Escaping the Delta (28 page)

Like virtually all the blues singers so far mentioned in this chapter, and most blues stars of the 1920s and 1930s, Turner was quite capable of singing other material. At the same session that produced
“Shake, Rattle and Roll” he also cut versions of Irving Berlin's “How Deep Is the Ocean” and the Frank Sinatra hit “Time After Time,” which he would continue to perform until the end of his career.
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In blues as in other styles, the more versatile and sophisticated artists, who could adapt to changing fashions, tended to be the most consistent and reliable hit-makers. This was particularly obvious in the work of the smooth balladeers, since blues crooning and pop crooning involved essentially the same vocal techniques, but the big band shouting style, descended from pre-microphone powerhouses like Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith, also proved remarkably adaptable. Men like Turner and women like Big Mama Thornton, Big Maybelle, and LaVern Baker proved that the old, loud style was as well suited to the hard-rocking R&B horn bands of the 1950s as it had been to the jazz horn bands of the 1920s.

There was another kind of blues performer, though, who was less adaptable and more idiosyncratic. Just as Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton had found audiences for their unique styles even in the era of piano combos and vaudeville queens, the late 1940s and early 1950s saw a new wave of “down-home” bluesmen rising up alongside the jazzier, poppier R&B artists. The most surprising of these were singer/guitarists like Lightnin' Hopkins and his cousin Smokey Hogg, who played their own accompaniments, at times on acoustic guitars. These players could to some extent be considered survivals of an earlier era—Hopkins had accompanied Texas Alexander, and Hogg had billed himself as “Little Peetie Wheatstraw”—but their sound was distinctive, and they managed to put a string of singles in the R&B top ten.

Hopkins and Hogg were from Texas, but the biggest star in this style was a Mississippian, John Lee Hooker. Hooker burst on the scene in 1949 with “Boogie Chillen,” and put three more records in the top ten before ending his run with another number one, 1951's “I'm in the Mood.”
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From a musical perspective, Hooker's approach was astoundingly archaic, and if one wanted to get involved in arcane musicological battles it would be easy to argue that most of his work was not even blues in any normal sense of the word. Many of his songs were far closer to field hollers than to any previous blues hits, consist
ing of unrhymed lines interspersed with moody moans, with no regard for normal bar lengths. His style was so personal and improvisatory that sidemen routinely got confused trying to follow him, and most of his greatest recordings were done alone, with only his voice, electric guitar, and sometimes his tapping feet. (As for his penchant for ignoring rhymes, it could reach perverse extremes: The first verse of “I'm in the Mood” begins “Every time I see you, baby, walking down the street/Know I get a thrill now, baby, from my head down to my toes.”)

Not all the down-home bluesmen were as deep as Hooker and Hopkins, and one who would prove to be singularly influential came from the opposite end of the spectrum. Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup, who hit in 1945 with “Rock Me Mama” and continued his run through 1951, was a Mississippi singer with a light voice and musically regular guitar style, worlds away from Hooker's ominous moan and eerie electric improvisations. Backed only by bass and drums, he kept an infectiously danceable beat that at times seemed to owe as much to western swing or hillbilly as to older blues, and delivered his lyrics with cheerful exuberance. The result was savvy and youthful, but with a countrified flavor—a combination that would hit a decade later for another Mississippian, Jimmy Reed—and it is easy to see why it was taken as a model by some young white rural musicians.

“The colored folks…played it like that in the shanties and juke joints, and nobody paid it no mind till I goosed it up,” Elvis Presley would say in 1956, two years after launching his career with a high-energy cover of Crudup's “That's All Right.” “I got it from them. Down in Tupelo, Mississippi, I used to hear old Arthur Crudup bang his box the way I do now, and I said if I ever got to the place I could feel all old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw.”
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Presley recorded a number of Crudup's songs, and to some extent can be filed as a similarly light, countrified, down-home blues singer—though his debt to Dean Martin was equally obvious and in the long run probably accounted for more of his popularity. He stuck to the stripped-down trio or quartet format, eschewing horns, and plenty of people in his first heyday reflexively thought of him as a blues singer.

There was obviously a vast difference between Presley—countrified as he was—and down-home artists like Hopkins, Hooker and the
crowd of Mississippi expatriates who came roaring out of Chicago's South Side on the heels of Muddy Waters. Nonetheless, it is worth remembering that Presley was also on the R&B charts, was originally hailed as a wild, primitive, and startlingly black-sounding singer, and might have fit more easily alongside them than alongside Dinah Washington or Louis Jordan.

To a great extent, what makes us file some artists as rock 'n' rollers, others as R&B singers, and still others as hard bluesmen has more to do with who accepted them, and how famous they became, than with how they sounded. Bo Diddley, for one, is routinely filed as a rock 'n' roller, though in musical terms he had as much in common with Hooker or Waters as he did with Presley and Chuck Berry. The only logical reason for this is that white teenagers bought his work in a way that they did not buy Hooker's—that his popularity was broad enough to lift him out of the blues category.

This highlights an important fact: Part of what defines the artists who have been remembered as “pure” bluesmen is that they were always a relatively minority taste. Hooker and the Chicagoans, great and popular as they were, never had the widespread appeal of Charles Brown, Big Joe Turner, or a jazzier player like B. B. King, whose obvious links to uptown stars like T-Bone Walker and Louis Jordan made him more acceptable to the cosmopolitan clubgoers of Harlem and Watts. The down-home singers could never even dream of reaching the heights attained by someone like Dinah Washington. Even at the moment of their greatest popular success, much of the more educated and urbanized black population thought of them in terms that are exemplified by an article that ran in the
Chicago Defender
in 1951:

Note that this is in Chicago, the apex of the down-home craze. Nationally, Hooker would have been considered more of an anomaly than a trendsetter, and no equally rural-sounding artist would come close to matching his success. Waters, for example, never placed a song higher than number three on the R&B charts—and that was “I'm Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” the first record on which he used a full, piano-driven band and sang a hip, funny lyric by the pop-oriented Willie Dixon rather than one of his own Delta-derived, Son House–style slide guitar numbers. Indeed, it is educational to compare a list of the Chicago-based Mississippians who are considered legends—Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Aleck “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller, Elmore James—with those who actually got number-one hits during this period: Eddie Boyd and Bo Diddley joined Tennesseeans Memphis Slim and Willie Mabon and the Louisianan Little Walter as the Chicago blues scene's R&B chart toppers.

Diddley was the only one of this bunch who might be considered a primitive, rural-sounding player, and he is a musical eccentric of his own unique stamp. The other four were versatile performers with few rural touches, three of them pianists. Boyd was actually Waters's cousin, and Waters briefly worked in his band, but could not manage the jazzy Johnny Moore licks Boyd favored.
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Little Walter, by contrast, worked for Waters and is often classed alongside him because of their almost telepathic gifts as collaborators, but he was nearly twenty years younger, and his harmonica playing resembled nothing from the older, acoustic era. He thought like a saxophonist, completely transforming
his instrument's musical range, and left the band in 1952 after hitting with “Juke,” a revolutionary instrumental that was Chess Records' biggest chart success to date, spending eight weeks at number one.
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Mabon was the only other Chess artist to equal this feat—with a slinkily nasty blues novelty called “I Don't Know”—until Chuck Berry came along three years later with “Maybelline.”

This is not to say that the deeper, more down-home players did not have a significant impact. Their strongest audience was in the South or among urbanites with strong Southern connections, but they also gained converts in the wider market, and measured over the long haul, some were more successful than the bigger hit makers. Leonard Chess, who founded the Chess label, has been quoted as saying, “Fuck the hits, give me thirty thousand on every record.”
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Whereas a single like Eddie Boyd's “Five Long Years” could spend five weeks at number one because of its mainstream, Carr-style appeal, it did not inspire the hard-core devotion that kept fans following their idols for record after record, making individualists like Waters or Wolf into long-term consistent sellers. And, of course, none of this is to deny the greater adventurousness, emotional power, and artistic depth of the best down-home singers. Once again, I am not trying to diminish the stature of geniuses like Waters and Wolf, but only to stress the fact that there were always smoother, more mainstream blues singers who were reaching larger audiences. In 1952, it was impossible to imagine that half a century later the earthiest of the Chess bluesmen would be more famous than T-Bone Walker, Charles Brown, or Dinah Washington. Not only could they not compare in sales, but they were considered essentially a backward, archaic taste, appealing mostly to country folk and Southern immigrants. With the arrival of rock 'n' roll, the down-home players were wiped off the charts, and everyone in the music business took it for granted that in another few years they would be completely forgotten.

In a way, the brief craze for down-home styles in the late 1940s and early 1950s can be compared to that period in the 1920s when Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Charley Patton, and the other rural guitarists came to the fore. Once again, the music business was aston
ished to find that a lot of black record buyers (and a few white ones) would go for idiosyncratic, countrified individualists. And, once again, a cooler, more urbane style came along and flooded the country players out. In this way of looking at things, Chuck Berry was the 1950s' Leroy Carr, a role he actually fits rather well. Waters, in particular, had an influence beyond his sales, but by the 1960s pretty much all of the down-home players would have been hard-pressed to make a living in music if the white audience had not discovered them.

This is not to say that blues, in a more general sense, saw any downturn with the coming of the rock 'n' roll revolution. Basic twelve-bar songs, sung in styles that reached back at least to the 1930s, remained a very strong part of the black entertainment world. Even if we look only at the records that made it to number one on the R&B charts in the mid-to late 1950s—a very limited selection, sometimes reflecting luck as much as sales, since one month's number three could outsell another's number one—they still include plenty of blues: