Escaping the Delta (14 page)
Read Escaping the Delta Online
Authors: Elijah Wald
The next generation, the people between fifty and seventy, had arrived in the settled, prosperous farm years, and represented stability. “All that is established and considered normal in the delta is represented by this generation,” Jones wrote. “They frown alike on the violence of the pioneer life they found andâ¦the present, [which] seems to them confusing and disorderlyâ¦. Their world reached its flowering around the First World War and suffered a collapse later
which they never quite understood.” These were the pillars of the church, the respectable people who felt that the modern world was dangerous and potentially evil.
The young adults, between thirty and fifty, had been raised by these respectable church folk, but they were comfortable with the changes happening around them. Jones wrote that:
Growing cotton for them has not departed from the “old way,” nor has the church become weakened in its expression of the true faith by the introduction of “a form and fashion.” Theirs has been a rapidly changing world. They have no pleasant memories of the isolation and stabilization before motor transportation arrived. They have enjoyed the freedom of movement that the “good road” broughtâ¦Electric lights in the church and electricity to make their nickels bring music out of “Seeburgs” [juke boxes] and radios are their pride.
The first great wave of Delta blues innovatorsâCharley Patton, Son House, Tommy Johnson, Willie Brown, Skip Jamesâwere all in this last age group, not pioneers or old-timers. Hot on their heels came the generation that would electrify their music and turn it into the toughest roots sound on the urban landscape. These young turksâHowlin' Wolf born in 1910, Robert Johnson in 1911, Muddy Waters and Aleck “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller in 1913, Willie Dixon in 1915, Big Walter Horton in 1917, Elmore James in 1918, John Lee Hooker in 1920, then Albert King in 1923 and B. B. King in 1925âperfectly fit Jones's final grouping:
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Youthsâ¦try to get a grip on life in the midst of a disintegrating past and a fascinating present. For them the new has as much place as the old. As they acquire the culture they receive the traditions from the past and the technology and the organization of the present, even the conflicts between the twoâ¦. They sing the songs currently popular on the radio and juke boxes and learn others as they hear them sung by older people at home and in the fields. Theirs is the task of discovering a pattern of living in conformity with their opportunities and the varied inheritance which their elders have handed on to them.
Jones was clearly excited by this spirit of change and opportunity, but the Fisk team also noted that the local folk culture was disappearing. “On one occasion when an old cotton picker was asked whether or not the people sang as they worked, he laughed as he repeated the question to others,” Samuel Adams writes. “In fact he yelled it out across the field. They all seemed to be amused by the question.” He also quoted a younger man who explained, “There ain't nothing about a tractor that make a man want to sing. The thing keeps so much noise, and you so far away from the other folks. There ain't a thing to do but sit up there and drive.”
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Even when people did feel like singing, Adams noted, “Today when a plantation Negro sings he is more likely to sing a popular song than a spiritual or folk song.”
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To him, blues were included in that “popular song” category, reflecting the fact that they were part of a broad national trend rather than a local tradition, though when he compiled song lists he separated them out from other pop styles.
Adams's master's thesis, the final product of the work he did under Jones's advisorship, provides a unique look at what was being listened to by black Delta dwellers at this key period. The Fisk trips were made only three or four years after Robert Johnson's death, and before Muddy Waters and many of his peers had left for Chicago. As Jones stressed, this was a time of rapid and intense change, and what was true in 1942 would in some respects have been quite different from what was true in 1935, but this study still provides the most accurate picture we have of musical tastes in the rural Delta during the blues boom. As part of its formal survey, the research team filled out forms on each person they interviewed, and one of the things they asked was the informant's favorite song. Adams supplies two lists of these titles, gathered in interviews with members of one hundred families living on the King and Anderson Plantation, near Clarksdale, and divided by age into “younger” and “older” tastes.
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(He did not specify at what age he drew the line between these groups.) Since, as far as I know, these are the only such lists compiled during this period, they are worth looking at in some detail.
Adams supplies only the song titles, with no supporting data on their collection, so it is impossible to know how many overlapped
between informantsâthat is, which songs were favorites of multiple peopleâbut even this simple list is interesting. Among the older people, church songs slightly outnumber secular songs, and the general grab bag of “popular songs” has twice as many titles in it as the “blues” category. Adams points out that the older people listed far more church songs than the youngsters did, and concludes from this that the power of the church was diminishing. It is equally likely, though, that his informants had simply followed the common human pattern of becoming more religious with age.
Among the favorites named by his older informants, Adams lists twenty-four popular songs, twelve blues, one lullaby (“Hush Little Baby, Don't You Cry”) and one work song (“Working on the Levee”), along with twenty-six hymns and eighteen spirituals. He apparently defines hymns as songs from the church hymnal, and spirituals as all other religious songs, from old camp-meeting shouts to modern “gospel” numbers. The popular songs are a mix of patriotic anthems, sentimental parlor songs, and current swing and country hits (for which I provide dates), along with a few unclassifiable titles:
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“Daisy May,” “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” “God Bless America,” “Good Morning, Mister Blue Jay,” “Good Morning to You,” “He's 1-A in the Army” (1941), “Home Sweet Home,” “I Don't Want to Set the World on Fire” (1941), “I Want a Girl,” “In the Shade of the Old Apple Tree,” “In the Mood” (1940), “Jumping Jive” (1939), “Let's Dream this One Out”(1941), “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” “My Country 'Tis of Thee,” “Old Black Joe,” “Star Spangled Banner,” “Stardust” (already a standard, but a huge hit for Artie Shaw in 1941), “Swanee River,” “Tuxedo Junction”(1941), “Walking by the River” (1941), “Walking the Floor Over You”(1941), “Yes Indeed” (1941), and “You Are My Sunshine” (1940â41).
The blues songs are also mostly of recent vintage, and I have added the recording dates and names of the artists who made them famous, in the cases where I can give these with some accuracy:
“Bumble Bee Blues” (1929), “Chauffeur Blues” (1941), “My Girlish Days” (1941) (all three by Memphis Minnie), “Confessing the Blues”
(1941, Walter Brown with Jay McShann), “Going to Chicago” (1941, Jimmy Rushing with Count Basie), “How Long Blues” (1928, Leroy Carr), “In the Dark” (1940, Lil Green), “St. Louis Blues” (many artists), “Sweet Home Chicago” (originally Robert Johnson, in 1936, but more popularly Tommy McClennan in 1939 and Walter Davis in 1941),
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“Highway Blues” (a generic title), “Weary Blues,” and “Lonesome Blues” (possibly generic titles, or possibly a mistranscription of Roy Acuff's recent record, “Weary Lonesome Blues”).
It is interesting that even the older listeners listed so many current hits. Though some of the pop numbers reach back to the nineteenth century, most of the blues and many of the swing and country records had been released within the year. Surprisingly, the list Adams provides for his younger informants contains far fewer recent swing and blues numbersâonly one swing cut, “Fur Trapper's Ball,” dates from after 1936âforcing one to wonder whether he may have somehow gotten the two lists confused. In any case, they show a similar balance of blues and other pop material.
The “young” list includes thirty-five popular songs, twenty-six blues, two work songs (“Working on the Railroad,” but this may be the minstrel favorite rather than a real work song, and “Water Boy,” but this may have been named by a progressive Paul Robeson fan), and one fiddle hoedown (“Hell Broke Loose in Georgia”), along with seven hymns and twenty spirituals. The preference for “spirituals” among the youth, if it is not a mistake, probably reflects the growing popularity of gospel groups like the Golden Gate Quartet and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, whose repertoires were largely made up of new numbers and songs from the oral tradition rather than official church hymns. The popular list was as follows:
“Basin Street Blues,” “Carolina Moon,” “Carry Me Back to Old Virginia,” “Coming Through the Rye,” “Darkness on the Delta,” “Drink to me Only with Thine Eyes,” “Fur Trapper's Ball,” “Girl of My Dreams,” “Going Home,” “Honeysuckle Rose,” “I Love You Truly,” “Is It True What They Say About Dixie?” “The Johnson Girls,” “Kiss Me Again,” “Lazy Bones,” “Livery Stable Blues,” “Lost in a Fog,” “The Man I Love,”
“Minnie the Moocher,” “My Blue Heaven,” “My Old Kentucky Home,” “My Wild Irish Rose,” “Negro National Anthem (Lift Every Voice and Sing),” “Nobody's Sweetheart Now,” “The Object of My Affection,” “Old Black Joe,” “Old Spinning Wheel,” “Oh! Susannah,” “Rainbow 'Round My Shoulder,” “She'll Be Coming 'Round the Mountain,” “Stormy Weather,” “Sonny Boy,” “Sweet Jennie Lee,” “Sweet Sue,” “When You and I Were Young Maggie,” “Yesterdays.”
In the blues category, I have once again tried to ascribe songs to the artists with whom they were most identified, but this is not always easy. “Walking Blues” might be the Robert Johnson song, but there were a dozen other artists who made records with that title, including Ma Rainey and the Mississippi Sheiks. I also suspect that a couple of these listings are mistakes, since they do not turn up in any discography, but it is also possible that they were local favorites that happened not to get recorded, or were recorded under other titles:
“Banty Rooster Blues” (Charley Patton or Walter Rhodes), “Beale Street Blues” (a W. C. Handy composition), “Biscuit Baking Woman” (Yank Rachell or Kokomo Arnold), “Black Gal Blues” (probably Joe Pullum), “Black Snake Blues” (Victoria Spivey, Lemon Jefferson, or others), “Careless Love” (Lonnie Johnson or others), “Digging My Potatoes” (Washboard Sam), “Evil Woman Blues” (probably Walter Davis), “Going to Move to Kansas City” (Jim Jackson), “Highway 61 Blues” (probably Roosevelt Sykes), “How Long Blues,” “Mean Mistreater Blues” (both from Leroy Carr), “Milk Cow Blues” (Kokomo Arnold), “Railroad Blues,” “Railroad Rag” (both too generic to say), “Rattlesnake Blues” (probably Blind Boy Fuller), “Salty Dog Blues” (Papa Charley Jackson, but often covered), “St. Louis Blues” (many artists), “Sitting On Top of the World” (the Mississippi Sheiks), “Sugar Mama Blues” (Tampa Red, Sonny Boy Williamson, or Peetie Wheatstraw), “Talking Blues” (generic), “Tin Can Alley Blues” (Lonnie Johnson), “T.B. Blues” (Victoria Spivey or Jimmie Rodgers), “Walking Blues.”
When Adams asked what the favorite dance pieces on the plantation were, his informants provided an even more modern and pop-
oriented list of titles. No traditional pieces were named, though a handful of blues were included along with current hits like “Chattanooga Choo Choo” and “One O'Clock Jump.”
Adams also compiled a list of favorite radio stars, and the Fisk-Lomax team made a list of what was available on jukeboxes in Clarksdale's black cafés. Before discussing these, though, it is worth considering the impact that such new technologies had on the music of the Delta, on blues, and on African-American tastes in general.
Radio is rarely discussed in histories of prewar blues, for the logical reason that so little bluesâat least of the sort that interests most historiansâwas heard on the air. There is also the problem that, unlike records, which survive to be studied and organized into discographies, early radio was a live and ephemeral medium, and we can never have more than a rough idea of what people were hearing. This is especially true for the smaller, local stations, but to a great extent it applies even to the most popular, national broadcasts.
Commercial radio broadcasting took off shortly after World War I, and grew at a phenomenal pace over the next decade. By 1923, there were 510 active broadcasting stations, 89 of them in the South. By 1930, there were over twelve million families with radio sets.
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Only a small proportion of these would have been Southern black families, both because radios were relatively expensive and because so many black Southerners were still living without electricity. Still, radio was a fact of life by the late 1920s, and even people who did not own one would be likely to hear them in public places or the homes of more fortunate friends or neighbors. Radio had several distinct advantages over the phonograph: Once the initial purchase price was paid one could hear a wide variety of programming without having to buy records, one could enjoy a full evening's entertainment without having to get up and change the disc every three minutes, and in general the radio provided much better sound quality, especially when compared to the hand-cranked Victrolas. By the time Adams did his survey, he reported that half the families he interviewed were radio owners.
While blues was not among the more common musical styles on the air, neither was it entirely absent. Eva Taylor, who is best remem
bered as a blues queen, was identified in a 1934
Chicago Defender
article as “the radio songster.”
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Bessie Smith made numerous radio appearances, and Delta dwellers could have heard her as early as the summer of 1923, when she was the star of a
Midnight Ramble
broadcast from Memphis's Beale Street Palace Theater.
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Such
Midnight Rambles
were special concert series produced in otherwise black theaters for an all-white late-night audience, and the Palace series was a regular radio offering.
