Escaping the Delta (15 page)

Many radio singers, whether with jazz bands or vocal ensembles, performed occasional blues numbers, and in some rural areas black string and jug ensembles lined up daily fifteen-minute spots.
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There were also quite a few blues specialists to be heard on hillbilly programs. The black harmonica player DeFord Bailey played blues along with his trademark train imitations on the
Grand Ole Opry
, and while the other blues singers on that show were all white, John Jackson cannot have been the only person who sometimes had difficulty sorting radio players by race.
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Sam McGee's hot fingerstyle guitar work was copied by plenty of black musicians, and his “Railroad Blues” was one of hundreds of twelve-bar numbers featured by hillbilly guitarists and singers. What is more, both Jimmie Rodgers and Jimmie Davis used black accompanists on several records, and may well have done the same on radio.

What is even more important is the extent to which radio exposed blues players, and rural listeners in general, to other styles. It was a great leveler, allowing someone in a Delta cabin to listen to anything from hillbilly fiddling to opera. The majority of musical programming, especially on the national networks, consisted of the most mainstream white pop music, and this sound would have been almost as inescapable for most people of that time as Britney Spears or Backstreet Boys is in our day. How much effect this had on black listeners is debatable, but there was a continuum of smooth singing that stretched from artists like Leroy Carr to popular black radio groups like the Mills Brothers and Ink Spots (who covered Carr's “In the Evening”) and on to Rudy Vallee and Bing Crosby (both of whom performed W. C. Handy numbers). It has become a cliché of jazz history that Louis Armstrong's favorite band was Guy Lombardo's Royal Canadians, and
in the early 1960s Chris Strachwitz was horrified to find that most of the rural musicians he recorded for his Arhoolie roots label, from blues singers to Tex-Mex bands and Louisiana zydeco outfits, were enthusiastic fans of Lawrence Welk. (Welk had a strong enough following among black listeners to reach the R&B top ten in 1961, with the harpsichord-led “Calcutta.” The world is not a simple place.)

This should not surprise anyone reading this book, since it is just as logical for a black Delta sharecropper to like sophisticated white urban music as for a lot of educated white urbanites to have fallen in love with Delta blues. Indeed, it is far more logical, since this music came to Delta dwellers as the sound of hope and promise, of faraway cities with good jobs and a more liberal racial climate.

Plus, a lot of the music was fun and exciting. Black kids were growing up on Gene Autry and Roy Rogers movies just like white kids, a fact that led the Duke Ellington Orchestra's silky voiced Herb Jeffries to star in a series of films with titles like
Harlem Rides the Range
and
The Bronze Buckaroo
(“Stout of heart, quick of eye, sweet of voice”). Autry, in particular, was a superstar who appealed across all boundaries of race, region, and riches. As we have seen, although he always considered blues his favorite music, Muddy Waters listed more Autry hits in his repertoire than songs by any blues artist.
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However typical this may have been, it is probable that there were very few nonclassical singers of the time—be they specialists in hillbilly, blues, jazz, or Tin Pan Alley—who could not have filled a request for an Autry number. For obvious reasons, no one bothered to record any black Delta musicians performing “Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle,” but it is not just my own conjecture that plenty could have done so if asked. In one of Lomax's Delta notebooks, he mentions meeting a black musician who played on a cowboy music radio show every Saturday afternoon from Greenville and told him, “You have to play all the Western tunes for the colored these days.”

Another blues star from the region, Bobby “Blue” Bland, though born in 1930, at the height of the blues boom, recalls that he started out singing hillbilly music off the
Grand Ole Opry
and only turned to blues after moving to Memphis, because “it was the wrong time and the wrong place for a black singer to make it singing white country
blues.” In the 1970s, after almost two decades as a blues star, he would say, “I still know more hillbilly tunes than I do blues. Hank Snow, Hank Williams, Eddy Arnold—so much feeling, so much sadness.” (He added that, in terms of singers, he liked “the soft touch,” and listened to a lot of Perry Como and Tony Bennett.)
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As for jazz, a lot of people would not have bothered to distinguish it from blues. Everyone could tell the difference between a big band and a Delta guitarist, but Count Basie and Robert Johnson both played Leroy Carr songs, and both played pieces like “My Blue Heaven.” There was nothing contradictory in liking to dance to guitarists at backcountry jukes and to jazz bands when you got near a radio or jukebox, and plenty of blues players were also jazz fans.

I had this fact forced on me one weekend in the mid-1980s, when my local blues club brought in the Texas barrelhouse pianist Whistlin' Alex Moore. Moore was then eighty-seven years old, an exuberant blues and boogie player who regularly improvised verses on the spot, and one of the last living exponents of the classic Dallas juke-joint style. He was playing two sets a night for three nights, and for the first couple of days he stuck to blues. Then, when he came out for the fifth show, he began a sort of rambling instrumental that gradually coalesced into the sentimental pop standard “Cottage for Sale.” Finishing it off, and perhaps sensing the perplexity of his listeners, Moore launched into a long monologue about how he had learned that song listening to the Benny Goodman band on the radio, and how he loved them so much that he learned all their songs. For roughly the next hour, he played nothing but versions of Goodman tunes, some recognizable, others so transformed as to be essentially his own compositions.

The point is that African Americans, whether in the Delta or not, have been just as varied in their musical tastes as any other racial group, and this was especially true during the blues era, when more music was available than ever before and styles were changing almost monthly. The list of favorite radio performers Adams compiled in the country around Clarksdale would probably have been typical for black listeners pretty much anywhere in the South, and to a great extent throughout the United States. Most of the acts on it are big bands,
leavened with two hot gospel acts, two country stars, a Broadway show-tune singer, and one lone blues artist: Cab Calloway, Artie Shaw, Benny Goodman, Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Mary Lou Williams, The Golden Gate Gospel Quartet, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Gene Autry, Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys, Lanny Ross (a largely forgotten crooner who in 1936 had been voted America's most popular vocalist), and Memphis Minnie. (Minnie is not known to have done radio work, and her inclusion on this list was probably a mistake. Still, given the gaps in our historical knowledge, one cannot be sure.)

As for the list of jukebox favorites, it includes all the record titles available at five of Clarksdale's black amusement places, and sheds still more light on the tastes of the region's black music fans. (The full list is too long to be given here, but is provided as an appendix.) Once again, this is not a definitive guide to what people wanted to hear—the café owners' personal tastes would have been a factor, as well as which records the jukebox operators chose to promote—but it is way better than anachronistic assumptions by modern-day blues lovers.

Johnny Shines recalled that, back in the 1930s, the jukeboxes (or “vendors”) provided a unique source for country blues records he could not hear on the radio—“I could take fifteen cents and go to a vendor and learn any song on there, music and lyrics”—but also for a great deal else. “In those places, the juke joints, there'd be quite a few blues on the vendors, and at that time you also had Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Fatha Hines, Teddy Wilson, a variety of guys, piano players and things like that who had those numbers on there. Quite a bit of jazz on those vendors. You had to play those kinds of things if you were a musician playing there.”
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The Fisk-Lomax list bears out his memories. I have seen no comparable jukebox tabulations from, say, Harlem or Chicago, but assume that there were more blues sides on the Clarksdale boxes than one would have found in most northern, urban locations. However, there was a lot else as well, and even many of the blues songs were by performers who today are more likely to be filed in the jazz category. At Messenger's Café, the one place to list a “top six” titles, the favorites were: (1) Count Basie's “Going to Chicago” (sung by Jimmy Rushing),
(2) Louis Jordan's “Pine Top Boogie Woogie,” (3) Johnny Hodges's “That's the Blues Old Man” (a Duke Ellington instrumental), (4) Eddy Duchin's “Maria Elena,” (5) Sammy Kaye's “Daddy” (which a note says had been first until recently), and (6) Louis Jordan's “Brotherly Love.” The first two are blues songs, and if one tabulates all the artists on all the boxes, one continues to find that a third of them played a fair proportion of blues, but that third includes not only Basie and Jordan but also Lil Green, Earl Hines, Buddy Johnson, Jay McShann, and Sam Price—all of whom are represented by blues titles, but also by quite different music.

There are some straight-ahead blues singers as well: Walter Davis and Memphis Minnie show up pretty regularly, and Davis's “Come Back Baby” was the big hit of the moment, the only record to be included on all five jukeboxes. (The runner-up for this honor was Earl Hines's “Jelly Jelly,” a pop-blues sung by Billy Eckstine, which was on four.) Still, there are only two artists whose sides could be considered truly “down home,” Tommy McClennan and Blind Boy Fuller, and each is represented by only a single song on a single box. Meanwhile, three-quarters of the artists are mainstream stars like Fats Waller and Artie Shaw. Clearly, there were plenty of people who wanted to hear blues—and it is worth noting that both Davis and Memphis Minnie had gotten their starts in the Delta region—but anyone prone to stereotypes will have to account for all those people who apparently preferred Eddy Duchin and Sammy Kaye.
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My intention in providing all these lists is to show the breadth of music that made up the world in which the great Mississippi blues singers lived and worked. Too often, blues lovers picture the Delta as an isolated backwater, a place where blues was the only music played and the typical black sharecropper's notion of a superstar was Charley Patton. The fact is that, greatly as Patton was admired by his local fans, they were also hearing the music of a lot of bigger stars, from Peetie Wheatstraw to Duke Ellington. I am sure that some preferred Patton's music to Ellington's, Louis Armstrong's, or Fats Waller's, but they were perfectly aware that he was a local hero while the others were nationally acclaimed, and that even in the Delta they were expressing a minority taste.

I am also trying to convey how little I or anyone else really knows about what made up the day-to-day soundtrack of black Delta life. Were those Duchin and Kaye records played in the afternoon, when older folks took their grandkids into town for an ice cream, or late at night, when young couples slow-danced close together and dreamed of marrying and moving to Chicago? How many of the great Delta blues players nurtured fantasies of throwing away their ratty guitars and stepping out in front of the Count Basie Band? How many people really did love Gene Autry?

We will never know all, or even most of the answers, but I feel completely secure in saying that rural black Delta dwellers were not only aware of all sorts of non-blues, non-Mississippi music, but were doing their best to keep up with the latest developments. This means that they had a very different set of musical reference points than those of modern blues fans. Many of us still listen to Louis Jordan and Count Basie, but few can claim much familiarity with Gene Autry, and I suspect that not one in a hundred thousand would even recognize the name Lanny Ross, much less have heard any of his music.

None of this is to diminish the importance of blues in Delta life, or to minimize the legacy of the region's guitarists and singers. Clearly, blues was more popular and important to the average person in Clarksdale and the Delta than it would have been in Harlem or Los Angeles. But we need to remember that the taste for blues was far from monolithic, and also that it could include Kansas City band singers as well as acoustic guitarists.

The point is not that the common preconceptions about Robert Johnson's musical world are entirely wrong, but rather that they are part of a much larger story. The Delta that Jones and Adams describe, in which radios and jukeboxes were supplanting work songs and wind-up Victrolas, and in which one-third of black tenant farm families had enough money to own some kind of car and a similar proportion said they regularly read an urban newspaper, is the same Delta that was plagued by intense racism and a plantation system often compared to slavery. And these two worlds not only existed side by side, they were inseparable parts of people's daily lives. The availability of radios and newspapers could at times make rural farm families feel more rather
than less isolated, taunting them with glimpses of a life that to many seemed infinitely unattainable. Others, though, dreamed of moving up and out, even if it was only to Clarksdale or Jackson, and the more ambitious made plans to build new lives in Memphis, St. Louis, or the fabled Chicago. It is surely no coincidence that the only two “favorite songs” in Adams's survey that mention a city in their titles are “Sweet Home Chicago” and “Going to Chicago.”

The Fisk–Library of Congress trip was made at a key time, with World War II gearing up and the Delta changing with the shifts of technology, politics, and a mass emigration to the North. One could argue that by 1941 or 1942 the area was already very different from what it had been when Robert Johnson recorded five years earlier, and a world away from anything Charley Patton would have known. And yet, it is not that simple. Modernization was proceeding at a rapid clip, but Muddy Waters was still living in a house without electricity and playing at dances with Patton's old fiddler. Much had changed, much remained the same. After all, the Delta had always been a region in a state of flux, full of comings and goings. Of a hundred families Adams surveyed, only four had spent their whole lives on the same plantation, and the average length of time that any family had been in the community was just over ten years. Robert Johnson was far from alone in having the walking blues and rambling on his mind, or dreaming of his sweet home Chicago.