Devil Sent the Rain (3 page)

The music of Patton's that we now have comes down to us not from pristine masters that have been sitting in a record company's vault; they have been transferred from extremely rare and worn old shellac discs, each of which once belonged to someone for whom that disc was a very important possession. These recordings were acquired mostly by very poor people at what was to them a significant cost, one by one, just as they were conceived and recorded. They meant so much to the original owners that they would often be played until the grooves disintegrated. We have these performances now because they were collected—one by one, and often from the original owners—by collectors who went out into neighborhoods and knocked on doors to find them.

The performances were not assembled digitally in a modern studio, with overdubbing and multitracking. Patton walked into a room and sat in a chair; a light went on, and he sang. Then the light went off. Charley Patton opened a window in time for himself. And the real meaning behind that voice and that guitar reveals itself only over time. Be glad.

From the
Oxford American
's Fifth

Annual Music Issue, Summer 2001

 

In 2003 PBS presented a series of films, produced by Martin Scorsese, about the blues. Each film was auteured by a different director, among them Clint Eastwood, Wim Wenders, and Scorsese himself. A couple of different companies got together to produce a companion five-CD set, for which I wrote the accompanying essay, which won a Grammy Award for best album notes.

The physical award itself arrived at my New Orleans home, surrounded by perfectly fitted dense foam that filled a box the size of a small guitar amplifier. The box was retrieved from my house in the weeks following Katrina and brought to our temporary evacuation quarters in Missouri. It is presently in a witness protection program in a location we cannot disclose. Six years later, it is remarkable how many people still have not fully unpacked from their Katrina evacuation.

The Blues: A Musical Journey

1.

The blues is a tangle of contradictions. It is sad and funny, personal and traditional, optimistic and fatalistic, dark and bright. The blues is, in fact, a way of holding such opposites in the mind, and the heart, simultaneously. It originated among people at the bottom of the American ladder, and it came to be treasured throughout the world.

And, of course, it is too big a subject to be covered completely in five thousand words. How could you do justice to a genre that includes Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Charley Patton, Big Bill Broonzy, Robert Johnson, Blind Willie McTell, Jimmie Rodgers, Memphis Minnie, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, Cassandra Wilson, and the White Stripes? The blues has been played and sung by lone men and women with guitars and by full orchestras, by jug bands, rock and roll groups, jazz pianists, and cabaret singers. Its borders are porous, and its influence has seeped out into nearly everything surrounding it.

In fact it may be helpful to see the blues as a huge river through the middle of our culture. Almost every notable form of American music in the twentieth century is a city, or a village, along that river. Jazz, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, bluegrass, and even so-called serious or classical music, have all drawn strength, power, and refreshment from, and owe much of their character to, the blues.

2.

No one knows exactly where, when, or how the blues began. Blues as a specific musical form is at least one hundred years old as of this writing. But blues performance involves a body of expressive techniques, many of which are traceable back well into the nineteenth century, and some of which clearly go back to Africa.

Visitors to the antebellum South commonly reported hearing unusual vocalizing from slaves. The English actress Fanny Kemble, who in the 1830s spent time visiting a Georgia plantation, published a memoir that contained widely quoted references to “a music . . . extraordinarily wild and unaccountable.” What she heard may very likely have resembled music that survived to be recorded by the Library of Congress in the 1930s and even later. The sound of the vocal line, based on the five-note “pentatonic” scale common in folk music the world over, contained a cry, or a holler; notes were bent, flattened, “worried” for expressive effect. The group singing relied heavily on call and response between leader and chorus, establishing a rhythmic element that was part of the melody and that helped set a tempo for heavy labor. These work songs and field hollers survived almost unchanged, apparently, in poor rural areas of the south well into the middle of the twentieth century.

Beyond the strictly musical elements, the blues implies a stance—you might, if you were feeling ambitious, call it a philosophy of life. It was and is a way of neutralizing hard luck, of gaining a purchase on the facts of life that would allow one to survive and even thrive with humor, resilience, and style. The subject matter often involved ironies, things that couldn't be spoken out loud, which would be couched in a kind of code that might sound like nonsense to an outsider. Often the songs were about men who had run off from an oppressive situation, finding better luck down the road, a theme that has proved to be one of the most enduring in the blues.

Formally, the blues most commonly consists of a line, a kind of proposition (“
The woman I love, got great long curly hair
”), which is then repeated over a slightly altered harmonic background. Then a rhymed answering third line arrives (“
She's a married woman; her husband don't 'low me there
”), and the effect is satisfying. But there are many variations on this basic form, and watching for those variations is one of the pleasures of listening to the blues.

The subject matter of the blues has a long literary pedigree, at least as old as Odysseus, wandering for years with a worried mind, trying to make his way home. Furry Lewis's existential question of whether to put an end to himself under an Illinois Central train—“Went to the IC station, lay my head on the IC track; saw the IC comin', Lawd, and I snatched it back”—is a variation on Hamlet's “To be or not to be” soliloquy, just funnier. Blues has its antecedents in the thirteenth-century Provençal troubadours, in Cervantes (himself an ex-slave), in the bawdy adventures in Chaucer and Boccaccio. To all this, the blues added a specific, overtly erotic urgency—an exultation in the body and sexuality, combined with a sense that it is an abiding source of trouble. Perhaps because of that, the spirit of the blues is often close to the spirit of the joke. When Rodney Dangerfield says, “My wife always wants to make love in the back seat of the car. While I'm driving,” he's singing his own version of the blues. A piece of hard luck, but you laugh at it. Or you dance to it.

3.

The blues had been around for a while before anyone realized it was worth recording or trying to sell. The songwriter and bandleader W. C. Handy, himself an educated man and a schooled musician, was one of the first to see the commercial, and artistic, possibilities in the blues in the early years of the twentieth century. He had been playing show tunes and light classical music without much success, when he began noticing an appetite in both white and black audiences for more syncopated or overtly African-American music. His imagination was captured one evening in 1903 by an itinerant musician in a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi. Playing guitar in what we would now call a bottleneck style, the man repeated the words,

—a reference to two railroads. The line haunted Handy, who got the man's name and transcribed the lyric, which later found its way into one of Handy's own formal blues, “The Yellow Dog Blues.”

Handy had heard something there that he knew might be useful, and he set to work writing a series of songs that became some of the best-known blues—“St. Louis Blues,” “Joe Turner Blues,” “Memphis Blues,” “Beale Street Blues,” and a long string of others. These were regarded at the time as novelty tunes. He made his headquarters in Memphis, a city that was to play a huge role in the spread of the blues.

His early blues became hits, performed by singers, pianists, jazz bands, and even military bands. Following in his wake came a procession of other songwriters, black and white, hoping to capitalize on Handy's success. Much of what they wrote had little to do with what we think of as the blues, being more like minstrel-influenced Tin Pan Alley material, with titles like “Farmyard Blues,” “War Bride Blues,” and “Prairie Blues.” It is worth mentioning, too, that from the beginning the blues as a form—as well as the bent notes and call-and-response techniques we associate with it—was an element in jazz music. In fact the very first issued jazz record, made in 1917 by a group from New Orleans called the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, was the “Livery Stable Blues.”

Had it stopped there, the blues might have come to be regarded as another caricature of African-American expression, like the “coon song” of minstrel days. But in 1920 something happened that made all the difference. The record companies had been slow to record black talent (despite the success of a handful of minstrel-based recording artists, like the great stage performer Bert Williams), fearing that there might not be a market for it. But through the efforts of the pioneering songwriter Perry Bradford, in 1920 a young black singer named Mamie Smith recorded a song called “Crazy Blues.” The success of that record—it sold more than 75,000 copies in the first month alone—told the companies that there was a lot of money to be made from black music.

They began signing up and recording a string of black “comediennes”—theater singers with vaudeville experience on the black circuit—who would sing the bluesy pop songs with something close to an African-American sound. The great Ma Rainey—a seasoned vaudeville performer—was one of the best of these, a flamboyant performer who wore a necklace of gold pieces and was often accompanied by the best jazz musicians of the time. But she was preceded into the studio by almost a year by the greatest of all the women blues singers, Bessie Smith.

Bessie Smith had the talent to make what had been regarded as a novelty into a serious art, and she raised the bar for everyone who followed. Her sound was heavy and powerful, yet full of subtle expressive detail. She had a way of inhabiting the lyrics—even the occasionally inane ones that she was called on to record—and investing them with a meaning and commitment that was beyond anything anyone had heard on records. Called the “Empress of the Blues” by Columbia Records publicity, Smith garnered unprecedented financial success and popularity. She recorded vaudeville material and pop tunes as well as blues, but she brought her blues sensibility to everything she did, and became a major influence on many who followed her, including Billie Holiday and, much later, Janis Joplin. Behind her came a long line of talented singers in the same vein, such as Clara Smith, Trixie Smith, Ida Cox, Alberta Hunter, Sippie Wallace, the irrepressible Victoria Spivey, and many others.

4.

The recordings of these so-called classic blues singers sold very well in the early 1920s. But, partly because of the new competing medium of radio, the record companies were under constant pressure to find something new to sell their established customers—or, better still, to find entirely new markets. Very often they would take chances on things with no idea what they were doing, trying to find something that would lure customers. A lot of good music got recorded in this almost accidental way, including much of the best early white country, pioneering Cajun, and other ethnic and regional music of all types.

And in this spirit, in 1926, a Wisconsin-based company called Paramount, which had been recording Ma Rainey and Ida Cox and many of the classic blues singers, recorded two sides by a street singer from Texas named Blind Lemon Jefferson. These were much rawer and closer to the rural sound of the field holler than anything that had ever been put on record. Jefferson was a great singer, and the wailing melodic lines of his high tenor voice were supported by a constant and extraordinarily inventive commentary from his guitar. The recordings sold extremely well, and Paramount lost no time in getting Jefferson into the studio again, to be followed by a series of others: a trickle at first, then a deluge, of men (and a handful of women) with guitars who could sing what came to be called the country blues.

There was an apparently insatiable appetite for this kind of expression among black audiences, to whom these discs were exclusively marketed as “race records.” Most record companies got involved in recording for this market, often setting up specially numbered series to distinguish the “race” discs from others in their catalogues. The companies made field trips into the South, to cities like Atlanta, New Orleans, Dallas, and Memphis, to record local talent; in many cases they would bring favored artists north to recording facilities in Wisconsin, Indiana, Chicago, or New York.

And what music and poetry they found waiting out there for them. It was like discovering a lost continent, or a parallel universe that had been there all along, hidden in plain sight. They recorded ballads of bad men and folk heroes, like Stack-O-Lee and John Henry, songs full of restlessness and rambling and lost love, worried minds and wry humor, trains, with their black smokestacks and bells that shine like gold, highways and dirt roads and blood-red rivers, rain and floods and sun that would shine in your back door someday.

Every area of the country, it turned out, had a different style, and the recordings began carrying these styles out, like notes in bottles, for others to hear in other places. Texas delivered the haunting gospel singer Blind Willie Johnson and Texas Alexander, whose singing sounded like field hollers. Urbane Memphis had jug bands and jaunty medicine show singers like Frank Stokes and Furry Lewis. There was Atlanta, with its twelve-string guitar tradition including Barbecue Bob and the great Blind Willie McTell, whose high, plaintive voice is one of the most identifiable in the blues; there was slick Lonnie Johnson from St. Louis; Blind Blake from Florida, who could make his guitar sound like a whole band; the great fingerpickers from the Piedmont area in the Carolinas; barrelhouse pianists who played in lumber camps in Mississippi and Alabama and created the beginnings of boogie-woogie
.
And, perhaps the most intense of all, there were the singers from the plantations and small towns of the Mississippi Delta, like Charley Patton, Tommy Johnson, Son House, and Skip James, whose dark, driven sound seared the soul for keeps once you had heard it.

White singers knew about this stuff, too, and many rural white performers began recording blues. The most famous, and the greatest, of these was Jimmie Rodgers, whose “blue yodels” became a sensation. From the beginning, blues was an integral part of country music, and early performers such as Dock Boggs, Frank Hutchison, and the Carter Family recorded convincing blues performances, as did some of the pioneering Cajun performers, like the great accordionist Amédé Ardoin. Decades later, both the father of bluegrass music, Bill Monroe, and the great country singer-songwriter Hank Williams claimed to have taken early “lessons” with local bluesmen while coming of age.

And, of course, jazz bands played the blues. King Oliver and Louis Armstrong both accompanied the classic blues singers on recordings and translated the blues into instrumental jazz terms. Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, Don Redman, and a number of others were learning to orchestrate idiomatic blues for large jazz orchestras; as writer Albert Murray has pointed out, their instrumental and expressive techniques, the grammar of their style, evolved in large measure from the palette of the blues. The jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote that “Jazz would be an empty house without the blues,” and during this period there might not even have been a house in the first place without the blues. The centrality of blues to American music wasn't lost on George Gershwin, either, who deliberately incorporated blues elements into both his popular songs and his more ambitious compositions such as “Rhapsody in Blue.”