Escaping the Delta (9 page)

Jackson's reaction makes instant sense if one watches a short film made in 1928 of the black banjo player Uncle John Scruggs.
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Sitting outside his cabin, Scruggs performs “Little Old Log Cabin in the Lane,” the same song with which Fiddlin' John Carson ignited the hillbilly recording boom. He is blind and looks to be around seventy, which could mean he was alive in slavery times, and he sings the lyric just as it was written in 1871, full of nostalgic parlor-minstrel lines about how “de darkies are all gone, I'll neber hear dem singin' in de cane.” There may be experts who, blindfolded, could tell that Scruggs
was black and Uncle Dave Macon was white, but it would be no easy feat. Indeed, despite exhaustive research, there are a number of early string-band recordings that have had to be classified as racially ambiguous.

Scruggs never recorded, though the phonograph era found him still in fine fettle and popular enough to attract a film crew, so it is no surprise that a lot of other black banjo and fiddle players failed to leave any trace of their music on discs. Even in the 1970s, a survey of old-time musicians in southern Virginia turned up quite a few black banjo players (at least one still calling himself “Uncle”), none of whom had previously recorded.
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Which is to say the perception that by the 1920s the “old-time” or “hillbilly” tradition of fiddle and banjo playing had pretty much died out in black communities is simply wrong. There were black square dances in Virginia at least up into the 1950s, and in the 1920s they were still being held in many areas of the South.

The same holds true for minstrel shows. Minstrelsy is often given short shrift in discussions of African-American music due to its racist associations—the shows relied on demeaning stereotypes and blackface makeup, and it was common for the performers, whatever their race, to be referred to as “nigger minstrels.” Nonetheless, the minstrel craze swept both black and white communities, and minstrel troupes nurtured generations of black artists, from banjo players and comedians to opera singers. As W. C. Handy recalled:

Minstrel shows remained common well into the 1950s, and—despite growing opposition to blackface stereotypes—their popularity was by no means restricted to white racists.
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A scan of the entertainment pages of the
Chicago Defender
, America's most widely circulated black newspaper, shows that minstrel troupes were covered far more frequently than blues singers and, though most of the music played at
these shows probably kept pace with changing fashion, the comedy still had a lot of classic minstrel elements. Indeed, Pigmeat Markham and other comedians were still “blacking up” for shows at Harlem's Apollo Theater in the 1940s. (Now that this practice has essentially disappeared, the question remains: What color makeup
should
a black clown wear?)

The most successful minstrel shows were major theatrical events, performed by large troupes with impressive sets and an orchestra, but blackface makeup and comic “coon” songs were also a staple of informal family and school groups,
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and of performers in touring “medicine shows.” These medicine shows were short collations of songs and skits designed to draw a crowd for a pitchman selling snake oil or other questionable vade mecums. They visited out-of-the-way areas, and provided work for all sorts of rural musicians, including many who are remembered as blues pioneers. Such shows employed both black and white performers, often doing virtually identical acts, and the basic style outlived both the medicine and the makeup. Spence Moore, a white guitarist who spent several years on the medicine-show circuit, explained that after blackface went out of fashion, he and his partners would dot their cheeks with exaggerated freckles, black out a tooth, wear old overalls with “one gallus unfastened,” and do the old “coon” routines as white hillbilly rubes. Which is to say that the sort of comedy featured on
Hee Haw
and the
Grand Ole Opry
is simply a minstrel survival with a new coat of paint.

As for black audiences, they were not as universally sensitive to the horrors of minstrelsy as some people like to believe. For example, numerous writers have stated that the banjo fell out of favor with black musicians because of its racist, minstrel associations, but this makes little sense when one considers that the most sophisticated black groups of the period, the orchestras of Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, and Jelly Roll Morton, continued to use banjos until amplification made the guitar viable in a bigger band setting. Likewise, a lot of the musicians now classified as bluesmen continued to play pieces that had originally been written as “coon songs,” and while some edited the lyrics, others continued to sing the lines just as they had been written in the 1890s. (White musicians also varied in this respect. The choice
to edit had to do with racial consciousness and pride in some cases, but in others it was simply a matter of bringing the songs up to date. Acting the part of a comic “coon” was not only racist but old-fashioned.)

All in all, the fact that so few black banjo players—or fiddlers, or accordionists—were recorded had less to do with what was available than with the perceptions of the “record men.” Having found that there was a large market for nostalgic “Old Fashioned Tunes” among white rural buyers, but that black consumers tended to prefer newer styles, the recording scouts made their choices accordingly. This left black string bands in a double bind: They were banned from the hillbilly catalogs because they were black, and from the Race catalogs because they played hillbilly music. The exceptions were those like the Mississippi Sheiks, who developed a large repertoire of straight-ahead blues songs for recording, while continuing to play hoedowns, pop songs, and other music in live performances.

One could argue that the record companies' policies were designed less to segregate the musicians than to provide uniform product lines. Indeed, in the few cases where black fiddlers recorded old-time hoedown numbers, these records tended to be issued in the hillbilly rather than the Race series. After all, there were no pictures on the record labels, so consumers would not know the difference.
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The practice was not common, though, and by the end of the 1920s the chance to work both sides of the color line had pretty much disappeared. For example, James Cole and Tommie Bradley, a black fiddle-and-guitar duo, made their recording debut in 1928 with a hoedown pairing released in Vocalion's “Old Time Tunes” series, and this was probably pretty typical of their repertoire, but after 1930 all of their records were blues and pop-blues tunes, released in Champion's Race line.

The record companies not only prevented black bands from playing what was perceived as “white” music, but limited both white and black musicians in all sorts of ways. For instance, despite the fact that rural players were regularly performing the latest Tin Pan Alley favorites, almost none of this material was recorded on the Southern field trips. From the companies' point of view, this was an obvious choice, since the average country fiddler or barrelhouse pianist lacked
the musical sophistication of the top New York jazz orchestras or Broadway pit bands. Such artists could play the uptown pop hits well enough to satisfy folks in a neighborhood saloon or at a country dance, but not many record buyers, even in rural areas, cared to hear a bunch of hicks playing “I'm Coming Virginia” when it was just as easy to get the Bing Crosby record.
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In this case, the commercial scouts were abetted by the folklorists who provide our only other documentation for this period. While some of these folklorists took care to preserve examples of black fiddle and banjo music, they had no interest whatsoever in hearing their informants perform pop hits. The more dedicated chroniclers at least made note of the fact that these informants knew pop material, but in general they viewed such matters as “contamination” of the pure folk tradition, and avoided the subject. As a result, we can never know the extent to which Race and hillbilly artists of the 1920s and 1930s were also adept at playing the latest urban exports, or how they reshaped this material to fit their tastes and instrumentation.

I am particularly conscious of this lack because I spent a couple of years as accompanist to Howard “Louie Bluie” Armstrong, the last of the great African-American string-band masters. Howard is a fiddle and mandolin player from outside Knoxville, Tennessee, who first recorded as a member of the Tennessee Chocolate Drops in 1930. All of his prewar recordings were in the countrified ragtime-blues genre, and if he and his playing partners had died before the 1970s it would be easy to assume that this was their basic repertoire. However, as I write, Howard is still alive and playing at age ninety-three, and he has spent the last thirty years demonstrating just how wrong that assumption would have been. It turns out that, even back when they were recording, his group's theme song was “Lady Be Good,” and their pop repertoire included pretty much any hit of the period, including a version of “Chinatown, My Chinatown” with a verse in what he swears is Mandarin Chinese. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. He always prided himself on being able to play whatever job came along, which meant that he mastered the whole square-dance repertoire, plus a full night's worth of Italian or Polish favorites, since his corner of eastern Tennessee had a large immigrant population from those countries. He
can sing sentimental Gene Autry numbers, play an elegant guitar arrangement of “Stardust” with all the fancy jazz chords in all the right places, and toss off a handful of Hawaiian and Mexican songs.

Now, Howard is not exactly typical—he is an accomplished painter, speaks several languages, and remarried at age ninety—but he worked as a professional musician for many decades, in Knoxville, Chicago, and Detroit, and always found other black players who knew a similar repertoire, or at least were expert enough to follow his lead. This was simply what was required of any musician who wanted to make a good living and take the variety of jobs that might be available. The same guy who was recording guitar blues on Saturday morning might go on to play in a minstrel theater band that night, provide the rhythm for a jazzy horn outfit at an after-hours juke joint, and play for a white country picnic on Sunday afternoon. Lonnie Johnson—able to play comfortably with a rough rural singer like Texas Alexander or the uptown swing orchestra of Duke Ellington, and to switch to piano or violin if necessary—was a particularly sophisticated example, but the country was full of adept journeymen who could hold down whatever chair was needed.

If some of these artists are now remembered purely as blues players, that is once again due to the commercial strictures of the record scouts. The Mississippi Sheiks, being black string musicians from Mississippi, were expected to stick to blues in the studio, but it is only this accident of recording fashion that makes us classify them as bluesmen. The band's leader and usual fiddler, Lonnie Chatmon, could read standard notation and taught the other players the latest hits off sheet music. His brother Bo recorded a long string of double-entendre blues under the name Bo Carter, but also filled in as alternate violin player, both with the Sheiks and with various mix-and-match aggregations of Chatmons and such other local musicians as Joe and Charlie McCoy. Scattered among the recordings of these Mississippi string players, one can find a typical assemblage of rural music of the time, from fiddle tunes to romantic waltzes and cowboy yodeling.

There are also some sides that force us to reassess any division between “country” and vaudeville styles. On one session, Carter and the McCoys back a minstrel singer named Alec Johnson, and in this con
text their playing shows no sign of country roots. Carter on fiddle and Charlie McCoy on mandolin play carefully arranged parts, with all the eerie, minor-key effects and flawless arpeggios one would expect of a well-rehearsed theater orchestra. Had recording fashions been different, we might well remember them as minstrel masters, and their blues work might have been heard only at live shows in juke joints and now be forgotten. It is an accident of timing that during the brief period when black Mississippi players were being recorded, blues was what was hot.

Some people might suggest that I am picking extreme examples, but plenty of artists who are regularly listed among the “deeper” bluesmen did their share of minstrel performance. Big Joe Williams was a hard-core Mississippi guitarist and singer, with a tough, fierce sound that has no trace of string-band lightness or versatility. His records, whether cut for the Race market of the 1930s or the revivalist scene of the 1960s, were all fairly straight-ahead blues. And yet, he started out with minstrel and medicine shows, and his memories of that time carry no suggestion of his later musical taste: “They had dancing, cracking jokes, blackface comedians—we all used to do that. Take flour and soot to make you dark; we had wigs we wore sometimes; we had them old high hats and them long coats and a walking cane and them button-type spats.”
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Had the record scouts happened on Williams a few years earlier, he would be remembered not as a bluesman but as a minstrel comedian. (Or rather, since minstrelsy has largely been ignored, he would not be remembered at all, and the blues fans who “rediscovered” him in the early 1960s would have gone after someone else who happened to record during the blues boom.)

Now, the normal way this subject is addressed in blues histories is to say that, on the one hand, some blues players could also play non-blues material, and on the other hand, there were also a lot of black guitarists and singers who were not bluesmen but “songsters”—Mississippi John Hurt, Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, and Mance Lipscomb are typical examples—who performed a huge range of material including some blues. This distinction is utterly modern and artificial, and has no bearing on the way musicians thought of themselves in the 1920s or 1930s. Rural Southerners often said “song
ster” for “singer,” as they said “musicianer” for “musician,” but they used these terms equally for players who are mostly known for their blues work and for those who are not. Indeed, everything I have heard suggests that if they had happened upon some classical records and liked them, they would have described Caruso as an expert songster and Segovia as a fine musicianer.
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And this is not just a matter of semantics. Genre distinctions were simply not part of most people's musical lives. A prewar “bluesman” like Jesse Thomas, in Shreveport, Louisiana, did not find anything strange about the fact that in the 1970s he was leading a hotel band that played “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” His choice of material surprised and disappointed the young blues fan who found him there, but to him it was as logical to play Tony Orlando and Dawn in the 1970s as it had been to play Lonnie Johnson in the 1920s.
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