Escaping the Delta (13 page)

The Delta seems to have been particularly rich in meditative, free-rhythmed hollers, and this had a strong effect on many Mississippi blues artists. The region had an unusually high concentration of African Americans—in some counties up to 90 percent of the population—and, as I will discuss in the next chapter, other factors combined to make it a rich area for the encouragement of deeply African styles. It is worth noting, though, that the most influential “moaner” among prewar male stars was Lemon Jefferson, from Texas, and that his fellow Texans Bessie Tucker and Victoria Spivey were among the most holler-inflected blues queens.
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Indeed, the one prewar blues star who recorded pure, free-form hollers for the commercial market was Alger “Texas” Alexander, a
Dallas-area singer who became a major seller after Jefferson's success sent scouts combing the region for other rural-sounding bluesmen. Unlike most of his male peers, Alexander did not play an instrument—he apparently carried a guitar with him at times, but would deputize someone else to play it—and he must often have performed a cappella, which is probably why he was drawn to the unstructured, arrhythmic hollers. These songs would have been impossible for the average guitarist to accompany, since Alexander improvises them as he goes, stretching measures and taking surprising melodic flights without any form or warning. Luckily, on many of his early sessions he was backed by Lonnie Johnson, a far from average player, and with Johnson's help he cut three pure hollers: “Section Gang Blues,” “Levee Camp Moan,” and “Penitentiary Moan Blues.” These are astonishing recordings, in which Alexander slides extemporaneously from line to line, with no worries about either rhyme or meter, while Johnson listens carefully and tries to find ways to follow and echo him. Alexander recorded sixty-five other songs, with accompanists ranging from the Mississippi Sheiks to the New Orleans trumpeter King Oliver, to a final session in 1950 with an electric band, but they were all relatively straightforward mainstream blues pieces. These three performances are something quite different, as is indicated by their titles, which neatly point up the three most usual sites to hear such material: not juke joints or parties, but railroad gangs, levee camps, and prisons.

To me, blues is often at its most moving when it comes closest to the holler sound, and I fully understand the temptation to think of it as an extension of this older folk form. The Delta singers whom Palmer celebrated in
Deep Blues
have at times an almost unearthly power, and a freedom of tone and rhythm that clearly links them to singers like Tangle Eye. Nonetheless, I must accept the fact that these attributes, much as I love them, did not show any correlation with success in the mainstream blues world. Even among Mississippians, the most popular and influential blues artists were string band and urban studio players like the Chatmons, the McCoys, Memphis Minnie, Big Bill Broonzy, and Walter Davis, all of whom sold a lot more records, even in the Delta, than their nearest “deep” competitor, Charley Patton. The deepest Mississippi singers—Skip James and Son House, for
example—typically had no hits whatsoever. This would change somewhat in the later, electric era, but even then John Lee Hooker was the only major Mississippi bluesman to record in a pure holler style, and his meditative moans were almost always released as album filler tracks, while his hit singles featured more upbeat, danceable rhythms.
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(Meanwhile, Robert Pete Williams—considered by some aficionados to be the deepest blues singer on record—was never even recorded until the revivalists came along, and had no black audience outside his local community.)

To a great extent, the problem was one of familiarity. The people who were buying blues records were not spending their hard-earned cash to hear the same stuff they heard or sang during their workdays in the fields. To folklorists, this music was fascinating, but to blues buyers it was not even music, in the sense that Bessie Smith or Lemon Jefferson records were music. What is more, plenty of black Southerners were singing Smith and Jefferson hits while they worked around the house or in the fields—along with pop and hillbilly songs heard on records or radio broadcasts—and it is purely due to the folklorists' agenda that such songs rarely show up on field recordings.
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I am reminded of a conversation I once had with the curator of an exhibit of African sculpture at the Harvard University art museum. She had accompanied a film crew through West Africa, trying to get footage of traditional carvers making masks and talking about their work. For a week, they traveled from village to village, seeing wonderful masks, but unable to find any carvers. They were always told that there was somebody in the next village, but then would just be sent on again. Finally, they reached a town where everyone agreed that a carver lived, and were taken to his house. To their disappointment, they found that he was doing kitschy tourist stuff—sleekly formulaic drummers and elephants—rather than traditional ceremonial pieces. “No, no,” they told their informants. “We don't want this kind of carver. We want someone who does the masks for festivals.”

“Oh, but those masks aren't made by carvers,” they were told. “We make those ourselves.”

In the same way, moaned, free-form, unrhymed verses, flavored with the flatted thirds and fifths we call blue notes, were part of daily
life in a lot of black households, but no one in those households confused the homemade moans with the blues being sung by professional entertainers. That conflation was made by outsiders. As Muddy Waters put it, talking to the English blues expert Paul Oliver, “Every man would be hollering, but you didn't pay that no mind. Yes, course I'd holler too. You might call them blues, but they was just made-up things. Like a feller be workin' or most likely some gal be workin' near and you want to say somethin' to 'em. So you holler it.”
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Asked when they first heard blues, Waters and his contemporaries would regularly refer not to any local singers or musicians, but to records. Waters's grandmother had a hand-cranked Victrola, and the list of artists he recalled hearing on it is pretty typical—though in my experience it is rare for a blues fan of his generation to name no female singers: Texas Alexander, Barbecue Bob, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Roosevelt Sykes, and Little Brother Montgomery. None of these were Mississippians, though Sykes and Montgomery were popular piano players around the Mississippi river towns and lumber camps. Earlier in the same interview, Waters gave a list of favorites that included some Mississippi players—the Sheiks, Son House and Charley Patton—but once again the first names he mentioned were from other areas, in this case the smooth urbanites Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr.
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Of course, there must have been Mississippians who were particularly drawn to local sounds, but it is typical of great musicians to have wide-ranging tastes. B. B. King, born in the heart of the Delta in 1925, makes a point of insisting that he was relatively unaffected by the regional style:

All in all, African-American blues fans were like most other people in their tendency to think very differently about the pop music they were buying and the songs their parents sang at work or around the house. Especially during the 1920s and 1930s, the peak period of black migration to the urban North, the blues records coming in from New York and Chicago were seen by a lot of Southern blacks as representing the antithesis of old-time field songs. Blues was the music of the present and future, not of the oppressive plantation past. That is why there was no African-American market for the sort of pointedly archaic material that dominated the white country record catalogs. I am told by one of the more assiduous 78 collectors that he often found Mississippi John Hurt records in white homes, and that makes sense, considering Hurt's preference for old-fashioned material. Conversely, he tells me that he virtually never found a fiddle hoedown record in a black home, though he frequently found Jimmie Rodgers discs. Again, fiddling was old-fashioned, while Rodgers's “blue yodels” were a modern sound that ushered in the Gene Autry country-pop style.
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I will go into this further in the next chapter, but I want to finish off with a glance at an interesting oddity, the only recording of a pure work song by a Race recording star. As I wrote earlier, while the hollers clearly influenced blues vocal styles and were sometimes mined for lyrical lines, the work-gang songs had little direct impact on blues. However, one such song did surface on the blues market, and in a distinctly surprising setting. Sippie Wallace was a popular blues queen from Houston, one of the Southern vaudeville singers who began recording in the wave that followed Bessie Smith's success. In 1925, she made a record called “Section Hand Blues,” which starts with an elegant “old South” orchestration, then goes into a traditional railroad spike-driver's song, beginning, “If my captain asks for me, tell him Abe Lincoln done set us free/Ain't no hammer on this road gonna kill poor
me.” Wallace's style gives little indication that she had any experience of railroad gangs, and the whole performance has the feel of a vaudeville set piece, accentuated when she segues into another work song, “This Old Hammer,” with her band grunting “uh” between lines, to the accompaniment of a ringing hammer sound.

Though Wallace was a good seller on the Race market, I find it hard to imagine her usual audience going for this number, and am tempted to guess that this one record was aimed at white listeners. Wallace was recording in New York, with the savvy composer and bandleader Perry Bradford, and this was the peak of the “Harlem Renaissance.” Four months earlier, Paul Robeson had made his debut as a concert artist, and among his featured numbers was an adaptation of the same traditional hammer song, which he called “Water Boy.”
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Robeson presented the song as an example of black folk culture for the New York intellectual and society crowd, which would continue to be the main audience for work-song recordings, buying albums of “chain gang” chants by Josh White in the 1940s and by Harry Belafonte in the 1950s. It seems likely that Bradford and Wallace had their sights set on this new market. (Admittedly, it is also possible that “Section Hand” was intended for the black vaudeville audience. So little is known about black vaudeville that my speculations on this subject are based as much on instinct as on evidence.)

The role of the white urban audience in the creation of black folk and blues archetypes will be explored at greater length in later chapters, but it is significant that already in the 1920s, white listeners were celebrating songs like “Water Boy” as examples of a pure, noble folk culture, similar to the spirituals and not to be confused with the low-down double-entendres of the professional blues scene. In later years, when artists like Big Bill Broonzy and Sippie Wallace were no longer getting hits on the black pop market, they would in turn be celebrated by white audiences as folk-rooted cultural figures, and the purity of their work would be contrasted with the commercial trashiness of the hits churned out by the pop stars of that later era. In the process, blues would come to be classified as a black folk form, and a new aesthetic developed that defined “true” or “deep” blues by its resemblance to the traditional hollers.

In the 1920s, most white people still thought of blues as racy pop music, but this new aesthetic would gain more power with each passing decade, and has helped shape the modern perception of blues as a black folk style, nurtured not in the publishing houses and studios of New York and Chicago, but in the most isolated regions of the deep South. This is the process by which Mississippi has come to be singled out as the music's unique heartland, and a handful of unquestionably brilliant but relatively obscure Delta artists were crowned kings of the blues pantheon. And one other thing: It has exacerbated the division between white and black blues fans, because if there is one place and time outside of slavery that black Americans have no romanticism or nostalgia about, it is Depression-era Mississippi.

T
HE
M
ISSISSIPPI
D
ELTA HAS PRODUCED MORE THAN ITS SHARE
of great blues musicians over the years, and there are many people who believe that it is where the blues was born. Maybe so, in some way—blues has meant so many different things to so many different people that it is a bit pointless to argue over origins. If I were feeling contrary, I might suggest that the state's reputation is largely founded on the modern revivalists' passion for later Chicago styles, and that if the West Coast sound of T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, and Charles Brown were valued alongside that of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf, “down home” could as easily mean Texas and Oklahoma. I could add that, in the 1920s and 1930s, none of the blues advertisements took any note of Mississippi roots, while Texas and Georgia birthplaces were cited as selling points. Looking at my list of top prewar blues stars, they were pretty evenly distributed across the South: Georgia accounted for eight names; Tennessee for six; Mississippi for five; Louisiana, Texas and Kentucky for three each; Arkansas and South Carolina for two each; and there are lone artists from North Carolina, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and Pennsylvania. Only one of the five Mississippians was born in the Delta, and that one (Big Bill Broonzy) spent most of his youth in Arkansas.

All of that being said, the Delta was home to a unique strain of blues music, which has become extremely influential on the modern-day scene, and the Delta musicians were undoubtedly affected by the
special conditions of their home region. The Delta was not as isolated and unusual as its myths might suggest, but if we hope to understand something about Robert Johnson, it is worth taking a closer look at this area and the musical tastes of its inhabitants.

The Delta, with its vast cotton plantations, devastating floods, and grueling poverty, has become the stuff of myth, and not only because of its music. It has been called the most Southern place on earth, and whether that phrase conjures up images of beautiful old mansions, cotton aristocracy, home-style cooking, and Elvis Presley, or the extremes of racism, isolationism, and a social system so archaically unjust as to invite comparisons to medieval feudalism, there is some truth to it.

For black people, Mississippi in the twentieth century was famed for its retrograde brutality. The New Orleans banjo player Danny Barker writes of his family's fear when Little Brother Montgomery asked him to come play some dates in the state: “It was the earnest and general feeling that any Negro who…entered the hell-hole called the state of Mississippi for any reason other than to attend the funeral of a very close relative…was well on the way to losing his mentality, or had already lost it.”
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What Mississippi was to the rest of the country, the Delta was to Mississippi. Though it makes up less than a sixth of the state's area, the Delta accounted for over a third of the lynchings reported between 1900 and 1930,
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and was legendary for towns with signposts warning black people not to be caught within their borders after sundown. By the 1920s, the region was ruled by a sharecropping system that tied black farmers to the land in a form of economic bondage that at times seemed little different from slavery. The plantations were vast, transportation was difficult, and workers had little choice but to buy all their goods at company stores that would sell to them on credit at inflated prices, creating a form of debt servitude. Once in debt, they could be bound to work off the money owed, and the legal system often functioned as an adjunct to the labor system. There are numerous reports of valued workers who could kill someone and never go to prison, because their “bossman” would arrange for them to remain in his fields. Likewise, a man who seemed likely to cause trouble for the
boss could be transferred to a prison farm for a couple of years to “settle him down,” then be paroled back to his home plantation, where he would go on doing the same sort of work he had done inside. And that is not to mention all the labor done by convicts, who built much of the levee and railroad system, and were also sometimes leased out to plantations as unpaid farmhands.
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It is often suggested that it was this vicious oppression, and the misery that went along with it, that fueled the deep emotional power of the area's great blues singers.

Be that as it may, there were other reasons why blues would have been particularly strong in the Delta. One was simply the density of African Americans in the region: In 1910, there was only one Delta county where blacks accounted for less than 80 percent of the population, and two where they accounted for more than 90.
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However unequal the distribution of power, either politically or economically, African Americans in the Delta lived in a world where there were very few white people, and that was bound to have an effect on cultural life.

Another reason why the Delta was particularly fertile ground for the blues boom was the youth and mobility of its black residents. In this way, it was quite the opposite of the oft-imagined stereotype of a timeless backwater little changed from slavery days, a harsh survival of the antebellum plantation South. Most of the Delta land was cleared and settled only in the decades around the turn of the twentieth century, and in order to attract black farmers and plantation hands, relatively high cash wages were paid. (Delta sharecroppers and renters also did far better at this time than they would in later years.) Life was often difficult, but the Delta promised a future that was unimaginable in the arid hill country to the east, and even in the 1930s black immigrants continued to stream into the area. For many of these immigrants, the Delta served only as a sort of staging ground, preparing them for the more dramatic move north to Chicago, and the overall effect was a population in flux, ready to cast off the old ways and receptive to new musical fashions. If the Delta bluesmen had less of a ragtime or hoedown feel to their music than many of their peers in Georgia and the Carolinas, that was as much a sign of modernity as of any links to the African past.

One can get a unique glimpse of the way black Delta residents regarded their world, and the place music played in it, by looking at the files of a team that visited the region in 1941 and 1942 under the joint sponsorship of Fisk University and the Library of Congress. This group included Alan Lomax, John Work, and the sociologist Lewis Jones, along with one of Jones's graduate students, Samuel Adams, who remained for some months in Clarksdale. Except for Lomax, all of the researchers were African Americans, which may have given them a somewhat different slant from that of the white folklorists who did most of the fieldwork in this period.

The team focused on Coahoma County, where Lomax recorded Muddy Waters, Son House, and Honeyboy Edwards, along with fiddlers, unaccompanied singers, and church services. Meanwhile, Jones conducted interviews about local life and history. While Jones never completed his study, an unpublished draft of his work gives some interesting views of black Delta life.
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Among the oldest black residents, people from seventy-five to ninety years of age, he found that the two hundred he surveyed had all arrived from other areas as “pioneers.” As he wrote:

Jones's pioneers had mostly come to the region during the last three decades of the nineteenth century. At that time, the Delta was famous for its fearsome floods and the marvelous richness of the soil that would be left behind when the waters receded. (This was the origin of the region's name. It is not in fact a delta, in the sense of an area where a river branches out in a triangular pattern and runs off into the sea, but the fertility of the Delta's soil, created by annual flooding, was reminiscent of the legendary fertility of the Nile Delta, replenished by
similar floods.) It was disease-ridden swampland, but also country where you could drop some seeds in the ground and be rewarded with crops at a speed and of a size that were incredible compared to anything in the played-out cotton lands of Georgia or Alabama, never mind the stony Mississippi hills. As one old woman told Jones: “The cause of my father and my relatives coming here was the talk of people who came down here and returned with big money. They make folks in the hills think greenbacks grow on trees and they had ponds of molasses here, and folks in the hills believed it.”

At the turn of the century, less than a third of the Delta was under cultivation, and the early arrivals spent much of their time cutting down forests and building levees, as well as plowing and planting the cotton that would make the area's fortune.
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Sharecropping was not yet as entrenched as it would become in later years, and some bought their own land, while others rented or worked for cash wages from the white landowners. The farming income was supplemented by hunting and fishing, and Jones's informants seem to have regarded this early period with a good deal of nostalgia. They spoke of summer celebrations, when “the frequent roll of the drums and shrill note of the fife enlivened the picnickers,” and of a game called the “ring play,” where couples would dance to the singing of a circle of onlookers. The more religious-minded recalled the “rock Daniel,” a game played at church events in which “a man and a woman facing each other would place their hands on each other's shoulders, sing and rock.”

The Fisk team did its best to record samples of these game songs, but found that many were already forgotten. They also sought out older musicians who still played the repertoire that had been common at square dances, or “breakdowns,” which typically featured a fiddler accompanied by a banjo or guitar, and a man who stood on a wooden box and called the figures. Seventy-year-old Alec Robertson recalled his days as a dance caller, remembering tunes familiar throughout the South: “Old Hen Cackle,” “Fisher's Hornpipe,” and “Billy in the Low-ground.” Robertson added that he called the same figures for white and black dances.

By the early 1940s, these dances had pretty much disappeared, replaced by several waves of pop music: ragtime, followed by blues, and
then big band swing. Orchestras like the one led by W. C. Handy had already been touring the Delta in the early years of the century, and local groups had done their best to assimilate the latest styles. Son House would recall that his father and uncles had a brass band that was playing regularly for dances when he was a boy. His father also played guitar, he said, but only around the house, since “back in that time they didn't care for guitar much.” (House said he was then about ten years old, which places his recollection around 1912.)
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Such country brass bands would have played ragtime, Handy-style blues, and something like early jazz, and they were both louder and more modern than the square-dance bands. Lucius Smith, a black banjo player from the Mississippi hill country who had started playing for dances around the turn of the century, recalled Handy's blues hits as the death knell of the old ways: “That done ruined the country [music]…such as ‘Walking in the Parlor' and all them other old pieces,…calling figures, promenade, swing your right partner, all that, you know…The ‘Memphis Blues' and all that, it done brought about a whole lots of trouble.”
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In the 1930s, jukeboxes arrived in many of the local bars, and the younger generation would come into town to dance to the latest hits of Duke Ellington and Louis Jordan. Nonetheless, the population remained overwhelmingly rural. “Thousands of houses dot the cotton fields that are planted right up to the clusters of houses that call themselves towns,” Jones wrote. By 1940 there were nearly 50,000 people in Coahoma County, but the closest thing to a city was Clarksdale, with 12,168 people. There were four other “incorporated places”: Friars Point, with 940 people, Jonestown with 706, Lula with 503, and Lyon with 339, but Jones writes that they were “of little more significance than a score of other places which are scarcely more than plantation headquarters.” The county's black majority lived out in the fields, coming in to these smaller centers when they had some time off, and traveling to Clarksdale if they had a few spare coins to spend on a movie or some city goods. (Alcohol was a touchier matter. Mississippi was one of three states that chose to continue Prohibition after 1933, and was the longest holdout, remaining “dry” until 1966. A great part of the reason for Friars Point's popularity as a weekend hang
out was that it was across the river from Helena, Arkansas, where liquor was legal, and hence was an active bootlegging center.)
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It was already clear, though, that the rural lifestyle was fading. More people were moving to town each year, though truckloads of workers still came out to the plantations when it was time to chop or pick the cotton crop. Mechanization was replacing much of the back-breaking labor that, hard as it was, had kept small farmers in business. Some of the plowing was still done with mules, but on the bigger farms draught animals had been replaced with tractors, and people were leaving the land, pushed by the disappearance of manual farm work and pulled by the lure of city jobs and the promise of a better life up north.

Jones divided the population he documented by age, and treated the differences between generations as a guide to the changing course of African-American life in the region. He reported that the old pioneers were unimpressed by modern trends. They complained that where once they had planted and brought in their own crop, now the white landowners would send tractor drivers to do most of the work, then charge the farmers the costs. The fishing and hunting grounds had largely disappeared, replaced by endless cotton fields and pricey store-bought goods. “I been all over here in boats,” one man said. “I can go and show you places that have cotton and corn on them now where I used to fish.” Jones noted that, along with their nostalgia for earlier times, they took pride in what they had accomplished, and considered themselves pioneers in the heroic sense: “They cleared the forests, built levees, traveled on the waters of the Mississippi in skiffs, made bumper crops of cotton, danced, gambled, loved and killed with what seems to have been tremendous zest.” They regarded the younger generations as soft and ordinary by comparison.