Escaping the Delta (41 page)

44.
Sykes had also recorded a “32-20 Blues” over a year before James's session, under the pseudonym Willie Kelly, and James mentions that caliber as well.

45.
This expert was William Ferris, then director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. He may have been oversimplifying his views to make a point, but he said that Powell and other Mississippi blues players preferred to play blues, and only broadened their repertoire for white gigs and visitors like myself. I would suggest that this view may say more about Ferris's own tastes than about those of the musicians.

4
Hollers, Moans, and “Deep Blues”

1.
The derivation of ballet from folk dances was asserted by Dame Ninette de Valois, director of the Royal Ballet of England, quoted in Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns,
Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance
(New York: Macmillan, 1968), p. xiv.

2.
“plaintive African songs,” Dena J. Epstein,
Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 72; “raised such a sound…into falsetto,” ibid., p. 182.

3.
Clarence “Tom” Ashley's “Walking Boss” is a pure work song, recast in a somewhat different rhythm, and Uncle Dave Macon's “Buddy, Won't You Roll Down the Line” has roots in a similar piece.

4.
Lomax,
The Land Where the Blues Began
, p. 273.

5.
Ibid., p. 273. In recent years, both Alan Lomax and his father, John, have come under attack from various writers for making their reputations and income off the music of poor people who only occasionally shared in the profits from their work. I do not want to address this question in detail at this point, especially since I do not address the many more egregious cases of exploitation by both commercial record companies and revivalist blues promoters. However, since I cite Lomax at some length, I would note that he preserved a lot of music and history of which we otherwise would be ignorant and, unlike some other folklorists and promoters of rural music, he has tended to be remembered fondly by the people he recorded, and has made all of his material freely available to the rest of us.

6.
This is on the LP
Roots of the Blues
(New World Records 252). The track alternates verses of a song Lomax recorded in 1959 from a Mississippi convict named Henry Ratcliff with verses recorded by David Sapir in Senegal in 1967 from a singer named Bakari-Badji.

7.
Toure sounds like Hooker not simply because they share common roots, but because he was entranced by Hooker's records and learned guitar licks off them. I see no reason to doubt him, though, when he says that what drew him to these records was their resemblance to the music he already knew as a herdsman on the upper Niger.

8.
In 1942, Alan Lomax made a recording of David “Honeyboy” Edwards singing a song that began “You got to roll, just like a wagon wheel,” first in free-meter holler style, then as a guitar-backed blues number (Library of Congress recording, available on
Honeyboy Edwards: Delta Bluesman
, Earwig CD 4922).

9.
African-American church services have at times included a sort of semi-organized group moaning, without any regular rhythm, which shares something in common with the hollers, though in other respects it is quite different.

10.
Lomax argued that the Delta style was unique: that hollers found elsewhere tended to be more organized and rhythmically regular, and more often showed the influence of British ballad styles. He recorded Delta-style hollers in other
regions, especially the Texas river country, but believed that he could always trace a Delta source. Other folklorists, such as David Evans, believe that Lomax was too narrow on this point, though agreeing that the Delta was particularly rich territory for the style. Evans adds that similar hollers have been recorded from cattle herders in Colombia and Venezuela (David Evans, personal communication with the author, 2002).

11.
Hooker's “Hobo Blues,” from 1949, was something of an exception. It had a solid dance rhythm, but Hooker's vocal was essentially a free-form holler. The fact that Hooker's success came in the late 1940s, and that nothing so rooted in the holler tradition had hit before this, may be due to the fact that many of his buyers were people who had been born in the South but now had been living for years in northern urban centers like Chicago and Detroit and wanted to hear some sounds from home.

12.
Dr. Harry Oster was more broad-minded than some of his peers, and when he did his fieldwork in Louisiana's Angola State Penitentiary in the 1950s (samples of which are available on
Angola Prisoners' Blues
, Arhoolie CD 419), he taped a female prisoner singing Annie Laurie's hit “Since I Fell for You” while working at a laundry machine, and a group of male prisoners singing doo-wop. Even in situations that would seem to require powerfully rhythmic work songs, singers often followed their own inclinations. The New Orleans singer Lemon Nash, born in 1898, worked on the railroad as a boy, and recalled the greatest singer there to have been a man from Port Gibson, Mississippi, who sang old parlor ballads like “The Boston Burglar” in time with his hammer strokes (Lemon Nash interview, Hogan Jazz Archive, Tulane University). Had the folklorists asked, there were probably always more prison inmates who were able to sing pop covers than who knew the traditional work songs.

13.
Paul Oliver,
Conversation with the Blues
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 26.

14.
Waters's first list is notable for the extent to which he associated artists with particular songs: “Lonnie Johnson was a good, nice, smooth blues singer: ‘Careless Love.' And Leroy Carr's a good smooth blues singer: ‘How Long,' ‘Prison Bound,' and ‘Rocks in my Pillow,' and on and on. Mississippi Sheiks, good blues, smooth blues singer. They would do ‘Sitting On Top of the World,' ‘Stop and Listen,' ‘Corrina,' you know. And get down to the heavy thing, you would go into things like Son House, Charley Patton” (Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall, unpublished interview, published in slightly different form in McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
).

15.
B. B. King with David Ritz,
Blues All Around Me
(New York: Avon Books, 1996), pp. 23–24. King described Rodgers as “a yodeler who happened to be white, but who sang songs like ‘Blues, How Do You Do?' He was called The Singing Brakeman, and I sang along with him.” Thirty years earlier, King listed his vocal influences as the blues singer Dr. Clayton, gospel lead Samuel McCrary of the Fairfield Four, and Blind Lemon Jefferson, followed by Leroy Carr, Bumble Bee Slim, Gene Autry, Jimmie Rodgers, Peetie Wheatstraw,
Tommy McClennan, Tampa Red, and Lonnie Johnson (Keil,
Urban Blues
, p. 107).

16.
The collector I cite was Richard Nevins. Aside from questions of modernity, there was a notable market for yodeling among black record buyers. Rodgers's early releases were listed in the Victor company's Race advertisements, and the white yodelers Roy Evans, Emmett Miller, and Happy Bud Harrison were all featured in
Chicago Defender
ads, the latter two as if they were black artists. Even before Rodgers hit, the black vaudeville singer Charlie Anderson made several yodeling records, and when Bessie Smith recorded a vocal imitation of a trumpet, on 1924's “Sinful Blues,” it was advertised as a yodeling number. Following Rodgers's success, both the Mississippi Sheiks and Tampa Red recorded yodeling features.

17.
Wallace recorded “Section Hand” in August 1925. Robeson had made his formal concert debut that April, and I assume “Water Boy” to have been one of his featured numbers because it was chosen as the first song at his debut recording session that July. As it happened, this recording was rejected, and the issued version was his third attempt, made the following January.

5
The Mississippi Delta: Life and Listening

1.
Danny Barker,
A Life in Jazz
, ed. Alyn Shipton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 71.

2.
James C. Cobb,
The Most Southern Place on Earth: The Mississippi Delta and the Roots of Regional Identity
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 114.

3.
Cobb gives the case of a black coast guardsman who was arrested for vagrancy in Tchula, Mississippi, in 1931, and sentenced to work for a month on the plantation of the man who had arrested him. During the thirty-six days he remained there, he was beaten several times, and reported that sixteen or seventeen other men were being held on that plantation under the same conditions (ibid., p. 121).

4.
Ibid., p. 99.

5.
Lewis Jones, unpublished manuscript, on file at the Alan Lomax Archive. Since this manuscript is not available, I do not give separate page citations for the various quotations from it, but make clear in the text when I am using it as my source.

6.
Cobb,
The Most Southern Place on Earth
, p. 125.

7.
House, interview with Fahey et al.

8.
Evans,
Big Road Blues
, p. 47.

9.
Another reason was apparently a curfew in Clarksdale, the main town in the central Delta. Muddy Waters recalled: “Twelve o'clock, you better be out of there, get off the streets. That great big police come down Sunflower Street with that big cap on, man, waving that stick…That's why all this country stuff, people go out in the country. Friars Point'd go up to four o'clock in the
morning, sometimes all night” (McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
, p. 232).

10.
Several of these ages are disputed, in Miller's case by as much as a decade. I follow the majority opinion among the various sources consulted, but this is only a guide, and not authoritative.

11.
Samuel G. Adams, “Changing Negro Life in the Delta” (master's thesis, Fisk University, Nashville, 1947), p. 51.

12.
Ibid., p. 65.

13.
Ibid., pp. 66–72.

14.
I have corrected a few obvious errors, though there are other songs that I cannot identify and which may be misfiled as well. In the “older” lists, Adams put Memphis Minnie's “My Girlish Days” in the popular category, and “Walking the Floor Over You,” a recent country hit for Earnest Tubb, in blues. In the “younger” lists, he put “Sitting On Top of the World” in the pop category (there was an older pop song called “I'm Sittin on Top of the World,” and it is possible that this is what was intended, but I am betting on the Mississippi Sheiks' song), and “Livery Stable Blues,” a jazz novelty, in the blues category. “Basin Street Blues” was also in the blues category, and I have moved it to pop, since there is not a single discographical entry for a blues singer of this era performing it. Adams had another title, “Fur Trapper Blues,” in blues, but I assume this was Woody Herman's 1941 hit, “Fur Trapper's Ball.” “Hell Broke Loose in Georgia,” a common fiddle hoedown, was also on the blues list.

15.
McClennan titled his version “Baby, Don't You Want to Go?” and Davis called his “Don't You Want to Go?” but the “Sweet Home Chicago” tag line finishes every verse, and many people must have assumed this was the title, especially if they were already vaguely familiar with Johnson's version.

16.
Bill C. Malone,
Country Music U.S.A.
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985), pp. 32–34.

17.
“Clarence Williams Backs Helen Kane Suit,”
Chicago Defender
, May 12, 1934, sec. 1, p. 9.

18.
Albertson,
Bessie
, pp. 51–52. He includes an extended review from the
Chicago Defender
, which describes the program as a “midnight frolic.” I take the “Midnight Ramble” name from Larry Nager,
Memphis Beat: The Lives and Times of America's Musical Crossroads
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998), p. 43.

19.
Howard Armstrong's string band had a radio spot in Knoxville, and a couple of jug bands are noted as radio acts in the
Chicago Defender
(April 2, 1932, sec. 1, p. 13, and September 16, 1933, sec. 1, p. 5). Jug bands were considered entertaining novelties, and a couple also made film shorts.

20.
It is important to keep in mind that relatively few radio listeners or record buyers at this time were seeing pictures of their idols. Muddy Waters would recall: “I pictured so many people from the records. I knowed their color. I knowed their size. When I sees 'em, I was all disappointed. Charley Patton, he had that big voice. I thought the dude weighed two hundred fifty, you
know, and he's big and black, much blacker'n I am. When I seen him, he was brown-skinned and neat. I said, ‘It can't be.' He's a little man, pretty, yellow-skinned” (McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
, p. 235). Years later, Chuck Berry would find that many fans of “Maybelline” had assumed he was a white country singer.

21.
In the 1942 Fisk–Library of Congress survey, Waters was asked what kinds of singing he liked, and responded positively to choir singing, jazz orchestra, quartets, long-meter hymns, and rally spirituals, but negatively to hillbilly songs. Presumably, Autry's music had enough jazz flavor for him, as it did for many pop fans. Waters said that he preferred black music to white, because it had “more harmony—in the blues line—white people can't play 'em.”

22.
McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
, p. 250. Likewise, the Chicago blues master Otis Rush told me that Bill Monroe and Eddy Arnold were among his early favorites, before he heard the smooth blues of Charles Brown.