Jim Crow's Counterculture

by Lawson, R. A.

  But southern blacks living under Jim Crow did not wait for southern whites’ opinions to match their own or for white-created policies to endorse African Americans’ political freedom. As we shall see, World War II, coming on the heels of the New Deal, provided poor southern blacks a chance to seize the identity of citizenship for themselves.10 Bluesmen crafted their music in the 1940s to reflect their efforts to tap into the war-era culture of pluralism. Robert Johnson died before the war, but other bluesmen who likewise had made their careers in the Mississippi Delta moaning about the lonesome sorrows of black life began to sing wartime songs about “our” effort and the challenges “we” faced, as if they had adopted a wider identity beyond their individual selves or their race. In addition to reflecting the nation’s unifying spirit, most blues recording artists in the Roosevelt era borrowed heavily from the mainstream musical craze that their jazz counterparts Count Basie, Fletcher Henderson, and Duke Ellington had been creating—swing. Like the white American icons of swing Glen Miller and Benny Goodman, the black bluesmen followed the lead of the jazz arrangers by utilizing Big Band-like instrumentations and calling on more polished accompanying musicians. Fading were the days of the solo guitarists, such as Patton and House, who jumped in on nightclub jam sessions. Like the female blues vocalists who had been plying their trade in vaudeville theatres and on the medicine show circuit, the postwar bluesmen such as Waters and King started to bring their (often well-dressed) bands with them.11

  But jazzing up their music and adding more band members did not necessitate a departure from traditional lyrics, and blues musicians would continue to record topical songs at the high rate established during the 1930s. So, from lyrics to instrumentation, the music of black southerners continued to chronicle their engagement with the mainstream. Some of the most important events African American musicians sang about during the war era were cultural rather than military. Before Pearl Harbor or D-Day, boxer Joe Louis was drawing black Americans into a more unified national culture. In the mid to late 1930s, Louis commanded the attention of Americans of myriad races and ethnicities when he squared off with German heavyweight Max Schmeling. Southern blacks in particular found pride in Louis’s representation of black America on the international stage and helped them forget about Red Cross stores and bread lines.

  Louis was born just before World War I to an Alabama sharecropping family and migrated north as a child when his mother moved the family to Detroit. In the Motor City, Louis grew as an amateur boxer and then, in 1934 at the age of nineteen, began to fight professionally. As most poor Americans struggled through what seemed like an endless economic quagmire, Louis soared high, winning his first twenty-seven bouts, twenty-three of those by knockout. By autumn 1935, Louis already had knocked out two former heavyweight champions and had won status among white audiences that lauded him with monikers such as the “Brown Bomber” and the “Tan Tornado.”12

  To black audiences, Louis was nothing short of a race hero. In September 1935, Carl Martin released what was probably the first blues recording dedicated to Louis. Martin’s “Joe Louis Blues” initiated a series of blues recordings that cast Louis as a folk hero of the stature of John Henry or Stackolee. “Joe Louis Blues” was released on the flip side of Martin’s “Let’s Have a New Deal,” a moaning complaint about the hardship of the Depression. Whereas “Let’s Have a New Deal” was a traditional blues conveying the sadness of the singer’s life, “Joe Louis Blues” had a more hopeful message of black strength and prowess. “Now listen all you prizefighters who don’t want to meet defeat,” Martin warned, “Take a tip from me, stay off Joe Louis’ beat.” Martin backed up his warning by singing about Louis’s mythic strength and ability to vanquish even the toughest foes.

  Now he won all his fights, twenty-three or -four, and left twenty of his opponents lying on the floor,

  They all tried to win, but the task was too hard,

  When he lay that hambone, up against that forehead.

  Listen all you prizefighters, don’t play him too cheap.13

  In 1935, Louis lived up to Martin’s heroic portrayal. He was 27-0 and seemed invincible. When he arrived in New York City for his fight against Primo Car-nera, the black porters at the train station hoisted Louis on their shoulders and carried him from the train with great fanfare. Among black intellectual circles, Louis’s bout with the Italian American Carnera (whom he knocked out in six rounds) symbolized the conflict between Ethiopia and Mussolini’s Italy. But Louis’s in-the-ring career was about to become symbolic of the greater conflict between the United States and Germany, a contest in which Louis—even as a black man—would come to represent American strength and hopes.

  On a summer night in Yankee Stadium in 1936, however, black and white Americans witnessed Louis’s vulnerability when he suffered a major upset at the hands of Germany’s Schmeling. Schmeling was a veteran fighter who had enhanced his success in the ring by joining the inner circle of Berlin’s Nazi society, and he was still at the top of his game. The Louis-Schmeling fight was supposed to determine the contender for a championship bout with the current titleholder, James Braddock. Despite Louis’s loss, his backers outbid Schmeling’s team and stole away the title fight, scheduling a Louis-Braddock fight in Chicago’s South Side Comiskey Park in 1937. Louis bounced back from the Schmel-ing defeat, winning the heavyweight title from Braddock—a title he would hold for almost twelve years (longer than any heavyweight before or since). The first African American to win the heavyweight championship since Jack Johnson had done so in 1908, Louis was a rare symbol of black masculinity and strength in mainstream culture, and despite segregation in American life, Louis (like gold medal Olympian Jesse Owens) challenged white supremacy and the notion of a master race.

  Louis’s reserved personality, yet undeniable power, made him the right hero at the right time for African Americans. Unlike his predecessor, Johnson, Louis avoided making the “race issue” part of his career. Whereas Johnson had openly dated white women and verbally assaulted defeated white opponents, Louis walked the racial line while commanding the respect of his fans. Johnson had epitomized the “Negro bad man,” but Louis pulled Americans from all walks of life toward him.

  Nowhere was his broad appeal more apparent than when all attention focused once again on Yankee Stadium in June 1938, when Louis and Schmeling squared off for a legendary rematch. The fight could not be held at the country’s premier fight venue, Madison Square Garden, because the Garden’s managers refused to host an interracial bout, but the importance of the event was undeniable. Both fighters knew that millions of onlookers in America, Germany, and throughout the world had attached to the fight a significance far beyond the importance of a heavyweight title defense. By this time, Hitler’s designs were clear, as was Schmeling’s coziness with Nazi leadership, and this gave to the fight an obvious subtext of American multiculturalism versus Teutonic hegemony. President Roosevelt invited Louis to the White House before the match, telling the fighter, “Joe, we need muscles like yours to beat Germany.” Americans knew that Germans equally attached pride and significance to their athletic representatives—the 1936 Olympic Games in Berlin had demonstrated that— and the world political stage seemed to shrink to a boxing ring on a ball field in the Bronx.14 Seventy million Americans—over one half of the U.S. population— tuned in to the radio for the fight. They did not need to bend their ears long. The fight was exponentially shorter than the international conflict it prefigured: Louis pummeled the now tired-looking Schmeling (he was thirty-two years old to Louis’s twenty-four in 1938), and the referee called the fight a technical knockout victory for Louis after two minutes and four seconds of the first round.15

  Across town, the day after the big fight in the Bronx, Little Bill Gaither and pianist Honey Hill recorded a tribute song to Louis, aptly titled “Champion Joe Louis Blues.”

  I came all the way from Chicago to see Joe Louis and Max Schmeling fight,

  I came all the way from Chicago to see Joe
Louis and Max Schmeling fight,

  Schmeling went down like the Titanic, when Joe gave him just one hard right.

  Having had little time to consider lyrics, Gaither nonetheless paired Louis’s dramatic win (Schmeling went down like the Titanic, after all) with the singer’s own sense of independence and mobility: “I came all the way from Chicago to see Joe Louis.” In the second verse, Gaither set up Louis as a cross-racial hero, comparing him to Benny Goodman, the King of Swing, and claiming that his popularity had transcended race (as had Goodman’s integrated band).

  Well, you’ve heard of the King of Swing, Joe is the King of Gloves,

  Well, you’ve heard of the King of Swing, Joe is the King of Gloves,

  Now, he’s the World Heavyweight Champion, a man that the whole world loves.

  Gaither’s remaining verses recounted the speed with which Louis dispatched Schmeling and talked about how Louis was a gambler’s sure bet—an association between Louis and gambling is present in many blues songs about the boxer.16 A Decca advertisement for its catalogue of Joe Louis songs claimed that the “Brown Bomber” was “still our bet for the championship.”17 But Louis represented much more than a gambler’s sure thing. Blues musicians also highlighted Louis’s value as a representative of black America over his value with the bookies. Ledbetter invoked Louis’s name in the months after the second Schmeling bout to chastise white Alabama over the Scottsboro affair: “I’m gonna talk to Joe Louis, ask him to listen to me / Don’t he never try to make no bout, in Alabamaree.”18 Other bluesmen equated the boxer’s success in the ring with the nation’s success overseas, even before Louis volunteered for the army in 1942. Guitarist Frank Edwards sang, “Uncle Sam needs the champ, still wearin’ the belt,” implying Louis could win “Double V” victories in the ring and on the battlefield. Edwards painted an image of a heroic Louis in a song whose title—”We Got To Get Together”—showed that Louis’s victories were not simply personal but national accomplishments.19

  Rather quickly, Louis had become a national hero—a role rarely, if ever, al lowed before to a black American. Louis had beaten the athletic world’s standing symbol of racial supremacy and successfully defended the nation’s pride. After the Schmeling defeat, Louis remembered receiving congratulations from Governor Frank Murphy of Michigan: “Michigan is proud of you, Joe.” A sign on a car in uptown Manhattan read: “Joe Louis for President!” In gaining national acceptance, Louis provided a contemporary role model of success and inclusion. In an unprecedented move in 1942, Louis defended his title against Buddy Beer, promising all profits would be donated to the Navy Relief Fund. Though his career was already irrevocably tied to America’s cultural and military battle with fascism, Louis used the war to stake further claims for acceptance by volunteering for the army in 1942. When he wrote his memoir after the war, Louis ended his account with a call for American unity through brotherhood—a lesson he said he had learned as a serviceman.20

  But Louis was not the only African American cultural figure who was winning favor with white audiences. In the musical world, W. C. Handy had become by World War II, according to his publicist and friend Abbe Niles, “the most famous and the most affectionately regarded American Negro.” In the words of blues historian Adam Gussow, Handy was “a Washingtonian refusal of ‘bitterness’ in the service of uplift and national unity, the anti-Native Son,” referring to the Richard Wright novel published a year before Handy’s autobiography, Father of the Blues. “Handy’s popular acclaim,” Gussow writes, “was grounded in the story of a southern black boy who makes good, creatively and financially, in an America fully prepared to honor his musical gifts, if not always his rights as a citizen.” And while most blues musicians were a bit edgier than Handy— they rarely ended their gigs with “God Bless America,” as Handy had ended his memoir—mainstream Americans’ acceptance of Louis and Handy began to open bigger stage and studio doors for the ambitious black musicians who had ridden the wave of the Great Migration to the northern cities and bigger markets. Although blacks and whites may have respected Louis and Handy for different reasons, they presented positive images of black masculinity and creativity, respectively, in a nation whose traditional social structures were under duress as a result of the Depression, the New Deal recovery, and World War II.21 One must be careful not to overstate the impact Louis had on society; it is worth remembering that five years after Louis’s stirring victory over Schmeling, just across the river from Yankee Stadium, young African Americans in Harlem rose up against police, resulting in five deaths and over five hundred arrests. That same summer (1943), Louis’s hometown, Detroit, erupted in a race riot that left over thirty people dead. The juxtaposition, then, of Louis’s cross-racial popularity and the racial antagonism exploding in northern cities during World War II highlights the turbulence of a society in flux.22

  Redefining Race: The Bluesmen’s Encounter with Wartime Pluralism

  African Americans in search of race reform during the late 193os and early 194os sought progress on two levels. First, black leadership in the NAACP and elsewhere pushed for increased solidarity and collective action. Explicit in the campaign for a “Double Victory” was the idea of intraracial cooperation, and contemporary race and labor activist A. P. Randolph began new experiments with organized protest. Southern African Americans that had for many years improved their lot by moving to a new sharecropping plantation or migrating to the city could now tap into more developed and sophisticated methods of effecting change, such as voting (provided they had migrated to the North). Second, black Americans pushed for inclusion via interracial cooperation. The 3 million African Americans who registered for service during the war showed that many fighting-age black men had answered the government’s call for a pluralistic war effort. Throughout the nation, African Americans enlisted for service at rates consistently higher than their proportion within the larger population.23

  While enrollment numbers alone tell the historian little about the motives behind African American enlistment, several blues recordings made during the buildup to the war reveal that the driving force behind black participation differed little from what influenced the majority of Americans who signed up: domestic masculinity was defined by fighting the country’s enemies and defending the principle of freedom. With the exception of the first blues song that mentioned the buildup of war, “Unemployment Stomp” (1938), in which the cautious war veteran Broonzy worried about a return to the draft, blues musicians made no mention of the war growing in Europe until the fighting actually began.24 Beginning in September 1939, following Germany’s invasion of Poland, bluesmen (mostly those younger than Broonzy’s World War I vet generation) hit the studios with impending war on their minds. During the early war years, black musicians used their medium to communicate new responsibilities— patriotism, self-sacrifice, collective action—that their peers just a decade before rarely touched on except as grist for sarcasm or irony. The first to do so was Little Bill Gaither, one of the Joe Louis balladeers. In “Army Bound Blues” (1939), Gaither emphasizes duty—even the song’s title reveals the momentum toward enlistment. Sonny Boy Williamson echoed Gaither’s call to duty a year later in his “War Time Blues,” adding an additional layer—that everyone had a role to play in the war effort. For bluesmen and their listeners, “Uncle Sam” embodied men’s martial responsibility to the nation. He was calling men to service and warning women: “Uncle Sam ain’t no woman, but he sure can take your man” was a common refrain. Even before the attack at Pearl Harbor that forced America’s transformation from Allied war chest to active belligerent nation, blues musicians sensed the war’s potential importance to black southerners.25

  Although the political consciousness underlying their music evolved during the war era, many bluesmen continued to rely on sexual themes and metaphors in lyric writing. Uncle Sam called men to war and, in so doing, separated many American spouses and lovers, thus creating new permutations of abandonment blues in which the chain gang, lynch mob, ra
ilroad, and the “other woman” were replaced by the white-bearded fellow in the red, white, and blue stovepipe hat. If we can talk about “abandonment blues” for women who lost their men to Uncle Sam, then we might equally discuss “replacement blues” for the male blues musicians, who sang about losing the companionship of lovers in exchange for the duty of military service, as in Gaither’s “Uncle Sam Called the Roll.”

  Uncle Sam called the roll, just a few days ago,

  It’s too late to worry, baby, your daddy’s booked to go.

  Don’t mind goin’ to war, not afraid to fight,

  But I’ll miss your lovin’ arms, baby, late hours in the night.26

  In his intensely rhythmic “Training Camp Blues,” pianist and singer Roosevelt Sykes similarly invoked the spirit of Uncle Sam as a replacement for sexual relationships, transferring potency in bed to potency on the field of combat— “your powder won’t be damp”:

  You may be mean as a lion, you may be humble as a lamb,

  Just take your mind off-a your wife, and put it on Uncle Sam.

  I want all of you draftees to put your mind on your training camp,

  So when you meet Hitler, your powder won’t be damp.

  So just pack your suitcase, get ready to leave your mate,

  You know you got to go, and help save them United States.27

  Both Gaither’s “Uncle Sam Called the Roll” and Sykes’s “Training Camp Blues” were recorded before December 7, 1941, and the rage militaire that would immediately follow, but these musicians had already come to see military service not only as a duty but a chance to contribute to society at large: “You know you got to go, and help save them United States.”28 Confidence was also the mood among black musicians on the eve of Pearl Harbor, as Williamson later sang in a track titled “We Got to Win,” claiming that “I just knowed that them United States was going to win!”29 Optimism outpaced fear in the early winter of 1941, and instead of viewing the looming war as impending doom or a chance to join with the enemies of white folks, blues musicians sang about unity and cooperation.