Electric Shock

by Peter Doggett

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  RECORD COMPANIES ORIGINALLY called them ‘Old Familiar Tunes’, unable until the Second World War to find a valid description for the music of white rural America. ‘Hillbilly’ was one label that stuck, though (like the N-word in hip hop) it was an insulting term applied to country folk by outsiders and only adopted by performers with a mixture of defiant pride and (here the rap comparison fades) self-deprecation. The song-collector John A. Lomax named his 1910 anthology Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads; Cecil Sharp’s research in Kentucky and Tennessee yielded English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians. Both those strands contributed to the multifaceted genre that became known (but only after 1945) as country music, or country and western, or even ‘folk’. But by the time the folklorists reached the American South, the ‘purity’ that they hoped to discover in the region’s music had already been tainted by countless other influences, black and white, popular and traditional. After radio reached the mountains, prairies and swamps of rural America, ‘hillbilly’ singers (and their African-American equivalents) would be just as likely to entertain their friends and neighbours with show tunes and vaudeville novelties as with anything that could be traced back to their forefathers.

  Similar problems had been experienced by Cecil Sharp and his peers when exploring the folk heritage of Britain. They had chosen not to document or preserve any song with a commercial root, opting for the supposed purity of ‘traditional’ material. (Moreover, many collectors bowdlerised lyrics that were bawdy or likely to offend polite ears.) There was a certain doomed majesty to the process, as the poet and collector Alfred Williams conceded in 1923: ‘The songs themselves3, as far as singing goes, are practically defunct. There is no need to revive them. To do so, in fact, would be impossible. It is also desirable. We live in a new age, almost in a new world … Let us, then, be content to say that folk-song is dead.’ But Williams insisted that the old songs should be saved, ‘not for their artistic or strictly literary value, but in order to have records of that which amused, cheered, consoled and so profoundly affected the lives of the people of an age that has for ever passed away’. There was a sense of noblesse oblige within this impulse: of educated men preserving the culture of those too ignorant to perform the service themselves. Most American collectors adopted a somewhat less puritanical and patriarchal attitude towards the material they gathered.

  To avoid the denigrating connotations of the H-word, performers from the rural South would accentuate the heroic qualities of cowboys and mountaineers, traditions which were rooted in a kind of fact and which could be cleaned up and polished for national and (later) international consumption. Tempting though it is to imagine that the pioneers of the blues and country were inspired only by an excess of emotion, both traditions quickly extended beyond local entertainment into a form of career structure. Rural musicians, toting a banjo, fiddle or guitar, would travel from community to community, with commerce on their mind, as country-music historian Charles Wolfe explained: ‘Many of the songs were printed4 on small cards about the size of a postcard (still called “ballet cards” by old-timers), usually signed by the composer or singer; rural minstrels wandered through the mountains singing at rural courthouses and making some money by selling their ballet cards for a penny or a nickel each.’

  In 1923, radio station WBAP in Fort Worth broadcast ninety minutes of old-time dance music by fiddler Captain M. J. Bonner, eliciting more telegrams and calls of appreciation than any previous presentation. Thus began the tradition of the radio barn dance, reaching an early pinnacle with the launch of the Grand Ole Opry from WSM in Nashville two years later. These shows were self-consciously ‘old-timey’ from the start: their appeal was to the entire family, especially those old enough to imagine that they remembered when mountain music and cowboy ballads were heard at every fireside. The advent of radio sparked a passion for old-time fiddlers – boosted, ironically, by that pioneer of mass-production engineering, Henry Ford, who reckoned that rural fiddle tunes could calm the immorality of the iniquitous modern age. The star fiddlers, as determined by nationwide contests, were showcased on the Opry, initially alongside brass bands and vaudeville stars, until primitive market research determined that the audience preferred their music to sound as if it came from their own kind.

  There was a field of opportunity in the old-time milieu for anyone brazen enough to reap it – for Vernon Dalhart, in particular, with his mid-1920s rural ballads describing train wrecks, or prisoners’ laments. The first of these, ‘The Prisoner’s Song’ (1924), is estimated to have sold more than 6 million copies.

  The tradition was inaugurated when folklorist Ralph Peer journeyed to Atlanta in 1923 to record Fiddlin’ John Carson’s ‘The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane’. The song had been familiar for decades; modern technology’s freshest inventions were being used to deliver comfortable nostalgia. Radio (and, in time, electrical recording techniques) might have been invented to display the fireside intimacy of such performances, and the second half of the decade produced such unlikely star performers as Gid Tanner & the Skillet Lickers, a prototype string band, whose ‘John Henry’ seemed to have been cut amidst a moonshine orgy; and Uncle Dave Macon, the self-proclaimed ‘King of the Hillbillies’, who travelled the South in a horse and cart when everyone else was using a Model T Ford. His cart carried an advertising slogan: ‘Uncle Dave Macon, Slowing Down But Still Moving. Old Time Religion, Old Reliable Way, My Gasoline Consists of Corn, Oats, Whip and Hay.’

  Radio exposure ensured that Uncle Dave would never be short of his ‘gasoline’. Such determined primitivism was clearly a trademark of rural authenticity for the ‘hillbilly’ audience: why else would Vernon Dalhart record a series of disaster ballads (floods, train wrecks, the death of Rudolph Valentino) with a deliberately out-of-tune guitar? Ralph Peer criss-crossed the South in search of talent to tap into Dalhart’s huge audience, and in Bristol, Tennessee he uncovered two of the most influential American acts of the century. The Carter Family was a trio made up of husband, wife and wife’s sister (who was conveniently married to A. P. Carter’s brother). The sister was ‘Mother’ Maybelle Carter, widely credited with inventing a style of country guitar picking that is still prevalent today. Her brother-in-law, A. P., was, like John Lomax and Cecil Sharp, a song-collector. He was also a canny entrepreneur, who mined the collective memories of the towns and villages that the Carter Family visited, uncovering ‘traditional’ melodies and lyrics which he updated for a modern audience – carefully claiming the composing credits and royalties for himself. Soon he was being sent such material through the mail, a mix of age-old oral tradition and modern efforts in the same vein, all of which was incorporated into the Carter Family songbook. The trio’s backwoods harmony singing, naïve but unaffected, has survived virtually unchanged into modern Americana, a genre that pays passionate homage to the Carters’ memory.

  Ralph Peer’s other 1927 discovery was too idiosyncratic to be imitated so widely. Jimmie Rodgers (alias ‘The Singing Brakeman’) was, in the opinion of 1930s–40s country star Alton Delmore, ‘simply the greatest5. There has never been one man in the whole history of entertainment that packed the wallop he did by himself. There have been good singers, good players and performers that have made great hits with the public and made millions of dollars. But there has never been one man with a single instrument that could sing and play like he could.’ Had Rodgers not been felled by tuberculosis in 1933, aged just 35, he might have carried his fearless blend of hillbilly sentimentality, cowboy swagger, blues emotion and (his trademark) Alpine yodelling into the mainstream of rock ’n’ roll and beyond, as the white equivalent of a Muddy Waters or John Lee Hooker. But in a six-year recording career, his procession of ‘Blue Yodel’ songs conjured up the image of the lonesome troubadour, patrolling the prairies with his guitar and dawg for company. (He had no first-hand experience as a cowboy, but he had indeed been ridin’ the rails and hoppin’ the freights since his early teens.) Rodgers
provided a template for the singing cowboys who populated the 1930s, on record or on screen, and for those – such as Bing Crosby – who imitated them so profitably. The cowboy tradition strayed into the mainstream of popular music with Billy Hill’s 1933 song, ‘The Last Round-Up’, the first in a long tradition of western-themed hits which would stretch into the early 1960s.

  By recording with Louis Armstrong, and casually sweeping the blues into his music, Jimmie Rodgers blurred the lines between white and black entertainment. He was not alone: the Allen Brothers duo were recorded on location by a Columbia engineer in 1927. He sent their discs to New York, where executives noted that both songs were blues tunes, and promoted the Allens amongst the label’s black performers. But the Allens were white, and threatened to sue Columbia for the damage to their reputation. Despite the racial tension and segregation still scarring the US, however, many musicians kept their ears and minds entirely open and free of prejudice. The radio barn dances (notably the Opry) were consumed avidly in black and white homes across the South, and such notable contributors to African-American music as Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Chuck Berry soaked up as much of the hillbilly tradition as they could.

  Yet music made by rural performers of their own race was carefully ghettoised, to prevent black styles and ideas veering in the opposite direction. When Ralph Peer began to record black artists such as Ed Andrews, he was forced to tread warily in the marketplace: ‘We were afraid to advertise6 Negro records, so I listed them as “Race” records.’ Even when, in 1930, the blues trio the Mississippi Sheiks blatantly imitated Jimmie Rodgers’s style with ‘Yodeling Fiddling Blues’, their music had no chance of reaching Rodgers’s white audience. But this segregation allowed the blues, as it grew from a style into a culture, to spark emotional and physical responses that would have been considered taboo in a more integrated milieu.

  Blind Lemon7 [Jefferson] and Lonnie [Johnson] hit me hardest, I believe, because their voices were so distinct, natural and believable. I heard them talking to me.

  B. B. King

  It’s funny how collectors8 want to know about records. In those days [we] just made them and forgot all about it. If we had known the interest that those things would arouse today, we would have paid more attention.

  Victoria Spivey

  Gertrude Pridgett – known as ‘Ma’ Rainey after her marriage to William ‘Pa’ Rainey in 1904 – could command a crowd. ‘She wouldn’t have to sing9 any words’, poet Sterling Brown told blues scholar Paul Oliver. ‘She would moan, and the audience would moan with her … Ma really knew these people.’ She’d learned to gauge their temperature at 14, when she first took the stage at an Atlanta music hall. At 19, she was one of the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels who worked a tent show across the South, eventually recruiting the young Bessie Smith to join the company. By 1914, Ma and Pa were an after-hours attraction with a travelling circus: something for the adults to enjoy once the kids had been sent home, when the self-styled ‘Assassinators of the Blues’ could play out sexual passion and romantic despair for folks who identified with every word.

  By the time she recorded ‘See See Rider Blues’ in 1924, Ma Rainey was 38 – a performer with every inch of her body: flamboyant, charismatic, theatrical, unchained. She invested the song with such desolation that it barely moved at all: voice and instruments, Louis Armstrong’s cornet and Don Redman’s clarinet, merged into a seamless groan of anguish, a vision of despair that, like the best of the silent films, could convey the story of a lifetime via only one of the senses.

  The greatest of the so-called classic blues singers were great actors, as Rainey must have been. They dressed to dazzle, sang to kill or thrill. With few exceptions, the material they sang was generic – albeit from a genre so compelling that many of its songs have survived undiminished for almost a century. Performers could, and did, swap verses from one number to another; repeat lines that tore out an audience’s heart; claim ownership (until the copyright lawyers were alerted) of scenarios and phrases that were the shared currency of a generation. What counted was the moan; the catch and flutter; the full-throated roar or half-choked sigh; all the tricks and idiosyncrasies of phrasing which separated Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith from the dozens of other women who were out to seize their thrones in the 1920s.

  Blues aficionados often lament Bessie Smith’s decision in the late 1920s, when she was struggling with alcoholism and her voice was fraying, to coarsen her appeal with the double entendre of ‘You’ve Got to Give Me Some’ and ‘I’m Wild About That Thing’. Subsequent critics might have preferred more subtlety, but in the 1920s, only the blues made it possible to admit that sex existed, and make a shameless declaration of how it felt to fuck, and want to be fucked.

  It was not only women who laid themselves bare this way. The jocular ‘Shake That Thing’ by Papa Charlie Jackson from 1925 masqueraded as a dance tune, but Papa’s gal must have been a private dancer. More explicit still was ‘It’s Tight Like That’ by Georgia Tom and Tampa Red from 1928, an unashamedly rude set of nursery-rhyme lyrics which could only allow for one interpretation. At a time when the pinnacle of pop eroticism was Ukulele Ike crooning ‘I Can’t Give You Anything But Love’, the blues skipped dinner and the walk in the park and raced straight to the bedroom.

  When folklorists and record company scouts set out to discover the ‘authentic’ black music of the American South in the 1920s, much of what they unearthed was soaked in everyday passion. One of the most successful early field recordings was made in Atlanta in 1927, when Columbia Records documented Peg Leg Howell’s ‘Beaver Slide Rag’ – a rambunctious fiddle and guitar instrumental interrupted by barely decipherable shouts about what animals did in the stall. Impossible to categorise today, pitched as it is somewhere between blues, folk and country, ‘Beaver Slide Rag’ sold more than 10,000 copies to people who recognised it instantly as their music. Figures such as this persuaded record companies big and small that they should delve beyond the female veterans of tent shows and the vaudeville stage, in search of more varied fare – anything to part black Americans in the country and the city from their dollars and cents.

  Each male performer of the late 1920s had his own idiosyncratic route to what passed for fame – $5 advance from a big city record label, and (in the case of an unmistakable hit) enough cash to buy a car. In late 1925, Paramount Records were alerted by a Dallas store owner to a blind guitarist who played regularly down the street. His name was Lemon Jefferson, but when Paramount took him to Chicago and heard his selection of down-home gospel songs, sung to the accompaniment of his solitary guitar, they renamed him Deacon L. J. Bates. The Deacon then made way for Blind Lemon Jefferson to become the (literally) inimitable father of a new tradition: the blues soloist. B. B. King talked of him in the same way Sterling Brown remembered Ma Rainey: as someone whose plaintive moan expressed the hidden feelings of everyone who heard him. ‘I believed everything he sang10’, King recalled. ‘Blind Lemon sang for sinners.’

  Jefferson’s moaning sounded positively polite alongside the raucous howl of another sightless Texan singer, Blind Willie Johnson. Columbia Records promoted him as ‘The new sensation in the singing11 of sacred songs – and what guitar accompaniment!’ He used the neck of a broken bottle to slide across his guitar strings, which let out an eerie, keening counterpoint to his tortured voice. Johnson offered no easy road to salvation: ‘I was sick and I couldn’t get well’, he cried on his first release, which was supported by a song entitled ‘Jesus Make Up My Dying Bed’. On the terrifying ‘Dark Was the Night – Cold Was the Ground’, he stumbled out into a darkness that only a blind man could feel, transcending the lasciviousness of blues or the hope of a second coming with a ghostly, lupine howl of despair.

  At the opposite end of the emotional spectrum was Lonnie Johnson, a blues crooner who emerged as the victor of an eight-week singing contest in St Louis, and became one of the best-selling black performers of the century. Future generations revered his guitar playing, which was
rich in vibrato, with a fluency matched only by the premier jazz instrumentalists. His contemporaries were sold on his voice, a comforting purr which coated even the bleakest of scenarios in fireside warmth. For the African-American audience of the late 1920s, a hint of urban sophistication trumped the echoes of the cotton fields every time. Hence the success, during his brief professional lifetime, of pianist Leroy Carr: with guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, he recorded the 1928 hit ‘How Long, How Long Blues’, phrasing as smoothly as Lonnie Johnson. This was the blues that black America most wanted to hear during the era of the Harlem Renaissance: it represented the promise of a less turbulent future, not the scars of a traumatic past.

  What made the culture of the city so appealing? For the many thousands of black Southerners who came north to Chicago and Detroit in the early decades of the twentieth century, the city offered the hope of rebirth: financial security, escape from back-breaking labour, and refuge from the lingering shadows of the South’s slave tradition. Not that labour was much softer in the north, where factory floors replaced the sun-scorched fields of the Southern states. Nor was the promised land free of prejudice; or, indeed, of violence, as the prolonged race riots in many cities, notably Chicago, demonstrated with fatal consequences between 1915 and 1919. In such an uncertain climate, black people clung to what they knew was true: the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost, heaven and hell.

  While the blues singers offered uncertain redemption, there was more encouragement from their evangelical peers – men such as Blind Joe Taggart, whose blues guitar licks were cleansed by his assurance that those who bought his records could ‘Take Your Burden to the Lord’, and Reverend E. W. Claydon, who put a bottle neck to sacred use on ‘The Gospel Train is Coming’. Gospel quartets (the so-called ‘jubilee’ singers) brought the sanctity of the church to the phonograph, with harmonies that would eventually reach secular ground via the vocal group boom of the 1940s and 50s. But by far the most popular African-American records of the era confronted their audiences rather than comforting them.