Escaping the Delta (38 page)

I
NTRODUCTION

1.
B. B. King with David Ritz,
Blues All Around Me
(New York: Avon Books, 1996), p. 23.

2.
Robert Neff and Anthony Connor,
Blues
(Boston: David R. Godine, 1975), p. 1.

3.
This is one of two markers, and it is not clear that either really marks the churchyard where Johnson was buried, or if it does, that his body is still there

4.
Samuel B. Charters,
The Country Blues
(London: Michael Joseph Ltd., 1960), p. 142.

1
What Is Blues?

1.
William Christopher Handy, “The Significance of the Blues,”
Talking Machine Journal
, August 1919, p. 50, quoted in Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow,
King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charley Patton
(Newton, N.J.: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), p. 18.

2.
Jim O'Neal and Amy Van Singel,
The Voice of the Blues
(New York: Routledge, 2002), p. 352.

3.
The use of the word “blues” to signify an emotional state has been common since at least the early nineteenth century. It appears in a few African-American songs and minstrel skits that predate the blues era, but these show no particular connection to the genre we call blues.

4.
Richard Nevins, personal communication with the author, 2002.

5.
William Christopher Handy,
Father of the Blues
(New York: Macmillan, 1941), p. 74. Some experts insist that the “slide” guitar style comes from African roots and was barely influenced by the popular tours of Hawaiian troupes around the turn of the century. It is worth noting that both Handy and
the Delta guitarist Son House referred to this style as Hawaiian. The idea that rural musicians were archaic conservatives rather than willing explorers of whatever new styles came their way is both patronizing and inaccurate.

6.
Little Milton Campbell, interview with the author, 1996.

7.
Son House, interview with John Fahey, Barry Hansen, and Mark LeVine, Venice, Calif., May 7, 1965, on file at the JEMF Archives, Chapel Hill, N.C.

8.
David “Honeyboy” Edwards, interview with the author, 1997. There are similar quotations from other Mississippians, including Sam Chatmon, Skip James, and Richard “Hacksaw” Harney, in Calt and Wardlow,
King of the Delta Blues
, p. 63.

9.
Both Josh White, in South Carolina, and Henry Townsend, in the Mississippi Delta, recalled their parents referring to their blues records as “reels.” Townsend gives a unique etymology for the usage, showing how far it had come from being a term for European folk dances: “Although they call it the blues today, the original name given to this kind of music was ‘reals.' And it was real because it made the truth available to the people in the songs” (William Barlow,
Looking Up At Down
[Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989], p. 326).

10.
John W. Work,
American Negro Songs and Spirituals
(New York: Crown Publishers, 1940), pp. 32–33.

11.
Ferdinand “Jelly Roll” Morton,
New Orleans Memories
(Commodore Records CR 8, 1947), phonograph recording. While Morton was not always a reliable raconteur, his main weakness was a tendency to claim credit for himself, and there is no reason to doubt him here.

12.
At other times, Handy reported hearing blues or blues-like songs as early as 1890, including a version of the eight-bar “East St. Louis Blues” (David Evans,
Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues
[New York: Da Capo Press, 1982], p. 33). Once again, this lyric refers to a major Mississippi River port, rather than the rural outback. The process of urban and composed pieces showing up years later as folk songs would continue into the blues recording era. Both black players like Peg Leg Howell and Charley Patton and white ones like Prince Albert Hunt and Dock Boggs recorded songs they had learned off records by the blues queens, and their rural instrumentation and approach could lead one to assume that these pieces were older than the recorded models, were there not plenty of evidence to the contrary.

2
Race Records: Blues Queens, Crooners, Street Singers, and Hokum

1.
Lewis Mumford,
The Myth of the Machine
(New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1966), p. 23.

2.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me': Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues,”
American Music
, vol. 14, no. 4, 1996, p. 405.

3.
Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff,
Out of Sight: The Rise of African American Popular Music, 1889–1895
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), p. 296.

4.
Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me,'” p. 413.

5.
Handy,
Father of the Blues
, p. 99.

6.
Handy confirmed that this change in nomenclature was made for commercial reasons: “Long ago, I wrote ‘Yellow Dog Rag.' It sold mildly well, and after a while I forgot about it. When the popular taste for blues asserted itself I took out that old number and changed its name to ‘Yellow Dog Blues.' Other than the name, I altered nothing. Within an incredibly short time I had earned seventy-five hundred dollars in royalties from ‘Yellow Dog Blues'—which, as ‘Yellow Dog Rag,' had not sold well at all” (W. C. Handy, “The Heart of the Blues,”
The Etude
, March 1940, p. 193).

7.
The black comedian Bert Williams had been a major record seller in the teens, but his work was considered standard pop fare, marketed to the same broad public that was buying Fanny Brice or Al Jolson, rather than being targeted at African-American consumers. It should be added that, while Mamie Smith and her followers were soon segregated into separate “Race” catalogues, this did not prevent their work from being marketed to white buyers in regions where the record companies sensed a receptive consumer base.

8.
I expect that broader scholarship will turn up other claimants for some of the “firsts” listed in this section, but will not alter the overall pattern. Who happened to publish the first sheet music or make the first record in a certain style is interesting, but the important thing to understand is that there was plenty of blues bubbling up in the minstrel and vaudeville world around this period.

9.
Evans,
Big Road Blues
, p. 62.

10.
Harris, a native of Kentucky, explained her attraction to blues material in a 1922 Columbia Records catalog: “In order to please you must do your best, and you usually do best what comes naturally. So I just naturally started singing Southern dialect songs and the modern blues songs, which closely resemble the darky folk songs” (Tim Gracyk,
Popular American Recording Pioneers: 1895–1925
[New York: Haworth Press, 2000], p. 173). While I describe all of these pre-1920 blues singers as “white,” Bayes (née Goldberg) was Jewish—like Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, and many other performers who specialized in “Negro” or blackface material—and that was not quite the same as being white. However, it was easy for Jewish entertainers to “pass” as white in vaudeville, and along with singing blues numbers, Bayes got her start doing Irish characters and made a huge hit as a hillbilly “rube,” singing “How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?”

11.
It is common to describe such ethnic impersonations as examples of the mainstream culture mocking minority or immigrant groups, but it is not that simple. Lynn Abbott has supplied me with several citations for African-American vaudevillians who specialized in this sort of material, drawn from Indianapolis's widely read African-American newspaper, the
Freeman
: On
July 14, 1900, an ad for Louis Vasnier boasted of his “Natural face expressions in five different dialects, no make up—Negro, Dutch, Dago, Irish and French. I sing in all. The only colored comedian who can do it.” On May 6, 1911, a review of a performance by H. Quallie Clark (later an associate of W. C. Handy's) noted that “His Hebrew song, ‘Rebecca,' won him big acknowledgement. At times it was hard to believe he was a colored man, so perfect was his accent and so realistically faithful were his portrayals of a real Jew.” On October 7, 1911, a review of the vaudeville team of Pinkey & Walker said, “‘Chinee Walker' has already won his laurels as a ‘Chink' impersonator…His ‘Dago' is equally as strong and he uses both in his act.”

12.
This song was one of several variants of a theme popular with minstrel and vaudeville performers in the Dallas area. The “Dallas Blues” published by the white composer Hart Wand in 1912 had a similar melody, though in its original form there were no lyrics included. Lyrics similar to those Cahill sang were registered for copyright in 1912 by a white minstrel, Le Roy “Lasses” White, of the Happy Hour Theater in Dallas, as “Negro Blues,” and published in Dallas the following year as “Nigger Blues.” This was recorded in 1916 by George O'Connor, a white lawyer from Washington, D.C., whose hobby was Negro dialect humor (Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert'ly Sound Good to Me,”' pp. 408–412). The song's distinctive “stuttering” pattern would turn up in many later blues songs, notably “Bad Luck Blues,” recorded in 1926 by the Dallas street singer Blind Lemon Jefferson. Jefferson's version may have drawn on an earlier “folk” source, but Peg Leg Howell, in Atlanta, recorded a similarly stuttering “Banjo Blues” in 1928 that is clearly derived from the minstrel stage, and it is possible that Jefferson was likewise adapting a minstrel theme.

13.
Handy,
Father of the Blues
, p. 195.

14.
Ibid., p. 200.

15.
Harris's original title for the song was “I Ain't Got Nobody Much,” but the “Much” was dropped on most later recordings.

16.
Strictly speaking, Smith was not the first African-American singer to record a blues. In 1917, Ciro's Club Coon Orchestra cut a version of “St. Louis Blues,” which included a vocal. However, this group was a hotel band in London, England, and its records had no impact in the United States.

17.
The
Chicago Defender
was pleased to note that Mamie Smith's live show was not simply a blues performance: “One would imagine from the records that she was of a rough coarse shouter [sic]. To the contrary, she was a splendid reproduction of May Irwin, who made this class of amusement what it is today…” (“Mamie Smith a Hit,”
Chicago Defender
, March 5, 1921, p. 5). The high point of her show was “Crazy Blues,” but the paper's vaudeville critic reported that “She has a personality and a smile that is infectious…And her gowns!…There is one made of some blue spangled material which has the ordinary rainbow skinned 40 ways from the deuce and she wears a flock of diamonds that has her lit up like a Polish church on Sunday night.” Her troupe included “Minstrel Morris, the Race's premier juggler,” a dance team, a man
doing animal imitations, and an ethnic comedy team offering “one of those Chink things that are so popular” (Tony Langston, “‘Mamie Smith Co.' Fills the Avenue,”
Chicago Defender
, March 5, 1921, p. 5). Today, all that is remembered of this golden age of black entertainment is the jazz bands and blues singers, whose work makes up the vast majority of what survives on recordings. There were a couple of black-owned record companies striving to redress the imbalance, and one can find examples of African-American singers doing everything from sentimental ballads, minstrel comedy, and yodeling to traditional spirituals and operatic arias, but not nearly enough to give a full picture of the field. In any case, it is only the blues recordings that have attracted the attention of modern-day fans, and much of this material remains unavailable except to collectors.

18.
“Mamie Smith is Still the South's Favorite Singer,”
Chicago Defender
, September 15, 1934, sec. 1, p. 8.

19.
Bessie Smith's biographer says that Rainey never appeared in New York (Chris Albertson,
Bessie
[New York: Stein and Day, 1972], p. 65), but Pigmeat Markham recalled her performing at Harlem's Lincoln Theater. Markham noted, however, that she was nervous because New York was not her usual turf (Pigmeat Markham with Bill Levinson,
Here Comes the Judge!
[New York: Popular Library, 1969], no page numbers).

20.
Black Swan owner Harry Pace is quoted in Jitu K. Weusi, “The Rise and Fall of Black Swan Records,”
Red Hot Jazz
, Spring 1996 (March 24, 2003), www.redhotjazz.com/blackswan.html. Sam Wooding is quoted in Michael W. Harris,
The Rise of Gospel Blues
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 81.

21.
Paramount Records emphasized Rainey's pioneer status, announcing her first record with the screaming headline “Discovered at Last—‘Ma' Rainey, Mother of the Blues!” and calling her “the wonderful gold-neck woman who starred for five years in three theaters in Pensacola, Atlanta, and Jacksonville!” (
Chicago Defender
, February 2, 1924, sec. 2, p. 10).

22.
Harris,
The Rise of Gospel Blues,
p. 93.

23.
Ibid., pp. 89–90.

24.
Okeh Race records ad,
Chicago Defender
, January 8, 1924, sec. 1, p. 6. This ad shows a headshot of Martin alongside a drawing of a little black girl listening to an old black man with a guitar, in front of a ramshackle wooden shack. It is interesting that Okeh should have chosen to emphasize the guitar and the rural setting. A possible explanation is that they had been having some success with white “hillbilly” records, and were testing the waters to see if there was a similar market for rural styles in the black community.