Escaping the Delta (26 page)

If one accepts the stories of Johnson's habitual attraction to older women, this lyric was oddly appropriate, and one cannot help smiling as he sings, “Your calf is hungry, I believe he needs a suck.” There is a note of pleading in his words and in the hesitant mildness with which he sings some phrases that is a far cry from the macho sexiness of
“Terraplane”—it may just be that he was getting tired, but it suits the mood. If his last three songs had been cut at a later date, rather than tacked on at the end of a marathon effort that had included “Me and the Devil” and “Traveling Riverside,” one might suggest that they showed a new romanticism and sensitivity. As it is, they wrap up one of the most varied one-man sessions in prewar blues, a survey of the 1930s scene as reinterpreted by a unique and extraordinary artist.

R
OBERT
J
OHNSON CREATED A BODY OF WORK THAT IS FASCINATING
and inspiring, but also at times both frustrating and ambiguous. Unlike Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton, who were already fully formed artists when they began to record, he entered the studio while still in a stage of artistic growth and flux. He had been playing for only a few years, during which he had progressed from rootsy Delta juke music through the work of uptown players like Carr and Lonnie Johnson, meanwhile assimilating the wide range of pop and hillbilly material that we know of only by hearsay. His final session found him still trying on various styles, from the smooth balladry of Johnson and Blind Blake to the eerie soulfulness of Skip James, and reports from his acquaintances suggest that he was also experimenting with a small band and moving toward a jazzy or “jump” combo sound.

Johnson's death, just fourteen months after this session, thus leaves us without any clear idea of which directions he might have pursued, or how he would have sounded even a few years further on. To judge by the choices his peers went on to make, he could have done anything from forming a jazz group to quitting music entirely, and if we grant that he had a breadth of talent unmatched by any of those peers, that opens up still broader vistas. And that is not even taking into account what might have happened if the jazz impresario John Hammond had succeeded in his attempt to find Johnson and present him at 1938's groundbreaking “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at New
York's Carnegie Hall, introducing him to the progressive, intellectual world of Café Society.

To get a sense of how little we really know about all this, imagine for a moment that Ray Charles had died in 1954, rather than continuing to develop and expand his work into the present century. By the early 1950s, Charles had recorded far more sides and achieved much greater popular success than Johnson, but he was still a relatively minor figure, despite having proved himself a brilliant synthesizer of the current blues-pop styles. He could play anything from the smooth cocktail jazz of Nat “King” Cole to gritty down-home sounds, to gospel-infused shouts. Still, he had not yet fused all of this into the unique personal style that would transform the black music world. Had he died then, there is no saying how the soul revolution would have developed, and there would have been no way to even imagine his later evolution, the genre-smashing ventures into country, modern jazz, and the pop mainstream. In the same way, we know a certain amount about Johnson's talents, the influences he had assimilated, and the way he chose to apply all of that over two recording sessions, but we can never know which stylistic tics he would have retained and which he would have abandoned in the next few years, or even whether he would have continued to have much interest in blues.

One could argue that any discussion of Johnson's theoretical potential is beside the point, but in many ways it seems to have been as important to his contemporaries as anything he actually put down on record. For the Delta musicians of his generation, it was inspiring to hear someone of their own age and background on a jukebox, proving that a young local player could stand alongside the national stars. Some played his songs or copped his guitar licks, but when they talked about him in later years it was rarely these specifics that seem to have captured their imaginations. Rather, it was his ability to reach beyond their own ambitions, to point the way toward more distant musical possibilities than playing Son House riffs in a backcountry juke joint.

Johnson was very much a “musician's musician,” never reaching a broad record-buying public, and it was this small circle of Mississippi peers who kept his work alive in the black blues world. The boogie bass pattern he used on a few songs became a favorite style among
younger Delta players, and three of his songs—“Sweet Home Chicago,” “I Believe I'll Dust My Broom,” and “Stop Breaking Down”—eventually became standards, though in the latter two cases only after a decade had passed, and in substantially different forms.
¹

To speak of Johnson as a star, or compare his influence in the black blues world to the effects of artists like Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Jimmie Rodgers, Hank Williams, Bob Dylan, or Jimi Hendrix, who revolutionized and redefined the music of their times, is absurdly misleading. Had one made any such sweeping statements to a black blues fan during the twenty years following Johnson's death, the response in the vast majority of cases would have been a puzzled “Robert who?” By the time he recorded, blues was moving in another direction, and soon the acoustic guitarists would be supplanted by jive combos, band singers and rhythm trios, modeled on the success of Louis Jordan, T-Bone Walker, Dinah Washington, and Johnny Moore's Three Blazers. There were a few “down-home” players who managed to make an impact in the 1940s, and a couple of them did cover one or another Johnson song. Still, until the 1960s Johnson's name was all but forgotten, except by his immediate neighbors, his playing partners, and a handful of white folk and jazz fans.

It was these white fans who would crown him king of the Delta, and whose opinion has come to be the gospel of blues history, and it is worth noting that until quite late in the establishment of this gospel they were acutely conscious of expressing an elite, extremely minority taste. To white aficionados in 1960, it was taken for granted that no blues artist without strong Delta connections would know of Johnson's records, and they were not surprised if his name rang few bells even in Mississippi. Johnson's obscurity and mystery were part of his appeal, setting him apart from the kind of blues that was still regularly featured on radio playlists throughout the United States.

Even today, when Johnson CDs have sold in the millions, Johnson posters are on the walls of multinational chains, conferences are held about his music, and his face has graced a postage stamp, if you go to a blues festival in the Mississippi Delta and take a poll of black listeners, you will find that many (in my experience, most) will not even recognize his name. Those who do will tend to know of him only as a
vague historical figure, without any sense of his music. Johnson is a hero to the white blues scene—defined as “white” not according to the race of the performers, but that of the overwhelming mass of audience members—but remains unknown to the remnants of the black blues audience, an audience now largely limited to older people in the South who would consider the top names in the field to be people like Denise LaSalle, Bobby Bland, and Clarence Carter.
²

This is not to deny Johnson's importance, either as an artist or as a historical figure, but only to put it in context. In later chapters, I will pick up the story of his discovery by the white world, and his elevation as the central figure of the modern blues pantheon. First, though, I want to return to the history of blues as black popular music, and sketch out its path in the decades following his death.

I
T CANNOT BE SAID TOO OFTEN THAT MUSICAL CATEGORIES ARE
artificial constructs, useful for many purposes but meaningless and limiting for others. Simply because blues has been separated into all sorts of subcategories—Delta blues, Classic blues, Piedmont blues, Chicago blues, Jump blues, Rhythm & Blues—does not mean that these categories meant much to the players or consumers of the music, or even existed at the time the music was being made. Every category is defined with a set agenda in mind. Sometimes a historian wants to make a point. Sometimes a marketing executive wants to make it easy for consumers to find a particular kind of product. Sometimes a performer wants to distinguish himself or herself from previous artists, or those with whom he or she disagrees about something. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but there are always confusing examples that illustrate the limits of the taxonomy.

In jazz, there came a moment when a group of fans tried to declare the whole category closed. The New Orleans music originally called jazz was jazz, they said, and “swing” was something else. Less hard-line members of the clan might even admit a Duke Ellington or Benny Goodman to the jazz pantheon, but still barred boppers like Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie. The New Orleans purists were dubbed “moldy figs” and eventually lost the battle, and with their loss it was generally agreed that the word “jazz”—like the word “classical”—would apply to a huge range of musics, some of them so dissimilar that
if one did not know the historical links one could hear no connection between them.

Blues could have gone the same way. We could easily think of Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry, Aretha Franklin, James Brown, George Clinton, Dr. Dre, and Missy Elliott as blues artists, since there is an easily traceable continuity linking them to each other and to all the blues artists who preceded them. Such taxonomy would not change the music, and would be neither more nor less meaningful than the taxonomy that separates them into R&B, rock 'n' roll, soul, funk, and hip-hop. This is not to say that the names are meaningless, or that they do not describe real musical changes, but only that the reasons such changes led to a complete recategorization here and not in jazz were cultural and commercial rather than musical.

As usual, my solution to this problem is to define blues in the years following the Second World War as the range of music that an average black pop listener would have been apt to refer to as blues, but I am well aware that this has its problems—starting with the questions of what is average and how I would measure “apt.” Still, it is clear that if somebody had called Joe Turner's “Shake, Rattle and Roll”—or even Elvis Presley's “Heartbreak Hotel”—a blues record in a Harlem bar in 1955, no one would have bothered to dispute the terminology (though they themselves might have called it R&B), while not many people in the same bar ten years later would have been likely to use that word for “Papa's Got a Brand New Bag”—even though James Brown's declaration of soul modernity was, musically, a straight twelve-bar blues. By the mid-1960s, at least in the northern cities, the black pop audience had come to use “blues” as a synonym for old-fashioned or countrified, and it would never again be used to describe a style regularly appearing on the R&B (or “Soul” or “Black”) record charts.

Through the 1940s and 1950s, though, blues often seemed to be stronger than ever. Times changed, but the blues changed with them. When Robert Johnson died, the sort of recordings he had made were already disappearing from the black pop scene. The single singer accompanied only by his acoustic guitar or piano was being replaced by larger ensembles, and only a few isolated figures would have further hits in the older style. However, while historians often describe this as
the end of an era, it is not at all clear that the normal run of music listeners noticed much of a change. There may have been fewer blues records being pressed in the early 1940s than in the mid-1930s, but the music continued to have a very significant presence. In 1943, the first full year for which
Billboard
magazine compiled its “Harlem Hit Parade” chart (renamed “Race Records” in 1945, and “Rhythm and Blues Records” in 1949), January found Wee Bea Booze's version of Ma Rainey's “See See Rider” in the number-one spot, and it stayed in the top ten for twenty-two weeks.

In a way, what had happened was a return to the era of the blues queens, with blues as a vocal style within the jazz world. “See See Rider” was supplanted in the number-one spot by “What's the Use of Getting Sober,” a blues-inflected tune by Louis Jordan, an all-around entertainer who had made his name with a smash version of Casey Bill Weldon's “I'm Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town.” That song was in turn replaced by a twelve-bar blues called “That Ain't Right,” by the King Cole Trio—the first major hit for the man who would become famed as the greatest of black pop crooners. Jordan and Cole could be considered the Tampa Red and Leroy Carr of the 1940s (though Cole soon moved beyond the blues field, as Carr probably aspired to do), and they were widely imitated, along with the Kansas City styles of Joe Turner and Jimmy Rushing, the Texas sound of T-Bone Walker, and the overwhelming influence of the new “Queen of the Blues,” Dinah Washington.

The
Chicago Defender
took note of this trend in 1944, writing that:

Part of what was happening was a shift toward harder, more driving dance rhythms, as exemplified by Kansas City bands like Count Basie's. These had a more blues-based sound than eastern outfits like Duke Ellington's orchestra, not to mention Glenn Miller's or Guy Lombardo's. Basie even cut a series of piano-and-rhythm records that were pure adaptations of 1930s blues hits—“How Long Blues,” “The Dirty Dozens,” and “When the Sun Goes Down” were typical—and his first vocalist, Jimmy Rushing, was equally schooled in the Carr style, with an overlay of the louder, Kansas City “shouting” approach of Big Joe Turner. As with many performers who are most famous for their blues work, Rushing resented being typed as a blues singer. He sang Tin Pan Alley standards and tender ballads as well, and was frustrated when Basie hired Helen Humes to do the pop material and he was pushed pretty much full-time into a blues role. (Ironically, Humes herself had first recorded as a teenaged blues queen, accompanied by Lonnie Johnson.)

In the first years of the 1940s, band singers were taking over the blues field. The defining new hits were Billy Eckstine's “Jelly, Jelly” with Earl Hines's orchestra, Walter Brown's “Confessin' the Blues” with Jay McShann, and the Rushing-Basie “Going to Chicago Blues.” The singing styles still owed a lot to Carr and Lonnie Johnson, but radio and jukeboxes were making it possible for folks all over the country to hear full-sized horn bands, played at whatever volume they pleased, and that was the sound of the moment. The big bands were already on their way out, though, threatened by the twin forces of economics and technology, and their demise was hastened by the extreme contraction of the record business during World War II. The War Production Board issued an order restricting domestic use of shellac, which was the main component of phonograph records, and in August 1942, the American Federation of Musicians imposed a recording ban
to force the payment of royalties for records played on radio and in public places.
²
This meant that virtually no records were made between 1942 and 1944, and by the time recording resumed, the full orchestras found a lot of their work taken by smaller groups. With electronic amplification, five players could be as loud as fifty, and club owners saw no reason to foot the expense of any more musicians than necessary.

Smooth trio balladeers and hot “jump” combos were on the rise, and both made blues a staple of their repertoires. By 1945, six of the eight songs to hit number one on the
Billboard
“Race” chart were blues. Two were with big bands, Eddie “Cleanhead” Vinson singing “Somebody's Gotta Go” with Cootie Williams and his orchestra, and Wynonie Harris singing “Who Threw the Whiskey in the Well” with Lucky Millinder, but the rest were by small groups. Two were actually versions of the same trendsetting song: “I Wonder” took off in a version by Private Cecil Gant, whose smooth style established a cocktail blues sound that made it one of the decade's defining records, and it had stiff competition from a cover by the old-time barrelhouse master Roosevelt Sykes, which held the number-one slot for seven weeks. Gant was from Nashville, as Leroy Carr had been, and “I Wonder” blended a vocal style formed under Carr's influence with the sophisticated piano approach of Nat Cole. It was a potent fusion, at once familiarly soulful and suavely urbane, and was instantly picked up by two Texas pianists, Charles Brown and Ivory Joe Hunter. Both started out with the Three Blazers, a Cole-style trio led by guitarist Johnny Moore, and both were such smooth, cultured singers that they became musical matinee idols—and later would be banished from the mainstream of blues history. Hunter did not rate even a mention in 1979's massive
Blues Who's Who
, and Brown only edged his way into the consciousness of the white blues world in the 1980s, when Bonnie Raitt took him on tour.

Gant, Brown, and Hunter all made their names on the West Coast scene. World War II had brought a flood of African Americans to California, forced out of the Southwest by the same dust storms that were ruining white farmers, and drawn by job openings in the war industries. After Pearl Harbor, there was a rush to build ships for the Pacific
Fleet. Los Angeles became a major center of war workers and, to serve them in their off hours, of black clubs and entertainers. These artists came mainly from Texas and the Southwest: the Texans included T-Bone Walker, Lowell Fulson, Cleanhead Vinson, Amos Milburn, Lloyd Glenn, Pee Wee Crayton, and Floyd Dixon, while Oklahoma provided Roy Milton and the Liggins brothers, Jimmie and Joe. Many of these names will ring few bells with modern blues fans, but Joe Liggins, for example, skewed the 1945 chart in favor of small-combo blues by keeping a twelve-bar hit called “The Honeydripper” in the number-one position for eighteen solid weeks.

These artists were contemporaries of Robert Johnson and the Mississippians who would shortly pioneer the electric “down-home” sound associated with Chicago, but they tended to be more musically sophisticated, as at home in jazz or pop as in blues settings. Charles Brown had been a high school science teacher before moving west, and got his start in the L.A. music world after winning a talent contest in which he played Earl Hines's piano showcase, “Boogie Woogie on St. Louis Blues,” then encored with the “Warsaw Concerto.”
³
Such artists played blues because it was in demand, and updated the style to suit the mood of the time—just as Carr and Tampa Red had done fifteen years earlier. As with Carr and Red, this did not negate their deep blues roots. Texas had always been a major blues center, and T-Bone Walker had spent part of his childhood leading Lemon Jefferson, while Lowell Fulson had traveled around the state as accompanist to Texas Alexander.

The fact, once again, is that blues and jazz were part of the same musical world. Some rural bluesmen were unable to negotiate swing chord changes, and some swing bands were incapable of getting any blues feel, but a great many musicians straddled both genres, often without even thinking about it. In the 1940s, the Three Blazers were in the same bag as the King Cole Trio, the Kansas City shouters were hitting as part of the big band craze, and the Race charts were dominated by such unclassifiable figures as Louis Jordan and Dinah Washington.

Along with the West Coast sound, a lot of blues was coming out of the middle of the country. Kansas City spawned a series of “blues
shouters,” influenced by the majestic Big Joe Turner. Turner's raw, exuberantly powerful style was taken up by singers like Jimmy Witherspoon and Wynonie Harris, and is generally hailed as a root source of rock 'n' roll. Both Witherspoon and Harris started out as big band vocalists but were equally at home with smaller combos, and they can be taken to represent dozens of other, less successful singers. Indeed, as with the 1920s or 1930s, the names I am mentioning throughout this chapter are only tips of a vast iceberg, not necessarily more talented—or even more influential, at least on a regional level—than dozens of other performers who did not get the same breaks in a notoriously capricious music business. I am not trying to mention even all the major hit-makers, but only to give a sense of the trends that drove blues in this period.

Three artists, though, must be covered in somewhat greater detail. Louis Jordan is the first, both because of his overwhelming popularity and because he is so often thought of as a jive comedian rather than as a blues singer. Jordan had been born in 1908, in rural Arkansas, and his father played in the orchestra for the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, the touring tent show in which Ma Rainey had introduced blues to the world. Jordan started playing with the troupe in his early teens, and also traveled with Rainey's own touring show.
⁴
An adept saxophonist, he worked in various bands before joining Chick Webb's orchestra in 1936. Two years later he formed his trendsetting combo, the Tympany Five (tympani was misspelled, and the group always had more than five members, but it hit so big that no one quibbled), and by the mid-1940s he had achieved a dominance of the R&B charts that remains unequaled to this day. In 1946 he had five of the seven number-one records, with his “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie” holding the top spot for eighteen weeks.
⁵
The following year, he had four of the seven chart toppers, accounting for forty weeks in all. And that does not include the dozen top-ten records he had in those two years that failed to reach the number-one spot, in most cases only because other Jordan songs had gotten there first.