Escaping the Delta (10 page)

Pretty much all the blues artists of the early era could fill requests for non-blues repertoire if asked, and it was due to the commercial trajectory of the record industry that they were so rarely asked during studio sessions. In this sense, the companies invented the concept of the “bluesman”—though this term was not current at the time—by always requesting blues from black rural performers. If black singers had no blues repertoire, they stood little chance of being recorded, while if they did, that repertoire tended to make up the vast majority of what got preserved, irrespective of what else they might know or what they performed most frequently at dances or on street corners.

A recently discovered Paramount “test pressing” proves that this could be true of even the deepest Mississippi masters. Tommy Johnson's records are considered to be among the bedrock documents of the classic Delta style, alongside those of Charley Patton and Son House.
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However, the unissued pressing reveals that Johnson began his first session for Paramount Records by trying out two versions of a yodeling cowboy number, complete with Jimmie Rodgers–flavored guitar strumming. Johnson's blues work was always noted for its lovely falsetto passages, and his yodeling has a similar feel, but the song is still a world away from his familiar repertoire. Listening to it, one cannot doubt that he was quite comfortable with the Rodgers approach, and could have come up with more of this material had it been in de
mand. Clearly, though, it was not what the record producers wanted from him, since it remained unheard for the next seventy years. As a result, Johnson was typed by everyone as a brilliant but limited exponent of the Patton style of hard Delta blues.
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As I have already suggested, the few folklorists who went into the South in those early years would only partially balance this picture. Though their motives were different from those of the commercial record scouts, they also had a specific agenda, which was to find survivals of older traditions and “typical” examples of regional and ethnic styles. Thus, they were uninterested when their informants, whether white or black, sang current hits or anything learned off records, and they often sought out “white” material such as the British ballads from their Euro-American sources, while mining Afro-Americans for songs that might reveal African or slavery-era connections.
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As a result, their recordings often reinforce the impression that Southern music could be split along racial lines. There were exceptions to this rule—John Lomax collected his canonical version of “Home on the Range” from a black cow-camp cook—but overall the recordings left to us by the folklorists and the commercial companies both tend to give a skewed view of the racial divide in the music of early rural performers, and reinforce the impression that such players were limited to a distinct “country” repertoire.

It is hard to blame anyone for this. In those days before tape recording, both folklorists and record company men were using metal or acetate discs, which were relatively expensive and in most cases could hold only between three and four and a half minutes of music or talk. (By 1940, Alan Lomax had large discs that ran at 331/3 and could hold fifteen minutes, but wartime rationing meant that he had a very limited supply of them.) The folklorists would certainly have liked to record far more than they did, but had to concentrate on what was most distinctive in each artist's repertoire. The most responsible ones tried to flesh out their recordings with other data, an example of which will help me make my broader point:

Any serious blues fan is aware of the recordings Muddy Waters made for Alan Lomax, John Work, and the Library of Congress in 1941 and 1942. These are precious documents, both because they are
excellent in themselves and because they provide a glimpse of one of the seminal electric blues artists near the beginning of his career. However, they include few surprises. Aside from the fact that on some tracks Waters is working with a fiddler, they are pretty much what one would expect, knowing the roots of his music and his later evolution. He has his own style, but is clearly a bluesman in what is now considered the mainstream Mississippi Delta tradition.

But what is not on the records, and how did Waters think of himself? In this case, Lomax and Work have provided the beginnings of an answer, and it is very revealing. Along with recording music, they conducted interviews and filled out a standard form on each of their informants. When asked to identify himself, Waters did not mention blues, but instead described himself as “Stovall [Farm]'s famous guitar picker.” Along with explaining that the first song he learned to play was “How Long—How Long Blues,” off the Leroy Carr record, Waters gave a list of the songs in his working repertoire, and it is not at all what one would expect from hearing his recordings.

Less than half the songs Waters mentioned were blues, and of the fifteen that were, one was “St. Louis Blues” (which Lomax classified as pop rather than blues) and six were learned off records by currently popular singers from Chicago and St. Louis. Meanwhile, Waters listed seven recent Gene Autry hits, including “Missouri Waltz,” “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” and “Take Me Back to My Boots and Saddle,” and a dozen mainstream pop songs, including “Chattanooga Choo-Choo,” “Darktown Strutters Ball,” “Blues in the Night,” “Red Sails in the Sunset,” and “Whatcha Know Joe?”
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Waters told Lomax that his most popular pieces at local dances included many of these blues and pop songs, as well as “Corinna” and “Down by the Riverside.” In another interview, he would recall: “We had pretty dances then. We was black bottoming, Charleston, two-step, waltz, and one-step.”
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Among the things worth noting here are that blues was part of a broader mix of pop music at Delta dances, even when the band featured Muddy Waters, and that all of the nonoriginal blues songs Waters mentioned were learned off records, most of them by current hit-makers like Walter Davis and Sonny Boy Williamson. When asked
about his favorite musicians, Waters named Davis as his favorite blues recording artist and Fats Waller as his favorite radio star.

Lomax also noted that Waters had a wind-up Victrola in his house, but only seven records. Four of these had been issued within the year, including two by the Mississippi bluesman Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup and one by Jay McShann and his Kansas City orchestra. The remaining three were a gospel preaching record and older discs by Peetie Wheatstraw and Sonny Boy Williamson.
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Unsurprisingly, Waters told Lomax that his favorite instrument was guitar, followed by piano and harmonica, but in other interviews he would add that his first instrument had been an accordion. (Only one black Mississippian recorded on accordion during the prewar era—Walter Rhodes, who cut a set of blues in 1927 accompanied by the legendary Delta guitarist Hacksaw Harney—but the instrument was not particularly rare. Henry Townsend, a sometime associate of Robert Johnson's, recalls that his father played one, and Charley Patton sometimes worked with an accordionist named Homer Lewis.)
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I cite all of this information to show what a limited and inaccurate picture we would have if all we knew about Muddy Waters's musical range was what survives on recordings. Without this additional material, it would be natural to classify him simply as a blues artist, firmly in the regional Delta tradition—indeed, that is how he has been remembered in every music history I know. Though Waters went on to become a major star, the defining figure in the evolution of acoustic Mississippi styles into the electric Chicago sound, all of the hundreds of sides he recorded over the years were chosen for their appeal to a blues-buying public. As a result, we will never know how he approached “Chattanooga Choo-Choo” or “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” whether he expertly reworked the Autry and big-band numbers to suit his style or just played pedestrian cover versions. Furthermore, we cannot judge how his experience with these other musics affected his blues style.

Since Lomax interviewed only a handful of musicians, it is also difficult to judge how closely Waters's repertoire matched that of his Mississippi peers. There are a few clues, though. Skip James, when he began playing on the folk circuit in the 1960s, would occasionally sit
down at a piano and perform Hoagy Carmichael's “Lazybones,” and his biographer wrote of him playing the Tin Pan Alley torch song “Am I Blue,” complete with a kazoo solo.
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Or take Johnny Shines, Robert Johnson's sometime traveling partner. Though his records all hew close to the standard blues forms, he took pride in his versatility, and enjoyed talking of his apprenticeship to a jazz piano player he knew only as W.J.:

Honeyboy Edwards, another of Johnson's associates, would recall working with a sax player and performing songs like “Sophisticated Lady” and “Blue Moon.”
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All in all, it seems fair to assume that most players who were regularly working at dances in any but the most remote rural locations could at least make a fair stab at this sort of pop material, just as those who played out in the country would generally have been able to include at least a few hoedowns and waltzes.

This was, if anything, more true in other regions of the South. The surviving recordings of black players from Atlanta and the Carolinas show a greater tendency to include non-blues material than in Mississippi. (Though this may be due as much to the tastes of the talent scouts in each region as to the repertoires of the players themselves.) Overall, it is probable that no one outside vaudeville made a living during this period as purely a “blues” player. All were dance players, party players, street-corner players—songsters and musicianers, if you will—who included blues because it was one of the hot sounds of their time. In vaudeville or minstrel troupes, things might be a bit dif
ferent. There, where a blues singer was just one of multiple acts and often performed only two or three songs, she might limit herself to blues. Even in the case of the blues queens, though, the earliest report of Bessie Smith describes her as a teenager singing “Won't You Come Home, Bill Bailey,” she recorded several Tin Pan Alley pieces, and by the end of her career she had abandoned her old-fashioned blues style for a more commercial swing sound.
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As for the city-based piano-guitar stars who followed Carr and Tampa Red, they were working a lot of all-night gigs at rent parties and clubs, and would frequently have to reach beyond their blues repertoire. Paradoxically, they were even less likely to get this repertoire onto records than a lot of their rural street-corner peers. While a more countrified player like Peg Leg Howell was assumed to be a musical primitive who would play a whole mess of different stuff, the urban professionals were expected to come into the studio with polished, salable material in the current commercial style. The result is that someone like Lonnie Johnson, who could croon a song like “Old Rocking Chair” or “How Deep Is the Ocean” as smoothly as the most adept band singer, recorded only a couple of non-blues vocals among his 191 prewar sides. This was by no means his own choice. He was a professional, and took pride in being able to handle whatever styles came his way. “We played anything they wanted to hear,” he once said, recalling his early days in New Orleans. “Ragtime melodies, sweet songs, waltzes…A lot of people liked opera, so we did some of that too.” He became a blues singer because that was his only route to recording. He was living in St. Louis in 1925, and entered a blues contest that offered an Okeh recording contract as first prize. “I guess I would have done anything to get recorded,” he recalled. “It just happened to be a blues contest, so I sang blues.”
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Johnson had a light, crooner's voice, and could easily have become a proto–Nat “King” Cole, but in 1928 there was no interest in that—or at least none perceived by the recording companies. As a result, he earned his place in history as a pioneering male blues star. He never lost his taste for smoother pop material, though, and when he was “rediscovered” in the 1960s, despite pressure from folk-blues enthusiasts
to maintain his 1920s persona, he chose to play an electric guitar and to sing a mix of pop-blues, Tin Pan Alley standards, and Frank Sinatra hits.

Likewise, a thorough survey of what was recorded by the Chicago-based blues stars of the 1930s turns up a number of examples that show how comfortable they were with other kinds of pop music. Georgia White, though known for her racy blues songs in the Broonzy style, first recorded as vocalist for Jimmy Noone's Apex Club Orchestra, singing a version of “When You're Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)” that shows fine jazz chops and an obvious debt to Louis Armstrong. Merline Johnson, “the Yas Yas Girl,” cut an exuberant version of Armstrong's hit “Old Man Mose,” accompanied by a racially mixed jazz band that included the teenaged George Barnes playing one of the earliest electric guitar solos on record. Casey Bill Weldon, a slide guitar virtuoso associated with the Memphis blues crowd, turned in a dazzling number aptly titled “Guitar Swing,” and his hokum outfit, the Washboard Rhythm Kings, cut an upbeat pop ballad called “Arlena.”
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In each of these cases, the recordings were unique and, if they did not exist, one would have no evidence that these artists were comfortable doing non-blues material. It is logical to assume that other Chicago “blues singers” were equally versatile but that the recording patterns of the period obscured this fact.