Escaping the Delta (11 page)

In support of this assumption, there is a surviving songlist from Memphis Minnie, provided to let customers at her shows know what numbers she could perform on request. Though she recorded only blues during her peak period, this list includes titles like “How High the Moon,” “Lady Be Good,” “Jersey Bounce,” “When My Dream Boat Comes Home,” and “I Love You for Sentimental Reasons.”
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Big Bill Broonzy was similarly versatile. Once again, he recorded only blues and hokum in the 1930s, but after connecting with white revivalist audiences in the 1940s he cut several Tin Pan Alley songs, including hot versions of “Who's Sorry Now” and “I'm Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover,” accompanied by Australian and English jazz bands.
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In fact, there was no neat divide between blues and jazz. All early jazz musicians could play blues, as witness the accompaniments Armstrong, King Oliver, Fletcher Henderson, and hundreds of other jazz-
identified artists provided for various blues queens. What is less widely acknowledged is that a lot of the musicians placed in the blues category were making at least some of their living with combos that would more logically fit into the jazz bag. Basically, it tended to be a question of instrumentation: If a blues artist ended up at a gig with some horn players, the result was likely to fit our modern idea of “good-time jazz,” the sort of music heard on records by Clarence Williams's Washboard Band or the Louisville Jug Band's sessions with Johnny Dodds and Earl Hines.
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The outstanding example of this overlap was the Harlem Hamfats, a Chicago band led by the Mississippi guitarist Kansas Joe McCoy, with his brother Charlie on mandolin and two New Orleans–style jazzmen, trumpeter Herb Morand and clarinetist Odell Rand. The McCoys, whom I already mentioned in connection with the Mississippi string bands, had impeccable blues credentials. Joe was most famous for the duets he cut with his wife, Memphis Minnie, and Charlie supplemented his solo career by recording as accompanist to Tommy Johnson, Peetie Wheatstraw, Sonny Boy Williamson, and dozens of other blues singers. Nonetheless, the McCoys' work with the Hamfats has a hip jazziness that cannot simply be credited to the influence of Morand and Rand. Joe wrote virtually all of the group's material, starting with “Oh! Red” in 1936, a song that was popular enough to be covered by Count Basie and the Ink Spots—as well as by Blind Willie McTell and Howlin' Wolf. The Hamfat sound was an influential precursor to the “jive” style that would be popularized by artists like Slim Gaillard and Louis Jordan, and McCoy would later reshape the Hamfats' “Weed Smoker's Dream” into a minor-keyed blues ballad, “Why Don't You Do Right,” which was a blues hit for Lil Green and launched Peggy Lee's career with the Benny Goodman Orchestra.

It should come as no surprise that Tampa Red and Leroy Carr, the defining pop-blues stars of the 1930s, were also adept at more mainstream styles. Red, in particular, was anything but a blues purist. He loved to play kazoo, blatting out rambunctious recaps of jazz horn lines, and one of the Hamfats' few nonoriginal songs was a cover of his uptown jive number, “Let's Get Drunk and Truck”—which he had recorded in 1936 alongside a kitschy rhumba, “When You Were a Girl
of Seven (and I Was a Boy of Nine).” By that time, his recordings already included a nice version of the pop standard “Nobody's Sweetheart,” and a jaunty tribute to Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway, titled “When I Take My Vacation in Harlem”:

Carr never got into anything quite that flamboyant, but he showed an equal affection for material that would startle those who think of him as a straight blues singer. It is very rare, however, for any of these songs to turn up on compilations of his work. A survey of Carr's familiar recordings would suggest that he was a fine but quite limited artist. His greatest success was with slow blues numbers, and while he was a superlative lyricist and sang with soulful grace, his piano accompaniments are very much of a piece—basic three-chord patterns, many played in the same key. This is why some of the more hard-core “country blues” fans have criticized him and his followers as facile hacks who churned out repetitive, assembly-line product.

I am a great admirer of Carr's blues ballads, but when one hears a dozen of them back-to-back they begin to get monotonous—which is why it is only fair to stress that they were never intended to be heard that way. They were singles, destined for home phonographs or jukeboxes where they would alternate with other selections. In live performance, Carr would presumably have interpolated a lot of other material to break up the evening, and when one searches more deeply into his discography, there are quite a few clues as to what it might have included. Along with upbeat hokum numbers like “Papa's on the Housetop” and “Gettin' All Wet,” which have been sparingly reissued on the ballad albums, there are a few sides that show Carr to have been a creditable Tin Pan Alley crooner.

To the best of my knowledge, only one such performance has been included in any blues compilation, and I can still recall my astonishment when I heard it for the first time. Back in the 1970s, Yazoo
Records issued an LP of Carr and Scrapper Blackwell, which along with the expected blues cuts had a lovely version of Irving Berlin's sentimental ballad “How About Me.” Had I not heard it in this context, I would not have even recognized the performers. Carr's voice is pitched in a higher tenor range than usual, and has a lilting, almost overrefined flavor, very different from the deeper and more conversational style of his blues work. His piano playing is light and swinging, and Blackwell adeptly negotiates the more sophisticated chord changes. For years, I played this song to people as an example of Carr's versatility, suggesting that the reason he had become the blues world's counterpart to Bing Crosby was because he was himself part of the wave of pop crooners. Believing it to be unique, I also put it forward as an example of the limitations of the historical record. It was only while working on this book that I finally listened to Carr's complete recordings, and found that he had cut a half dozen similar pieces.
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It is an open question whether, given orchestral arrangements and first-rate material, Carr could have done as well crooning Tin Pan Alley ballads as he did singing blues. Judging by what survives on record, he would not have been a serious threat to Bing Crosby and Rudy Vallee, but the playing field was anything but level. In any case, he handled this material more than competently, obviously enjoyed it, and would undoubtedly have recorded a lot more of it had the opportunity been available. However, blues artists were explicitly discouraged from broadening their range in this way. As Little Brother Montgomery recalled:

Paramount's Mayo Williams made no bones about the limitations he placed on the artists he considered to be blues singers. He explained that when they came in with pop-style ballads, “I would very quickly say: ‘Well, we can't use it. Write me a blues.' In doing it that way I'd save a lot of embarrassment for myself, the company, and the person.”
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Because of such strictures, I can produce no proof that blues balladeers like Peetie Wheatstraw or Bumble Bee Slim ever sang pop, but it certainly seems probable. Being more limited musicians than Carr or Lonnie Johnson, they may have been less expert at it, but that would have been irrelevant if they were the only musicians available at a particular party and the crowd wanted a break from twelve-bar repetition. Or, perhaps more to the point, if the musician himself needed a break. Over the years, I have heard any number of black blues stars complain about always being ghettoized in that category, and insist that they were comfortable with a lot more than what they were typically allowed to perform on record or onstage. As Little Milton, who continues to be classed as a bluesman despite several soul hits, told me, “I would get totally bored if I just sat around from night after night and I could only play the twelve-bar blues stuff. I would always want to venture off into the T-Bone Walkers, the Roy Browns, Big Joe Turners and people that were doing different kind of stuff—even Nat ‘King' Cole, a little Sammy Davis, a little Frank Sinatra. I always had the versatile-type thing in my mind.”

Before moving on, two further points should be made. The first is that, along with barring blues players from performing the latest Bing Crosby numbers, record producers also tended to discourage them from simply covering Leroy Carr or Lonnie Johnson songs (except in situations where one company wanted to rush out a cover of another company's hit).
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One of the basic requirements in the blues recording field, at least by the late 1920s, was that the artists must have new material. Mississippi bluesmen have recalled that H. C. Speir, the Jackson furniture store owner who acted as a local talent scout, would tell them that they needed a minimum of four original songs in order to do a session, and that was probably typical of the field as a whole.

This demand for original material was the exact opposite of what
was expected of musicians at clubs or dances. As I have mentioned, even the best-known live entertainers in the days before jukeboxes were expected to perform a range of contemporary hits, and that was as true in the blues world as anywhere else. Just as Duke Ellington covered the latest pop products along with his own compositions, anyone known as a blues singer would be asked to play “How Long,” “Tight Like That,” and similar standards. Most crowds have always preferred hearing the hot favorites to exploring unfamiliar material, and in this way the juke joints and rent parties were much like the modern bar scene, where blues bands—like country, soul, or classic rock bands—still devote the majority of their stage time to covering other people's songs, only pulling out original material when they are feeling adventurous or trying to impress a record company scout.

The songs that blues artists played in the studio not only failed to represent their day-to-day repertoires, but were often created specifically for the recording session and never performed before or since. In the 1960s, revivalist fans were often astonished to find that their idols did not remember songs recorded thirty or forty years earlier, not understanding that in many cases the singers had only learned those songs for an afternoon session and would not have been able to sing them even the following week. (And that is assuming they knew them at all. Blues singers, like other people in commercial pop, often used lyric sheets at their sessions—or if they were illiterate, had lyrics read to them—and did not necessarily memorize a song unless it became a hit and needed to be performed at live shows.) This was true not only of the more uptown, formulaic performers. Blind Willie McTell has a record called “Georgia Rag,” which was a studio reworking of Blind Blake's “Wabash Rag.” He may have rehearsed it for a few days previous to recording, but was obviously more accustomed to just singing the original Blake version, since at one point he slips up and sings “Doin' that Wa-Georgia Rag.” Likewise, Skip James told of the producer asking him for a reworking of Roosevelt Sykes's hit “44 Blues,” and on the resulting record, which he called “22-20 Blues,” he slips near the end and goes back to Sykes's original caliber.
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I am not suggesting that bluesmen created original material only for recording purposes. The blues style has always put a certain value on
personal expression, and lots of people came up with original songs that were never recorded. My point is only that every blues performer had a solid repertoire of other people's songs, and these were often their most popular and requested numbers, but this fact is not reflected by their recordings.

The final matter to be addressed here is the argument made by some blues experts that, although blues singers did indeed perform non-blues material, this was done only to please white audiences. It is true that white and black audiences often had different tastes, and that in some regions, at some times, black dancers were happy with a full evening of blues while white dancers demanded other styles. However, it is equally true that, even in the small towns of the Mississippi Delta, there have always been plenty of black dancers who wanted to hear the latest hit sounds—whether those were brass band ragtime, Ellingtonian swing, Louis Jordan, or James Brown—and plenty of white folks who demanded the rawest, raunchiest, most primitive blues. White fans may have been a factor in keeping the black fiddle tradition alive, but they were hardly the main catalyst in making black rural musicians cover the hits of Louis Armstrong and Earl Hines. Even in areas where such musicians have recalled that they played more non-blues material for whites than for blacks, this seems to have been a matter of proportion, not exclusivity.

Meanwhile, the more thoughtful white blues researchers have long been aware that they are themselves an audience, and that black musicians have often tailored both performances and interviews to their tastes. If an older artist knew that his interviewer loved the early acoustic styles, he might emphasize his own affection for old-fashioned blues playing, even if at home he preferred to listen to Lawrence Welk. I once had a Mississippi blues expert insist that Eugene Powell, who had spent an afternoon proudly showing me the sophisticated chord changes he had mastered, played pop and country songs only to please white visitors. I could not help thinking that this implied a striking contempt for Powell's intelligence, since for at least thirty years all the white people who had come to see him were blues fans, and they wanted to hear him sing “Street Walkin' Blues,” not his versions of “Five Foot Two, Eyes of Blue” or “Tennessee Waltz.”
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