Escaping the Delta (8 page)

A similar scene existed in St. Louis, also heavily weighted to piano-guitar duos and post-Carr vocalists like Walter Davis and Peetie Wheatstraw, and most of the main blues recording stars of the period seem to have been prized as much for their consistency and reliability as for any uniqueness of talent or approach. (Uniqueness, hell: One of the most popular singers of the 1930s was Bill Gaither, who was so obviously a second-string Leroy Carr that, instead of using his own name, he recorded as “Leroy's Buddy.”) These players would make the vast mass of blues recordings in the 1930s, their reign only occasionally interrupted by an oddity like Blind Boy Fuller or Bo Carter, whose imaginatively obscene lyrics compensated for a relatively rural-sounding solo guitar accompaniment.

Of course, records are not the whole story, and there was a lot of other music being played that was not considered salable enough to be captured for posterity, whether in city apartments or at backcountry dances. In the next chapter, I will attempt to flesh out the picture, exploring what the records may have missed. However, to complete the saga of the early blues boom, I want to give a list of its top recording stars. This is necessary, because many histories have left readers with severe misimpressions about the period. Writers typically give disproportionate space to Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and other rural players, and though they may mention the greater sales of blues queens like Clara Smith and Sara Martin, and uptown pianist-singers like Walter Davis and Peetie Wheatstraw, it is natural for readers to lose any sense of scale.

To be fair, this list is not an absolute indicator of popularity. It does not convey the importance of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr, who died at the peaks of their careers, and since it tabulates only numbers of recordings, rather than sales per record, it also understates the impact of “one-hit wonders” like Jim Jackson. Meanwhile, some of the Chicago and St. Louis players of the 1930s may be overrepresented, since their proximity to the recording studios gave them an advantage over their rural peers. (Though, to balance that, the entries for studio
stalwarts like Big Bill Broonzy and Tampa Red do not include the many cuts that featured their vocals but were released under group names like the Hokum Boys.)

On the whole, though, I believe that this list gives an accurate picture of what was being sold on the blues scene of the 1920s and 1930s, and it generally matches the recollections of people I have interviewed who were playing and listening during that period. Certainly, every artist included here was popular enough to record again and again, and the top twenty names would have been known to anyone even faintly interested in the style. If many of them are unfamiliar to most present-day blues fans, that indicates how much our view of the scene has been influenced by the intervening years, and how little it resembles the views of listeners at the time.

Here, then, are the blues artists who had more than a hundred sides released under their names between 1920 and 1942:

 

Tampa Red—251 sides, between 1928 and 1942

Big Bill Broonzy—224 sides, between 1927 and 1942

Lonnie Johnson—191 sides, between 1925 and 1942

Bumble Bee Slim—174 sides, between 1931 and 1937

Peetie Wheatstraw—161 sides, between 1930 and 1941

Bessie Smith—160 sides, between 1923 and 1933

Walter Davis—160 sides, between 1930 and 1941

Memphis Minnie—158 sides, between 1929 and 1941

Washboard Sam—141 sides, between 1935 and 1942

Roosevelt Sykes—132 sides, between 1929 and 1942

Blind Boy Fuller—129 sides, between 1935 and 1940

Sara Martin—128 sides, between 1922 and 1928

Clara Smith—124 sides, between 1923 and 1932

Leroy Carr—120 sides, between 1928 and 1935

Bo Carter—109 sides, between 1928 and 1936

Bill “Leroy's Buddy” Gaither—109 sides, between 1931 and 1941

 

The runners-up are Ethel Waters with 97 sides (though her position would be far higher if I included the many pop-jazz recordings she made in the 1930s after abandoning the blues scene, and lower if I
removed the pop songs she did during her blues phase); Ida Cox with 96; Rosa Henderson and Ma Rainey with 94 each; Georgia White with 91; John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson with 89; Lemon Jefferson with 86; Georgia Tom Dorsey with 85; the Mississippi Sheiks with 84; Blind Blake, Alberta Hunter and the Harlem Hamfats with 79 each; Kokomo Arnold and Eva Taylor with 78 each; Kansas Joe McCoy and Victoria Spivey with 77 each; Mamie Smith with 75; Curtis Jones with 74; Lucille Hegamin and the Memphis Jug Band with 73 each; the Yas Yas Girl with 71; and the Hokum Boys, Papa Charlie Jackson and Josh White with 69 each (not counting the records White made in the early 1940s for the white folk market, which would bring him up to 109).
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Barely a half dozen of these forty entries are the sort of rural, street-corner or juke-joint players that most present-day listeners associate with the golden age of acoustic blues. These were the stars, the popular professionals who had the hits that the rural players learned, imitated, and reworked for local fans. They are not the whole story of the blues era, but they were by far the most visible and influential figures, and the ones who defined the style for the vast majority of its audience.

A
S
I
TRIED TO EMPHASIZE IN THE PREVIOUS CHAPTER, THE MAIN
purveyors of blues music were professional musicians. I need to stress this, because blues has so often been trumpeted as a black folk style, in the sense of being a “music of the people,” played by farmers and laborers as a form of relaxation from their harsh daily grind. Of course, plenty of people did play blues at home to relax after a day's work—just as people today may get together to play blues, jazz, country, or classical string quartets—and this kind of informal music making was far more common before phonographs, radio, and television made professional entertainment accessible in every living room. However, the vast majority of the music that got recorded and that influenced amateurs and professionals alike was made by people who played for a living. Some had other jobs as well, but even these performed for a paying public and were not just enthusiastic amateurs.

These musicians worked in all sorts of settings, from formal concert halls to street corners, to places that few of us would think of as performance venues. A good example is the local barbershop. Despite
the survival of the term “barbershop quartet,” most people have forgotten how much music was played in barbershops, which were a common place for men to gather in idle moments. Frequently, the barber would keep a guitar or mandolin hanging on the wall, handy for any musician who happened to wander in. Nonprofessionals might while away their time harmonizing on favorite songs, but professionals would also stop in and play for tips, or to demonstrate their expertise for potential customers. After all, until recording came along, an event that wanted to have music had to have live musicians. Be it a picnic, a bar, or any kind of dance or social occasion, no music was available unless there was someone to play it.
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As a result, musicians of that time had a degree of versatility that is now extremely rare. Or maybe that is the wrong way to phrase it. Our idea of musical versatility is largely based on a system of taxonomy that did not even exist before the recording era. The idea of genres and categories, which most of us now take for granted, was invented as a means of filing and marketing records. Before the twentieth century, while one heard very different styles in different settings, they were not neatly classified, and the divisions were generally based on performance style rather than types of music. For example, European concert virtuosos who toured the United States would routinely work up an arrangement of “Yankee Doodle” as a crowd-pleasing adjunct to the more highfalutin German or Italian compositions. There were any number of pieces that would have been equally likely to show up in the repertoires of players at minstrel shows, rural picnics, brass band concerts, and Carnegie Hall, catchy tunes like “Blue Bells of Scotland” and “Over the Waves.”
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Of course, some audiences preferred one style and others another, but these styles were not yet codified and there was a good deal of shading and overlap. Any working musician was thus expected to play a range of music that would surprise modern listeners, who are used to the idea that classical musicians play classical, country musicians play country, and jazz musicians play jazz. This was especially true in rural backwaters where audiences were lucky if they heard a touring band every few months. Hillbilly groups like the Carolina Tarheels, far from sticking to fiddle breakdowns, would advertise their shows as
consisting of “old time Southern Songs mingled with the latest Broadway Hits.”
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When it came to blues, there were probably very few musicians working in the 1920s or 1930s who restricted themselves to that style. What survives in the Race record catalogs may imply that certain artists could play only the most basic twelve-bar blues pattern, but that has far more to do with what the companies wanted than what the musicians were capable of providing. As we will see in this and ensuing chapters, a performer whose entire recorded repertoire consists of blues might have been making his or her day-to-day money playing in a jazz group or a country hoedown band, or even plinking out Neapolitan mandolin melodies in Italian restaurants.

As Johnny Shines, one of the great Delta blues artists, explained:

Shines was comfortable with this broader repertoire, but recorded only blues, and this was typical of a lot of black musicians of his time. As a result, if we want to understand such musicians and try to form a full idea of their musical world, we have to look beyond what survives on their records. This is not an easy process, but we can certainly paint a far broader, more inclusive picture of black vernacular music than is commonly accepted. We cannot say exactly how some unrecorded music would have sounded, but we can at least insist that it existed and remember that the people we think of as blues artists were playing and listening to it.

The most obvious gap in blues history, or the history of African-American music in general, is all the material that went unrecorded before the 1920s. Many scholars have attempted to extrapolate earlier styles from recordings of the oldest black players, and of white artists who showed clear affinities with common black styles. This approach provides a lot of information, especially about the string band tradition, but we will never know for sure how accurate a picture it has given us. Times and styles change, among vernacular country players as well as among trendy urbanites, and this was particularly true in this period, due to the arrival of the phonograph. For some twenty years before rural Southern artists or black players of almost any kind began to be recorded, such artists could sit at home and listen to Caruso, John Phillip Sousa, Al Jolson, and a lot of minstrel comedy. Even in the most isolated mountain areas, peddlers carried sheet music and phonographs, and wandering musicians brought news of the latest innovations.

Because of this, we will never know exactly what music the parents and grandparents of the blues stars would have played, or how they would have played it. Nonetheless, I can say with absolute security that they played a much, much more varied repertoire than is usually assumed by people who have not made a study of early rural music-making. The common stereotype of black music in the slave and Reconstruction eras is of somber, African-inflected spirituals and field songs, leavened with ecstatic religious pieces that may be hailed as coded celebrations of future freedom. This is accurate up to a point, but obscures the fact that African Americans played every sort of music in the South, and made up the majority of full-time musicians. When white plantation society fell in love with the waltz, the schottische, or the latest French ballroom fad during the antebellum years, its dance orchestra would typically be made up of black slaves. Some of these slave musicians were perforce skilled music readers, and a few became highly skilled classical artists. (Black classical musicians are rarely mentioned in blues histories, but it should be noted that the most sophisticated American guitarist of the nineteenth century was a black man from Virginia, Justin Holland, who introduced the European techniques of Sor and Carcassi to the United States.) The clas
sical influence was not restricted to a tiny elite, but seeped down to a lot of people who did not have access to formal training. After the guitar became widespread in the 1890s (when Sears-Roebuck made inexpensive mail-order instruments available), one of the instrumental numbers most frequently found among rural players was “Spanish Fandango,” a standard beginner piece in the formal instruction manuals, which was so popular that many blues players continued to refer to its trademark “open G” tuning as “Spanish.”
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Meanwhile, the slaves themselves held dances, and much of what we now think of as “old-time” or “hillbilly” music derives from their so-called jigs and reels (terms that were routinely used for any dance that struck respectable people as wild and unrestrained, whether Irish or African). Our view of this music has been forever slanted by the vagaries of the record scouts who arrived in the 1920s and, having learned that such pieces sold much better to white customers than black, discouraged black musicians from playing them. This is why all but a tiny sample of the rural fiddle music recorded during this period and afterward comes from white players.

Up through the first years of the twentieth century, the fiddle was by far the most common and popular instrument among Southern musicians, regardless of race, and older white musicians have regularly credited tunes and styles to black players. Whether or not their reproductions of such pieces exactly duplicate the way their black forebears played, they provide a glimpse of an extremely vibrant African-American hoedown tradition, and one that has profoundly affected what is now thought of as white country music. Most experts agree that between a third and a half of the standard Southern fiddle repertoire is drawn from black tradition, including such favorites as “Old Joe Clark,” “Cindy,” and “Cripple Creek.”
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What is more, this tradition was still very much alive during the blues era. Even in 1975, the
Grand Ole Opry
guitarist Kirk McGhee could name a dozen black fiddlers living in his home county of Franklin, Tennessee, so one can only imagine how many must have been there fifty years earlier.
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It is worth taking a couple of paragraphs here to explore the overlap of black and white music making in the rural South, a subject that has only recently begun to receive anything like its due from either
blues or hillbilly scholars. I once put together a talk called “Before Music Was Segregated” and, while the title was consciously provocative, I do not think it was on the whole inaccurate. It reflected the reality that most Southern music came out of a brutally unequal but broadly overlapping culture. Even in the midst of the Civil War, the Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart traveled with a personal string band that included both black and white players, and such “mixed” groups continued to play for dances throughout the South, despite the segregation common in other aspects of the players' lives.
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(Furthermore, that segregation cannot be taken for granted, especially in the mountain areas where there were no large plantations and hence relatively few African Americans. Virulent racism did exist in many mountain communities, but there were also pockets where, as the black Virginia guitarist Turner Foddrell recalled, “We all danced together and drank out of the same jug.”)
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Several interracial string bands recorded in the 1920s. Taylor's Kentucky Boys featured white musicians supporting the expert fiddling of Jim Booker, born in 1872 and considered one of the greatest old-time “hillbilly” players in central Kentucky, and the white Georgia Yellowhammers recorded with the black fiddler Andrew Baxter. Both Bill Monroe and Merle Travis traced their music back to a black fiddler and guitarist, Arnold Schultz, who had regularly played in their region of Kentucky, often supported by white musicians. While these examples might suggest a sort of exceptionalism—that white musicians would work with a black player, but only if he was the greatest fiddler in the region—Mississippi John Hurt came to the attention of Okeh Records scouts through his association with the white fiddler William T. Narmour, who used him as an accompanist whenever his regular guitarist could not make a gig. Meanwhile, over in Tennessee, Brownie McGhee's father played blues guitar but also worked regularly with a mixed hillbilly band.
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Some scholars insist that such interracial groupings were a rarity, but there is little or no evidence to support this assertion. Across the South, if one bothers to ask, one finds reports of black and white musicians working together. The fact is that most rural areas had only a limited number of skilled players available for dances, and often ended
up using mix-and-match groups of whoever could make it that night. Even in the most racist areas, white dancers rarely objected to blacks providing the music, as long as the musicians “stayed in their place,” playing but not mixing socially, and a lot of white musicians developed their tastes and techniques at these events. Interracial jamming was far more common than is generally suggested, though I do not want to overstate this case, and would take the rarity of mixed groups on record to indicate that, when a group of musicians considered themselves a serious band rather than just whoever had showed up for a dance, they tended to group along racial lines.
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Even when musicians were segregated by race, there was no barrier preventing them from adopting each other's tunes and playing styles. The bulk of Southern fiddling sounds quite unlike anything to be found in either Europe or Africa, and that can be laid squarely on the pressures and inspiration that the black and white musical traditions exercised on each other.
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As for other instruments, the banjo originally came from West Africa, and the percussive “frailing” or “rapping” style we hear on the records of white players like Uncle Dave Macon is a survival of an African-American technique. An interesting anecdote on this theme comes from the Virginia blues and country player John Jackson: Shortly after he was “discovered” by the white folk crowd, a folklorist was talking with Jackson about the harmonica master DeFord Bailey, and described Bailey as the only black star of the
Grand Ole Opry
. Jackson startled the folklorist by asking, “What about Uncle Dave Macon?” He had simply assumed that the old banjo player, with his repertoire of plantation tunes and the “Uncle” sobriquet—as in Uncle Ben, Uncle Tom, Aunt Jemima—was black.