his short life. Johnson’s recordings from 1936 and 1937 reflect his musical genesis in the Mississippi Delta where he learned from listening to Son House (in person) and Charley Patton and others on records.

  Wheatstraw’s early experiences in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, may have mirrored Johnson’s young life in Copiah County, Mississippi, but Wheatstraw’s migration to the city fueled an urban transformation in his blues repertoire and allowed him to have contact with a wider variety of talented musicians than Johnson could work with in the Delta. When Wheatstraw abandoned his traditional downhome blues guitar playing and began to accompany himself on piano, he afforded himself collaboration with talented guitarists such as Kokomo Arnold, Casey Bill Weldon, and Lonnie Johnson—one of the most inventive guitarists of his era. In April 1938, Wheatstraw and Lonnie Johnson made the trip to New York City to record “Cake Alley,” a song about the seedy St. Louis neighborhood so familiar to both men.

  There’s a place in St. Louis, they call Cake Alley, you know,

  There’s a place in St. Louis, they call Cake Alley, you know,

  It’s a very tough place, ooh, well well, where all the bums do love to go.

  Like “Deep Ellum Blues” about the rough-and-tumble black neighborhood in Dallas, “Cake Alley” alludes to prostitution, alcohol, and violence in lyrics that are part invitation, part warning:

  Cake Alley run from Blair Avenue, on down to Fifteenth Street,

  Cake Alley run from Blair Avenue, on down to Fifteenth Street,

  But the good things you can get in Cake Alley, ooh well, I swear it can’t be beat.

  The urbane lyrics of “Cake Alley” follow the old country blues verse f
orm, but gone are the references to cotton, corn, and mules. Another song recorded that day, “What More Can A Man Do?” strikes a balance between drums, string bass, Johnson’s guitar, and Wheatstraw’s piano, creating an upbeat, quick-paced tune. Wheatstraw’s vocals are fairly traditional—though not in the AAB lyrical form—and his piano mostly beat out the rhythm while Johnson’s fingers run up and down his guitar’s fretboard. There is no reason not to think of the song as a blues song, but the open-minded listener can hear something of rhythm and blues in “What More Can A Man Do?” and some might argue that early traces of rock and roll can be heard. This kind of innovation helps explain Wheatstraw’s popularity in St. Louis, Louisville, Indianapolis, and Chicago—all cities he called home after his departure from Arkansas—as well as the repeated requests from Decca to record his music. Like Robert Johnson, Wheatstraw died prematurely and interestingly, at a crossroads of sorts. He was killed when a train struck his car at a railroad crossing in Illinois in 1941.9

  By recording blues material in varied idioms, Wheatstraw and the better musicians of his generation emulated the finely tuned musicianship of their immediate elders—the first cadre of professional bluesmen. Huddie Ledbetter (b. 1888), Big Bill Broonzy (b. 1893), and Blind Lemon Jefferson (b. 1897) had come of age by the time of America’s involvement in the Great War, although Broonzy was the only one to serve in the military—Jefferson was blind and Ledbetter was doing time for murder in the Texas prison system.10 Nevertheless, these blues artists remembered the brief glimmer of patriotism shown by African Americans during the European conflict. They also had increased their fame and income by migrating to northern cities: Jefferson and Broonzy to Chicago (where Jefferson froze to death in the streets in December 1929) and Ledbetter to Washington, D.C., and New York City. Like the older generation of bluesmen, Wheatstraw and his contemporaries often shaped their blues by drawing on mixed experiences of rural sharecropping and urban, industrial life. Wheat-straw’s generation, too young for the service in World War I, remembered little but disappointment in the wake of a Jim Crow army, veteran lynchings, and domestic race riots. The 1920s had treated them much better than the decade before. Music was a hot commodity, bootlegged whiskey was easy to get, and recording machines turned out disc after disc.

  By the summer of 1927, however, blues musicians from the Delta to Chicago were recording songs about the Great Flood that had been devastating the residents of the Lower Mississippi Valley since April of that year. Managing the disaster proved too great a task for local and state authorities, and the federal government (under the direction of Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover) stepped in to direct relief efforts. Two years later, the stock market crash signaled the beginning of an unprecedented economic downturn that crippled the already poor black South. During the late 1920s and 1930s, southern blacks grappled with federal government relief initiatives that reminded them of the Jim Crow presidency of the war years. Federal domestic policy dovetailed with southern social policy in the years during and after the Great War. No longer a region governed by former secessionists and Confederates, the “New South” willingly accepted the rule and resources of federal power, so long as the power was wielded substantially by the long-tenured southern Democrats in Washington or ceded to their counterparts in state and local government. In the wake of devastating flooding and national economic collapse, the federal government became involved in the lives of southerners to degrees unseen since Reconstruction. Blues musicians created an auditory documentary of and commentary on the Flood of 1927 and the Great Depression—disastrous events that reformed both the white political power structure as well as the musical culture of the black working class that labored under that power structure. This musical archive reveals the bluesmen’s thoughts on the federal government’s response to these disasters, as well as several interesting changes in African Americans’ identities and attitudes that, without investigating blues culture, are hard to discern.

  Water All in Arkansas, People Screamin’ in Tennessee: The Great Flood of 1927

  In the years preceding the flood and the Depression, federal officials had done little to assuage black leaders’ fears that the national government represented to African Americans nothing more than an unreliable ally, at best, and, at worst, a willing accomplice to Jim Crow. In the wake of the war to make the world safe for democracy, the Ku Klux Klan emerged as a legitimate political force in many northern communities and the federal government imposed stiff, nationality-based immigration quotas. On Capitol Hill, white race liberals were increasingly isolated in public policy debates and, across the Mall, black observers at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922 were roped off in a Jim Crow section.11 In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge vetoed the much-anticipated Adjusted Compensation Act, which amounted to a veterans’ “bonus bill” that would pay an average of $1,012 to World War I vets to make their income commensurate with their civilian peers.12 Congress passed an override of Coolidge’s veto, but the funds were not slated to be dispersed until two decades later. Black veterans in the South and elsewhere faced widespread discrimination as they attempted to reenter the American work force, and many were in need of immediate assistance by the mid-1920s. Then, the disastrous Flood of 1927 crippled the Delta areas of the Lower Mississippi Valley, a rural region predominantly populated by African Americans.

  For many decades before 1927, the task of managing the Mississippi River and its tributaries had placed southern white leadership in close collaboration with federal officials. Landowners in the plantation districts had for generations welcomed the aid of the Army Corps of Engineers and other offices of the national government in protecting the cropland that generated their wealth through the tenant farming system. Even during the last years before the Civil War, when Fire-Eaters dominated the southern political landscape, Louisiana state engineer Louis Hébert, in Whig-like fashion, acknowledged the state’s need for federal assistance in the flood control effort; the national government alone wielded the scientific and material resources necessary to maintain the river in its banks. “We are forced to admit,” he wrote in his 1859 Annual Report to the Louisiana government, “that we have not yet established the premises necessary to the solution of our great problem” of flooding on the Mississippi.13 State officials collaborated with federal engineers, and, in the years following the Civil War and Reconstruction, the Mississippi River levee system was thought to be in optimal condition. In 1926, the Army Corps Chief of Engineers expressed his confidence in their harnessing of the river’s waters: “It may be stated that in a general way the improvement is providing a safe and adequate channel for navigation and is now in condition to prevent the destructive effects of floods.” A better prognostication could be found in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi (1883): “One who knows the Mississippi will promptly aver—not aloud, but to himself—that ten thousand River Commissions, with the mines of the world at their back, cannot tame that lawless stream, cannot curb it or confine it, cannot say to it, Go here, or Go there, and make it obey; cannot save a shore which it has sentenced.” In April 1927, the river proved its ability to defy any engineer’s levee and “sentenced” its ancient floodplains to the deluge that had before the levees been an annual event.14

  The record-setting flooding of the Lower Mississippi Valley in 1927 destroyed homes and lives, devastating tens of thousands of poor black southerners and affecting tens of thousands more African American migrants who had left family behind in the sharecropping districts. Quick snowmelts and early spring rains were the primary cause. By mid-April, the tributary rivers of the Mississippi from Oklahoma to Illinois to Pennsylvania had already overrun their banks, and the “Father of Waters” itself had risen to a record mark. On Good Friday, April 15, the skies opened and poured fifteen to sixteen inches of rain over the Mississippi Valley, a region measuring hundreds of thousands of square miles from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico, from Texas to Alabama. Greenville, in the Mississippi Delta, received 8.12 inches; New
Orleans recorded its heaviest rainfall to date—14.96 inches in eighteen hours. The Mississippi rushed along at the rate of three million cubic feet per second, three times the rate of the infamous 1993 flood on the upper Mississippi that swept away neighborhoods in Missouri and Illinois.15

  After so many tributaries had inundated their floodplains, the Mississippi levees finally began to give way. On Saturday, April 16, the levee broke at Dorena, Missouri, forming a crevasse thirty miles downstream from the Ohio-Mississippi confluence at Cairo, Illinois. People living along the lower river began to panic. Levee captains armed their workers with firearms to guard the earthworks against landowners and other interested parties who might dynamite the levee, sabotaging the system at calculated points to protect their lands across the bank or upstream. One of thousands of black levee workers, Bill Jones, remembered his experience during the Good Friday weekend on the levee near Memphis. “They gave me a shotgun and told me, ‘Don’t let nobody from the Arkansas side come over.’ “ Over the weekend, levee guards in St. Bernard Parish downriver near New Orleans shot three suspected dynamiters, but the worst levee failure—at Mounds Landing, in northwest Mississippi— resulted not from sabotage but the water’s sheer force. The Mounds Landing crevasse burst open the morning of April 21, issuing water at a rate equal to that of Niagara Falls and unleashing cataclysmic natural forces on the communities adjacent to the river.16