Escaping the Delta (31 page)

While the Harlem Renaissance laid the groundwork, the key moment in the transformation of black vernacular music into an important white taste came on December 23, 1938, with the “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall. Here, for the first time, white New York society heard a broad range of African-American music presented as art rather than simply entertainment.
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John Hammond, who organized the program, was a wealthy connoisseur who is justly famous for his work on behalf of such artists as Teddy Wilson, Billie Holiday, Count Basie, and many others. It was through his in
fluence at Columbia Records that Bessie Smith was able to make her last recordings, after her glory days were past, and he would go on to sponsor the varied talents of Charlie Christian, Aretha Franklin, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. He conceived of “Spirituals to Swing” as a capsule history of African-American music, and began the evening by playing some field recordings of traditional African chants. Then came the Count Basie Band, the boogie-woogie pianists Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and Pete Johnson with Joe Turner, gospel from Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mitchell's Christian Singers, New Orleans jazz from a group fronted by Sidney Bechet, stride piano by James P. Johnson, a harmonica instrumental from Sonny Terry, and blues from Big Bill Broonzy.

How Hammond thought about blues and its place in this mix is implied in the way he always wrote of Broonzy's appearance. He recalled that “Big Bill Broonzy was prevailed upon to leave his Arkansas farm and mule and make his very first trek to the big city to appear before a predominantly white audience,” and described him as a “primitive blues singer” who “shuffled” onstage to sing a song about one of his dreams.
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Reviewers, presumably on Hammond's briefing, noted that Broonzy had bought a pair of new shoes for his trek north, and this entertaining tidbit was routinely recycled by jazz critics over the following decades.

Now, Broonzy had been born in Mississippi and raised in Arkansas, but he learned to play guitar only after moving to Chicago in the early 1920s. By 1938, he had released over two hundred sides under his own name and appeared as an accompanist on many hundreds more. He wore fashionable suits, and kept up with contemporary musical trends: three months before Hammond brought him to New York, he was leading a group that included trumpet and alto sax for a session that included songs like “Flat Foot Susie with Her Flat Yes Yes.” Which is to say it had been a hell of a long time since he could reasonably be described as an Arkansas farmer. Nonetheless, that was what Hammond wanted and what appealed to the Carnegie Hall public, and it would remain Broonzy's image whenever he appeared for white audiences, right up to his death in 1958. Though he was shortly back in Chicago working on a series of hit records for Lil Green, he returned
to the folk scene when the market for old-time blues collapsed, and consciously shaped himself into the living embodiment of his white fans' fantasies. Some blues historians attempted to set the record straight, but when I bought my first Broonzy record in the mid-1960s, the liner notes were still perpetuating the popular myth:

As it happens, Broonzy had not been Hammond's original choice for the blues singer slot in “Spirituals to Swing.” He had been brought in at the last minute, as a replacement for a genuinely rural and mysterious artist: Robert Johnson. Hammond had produced jazz sessions for Columbia Records, and it was apparently through his special access to the company's product that Johnson came to his attention.
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It is not clear exactly what it was about Johnson's work that so appealed to Hammond, but there are a couple of clues. He would write that he originally considered Blind Boy Fuller for the blues singer slot in the concert, but rejected him because his voice was too nasal. Johnson's voice was fuller and more emotional, closer to that of Broonzy and the other mainstream stars, and thus easier on white urban ears. Its relative smoothness, however, was balanced by the high, eerie moan of his slide guitar, a sound that to white listeners would become synonymous with Delta blues.
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Hammond apparently sent an emissary to invite Johnson to New York, and when he heard that Johnson had recently been murdered, he hired Broonzy as a replacement. Unwilling to give up completely on his original choice, he played two Johnson records
for the Carnegie Hall audience: “Walkin' Blues” and “Preachin' Blues.” Since, aside from the African field recordings, the rest of the concert was devoted to live music, this demonstrates the extent to which Hammond considered Johnson a uniquely great artist, for whom there was no substitute.

At the time, this was an extremely unusual position—indeed, I am tempted to suggest that Hammond was the only man on earth who held it. Not even Johnson's friends and playing partners would have described him as America's greatest blues singer; they were proud enough to consider him the greatest young player in the Delta. Furthermore, had they been inclined to make a broader case for his supremacy, they would never have based it on two Son House covers that were among the most archaic numbers in his repertoire. Hammond, though, was specifically looking for a “primitive” blues sound, and there is no reason to think that he had ever heard the older Mississippi players—certainly, House's records would have been very unlikely to have come to his attention. Johnson exemplified the deep, old-time style he was looking for, and the tracks he played at “Spirituals to Swing” defined what several decades later would become known as the Delta blues style.

In those days, the Delta was not yet regarded as a major blues center. North Mississippi had produced a few important stars, like Memphis Minnie and Walter Davis, but they were trendy, modern Chicago-and St. Louis–based players whom few fans would have associated with any particular rural region. The one group that would have sprung to most blues buyers' minds as having a down-home, Mississippi sound would have been the Mississippi Sheiks, both because of their name and because their fiddle lead was the epitome of the old-time country style. However, the average blues buyer never gave much thought to where singers were from. Local fans might support their favorite sons and daughters, and certain records sold better in some places than others, but the whole idea of classifying blues by region would not appear for another twenty years. Hammond was no exception, routinely mentioning Johnson alongside Blind Boy Fuller, who was from the Carolinas. In terms of the 1930s market, this pairing made sense, since Fuller and Johnson were among the relatively few
exceptions to the current blues mainstream, working solo, in rural-sounding styles. (Both also recorded for the Columbia family of record labels. It is not clear to me that Hammond had heard any rural blues singers who did not.)

Hammond would remain a key figure in Johnson's posthumous career. A man of varied and passionate tastes, he had a gift for persuading other people to share his enthusiasms, and his place in history is less as a producer than as the most effective of fans, the man who would force Benny Goodman to listen to Charlie Christian, or insist that friends come down to a bar to hear Billie Holiday. In those days, he does not seem to have had as many friends who were into the folkier, more rural black styles, and although in 1938 he had convinced Columbia to put out an album of Bessie Smith reissues, it would be more than twenty years before Johnson received similar attention. Still, he caught the ear of Alan Lomax, and Lomax became an important fellow prophet.

Lomax was already well on his way to being America's foremost folk music collector, promoter, and popularizer—at a time when “folk music” still meant music created and performed by nonprofessional, usually rural people without formal training.
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With his father, John, he had done extensive field recordings in the South, and had been intimately involved in Leadbelly's career. If it had been up to him, Leadbelly undoubtedly would have been the bluesman at “Spirituals to Swing,” and it surprises me that Hammond never seems to have considered this.

Lomax paid closer attention to commercial blues records than other folklorists of his generation, but generally regarded them as an adulterated form of the pure folk style. He was devoted to the idea of folk music as a voice of the voiceless, the heartfelt expression of ordinary working people who could not write books or enjoy access to the academy or high society. He appreciated someone like Leroy Carr—or more specifically, Josh White, whom he presented in numerous radio shows—as a bridge to the broad pop audience, but was not as excited by their work as by that of more countrified players like Leadbelly. Furthermore, he laid little stress on originality. He could recognize a fine songwriter when one came his way, but he tended to speak of even
such uniquely gifted creators as Big Bill Broonzy and Woody Guthrie as representatives of their cultures and carriers of older traditions.
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Still, he had been struck by the work of Blind Lemon Jefferson, and when Hammond introduced him to Johnson's records he filed Johnson as a Jefferson disciple and “one of the two or three great originals of the blues.”
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One of the reasons he chose to go to Mississippi in 1941, rather than to one of the other regions he and the Fisk team had considered, was to explore Johnson's musical circle, and this was how he came to meet Son House and Muddy Waters. (In assessing Johnson's local reputation, it is worth noting that the first white, northern blues fan that House, Waters, Honeyboy Edwards, and other Delta players met was already an ardent Johnson admirer. One has to wonder what effect this had on their own estimations of their onetime peer.)
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While their influence would eventually reach around the globe, Lomax and Hammond were to a great extent operating within the small bubble of New York liberal intellectual society, and in this world virtually everyone accepted their opinions as definitive when it came to “country” blues. However, it is important to remember that pop songs with “Blues” in their titles had been familiar fare for whites as well as blacks for several decades, and Hammond and Lomax were fighting to change a broad-based, preexisting concept of the music. After a quarter century of jazz, vaudeville, and Broadway treatments, most educated people considered blues to be cheap, flashy, good-time entertainment, possibly fun but certainly not important. This view was shared by a substantial portion of the scholars who had made a serious study of black folklore. When the first thorough survey of African-American rural folk music,
The Negro and His Songs
, was published in 1925, the authors divided secular performances into three categories: Most valuable were the folk songs created by rural blacks themselves; then came “modified or adapted” songs, which had white or Tin Pan Alley sources but had been significantly changed by the singers; of least interest, despite their widespread popularity, were the purely commercial pieces, which were subdivided into three further categories: “‘Nigger songs' [the authors' term for minstrel pieces], popular ‘hits,' and ‘blues.'”
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While Hammond and Lomax each viewed blues through his own
aesthetic lens—Hammond saw it as the roots of Basie and Goodman, while Lomax considered it a black equivalent of the Appalachian ballads—both felt that it was a vital, important folk form, central to the broader field of African-American music. Thus, both sought to present it in what they considered to be its purest form, sung by “real” blues singers, fresh out of the country.
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The idea that some blues singers were “realer” than others would become a commonplace (and the source of infinite arguments) among white enthusiasts, but in the late 1930s it was quite new. Of course, plenty of black record buyers appreciated blues as “real”—one of the music's greatest strengths had always been that it expressed what listeners were experiencing in their daily lives—but they did not consider Bessie Smith's songs less real because she was wearing an expensive gown and backed by painted sets and a jazz band, or Leroy Carr and Lonnie Johnson less real because of their cool, urbane vocals. It was a purely white aesthetic that considered the blind street guitarists to be “realer” than the Smiths and Carrs, or Robert to be the “realest” of Johnsons—or that needed to imagine Big Bill Broonzy back on an Arkansas farm in order to consider him a true bluesman.

Leadbelly's New York career was Exhibit A for the white blues aesthetic. When the Lomaxes came upon him, he was a prisoner in Angola State Penitentiary and had never recorded for a commercial label. He could sing blues, but also the whole panorama of black traditional music, from children's rhymes to field hollers and work songs, and once he was out of jail, he learned and performed other pieces the Lomaxes had collected, such as “Rock Island Line,” along with his previous repertoire. The Lomaxes brought him to New York in 1935, and his early appearances got a splash of publicity that tended to focus as much on his colorful past as on his music. A
March of Time
newsreel recreated his prison meeting with John Lomax, and a
Life
magazine profile was titled “Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.”
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