During the 1920s a number of tent shows included or indeed were presided over by women blues singers, whose performances introduced the latest examples of formally composed blues to audiences throughout African America. Best known of these was “the Empress of the Blues,” Bessie Smith, who toured with a tent show during the summers of the 1920s and continued to do so early in the next decade. Among her West Virginia engagements were three in Wheeling on May 14, 15, and 16, 1931. Her presence provides further evidence that the culture of black West Virginia included the influence of commercially produced music, a fact notable for several reasons.
Unlike folk music, commercial music was not a music of place (except in “places” imagined by a lyricist), nor was it explicitly rooted in the histories and collective experiences of the residents of the West Virginia communities where it was performed. This repertory had not been imported from Virginia, the Carolinas, nor any other southern state by black migrants, unlike the folk styles previously discussed. It came primarily from New York City, a place distant in miles and culture from the rural setting of the coalfields. When performed by elegantly costumed performers—Bessie Smith was well known for her attire—it acquired at least a veneer of sophistication associated with an urban life with which few black Mountaineers had much, if any, direct experience.
Just as they led the way in introducing products of New York and other northern cities’ music industries to the central Appalachians, the tent shows may have provided the business model for big bands on the road. The advance men promoting a forthcoming performance by a circus or vaudeville troupe would have learned which local communities would turn out in large numbers for a show and what days were paydays—on which a show could expect greater attendance, particularly if it pitched its tent close to several company towns. Of great importance both to the tent shows and subsequently to the bands were the names of people in those towns who would welcome a placard in the window of their business or on the side of their building, would sell tickets in advance, and could be counted on to deal honestly with the shows’ representatives when they came to collect the proceeds from those sales.
The song-and-dance acts of a vaudeville tent show included music that would later become part of the jazz repertories of dance bands. Regardless of any differences, in both instances the music was being performed by strangers, not by banjo-picking and fiddle-playing neighbors who, during the week or even earlier on the same day, might have dug one or more tons of coal in the same mine alongside the owner of the house in which they were performing. Like the tent shows, the touring dance bands may have contributed to a sense of community among audience members during a performance, but they were not part of that community; indeed, they moved on as soon as the engagement was finished.
After the early 1920s, the blues also came to the Mountain State on records. Wind-up Victrolas appeared throughout the coalfields, and race records could be purchased by mail order. In August 1973 Tom Brown, a member of the faculty of West Virginia University, interviewed Charles Walker, then residing in the McDowell County town of Jenkinjones, a former coal camp near the border with Virginia. Born on the banks of the New River in predominately white Summers County in 1914, beginning at age seventeen Walker had played the banjo as a member of a string band whose other members were two whites playing mandolin and guitar respectively. The trio primarily played for white square dances. Walker also picked up the guitar and began to acquire a repertory of blues and other vernacular songs, some undoubtedly originating as recordings but coming to him through oral transmission.
During the interview he performed “My Baby’s Gone Blues,” which he said he learned from a black miner in Coalwood, McDowell County, sometime in the mid- to late 1930s. The performance consisted of five twelve-bar choruses and a bit more: a short guitar introduction, three vocal choruses, an instrumental chorus, another vocal chorus, and a partial repeat of the instrumental chorus, at which point he stopped. The fact that the song was limited to five choruses suggests that Walker had learned it from a recording, since blues recordings on ten-inch 78 r.p.m. discs typically accommodated only this much music. In addition, the instrumental chorus seemed formulaic, further evidence that he appropriated it from a recorded performance. Nothing about this performance suggests it was either spontaneously improvised or had originated in live performance where no time constraints would have limited the number of verses. In essence, Walker “covered” a recording, evidence that black Mountaineers could actively participate in a national musical culture that came to them through recordings, radio, as well as by means of performances by traveling musicians. (Walker 1973).
Other varieties of secular music were also part of African American life of the company towns. String-band music,—primarily to accompany dancing, with prominent roles for fiddles, banjos, and guitars—was one such variety, as Charles Walker’s testimony confirms (Walker 1973). In Gary, located in McDowell County and the site of a mine owned by U.S. Steel, a black five-piece string band played regularly during the 1930s (Cranford et al. 2008). Black parade bands presented another musical repertory and sound on patriotic and other celebratory occasions, and their older musicians taught the rising generation to play the brass and wood-wind instruments that would later anchor the dance bands.
While the preceding genres were appropriate for Saturday night, Sunday morning’s music included gospel and other types of black sacred musical expression cultivated within black Baptist and Methodist churches, as well as those of other denominations. As with the blues, the Piedmont region east of the central Appalachians was no doubt one source of this music. In Itmann, a coal company town, six young men, two of them brothers, formed the Starlight Gospel Singers in the late 1920s or early 1930s to perform at various black churches in the southern coalfields. Similar ensembles could be found within many black congregations in the Mountain State at that time (Kline 1987, 10). Among more socially conservative congregants dancing and the music with which it was associated was frowned upon, and gospel and other sacred music constituted one of the few acceptable repertories (Cranford et al. 2008).
Quartets performed on secular occasions as well. At a Republican party rally on July 20, 1934, in the Logan County community of Holden, a company town of the Island Creek Coal Company, Rector Charles McIver, in his “Local Colored News” column for the Logan Banner, reported that “the Carey Jug band and several quartets are to alternate with patriotic selections...” (LB 7.20.34, 2). One wonders if in Logan County political differences were accompanied by aesthetic differences when it came to music. On the following evening, the Southern West Virginia Negro Democrats held a dance in the Logan armory for which Speed Webb’s dance band from Indianapolis provided the music (PC 7.14.34, 1/5).
While these musical styles and genres defined much of the black musical culture in the coalfields, the influence of other musical traditions and collaborations among musicians both black and white were also part of these scenes. Studies of West Virginia’s mining industry in the period have often drawn attention to the fact that most mine owners created segregated communities within their company towns, establishing distinct neighborhoods for blacks, for European immigrants, and for native whites. In terms of the musical life of company towns, racial and ethnic segregation meant little. Sounds traveled, and musically talented neighbors of varied ancestries and ethnicities could have easily heard something they liked of a tradition other than their own. Shared interests in making music undoubtedly brought diverse people together on one another’s front porches or in other social settings to exchange elements of their respective musical styles and practices. Folklorist Alan Lomax’s broad observation about cultural exchanges between diverse people certainly applied to residents of company towns: “Blacks and whites lived [as] neighbors, swapped favors, and stole each others’ music” (Lomax 1990). The results of such “theft” were surely to be heard in the types of music community-based musicians performed, reflecting in part the settings in which they played.5
> In Virginia Piedmont Blues: The Lives and Art of Two Virginia Blues-men, Barry Lee Pearson enumerated the variety of “community-based social events” that were major occasions in the lives of African Americans in the rural agricultural communities of the Piedmont in Virginia and the Carolinas, the “home places” of many black Mountaineers. These included “frolics, suppers, selling parties, hoedowns, breakdowns, and seasonal collective work parties all [of which] served as homegrown recreation.” Central to these occasions was the music made by local musicians, most of whom “played for fun, recognition, and a chance to test their skills against [those of] other performers” (Pearson 1990, 14).
The one occasion shared by residents of the Piedmont and those of West Virginia coal camps would have been parties held at the end of the work week. Nat Reece recalled that in Itmann where he had lived from the age of four:
On Friday nights one house would have beer, home brew, and whiskey, and they would hire someone to play, or two people to play guitar. And they’d have one of the biggest house dances ever was, boy! People’d be dancing everywhere. A man’d knock the paneling out between two rooms [of a company house] and make one great big space. People would get in there and dance just the same as they was in a ballroom, boy, at the Holiday Inn! Yes sir. And they would dance all night long, as long as the music was there. Of course, when you seen one house party you seen them all. They were no different, wasn’t nothing but a couple of walls knocked out, where you’d have enough room to jitterbug. (Kline 1987, 15)
Not only guitarists were involved. E. Ray Williams of Welch recalled traveling “professors” who played the piano here and there in McDowell County and found plenty of work in homes where an upright piano and partygoers ready to dance might be found (Cranford et al. 2008).
That the hoedown did not endure in the Mountain State is suggested by a brief article in the Williamson [West Virginia] Daily News for January 26, 1938 (see Fig. I.2). It announced: “Gingham dresses and overalls will dominate at an old-fashioned ‘Barn Dance’ to be sponsored by the elementary department in Liberty high school gymnasium Monday night [February 1].... Grownups will be given an opportunity to show the youngsters a thing or two about the Virginia Reel, Georgia Stomp, and other dance floor capers.... Square dancing will be the main diversion of the evening...” (WillDN 1.26.38, 7). Liberty was Williamson’s and Mingo County’s sole school for African Americans, and despite its name it included both primary and secondary grades.
That the barn dance was characterized as “old-fashioned,” and that the “grownups” had to “show” young people how to perform various dances, such as the Virginia Reel, implies that these had become passé, presumably along with the music to accompany them. It would seem that only by deliberately creating an occasion for their performance might devotees of these older musical traditions attract the attention (and perhaps the interest) of those otherwise entranced by the fox-trot and the Lindy and by the big bands that played the music appropriate for those dances.
Fig. I.2. “Old-fashioned Barn Dance To Be Given Here,” article in the Williamson Daily News, January 26, 1938. Liberty High School served the black students of Williamson (seat of Mingo County) and vicinity. (Williamson Daily News)
By contrast, in the northern coalfield, where there were comparatively few blacks in any one company town, the situation was very different. Square dances and polkas, the latter possibly introduced by immigrant Slavic miner/musicians, were the principal dances in Cassville, Monongalia County. For this reason, Marcus Cranford, a member of one of only three black families residing in that community, learned these dances long before he encountered the fox trot, the Lindy, or any other dances associated with the black big band jazz of the period before World War II (Cranford et al. 2008).6
Little is known for certain about the diversity of musical genres cultivated within the small middle-class African American communities of Beckley, Bluefield, Charleston, and other county seats, but it is hard to imagine that it would have been significantly different from that of middle-class neighborhoods in other parts of the nation. Popular songs, hymns, and dance music—whether syncopated in the tradition of ragtime and jazz or more stylistically conservative as in the case of the waltz—would have constituted the repertory played primarily by the women of the house on the parlor piano to entertain family and friends. In addition to, or in place of, the piano might be a radio, a phonograph, or both, intended for the family’s entertainment and for private social gatherings during which the carpet might be rolled up for dancing. One such dance occurred in Fairmont in the northern coalfield on August 27, 1934, when “a radio party was staged at 218 Jefferson Street on Monday evening by Ernest Owens. Noble Sissle, Wayne King, and Claude Hopkins entertained. Sissle was heard from the French Casino in Chicago, and Hopkins was playing a dance in Charlotte, N.C.” (PC 9.1.34, 2/6). Whatever else he did in life, Mr. Owens was known in the community for his tap dancing (Nallen, 2001). While his may have been a special interest in dancing, this event was surely not the only occasion when black Mountaineers danced in their homes to music broadcast on the radio. From the perspective of the music involved, the only differences between the Friday night parties in coal camps as described by Nat Reece and Ernest Owen’s radio party would have been the style of the music performed and the medium through which it was presented to the partygoers.
Commercially published repertories, found on the rack of a piano or in its bench, and broadcast performances that provided music for “radio parties” turn our attention from the homemade folk musical styles of the mountains toward the commercial music imported into West Virginia, repertories making little use of banjos, fiddles, guitars, and other “folk” instruments, instead favoring the brass, reed, and percussion instruments of the band tradition, and above all the piano. Dependent on musical notation, this music required performers who could not only play their instruments with technical facility but also read music and play parts that became more and more demanding as arrangements grew more sophisticated, expectations also to be met by the members of a dance band at that time.
The Social and Political World of Black Mountaineers
The migration of large numbers of African Americans to West Virginia was prompted in part by the promise of economic prosperity. Working on a railroad paid better than working as sharecropper or farm laborer. Those building the C&O, for instance, earned an average of $1.75 per day and were paid in cash once or twice a month (Taylor 1926, 114). In the same period, black farm workers in Virginia and elsewhere might earn between nine and fifteen dollars a month; a sharecropper might get between a quarter and half of the crop, but what that was worth depended upon the price paid for the commodities grown in a given year (Franklin and Moss, 212).7
Miners’ wages were comparable to those of railroad workers, which motivated Thomas Cannady, a former sharecropper, to move to McDowell County to mine coal simply because he “could see [the money] better. The miner got paid once or twice a month. On the farm you had to wait till the fall of the year when you gathered your crops, and then the other fellows, the landowner, merchants, etc., got it all and that way we didn’t make nothing.” This sentiment was echoed by Bill Deering, another black miner: “On the farm I was no[t] making anything; in West Virginia I made a dollar on my first day, and I thought I was rich!” (Corbin 1981, 63, based on interviews conducted by the author in 1975).
Beyond the opportunity to receive hard cash on a regular basis, a second benefit of mining in West Virginia was comparative job security. The rapidly expanding industry experienced a chronic shortage of miners until the 1920s, so blacks and whites were not competing for jobs. Consequently, there was little or no racial conflict over employment in the coalfields— a very different situation from northern cities, where the fact that there were fewer jobs than available workers at times caused racial tension, if not outright violence. Most trade unions denied African Americans membership in an effort to reduce the competition for employment; a conspicuous exceptio
n was the United Mine Workers of America, a fact having major implications for black miners in West Virginia during the 1930s.
There were political benefits to living in the Mountain State unknown to African Americans both in adjacent states and in Alabama, site of another major coalfield from which there was considerable migration to the Mountain State between 1910 and 1930 (Trotter 1990, 78–79). Drafted in 1872, West Virginia’s constitution followed by only a few years the ratification of the U.S. Constitution’s Fifteenth Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote to all adult males. The state’s constitution adopted similar language, and by implication, “all adult males” included African American men, who could also testify in court, hold political office, and (after 1881) serve on juries, though schools were racially segregated and interracial marriages were outlawed by the same document (Ambler and Summers, 270–73).8 Because white Republicans and Democrats were more or less evenly divided in the Mountain State, the black vote was often crucial to a party’s electoral fortunes, and African Americans’ interests were taken seriously by the political establishment, as shown by several developments.
Big Band Jazz in Black West Virginia Page 4
