by Tom Piazza
The Great Depression hit poor blacks especially hard. Record sales were down all over, but the blues’s main audience was at the low end of the economic ladder, and they rarely had extra money to spend on records. “Some people say money is talkin’,” the Atlanta bluesman Barbecue Bob sang, “but it won’t say a word to me.” Across the country, people faced bread lines, subsistence conditions, and worse, and naturally enough the blues began to reflect this reality. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs began to provide some relief, and they themselves became a topic for blues in songs like “WPA Blues” and “Welfare Store Blues.”
As the 1930s went by more Southern black people moved to Northern cities, especially Chicago, where the opportunities for work were somewhat better. Swing—the dance music of the time, based on jazz—was the popular music, and it began to leave its imprint on the blues. Rhythms got smoothed out; the irregular vocal lines of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton, so close to memories of field hollers and cotton-patch work that many emigrants to the cities may have wanted to forget, got streamlined, and the most popular performers, like Peetie Wheatstraw, Leroy Carr, Tampa Red, Big Bill Broonzy, Big Maceo Merriweather, and John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, provided a solid, jazz-edged rhythm, often with bass, piano, and drum accompaniment.
The influence didn’t just go in one direction, of course. Many of the most popular big bands of the time relied heavily on the blues. Count Basie, whose band featured the great blues singer Jimmy Rushing, brought the sound of the Kansas City blues tradition to a national audience, and Duke Ellington used his compositional genius to ring more changes on the blues form than anyone has before or since. Clarinetist Woody Herman even dubbed his ensemble the “Band That Plays the Blues.” A number of the best popular singers, too, showed the influence of the blues, above all the great Billie Holiday, who delivered even the sappiest pop tunes with a strong blues sensibility.
There was still a market for the earlier, rougher kind of blues, although it was shrinking. A late entry turned out to be one of the most extraordinary singers and guitarists who ever lived—Robert Johnson. Influenced by Son House, still absolutely a Mississippi Delta bluesman, Johnson had also clearly heard pop singers like Bing Crosby. Johnson’s mid-1930s records were dark and intense and driven, like House’s and Patton’s, yet his style was just a bit more finished around the edges, and his stunning guitar playing laid the groundwork for the rocking bass of Chicago blues. His recordings would become a major influence on many of the blues revivalists of the 1960s. His murder in 1938 cut short one of the great blues careers.
6.
And then, of course, came World War Two, and everything changed. The war shuffled the entire deck of American society—people from different backgrounds were thrown together in the armed services, and also in the rapidly growing cities where there was an accelerated demand for war workers in factories. Chicago, Detroit, Indianapolis, and many other cities swelled with black and white workers. The scene was stimulating, but there was also a sense of dislocation, which gave an edge to the blues (and to a new form of white country music called honky-tonk), a double edge of bittersweet nostalgia for the familiarity of life back home, wherever home was, mixed with a realization that one could never really go back.
One of those who moved north to Chicago was a young man named McKinley Morganfield, who had been living on a plantation just outside of Clarksdale, Mississippi. Muddy Waters, as he called himself, began making a name at house parties and, later, nightclubs, playing an electric guitar and doing intense versions of down-home tunes like “Rolling and Tumbling” and “Walking Blues.” Along with other Southern transplants like Howlin’ Wolf, Sunnyland Slim, Little Walter Jacobs, and Rice Miller, he changed the sound of the blues. What came to be known as Chicago blues was in essence Mississippi Delta blues run through an amplifier—the music of Robert Johnson and Son House and Charley Patton, keyed to a new pitch of urban tension and urgency. Over insistent bass lines and accompanied sometimes by drums, piano, and throbbing amplified harmonica, this was destined to become one of the most influential types of blues.
After the war, there was an echo of the confidence of the 1920s as people began spending money more freely. And, as in the 1920s, the recording companies were under pressure from a new media rival—television, this time, rather than radio. Once again, the companies would take a shot on just about anything—once, at least. Audiences were changing, too; black people and white people had been thrown together in new ways, creating new kinds of tensions and opportunities. The younger black audiences in the cities had been listening to the jump blues of Louis Jordan and, later, Amos Milburn, Wynonie Harris, Joe Liggins, and suave Charles Brown, as well as the amplified gospel blues of Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Dozens of independent labels sprung up like wildflowers, with names like Atlantic, Chess, Savoy, King, Swing Time, Imperial, and Specialty, both to cater to these newer tastes, and to see what else would fly.
In their search for new sounds that would sell, the little record labels documented the early work of such important blues, and blues-based, performers as Fats Domino, Big Joe Turner, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Professor Longhair, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, Percy Mayfield, and, perhaps greatest of all, Ray Charles. In 1951 the small Sun label in Memphis released a record by a relatively obscure singer named Jackie Brenston, with an exuberant vocal riding over an aggressive shuffle beat, answered by a sandpaper-rough saxophone, and many consider that disc, “Rocket 88,” to be the first real rock and roll record. Records by performers like Ike Turner, Roscoe Gordon, Big Mama Thornton (who scored an immense hit with “Hound Dog”), and the charismatic singer and guitarist B. B. King were selling well to black buyers but were having trouble getting heard beyond what was still a more or less segregated “rhythm and blues” audience.
But then, in 1954, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips recorded young Elvis Presley, and all hell broke loose. Presley’s versions of blues-based material—covers of Arthur Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” Junior Parker’s “Mystery Train,” and, later, “Hound Dog,” among many others—were inflected, too, with the feel of country music, and that fusion helped the blues cross over to a national white mass audience. Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Bo Diddley and white singers like Carl Perkins and Jerry Lee Lewis brought the sound and the feeling of the blues into the main vein of American popular music.
While this was going on, technology was opening its own unexpected doors. Through the new medium of the long-playing record (LP)—which could fit much more on a side, at the slow speed of 331/3 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the earlier records’ 78—reissues of extremely rare old records began to make the earlier music available to a younger generation, who were often at quite a geographical and cultural remove from the sources. Harry Smith’s famous six-record Anthology of American Folk Music and Samuel B. Charters’s pioneering collection The Country Blues turned on these younger listeners, some of whom made it their business to begin learning the old music, note for note—the beginnings of what came to be known as the folk revival.
Young record collectors and fans also began trying to locate the men and women who had made those treasured old recordings, and trips south turned up figures like Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Sippie Wallace, and quite a few others. They emerged from the past (along with a number of seminal white rural performers, like Dock Boggs), in many cases playing every bit as well as they had on their recordings thirty years earlier. They were brought north to play in concerts and coffeehouses, and at the enormously important Newport Folk Festival, and they made an indelible impression on everyone who heard them.
7.
At the same time, there was an odd ebb in the blues quotient in pop music. From about 1959 to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963, things got . . . comfortable. Although blues was still being recorded and listened to by black audiences, and classic recordings by the likes of Ray Charles, Jimmy Reed, Slim Harpo, and Bobby “Blue” Bland wer
e still being made, on the airwaves it was largely the era of white teen idols like Frankie Avalon, Paul Anka, and Pat Boone; the blues was in a partial eclipse.
But it is one of the odd coincidences of the era that, within three months of JFK’s assassination, the blues came back in force, from an unexpected direction: England. The Beatles arrived to an upsurge of hysterical appreciation, singing their Chuck Berry– and Little Richard–inspired rock and roll, and after them came the entire British Invasion. Just when it looked as if maybe the blues were gone, the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Yardbirds, and John Mayall reminded white America of what its culture was really all about.
America was ready for it. After the 1950s the complexities that the country faced—the emergence of the civil rights movement, the acceleration of the Vietnam War, the assassinations, the increased consciousness among the young that things were not as they seemed on the surface—began to give everyone a case of the blues. The blues as music found a new resonance with a wide public, which needed a way to prevail and continue to operate in the face of injustice and trouble, a way of affirming humanity without turning a blind eye to the facts of life in America.
One of the most important performers at this time was the protean genius Bob Dylan. From his first recordings, in 1962, Dylan was mixing material from the black and white rural traditions, performing songs such as Bukka White’s “Fixin’ to Die” and Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean.” After the British Invasion, Dylan began plugging in and delivering a more aggressive, blues-based form of rock and roll on albums like Bringing It All Back Home and Highway 61 Revisited, on which he brought his own brand of imagist poetry to a series of kaleidoscopic variations on the blues form.
In the mid-1960s a number of young white and black performers and bands, fueled in part by the British Invasion and in part by the reissuing of older performances, began playing blues as a main part of their repertoire. The Blues Project, the Paul Butterfield Blues Band (which had accompanied Dylan in his first electric performance), the Lovin’ Spoonful, Janis Joplin, Taj Mahal, the Grateful Dead, Jimi Hendrix, Canned Heat (which took its name from a recording by Delta singer Tommy Johnson), and the Jefferson Airplane (which cribbed part of its name from Blind Lemon) all spun their own variations on traditional blues.
These developments also meant a new lease on life for Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, and others who had been playing the blues all along. To their credit, a number of the blues-influenced rock bands made a point of steering audiences to the sources of their music. The Rolling Stones made it a condition of one of their appearances on the television music show Shindig! that Howlin’ Wolf appear as well. In the 1960s and 1970s performers like Wolf, Waters, Albert King, and especially the brilliant B. B. King began playing to much larger crowds than they had known before, and different crowds. As the audience for blues began to dwindle somewhat among urban African-Americans, the slack got taken up by young white audiences. The impact of seeing the earlier players live—still powerful and vital—made an impression that many never forgot. Some of the most popular rockers of that time were those most rooted in blues: the Allman Brothers, Led Zeppelin, Johnny Winter, Eric Clapton. Young musicians who heard the older blues musicians live were marked by that experience, and the careers of Bonnie Raitt, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Lucinda Williams, and many others would have been unrecognizable without it.
8.
Today, blues is having another of its periodic resurgences—in the music of the White Stripes (who have recorded songs by Son House, Blind Willie McTell, and others), Jon Spencer, Keb’ Mo’, Corey Harris, Chris Thomas King, Susan Tedeschi, Cassandra Wilson, David Johansen, and some hip-hop artists, most notably Chuck D. It has made its way back to its ultimate source, as well, influencing the music of such contemporary African performers as Ali Farka Touré. It has proven to be so durable partly because it is not just a way of playing music but a way of living in the world.
The blues is a reminder of the painful facts of life in the midst of good times, but it is also a reminder that hard times can’t last. In the world of the blues, nothing lasts forever—except, perhaps, the constant struggle with the blues. Acknowledging that fact, the blues seem to say, is the key to living realistically. The incredible diversity of voices and approaches, the breadth of soul, that has found expression in the blues, is a testament to the durability and usefulness of that worldview.
The blues has always met resistance from those who don’t, for one reason or another, want to be reminded that life will always be hard. And there are some, to this day, who prefer not to hear its message. But what would American music sound like without the blues? What would Louis Armstrong sound like? Or Chuck Berry? Or Bill Monroe and his bluegrass, or Elvis Presley, or Hank Williams? Or Cajun music? Or George Gershwin, or Duke Ellington, or Bob Dylan? Not just jazz but all American music would be an empty house without the blues. It would be a town without a river, a ship without a sail, a train without an engine. And by that measure alone, if no other, the blues will never die. It is perennial, like the showers of rain—and the sun that will surely follow.
In 1989 I flew from New York to Memphis to do a short travel piece. While I was there I rented a car and made a side trip down to Clarksdale, Mississippi, near where Muddy Waters had worked on a plantation and made his first recordings, in 1941 and 1942, for the Library of Congress. I visited the Delta Blues Museum, which at the time was located on the second floor of the public library. It was a quiet, still room on a hot afternoon; little dust motes floated in the sun that came through the partly closed blinds. A few cases with some 78s, a few artifacts, not a lot, but it evoked a period and a feeling, and I loved it. (It has subsequently moved to new quarters and expanded greatly.)
On my way out, the librarian, a very gracious middle-aged white lady who had shown me the way to the second-floor museum, asked if I wanted to go and see “Muddy’s house.” The cabin where Muddy Waters had lived was apparently still there, just a few miles outside of Clarksdale, in what was now a town called Stovall. She drew me a little map, and, thrilled, I set out to find Muddy’s cabin. After not more than five minutes I was outside of town, surrounded by endless fields stretching off under a grey sky; another five minutes or so and I easily found the cabin, set just off the road on a slight rise, surrounded by more fields. Its brick-red paint was almost all gone; the doors were gone, the windows were gone, and the roof was gone. There it was.
I got out of the car, and with no one to stop me I climbed up onto the doorjamb and stepped inside a large room, open to the sky above. I walked around on the bare planks, looked out the window across the fields, walked back across the floor, pulled a loose nail out of a wall for a lucky piece. I wish I could say that I heard the echoes of long-ago music, or that an entire world was summoned up for me, but mainly what I heard was time rushing by.
Eight years later, I returned to Clarksdale to do this interview with Muddy Waters’s cousin, the Reverend Willie Morganfield. While there, I drove out again to see Muddy’s cabin, but it was gone—purchased and moved, apparently, by a well-known and well-heeled blues maven. It has since been returned to Clarksdale, and it now sits in a room in the restored train depot that houses the new Delta Blues Museum.
Sacred and Profane in Clarksdale
Saturday afternoon at the Western Sizzlin restaurant in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Outside, just beyond the parking lot, runs Highway 61, which in Clarksdale is the strip with the fast-food places, the chain motels, the turning lanes, the mini-malls—the oasis in the desert for those passing through the Delta south toward Greenville or north toward Memphis. Inside, Reverend Willie Morganfield, trim at seventy years of age in a beige windbreaker and brown touring cap, walks past the end of the salad bar and affectionately greets a couple of waitresses, flirting politely and generating good-natured laughter.
On Sunday mornings, when Reverend Morganfield emerges from his wood-paneled basement office at the Bell Grove Baptist Church and ascends i
n glory to the pulpit, he gives the impression of great size, like a barrel wrapped in a bright blue double-breasted suit. Here, though, as he makes his way to the restaurant’s back room, he looks compact, spry, something like a fight trainer—quick on his feet, able to notice small increments of advantage and disadvantage in a developing situation. To an outsider, his eyes present a pleasant, guarded, searching expression, as if he were waiting to be tipped the first part of a password. He is Muddy Waters’s cousin.
As he settles down at a table in the Sizzlin’s back room, he lights up a Virginia Slims menthol. “I don’t like the members of the congregation to see me smoking that much,” he explains. “It’s okay around a certain small group of them, but . . .”
The reverend is one of the best-known preachers in the Mississippi Delta. He is also a prolific recording artist with several sermons committed to record as well as a string of gospel songs (many written by him) stretching back nearly forty years. A preacher in the Mississippi Delta has a peculiar problem, to this day, because he has to coexist with a secular tradition—the blues—as profound as any sacred tradition. The blues offers an implicit, comprehensive, existential philosophy that operates outside the framework of Christian belief, yet which is haunted by it just the same; they are the Delta’s spiritual poles—one sacred and the other profane—and I am here to ask Muddy Waters’s cousin his thoughts about them.
As a preacher, Reverend Morganfield’s technique runs toward the “Behold, I set before you a multitude of details” variety, as opposed to the intensely anecdotal, narrative, even poetic style favored by preachers like Reverends C. L. Franklin and Jasper Williams Jr. Reverend Morganfield tends to lecture his congregation on performing church duties, or on the need to contribute more money to the church. In one of his recorded sermons he estimates what an average church member might spend on cigarettes, soda pop, chewing gum, and other nonessentials in a given year, and contrasts that with what he or she might give to the church.
