Escaping the Delta (12 page)

The fact is that all entertainers try to please their audiences, and the successful ones are expert at figuring out what an audience wants. The great blues singers were pros, not primitives. While most had very limited formal schooling, they were often well traveled, had performed for a wide range of people in widely varied situations, and were smart, sophisticated men and women. Many were adept at “reading” their listeners—and revivalist blues fans, whether scholarly or not, are a pretty easy audience to read. Such fans want to hear “deep,” “authentic” black music, and the musicians generally understand that. Which is to say, when an old black man at a blues festival chooses to play a prison song rather than “Tennessee Waltz,” that is not necessarily because he prefers it or finds it more personally expressive. Charley Pride is not the only African American who ever loved country-and-western music. When Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James got together in the 1960s, they would sometimes trade yodels on Jimmie Rodgers's “Waiting for a Train.” Just as in the 1920s, no one saw fit to record this duet, since it was not what the public expected of them. So Hurt and James sang the hillbilly harmonies for their own pleasure, then went onstage and played the blues songs that their audience wanted to hear.
Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
….

I
N THE PRECEDING CHAPTERS
, I
HAVE CONCENTRATED ON
styles played by professional musicians, but that was by no means the only music familiar to African Americans in the rural South. Throughout history, the vast majority of people have first heard music in and around their own homes, sung by their parents, siblings, and playmates. Unlike professional styles, this “folk” music need follow no trends or tastes beyond those of the singer, and can include everything from the barely formed tunes a parent hums to lull a baby to sleep to jump-roping chants and obscene doggerel—or snatches of pop music or opera. While some of these songs may be indigenous to a region or a particular group of people, and these tend to be the ones of most interest to folklorists, private singing knows no limits. People sing whatever they like, or what happens to stick in their heads, be it an ancient ballad or an advertising jingle.

In my own home, I grew up hearing my father sing the Tin Pan Alley hits of his youth, songs like “When Francis Dances with Me” and “The Sheik of Araby.” This was my home folk music and, as with most people, I did not take it seriously. It was not music, it was just my dad. The music I valued was sung by Woody Guthrie, Cisco Houston, and Pete Seeger, and later by Skip James and the Reverend Gary Davis. I called this music “folk,” but in my own life all the cowboy songs, blues, and gospel arrived as commercial imports, heard only at formal concerts and on recordings. In the same way, a black child in the South in
1925 could have heard his grandmother humming old minstrel or parlor hits and thought of that as the music of the local old folks, while regarding blues as something that arrived on records from up north, fraught with all the magic of Chicago and Harlem.

Around a lot of households, or in the surrounding fields, there was other music as well, though, and some of it predated either the blues or the minstrel shows. Black Southerners had a deep tradition of private and communal singing, much of it with roots reaching back to Africa. Histories of blues frequently begin with a discussion of this music, the “work songs,” “moans,” and “field hollers,” and treat the commercial blues compositions as an outgrowth of this folk tradition, the natural extension of a shared cultural heritage. There is a great deal of truth in this. Blues was unquestionably influenced by older styles, and there is no mistaking the traces of traditional moans and hollers in popular blues songs, and still more so in the performance styles of many, if not most of the singers. These ancient, intricate singing techniques gave blues music the flavor that Robert Palmer explored in his influential book
Deep Blues
, and are often regarded as its most distinctive and emotionally powerful characteristic.

It is impossible to trace the history of blues without taking note of these older black singing traditions, but one must also remember that blues was something quite new and different. Just as one can say that all the fundamental ballet steps are derived from Western European folk dances, one can argue that all early blues and jazz performances are extensions of African-rooted folk forms, but in none of these cases is that anything like the whole story.
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The blues that was sold on sheet music and recordings, and performed on street corners, in theaters, and at rent parties or picnics was not simply a commercialization of the styles that black Southerners had sung to ease the burdens of work, sorrow, or boredom, or shared in a group, swaying and breathing together in ceremonial communion that might or might not involve the formality of a church service.

I am going out of my way to stress this difference, in part, because many of the most influential and successful blues stars had relatively little “deep” flavor in their work, and this has often caused these artists to be shunted aside by fans and historians who want to define blues
according to their own tastes rather than the tastes of the black audiences who originally supported the music. One can read over and over how the deep blues style traveled from Africa and was nurtured in the fields of the South, then served as the roots of the blues boom, of jazz, of soul, indeed of virtually all that is unique and great in American music. Very rarely does one read about the influences that traveled in the other direction, the extent to which rural African Americans in the deep South were consumers and fans of pop music coming to them from the cities. White urbanites, for obvious reasons, are fascinated by a creation myth in which genius blossomed, wild and untamed, from the Delta mud, and are less interested in the unromantic picture of Muddy Waters sitting by the radio and listening to Fats Waller, or a sharecropper singing Broadway show tunes as he followed his mule along the levee.

White people were commenting on the unusual and moving songs of black Americans long before the blues boom. A visitor to South Carolina in 1777 wrote of the “plaintive African songs” sung by slaves as they paddled a canoe, and a visitor to North Carolina in 1853 gave an early description of a “field holler,” writing of a black man who “raised such a sound as I never heard before: a long, loud, musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto.”
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When folklorists headed into the rural South with portable disc cutters in the 1930s, such hollers were among the styles they were anxious to document, and they recorded some magnificent examples of the form. It is an odd historical fact, and one that may create a thoroughly misleading impression of black folk music, that a very high proportion of this recording was done in penitentiaries like Mississippi's notorious Parchman Farm. This was in part because folklorists were always interested in finding the oldest possible material, and thought that places like Parchman, with their isolated populations and harsh conditions of forced labor, were the most likely place to find songs still surviving from slavery times. The main advantage of the prisons, though, was that they gathered a lot of black men together in an environment where they were eager to sing for folklorists. In the outside world, many people were suspicious of strangers with recording machines—or simply did not care to waste time singing for them—and plantation
owners and local lawmen were openly hostile to white northerners interviewing “their” black folk. In the prisons, a recording session would provide convicts with a welcome break from work, and everything was approved in advance by the relevant authorities.

The concentration on prisons, though, had its downsides. Combined with the fact that so much of early folk collecting was done by white men, it meant that a disproportionate number of the recorded moans and hollers come from male singers. (There was no comparable population of female prisoners, though a few were recorded.) In normal life, women sang to themselves at least as much as men did, but this singing was generally less public. Much of their work was solitary, and it is a commonplace of blues memoirs that the first music a young artist heard was his or her mother singing while sewing, cooking, cleaning or doing the washing around the house. The fact that so much of the singing of Southern black people was collected in places like Parchman has also encouraged a linkage in many white fans' minds between prisons and blues music. Of course, prisons have been mentioned in quite a few blues songs, just as they have become a country-and-western cliché. However, no one imagining the roots of white hillbilly music thinks instantly of a line of chain-gang convicts, while such pictures are ubiquitous in documentaries and books on blues. After years of hearing prison recordings played as examples of the earliest African-American song styles, it is easy to forget that most of the people singing field hollers had never been to prison in their lives, nor was the style in any way tied to that environment.

Work songs, the rhythmic call-and-response pieces designed to keep a crew moving in unison, were a somewhat different story. These had been common throughout the South, part of the same tradition as the Anglo-American sea chanteys. (Which, though the fact is rarely pointed out, arose largely from African styles.) By the time John and Alan Lomax and other folklorists began recording in the 1930s, these songs were dying out, and the prison farms were one of the few places where they remained common and vibrant. However, while these group songs are often cited alongside the hollers, and given equal space in discussions of blues roots, they were quite different, and in very few cases have any direct connection with what was recorded by
commercial blues artists. In fact, when I try to think of examples of rural Southern musicians who reshaped such work songs into professional performance pieces, I come up with as many white banjo players as black blues singers.
³

The field hollers (also called “corn songs” or “cornfield songs”) were quite unlike the tightly structured, heavily rhythmic work-gang chants. As Alan Lomax, who recorded many of them over the years, has written:

The hollers were not performance music, in the way that blues or jazz is, nor were they communal music like the work-gang chants or church singing. They were more like a musical way of talking to oneself, and often were sung by people alone in the fields, driving a mule, tending cattle, or doing other isolated work. As Lomax wrote:

Hollers could be very simple, and of little interest to anyone but the singer, but in the hands of a virtuoso they are among the most brilliant
and intense sounds in American music. Of the few that were captured on record, the outstanding example is a freely improvised song by a man nicknamed Tangle Eye, a black convict whom Lomax recorded at Parchman in 1947. Tangle Eye's holler was preserved more or less by accident: Lomax was recording him along with a group of other convicts who were demonstrating the work songs they used to keep time while “double-cutting” a tree. Four men would stand around the tree trunk, and would let their axes fall in pairs, with the music keeping anyone from getting confused and making an ill-timed stroke that could maim the next man over. As the tree fell, they finished the song and paused to catch their breath. It was then that Tangle Eye began to sing by himself, “looking wistfully across the Delta plain.”

Lomax would title this piece “Tangle Eye Blues,” but it is a blues only by the loose definition that applies that word to any sad Delta song. It has no blues structure, or indeed any structure at all. Tangle Eye starts off with a long, wordless, vibrato-laden moan, a hmmmmmmmmm that rises a moment, then sinks and trails off in a wisp of melisma. He pauses, as if wondering whether to continue, then starts up again, the hmmmm-mmm this time easing into a softly murmured “hoh-hoh-oh-oh, Lord.” Then he begins to sing words: “Well I wonder will I ever get back home, hey, hey-ey-ey…” For the next three minutes, he blends stanzas of lonesome nostalgia—for his woman and baby, for all the time he has been on “the farm,” for the friends who no longer come to see him and his mother who is dead and gone—with wordless moans and cries, sometimes floating in mellow falsetto, sometimes rumbling like underground lava. He never raises his voice, and there is something almost painfully delicate in the way he tastes and mulls over each phrase, turning it one way then another before letting it go and moving on to the next. There is no growl, no roughness, just a meditative melancholy, as if he had far too much time for thinking, and no other outlet than shaping and reshaping a personal masterpiece that will probably mean nothing to anyone else.

Such hollers are particularly interesting to folklorists, because of their clear relationship to African singing. In the 1970s, Lomax demonstrated this affinity by issuing a recording of a Mississippi holler interwoven with a song recorded in Senegal, the two singers sounding
so similar that the result feels like a single, cohesive performance.
⁶
While African music is associated in many people's minds with a drum-driven, rhythmic dance beat, these songs are part of a quite different tradition, the sort of vocal improvisations that herdsmen use to keep their flocks aware of their comforting presence, to warn off predators, and to while away long days alone with animals and spirits. This is the sound that links the Malian guitarist Ali Farka Toure with John Lee Hooker, and is perhaps the oldest strain in blues.
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When prompted by folklorists, several bluesmen have demonstrated how they reshaped and streamlined hollers into blues numbers, and the holler style permeates the singing of many of the greatest blues artists.
⁸
This is most obvious in songs like Blind Lemon Jefferson's “Black Snake Moan,” Skip James's “Devil Got My Woman,” or Tommy Johnson's “Cool Drink of Water,” but also in the work of Southern vaudeville stars like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Clara Smith, who was billed as “Queen of the Moaners.” Still, this does not mean that hollers are simply primitive blues songs. Like ragtime or hoedowns, they left their mark on blues, but plenty of excellent blues performances show little holler influence, and very few have the free-metered, relaxed, murmuring flavor of the pure field songs. From hoedowns to hip-hop, African-American popular styles have been overwhelmingly social, designed for dancing—or in the case of gospel, for uniting a congregation—and marked by their steady, propulsive rhythms.
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