Escaping the Delta (6 page)

In any case, the next trend in blues recording introduced the male performers whom most people today think of as the music's originators—though it took a couple of years and happened in fits and starts. By 1924, the basic style of the blues queens was thoroughly established, and the record companies were hunting around for novelties that might set their products apart. Okeh Records, which had pioneered the white “hillbilly” recording boom the previous year, was the first to explore a more countrified blues style, releasing a record of Sara Martin with Sylvester Weaver's “big, mean, blue guitar” in January, and making an abortive attempt to promote an Atlanta street singer and guitarist named Ed Andrews that summer.
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Martin's record did well enough that she was soon traveling to Atlanta to cut further sides with Weaver, and by the fall she was recording regularly with the fiddler Clifford Hayes and his Louisville Jug Band. Still, she remained essentially a blues queen of the old style, and it was the Chicago-based Paramount label that found the first real country-style blues star—though he was a long way from fitting any modern stereotypes.

Papa Charlie Jackson was an anomalous character, as much an old-time minstrel or medicine-show man as a blues pioneer.
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Originally from New Orleans, he was a journeyman singer and banjo player who could do everything from playing rhythm in jazz bands to picking out finger-style arrangements of ragtime numbers. By the early 1920s, he had settled in Chicago and was earning his living as a street musician,
and the fact that he was based in an important recording center must have been a key factor in his getting the opportunity to make records.
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Jackson's main strength may well have been his crossover appeal. While he sang blues from his first records on, his most enduring number was “Salty Dog Blues,” a comic ragtime piece that sold not only to blues fans, but also to lovers of minstrel novelties. The song would become a standard in the white country and bluegrass repertoire, and if our usual views of music history were not so deeply colored by race, Jackson might be considered a pioneering “hillbilly” performer as much as a bluesman.

Paramount promoted Jackson as a blues singer, introducing his debut with the claim that “this man can sing and play the Blues even better than a woman can,”
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and many fans undoubtedly placed him right alongside Rainey and Ida Cox. Still, even on his most straightforward blues songs, his style of singing and his approach to the banjo—an instrument already falling out of favor on the black pop scene—always had an archaic, ragtime feel. His most widely imitated record among black performers was “Shake That Thing,” a risqué twelve-bar novelty with a jaunty rhythm that sounded like nothing else on the blues market of the time—though it presaged the double-entendre Chicago style that would come to be known as “hokum.”

The idea that Jackson was regarded as a unique novelty is supported by the fact that his success did not provoke any rush to record other black banjo players or street singers. Though he hit in August of 1924, it was not until 1926 that the next self-accompanied male singers made a dent in the market, and the first of these could not have been further from Jackson's down-home minstrel persona.

Like Jackson, Alonzo “Lonnie” Johnson was from New Orleans, but he was one of the most sophisticated and forward-looking instrumentalists of the period, a virtuoso guitarist who also played creditable violin and piano. As a singer, his hallmark was a suave delivery tinged with both humor and gentle melancholy—B. B. King, who cites him as a defining influence, describes his style as “dreamy”—and musically he was closer to the blues queens than to most of the other male artists who would appear in the next few years, though historians have tended to emphasize not his mellow vocals but his astonishing guitar work.

Johnson had grown up working the streets and bars of New Orleans with a family string band, then spent several years as a jazzman on the Mississippi riverboats, and he was comfortable playing in the most modern instrumental ensembles. Even after becoming a bestselling vocalist, he continued to play jazz dates, recording guitar solos with the Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington bands and a groundbreaking series of duets with the white New York guitarist Eddie Lang. He is widely considered the father of jazz guitar, and his dazzling, vibrato-laden solos laid the groundwork for all the electric lead styles to come. It is this instrumental virtuosity that has kept his name alive among blues revivalists, many of whom consider his singing too urbane and smooth. By contrast, in the 1920s and 1930s he was best known as a singer. Of the forty ads for his records that appeared in the
Chicago Defender
between 1926 and 1931, not one even mentioned that he played guitar.
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That being the case—and considering the fact that he recorded numerous duets with female vocalists like Victoria Spivey—it might be more appropriate to regard Johnson as a sort of male blues queen than to class him with Jackson and the “down-home” street singers that would shortly flood the blues market.
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These artists were a complete departure from the previous black recording stars, and were intended to reach a different market. In 1924, Paramount records had included a paragraph in its catalog, accompanying a photograph of its one African-American recording manager, J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, which expressly solicited consumer input: “What will you have? If your preferences are not listed in our catalog, we will make them for you, as Paramount must please the buying public. There is always room for more good material and more talented artists. Any suggestions or recommendations that you may have to offer will be greatly appreciated by J. Mayo Williams, Manager of the ‘Race Artists Series.'”
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How many responses Paramount received is unknown, but one of them would change the course of the Race record industry. In 1925, Williams got a letter from a music store in Dallas, recommending that he record a blind street singer and guitarist named Lemon Jefferson.
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Blind Lemon Jefferson—as he would be billed throughout his career—was a new kind of blues singer. He had a rough-hewn,
intensely personal style, and no one could have mistaken him for a vaudevillian or minstrel showman. Indeed, he must have struck some of the Paramount executives as a pretty risky proposition, since no similarly raw artist had so far had any success on the Race scene, but the gamble paid off with astonishing speed. Jefferson was a sensation, selling not only in the rural South but also in northern cities, and this time the record companies did not treat these sales as a fluke. Within months, the Race catalogs filled with a varied panoply of Southern street-corner players. Many were blind men, and the more romantic historians link them to the long tradition of blind bards reaching back to Homer, but it is worth remembering that a lot of people in their home communities regarded them as essentially musical beggars, and one can only imagine how surprised these folks must have been to see them suddenly advertised as national stars. Even the people who crowded around Jefferson when he performed on the Dallas streets and who considered him a musical prodigy must have been startled to see him buying a car and hiring a chauffeur to bring him to his recording dates.

Jefferson's arrival not only heralded a new era in blues, but was part of a broader movement that would reshape the entertainment business. Until the mid-1920s, records had tended simply to duplicate popular show-business successes. There were some widely recorded artists who had no great reputation as live performers, but they were performing in mainstream pop styles, providing recorded versions of Broadway and vaudeville hits, light classics, or old parlor and minstrel favorites. In the 1920s, the record companies gradually became aware that there were huge profits to be made off niche and regional markets. It turned out that a lot of folks were not only hungry for the latest hits from New York, but could be even more excited to hear a record of someone who sounded like them or their favorite local entertainers.

The first sign that recording would create a new set of rules came in 1923. That was the year that Bessie Smith hit, directing attention toward the rougher-voiced Southern blues singers, and it also saw the first Southern “field trip” by a recording scout for the Okeh record label. Okeh's Atlanta-area distributor, Polk Brockman, wanted the com
pany to record a white “hillbilly” musician named Fiddlin' John Carson, who had a regular local radio spot. Okeh's scout, Ralph Peer, thought Carson sounded too screechy and unprofessional, but Brockman promised to order five hundred copies of the first release, so Peer recorded Carson doing a sentimental nineteenth-century minstrel number, “The Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane.” The song had already been recorded by everyone from the black concert artist Carroll Clark to the white opera singer Alma Gluck, but Carson's version was entirely different.
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He sang in a halting, nasal voice, with no accompaniment aside from his fiddle, and sounded straight out of the backwoods. It is easy to see why Peer was dubious, but Carson's music turned out to be exactly what a lot of country people were waiting to hear. The record was an immediate hit, and Carson went on to record almost two hundred pieces—more than all but a couple of blues singers.
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With Carson's success, record companies began sending mobile units south in search of other quirky, regional players, though it was two more years before Jefferson's success set off a similar boom in black rural recordings. As with vaudeville blues, many of the first country blues records were made by white “hillbilly” musicians. Even before Carson's success, the white Virginia guitarist and harmonica player Henry Whitter had cut four “blues” songs, including the influential “Lonesome Road Blues,” and Carson recorded a song he called “Tom Watson Special,” which was a variation of the piece W. C. Handy called “Hesitating Blues.”

In this case, though, there was a fundamental difference between the markets served by the early white country musicians and by the black street singers who followed. The white rural recordings were released in series labeled “Old Time Tunes” or “Old Fashioned Tunes,” reflecting the perception that their music was a treasured relic of past times. Many white Southerners had a fond attachment to the good old days “before the war,” and the nostalgic advertising rubrics were designed to appeal to such feelings. This appeal would remain a commonplace of country-and-western music, and is still routinely invoked by Nashville stars in the twenty-first century.

African Americans, by contrast, were anything but nostalgic for the
old South. As a result, records by black rural artists were marketed not in separate black country series, but in the regular Race catalogs, alongside the hottest singers on the contemporary pop scene. While advertisements often described Jefferson as “down home,” and his records certainly appealed to a regional market, he was not in any way a nostalgia act. Indeed, his greatest strength was his originality. His style was dazzlingly idiosyncratic, and most of his songs were entirely new compositions. Even when he recycled older verses, he tended to shape them into novel and unique configurations. He usually stuck to the twelve-bar form—though he did not hesitate to expand or contract a bar if he happened to be in the mood—and indeed was probably more dedicated to it than any previous blues star. He could play other styles, from gospel to ragtime, but the twelve-bar blues was where he felt most at home, and almost all of his own compositions were in that pattern.

This raises an interesting question. Jefferson was born in the mid-1890s, so he would have been in his teens when the blues craze hit.
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As many of us can testify from personal experience, that is a particularly susceptible age for forming musical tastes, and it would not be at all surprising if he was caught up in the spirit of the blues boom, and derived much of his style from the popular hits of his youth. On the other hand, he was from the area around Dallas, and “Dallas Blues” was one of the first published blues numbers, providing circumstantial evidence for an earlier folk-blues tradition in the region. Hence the great mystery: Does Jefferson represent the survival of a root style that preceded and influenced the work of singers like Rainey, or was his style a brilliant reshaping of the pop form Rainey pioneered, tailored to fit his own tastes and talents?

The fact that Jefferson's music was marketed as blues was due to its resemblance to the pop style, but that tells us nothing about which came first. Most likely it was a chicken-or-egg situation, with pop and folk artists nurturing one another and neither having primacy. The music played by Jefferson and the wave of black street musicians who followed him into the studios in the mid-1920s retained traces of regional styles that predated and influenced the blues composers, but
such styles may well have gelled into a uniform “blues” pattern under the influence of the national hits.

I am emphasizing this question because it is often assumed that the styles played by Jefferson and the other guitarists were the roots of Handy's and Rainey's music, despite the lack of any recorded evidence to support such an assumption. It would be ridiculous to accept the evolution preserved on record—white vaudevillians to black vaudevillians to black Southern female blues specialists to idiosyncratic guitarists—but it is only slightly less absurd to suggest that the evolution progressed cleanly and precisely in the opposite direction. There were certainly black rural guitarists before there was a blues boom, but there is no reason to think that they were playing anything much like Jefferson's repertoire before Rainey and her followers made blues one of the most popular styles in black America.

In fact, if we listen to the first wave of records by black guitarists, it is striking how much of their repertoire consists of non-blues material, even though blues was the hot sound of the moment. The success of Carson's and Jefferson's records persuaded most of the major companies to send field outfits to hold auditions in Southern centers like Atlanta and Dallas (and secondarily in Memphis and New Orleans). At first, since their early successes had been so unexpected, they were open to recording pretty much any rural-sounding entertainer who had some local fans, and these early outings preserved a variety of music that is still astonishing. Blind Blake, a Florida-Georgia guitarist who became the next big name after Jefferson, played a virtuosic ragtime dance style, and if the exuberance of his performances is any guide, he favored minstrel and ragtime tunes over his more stolid blues material. Atlanta street singers like Blind Willie McTell and Peg Leg Howell performed everything from blues to minstrel, ragtime, hillbilly, and gospel.
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