GOT A MIND TO RAMBLE: THE STORY OF THE BLUES FROM CLARKSDALE TO

CHICAGO

By

Jared Berkowitz

A thesis submitted to the History Department

Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey

for Undergraduate Departmental Honors

Advised by Professor James Livingston

and Professor Louise Barnett

New Brunswick, New Jersey

March 2008

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Professor James Livingston, my advisor, for allotting me the freedom and direction to complete such a project, Professor Barnett for bringing the close eye of an English scholar to my manuscript, the Aresty Research Center at Rutgers University for their generosity, Greg Johnson, curator of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, for his help in navigating the collection, and my parents for nurturing my love of music and history—encouraging me to combine the two.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION 1

PROLOGUE 4

Chapter 1. Classic Blues: Race Records and Chicago, 1920-1924 5

Chapter 2. “It May Bring Sorrow, It May Bring Cheer,” Delta Blues, 1924-1930 16

Chapter 3. City Folk, Urban Blues, 1930-1935 33

Chapter 4. Standing at the Crossroads, Robert Johnson, 1935-1938 46

EPILOGUE: The Blues Continuum: Muddy Waters, 1941 -1943 64

APPENDIX: The Blues Statement 68

Bibliography 69

Discography 72

That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today—jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock-and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on—is derived from the blues.

—Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country

So long, So far away Is Africa. Not even memories alive Save those that history books create, Save those that songs Beat back into the blood— Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue— So long So far away Is Africa. Subdued and time-lost Are the drums—and yet Through some vast mist of race There comes this song I do not understand, This song of atavistic land, Of bitter yearnings lost Without a place— So long, So far away Is Africa’s Dark face.

—Langston Hughes, Afro-American Fragment

1

An Introduction:

The history of the blues is a well-traveled subject. This indigenous American

musical form of incalculable value has earned a cannon of scholarly literature,

intellectual attention and recognition. But it has been at a certain expense. There is the

issue of race. Before the Civil Rights Movement black men and women in this country

walked a hard line trying to get a decent education. This plight was intensified in the

apartheid American South. Consequently, early popular scholarship of the blues was

limited to college educated white men who, despite their altruistic intentions carried with

them and applied a preconceived notion, a stereotype of what black culture was in the

United States. Samuel Charters’ early works: The Country Blues, and The Bluesmen;

Alan Lomax’s later book, The Land Where The Blues Began, form unfair assumptions

that the blues was the product of sorrow, of an uneducated populace, and consequently—

a somehow inferior music.

Such misnomers found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Music where

blues is defined as “a slow jazz song of lamentation, generally for unhappy love affair.”1

This cursory definition suggests the form is a type of jazz, ignoring its distinction as an

independent form. In the definition of jazz there is further discussion: “Blues implies a

largely vocal form and a depressed frame of mind on the part of the performer.”2 The

problem is exacerbated in the OED that defines blues as “a melody of a mournful and

haunting character, originating among the Negroes of the Southern U.S.” The key words

of these definitions are “lamentation,” “depression,” and “mournful,” making for a

1 Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne, ed., (Oxford Dictionary of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 101. 2 Ibid, 445.

2

pessimistic interpretation of the blues at best. If we follow these lines, then we are led to

consider the blues as downhearted, sorrowful and melancholic jazz. And this is what

blues musicians and writers have since struggled against.

Blues was a way to get out from behind the plow, to escape the injustice of a

segregated society. I do not make the case that the blues was invented in the Mississippi

Delta, no, but there was a kind of blues invented there that became some of the most

influential not just to blues itself, but to Rock and Roll and American popular music as a

whole. The starting point that I chose is the Mississippi Delta, not because of its

uniqueness but because of its importance. The blues came from the South—that is

indisputable. It followed the migration of the American black population that since the

1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War has steadily moved north

barring any economic trauma, i.e., the Great Depression of 1929 that stalled internal

migration across the nation. I chose deliberately not to start with West Africa, in fact to

leave Africa out of the picture because although we can go back and trace polyrhythm to

native African music, we can find the origin of the banjo in the African akonting, we can

hear call and response in the African spiritual ceremony—the blues is too far removed

from the African tradition for these comparisons to illuminate much about the music.

I chose to start with the blues itself, with the music, as such, in the American

South. Its origin as popular music, importance as a folk form, and function as a literary

form—I emphasized the role of the talent scouts because without them we would not be

hearing the blues.

It is true that there was something in the desperation of an isolated life in an

unjust society that gave birth to great music. But we do a disservice to the artists to focus

3

only on the sorrow and neglect the purpose of this work—jubilation, to rid him or her of

depression. Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues was one of the first to make the case for

the blues as joyful music. The blues is in itself a process, an existential truth

acknowledging the burdens of life while demonstrating and teaching us the will to

persevere. The music holds the primary truth of the blues, the lyrics are secondary, a

collection of borrowed folk phrases and idioms. The aesthetic of the blues, the spirit of

improvisation, has a distinct purpose and that is to cure us of the affliction of the blues.

Blues music is a gift—a humanist declaration of perseverance, a poetic and artistic

statement. Albert Murray wrote: “The whole point of the blues idiom lyric is to state the

facts of life.”3

I have the privilege of writing about this music in a time of racial emancipation.

Charles Keil published the year following the assassination of Malcolm X, the same year

the Voting Rights Act was passed. Samuel Charters wrote his early histories during the

Brown v. Board of Education trials, the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, and the ensuing riots

at Ole Miss. I am writing my history of the blues forty years after the March on

Washington, after Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, and while a black man is

an exceptional and realistic contender for the presidency of the United States. I have

attempted to peel back the political and racial dimensions of such a project in order to

place my focus on the music itself.

Musicologist Dr. John W. Work III writes in his preface to an anthology of

African-American folk songs: “The fatal error made by many writers in this field is that

in their analysis of these songs they rely altogether upon the verse, rather than upon the

3 Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues, (University of Missouri Press, 1973), 87.

4

music.”4 To the best extent possible within the boundaries of both my musical knowledge

and discipline, I have tried to avert this error.

Prologue:

American involvement in World War I, between 1916-1918, catalyzed the Great

Migration, the mass-movement of black Americans from the South to the North in search

of a better life.5 The Selective Service Act of 1917 conscripted all able-bodied males

between eighteen and forty-five and sent millions overseas leaving an array of vacant

jobs in the industrial North. Nearly half a million blacks who had not been drafted fled

the oppressive, Jim-Crow South with the promise of better pay and living conditions in

the urban North. Following the Great War, as America turned inward, there was a burst

of xenophobia fueling the 1924 immigration laws that enforced new strict quotas on

international migration to the United States. This caused a second labor vacuum that

brought another million black Americans north. As African-Americans left the rural

South for the urban North, black culture began to enter the American mainstream and the

blues began its dynamic journey out of the South.6

4 John W. Work III, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, (New York: Bonanza Books, 1940.), 9. 5 Paul S. Boyer, The Oxford Guide to United States History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 789. 6 David M. Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear Part One, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18, John W. Chambers II, ed. The Oxford Companion to Military History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181.

5

Chapter 1

Classic Blues: Race Records and Chicago, 1920-1924

The women get the blues from all the trouble those men give them, but these men don’t have the blues, hell no.

—William Lee Conley Broonzy, Big Bill Blues

In January of 1916 the Chicago Defender, a widely read African-American

newspaper, appealed to the burgeoning record industry with a front-page headline

announcing “RACE ARTISTS TO SING FOR VICTROLAS.” Beneath the headline the

Defender continued: “If Race Makes Demand for Our Singers to Be Heard, Edison and

Victrola People Will Be Eager to Employ Them.” It was the beginning of a grassroots

campaign for the recording of black artists for black consumers. The article asked the

American black community to consider the artists they want to spend their hard earned

dollar on to hear on their newly purchased home phonograph:

During the Christmas holidays there were thousands of dollars spent by our people for Victrolas. It was an easy matter to hear one say they got a $250 Victrola for a Christmas present and that they paid seven and eight dollars for records…But how many of our race ever asked for a record of Mme. Anita Patti Brown, Mr. Roland Hayes, Miss Hazel Harrison, Miss Maude J. Roberts….Are these not our great artists?7

The rhetoric of the Defender was aimed at both black record buyers and the commercial

recording industry. Desirous of hearing their own artists recorded, the newspaper sought

to catalyze a movement. The conclusion of the article is both practical and idyllic,

suggesting first that it is in the industry’s interest to fill this gap in the market: “The point

7 Chicago Defender, January 1916.

6

is, dear reader, if there is a demand for a record…the record people will soon get busy

and secure them.”8 And secondly, concluding with a romantic appeal, poignantly arguing:

“Prejudice vanishes when art steps in. Music—inspiring, soul-stirring music—knows no

color: it’s divine, it touches all hearts and all nationalities.”9

The appeal was a success but the recording industry needed assurance that this

was not a bluff. In October of 1916 the Defender ran an article announcing their triumph

detailing that now the recording industry must discover how many potential black record

buyers existed. To expedite the process the Defender requested that all black phonograph

owners interested in purchasing race records send their information to the newspaper

office. It was still four years before the recording industry would experiment with race

labels but the Defender focused the industry’s attention on this yet untapped market

becoming instrumental in the discovery of African-American music—first through

popular jazz and later with the great female blues singers.10

In 1920 race labels emerged, beginning with a small subsidiary of the General

Phonograph Company, Okeh. The first blues to be recorded was Mamie Smith’s Crazy

Blues in August of 1920. The song today is difficult to associate with the blues form. It

was closer in style to the popular hits of the time but incorporated the blues aesthetic.

Crazy Blues has a slow dragging rhythm behind an iambic vocal line. What gives the

song life is the passionate singing of Mamie Smith. Smith’s voice is gospel inspired, but

to call it a shout is to strip it of its musical quality. Though Crazy Blues was only a titular

8 Chicago Defender, January 1916. 9 Ibid. 10 Robert M. W. Dixon and John Godrich, Recording the Blues, (New York: Stein and Day Publishers, 1970), 9.

7

blues, it showed that there was a viable, broad and untapped market of black record

buyers eager to purchase music sung by artists of their own race. The formula proved to

be a success and record companies continued to pursue the race model.11

Unlike country blues artists who composed their own music borrowing from the

folk tradition the classic blues singers had independent writers. W. C. Handy, the self-

billed ‘father of the blues’, composed Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey’s songs.∗ Though he

did not invent the blues form, he adapted it for popular compositions, the first of which

was his 1914 publication of Memphis Blues. The song was closer in form to Mamie

Smith’s Crazy Blues than Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues. It did not use the twelve bar

structure∗ but did incorporate blue notes, an important element to the blues feel derived

from the knife style guitar work from the southern country bluesman that Handy recalls

in his autobiography, Father of the Blues:

[O]ne night at Tutwiler, as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.

A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’

The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. When the singer paused, I leaned over and asked him what the words meant. He rolled his eyes, showing a trace of mild amusement. Perhaps I should have

11 Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich, 20. ∗ W. C. Handy was a popular, classically trained jazz pianist in the first decade of the twentieth century. Born November 16 1873, in Florence, Alabama the son of former African American slaves who were freed with the surrender of the Confederate Army five years earlier. Handy, himself, became literally and figuratively the product of emancipation. As a young man he studied music and played in traveling orchestras for most of his life. In his autobiography Father of the Blues he writes of the first time he heard what became known as the blues ∗ Refer to appendix on the twelve bar structure and formation of the blues statement.

8

known, but he didn’t mind explaining. At Moorhead the eastbound and the westbound met and crossed the north and southbound trains four times a day. This fellow wa going where the Southern cross’ the Dog, and he didn’t care who knew it. He was simply singing about Moorhead as he waited.12

W.C Handy applied what he heard that night in Mississippi to his popular compositions.

In St. Louis Blues the lyrics follow the three-line stanza that his wandering musician sang

in Tutwiler:

Feeling tomorrow like I feel today. If I feel tomorrow like I feel today. I’m gonna pack my trunk, gonna make my get away.13

The refrain in Handy’s Yellow Dog Blues was also inspired by his elusive bluesman:

Easy rider’s got a stay away, so he had to vamp it But the hike ain’t far, He’s gone where the

Southern ‘cross the Yellow Dog.14

Handy applied the lyric and style he learned in Mississippi to his popular songs.

Although aesthetically Handy’s compositions are more closely related to ragtime∗ and

popular jazz styles, lyrically they helped to establish the blues idiom. That is the three-

line stanza and rolling iambic rhythm that would be applied to the popular recordings of

the early classic blues. But as the genre broadened and scouts began seeking out rural

blues—self accompanied solo artists—the blues idiom would change.

The classic blues was born in 1923 when Okeh and Paramount turned toward

vaudeville inspired blues women to broaden their race catalogues. Singers like Bessie

12 William Christopher Handy, Father of the Blues: an Autobiography (New York: Collier Books 1970), 78. 13 W. C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” in Blues: an Anthology, (New York: Da Capo Paperback, 1990), 82 14 Ibid., “Yellow Dog Blues,” 86 ∗ The OED defines ragtime as: “A musical rhythm characterized by a syncopated melodic line and regularly-accented accompaniment, evolved among American Negro musicians in the 1890s; hence, music (esp. for the banjo and piano) of this character, the immediate precursor of jazz.”

9

Smith, Ma Rainey and Victoria Spivey dominated the blues scene. Each had their own

style of loose-knit twelve bar blues based on popular compositions by W.C. Handy. The

classic blues had much in common with early jazz but was distinct. Blues is primarily a

vocal form as opposed to the instrumental dominance of jazz. As the classic blues

progressed the form gradually broke away from jazz nuances and emerged as a unique

style.

In 1923 Columbia talent scout, Frank Walker brought Bessie Smith, up to New

York from Memphis, Tennessee to record her debut sides. Smith was an instant hit with

the race market and her best was the W.C. Handy composition, St Louis Blues. It was

closer in form to the blues we know today—a twelve bar structure, rolling iambic rhythm,

with blue notes, flatted thirds and sevenths. The lyrics of the song followed the blues

idiom with rhyming tercets each repeating the first line twice establishing either a feeling

or setting:

I hate to see that evening sun go down. I hate to see that evening sun go down. It makes me feel, like I’m on my last go ‘round.15

Bessie Smith was one of the most influential and successful of the classic blues singers.

Billed as the “Empress of the Blues” by Columbia records, she continued to record and

perform widely until her untimely death in an automobile accident in 1937. Bessie Smith

did not emerge without a tradition. She learned her blues from Ma Rainey during her time

in the traveling Rabbit Foot Minstrel show.16 Paramount put her on record a few months

after Bessie recorded, billing her as “The Mother of the Blues.”

15 W. C. Handy, “St. Louis Blues,” 82. 16 Studs Terkel, Giants of Jazz, (New York: the New Press, 1957), 35.

10

Gertrude “Ma” Rainey was the link between the traveling vaudeville shows and

the classic blues. In 1923 she recorded for Paramount in Chicago. Her first sides were

Bad Luck Blues and Bo-Weavil Blues, both of which use the same blues idiom and

aesthetic popularized by Smith’s staple, St. Louis Blues. Rainey’s repertory included a

number of folk standards: Stack ‘o’ Lee Blues, Careless Love and See See Rider. But her

trademark was Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, one that exemplifies Rainey’s southern roots.

The song has a loose-knit dragging rhythm with ragtime sentimentality and a rising and

falling trombone backbeat.

As the classic period progressed, the blues grew distinct from jazz. The

emergence of Victoria Spivey in 1926 illustrates the move away from large orchestras

towards the personal, stripped down and self-accompanied artists that would signify the

blues in later years. Her first side was Black Snake Blues. A slow paced song beginning

with light piano chording between Spivey’s smooth vocal. Victoria Spivey establishes a

conversation between instrument and voice. She croons a tale of suspicion:

Cause my left eye jumping, my flesh began to crawl. My left eye jumping, my flesh began to crawl. Bet you my last dollar another woman is kicking in my stall.17

The piano answers her intuition. Spivey uses the blues form to resolve the problem of the

lyric. At the conclusion of the song she approaches the last blues chorus with a fifth

seventh chord establishing a mood of unresolved tension through sound but quickly eases

our ears and minds returning to the tonic with a full tone major chord. But the song ends

in a mysterious tone with a resonant seventh chord. Victoria Spivey’s success illustrates

17 Black Snake Blues, Victoria Spivey, Vol. 1 1926-1927, Document Records 2005 CD, track 1.

11

the movement away from the vaudeville inspired blues orchestra toward personal and

subtle self-accompanied artists, movement began toward the country blues.

New Orleans native Papa Charlie Jackson became the first successful proto-

country blues artist.∗ In April the Okeh label recorded two sides by Ed Andrews, a self-

accompanied guitarist and singer. His records sold poorly and his first single, a Ma

Rainey cover, Barrel House Blues, was his last. Consequently, Okeh abandoned the

country blues experiment.18 This left Paramount in a unique position: since most of the

company’s business was done through their mail order catalogue, they had a direct link

with the rural audience. Following the precedent set by the Defender with their campaign

for race recordings, Paramount asked its customers what artists they would like to hear.

Despite being a much smaller label than its competitors, Okeh and Columbia, Paramount

had an advantage in the country blues market. With a combination of well-placed talent

scouts and customer requests Paramount succeeded where others failed, recording the

most influential and unique country blues artists of the period.

In August of 1924 Papa Charlie was brought to Chicago to record two sides:

Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues and Airy Man Blues. Compared with the music of Bessie

Smith and Ma Rainey, who were bound by structure, Papa Charlie’s blues was

unpredictable.∗ It was less refined than the popular commercial ready ragtime inspired

∗ Papa Charlie was a titular country blues singer being from New Orleans he was not really from the country but his blues had more in common with later country styles than the contemporary classic style he competed against. And so I have designated him a proto-country blues singer, I suppose in the same fashion that Mamie Smith can be considered a proto-classic blues singer. 18 Dixon and Godrich, 33. ∗ Since both Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith fronted large orchestras it was necessary for everyone to be on the same page—the musical page—so at times phrasing became repetitive and too predictable leaving little room for improvisation or variation.

12

pieces. His records sold well and he became the first male singer able to hold his own

among the vaudeville blues women. Jackson’s success proved that there was a viable

market for the country blues.19

In 1925 a man named Sam Price wrote to Paramount scout, Mayo Williams,

suggesting the company record Blind Lemon Jefferson, a blues guitarist from Texas.20

Jefferson was taken to Chicago to record his first two sides: Booster Blues and Dry

Southern Blues. In 1926 Paramount issued eight more songs by Jefferson. His success

created a demand for more country blues artists. Between 1927 and 1930 larger race

labels began field trips to the South in search of new country blues talent. Georgia native,

twelve-string guitar player Blind Willie McTell was discovered in 1927 along with Blind

Willie Johnson from Texas and Florida native Blind Blake. Seeing their success, Okeh

records returned to the country blues market. Although the field trips were able to

uncover the piedmont guitar players from Georgia, Texas, and Florida—it was the talent

scouts for Paramount Records that found the most influential players. These musicians

were coming out of northern Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee—a region known as

the Mississippi Delta.

In April of 1927 Sam Collins, known as Cryin’ Sam, a self-accompanied slide

guitar player, was recorded. His blues, though underappreciated, has the emotional

intensity and musical virtuosity of Robert Johnson. And like Skip James, Collins sang in

a high soprano voice closer to a cry than the characteristic blues shout earning the nick

name “Cryin’ Sam Collins.” Little attention has been paid to Collins, mostly because he

19 Dixon and Godrich., 34. 20 Ibid., 34.

13

recorded only a handful of sides for the small Genett label that barely stayed afloat

against Paramount and Okeh.21 Despite his lack of commercial success at the time he

recorded some of the most refined blues of the period. Collins was one of the first blues

musicians from Mississippi to be put on record.∗

It is difficult to assess if Collins’ blues influenced other artists in the Delta. But

we do know he was discovered in southern Mississippi. No biographies have been written

on the musician. Eric Sackheim includes Collins in his anthology of blues lyrics but

catalogues him under New Orleans instead of Mississippi.22 Collins escaped the folk

revival of the 1950s and consequently never received the notoriety. But he did leave a

collection of beautifully crafted recordings made at a time when the country blues was

just beginning to be put onto wax. Collins’ blues has the delicate precision of musicians

like Blind Willie McTell from Georgia and Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas. There is

the bottleneck, or knife style that W.C. Handy spoke of in Tutwiler, Mississippi. He even

sings a song with the lyric mentioned by Handy, “Going where the southern cross the

yellow dog,” though it is doubtful that he was Handy’s forlorn bluesman. Collins used

open tunings, or Spanish Style, used by Delta musicians like Son House, Charley Patton

and Muddy Waters. The call and response between voice and guitar in which the lyrics

melt into the precise slide playing—the guitar cries with Collins. Since there was no

name for bottleneck style guitar and Sam Collins was billed as a ‘Git Fiddler’ player—

probably because of how much his guitar sounded like a fiddle. Collin’s recording career

21 Dixon and Godrich., 54. ∗ His best-known sides are Riverside Blues, Devil in the Lions Den, and Yellow Dog Blues. Collins recorded the railroad ode, Midnight Special that was later done by both Big Bill Broonzy and Huddie “Leadbelly” Leadbitter. 22 Eric Sackheim. The Blues Line: a Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy Waters (New York: Schirmer Books, 1975), 145.

14

with Gennett was short-lived—on January 30, 1930 he was withdrawn from their race

catalogue.23

Okeh Records turned to Avalon, Mississippi and uncovered Mississippi John

Hurt. In 1928 Hurt recorded for the Okeh record label in New York City. He was part of

the songster tradition—known at home as the “walking Victrola,” Hurt was the

entertainment in his small town of Avalon. The style of music that Hurt plays has more in

common with the folk traditions of Woody Guthrie than with the Mississippi bluesmen

like Son House and Skip James. A concert review in Blues Unlimited of one of

Mississippi John Hurts many college performances after his 1964 rediscovery expounds

on this idea: “Hurt is, of course, not strictly a bluesman. In a sense, he represents the

older traditions of Negro secular music….the whole range of vocal and dance music that

flourished in rural Negro communities…before recording placed a one-sided emphasis on

the blues.”24 The isolation of pre-commercial days allowed regional folk music to

flourish. Mississippi John Hurt represents a moment in blues history and American

culture when regional identity was at its apex. As record companies expanded their

markets regional blues and folk music traditions began to blend together as artists heard

different ways of expressing their musical thoughts. This advanced the blues form but

there were two sides to the phenomena. The loss of regional identity, combined with the

advent of jukeboxes and emergence of radio made musicians like Mississippi John Hurt

archaic pieces of a folk past.∗

23 Dixon and Godrich, Recording the Blues, 53. 24 Peter J. Welding, “Not Strictly a Bluesman,” (Blues Unlimited, No. 30, 1966), 3. ∗ Mississippi John Hurt had a few numbers similar to Collins and the Blind country pickers of the later twenties. He brought a syncopated finger picking style to his music, a technique that was adopted by Robert Johnson as he learned how to emulate the sounds of ragtime and boogie-woogie piano on the guitar. He sang his blues with a smooth tenor tone, there is no gospel inspired shout, and no Collins’ cry but there is

15

The blues at the end of the 1920s was a dynamic musical force—still in its

adolescence, still coming into its own. With the call for race recordings by the Defender

began a discovery of this indigenous southern black musical form. It had shed its jazz

skin and emerged with a distinct idiom and aesthetic. It began in Chicago with the classic

blues singers fronting large orchestras—Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey and Victoria Spivey.

But soon the genre broadened as more musicians were discovered and the blues came to

include the inventive guitar pickers Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Willie McTell

Mississippi John Hurt and the ‘Git’ Fiddler’ or slide guitar player, Crying Sam Collins.

Even after ten years of recording the music continued to grow, but it was not until the

Delta blues was recorded that the intensity of the music was revealed. The Mississippi

Delta was the final uncharted region for the recording industry—one with a sound all its

own anxious to be preserved in wax.

an emotional power and authenticity in his voice as if he has lived each word he sings. John Hurt’s music is upbeat, passionate sincere—he sings of the injustice, dissatisfaction and joys of existence—an existential prophet of folk wisdom.

16

Chapter 2

“It May Bring Sorrow, It May Bring Cheer,” Delta Blues, 1924-1930

My soul has grown deep like the rivers. —Langston Hughes, The Negro Speaks of Rivers

Trace a line along the Mississippi River north from Vicksburg, Mississippi to

Memphis, Tennessee. Now follow Highway 61 south from Memphis, through Clarksdale,

Greenville, Tutwiler, Rolling Fork, all the way back down to Vicksburg and you have the

boundaries of the Mississippi Delta. This strip of land, rich in history, experiencing both

the turning point of the Civil War and the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, is the triangular meeting

of the Mississippi, Yazoo, and Sunflower Rivers in the northwest corner of the heart of

the deep south. It is an inland delta of fertile alluvial soil provided by the periodic

flooding of the Mississippi and surrounding smaller rivers. These rivers gave life to the

Delta as the Nile gave life to the Egyptians in the northeast corner of Africa. And as the

Euphrates and Tigris Rivers gave birth to man in the fertile crescent of Mesopotamia—

the Delta gave birth to the blues.25

Paramount records focused its attention on the Mississippi Delta through the eyes

of H.C. Speirs, owner of Speirs Phonograph Company in Jackson, Mississippi. Speirs

opened up his music store in 1925, the same year that Blind Lemon Jefferson and the

country blues trend began to take off. He took to talent scouting as a way to broaden his

business. Speirs had a fine ear for blues, in conversation with Gayle Wardlow he

discusses his standards: “ ‘The playin’ and singin’ had to be together. If the singer didn’t 25 Samuel Charters, the Bluesmakers, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 25.

17

know songs, I’d have him write up some more.’ ”26 Speir admired originality and talent

but also knew that not every artists took to recording as well as others: “You can be the

best scout in the world and hear a man sing and unless you put ‘em on a record and hear a

man’s voice, you don’t know if he’ll go over.”27 Through H.C. Speir the best musicians

of Mississippi were given the opportunity to record. Tommy Johnson, Skip James, Son

House are just a few of the bluesmen to pass through Speir’s Phonograph Company. But

the most influential of the many he recorded was Charley Patton, the fountainhead of the

Delta blues sound.28

They run me from Will Dockery’s Willie Brown, how ‘bout your job? They run me from Will Dockery’s Willie Brown, I want your job. I went and told Papa Charlie: I don’t want you hangin’ round my job no more.

—Charlie Patton, 34 Blues

As a young man Charley Patton would sneak around to local juke joints, learn

what he could from other musicians and while gradually developing into his own.

Patton’s relationships with local musicians were crucial to his development. What he

could not learn by ear from the local jukebox he was taught by fellow musicians. Patton’s

first familiarity with music began with the Chatman family. The Chatmans were related

to the Patton—Charley was the son of Henderson Chatman, an early love affair of his

mother’s before she marrying Bill Patton. The Chatman family—Sam, Lonnie, and Bo—

formed the core of the well-known string band, the Mississippi Sheiks.29

26 Gayle Wardlow, “The Talent Scouts: H.C. Speir 1895-1972,” (78 Quarterly, No. 8 1994), 25. 27 Ibid. 28 Ibid., 29. 29 Francis Davis, The History of the Blues, (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), 100.

18

The Sheiks played a collection of ragtime, blues and country tunes. The height of

the Sheiks’ commercial career was the February 17, 1930 recording of Sitting on Top of

the World for Okeh Records in Shreveport, Louisiana.30 It was a song that quickly

became a standard in their time and has since been recorded by modern artists such as

Ray Charles, Howlin’ Wolf, and Cream. The melody of the song was adapted in Tampa

Red’s 1931 Things About Coming My Way and Robert Johnson’s 1936 Come On In My

Kitchen. Charley Patton was, at a young age, under the tutelage of one of the most

influential musical groups of his time. But Patton’s primary musical education came from

his constant badgering of Henry Sloan.

Sloan earned a reputation around Dockery’s for his inventive guitar style. At least

ten years Patton’s senior he was in the position to teach the young man how to play.

Historian Robert Palmer writes: “Henry Sloan played a rough, rhythmic sort of music Bill

Patton must have found positively barbaric compared to the hot but polite playing of the

southern Mississippi string bands.”31 Sloan’s style was percussive, abrasive, and more

emotionally intense than the bluegrass-like tones of the Sheiks who were part of the

string band tradition.∗ This rough, percussive style found its way into Patton’s repertory.

From an early age Charley was drawn toward music—secular music, which in Delta

culture was synonymous with sin.

Bill Patton, Charley’s father and their fellow Delta churchgoers undoubtedly

associated the danceable rhythms with sex—believing wholeheartedly that the blues was

a derivative of sin, the devil’s music. Palmer explains: “To a man of God, guitar picking 30 Dixon and Godrich, Blues and Gospel Records, 502. 31 Robert Palmer, Deep Blues, (New York: Viking Penguin Inc, 1981), 51. ∗Gerard Herzhaft, Encyclopedia of the Blues, (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992) , 249: “The existence of string bands, with guitar, fiddles, bass, and mandolins or banjos dates back to the nineteenth century. In rural America, they were the only source of dance music.”

19

was a sin, and playing reels and other sinful tunes at parties and picnics where gambling

and fornication were rampant was tantamount to selling one’s soul to the Devil.”32 The

extracurricular activities that surrounded secular music were only half of what angered

the god-fearing community of the Delta. The other was that blues, and other secular

musical forms were derived from spirituals performed during Sunday morning worship.

Hearing the melodies of the church within houses of sin—juke joints, barrooms, and

brothels—on Saturday evenings was enough to enrage any devout Christian.

Musicologist John W. Work explores the association of blues with sin in his Delta

manuscripts:

There is a vast amount of music which Negroes sing, work by, and dance and listen to which is far removed from the influence of the church. In this category, fall the blues, work songs, children’s game songs, ballads, hollers, and social songs. Indeed it might be said that this music grows and thrives in ratio to its distance from the influence of the church. For, with the exception of the children’s songs, the traditional churches have frowned for generations on this music and have condemned its makers and users to hell-fire and brimstone.33

Any music not explicitly interwoven with the Church—spirituals, psalms and hymns—

was an immediate transgression. There was a strict divide between the sacred and the

secular in Delta culture. A line had been drawn between spiritual and secular music that

blues musicians were not afraid to cross.

In conversation with Work, a nineteen-year-old Delta local explained: “Yes sir! I

think blues is wrong to sing, especially for a Christian. No folks around here who calls

themselves Christians sing the blues. Dancing is all right if its just a sociable thing; but it

32 Robert Palmer, 51. 33 John Wesley Work III, “Untitled Manuscript,” in Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, ed. Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 79.

20

ain’t right if its like at the juke….”34 The subject was approached later with an elderly

Sunday schoolteacher:

Now I want to tell you. Not so long ago I was teaching Sunday School to a group of these boys and girls around here, and we was talking about using one’s talents. You know about how God gave every man certain talents, and some used them wisely and others used them foolishly….

Then several inquisitive souls began to want to know if a person could use his talents successfully—and be a sinner? They talked about the gambler, the card shark, the policy operators, and finally they go settled down on Blues singers.

They wanted to know if it was a greater sin to let one’s talents lay aside or to use one’s talents in the wrong way, yet share the profits with the church…. They talked about Ella Fitzgerald who makes her living singing the blues. Some thought that singing the blues was her talent and they couldn’t see that as wrong, especially if she shared her profits with the church.35

What the Sunday schoolteacher was commenting on were the decaying morals of the

Delta youth—the corruption of rural culture with the infiltration of city life. The

conversation continues:

Now take this little church here,___ They got preacher, Reverend ___, and you hear some of the younger folks at the church talking about him drinking with the deacons….Sometimes he goes off and preaches in other places, seems like just for the dollar.

All of these things are going on, especially in the younger generation. Long time ago, country boys mostly married country girls, and folks thought that something was wrong if they didn’t. Folks used to look at city folks as outsiders. Not they go to the city so much and the city folks come out to the rural so much, that the way is not like the old.36

There is no way to tell whether the nineteen-year-old boy or the Sunday School teacher

forms an accurate cross section of Delta culture. But there is enough evidence in the

tonality of blues music and secular Delta folk songs to illustrate the influence of the

Church. Albert Murray discusses the association of the sacred and the secular with their

34 John Work, “Untitled Manuscript,” 79. 35 Ibid., 82. 36 Ibid.

21

association with the blues: “many of the elements of blues music seem to have been

derived from the downhome [sic] church in the first place. After all, such is the nature of

the blues musician’s development that even when he or she did not begin as a church

musician, he or she is likely to have been conditioned by church music from infancy to a

far greater extent than by blues music as such.”37 Religion was such an important part of

Delta culture that it touched on every facet of life.

Charley Patton was the fountainhead of the regional Delta blues sound. His

powerful gospel-inspired vocal shout, percussive, syncopated guitar work, haunting

bottleneck-slide technique and topical lyrics characterized the Delta blues aesthetic. H.C.

Speirs recalled of Patton’s mastery of the guitar: “Charlie was good with that guitar. I

mean he could handle a guitar outta [sic] this world. Charlie was the best. He beat ‘em

all.”38 Mississippi blues was unpredictable, it did not follow the strict twelve bar structure

of the classic blues. Like Papa Charlie Jackson and his banjo in 1925 distinct Delta blues

artists were self-accompanying musicians with the freedom to improvise during any

performance on the basis of emotion without fear of misleading other instrumentalists. As

such, the Delta blues became uniquely personal and emotionally intense. Big Bill

Broonzy, a fellow Mississippi musician, explained in a 1955 interview with Studs Terkel

in Chicago, a Mississippi blues is a straight blues; as opposed to the “dressed up blues” of

New Orleans, or Texas. What Broonzy is alluding to is the emphasis on the concentrated

emotional intensity of Delta blues that began with Patton.39 The song High Water

37 Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues, (Da Capo Paperback, 2000), 27. 38 Gayle Wardlow, 29. 39 Big Bill Broonzy, in Studs Terkel’s Weekly Almanac Radio Program No. 4: Folk Music and Blues, Smithsonian Folkways 1956, CD, track 1, re-released in 2005.

22

Everywhere exemplifies the Delta sound and Patton’s ingenuity within the blues

aesthetic.

The sound must seem an echo to the sense. –Alexander Pope, An Essay On Criticism

Form, in blues music as in poetry, is an extension of content. Patton’s topical

blues recorded during his first Paramount sessions in 1929, High Water Everywhere Part

II tells the story of the 1927 flood in Mississippi County, Arkansas. April 21st the tragedy

reached the Delta when the Levee at Mound Landing broke sending floodwaters tumbling

through the region. The final geographical toll of the flood was sixteen and a half million

acres in seven states, 162,000 homes, and 41,000 buildings. The human toll is estimated

between 250 and 500 people killed; in Mississippi it was 125.40 Jazz Historian Francis

Davis describes the song High Water Everywhere as: “the most vivid of the many blues

songs to tell of the 1927 flood; it’s not going too far to say that it rivals Faulkner’s

novella in detail.”41 When Patton recorded his blues in 1929 the tragedy still resonated in

the minds of his audience. High Water Everywhere is a compelling blues in which lyrics,

rhythm and melody harmonize to create a genuine statement of the Delta sound.

Backwater at Blytheville backed up all around.

Backwater at Blytheville done took Joiner town. It was fifty families and children, come to sink and drown.42

40 David Evans, Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1987), 200. 41 Francis Davis, History of the Blues, 99. 42 High Water Everywhere Part II, Charley Patton, “Charlie Patton: Primeval Blues, Rags, and Gospel Songs,”, Yazoo Records, 2005 CD, track 4.

23

The song is played with an open G or Spanish Tuning as it was commonly called

among southern musicians.∗ The lyrics and the music follow the flow of the Mississippi

River. The rhythm churns downstream as the lyrics begin in the northernmost town

affected—Blytheville. “Backwater at Blytheville backed up all around.”43 Patton sings

his first stanza with a trochaic rhythm we can hear the thick, flowing waves of the

Mississippi River’s flood waters. In the blues idiom it is common for the singer to repeat

his first line. Patton follows this tradition while adding a slight variation to his blues:

“Back water at Blytheville, done took Joiner town.”44 The water continues to punish

Mississippi County now arriving at Joiner, a town roughly twenty miles south of where

the song began, Blytheville. Patton’s choice to repeat the first line gives dramatic

emphasis to his lyric much the way a caesura, or rhetorical pause would in poetry. The

caesura focuses the reader’s attention; it breaks up the lyrical rhythm of a poem just as

repetition does in a song. Since Patton repeats the same verse there is a break in time, in

the linear flow of the song. We focus our attention on the words.

The turnaround or blues chorus comes in the final lines of the stanza: “It was fifty

families and children, come to sink and drown.”45 With the turnaround we are introduced

to Patton’s imagery and the movement in the song. As Patton sings of the deadly effects

of the flood, the music follows the verse. Patton plays a descending chord pattern: a

chromatic decent from the V, or the subdominant chord, to the IV, or dominant

eventually falling back to the I or tonic as he begins the second stanza of his blues. The ∗ In the 1941 Plantation Recordings by Muddy Waters for Alan Lomax and John Work he explains open G tuning, referring to it as ‘Spanish Style’—a term that probably has its origin in the Creole sections of New Orleans that were influenced by French, Spanish, and Caribbean cultures. Low to high it follows: D-G-D-G-B-D. The tuning is commonly used among slide players because it allows the musician to voice a full chord with open strings leaving the neck of the guitar open for more complex chord voicing. 43 High Water Everywhere Part II, Charley Patton. 44 Ibid. 45 Ibid.

24

movement in the song becomes both tonal and lyrical. Patton juxtaposes the image of

water rising against families drowning. As the blues chorus resolves the next verse

begins: “The water was rising, got up in my bed.”46 Patton speaks of the families sinking

down, and plays a descending run—form and content work together creating a poetic

statement in Patton’s blues, one characteristic of the Delta sound.

As Patton begins the third stanza he plucks a staccato alternating bass rhythm in

standard, 4/4 time. He plays an octave-based accompaniment on his guitar by alternating

between the sixth and fourth strings. The technique sounds like a drum, accomplished by

Patton’s use of the wooden acoustic guitar body. We are able to hear bass and drums at

work but it is only an effect created by Patton’s skillfully played acoustic guitar.

The technique allows one guitar to do the work of two. It sounds as though there

are both rhythm and lead tracks at work but it is only Patton’s right and left hands. The

effect is created by Patton’s picking technique using the weight of the thumb to hammer

out a steady syncopated bass and the remaining fingers to strum chords and melody notes

complimenting the vocal melody. The thumb works independently of the fingers in this

technique just as drummer’s bass foot, and a piano player’s left hand.

Highwater Everywhere Part II is a tame track next to Patton’s Pony Blues, an

expressive double entendre replete with seductive slide playing and an unpredictable

rhythm recorded in 1929. Patton sings:

Baby saddle my pony, saddle up my black mare Baby saddle my pony, saddle up my black mare I'm gonna find a rider, baby, in the world somewhere47

46 Eric Sackheim, 194. 47 Pony Blues, Charley Patton, in “Martin Scorsese Presents: the Blues,”, Hip-O Records, 2003 CD, disc 1, track 20.

25

The song begins with light chording alongside call and response slide accenting the

breaks between Patton’s vocal. Charlie Patton’s slide allows the melody of the guitar to

blend with the lyrics, an effect that Sam Collins was also able to achieve. But unlike

Collins, Patton does not cry his blues. His voice is a brawny gospel-inspired shout,

having more in common with Bessie Smith.

Got a brand new Shetland, man, already trained, Brand new Shetland, baby, already trained, Just get in the saddle, tighten up on your reins.

And a brownskin woman like somethin' fit to eat Brownskin woman like somethin' fit to eat But a jet black woman, don't put your hands on me48

At first the double meaning of Patton’s lyric is subtle but by the third stanza the song

breaks open. Patton’s chording intensifies, plays with the time signature of the song while

maintaining a steady syncopated rhythm. And despite the dissonance does not lose our

attention.

By the end of the song Patton is exhausted with hints and the meaning of the song

surfaces. We see him at his comedic best:

I got somethin' to tell you when I gets a chance Somethin' to tell you when I get a chance I don’t want to marry, I just want to be your man.49

Patton concludes the song with a sincere and culturally shocking lyric that would have

put his pastor father in the grave had he lived to hear his music. But it is part of the blues

idiom established in the Delta by Patton. The double entendre, irony, and brutal honesty

48 Pony Blues, Charley Patton. 49 Ibid.

26

of Patton’s lyrics along with his precise slide playing and syncopated rhythms would

come to characterize the Delta sound.

On May 28, 1930 Paramount recorded Charley Patton, Son House, Louise

Johnson, and Willie Brown. It was Patton’s fourth session for the company and he

wanted to bring along his troupe of Delta musicians. Son House recalls the events leading

up to the session in a 1965 interview with Sing Out journalist Julius Lester:

There was this man, A.C. Laibley who was Charlie’s manager at that time. He was in Grafton Wisconsin. That’s where the Paramount Record laboratory was. He came down on a little tour hunting talent, and he stopped by and told Charlie they wanted him to come up for recordings again. Well, Charlie…told them about me. So they said, ‘Bring him along with you and bring Willie Brown.50

With A.C. Laibely’s approval they accompanied Patton in Wisconsin. Together, Patton,

Son House, Willie Brown and Louise Johnson recorded the definitive collection of

commercial country blues sides.

Eddie James “Son” House Jr., fell under the tutelage of Willie Brown and Charley

Patton when he began playing music in 1927.51 His blues exhibits a tension between

virtue and vice, sin and piety that was common within the Delta canon. Son’s vocal is a

powerful church-inspired gravel howl—one that endures long after his song ends. Like

Charley Patton his slide playing is intricate and precise. House added a haunting vibrato

to his slide playing; a technique that evolved among younger Delta musicians such as

Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Musicologist John Work III observed in his notes:

“The playing of ‘Son’ House represents the pinnacle of guitar performance. The style he

50 Julius Lester, (“I Can Make My Own Songs—an interview with Son House,” Sing Out, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1965), 40. 51 Julius Lester, 39.

27

employs elevates the guitar to an equal importance with the voice. In it the deeply

resonant tone, the stimulating rhythm and the fascinating patters, as well as the

thoroughly adequate harmony provide completely satisfying music.”52

During the 1930 session with Patton Son House recorded ten sides: See That My

Grave is Kept Clean, My Black Mama—Part I and II, Preachin’ the Blues Parts I and II,

Dry Spell Blues Parts I and II, Clarksdale Moan, Mississippi County Farm Blues, What

Am To Do Blues. These were the only commercial recordings Son House made until his

1964 rediscovery in Rochester, New York.53 Of those ten sides Mississippi County Farm

Blues and My Black Mama Part I are examples of Son House versatility and virtuosity.

Mississippi County Farm Blues is a morality tale of the corrupt justice system in

the Mississippi Delta. It is written from experience. Robert Palmer explains, “In 1928

House shot and killed a man at a drunken house party near Lyon, and although he

pleaded self-defense, he was sent to the state penal farm at Parchman.”54 The county farm

in House’s lyric was Parchman Penitentiary—a prison farm, an institution in Mississippi

that from the outside looked like any other plantation except for the barbed wire and

striped work gang outfits on the farmers.∗ Son House’s blues is a heartfelt topical tale that

begins with melodic slide notes establishing a rhythm line, followed by a single note run

anticipating the vocal. When Son begins to sing his lyrics are barely audible but there is

an incredible passion behind his vocal:

52 John Wesley Work III, Untitled Manuscript, 88. 53 Peter Guralnick, Feels Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock n Roll. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999), 52. 54 Robert Palmer, 81-82. ∗ The Prison Farm appeared like any other plantation in the South but was outlined with barbed wire, tended to by convicts and secured by armed prison guards. A sentence to Parchman Farm was a return to slavery for any black Mississippian unfortunate enough to get caught in the crossfire of racial injustice. This was a southern institution with the two largest in Louisiana and Mississippi—Angola and Parchman.

28

Wish I was a baby in my Mama’s arms Wish I was a baby in my Mama’s arms, Wish I was a baby in my Mama’s arms, Wouldn’t be here, workin’ on the county farm. I’d rather be broke and out of dough, I’d rather be broke and out of dough, I’d rather be broke and, Lord, out of dough, Than to be here workin’ on the forty-four.55

The narrator of Son’s blues is a desperate man looking inward wondering where he went

wrong. The tale begins with allusions to childhood, to innocence—a baby in his mother’s

arms. It is not until the final line that the prison is mentioned. Son House makes a unique

statement in Mississippi County Farm Blues using a four-line stanza instead of the typical

three. It is reminiscent of Broonzy’s comment on the dynamic nature of the Delta blues.

Like Patton, Son House incorporates repetition in his verse to create an emotional

statement—each line swelling with greater passion as he sings his blues.

Rhythmically the music is uplifting but House uses dissonance to create a jarring

musical effect. He unhooks the rhythm alternating between 4/4 and 2/4 time signatures

between chording and linear phrases. Son’s voice is what holds the music together and

beneath his singing is the guitar crying with him while the 2/4 rhythm looms in the

background.

In contrast My Black Mama is a lighthearted song with a steady hypnotic rhythm.

Son House breaks up his vocal melody much in the way that Charlie Patton experimented

with on songs such as Hang it on the Wall. Son House begins with high-pitched chords

55 Mississippi County Farm Blues, Son House, in “The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of: Rarities and Re-issued Gems of the 1920s and 1930s.”, Shanachie Records, 2006 CD, track 2.

29

played with a slide in triplet form. Eric Sackheim reconstructs the lyrics on the page to

mirror the poetic statement born of Son House’s complex polyrhythmic structure.

Well black mama, what’s the matter with you today Ain’t satisfactory, don’t care what I do heh-eh, mama, what’s the matter with you Baby, it ain’t satisfactory, baby and I don’t care what I do56

House renews the blues form with My Black Mama—creating an innovative but familiar

statement imbued with emotional intensity. My Black Mama was one of Son’s most

influential songs in the Delta. Traces of it can be heard in Robert Johnson’s Walking

Blues and Muddy Water’s Feel Like Going Home. Johnson uses both the vocal melody

and harrowing slide vibrato for his take on the song. Muddy Waters borrows House’s

vocal inflections alongside his slide technique.

Following Son House was Willie Brown, a fellow musician and long time friend

of Patton, who used to play with him and Son House at local juke joints in the Clarksdale

area. In his Future Blues, Brown uses a similar syncopated bass pattern that Patton does

on High Water Everywhere Part II. The theme of Future Blues is the internal torment of

a man dreading the return of his unfaithful lover. Time haunts the narrator of Brown’s

blues:

Can’t tell my future, I can’t tell my past. Lord it seems like every minute, sure gon’ be my last

56 Eric Sackheim, 204.

30

Minutes seem like hours, and hours seem like days. Yes, it’s minutes seem like hours, hours seem like days. And it seems like my woman oughta, stop her low down ways. Oh the woman I love now, she’s five feet from the ground. I said the woman I love, now lord, is five feet from the ground. And she’s tailor-made and ain’t no hand-me-down.57

Brown alternates the literary form of the blues adding a lead couplet before settling into

the standard three-line blues stanza. The alternating bass echoes the sound of a ticking

clock—complementing these lyrics, while the steady trochaic rhythm propels the song

forward toward its crisis. Future Blues was Brown’s most influential piece whose lyrics

became part of the Delta canon. Both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson borrowed

phrases used by Willie Brown.

The only piano player to record that day in Grafton was Louise Johnson. Her

brand of blues was unique among Brown, Patton and House. She showed that women

kept on singing the blues alongside men in the tradition of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey.

Louise’s piano playing was similar to the urban stride styles played by St. Louis’ Peetie

Wheatstraw, Chicago’s Roosevelt Sykes, and southern Mississippi’s Skip James.∗

Johnson’s playing incorporates the steady walking bass of early stride piano that would

be adapted by Robert Johnson to the guitar. She recorded two sides: Long Way From

Home and On the Wall. During her take of Long Way From Home we can hear House and

Patton talking in the background sounding as though it was recorded in the Clarksdale

57 Future Blues, Willie Brown, in “Masters of the Delta Blues: Friends of Charley Patton,” CD, Track 4. ∗ The OED defines stride as, “a style of piano-playing in which the left hand alternately plays a single note and a chord that is an octave (or more) higher.” Stride was a popular jazz style born in the city that became part of the blues collective.

31

juke joint. Louise Johnson’s vocal sounds like a soprano Bessie Smith. Her song, Long

Way From Home is a vibrant blues about her search for a satisfying lover.

I woke up this morning, blues all around my bed. I woke up this morning, blues all around my bed. I never had no good man, to ease my worried head.58

Within her blues Louis Johnson is able to showcase her feminine sexual prowess. Like

Patton’s rich double entendre in Shetland Pony Blues, Johnson’s records celebrate her

desires. Johnson uses the piano like Patton, House and Brown used the guitar. There is

the call and response between voice and instrument. Louise strikes up a conversation

between herself and her piano that is resolved in the notes she plays. She follows a loose

knit twelve bar structure with poignant turnarounds during the blues chorus. And like

Patton, Louise plays ascending and descending musical phrases to fashion her blues

statement.

The landmark 1930 Paramount session was the only commercial recording Son

House, Willie Brown, and Louise Johnson completed. It allowed the four musicians to

define a distinct Delta sound on record. But as the country fell headlong into the Great

Depression record companies began to feel its effects and smaller labels were the hardest

hit. Paramount downsized—closing its recording studios in Chicago and New York

keeping only the Grafton, Wisconsin studio active. The company did not have the money

to send for artists from the South to travel north in order to record nor did they have

portable equipment available to travel to them. Attention now turned toward the urban

sounds that were brewing in nearby cities such as Chicago and St. Louis. Though all four 58 Longway From Home, Louise Johnson, in “Masters of the Delta Blues: Friends of Charley Patton,” CD, Track 6.

32

continued to play music together only Patton continued to record commercially. The rest

would have to wait until1941 when John Work III and Alan Lomax would arrive in the

Mississippi Delta as part of the Coahoma County Study.

33

Chapter 3

City Folk, Urban Blues, 1930-35

When we talk about big town blues, the words ‘big town’ is places like New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, Kansas City, Little Rock, Jackson, Vicksburg, and that’s where these big town blues players started playing.

—William Lee Conley Broonzy, Big Bill Blues

The Great Depression brought the Great Migration to a grinding halt, internal

movement in the United States slowed among black families. Between 1920 and 1930 the

black population of Illinois increased from 182,274 to 328,972, almost doubling. But

between 1930 and 1940 the population rose by only 60,000, slowing dramatically. After

1940 the movement picked up speed again and by 1950 the black population of Illinois

numbered 645,980.59 The two chief attractions to the North were higher wages and better

living conditions—both were undermined by the Depression. This was due in part to the

closing of factories by American industries in order to curb overproduction, with no

promise for work else where the black population stayed in place. Without guaranteed

employment the risk became far too high.

With the Depression came a period of reorganization for the record industry. As

sales plummeted a series of mergers ensued. Historian Mike Rowe describes the chaotic

chain of events: “Paramount failed in 1932, the parent company of the Gennett group of

labels went into liquidation in 1934, and Columbia was in serious financial straits.”60

Since Paramount was responsible for the recording of blues artists from the Delta

59 Table Aa 3300-3398, contributed by Michael R. Haines.“Illinois populartion by race, sex, age, nativity, and urban-rural residence: 1800-1990,” Historical Statistics of the United States. Millenial Edition On Line, ed. Susan B. Carter, Scott Sigmund Gartner. 60 Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: the City and the Music, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 14.

34

commercial recording sessions of these was abandoned. Record companies could no

longer afford the high cost of field trips into the South or travel expenses to bring

musicians north. Instead, they focused on pools of talent in near by cities such as St.

Louis and Chicago. The result was the rise of a new urban blues sound played by

southern musicians who had moved north and combined a number of regional styles to

create a unique blues statement.

The urban blues that surfaced between 1930 and 1935 was a combination of the

early country and classic sounds. It used both characteristics of the Delta blues—trochaic

rhythm, syncopated beat, topical lyrics—and early classic blues—jazz inspired rhythm,

cosmopolitan complexity, and loose-knit structure. Mike Rowe suggests, “The urban

blues were….lighter in texture with the emotional power turned down and the beat turned

up.”61 What distinguished urban blues from earlier classic and country was the instantly

recognizable up-tempo optimism fueled by the feel and pace of city life. The slow,

brooding, introspective intensity of Mississippi had no place in the soundscape of

Chicago. The mirror of the blues reflected urban life with optimism and vitality. Within

the city the gallop of a horse was replaced by the roar of an automobile, the steady beat of

the railroad hammer gave way to the clamor of the assembly line, and the locomotive

yielded to the streetcar. The sounds of the city were elements outside of rural life and

became raw material for a new blues sound.

Memphis Minnie, Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy were the purveyors of the

early urban blues. Together they illustrate the dynamic range of the urban blues and the

genre itself, from the country bred, city reared sounds of Memphis Minnie and Big Bill

Broonzy to the urban infused life and sound of Tampa Red. Based in Chicago, these 61 Rowe, 15.

35

musicians paved the way for future blues men and women to make the trip up the

Mississippi River, escape the oppressive isolation of the South and bring to its sweet

home in Chicago.

Elizabeth “Memphis Minnie” Douglas made a name for herself with her strength

as a both a guitarist and singer. She was born 1897 in the countryside of Algiers,

Louisiana. After her recording career began in Memphis, Tennessee she moved north to

Chicago. Throughout her career she was married to a series of bluesmen, beginning with

Casey Bill Weldon. By her first recording session in June 1929 she had divorced Weldon

and married another bluesmen by the name of Joe McCoy, known on record as ‘Kansas

Joe.’ The two recorded a number of duets together, but Memphis Minnie remained an

artists all her own. Memphis Minnie’s earliest hit, Frisco Town, featured herself on lead

guitar and vocal with Kansas Joe accompanying her on rhythm guitar. Frisco Town is a

song of escape, seduction and eagerness. With Memphis Minnie crying:

You can toot your whistle, you can ring your bell. You can toot your whistle, you can ring your bell. Well I know you been want’ it by the way you smell. I’m on my way to ‘Frisco town.62

Minnie is a knowing women who will not be tied down by any man. Her refrain reminds

us that she is San Francisco bound regardless of what any man throws her way. Early in

her career, Memphis Minnie’s voice maintained a light soprano melody closer to Leroy

Carr or Lonnie Johnson than Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. The guitar accompaniment

62 Eric Sackheim, 60.

36

features the steady trochaic rhythm popular among country blues with a hokum twist that

would become characteristic of the urban blues sound.∗

I Hate to See The Sun Go Down. an adaptation of Leroy Carr’s 1935 hit, When the

Sun Goes Down, was recorded in Chicago the summer of 1938. Fellow Chicagoan, Big

Bill Broonzy went on to record his own version later in his career. Memphis Minnie

borrowed her refrain from Bessie Smith’s classic blues hit St. Louis Blues singing:

I hate to see that evening sun go down. I hate to see that evening sun go down. Cause it makes me think, I’m on my last go’ round. I been to the river, looked it up and down. I been to the river, looked it up and down But my mind never led me to jump up off the ground. 63

Bessie Smith’s version is slow, sorrowful, brooding blues telling the tale of a woman at

her wit’s end with her unfaithful husband. Memphis Minnie’s version features guitar

alongside stride piano giving the song a characteristic up tempo stomp in the tradition of

Big Bill Broonzy’s hokum tune Saturday Night Rub.

As Memphis Minnie’s career progressed, she matured as a singer. The recordings

of her later career are uniquely Minnie’s blues. Me and My Chauffeur Blues, Memphis

Minnie’s influential 1941 hit for Okeh Records, displays the strong church inspired vocal

of the early classic blues women. The song became the template for Muddy Waters’ hit

Good Morning Little School Girl and its rhythm emerged in many of Jimmy Reed’s later

hits such as Big Boss Man and the Sun is Shining. The song features Little Son Joe on

∗ Hokum was a blues derivative with ragtime and stride piano nuances adapted to the guitar. The danceable rhythm of made it popular during the Saturday Night Functions and house parties where most of the blues music was played in Chicago during the period of prohibition. 63 I Hate to See the Sun Go Down, Memphis Minnie, “Hoodoo Lady: 1933-1937,” Sony BMG Music, CD, track 3, 1991.

37

rhythm guitar with Memphis Minnie trading skillful fours imitating her vocal line.

Lyrically, the song is Minnie’s plea for a man who will be at her command. Memphis

Minnie sings:

Won’t you be my chauffeur, I want someone to drive me Won’t you be my chauffeur, I want someone to drive me Down town. Baby drives so easy, I can’t turn him down.64

Later in her career Memphis Minnie’s brought out the influence of Bessie Smith

and the classic blues singers of the early 1920s. But there is strength to Minnie’s music

that comes through with her guitar-playing going beyond her strong vocal. Big Bill

Broonzy spoke of Memphis Minnie affectionately in his autobiography Big Bill Blues:

“Memphis Minnie could make a guitar speak words, she can make a guitar cry, moan,

talk and whistle the blues.”65 Female blues singers are usually remembered for their

strong expressive vocals, not for their instrumental virtuosity or talent for musical

composition. Memphis Minnie held both these talents in stride; she was a soulful singer,

influential guitar player and talented songwriter—an invaluable figure in blues history.

Hudson “Tampa Red” Whittaker represents a moment in blues history when

musicians began to broaden the genre incorporating elements of jazz, ragtime, and other

regional folk styles. His influence continues to resonate in both blues and rock and roll.

B.B. King’s Sweet Little Angel was a Tampa Red hit as well as Creedence Clearwater’s

Susie Q. Big Bill Broonzy recalls: “A man like Tampa Red has got a style of his own,

playing guitar with a bottle neck on his little finger, sliding up and down the guitar

64 Eric Sackheim, 58. 65Yannick Bruynoghe and Big Bill Broonzy. Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as told to Yannick Bruynoghe. (Da Capo Press 1992. New York City, New York.), 138.

38

strings.”66 Red was born in Smithville, Georgia but moved north to Chicago during the

early 1920s in his late teens. Tampa Red was an innovative guitar player with New

Orleans jazz inspired sensitivity in the fashion of Lonnie Johnson and Scrapper

Blackwell. Red, like T-Bone Walker, represents a fusion of the country and urban sound.

In the winter of 1931 Tampa Red, billed as the “Guitar Wizard,” recorded his hit

Things ‘Bout Coming My Way in Chicago. The song uses the melody of the Mississippi

Sheiks early hit Sitting On Top of the World but is recorded with just piano and guitar in

the manner of Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell. The song uses a loose-knit dragging

trochaic rhythm with Tampa Red’s guitar mimicking his vocal line. Lyrically it is a

jubilant song about the high points in life, telling us not to forget hard times— a moral

tale teaching us not to take life for granted.

Lost all my money, ain’t got a dime. Giving up this whole world, leaving it behind. But after all my hard traveling, things ‘bout coming my way. When I was sick, down on my bed. My friends forgot me, thought I was dead. But after all my hard traveling, things bout coming my way.67

Interspersed between lyrics are Tampa Red’s melodic guitar phrases that complement his

vocal line. It is the same call and response technique reminiscent of the Delta church

service.

Tampa Red’s It’s Tight Like That ushered in the hokum stomp craze and allowed

him to make a name for himself within the urban blues scene. Recorded in Chicago in

April of 1929 the song featured Red’s lead slide and skillful rhythm playing. It was an

66 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 116. 67 Things ‘Bout Coming My Way, Tampa Red, in “Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” Yazoo Records, 2004, CD, track 18.

39

instrumental piece that inspired Big Bill Broonzy’s Saturday Night Rub and Hokum

Stomp. Tampa Red played with Big Bill and Thomas “Georgia Tom” Dorsey in a well-

known group: The Hokum Boys.

William Lee Conley Broonzy, known on record as Big Bill, was born 1893 in

Scott, Mississippi. He lived throughout the Delta region until serving overseas in World

War I. Afterwards, like many black American veterans, he moved north to Chicago.

Broonzy played music from a young age first as a fiddle player under the instruction of

his uncle, later he picked up the guitar for which he is best known. Like Charley Patton,

Skip James and Son House, Broonzy was reared to be a preacher as a young man. “I

started to preaching and I preached for four years…”68 During these years Broonzy was

torn between the stage and the pulpit until his Uncle told him he must make a choice.

“Just be what you are,” Broonzy explains, “preacher or a fiddler.”69 The two were

irreconcilable and Broonzy had to make a choice. Desirous to get out from behind the

plow, he chose music; citing a the moment when his boss came out to the field and

offered him fifty dollars to play at his picnic—more than he would earn in a year as a

field hand. But music was more than a paycheck for Big Bill it was his ticket out of the

South imbued with passion and emotion.

Lester Melrose was the talent scout in Chicago responsible for the early urban

blues. Like H.C. Speirs he had an ear for brilliance and was able to recognize both

longevity and marketability in an artist. In 1928 working as a freelance agent Melrose

recorded Big Bill as part of the Hokum Boys with Georgia Tom and Tampa Red.

68 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 35. 69 Ibid.

40

Broonzy explains: “[I]n 1928, I met Mr. Lester Melrose. I was a grocery boy and he told

me to come to his office. So I did and carried my guitar with me. Him and his buddy

Herman took me to the studio and I made four songs for them: Date With an Angel Blues,

the Walking Blues, Big Bill Blues No. 2, and House Rent Stomp No. 2.”70 Unlike Speirs

who worked directly with Paramount, Melrose did not hold any corporate allegiances

working simply as an agent. His artists recorded for collection of labels: Paramount,

Gennett, RCA-Victor, and Columbia all had Melrose artists in their catalogues.71

Like Tampa Red and Memphis Minnie, Big Bill’s music combines elements of

New Orleans jazz, down home Delta blues, and up-tempo ragtime numbers. Like

Mississippi John Hurt, Broonzy was a stand alone jukebox with a repertory of hits

ranging from Bessie Smith’s Backwater Blues, folk standards like Midnight Special and

piano rags adapted to the guitar like Hokum Stomp. It is the music of a well-traveled

musician who internalized the sounds of America in the 1920s and ‘30s while

contributing his own personal nuances. Bill Broonzy’s trademark was Big Bill Blues was

recorded first in Chicago in 1926 for Paramount but it went unreleased until 1932 on the

Champion label.

Songs like Baby Please Don’t Go demonstrate the Delta influence, using the folk

melody of Vera Hall’s Another Man Done Gone.

Baby please don’t go, Baby please don’t go Baby please don’t go, back to New Orleans, You know it hurts me so, Baby please don’t go.72

70 Bruynoghe and Broonzy., 48. 71 Mike Rowe, Chicago Blues: the City and the Music, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1975), 17. 72 Baby Please Don’t Go, Big Bill Broonzy, “An Introduction to Big Bill Broonzy,” Fuel Records, 2007, CD, track 1.

41

Vera Hall’s version recorded for Alan Lomax appearing in the collection Blues in the

Mississippi Night—the song was a topical blues about racial injustice and told the tale of

the disappearances of black men and women with no investigations simply because the

life of a black man in Mississippi was barely valued above that of a mule. Vera Hall sings

in a beautiful, heartfelt tone. She has the ability to make each line sound new despite the

repetition. Her version is sung as follows:

Another man done gone, Another man done gone, Another man done gone, Another man done gone. He’s from the county farm, he’s from the county farm.73

Bill Broonzy’s version is a popular song, a dance number, derived from the sorrowful,

melancholic song of Vera Hall. It is almost as if the two songs are in conversation with

each other. Between both songs, lovers are separated, characters are absent and there is a

sense of desperation—the artist is reaching for something absent. But Broonzy’s song has

a resolution an up-tempo optimism representing the shift from Mississippi life to Chicago

life. Behind the strong lead vocal melody there is Big Bill’s melodic guitar work that

reconciles the sad lyric. It is the jubilant rhythm, the driving beat that gets our feat

tapping, puts a smile on our faces and gives us a sense of hope.

Big Bill Broonzy navigates the space between the city sounds of Lonnie Johnson

and the Delta intensity of Son House. One of his earliest records, Big Bill Blues,

incorporates the linear single note guitar runs of Lonnie Johnson and Tampa Red.

Recorded first in Chicago for Paramount in 1926 but went unreleased. Big Bill recorded

the popular version six years later for Champion in 1932. Big Bill sings with a light tenor

73 Another Man Done Gone, Vera Hall, in “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” Rykodisc, 1991, CD, track 13. Includes field recordings by Alan Lomax featuring conversation between Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson interspersed between songs.

42

voice, a deep clear tone closer to Lonnie Johnson than Charlie Patton. But musically there

is a strong Delta influence. Broonzy begins his song with a characteristic Delta

introduction—triad seventh chords strummed in triplets, mimicking the sound of a slide.

As he leads into his vocal he plays a descending chromatic run approaching the tonic.

Broonzy croons:

Lord my hair is a risin, my flesh begin to crawl. My hair’s a risin, my flesh begin to crawl. I had a dream last night babe, another mule in my dog gone stall. Some people say these, Big Bill blues ain’t bad. Some people say these, Big Bill blues ain’t bad. Lord it must not have been them, Big Bill blues they had.74

Big Bill sings with a light trochaic rhythm as opposed to the rolling iambic sounds

of the classic blues singers. Lyrically it echoes Victoria Spivey’s hit, Black Snake Blues,

but it remains a deeply personal song telling of the difficulties of seeing the world from

another’s eyes—people try to tell Bill that his blues is not so bad, that other’s have it

harder, but only he knows his blues—they can only guess. The song features a loose knit

twelve bar structure with a call and response between Broonzy’s vocal and guitar.

Broonzy takes an extended lead break common in urban blues.

There is a courage to Big Bill’s music found in his topical songs that illustrate a

liberated urban consciousness as opposed to the psychology of oppression looming in the

Delta. The most powerful statement is made in When Will I Get to Be Called a Man

where Broonzy sings of American hypocrisy and racial injustice. Broonzy talks about the

background of this blues in his autobiography:

74Big Bill Blues, Big Bill Broonzy, “Big Bill Broonzy Vol. 1 1927-1932,” Document Records 2005, Ch 18385, CD, Track 22.

43

There was a man that I knew, when I was ten years old, that the white people called a boy. He was about thirty then. When I went to the army and came back in 1919, well he was an old man then and the white people was calling Uncle Mackray. So he never got to be called a man, from ‘boy’ to ‘Uncle Mackray’.

And so it is still today. They call all Negro men ‘boys’ and some of them is sold enough to be their father. In fact I do think that some old men is glad to be called boys, but they call you so until you get to be fifty, and at the time you would appreciate to be called a boy they start to call you ‘uncle’.

That’s the time when I would like to be called a boy, when I get to be fifty or older. It’s all right for my sister’ skids to call me ‘uncle’ , but not by a man or a woman eighty years old.75

The song uses a trochaic stomp rhythm that Broonzy popularized. Musically it uses the

emancipated rhythms of city life as opposed to the slow brooding melancholy of southern

blues. The lyrics are sung with a tone of bitter sarcasm and longing.

When I was born into this world, this is what happened to me. I was never called a man and, now I’m fifty-three.

I wonder when will I be called a man. Or do I have to wait till I get ninety-three? When Uncle Sam called me I knew I would be the real McCoy But when I got in the army they called me soldier boy. They said I was undereducated, my clothes was dirty and torn, Now I got a little education, but I’m a boy right on.76

When Will I Get To Be Called A Man was written in 1928 but it had to wait until 1955 to

be recorded. It remains a musical statement of hope in the blues form. Broonzy put to

words what many black musicians felt but avoided stating explicitly. It remains today a

piece of oral history sung by a man who wore many caps in his life—soldier, farmer,

janitor and most proudly—musician.

75 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 71. 76 Ibid., 70.

44

Broonzy honed his talents in the South, was one of the first bring the blues to

Chicago, and later brought his music overseas to Europe. While in England in the early

1950s, he met music critic Yannick Bruynoghe who was captivated by Big Bill’s

articulate storytelling, deep experience with the blues, and desire to preserve the music.

As such he encouraged Big Bill to write an autobiography, which he edited and published

in England in 1955. An American edition was not released until 1964 at the height of the

folk revival. The book, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as told to Yannick

Bruynoghe is the only autobiography we have of such a figure in blues history. Though

some facts have been contested and corrected the book itself is a an undisputed piece of

blues history that for all its triumphs and faults, hyperboles and inaccuracies is a brilliant

primary document of a blues singer—an insightful look into the soul of a central figure in

blues history. In his preface to the American edition of Big Bill Blues Bruynoghe explains

what Broonzy wanted to do was to write “the truth about the blues.” But he far exceeded

his goal: “More than being the truth about the blues, it is the truth about a man whose

psychology it perfectly reflects.”77 It is Broonzy’s subjective truth of the blues and in

turn, a look inside a man who created such beautiful music.

At the conclusion of Big Bill’s autobiography is a humble request for how he

would like to be remembered. There is no finer way to end a discussion of a man who

deserves the last word:

[W]hen you write about me, please don’t say I’m a jazz musician. Don’t say I’m a musician or a guitar player—just write Big Bill was a well-known blues singer and player and has recorded 260 blues songs from 1925 up till 1952; he was a happy man when he was drunk and playing with women; he was liked by all the blues singers, some would get a little jealous but Bill would buy a bottle of

77 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 9.

45

whisky and they all would start laughing and playing again, Big Bill would get drunk and slip off from the party and go home to sleep.78

Chicago artists defined the popular blues sound of the 1930s. Memphis Minnie,

Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy brought a collection of regional styles together for the

first time to create an original sound. They kept the blues alive and well through the

depression and their influence would carry through to the postwar generation. Big Bill

Broonzy took the next generation of migrating musicians under his wing. Musicians such

as Sonny Boy Williamson, Little Walter Jacobs and Memphis Slim all recall Broonzy’s

kindness. Younger generations of country blues musicians—Robert Johnson, Skip James,

Muddy Waters—heard the sounds of the developing urban blues and adapted their

playing accordingly. One of the most influential and inventive was the young Robert

Johnson whose life has since been shrouded in myth that regrettably subverted much of

the reality and brilliance of his music. Johnson combined poetic lyrics with musical

virtuosity to create an original blues statement whose influence pervades modern blues

and rock ‘n’ roll to this day. Such a heroic and tragic persona in blues history commands

a space all his own.

78 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 151.

46

Chapter 4

Standing at the Crossroads: Robert Johnson, 1935-1938

You may bury my body down by the highway side. So my old evil spirit can catch a Greyhound Bus and ride.

—Robert Johnson, Me and the Devil Blues

If Robert Johnson had not existed, they would have to have invented him. —Bruce Cook, Listen to the Blues

Before the publication of Mack McCormick’s research in Peter Guralnick’s

Searching for Robert Johnson in 1989, Robert was a malleable character of blues

history—conforming to the imaginations of eager writers. Samuel Charters in 1959

wrote: “There is a story that his first recordings were done in a billiard parlor and a

drunken fight broke out after he had recorded. Someone threw a billiard ball at one of the

engineers and smashed several of the masters. The company ledger sheets….list only a

single recording for the second session; so the story may be true.”79 In his brief but

influential chapter on Robert Johnson, Charters acknowledges the lack of biographical

information on the artist but begins the process of mystification by reproducing such a

rumor. Although, Charters did not intend to propagate a falsehood and the tale has since

been disproved, the effect still resonates—setting the precedent for the myth of Robert

Johnson.

Charles Keil poses the problem in less flattering terms arguing that what early

blues researchers suffered from was “moldy fig mentality” defined as “a term formerly

79 Sam Charters, the Country Blues, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1959 revised. 1975), 208.

47

used by ‘modern’ jazzmen and their supporters to designate individuals whose interests in

jazz was restricted to the prewar period—pre World War I.” 80 These “moldy fig”

researchers were bent on uncovering, recording and perpetuating their idea of the “real

blues.” Keil comically elaborates on the elements of a “real” blues singer, according to

the “moldy fig” paradigm: old age, obscurity, the student of a legend, and a former

farmer or prisoner. Though Keil uses the moldy fig as a reaction against the rejection of

modern blues,∗ the same mentality is manifested in writings on Robert Johnson.

Music and film critic, Bruce Cook wrote: “If Robert Johnson had not existed,

they would have to have invented him….He is the Shelley, Keats, and Rimbaud of the

blues all rolled into one. If any bluesman is assured of immortality it is this little drifter-

with-a-guitar who may never have left the South.”81 His 1973 analysis is both prophecy

and praise. There is no question to Johnson’s immortality, sealed first on acetate in San

Antonio back in 1936, later pressed onto vinyl in 1961 and finally digitally mastered onto

compact disc in 1990. But Johnson becomes Cook’s own tragic and romantic hero of the

blues—an example of blues exegesis—the interpretation of artistic figures undertaken by

early researchers, specifically those like Samuel Charters and Alan Lomax who were in

the position to establish a starting point for our historical memory.

Current studies of Robert Johnson center themselves on the question of influence.

Blues musician and historian Elijah Wald argues in his recent book, Escaping the Delta,

we should look at Robert Johnson through an objective lens—peel back the elaborate

80 Charles Keil, Urban Blues, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 34. ∗ Post World War II, 1945-present. 81Bruce Cook, Listen to the Blues, (New York: Da Capo Press, 1973), 74.

48

prose and far fetched myths—decide for ourselves the truth. 82 Paul Garon in his article,

Robert Johnson: Perpetuation of a Myth, suggests writers are too eager to elevate

Johnson, making him a god among men in the blues world. Within his article Garon

provides a criteria for analysis of influence: “Johnson’s influence, as well as that of other

performers, is usually discussed in terms of who sings like him, who plays like him, and

what songs of his are sung by others.”83 Influence is what outlives an artist, how much of

their innovations pervade popular culture and alter the way we interpret their genre. Art is

not created in a vacuum and each artist contributes to the continuum. We are too anxious

to search for originality, authenticity in those we consider to be influential. According to

Garon: “Originality itself is not the sole criterion, of course, for the tracing of influences

proves only that an artist was part of the continuum along which the blues developed—it

is hardly demeaning to have evolved out of something.”84 What Garon wants is for us to

recognize Johnson’s place in the development of the blues—the continuum. With Wald

and Garon we have a foundation to evaluate the music, divorced from the mystery of the

man—Robert Johnson as artist, innovative but still a character in the story of the blues.

Our finest and most consistent record of Johnson is his music, the result of two

recording sessions under the direction of the American Recording Company, issued by

Vocalion, after H.C. Speirs alerted Ernie Oertle, another recording scout, to his new

talent. In November of 1936 the first of the ARC sessions in San Antonio, Texas took

place under the auspices of Don Law inside an impromptu recording studio in their

82 Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. (New York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2004), 127. 83 Paul Garon, “Robert Johnson: Perpetuation of a Myth,” (Living Blues, November/December 1990), 34. 84 Ibid., 35.

49

hotel.85 Johnson’s second and final session was roughly a year later, in 1937, this time in

Dallas for ARC. Johnson recorded a total of twenty-nine sides, of which all have been

preserved. The complete recordings of Robert Johnson issued by Columbia Records in

1990 are a study in the dynamic range of the blues. They show the variation in form, the

spirit of improvisation—the idea that a blues can be played one way, and then altered to

match an artist’s changing mood and tone.

Like Django Reinhardt, the gypsy jazz guitarist, Robert Johnson left behind a

body of mystery and an estranged past. Like Jim Morrison, he lived fast and died young

while simultaneously inspiring generations of young musicians. Today, Johnson is a

household name among blues aficionados and casual fans. He crafted a compelling

persona out of demonic myth, stride piano and Mississippi Delta blues, a musician of

great skill, whose life was shrouded in myth and whose music had the ability to send

chills down your spine. It is the same idea that continues to fascinate us with musicians

such as Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison—a process of cultural mystification, a

posthumous fascination that canonizes cultural heroes.

Robert Johnson was born approximately May 8, 1911 in Hazlehurst,

Mississippi.86 He spent his early years in Memphis, Tennessee and came of age in

Robinsonville, Mississippi. Johnson grew up alongside the musicians that defined the

Delta blues sound—Son House, Willie Brown and Charlie Patton. Eddie James “Son”

House, in a 1965 interview with Julius Lester for the folk periodical Sing Out tells of the

early days of Robert Johnson. As the story goes, the fabled bluesman began as a

85 Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989), 33-34. 86 Peter Guralnick, 10.

50

harmonica player, not even knowing how to play the guitar until his twenties. House

explains:

…We’d all play for the Saturday night balls and there’d be this little boy standing around. That was Robert Johnson. He was just a little boy then. He blew harmonica and he was pretty good with that, but he wanted to play a guitar.87

In his teens he would hang around Clarksdale jook joints to his mother and stepfather’s

dismay, hounding Son House and Willie Brown to let him sit in between sets. Desperate

for a chance to play the blues:

…We’d get a break and want to rest some, we’d set guitars up in the corner and go out in the cool. Robert would watch and see which way we’d gone and he would pick on of them up. And such another racket you never heard! The problem was he could not a play a thing.88

House and Brown pleaded with Johnson to leave the guitars alone while they went

outside for a break. But the young man could not resist a chance to play. Brown and

House knew this and could do little to keep Johnson from sitting in. But they knew the

moment he picked up the guitar because the crowd reacted accordingly—with hollers of

contempt.

It’d make the people mad, you know. They’d come out and say, ‘Why don’t y’all go in there and get that guitar away from that boy! He’s running people crazy with it.’ I’d back in and I’d scold him about it. ‘Don’t do that, Robert. You drive the people nuts. You can’t play nothing. Why don’t you blow the harmonica for ‘em?’ But he didn’t want to blow that. Still, he didn’t care how I’d get after him about it. He’d do it anyway.89

87 Julius Lester, “I Can Make My Own Songs—an interview with Son House,” (Sing Out, Vol. 15, No. 3, 1965) 41. 88 Julius Lester, 41. 89 Ibid.

51

When Son House and Willie Brown returned they immediately grabbed the guitar from

Johnson. He was eager to master the guitar willing to do anything—even sell his soul to

the devil.

Johnson like so many Delta bluesman knew that a life of music was an alternative

to life on the farm. Son House explains:

…he [Johnson], didn’t care anything about working in the fields and his father was so tight on him about slipping out and coming where we were, so he just got the idea he’d run away from home. He was living on a plantation out from Robinsonville. On a man’s place called Mr. Richard Lellman….Didn’t want to work on any farms.90

And like that Johnson disappeared, at least according to Son House’s recollection. When

he saw him again six months later, Johnson had mastered the instrument. Son House

provides a colorful explanation of this impromptu reunion in Banks, Mississippi of

himself, Johnson and Willie Brown:

….all of a sudden somebody came in through the door. Who but him! He had a guitar swinging on his back. I said, “Bill!” he said, “Huh?l” I said, “Look who’s coming in the door.” He looked and said, ‘Yeah Little Robert.” I said ‘And he’s got a guitar.’ And Willie and I laughed about it….I said, “Well, boy, you still got a guitar, huh? What do you do with that thing? You can’t do nothing with it.” He said, “Well, I’ll tell you what.”…. “Let me have your seat a minute.”…. So he sat down there and finally got started. And man! he was so good! When he finished, all our mouths were standing open. I said, “Well, ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!91

Robert Johnson disappeared from the Delta barely able to fumble his way through chord

changes and reappeared a blues virtuoso. When man attempts to account for mystery he

appeals to the metaphysical—to religion or myth. But this is the blues, the ‘Devil’s’

music, in the devoutly religious Mississippi Delta. The black community of the Delta

90 Julius Lester, 41. 91 Ibid, 42.

52

believed wholeheartedly in what they called ‘hoodoo’—the will of the devil, the root of

misfortune. It was believed in the thick Delta night, one could strike a deal with the devil

under the right circumstances. And if one desired, they could sell their soul in exchange

for whatever it was they wanted from this world. Bertrum Barnes and Glen Wheeler tell

the tale of the occult with great artistry and grim detail:

If you want to make a contract with the devil, first you trim your nails as close as you possibly can. Take a black cat bone and a guitar and go to a lonely fork in the roads (a crossroads) at midnight. Sit down there and play your best piece…wishing for the devil all the while. By and by you will hear music, dim at first but louder and louder as the musician approaches nearer…just keep on playing your guitar. The unseen musician will finally sit down beside you. After a while you will feel something tugging at your instrument do not try to hold it. Let the devil take it and keep thumping along with your fingers as if you had a guitar in your hands. Then the devil will hand you his instrument and accompany you on yours. After doing this for a time he will seize your fingers and trim your nails till they bleed, finally taking his guitar back and returning your own. Keep on playing; do not look around. His music will become fainter and fainter as he moves away….You will be able to play any piece you desire on the guitar and ….but you have sold your soul to the devil.92

According to legend, Robert Johnson gained his guitar skills at the expense of his soul.

Folk singer Bob Dylan remembers the hysteria surrounding Johnson, “There’d been a fast

moving story going around that he had sold his soul to the devil at a four-way crossroads

at midnight and that’s how he got to be so good.”93 But the devil myth did not originate

with Johnson, it was first applied to Tommy Johnson, a fellow Delta musician, unrelated,

fifteen years his senior, who like Robert Johnson, vanished for a period of time only to

emerge a Delta blues staple.

In an interview with historian, David Evans, Ledell Johnson, brother of Tommy

Johnson explains the musician’s disappearing act before achieving his legendary skill.

92Bertrum Barnes and Glenn Wheeler, “A Lonely Fork in the Road,” (Living Blues, November/December 1990), 26-28. 93 Bob Dylan, Chronicles Vol. 1, (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 2004), 286.

53

“Now if Tom was living, he’d tell you. He said the reason he knowed [sic] so much, said

he sold hisself [sic] to the devil.”94

Ledell Johnson explains the Delta myth.

He [Tommy] said, ‘If you want to learn how to play anything you want to play and learn how to make songs yourself, you take your guitar and you go to where a road crosses that way, where a crossroad is. Get there, be sure to get there just a little ‘fore 12:00 that night so you’ll know you’ll be there. You have your guitar and be playing a piece there yourself….A big black man will walk up there and take your guitar, and he’ll tune it. And then he’ll play a piece and hand it back to you. That’s the way I learned to play anything I want.95

The Delta myth existed before Robert Johnson even picked up a guitar. That was

not all, so did manifestations of the devil in the blues lyric. One of the earliest instances

was southern Mississippi native Sam Collins, in his 1927 recording of Devil In The

Lion’s Den in which Collins paints a haunting satanic image of himself:

I got wings like a devil, sleeping in a lion’s den. I got wings like a devil, sleeping in a lion’s den. If I can find me a good gal’ I want to take her hand.96

Skip James came next with his 1930 recording of Devil Got My Woman. The song tells

the story of an ill-fated relationship using the devil as a harbinger of adultery, an image of

impending crisis:

I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman’s man. I’d rather be the devil, to be that woman’s man. Oh nothing but the devil, changed my baby’s mind Oh nothing but the devil, changed my baby’s mind. I laid down last night, laid down last night. I laid down last night, laid down last night. My mind got to rambling like the geese from the west.97 94 Peter Guralnick, Searching for Robert Johnson, 18. 95 Ibid. 96 Devil in the Lion’s Den, Cryin’ Sam Collins, “Jailhouse Blues,” Yazoo Records, 1991, CD, track 1.

54

A more personal association with the devil was undertaken by Ripley, Tennessee native,

St. Louis migrant, William Bunch, better known as Peetie Wheatstraw, a successful

musician between 1930 and 1941who constructed an infamous blues persona based on a

dark affinity with the devil. The first of Wheatstraw’s recordings preceded Johnson’s by

five years. In 1931 Wheatstraw recorded a series of successful sides for Decca Records’

race catalogue. Johnson was exposed to Wheatstraw’s music—evident in his adaptation

of the boogie-woogie piano style that flowed from urban musicians. Also music by Peetie

Wheatstraw was available on Clarksdale jukeboxes alongside barrelhouse pianists such as

Louis Jordan and Memphis Slim.98 Wheatstraw was a musician whose persona was as

large as his sound. He was known as the Devil’s Son in Law—a theatrical identity of his

own construction derived and perpetuated through songs such as Peetie Wheatstraw

Stomp, and Devil’s Son in Law. William Bunch sings in Peetie Wheatstraw Stomp

recorded in 1931:

I am Peetie Wheatstraw, the High Sheriff From Hell. I am Peetie Wheatstraw, the High Sheriff From Hell. The way I strut my stuff, Woo-well now, you never can tell.99

Again in Devil’s Son in Law recorded the same year:

Now I've got eleven women, and I got one little Indian squaw. I say I got eleven women, and I got one little Indian squaw. Now that they come to see me, I'm liable to be the Devil's-Son-In-Law.100

97 Devil Got My Woman, Skip James, in “Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” Yazoo Records, January 2004. CD, track 8. 98 Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. Ed. Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk University Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press), 311-314. 99 Peetie Wheatstraw Stomp, Peetie Wheatstraw, “Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 4 1936-1937,” Document Records 2005, CD, track 22. 100 Devil’s Son in Law, “Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 1 1930-1932,” Document Records 2005, CD, track 13.

55

Robert Johnson follows Wheatstraw’s model in Me and the Devil Blues recorded in 1936:

Early this morning when you knocked upon my door. Early this morning, when you knowed upon my door. And I said, Hello Satan I believe it’s time to go

Me and the Devil was walking side by side. Me and the Devil, was walking side by side. I’m going to beat my woman until I get satisfied. She said you know the way that I always dog her ‘round. She said you know the way, that I be dog her ‘round. It must be that old evil spirit, so deep down in the ground. You may bury my body down by the highway side. You may bury my body down by the highway side. So my old evil spirit can get a Greyhound Bus and ride.101

Wheatstraw sang his blues with an indecipherable slur, and included between

verses a blues cry or moan insinuating there was something inside of him that, if he sang

too loud—opening his mouth too wide—it would leap right out. In Delta culture this style

was derivative of Satan. Barnes and Wheeler explain: “This blurring of the lyrics and

melting them into the music is associated with the devil, who according to Delta myth

had to slur his speech and moaned when he sang, as he was afraid to open his mouth very

wide because it was full of captured souls and they would escape.”102 This myth, derived

out of New Testament theology, was a consequence of a devoutly religious culture that

believed the blues was imbued with sin. And, as they might have hoped, by associating

the music with the devil it would scare away potential musicians—purging the Delta of

the Devil’s music.

101 Me and the Devil Blues, Robert Johnson, “The Complete Recordings,” Columbia Records, CD, Track #, 1991. 102 Bertrum Barnes and Glenn Wheeler, “A Lonely Fork in the Road,” (Living Blues, November/December 1990), 26-28.

56

Wheatstraw set a cultural precedent, one that like the blues would find itself

reborn in Rock ‘n’ Roll. He codified folk legend and musical genius to create an identity

as an entertainer that would outlast his tragic death in an automobile accident in 1941.

Paul Garon relates the events in his biography of Wheatstraw, “The car in which he was

riding was being driven south on Third Street when it failed to make a curve, left the

road, and struck a standing freight car.”103 Robert Johnson saw in Wheatstraw a formula

for success—a ticket out of the Delta.

I think the power of his music comes in part from Johnson’s ability to shape the loneliness and chaos of his betrayal, or ours. Listening to Johnson’s songs, one almost feels at home in that desolate America.

—Greil Marcus, Mystery Train

Johnson’s style combines a variety of blues traditions. Music historian Robert

Palmer explains that other musicians were listening to the race catalogues, hearing blues

from across the South, but Johnson was the first to apply what he heard to his playing.

“House and Brown listened to the popular race records like everyone else….but their

styles and repertoires had been shaped mostly by local influences and weren’t particularly

susceptible to innovation.”104 Although he is catalogued alongside fellow Delta

bluesmen, his music transcends regional categorization—one reason to why it is so

universal. Johnson’s earliest encounter with the blues was upon hearing Son House and

Willie Brown. As he matured and began traveling, rambling across the country like so

many aspiring bluesmen, he absorbed a dynamic range of blues styles. From the smooth

103 Paul Garon, The Devil’s Son-in-Law: The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and his Songs, (London: November Books Limited, 1971), 100. 104 Robert Palmer, 114.

57

piano dominated St. Louis Blues, the ragtime-hokum guitar playing of Chicago, the

boogie-woogie barrelhouse pianos of New Orleans, the blind guitar pickers of the

Carolinas—in addition to classic singers and early country blues. These musicians

showed Johnson the range of the guitar. New Orleans native Lonnie Johnson, unrelated to

Robert, was particularly influential in pioneering single note guitar phrasing much like

Tampa Red was doing in Chicago.

Lonnie Johnson began his life as a musician in St. Louis, Missouri after winning

first place in a blues competition organized by Okeh Records in 1925. Within the next

five years Lonnie became the second best selling male blues musician—second only to

country bred Blind Lemon Jefferson.105 This was tantamount to the rural/urban

dichotomy that existed in blues. This divide broke down first with piano guitar duets like

Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell and later through the innovations of Robert Johnson.

Lonnie’s music uses both the blues idiom and aesthetic—the three-line stanza and twelve

bar structure. But he was one of the first to assert the guitar as a lead instrument. Big Bill

Broonzy recalls: “Lonnie Johnson had a different style of playing a guitar—we called his

style ‘thumbing a guitar.’ ”106 He used single note phrasing that mirrored the sounds of a

jazz trumpet. Francis Davis writes, “…he was probably the first improvising guitarist to

base his style on cleanly articulated single-string lines rather than heavily strummed

chords—the first guitarist to phrase like a horn…”107 The stylistic influence of Lonnie

Johnson is found in any guitarist using improvised pentatonic modal phrasing—this

extends from B.B. King to Wes Montgomery. The immediate impact on Robert Johnson

as an emerging artist is evident in his incorporation of extended improvised single note

105 Francis Davis, 144. 106 Bruynoghe and Broonzy, 118. 107 Francis Davis, 144.

58

guitar lines complementing his vocal melody. Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell fall in

the direct line of influence from Lonnie Johnson. A piano and guitar duet that was

especially influential in the development of Johnson’s unique guitar style.

In the late 1920s and early 1930s Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell sought to

give the blues a more refined cosmopolitan, jazz infused tone. This was a reaction to the

rough, gritty, and stripped down acoustic styles of Charlie Patton and Son House.108 Carr

brought the piano and the ease of city life to the blues, and Scrapper Blackwell backed

him up on guitar. Leroy Carr is credited with bringing the rolling, walking bass,

emphasizing the backbeat—the second and fourth beats of the measure—to the blues.

Blackwell would play lead runs over Carr’s steady beat reminiscent of Lonnie Johnson’s

single note, jazz inspired guitar sound. As Carr and Blackwell gained success, a number

of piano and guitar duos soon surfaced. Between the years 1928 and 1935 Blackwell and

Carr dominated the blues scene. Francis Davis argues: “[W]e owe the very concept of

urban blues to Carr and Blackwell, the commercial success of whose duets sent record

company representatives in search of talent in cities, not just rural outposts.”109 Without

the popularity of Carr and Blackwell the blues of Memphis Minnie, Big Bill and Tampa

Red may have gone unnoticed, as scouts would have remained fixated on country sounds.

Leroy Carr grew up in Nashville never knowing the hard, rural life of the Delta

and so his blues had more in common with the early urban styles coming out of Chicago

than the country blues that was brewed in the Delta.110 He sang with a relaxed soprano

tone, with high-pitched hollers and moans—vocal techniques that would become

associated with Robert Johnson. Behind this powerful vocal was a steady rolling rhythm

108 Herzhaft, Gerard. Encyclopedia of the Blues. (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1992), 54. 109 Francis Davis, 139 110 Ibid., 138.

59

line. This rhythm is sometimes referred to as a walking bass because the sound mimics

the rhythm of a person walking down the street. This steady, circular, bass—

accomplished with the left hand on the piano—was what Johnson brought to the guitar.

Carr’s left hand rhythms were complemented by right hand chording, typically triads or

three note chords, mostly sevenths that would fill out the sound and mimic the vocal line.

Blackwell would then play a lead riff, between the verses—a call and response—trading

fours with Carr, and answering the call of his voice.

Carr and Blackwell established a southern urban blues sound combining

characteristics of classic and country blues. In June of 1928 they recorded two sides for

Vocalion. One, How Long, How Long Blues, was their most popular and influential hit.111

Despite Blackwell’s reputation as a sideman he did record a set of solo sides for Vocalion

,most importantly a song titled Kokomo Blues during the same session—one that would

surface again by James “Kokomo” Arnold∗ for Decca records in 1934 as Old Kokomo

Blues.112 Together these songs formed the foundation for Robert Johnson’s classic, Sweet

Home Chicago, recorded during his first San Antonio session in November of 1936.113

Robert Johnson’s Sweet Home Chicago is an example of his adaptation of piano

techniques to the guitar. Francis Davis notes: “Johnson’s appeal lies in the tension

between his raw vocals and a sophisticated guitar technique that enabled him to make

good on his boast…of being able to play anything a pianist could.”114 Lyrically and

111 Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich, Blues and Gospel Records: 1902-1942, 138 ∗ Kokomo Arnold was a slide guitarist who also recorded with Peetie Wheatstraw. Deeply influential, Kokomo Arnold had a number of song’s that found their way into the repertory of not just Robert Johnson but also Elvis Presley. Arnold recorded the song Milkcow Blues in 1935 that was adapted partially for Johnson’s Milk Cow Calf Blues. Originally a steal from Patton’s You Gonna Need Somebody When You Come To Die the song was also the template for Elvis’s hit, Milkcow Blues Boogie. 112 Ibid., 50. 113 Ibid., 675 114 Francis Davis, 129.

60

musically the song is derivative of both Scrapper Blackwell and Kokomo Arnold’s

pieces. Throughout the song Johnson maintains a steady backbeat and walking bass—

adapted from the piano, but played on the guitar. Johnson prided himself on his ability to

play the steady rolling piano bass line on the guitar—conscious of his own innovation.

This is accomplished with a picking style popularized by guitarists such as Mississippi

John Hurt, in which the thumb assumes the role of a piano players left hand, and the

remaining fingers play right hand melodies. Johnson was able to play an independent

walking bass pattern with his thumb while his fingers plucked out lead and melody lines.

Johnson begins Sweet Home Chicago with a characteristically Delta introduction.

Playing a descending chromatic run leading up to the subdominant, landing back on the

tonic, Johnson in 1936 sang:

Oh, Baby don’t you want to go. Oh, Baby don’t you want to go. Back to the land of California, To my sweet home Chicago.115

Just as Kokomo Arnold crooned in 1934:

Baby don’t you want to go. Back to the bright light city To sweet old Kokomo.116

And Scrapper Blackwell in 1928:

Oh, Baby don’t you want to go. Oh, Baby don’t you want to go. Pack your little suitcase, Papa’s going to Kokomo.117

115 Sweet Home Chicago, Robert Johnson, “The Complete Recordings: Robert Johnson,” Columbia Records, CD, disc 1, track 1. 116 Old Original Kokomo Blues, Kokomo Arnold, in “Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” Yazoo Records, January 2004, CD, track 2. 117 Kokomo Blues, Scrapper Blackwell, in “Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” track 17.

61

Sweet Home Chicago illustrates the influence of earlier blues artists on Johnson

and his application of the Delta aesthetic. His verse maintains the trochaic Delta rhythm,

synchronized with the tight backbeat of Scrapper Blackwell and Leroy Carr. Kokomo

Arnold’s version is more of a jump blues, Chicago inspired version, played in a faster

tempo than either Blackwell or Johnson’s. Arnold plays an elaborate slide introduction—

a sped up Delta introduction that was derivative of Son House, a kind of liberated sound

that would characterize records such as Muddy Waters Got My Mojo Workin—but that

would have to wait until 1957.118

Robert Johnson’s adulterous and violent tale told in 32-20 Blues, adapted from

Skip James’s 22-20, is another song that follows a similar path of development as Sweet

Home Chicago. Skip James is the father of the Bentonia sound, a region of Mississippi

closer to Vicksburg, the southern portion of the Delta—centered between New Orleans

and Memphis.∗ 22-20 blues was originally played as a piano piece that, like Sweet Home

Chicago Johnson adapted to the guitar. It was recorded for Paramount Records in

Grafton, Wisconsin in February of 1931. Skip James found inspiration for 22-20 from a

blues recorded by pianist, Roosevelt Sykes called 44, a song that was recorded in New

York for Okeh records February of 1929. A musician associated, like Leroy Carr, with

the urban New Orleans, jazz influenced blues style. 44 was recorded in 1929 two years

before Skip James recorded his 22-20 and seven years before Johnson recorded his 32-20

illustrating the continuum of the blues. 118 Got My Mojo Working, Muddy Waters, ∗ The Bentonia sound, like the early urban blues of Carr and Blackwell, is a smoother more refined sound compared to the raw blues of Son House and Charlie Patton.

62

Skip James begins the song excitedly with piano chording between vocal lines.

22-20 has a relaxed structure, a loose knit call and response between Skip’s vocal and

expressive piano. Most impressive and characteristic of which are the descending

chromatic runs after the blues chorus or turnaround that bring the song back to the tonic,

to begin the next verse. The walking bass of Leroy Carr is absent, but there is a defined

rhythm that keeps the song together.119

Robert Johnson’s version features the chording of Skip James piano adapted to

guitar but he adds a syncopated walking bass line. His blues is held together by the

backbeat provided by this driving rhythm. The song begins with high triads, seventh

chords, played in triplets modeling James’ piano. Johnson also maintains the call and

response technique of Skip James—keeping the descending chromatic runs after the

blues chorus. What is most compelling in Johnson’s recording are the dynamics. As the

intensity of the song builds, Johnson’s playing follows suit. As the song approaches its

crisis Johnson sings:

Oh baby, where you stayed last night? Oh baby, where you stayed last night? You got your hair all tangled, and you ain’t talking right?120

As he alludes to his unfaithful lover, he plays straight seventh note triads in quarter note

time, creating a haunting unresolved effect. The tone is slightly dissonant and haunting,

but the form is in tune with the content of the song. Robert Johnson was able to show that

the guitar could do anything a piano could with the right amount of innovation and

musical knowledge.

119 22-20, Skip James, in “Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” CD, track 15. 120 32-20 Blues, Robert Johnson, disc 1, track 14.

63

As a piano and guitar player, Skip James sought, like Johnson, to combine

elements of various regional styles of the blues in a search for his own unique, refined

sound. James discussed his originality in conversation with Peter Guralnick: “I don’t play

guitar like nobody else….I don’t pattern after anyone or either copycat. Even when I sing

a song you might have heard someone else do I rearrange it to suit myself. It’s all

original.”121 He asserts that originality in the blues comes from the personal signature a

musician imparts on his music. Lyrics or musical phrasing may be similar but what

matters is what the artist adds to the song: what they change, keep, and how they arrange

their blues to match an emotion. Following Skip James argument, we see the ingenuity in

Johnson. An artist who was able to combine elements of classic, country and emerging

urban blues and create a sound of his own. Robert Johnson represents a period in the

blues when musicians were combining a variety of techniques and styles in new and

original ways to advance the form.

In the summer of 1941 Dr. John Work of Fisk University and Alan Lomax of the

Library of Congress undertook a project to document the culture of the Mississippi Delta.

Folk music was their primary focus but they were interested in all facets of Delta life.

Both Work and Lomax were intrigued by stories of Robert Johnson and intended to

record him first hand for the Library of Congress. After talking to the locals, they learned

that Johnson had been murdered in 1937—poisoned by a jealous lover’s husband. The

fabled bluesman was gone but the blues still lived in the Delta. Disappointed but not

disillusioned, they continued their project. Word of mouth brought them to Stovall’s

Plantation and to ask for Mckinley “Muddy Water” Morganfield.

121 Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home, 112.

64

Epilogue:

Muddy Waters, 1941-1943

The blues can’t die because spirituals will never die, and it’s a steal from spirituals and Rock and Roll is a steal from the old original blues.

—Big Bill Broonzy I’m leavin’ this mornin’ if I have to, to ride the blinds. I’m feelin’ mistreated, and I don’t mind dyin.’

—Muddy Waters, Country Blues

Commercial interest in the Delta had all but ceased. Charley Patton’s last

Paramount session was in 1934. Son House, Willie Brown, and Louis Johnson recorded

only once in 1930. Outside of Robert Johnson, no Delta musician had recorded since

Patton. Beneath the record industry’s disengagement, the regional style flourished. Delta

musicians were hearing Big Bill Broonzy, Peetie Wheatstraw, and Memphis Minnie.

Younger musicians were more in-tune to popular trends. Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters,

and David “Honey Boy” Edwards, combined the smooth urban tones with rough Delta

intensity creating a sound distinct from their teachers—Patton, Brown, Louis and House.

The Fisk University-Library of Congress Coahoma County study undertaken in

1941 was born of John Work’s vision to collect folk expressions of the Delta’s African-

American population. The study found the Delta at a crossroads. Robert Johnson was the

first of a generation of younger musicians whose musical influences came from outside

the boundaries of the Delta. With the benefit of the jukebox and popular records a wider

range of blues influenced the generation that followed Patton, Brown and House. The

result was a new blues sound that combined the distinct regional style of the Delta with

other forms of expression found in classic and urban blues. John Work and Alan Lomax

65

came to Mississippi as researchers—in the end they propelled the blues forward, bringing

the Delta sound out of the South by inspiring the young Muddy Waters.122

On Thursday, August 28, 1941 John Work and Alan Lomax arrived in Coahoma

County, Mississippi. On Sunday they found Muddy Waters, then twenty-six years old

and soon to be one of the Library of Congress’ spokesmen on the Delta blues. Muddy

recorded two solo sides for Work and Lomax.

The first song recorded was titled Country Blues in Lomax notes and Late in the

Evenin’ in Work’s; the second was I Be’s Troubled or I’ve Never Been Satisfied

according to Work.123 Muddy’s blues begins with the slide, playing a descending

chromatic run leading toward the tonic before beginning his vocal line—echoing Son

House and Charley Patton. Once he starts singing we can here an artist coming of age.

Underneath Muddy’s rich tenor are his influences: the high soprano cries of Leroy Carr,

mixed with the shouts of Patton and Willie Brown, and the raspy mumble of Peetie

Wheatstraw. The lyrics are built from a collection of stock blues phrases borrowed from

earlier classic and Delta tunes. There are lines from Bessie Smith’s St. Louis Blues,

Willie Brown’s Future Blues and Robert Johnson’s Walking Blues.

In Country Blues Muddy parallels Willie Brown:

Minutes seem like hours, child, and hours seem like days. Seems like my woman, she might stop her low down ways.124

And in I’ve Never Been Satisfied Muddy borrows from Bessie Smith:

Well, if I feel tomorrow like I feel today, I’m goin’ pack my suitcase and make my get-a-way.125

122 Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov, “Introduction,” in Lost Delta Found, 1. 123 John Work, “Untitled Manuscript,” in Lost Delta Found, 88. 124 John Work, 88-89. 125 Ibid.

66

Muddy is part of the blues continuum. There is the trochaic rhythm and twelve bar

structure that characterized both classic, urban and some Delta blues. He embraced

tradition and originality while applying his own personal nuance on record alongside his

forefathers.

After his song, conversation began between Alan and Muddy. Alan led the

discussion, “Tell me a little of the story of it, if you don’t mind, if it’s not too personal. I

want to know the facts, and how you felt and why you felt the way you did. It’s a very

beautiful song.”126 Muddy’s answer illuminates a simple truth about the blues idiom

lyric: “Well I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind.”127 Muddy’s blues is a sound

born of emotion, perhaps why it hits such a powerful chord inside so many people. It is

universal. The blues transcends racial dimensions. The Chicago Defender recognized this

power in 1916: “Music—inspiring, soul-stirring music—knows no color: it’s divine, it

touches all hearts and all nationalities.” In 1916 the Defender was appealing for popular

recording of the blues, in 1941 Muddy Waters asserted the same simple truth in his own

words when he explained the blues to the Library of Congress.

I’m leaving this morning, sure do hate to go. I’m leaving this morning, and I sure do hate to go. Well I got to leave this Burr Clover Farm, I ain’t coming back here no more.

—Muddy Waters, Burr Clover Blues

126 “Interview No. 1,” in Muddy Waters: the Complete Plantation Recordings, UMG Recordings Inc, 1993, CD, track 2. 127 Ibid.

67

In August of 1943, Muddy Waters boarded a Chicago bound train, leaving his

southern roots for the last time. When he stepped off the platform the Delta blues—the

steady trochaic rhythm, haunting slide, and deep history of Patton, House and Robert

Johnson, had arrived in Chicago. Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, and Memphis Minnie

helped Waters navigate the urban blues scene. Broonzy in particular, took Muddy under

his wing. The subsequent generations of blues musicians would make the same trip out of

the Delta—Elmore James, Sonny Boy Williamson II, and Little Walter Jacobs would all

leave the oppressive South to break into the music business in the North. Muddy Waters

was a true link between the arid Delta blues and the modern Chicago blues.

In an interview with Peter Guralnick in the 1960s, Muddy Waters reflected on his

place in the blues: “I consider myself to be, what you might call, a mixture of all three. I

had part of my own, part of Son House, and a little part of Robert Johnson.”128 He was

always conscious of his place in the blues continuum—an instrumental part in the

journey of the music.

128 Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home, 67.

68

Appendix:

The Blues Statement

A rhyming three-line stanza establishing a setting or stating a problem forms the

blues idiom. A blues may follow:

Well I’m drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea. Well I’m drifting and drifting, like a ship out on the sea. Well, I ain’t got nobody in this world to care for me.129

Our narrator’s problem is a feeling of despair, loneliness and heartache. Underneath the

lyrics the music brews a solution. The verse is sung over the twelve bar structure

beginning with the tonic. After the verse ends the music continues, responding to the

feeling presented in the vocal. It either repeats musically what the singer expresses

vocally or offers some kind of tonal resolution by way of blue notes. These blue notes are

half tones, in between tones. They are not quite half steps, nor whole steps, far from

accidentals—they cannot be transcribed and are only felt. They are defined technically as

flatted thirds or fifths but are elusive. Characteristic blue notes and revolving twelve bar

structure create the blues aesthetic:

I ---- I ---- I ---- I ---- IV ---- IV---- I---- I---- V ---- IV ---- I ---- V----I :

I = Tonic IV = Dominant V = Subdominant

The sum of the blues idiom and the aesthetic creates the blues statement—the musical

resolution of a lyrical problem. There are many exceptions and these terms are meant

only as points of departure to discuss the genre in further detail. 129 Driftin’ Blues, Charles Brown, in “Best of the Blues Vol. 1,” CD, track 4.

69

Bibliography

B.B. King and David Ritz. Blues All Around Me: the Autobiography of B.B. King. New York: Avon Books, 1996.

Bertrum Barnes and Glenn Wheeler, “A Lonely Fork in the Road,” Living Blues,

November/December 1990, 26-28. Bruynoghe, Yannick and Big Bill Broonzy. Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story as

told to Yannick Bruynoghe. Da Capo Press 1992. New York City, New York. Charters, Samuel. The Blues Makers. New York: Da Capo Paperback, 1991. ___. The Legacy of the Blues. London: Da Capo Paperback, 1977. ___. The Roots of the Blues: an African Search. Boston: Marion Boyars,

1981.

___. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1959 rev.1975. Cook, Bruce. Listen to the Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1973. Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. Cambridge: Da Capo Paperbacks, 2002. Evans, Davis. Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues. New York: Da

Capo Press, 1987. Ferris, William. Blues From the Delta. New York: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1978. Garon, Paul, “Robert Johnson: Perpetuation of a Myth,” Living Blues,

November/December 1990, 34-36. ___. The Devil’s Son-in-Law: the Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and his Songs. London:

Studio Vista Limited, 1971. Gordon, Robert. Can’t Be Satisfied: the Life and Times of Muddy Waters. New York:

Back Bay Books, 2002. Groom, Bob, “Blind Lemon Jefferson,” Blues World, Booklet No.3, March 1970, 1-34. ___, “Charlie Patton,” Blues World, Booklet No. 2, March 1969, 1-18. ___, “Robert Johnson,” BluesWorld, Booklet No. 1, May 1969, 1-26.

70

Guralnick, Peter, “The Rediscovered Bluesman—Skip James,” Blues World, November 1966, 11-17.

___. Feels Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues and Rock n Roll. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1999.

___. Searching for Robert Johnson. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1989. Handy, W.C. Father of the Blues: an Autobiography. New York: Collier Books, 1970. Herzhaft, Gerard. Encyclopedia of the Blues. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press,

1992. Hughes, Langston, ed. The Book of Negro Folklore. New York: Dodd, Mead and

Company, 1958. John Godrich and Robert M. W. Dixon. Blues and Gospel Records: 1902-1942. London:

Storyville Publications and Co., 1969. Jones, Leroi (Amiri Baraka). Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York:

Perennial, 2002. Keil, Charles. Urban Blues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Lavere, Steve, “Tying Up a Few Loose Ends,” Living Blues, November/December 1990,

31-33. Lester, Julius, “I Can Make My Own Songs—an interview with Son House,” Sing Out,

Vol. 15, No. 3, 1965, 38-47. Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. Marcus, Greil. Mystery Train Images of American Rock n Roll. New York: Plume Books,

1997. Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne, ed. Oxford Dictionary of Music. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1994. Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. Da Capo Paperback, 2000. ___. The Blue Devils of Nada: a Contemporary American Approach to Aesthetic

Statement. New York: Pantheon Books, 1996. ___. The Hero and the Blues. University of Missouri Press, 1973. Oliver, Paul. Conversation With the Blues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1965.

71

Palmer, Robert. Deep Blues. New York: Penguin, 1982. Perls, Nick. “Son House Interview—Part One,” 78 Quarterly, No. 1 1967, 59-61. Robert Gordon and Bruce Nemerov. Ed. Lost Delta Found: Rediscovering the Fisk

University Library of Congress Coahoma County Study, 1941-1942. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press.

Robert M.W. Dixon and John Godrich. Recording the Blues. New York: Stein and Day

Publishers, 1970. Rowe, Mike. Chicago Blues: the City and the Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1975. Sackheim, Eric. The Blues Line: a Collection of Blues Lyrics from Leadbelly to Muddy

Waters. New York: Schirmer Books, 1975. Santelli, Robert. The Big Book of Blues. New York: Penguin Books, 2001. Terkel, Studs. Giants of Jazz. New York: the New Press, 1957. ___. Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times. New York: Pantheon Books, 1977. Wald, Elijah. Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues. New

York: Harper Collins Publishers, Inc., 2004. Wardlow, Gayle Dean, “Ledell Johnson Remembers his Brother Tommy,” 78 Quarterly,

No. 1, 1967, 63-65. ___ . “The Talent Scouts: H.C. Speir 1895-1972,” 78 Quarterly, No. 8 1994, 11-33. Welding, Peter J. “Not Strictly a Bluesman,” Blues Unlimited, No. 30, 1966, 3-5. Work, John Wesley, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, New York: Bonanza Books,

1940. ____. Folk Song of the American Negro, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969.

72

Discography:

“Back to the Crossroads: the Roots of Robert Johnson,” various artists, Compact Disc:

Yazoo Records, 2004. “Master’s of the Delta Blues: Friends of Charley Patton,” various artists, Compact Disc:

Yazoo Records, 1991. “The Stuff That Dreams Are made of: Rarities and Re-Issued Gems of the 1920s and

1930s.” Compact Disc: Shanachie Records, 2006. Broonzy, Big Bill. “An Introduction to Big Bill Broonzy,” Compact Disc: Fuel Records,

2007. Broonzy, Big Bill. “Vol. 1 1927-1932,” Compact Disc: Document Records, 2005. Collins, Sam. “Jailhouse Blues,” Compact Disc, Yazoo Records, 1991. Johnson, Robert. “The Complete Recordings,” Compact Disc, Columbia Records 1991. Lomax, Alan. “Blues in the Mississippi Night,” various artists, Compact Disc: Rykodisc,

1991. Minnie, Memphis. “Hoodoo Lady: 1933-1937,” Compact Disc: Sony BMG Music, 1991. Patton, Charley. “Charlie Patton: Primeval Blues, Rags and Gospel Songs,” Compact

Disc: Yazoo Records, 2005. Scorsese, Martin. Prod. “Martin Scorsese Presents: the Blues,” Compact Disc: Hip-O

Records, 2003. Smith, Bessie. “Empress of the Blues.” Compact Disc: Charly Records, March 1994. Spivey, Victoria. “Vol. 1 1926-1927,” Compact Disc: Document Records, 2005. Terkel, Studs. “Studs Terkel’s Weekly Almanac Radio Program No. 4: Folk Music and

Blues.” Compact Disc, Smithsonian-Folkways 1956, re-released in 2005. Waters, Muddy. “The Complete Plantation Recordings,” Compact Disc: UMG

Recordings Inc. 1993. Wheatstraw, Peetie. “Vol. 1 1930-1932,” Compact Disc, Document Records: 2005. ___. “Vol. 4 1936-1937,” Compact Disc, Document Records 2005.

73

Further Listening:

Classic Blues: Bessie Smith, The Complete Recordings Volumes 1, Columbia. Ma Rainey, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, Yazoo Records. Mamie Smith, Crazy Blues, Vol. 1920-1921. Document Records. Victoria Spivey, Vol. 1 1926-1927, and Vol. 2 1927-1929. Document Records Country Blues: Blind Blake, Before the Blues: Early American Black Music Scene Vol. 3 Blind Lemon Jefferson, the Best of Blind Lemon Jefferson: Recordings of the 1920s Blind Willie Johnson, Praise God I’m Satisfied Blind Willie McTell, Statesboro Blues: the Early Years, 1927-1935 Mississippi John Hurt, D.C. Blues: the Library of Congress Recordings, The Avalon Sessions: Complete 1928 Okeh Recordings 1928 Sessions Mississippi Blues: Bertha Lee, Masters of the Delta Charlie Patton, Charlie Patton, Father of the Delta Blues Louis Johnson, Masters of the Delta Muddy Waters, the Complete Plantation Recordings: 1941, Folk Singer Chess-MCA Records. Robert Johnson, the Complete Recordings: Robert Johnson Skip James, the Complete Early Recordings Son House, Original Delta Blues, Complete Library of Congress Recordings Tommy Johnson, the Complete Recordings 1928-1930 Document Records. Willie Brown, Masters of the Delta: Friends of Charlie Patton Early Urban Blues: Big Bill Broonzy, the Big Bill Broonzy Story UMG Records, The Young Big Bill Broonzy Shanahachie Records. Memphis Minnie, Hoodoo Lady: 1933-1937 Sony Records. Lonnie Johnson, 1926-1940 Document Records. Leroy Carr, Naptown Blues Yazoo Records. Scrapper Blackwell, the Virtuoso Guitar of Scrapper Blackwell, Yazoo Records. Peetie Wheatstraw, The Devil’s Son-in-Law Document Records. Tampa Red, Vol. 1-15 Document Records.