Escaping the Delta (39 page)

25.
A sample from the
Chicago Defender
's entertainment pages finds Trixie Smith headlining a show that included acrobats, a couple whose act consisted of “iron jawed balancing [and] a muscular display by the lady part of the team,” various dancers and singers, and “an Ofay mentalist” (Tony Langston, “Trixie Smith Pleases Grand Patrons,” December 23, 1922, sec. 1, p. 6). Sara Martin toured Texas with a troupe that included the comic couple Butterbeans
and Susie and a contortionist (“Sara Shines,” January 25, 1924, sec. 1, p. 6). Bessie Smith made her Chicago debut supported by a blackface comedy duo, a “prima donna,” a trio of child dancers, and a juggler (“Bessie Smith & Co. at the Avenue,” May 10, 1924, sec. 1, p. 6).

26.
There were a handful of male singers who recorded blues during the first years of the 1920s, in much the same style as the blues queens. George Williams shows up in several record advertisements, and there was also the blues-singing, yodeling female impersonator Charles Anderson. Compared to the female singers, though, their impact was minimal. The Norfolk Jazz Quartet, a popular black male vocal group, also recorded some songs with “blues” in their titles. None of these sound much like blues, but one, 1921's “Monday Morning Blues,” was adapted by the Atlanta guitarist Blind Willie McTell for a section of his “Georgia Rag.”

27.
There was also a guitarist named Johnny “Daddy Stovepipe” Watson who recorded in this period. My lists, here and elsewhere, are far from exhaustive. I have concentrated on the few artists who opened significant new markets and changed the course of the blues boom, so many fine musicians are omitted or mentioned only in passing. My intention is not to provide a comprehensive survey of early blues artists, but simply to trace the dominant commercial styles.

28.
This ambivalent status is evident in contemporary descriptions of Jackson's records. A newspaper blurb about his third release, “Cat's Got the Measles,” called him “the greatest novelty entertainer on the records” (
Chicago Defender
, March 28, 1925, sec. 1, p. 8), and an advertisement for the Paramount Race catalog filed Jackson's records not in the “Vocal Blues” category used for the blues queens, but in a separate “Novelty Blues” section (
Chicago Defender
, May 2, 1925, sec. 1, p. 7).

29.
Paramount Records, which was probably the most influential label in promoting rural blues styles, had its head offices in Chicago, and Okeh also did frequent sessions there.

30.
Chicago Defender
, August 23, 1924, sec. 1, p. 6. Though Ed Andrews and Daddy Stovepipe had already made solo blues recordings, they had so little impact that Paramount advertised Jackson as the “Only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.” Jackson played a six-string banjo, tuned like a guitar, and for the first year and a half of his success the Paramount ads referred to this as a “Blues Guitar,” dropping this terminology only when they began to release records by blues guitarists.

31.
This is a startling fact, especially since it was common for bluesmen like Lemon Jefferson and Blind Blake to be pictured with guitars in record advertisements, and Johnson's record company, Okeh, routinely referred to artists like Sylvester Weaver as “singer and guitar player.” Johnson was never shown with a guitar (though an ad in the
Chicago Defender
, December 17, 1927, sec. 1, p. 6, showed him playing violin), and if his record ads mentioned instrumentation at all, they referred to him as a singer “with guitar accomp.,” never making it clear that he was himself the player. The only
time he was listed as a guitarist was in an ad for a Texas Alexander record, which parenthetically noted “Lonnie Johnson plays the guitar” (
Chicago Defender
, December 9, 1928, sec. 1, p. 12), but in ads for the other Alexander records on which he appeared there was only the standard notation “with guitar accomp.” It is odd that Okeh neglected this aspect of Johnson's talent, but this indicates the extent to which blues was considered a singers' medium.

32.
The term “down home” is now generally associated with the rurally rooted electric styles of John Lee Hooker and Muddy Waters, but it was regularly used by Paramount in its ads for Blind Lemon Jefferson's early recordings.

33.
Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich,
Recording the Blues
, republished as part of Paul Oliver et al.,
Yonder Come the Blues
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 271.

34.
This letter is sometimes ascribed to a clerk named Sam Price, who would go on to become a popular blues and jazz pianist (Ibid., p. 262). However, Price wrote that he suggested Jefferson to a local record store owner, and this man then contacted Paramount on his own (Sammy Price,
What Do They Want?
[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990], p. 27).

35.
“Little Log Cabin in the Lane” had been recorded as early as the 1890s, and Carroll Clark, a black singer from Kentucky who performed light classical and Tin Pan Alley material, made three recordings of the song between 1907 and 1918, accompanied by the white banjo player Vess Ossman. The song had first hit on sheet music in 1871, and was the most popular composition of William Shakespeare Hays, the best-known minstrel composer after Stephen Foster and James Bland. Clearly, it was not the novelty of the material that made Carson's record so successful. (Information on Hays is from Bill C. Malone,
Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers
[Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993], pp. 60–64; information on Carroll Clark is from Norm Cohen,
Minstrels & Tunesmiths
[El Cerrito, Calif., JEMF 109, 1981], phonograph album notes, p. 30).

36.
The story of Peer's trip to Atlanta is drawn from Dixon and Godrich, in Oliver et al.,
Yonder Come the Blues
, p. 265, and Paul Kingsbury, ed.,
The Encyclopedia of Country Music
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 81. On the same trip, Peer also recorded the black singers Lucille Bogan and Fannie Goosby, and there seems to be some question whether he went to Atlanta specifically for Carson, or recorded Carson as a side project while in search of new Southern blues queens.

37.
Jefferson's birth date is normally given as July 1897, but the U.S. census conducted in January 1920 recorded his age as twenty-five, and recent scholarship suggests a still earlier date of 1893.

38.
McTell's final session, recorded in 1956, would range from the minstrel standard “Married Man's a Fool” to the Tin Pan Alley pop of “Call Me Back Pal O' Mine,” the Carter Family's “Wabash Cannonball,” and hokum blues like “Salty Dog” and “Beedle Um Bum.” Bruce “Utah” Phillips, who met him around this time, tells me that when asked how he had sounded before
he began recording, McTell responded that he had sung just like Elvis Presley.

39.
The first blues Christmas record was Bessie Smith's “At the Christmas Ball,” in 1925. In 1927, Victoria Spivey did “Christmas Morning Blues,” while the Reverends A. W. Nix and J. M. Gates produced “Death May Be Your Christmas Present,” and “Will the Coffin Be Your Santa Claus?”

40.
Chicago Defender
, August 27, 1927, sec. 1, p. 7.

41.
Chicago Defender
, December 12, 1931, sec. 1, p. 2.

42.
“one of the most important…has produced,” Robert Palmer,
Deep Blues
(New York: Viking Press, 1981), p. 57; “the first blues superstar,” Elmore Leonard,
Tishomingo Blues
(New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 33. Leonard is a crime novelist, not a blues expert, but his assessment of Patton reflects a common perception among fans who have not spent much time researching the field. Interestingly, he puts this phrase in the mouth of a black character.

43.
Patton's black fans often remembered him more as a guitar trickster than as a master musician. Muddy Waters's recollection is typical: “What got to me about Patton was that he was such a good clown man with the guitar. Pattin' it and beatin' on it and puttin' it behind his neck and turnin' it over” (Robert Gordon,
Can't Be Satisfied: The Life and Times of Muddy Waters
[Boston: Little, Brown, 2002], p. 24).

44.
Patton did not, in fact, have any success outside the rural Southern market. Judging by copies of his records found in later years, John Fahey reported that “The records which have been canvassed from black homes have all turned up in rural areas. This is in marked distinction to Blind Lemon Jefferson's records, which are found in cities as well.” Fahey also noted that only Patton's early records sold well: Six of his first eight releases did fine, the exceptions being the gospel “Prayer of Death” and the pre-blues minstrel pairing “A Spoonful Blues” b/w “Shake It and Break It But Don't Let It Fall Mama,” but none of the later records were successes. This statement was based on how many records survived into the 1950s and 1960s, which is not a foolproof method, but seems reliable at both extremes: A record that could still be found in hundreds of homes across the country was certainly a hit, while one that survived only in a single copy must have sold poorly (John Fahey,
Charley Patton
[London: November Books, 1970], p. 111).

45.
Arnold Shaw,
Honkers and Shouters: The Golden Years of Rhythm & Blues
(New York: Macmillan, 1978), pp. 268–269.

46.
Anthony Heilbut,
The Gospel Sound: Good News and Bad Times
(New York: Limelight Editions, 1997), p. 81.

47.
These days, it is common to find Carr and Blackwell billed as a duo, but three-quarters of their records—including all the early hits—bore only Carr's name, and he is the one remembered by decades of fans. Blackwell was a fine player, but blues was singers' music.

48.
“How Long” was not a Carr original. A version had been recorded by Ida Cox with Papa Charlie Jackson as early as 1925, and the melody was closely re
lated to “East St. Louis,” which W. C. Handy recalled hearing in 1890. Still, it was Carr's record that made the song into a standard and his style that was generally imitated on later records.

49.
“Hokum” was a common vaudeville term for rowdy comedy or clever stage business. It is not clear that anyone used it as a name for the kind of music played by Red and his peers until the 1960s.

50.
In 1927, there were reported sales of 987,000 phonographs and 104,000,000 discs. In 1932, the respective figures were 40,000 and 6,000,000 (Mark Katz, “Making America More Musical through the Phonograph, 1900–1930,”
American Music
, Winter 1998).

51.
These numbers represent issued recordings, as listed in Robert M. W. Dixon et al.,
Blues and Gospel Records 1902–1943
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). I have included records issued under pseudonyms, but not those on which the singer made an entirely unbilled appearance. I have included duplicate songs as two entries if they were issued separately, but as one if they simply appeared interchangeably on the same 78 release. I have not filtered out gospel or pop releases, because it was not always either appropriate or possible to do so. Finally, I have confined myself to artists listed in Dixon et al., leaving out people like Clarence Williams who are generally considered jazz rather than blues performers, although I am dubious about such divisions and do this with some misgivings.

3
What the Records Missed

1.
Quoted by Mack McCormick in Charles Keil,
Urban Blues
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 58. McCormick added that Lipscomb thought of all his pieces in terms of dance accompaniments: “Ella Speed” was a breakdown, “Alabama Bound” a cakewalk, “Bout a Spoonful” a slow drag. Most modern fans would call all of these blues, but Lipscomb thought of blues as “a particular slow-tempoed dance that became fashionable around World War I.”

2.
Some amusement places did have player pianos and other sorts of mechanical music boxes, but these were not mobile, nor were they generally considered to be adequate substitutes for live music. It was not until the arrival of jukeboxes that musicians faced serious competition from inanimate objects. The place of barbershops in African-American song is explored in Lynn Abbott, “‘Play That Barber Shop Chord': A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,”
American Music
, Fall 1992.

3.
“Over the Waves,” a light classical waltz by the Mexican composer Juventino Rosas (1868–1894), was mentioned as a standard early repertoire piece by Son Simms, the Delta fiddler who recorded with both Charley Patton and Muddy Waters (Alan Lomax field notes).

4.
Tony Russell,
Blacks, Whites and Blues
, republished as part of Oliver et al.,
Yonder Come the Blues
, pp. 152–53.

5.
Pete Welding, “Ramblin' Johnny Shines,”
Living Blues
, no. 22, July–August 1975, p. 29.

6.
The other common open tuning, “open D,” is often referred to as “Vestapol” (in Son House's case, “Vestibule”), after another mid-nineteenth-century parlor piece, “Sebastopol.” (Most modern sources trace this usage incorrectly, to an apocryphal guitar piece called “The Siege of Sebastopol.”) Far from being unique to the blues world, the use of “Spanish” and “Sebastopol” for these tunings also turns up in music magazines published in the 1890s for educated white amateurs.

7.
No one knows who composed these particular pieces, so it is possible that in each case the composer may have been black or white—or Cherokee—but all three share traits that place them within the black fiddle tradition: a simpler harmonic structure, more room for improvisation, and powerful rhythmic drive. Such pieces sound quite different from the tunes that have clear Scots-Irish-English roots, but there are also many pieces that fall on the borderline. The important point is that the hoedown tradition is an African-European fusion.