Escaping the Delta (30 page)

Considering that the two hits with which Brown announced himself as the king of funky soul modernity in 1965, “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag” and “I Got You (I Feel Good),” were both cast in the twelve-bar blues form, this seems more than a little odd. By that time, though, Brown was defining a new musical movement founded on black pride, and the word “blues” had come to symbolize the poor, rural, Southern, segregated past. Some black intellectuals might claim artists like Robert Johnson as a valuable part of their cultural heritage, but to a lot of people scraping by in the ghettos of urban America, one of the few consolations in life was that at least they were well away from any cotton fields. As Arthur Crudup would put it, the attitude was: “What's the use in my worrying about going to hear such-and-such-a-one play the blues and I done already had the blues all my life?”
²⁶
By the late 1960s, a lot of black music listeners equated blues
with slave-time music, and in 1969
Billboard
retitled its “Rhythm & Blues” chart “Hot Soul Singles.” By then, all but a handful of blues stars were either working for white audiences or had given up the business. B. B. King, Bobby Bland, and Little Milton still had a few hits coming, but King would soon be working almost entirely for white concertgoers, while Bland and Milton would more and more find their touring confined to the Southern “chitlin' circuit,” with occasional forays into the ghetto clubs of Midwestern cities like Chicago, St. Louis, and Detroit. Over the next two decades, this circuit would continue to shrink, though through the 1990s it remained strong enough to provide a decent living for later arrivals like Z. Z. Hill, Denise LaSalle, and Latimore.

Meanwhile, the mainstream of black listeners turned to disco, funk, and rap, and more recently to a new generation of sexy ballad singers and neo-soul sensations. In 1982, the
Billboard
chart for African-American pop music changed its name from “Soul” to “Black,” and in 1990 it once again became “R&B,” but by then the letters had stopped standing for words, and today the magazine actually has a separate “Blues” chart. Some of the artists on that chart—which ranges from white Stevie Ray Vaughan clones to old-time soul masters like Tyrone Davis—remain far better known to black than white fans, but these singers tend to consider it a musical ghetto and yearn to cross over to R&B. Pretty much any professional performer who is happy to be labeled as a blues artist has long ago become reconciled to playing mostly for white people—except when touring Japan.

Obviously, I am generalizing here. The soul era's standard-bearers of black pride are now in their fifties or sixties, and in the twenty-first century it is not clear that any young black music listeners in urban America have anything against the idea of blues. That whole era is ancient history, and hip-hoppers name-check Robert Johnson along with Marcus Garvey. If anything, though, that simply proves the point. They are not name-checking Leroy Carr or T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan or Bobby Bland, or any of the black community's biggest blues stars. The white, cult, museum mentality has triumphed, and the whole idea of blues as black popular music rather than a historic folk heritage has disappeared.

W
HEN
S
CREAMIN
' J
AY
H
AWKINS, ONE OF THE WILDEST
R
HYTHM
and Blues performers of the 1950s, made a comeback album in 1991, he appeared on the cover in full jungle regalia, with a snake around his neck and a bone through his nose, holding in his arms the limp body of a pale blonde in a wedding dress. The album's title was
Black Music for White People
.

While individual tastes obviously vary, black and white fans have tended to feel quite differently about blues. To revisit Robert Johnson's example, black fans in the 1930s heard a good singer and writer in the contemporary blues mainstream, with a solid beat, interesting lyrics, but little to distinguish him from a lot of similar and far-better-known stars. The few white fans who heard him at that time seem to have considered him a brilliant rural primitive. In the 1960s, mainstream black blues buyers who stumbled across an LP reissue of his work would have heard a guy who sounded like the old-fashioned countrified music their parents or grandparents might have liked. Meanwhile, young white fans were embracing the same recordings as the dark, mysterious, and fascinating roots of rock 'n' roll.

Jorge Luis Borges once said that every author creates his own precursors. In this sense, the Robert Johnson that most listeners have heard in the last forty years is a creation of the Rolling Stones. Indeed, for most modern listeners, the history, aesthetic, and sound of blues as a whole was formed by the Stones and a handful of their white, mostly
English contemporaries. That is why Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson have disappeared from the pantheon, along with almost every other major star of the 1920s and 1930s.
¹
They were geniuses, perhaps, but also smooth, intelligent professionals. And as we now know, that is not blues. Blues is the image presented by Keith Richards and Mick Jagger: sex and drugs, and raw, dirty, violent, wild, passionate, angry, grungy, greasy, frightening outlaw music.

Check any popular image of an old-time blues singer. He is male and black, of course. He plays guitar. He is a loner and a rambler, without money or a pleasant home. He is a figure from another world, not like the people next door, or anyone in your family, or anyone you know well. And his music is haunting, searing, and cuts you to the bone.

That is how the blues struck a small clique of English kids in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and it is through their eyes that the rest of the world has come to see it. Which is not to say that they were the first white people to fall for this music, or even the first to seize on it as their personal door into a wilder, more exciting world. The lure of blackness, of primitivism and African rhythms, of the elusive freedom of otherness, has attracted Europeans for centuries. Jagger's love for Muddy Waters is in a line that reaches back to Caesar's love for Cleopatra and Desdemona's for Othello, as well as to Elvis Presley's for Arthur Crudup. (“I said if I ever got to the place I could feel what old Arthur felt, I'd be a music man like nobody ever saw”—he was not just after the notes or style, but the feel.) And it is not for anyone to sneer at such ambitions. Whatever our color, our language, or our continent, we all have images we associate with our favorite music, and the pretensions of blues lovers are no worse or weirder than the pretensions of those who love Beethoven, salsa, or Britney Spears.

But let us stick to the case at hand, and quickly run through its history: White Americans have been attracted to the music of black Americans since colonial times. In the mid-eighteenth century, a French immigrant to rural New York State was writing that, “If we have not the gorgeous balls, the harmonious concerts, the shrill horn of Europe, yet we dilate our hearts as well with the simple Negro fiddle,”
²
and reports of society dances in cultural centers like Charleston,
South Carolina, tell of white dancers enjoying “Negro jigs” along with European minuets.

There are occasional mentions of black performers and styles crossing over to white audiences in the late 1700s, but the real flood came toward the middle of the next century. From about 1840 until the early 1900s, the whole country was caught up in the minstrel craze, with thousands of white entertainers blacking their faces with burnt cork and singing what purported to be “plantation melodies.” Many of these songs were simply reworkings of English music-hall entertainment, but others were directly based on African-American sources. Within a few years, the white “Ethiopians” were facing competition from entertainers who required no makeup to look black—though minstrel custom would dictate that all comedians use burnt cork, whatever their natural hue. A newspaper article from 1858 reports: “A company of real ‘cullud pussons' are giving concerts in New Hampshire…we do not see why the genuine article should not succeed. Perhaps this is but the starting point for a new era in Ethiopian entertainments.”
³
As the century rolled on, it became common for African-American minstrel troupes to try to one-up their more numerous Euro-American competitors by stressing their genuineness, often boasting that they were presenting a true picture of black plantation life—even including segments such as “a real cotton picking scene, showing the darkies picking cotton, while singing their melodies.”
⁴
Such claims to accuracy were pretty dubious, but the consistency with which they were made proves that there was an audience that valued the idea of observing “real” black Southerners displaying their “natural” gifts.

While the mass white audience flocked to see professional entertainers presenting a bizarrely reimagined picture of Negro life, there were also some enlightened spirits who tried to draw attention to genuine black folk traditions. Writers, especially if they favored abolitionist views, sought to counter the minstrel and literary stereotype of happy, childlike plantation “darkies.” A reporter to the
Continental Monthly
in 1863 noted that, when one heard true Southern Negroes singing, “a tinge of sadness pervades all their melodies, which bear as little resemblance to the popular Ethiopian melodies of the day as twilight to noonday.”
⁵

Usually, such writers concentrated on religious music. Good Christian folk would praise the Negroes' sincerity of religious observance, and contrast this to the negative stereotype of the lying, lazy savage—though the sincerity was frequently described as “childlike,” and few suggested that it was the product of any elevated intelligence. By the 1870s, a group of African-American college students had begun making fund-raising tours as the Fisk Jubilee Singers, and their success spawned a number of “Negro spiritual” ensembles, which generally performed in churches and concert halls. The spirituals were hailed as a rich, valuable cultural heritage, as opposed to the demeaning and grotesque minstrel ditties. Though the student ensemble style was hardly closer than the minstrel approach to the normal singing of rural black Southerners, it did draw attention to the religious songs that had become popular in the oral tradition, and helped to encourage their collection and preservation. Hailed as a valuable cultural expression, these spirituals account for almost all the transcribed examples of African-American rural music before the dawn of recording, which has created the widespread impression that the slaves sang far more religious than secular songs. (The seminal collection of African-American folk songs,
Slave Songs of the United States
, published in 1867, consists overwhelmingly of religious material. Oddly enough, seven of the thirteen secular songs that are included come from Louisiana, and are sung in French.)

It should not surprise us that so little secular music was transcribed, even if—as I tend to believe—it was as common as the spirituals. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the whole field of folklore was still in its infancy. The idea that music created by untrained singers and players might be important, valuable art was fairly avant-garde, and very few educated people made the still greater leap to valuing it precisely because the performers were untrained. Such an idea, though, fit the spirit of America's self-image as the world's cradle of democracy, and also the Romantic movement, which celebrated the wonders of nature and “natural man.” It was only a matter of time before folk songs would be hailed as the truest, deepest expression of the American people.
⁶

The breakthrough for American folklore publication came in 1910,
when John A. Lomax published his
Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads
, with a prefatory note by Theodore Roosevelt that pointed out cowboy culture's similarity to the conditions that produced the medieval English ballads. Ballads had become the one folk form that was hallowed in the academy, considered a sort of ancient rural poetry, and the other great American folk music book of the period was 1917's
English Folksongs from the Southern Appalachians
, by the English folklorist Cecil Sharp.

As long as folk song was valued as a carryover of the epic ballad tradition, black singers were not going to get a fair shake. There are a handful of narrative ballads in African-American culture, most famously “John Henry” and the badman ballad “Stagolee,” but on the whole the form was not particularly popular.
⁷
As a result, when early writers would praise the “poetry” of black singers, their examples tended to be only a line or two long, on the order of W. C. Handy's recollection of the phrase he heard at the Tutwiler railroad station. Black music was praised less often for its lyrics than for the style of performance, which could be described as weird, exuberant, plaintive, melancholy, joyous—an array of adjectives that tended to emphasize natural, unspoiled qualities rather than anything that smacked of formal composition or conscious artistry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these were precisely the same adjectives used by those who loved the minstrel tunes, which ranged from exuberant, joyous songs like “Oh! Susannah” (by Stephen Foster, a white composer from Pittsburgh) to plaintive, melancholy songs like “Carry Me Back to Old Virginny” (by James Bland, a black composer from Flushing, Long Island).

This attitude began to shift with the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, which marked a sea change in white America's appreciation of black culture. In particular, it marked a new consideration of black popular music as art. Langston Hughes wrote a number of poems in blues form, and while some people looked askance at such efforts—the academic celebration of “popular culture” was still to come—his work exemplified a hitherto unimagined respect for the literary gifts of the blues singers.

It is worth emphasizing here the extent to which the Harlem Renaissance was driven by white tastes. Of course, the most celebrated
artists were black, and many of the guiding spirits as well, but the people who financed, published, and consumed the fruits of the artistic flowering—whether theatergoers, readers, or buyers of art—came overwhelmingly from the white intellectual and social elites, and their sensibilities were always a prime consideration. As Hughes pointed out, most black Harlemites of the time had not even heard of the Renaissance, “and if they had, it hadn't raised their wages any.”
⁸
For the black artists caught up in this movement, it was a wonderful time, full of promise, but they were also confronted on a daily basis with the stereotypes and romanticism of their patrons. Figures like Carl Van Vechten, the white socialite who was a famous supporter and sometime participant as both an author and a photographer, frequently mixed ardent enthusiasm with more than a hint of condescension. For instance, while Van Vechten compared his first Bessie Smith concert to the experience of “going to a Salzburg Festival to hear Lilli Lehmann sing Donna Anna in
Don Giovanni
,” it is hard to imagine him describing Lehmann's art as he described Smith's:

I do not want to simply dismiss such descriptions as racist or patronizing. The point is that, however complimentary, they are celebrating otherness as much as art. Van Vechten truly admired Smith, took gorgeous pictures of her, and did all he could for her career. He did not insist that African Americans only do “black” art, but also supported the work of many who preferred to work in traditionally
European forms. Nonetheless, his romanticization of black culture was integral to his appreciation of it. There is the famous story of his party where Bessie Smith was invited to sing some songs, then responded to a request for a parting kiss from Mrs. Van Vechten by knocking the small white woman to the floor, and snarling, “I ain't never heard of such shit!” Van Vechten's response was to follow Smith out to the elevator and murmur, “It's all right Miss Smith, you were magnificent tonight.”
¹⁰
I think it is not overstating the case to suggest that he regarded her behavior as part of the thrilling, savage character that he admired, and that he would have reacted quite differently if a white stockbroker had behaved in a similar manner.

Unlike many later white blues fans, Van Vechten socialized with black people, and did not insist that all of them be blues singers.
¹¹
He supported and encouraged a wide range of poets and musicians, and did not assume that all great African-American art was made by illiterate geniuses from the depths of the rural South. When he compared Smith to Lilli Lehmann, the implication was that her work should be considered a kind of formal concert music rather than folklore. This was an idea that would be short-lived among white blues lovers. While jazz would go on to achieve the stature of “black classical music,” blues would come to be seen as something entirely different, a folk form that should be appreciated on a par with the world's other great rural folk forms. It would be presented in concert halls, at times, but not with the gaudy, theatrical trappings of operatic show-women like Smith and Rainey. Instead, the appropriate costume for blues singers would be overalls, work clothes, or anything that suggested that they were simple country people, demonstrating their native culture.