Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  On the other hand, southern blacks seemed ready to accept any hand that was willing to help, even if it came from an upper-class New Yorker who was politically cozy with the demagogues who enforced Jim Crow. In surveying the blues recordings of the Great Depression, gone were the hopeful, if sometimes sarcastic, messages associated with the music of World War I and the Great Migration. During the Depression, Wheatstraw, Short, Williams, and other bluesmen composed lyrics so pessimistic or bitterly ironic as to indicate that black southerners held little hope for their futures; they seemed unsure of their very survival. Roosevelt knew how to appeal to the “hopeless,” and his coalition-building skills did not end with courting powerful southern senators. During the first hundred days of his presidency, African Americans south and north found a potential friend in Roosevelt. As New Deal historian Kenneth Bindas has observed, Roosevelt’s “comfortable manner, physical handicap, and ability to make everyone feel personally involved” drew many Americans to look upon him with favor.59 His ability to unite the many in a singular purpose was evident in the famous fireside chats. Exploiting the radio technology that had made its way from the cities to the country towns, Roosevelt confidently called all Americans together to rally their spirits and steel their resolve. Just days into his presidency, Roosevelt encouraged and challenged Americans to right the ship of national economics: “It is your problem, my friends, your problem no less than mine. Together we cannot fail.”60 Testament to the effectiveness of his inclusive message were the tens of thousands of songs and poems sent to the Roosevelts from Americans all over the nation. Many of the authors were barely literate, while others displayed honed literary or musical skills, but common to all was the theme that Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were personally connected to and involved in their lives.61 Indeed, FDR’s appreciation of cooperation reinforced his commitment to pluralistic politics. Coming from an old money Hudson Valley family, Roosevelt was not strongly attached to any particular identity group. Conversely, he was free to draw support from and help these groups—an ability that had eluded his Republican predecessors in the White House.62 For example, when three thousand members of the BEF returned to Washington, D.C., in May 1933, Roosevelt provided shelter for the protestors. Eleanor Roosevelt made a trip across town to visit the veterans, one of whom expressed the trust Americans were developing in the Hyde Parkers now residing in the White House. “Hoover sent the army,” the veteran declared, “Roosevelt sent his wife.”63

  Beyond FDR’s general method of extending aid to those who before had been turned away, the Roosevelt presidency held promise for African Americans in particular, and Eleanor Roosevelt was a key player in forming that potential. The first lady, wrote William Leuchtenburg, was “the Good Fairy who saw to it that in a world of pressure groups and partisan decisions, the president did not neglect people and causes that had no other voice in places of power.”64 Certainly, the first lady held the president’s ear on racial and other social matters, but Eleanor was no anomaly in the Roosevelt White House. Race liberal and New York relief administrator Harry Hopkins would play a significant role in the upcoming New Deal social and economic programs, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes had been the president of Chicago’s chapter of the NAACP.65 Ickes, along with prominent reformers Edwin Embree and Will Alexander, helped FDR in 1933 to form the new position of Adviser on the Economic Status of the Negro with liberal white southerner Clark Foreman as its first appointee. These early appointments paved the way for the creation of the “Black Cabinet” of African American advisors in 1934. Although Roosevelt often pursued an ambivalent course on racial matters in actual policy making, the public promotion of black civil rights on the part of high-ranking administration officials evidenced a departure from previous administrations, which had offered few forums for debate on the subject. In sum, most Americans felt that Roosevelt played a personal role in their individual experiences; black Americans suffering during the Depression could find reasons for both fear and hope when they considered the effect Roosevelt’s leadership could have on their lives.66

  By 1933, bluesmen and other black musicians had incorporated the Great Depression into their cultural identity and memory, and these artists were eager to reflect in music their views about Roosevelt and the New Deal, which they did with notable frequency.67 Still grappling with the continuing economic collapse, black musicians during the early New Deal expressed in their songwriting more skepticism than enthusiasm, more fear than hope. It was not clear to black southerners that circumstances were changing after Roosevelt’s inauguration in 1933. That year, farm income remained highly concentrated among a minority of wealthy landowners, while the poorer half of American farmers shared only 15 percent of the national total.68 It seemed to be a living out of the old song fragment that had been circulating in the lyrics of black folk songs since the nineteenth century:

  Nigger plow de cotton, Nigger pick it out;

  White man pockets money, Nigger does without.69

  The impact of new Keynesian economic policies and government agencies would do little to shake this cynical attitude among the black farmers of the South, in part, because the New Dealers deferred to the prevailing custom of respecting land-ownership rights and privileges over workers’ rights and welfare. A good example of such respect of tradition in economic policy may be found in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA), the first New Deal program that affected the African American laborers of the Lower Mississippi Valley. Under the AAA, black farmers were not meant to pick the cotton, as in the song fragment above, but to plow it under.70

  Under the AAA, farmers would receive government money in exchange for reducing acreage and supply. Although sharecroppers were unused to plowing under their crops, black southerners sensed a great deal of continuity between the new AAA management of southern farming and the planter-dominated status quo before the Depression. Unlike the race liberals within the Roosevelt administration, the AAA’s finance director, Oscar Johnston, had no penchant for social engineering. Johnston managed the nation’s largest cotton plantation, the Delta and Pine Land Company in Scott, Mississippi (Broonzy’s birthplace), and as a New Dealer he wanted to get economic aid to the South’s planters and their creditors.71 Landowners were given great privilege under the AAA, reflecting Johnston’s preference for a top-down solution to the economic problem in the agricultural sector. Fearing that direct payments to the farmers would undermine their social and economic influence over the plantations and claiming that tenant farmers would “throw away” their money, landowners kept the sharecroppers’ relief funds for themselves while accepting less and less responsibility for the welfare of the farming families. In some cases landlords simply evicted the field workers.72 White tenants in the sharecropping districts suffered from these policies as well, but landowners often practiced discrimination in their seizure of AAA payments. One study in Alabama reported that 86 percent of the black tenants surveyed had received only partial payments from their landlords, whereas only 48 percent of the white sharecroppers had funds withheld. The NAACP mounted a vociferous protest to AAA policies, and the administration reformed its practices after 1933. Still, the program offered little that was new or better to the black farmers in 1934; the luckiest cropper could expect a mere fraction of the federal funds allocated to the plantation he or she lived on. For example, for plowing under a twenty-acre plot yielding two hundred pounds of cotton per acre, the maximum a tenant in the Mississippi Delta could expect to receive in 1934 (via his or her landlord) was eight dollars—the same crop would have been worth almost forty dollars in 1929. When administration liberals raised concerns, Roosevelt urged his lieutenants to remain patient. Black farmers were not saddened when the program was discontinued in 1936. The AAA, according to Reinhold Niebuhr, “designed to alleviate the condition of the American farmer,” had actually “aggravated the lot of the poorest” farmers in the South.73

  Other early New Deal initiatives promised better economic conditions
for black farmers but ultimately fell short. The Farm Securities Administration helped some displaced black sharecroppers by providing farm loans and undertaking community-building projects. Sleepy John Estes recorded an unsolicited promotional song about aid programs like the FSA, entitled “Government Money.” After encouraging “all you farmers” to “join the government loan,” Estes showed how government aid led to self-sufficiency instead of dependence, singing, “you could have sumtin’ of your own.”

  You know the government furnish you a milk cow, you know, a rooster and some portion of hen,

  Now, the government furnish you a milk cow, you know, a rooster and some portion of hen,

  You know ‘long though the spring, you could have some money to spend.74

  Despite Estes’s rosy picture in “Government Money,” the New Deal farmer aid programs were not easily accessible, especially for southern black farmers. The FSA was able to provide farm loans to only about 1 percent of the 200,000 black tenant farmers who were displaced during the Great Depression, and other reform efforts, such as farmer unionism, were bitterly resisted by local landowners.75

  Perhaps most frustrating to black Americans was that discrimination in the New Deal was not limited to administrations under the leadership of southern planter elites such as the AAA’s Johnston. Discrimination against blacks also seemed the rule in the National Recovery Administration (NRA), a program aimed at industrial relief and affecting thousands of black laborers who had moved to the cities for better work opportunities during the 1920s. Blacks employed in NRA industries were not hired on equal terms or for equal pay, and were often laid off when sufficient numbers of white workers became available. Black leaders labeled the NRA Blue Eagle a “predatory bird” on account of the administration’s displacement of black workers, and critics mocked the agency’s acronym as meaning “Negroes Ruined Again” or “Negro Removal Act.”76 Likewise, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)—another national program administered by local interests—discriminated against African Americans, forcing them to uproot and move more frequently than whites and offering less recompense for their land. The TVA restricted African Americans from employment and education programs, and the authority’s showcase town of Norris, Tennessee—like the New Deal’s model homestead community of Ar-thurdale, West Virginia—was a segregated town.77

  In most early New Deal programs, agencies maintained the patterns of employment discrimination common in mainstream American society. The Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) had a dual goal of providing gainful employment for the jobless and keeping destitute males away from the cities; this program seemed a perfect fit for southern African Americans who had been fired from jobs or displaced from farm labor. However, the CCC was stiflingly discriminatory in its hiring practices. Across the nation, blacks filled only 5 percent of the CCC’s ranks in 1933 and only 6 percent a year later. In Mississippi, where over half of the state’s population was African American, less than 2 percent of those in the CCC’s employ were black.78

  Black singers’ relayed their lack of confidence and skepticism in the CCC and other early New Deal programs. “I’m goin’ down,” sings Washboard Sam in “CCC Blues,” “I’m goin’ down, to the CCC / I know that they won’t do a thing for me.”

  I told her my name and the place I stayed,

  She said she’d give me a piece of paper, “Come back some other day.”

  I told her I had no peoples and the shape I was in,

  She said she would help me, but she didn’t say when.79

  Washboard Sam recorded “CCC Blues” in 1938 before his cynicism had dissipated, and old-time distaste for paternalism is evident in his lyrics: “Come back some other day,” she says. Being turned away after waiting in line makes for a low-down blue feeling. Years after the Depression Big Bill Broonzy reminded his listeners of the feelings of futility and frustration so many had felt during the hard times—feelings he had observed in folks around him as he, too, applied for New Deal work relief. His 1950s piece, “Black, Brown, and White,” begins as a rather general mourning of being denied:

  I went to an employment office, got a number and I got in line,

  They called everybody’s number, but they never called mine.

  If one considers the first two lines only, it seems that Broonzy was offering a universal feeling of rejection, but in the later years—when this song was composed—Broonzy became more explicit.

  They say if you’s white, should be all right,

  If you’s brown, stick around,

  But as you’re black, mmm, mmm, brother,

  Git back, git back, git back.80

  The dominant theme of Washboard Sam’s and Big Bill’s songs appears to be the singers’ dissatisfaction with hiring practices, but the subtext to both songs is the desire for gainful employment. Lured North by the promise of industrial labor, southern African Americans had recast many of their attitudes regarding work. Could those who had found work outside the rural South maintain their newfound work ethic in a time of such widespread unemployment?

  Displaced, jobless, and hungry, many blacks in the Lower Mississippi Valley turned to the dole. The Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA), headed by Harry Hopkins, provided a half-billion dollars in grants to the states for distribution of aid by local relief agencies. Since black Americans had been last hired and first fired in most sectors of the industrial economy and black tenants were more likely to be evicted, a disproportionate of African Americans sought welfare relief during the New Deal. By the end of 1933, 18 percent of black Americans were receiving relief funds and supplies.81 In visiting “the relief,” St. Louis bluesman Blind Teddy Darby equated charity funds with food and, therefore, female companionship—not an uncommon connection in the blues tradition.

  Now I’m goin’ down to the relief, I want an order today,

  Now I’m goin’ down to the relief, I want an order today,

  If I don’t get some groceries, my baby’ll run away.

  Whereas the paid jobs offered by the CCC were limited, and therefore competition for them was strong, the relief stations were less discriminatory. Gone is the cynicism of Washboard Sam describing the CCC; instead, Darby expresses desperate hope for simple charity:

  Uncle Sam is helping millions, seems like he’d help po’ me,

  Uncle Sam is helping millions, seems like he’d help po’ me,

  Now I’m goin’ down there tomorrow mornin, and ask for sympathy.82

  Darby shows that even charity requires some action on the part of the recipient—he had to go “down there tomorrow”—but his lyrics also revive the pleas for deliverance that the slaves cried in their spirituals: “He delivered Daniel from de lion’s den / Jonah from de belly ob de whale / And de Hebrew children from de fiery furnace.” In Darby’s song, Uncle Sam becomes like Moses or Jesus—a hoped-for savior or deliverer. With Hopkins as the FERA’s director, African Americans found fairer treatment in seeking charity, but Hopkins himself had misgivings about the dole. He believed “handouts” had a “debilitating effect psychologically on the unemployed.” “Give a man a dole,” he professed, “and you save his body and destroy his spirit.”83 Hopkins’s point was not merely paternalism nor was it an elitist’s interpretation of the “white man’s burden.” Bluesmen seemed to agree for the most part.

  Indeed, in reviewing the corpus of blues material on the FERA and other New Deal charity efforts, we find that Darby’s positive, hopeful feelings about welfare were rare among black musicians. Much more common were the sentiments reflected in the numerous versions of “Red Cross Blues,” first recorded in New York City in the summer of 1933 by multitalented musician and singer Walter Roland, blues diva Lucille Bogan, and guitarist Sonny Scott. Roland and Scott were based in Birmingham, Alabama, and June 1933 found them making their first trip to New York to record for the American Recording Company. There they teamed up with Bogan, a vaudeville blueswoman who had been recording professionally for several years under the name Bessie J
ackson. Roland cut two tracks, “Red Cross Blues” and “Red Cross Blues No. 2,” and then accompanied Bogan on her song “Red Cross Man.” A few days later, Scott recorded two versions of the song as well.

  On his first track, Roland accompanies his vocals with a bawdy barrelhouse piano rhythm. On his second track, he backs up his lyrics with a down-home, Mississippi-style guitar accompaniment. In both versions, Roland’s lyrics tie purchasing power and consumption to sexual power and attractiveness. The song conjures its most vivid image when the singer cannot afford to go to the grocery and is instead forced to get undesirable foodstuffs such as tripe and beans at the Red Cross store. In Roland’s first two versions of “Red Cross Blues,” as well as the many renditions under various titles that were to come afterward, the relationship between poverty and shame is the salient feature. In her studio session, Bogan developed the urban sound Roland had utilized in his first take. Titling the song, “Red Cross Man,” Bogan had Roland accompany her on piano. The two created new music and new lyrics, but they still portrayed the choice between hunger and handouts as a gendered dilemma. Sung to the melody of “Kokomo Blues,” Bogan’s lyrics became inspirational for Robert Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” several years later. However, Johnson’s feel-good song lacks the sarcasm and bitter humor of Bogan’s lament: “Ohh, baby don’t you want to go,” she sings, “You can go with my man, down to the Red Cross store.” In contrast to Bogan’s urban, barrelhouse interpretation of the song, Scott picked up on the down-home approach that Roland had established in his second take. Scott developed the “cotton country” sound by making his guitar accompaniment more reminiscent of the strong, Delta style of Patton and House, while also strengthening the imagery of impoverished emasculation, singing, “Lord, I had two women, walkin’ hand-in-hand / They said they didn’t want no Red Cross man.”84