Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  But something survived that night. Something that was bigger than Bessie and beyond music. Something that, instead of confirming the continuing presence of racism in American society, showed that perhaps the future held out some possibility of racial reconciliation after all. Since the late nineteenth century, an alliance had been brewing in America between black women and white women, between abolitionists and the activists who would form the core of the feminist movement in the twentieth century. There was empathy on both sides. As Angelina Grimké, who, along with her sister, Sarah, was one of the leading white abolitionists of the nineteenth century, said in 1837: “They are our country women—they are our sisters—and to us, as women, they have a right to look for sympathy with their sorrows, and effort and prayer for their rescue.” Decades later, in the 1960s, the white female social activists who worked on civil rights campaigns took the energy and stratagems they had seen on display in the South and transplanted them to the growing feminist movement in the North. Sara Evans, in her book Personal Politics: The Roots of Women’s Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement and the New Left, writes in a chapter with the heading “Black Power—Catalyst for Feminism” that “thus the fullest expressions of conscious feminism within the civil rights movement ricocheted off the fury of black power and landed with explosive force in the northern, white new left.”

  Blueswomen, chief among them Bessie Smith, played a role in creating the new activist woman of the twentieth century. Bessie Smith, by living by her own rules, by singing about working women and their loves and struggles in public places, gave women a voice—a voice that was big and assertive and unafraid to explore any issue, from the bedroom to the barroom, from the poorhouse to the jailhouse. Her death—especially, perhaps, because of the controversy and publicity her end inspired—was confirmation that a woman could live a bold life, dictate her own rules, set her own sexual boundaries, and go down in history as a woman of consequence to whom attention must be paid. She became an icon, a lodestar, whom black women, and eventually women of all colors, could follow. Daphne Duval Harrison, in her book Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, asserts that blues divas helped create “an emerging model for the working woman—one who is sexually independent, self-sufficient, creative, assertive, and trend-setting.” Activist Angela Davis, author of the book Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, also argues that the work of pioneering blues women Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and Billie Holiday has been instrumental in the formation of the core values of feminist thought. Bessie’s voice has echoed, through the decades, louder and longer than the crash that took her life.

  RECOMMENDED LISTENING:

  Bessie Smith, Bessie Smith: The Collection (Columbia, 1989). The best sampling of Smith’s work.

  Bessie Smith, The Essential Bessie Smith (Columbia, 1997). A fairly comprehensive two-disc set with most of Smith’s greatest numbers. If you want a hefty helping of Smith, this is the set to get.

  Bessie Smith, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: The Definitive Bessie Smith (Columbia/Legacy, 2003). The companion CD to the documentary series.

  Janis Joplin, Martin Scorsese Presents the Blues: The Definitive Janis Joplin (Columbia/Legacy, 2003). This companion CD to the documentary series showcases Smith’s powerful spiritual heir of the rock era.

  A NIGHT WITH BESSIE SMITH

  By Carl Van Vechten

  [From “Negro ‘Blues’ Singers,” Vanity Fair, 1926]

  A trip to Newark is a career, and so I was forced to rise from the dinner table on Thanksgiving night shortly after eight o’clock if I wished to hear Bessie Smith sing at the Orpheum Theatre in that New Jersey city at a quarter of ten. I rose with eagerness, however, and so did my guests. Bessie Smith, the “Queen of the Blues,” whose records sell into figures that compete with the circulation of the Saturday Evening Post, was to sing in Newark, and Bessie Smith, who makes long tours of the South where her rich voice reaches the ears of the race from which she sprang, had not been heard in the vicinity of New York, save through the horn of the phonograph, for over a year.

  The signs and tokens were favorable. When we gave directions to the white taxicab driver at Park Place, he demanded, “Going to hear Bessie Smith?” “Yes,” we replied. “No good trying,” he assured us. “You can’t get in. They’ve been hanging on the chandeliers all the week.” Nevertheless, we persevered, spurred on perhaps by a promise on the part of the management that a box would be reserved for us. We arrived, however, to discover that this promise had not been kept. It had been impossible to hold the box: The crowd was too great. “Day jes’ nacherly eased into dat box,” one of the ushers explained insouciantly. However, Leigh Whipper, the enterprising manager of the theater, eased them out again.

  Once seated, we looked out over a vast sea of happy black faces-two comedians were exchanging jokes on the stage. There was not a mulatto or high yellow visible among these people who were shouting merriment or approval after every ribald line. Were did they all come from? In Harlem the Negroes are many colors, shading to white, but these were all chocolate browns and “blues.” Never before had I seen such an audience save at a typical camp-meeting in the far South.

  The comedians were off. The lights were lowered. A new placard, reading BESSIE SMITH, appeared in the frames at either side of the proscenium. As the curtain lifted, a jazz band, against a background of plum-colored hangings, held the full stage. The saxophone began to moan; the drummer tossed his sticks. One was transported involuntarily, inevitably, to a Harlem cabaret. Presently, the band struck up a slower and still more mournful strain. The hangings parted and a great brown woman emerged—she was the size of Fay Templeton in her Weber and Fields days, and she was even garbed similarly, in a rose satin dress, spangled with sequins, which swept away from her trim ankles. Her face was beautiful, with the rich, ripe beauty of southern darkness, a deep bronze brown, like her bare arms.

  She walked slowly to the footlights.

  Then, to the accompaniment of the wailing, muted brasses, the monotonous African beat of the drum, the dromedary glide of the pianist’s fingers over the responsive keys, she began her strange rites in a voice full of shoutin’ and moanin’ and prayin’ and sufferin’, a wild, rough Ethiopian voice, harsh and volcanic, released between rouged lips and the whitest of teeth, the singer swaying slightly to the rhythm.

  Yo’ treated me wrong;

  I treated yo’ right;

  I wo’k fo’ yo’ full day an’ night.

  Yo’ brag to women

  I was yo’ fool,

  So den I got dose sobbin’ h’ahted blues.

  And now, inspired partly by these lines, partly by the stumbling strain of the accompaniment, partly by the power and magnetic personality of this elemental conjure woman and her plangent African voice, quivering with pain and passion, which sounded as if it had been developed at the sources of the Nile, the crowd burst into hysterical shrieks of sorrow and lamentation. Amens rent the air. Little nervous giggles, like the shivering of Venetian glass, shocked the nerves.

  It’s true I loves yo’, but I won’t take

  mistreatments any mo’.

  “Dat’s right,” a girl cried out from under our box.

  All I wants is yo’ pitcher in a frame;

  All I wants is yo’ pitcher in a frame;

  When yo’gone I kin see yo’ jes’ duh same.

  “Oh, Lawdy! Lawdy!” The girl beneath us shook with convulsive sobbing.

  I’se gwine to staht walkin’ cause

  I got a wooden pah o’ shoes;

  Gwine to staht walkin’ cause I got

  a wooden pah o’shoes;

  Gwine to keep on walkin’ till I lose

  dese sobbin’ h’ahted blues.

  The singer disappeared, and with her her magic. The spell broken, the audience relaxed and began to chatter. The band played a gayer tune.

  Once again, Bessie Smith came out, now clad in a clinging garment fashioned of beads of silver steel. More than ever she was like an African e
mpress, more than ever like a conjure woman.

  “I’m gwineter sing dose mean ornery cussed ‘Wo’ khouse Blues,’“ she shouted.

  Everybody’s cryin’ de wo’khouse

  Blues all day,

  All ‘long,

  All ‘long …

  A deep sigh from the gallery.

  Been wo’kin’ so hard—thirty days

  is long,

  long, long,

  long, long …

  The spell once more was weaving its subtle sorcery, the perversely complicated spell of African voodoo, the fragrance of china-berry blossoms, the glimmer of the silver fleece of the cotton field under the full moon, the spell of sorrow: misery, poverty, and the horror of jail.

  I gotta leab heah,

  Gotta git du nex’ train home …

  Way up dere, way up on a long lonesome road;

  Duh wo’khouse ez up on a long lonesome road …

  Daddy used ter be mine, but look who’se got him now;

  Daddy used ter be mine, but look who’se got him now;

  Ef yo’ took him keep him, he don’t mean no good nohow.

  BILLIE HOLIDAY BY HILTON ALS

  What can we offer her by way of recompense for the various messes made of Her Story? The pop vulgarizations, the dry-mouthed academicism of technical writers without benefit of ear or compassion, the gaseous memoirs by overinflated egos who once caught a glimpse of the famous bad temper, the unimpeachable style, and yet remember nothing of the woman but what they felt once she left the room to do God knows what?

  She was trouble and looked for it. She was a changeling who found her true shape in an atmosphere of disaster. She was intent on having things her way because that is the only way an artist knows how to tell it: her way, and ruthlessly, with not a modicum of decency tainting the surface of her sound or stage appearances, since that is the mark of the bourgeois, the tidy-minded, something to get over if you are intent on doing the do and realizing your own genius.

  “Here was a woman who had never been a Christian,” Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in her 1977 novel, Sleepless Nights, which remains the best account we have of this “bizarre deity.” What made her so strange? Well, she never compromised—the better to be loved by many instead of the few. She was not interested in the American way of the public validation of a private preoccupation. And she suffered for it.

  She embodied the self as myth. She was witty no matter what the context, meaning no matter how trite the song she sang, or tiresome the context she sang the song in. Women are not like that. They are socialized to make things better, not worse, often by not acknowledging “the worse.”

  She couldn’t help seeing what was wrong and saying something about it. Her mind would not shut up. She was born in 1915 and died forty-four years later. She saw the South, and Europe, and should have lived abroad, where she was adored, but adoration is no kind of life if you’re interested in life. And despite her horror at what it could do, and had done to her, she lived her life because she had a sense of humor about life’s horrors, but maybe not such a great sense of humor about herself. Maybe she was curious about this dichotomy. At times.

  She was a documentation, interested in her own version of the facts. She mythologized her sound. She said that Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong influenced her sound. And yet one hears a great deal of Ethel Waters in her early recordings—the high-pitched wail that has more than a bit of the smart aleck in it. Sometimes, it’s all one can do not to laugh right along with her. The joke she’s telling is about our squareness. She exposes our silly and conventional lives with the asperity of her vision, which tells us that love and respectability are fiction, as much a fiction as anything else. That’s the story she wanted to tell. And she did.

  You can see her telling it in her various appearances on film, on TV. She knew what the camera was for. In front of it, she projected volcanic emotion disciplined by subtlety and intellection. She was a motion-picture star who dared us to look at her while we listened. Some of us did. Still do.

  EARLY DOWNHOME BLUES RECORDINGS

  By Jeff Todd Titon

  [From Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis, 1977]

  As early as 1923, Black Swan and OKeh thought there might be a market for [downhome] blues, or blues less sophisticated than the vaudeville variety [that they had been releasing]. A Black Swan advertisement for Josie Miles’ “Love Me in Your Old Time Way” read: “Have you ever heard the snatches of songs sung by Negro section hands on Southern railroads? Do you recall how their plaintive melodies struck a responsive chord in you? Generally termed blues, yet how strongly contrasted are these songs springing from the depths of the laborer’s soul to the commonplace dance tunes that we are accustomed to call BLUES. LOVE ME IN YOUR OLD TIME WAY is in the vein of the laborer’s songs.”

  Miles was a vaudeville singer, and her song was merely “in the vein of” the “songs springing from the depths of the laborer’s soul.” … [Her] record, released on the Black Swan label in 1923, a year after it was made, and reissued on Paramount in 1924, when the latter company absorbed the former, evidently was successful, but it did not lead to imitations. In 1923, OKeh A&R director Ralph Peer took portable equipment to Atlanta, ostensibly to record hillbilly musician Fiddlin’ John Carson. Atlanta’s OKeh jobber, Polk Brockman, thought Carson’s records would be successful locally. They were. But neither Peer nor Brockman predicted what happened next: Carson’s record opened a hillbilly market as lucrative as the race market. And though Peer had recorded Birmingham blues singer Louise Bogan on the Atlanta trip, the idea of making field trips to record blues singers in Southern cities was forgotten in the rush to capitalize on the new hillbilly market.

  The downhome impulse [though] was undoubtedly responsible for Paramount’s promotion of Ma Rainey as a Southern-styled singer. It was also responsible for the publicity surrounding that company’s “discovery” of Papa Charlie Jackson—”the only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records”-who was introduced in a [Chicago] Defender advertisement as if he were a relic of a bygone era. Since his records sold well, he is a likely candidate to honor as the first downhome blues singer, but others have classified him a vaudeville singer because he accompanied his songster’s repertoire (which did include some blues) on six-string banjo-guitar, which gave it an unmistakable minstrel-show sound. Although he was a minstrel-show veteran, his downhome blues credentials are at least as good as those of some, such as Jim Jackson, who had the good fortune to record after Blind Lemon Jefferson…

  Local record dealers in the South had been suggesting downhome singers for some time before Sam Price sent a letter to Paramount recommending Jefferson, who was already well known throughout Texas. A.C. Laibley, Paramount recording director, claimed that he found Jefferson on the streets of Dallas and late in 1925 invited him to Chicago. The music of the vaudeville blues singers was close enough to Tin Pan Alley for the record companies to feel familiar with it; and the music of singers like Papa Charlie Jackson and Daddy Stovepipe was close enough to the common stock of folk and minstrel song shared, at the turn of the century, by Anglo-and Afro-Americans for the record companies to recognize that. The inescapable conclusion is that Jefferson’s music confused them. Unsure at first what to do with the blind singer, Paramount had him record a spiritual under the pseudonym “Deacon L.J. Bates,” but its release was delayed. In March 1926, he recorded four blues songs. For the first release, “Booster Blues” and “Dry Southern Blues,” Paramount introduced him in an April 8, 1926, Defender advertisement as “a real, old-fashioned Blues singer” singing “a real, old-fashioned Blues.” The point was emphasized in succeeding sentences, which called his songs “old-time tunes” and his guitar playing “in real Southern style.” It is difficult to imagine a better word to describe Paramount’s judgment of Jefferson’s songs than the one they used continually in their publicity about him: weird. They could not understand his words; they had never heard anyone play the guitar as h
e did. Even his appearance must have been startling—a blind, black street-singer of enormous girth with tiny, steel-rimmed glasses perched on his nose. So striking was his appearance that the advertising illustrators forgot their rule of avoiding cartoon caricatures of the singer’s likeness when it came to his advertisements.

  Yet Jefferson’s downhome style was familiar to almost anyone from the Black Belt. His first record sold moderately well, but his second, “Got the Blues” and “Long Lonesome Blues,” became [a] best seller. Paramount’s success with Jefferson led the other record companies to work [in] the same vein, and they quickly sent scouts south looking for downhome blues talent. The naïvete of the companies’ scouting behavior indicates unfamiliarity with the music; they sent their representative directly to Dallas, Jefferson’s home city. Dallas pianist Alex Moore described this activity: “Specialty Records, OKeh, Vocalion, Decca Records, Columbia Records, all had talent scouts in Dallas … [they] were in and out of Dallas every fifteen to thirty days. You can’t imagine how they were, savaging [sic] up songs for recordings. Dallas was a noted town for piano players and guitarists, blues and boogie-wise, good ones like Blind Lemon Jefferson…”

  In the early twenties, OKeh courted a new group of record buyers as it pushed the downhome blues, sold as “race records.”

  The first major period of downhome blues recording extended from 1926 until 1930. (The second occurred from 1947 until 1955.) Talent scouts secured primarily local and regional Southern blues singers who had been entertaining in juke joints, in barrelhouses, and at suppers, picnics, and country dance parties. Most of these entertainers were songsters whose repertoires included many kinds of songs besides blues, but the scouts were looking for original blues songs. Many of the singers had just one recording session, in a makeshift studio in a Southern city. Others, like Blind Blake, were so successful that they were invited to make records on a regular basis.