Escaping the Delta (27 page)

Jordan's appeal was almost as strong with white as with black listeners, and fourteen of his hits crossed over to the
Billboard
pop charts, while in 1944 he even put two songs in the number-one
position on the magazine's country chart.
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All of this has led historians to classify him as something other than a blues singer, as if his pop and novelty numbers somehow negated his status as one of the top blues artists of the 1940s. Certainly, he recorded non-blues pieces as well, but B. B. King is only one of many bluesmen who are indebted to him for much of their style and material. “All of my things are based on the blues, twelve-bar blues,”
⁷
Jordan said, and while that is a slight exaggeration, most of his hits were indeed in the basic twelve-bar pattern. Even jumping jive numbers like “Caldonia,” “Choo Choo Ch-Boogie,” and “Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens” were sung over twelve-bar boogies, and if some aspects of their rhythm and feel were unusual for the blues mainstream, the same can be said of Tampa Red's work with the Hokum Boys, or the ragtime rhythms of Blind Blake and Blind Boy Fuller. Indeed, it makes perfect sense to consider Jordan's records an extension of the hokum blues style. He was an entertainer first and foremost, but blues was always his mainstay and his influence was felt as much by later blues singers as by such disparate disciples as Chuck Berry and James Brown. His most sincere memorial may be a quote from Berry, who credited his own humorous wordplay and engaging stage persona to Jordan's example (and his guitar style to the Tympany Five's Carl Hogan): “I identify myself with Louis Jordan more than any other artist,” Berry said. “If I had only one artist to listen to through eternity, it would be Nat Cole [but] if I had to work through eternity, it would be Louis Jordan.”
⁸

A more obvious model for Berry's music, if not his writing, was T-Bone Walker, who was the defining blues guitarist of the 1940s, as well as being the top live entertainer among the West Coast crooners. Though his first record, from 1929, was a pure Leroy Carr imitation, by the time he hit in the 1940s Walker had become a stronger and more modern singer. The Carr inflections were still there, but now colored with a wealth of jazz phrasing. History remembers him as a trail-blazing guitarist, since he and Charlie Christian—who in their youth had worked together as a dance team—essentially invented electric lead playing, blending Lonnie Johnson's innovations with the sustained, hornlike phrasing that had been impossible on the acoustic instrument. His first hit, though, was as a guitarless vocalist with Les
Hite's orchestra, and it was his singing and dynamic live shows that made him a superstar. He was famed for his hot dance moves, doing the splits while he played guitar behind his head, and delivering songs with a suave romance and humor that took blues out of the juke joints and put it in the classiest urban nightclubs.

Walker's blend of biting electric guitar, exciting stage moves, and big band backing was an inspiration to a generation of blues artists, though only a handful would ever have the financial security to build a similar sound—for the last forty years, B. B. King and Ray Charles have been the only bluesmen to regularly carry a Walker-sized band on the road. Like King, who has often named Django Reinhardt as his favorite player, Walker was a far more complex and sophisticated musician than he is usually given credit for, and at live shows he interspersed his blues numbers with pop ballads like “Stardust.”
⁹
He never equaled Jordan's genre-spanning success, but his showmanship and musical innovations transformed blues, and his image as a thrillingly attractive guitar-hero frontman presaged generations of blues and rock idols.

The third trendsetter of 1940s blues was Dinah Washington, who almost single-handedly reinvented the role of the blues queen. If I had to propose three names as the most underrated influences in American singing, they would be Carr, Sam Cooke, and Washington—all recognized as important figures, but rarely given full due for the overwhelming effect they had on later generations of vocalists. In Washington's case, this is particularly odd, since she was so widely celebrated over so many years, and carried the mantle of the century's defining blues superstars.

From its earliest days, blues had been considered primarily women's music, and it is an almost immutable rule that when men were the genre's biggest stars that meant that it had become a secondary market rather than a mainstream black pop style. In the 1930s, for example, women had ceased to lead the blues field because they were too busy setting the vocal standard for swing and big bands, and to many music listeners blues had disappeared with them. Throughout the pages of the main black newspapers—the
Chicago Defender
and New York's
Amsterdam News
—for that decade, the word “blues” is
almost never used in reference to a male singer. (The sole exception is W. C. Handy, still touring as the music's pioneering progenitor.) As far as the mainstream black entertainment business was concerned, the decade's most visible blues star was still Ida Cox, who continued to carry a full troupe including dancers and comedians, and to fill theaters throughout the South, as well as in Chicago and other northern cities that had substantial black populations.
¹⁰
Alberta Hunter and Ethel Waters were by then considered pop singers rather than blues queens, but remained major figures. Billie Holiday was occasionally mentioned as a blues stylist on the strength of her breakthrough hit, “Billie's Blues,” but soon became better known for her unique transformations of Tin Pan Alley material. In 1940, when Lil Green hit with “Romance in the Dark,” then followed up with “Why Don't You Do Right,” this was widely hailed as a return of the blues, as if the music had essentially disappeared when the Depression ended the era of the great blues queens. Green's guitarist was Big Bill Broonzy, and her second hit was penned by Kansas Joe McCoy, but neither of these names had ever been considered on a par with Cox, Hunter, or any of the various Smiths, and neither was even mentioned in her newspaper reviews. Wee Bea Booze's success with “See See Rider” was only one manifestation of the revival Green was spearheading. Holiday, who had briefly returned to blues in 1939 with “Fine and Mellow,” covered “Romance in the Dark,” while Peggy Lee had her first major hit with “Why Don't You Do Right.”

It was during this flurry of big-band canary blues that Lionel Hampton hired Ruth Jones, a teenager who sang in the thin-voiced, jazz-inflected Green-Holiday style. Jones had been a member of the Sallie Martin Singers, one of Chicago's top gospel groups, and she brought a gospel inflection to her blues work that would eventually lead to the new style known as “soul” music. With Hampton, she changed her name to Dinah Washington, and her first, four-song recording session produced two top-ten Race hits, “Salty Papa Blues” and “Evil Gal Blues.” That was in 1944, and for the next twenty years she was America's most popular and influential female blues singer.

If Washington rarely receives her due in the history books, it is in part because jazz and pop historians tend to feel that she devoted too
much of her life to blues and R&B, while many blues historians dismiss her as essentially a pop singer. Of course, this was no problem at all for the record-buying public, which could not have cared less about such classifications, and the only regrets along these lines to come from her legion of imitators were at their own failures to duplicate her genre-spanning success. It is true that Washington started out worshipping Billie Holiday, and ended up sweeping the pop charts with “What a Difference a Day Makes,” but she was also regularly billed as the “Queen of the Blues,” and most of the top female blues singers to come, including Esther Phillips, Ruth Brown, and Etta James, started out by slavishly modeling themselves on her example.

Washington would achieve her greatest overall pop success toward the end of her career, but her most influential period was the late 1940s and early 1950s. Her dominance of the R&B charts started in 1948, with the torchy ballad “Am I Asking Too Much,” but by 1949 she was in solid blues mold with “Baby Get Lost.” This was a hard-hitting twelve-bar declaration of war, shaded with traces of gospel melisma that foreshadowed Ray Charles's breakthrough blend of church and barroom. Her next hit, “Long John Blues,” was a hiply phrased update of the kind of racy hokum that had dominated the 1930s blues market, a song about a dentist who “said he wouldn't hurt me but he'd fill my hole inside.” Over the next five years, she would put twenty songs in the
Billboard
top ten, including big band pop ballads and even covers of country hits. (She reached number three on the R&B chart with Hank Williams's “Cold, Cold Heart” in 1951, and the same position three years later with a fiery, gospelized reimagining of Hank Snow's “I Don't Hurt Anymore,” pioneering another fusion for which Charles has received the historical credit.) She always returned to blues, though, reaching number four in 1952 with the old standard “Trouble In Mind,” and amusing the kids with stripped-down twelve-bar Rhythm and Blues romps like “TV Is the Thing (This Year).”

The term “Rhythm and Blues” became standard in 1949, after being adopted by
Billboard
as the new chart euphemism for music aimed principally at African-American consumers. Such landmarks understandably get seized upon as evidence of sweeping musical changes, and this was indisputably a period of transformation and upheaval in
African-American life and culture. World War II had sparked a new racial pride, segregation was beginning to crumble at the edges, and it is easy to detect a growth of power and optimism in black pop music. That said, it is at least as easy to detect a lot of continuity. Many of the records on
Billboard
's chart came from singers already well known for their blues work, and would be classified by most modern listeners as blues. As various historians have defined their terms, many have drawn a dividing line between blues and R&B, but no two would be likely to agree on exactly which songs end up on which side. B. B. King has regularly pointed out that the terms varied from city to city and year to year, and that he always considered himself fimly part of the R&B era. Meanwhile, the newly named chart still included names like Tampa Red, who made the top ten in both 1949 and 1951—not to mention Lonnie Johnson, whose lilting ballad “Tomorrow Night” had taken the number-one spot for seven weeks in 1948. The lines became no clearer in the next decade: In heavy blues towns like Memphis or Chicago, innovative hits like Muddy Waters's “Hoochie Coochie Man,” Little Walter's “Juke,” or any number of King's records might have been considered modern R&B, while in New York or Los Angeles they might sound countrified enough to be classified as blues. More to the point, nobody in any of these places would have cared much one way or the other.

One artist who perfectly exemplifies the absurdity of insisting on such categories is Big Joe Turner. Born in 1911, Turner started out leading blind street singers and listening to records of everyone from Ethel Waters to Leroy Carr, but the full-voiced Bessie Smith left the strongest mark on him, and he became the prototypic Kansas City shouter. By about 1930, he had teamed up with Pete Johnson, a pianist whose solid left-hand bass rhythms would form one of the cornerstones of the boogie-woogie craze, and was doubling as singer and bartender in the city's thriving after-hours clubs. A big, funny man, famed for his overpowering volume and endless supply of verses, Turner influenced a generation of Midwestern male singers before making his first record. Everyone toured through Kansas City, which thanks to a particularly corrupt political machine was then the region's center for booze, prostitution, gambling, and—by direct extension—
jazz, and Turner got all the work he wanted without bothering to leave town.

It was only in 1938 that he and Pete Johnson finally recorded, after John Hammond brought them to New York for the first “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. This was a key event in introducing blues, gospel, and jazz artists to a white intellectual audience, but only in Turner's case did it lead to the top of the R&B charts, and only by a rather circuitous route. The concert sparked a nationwide boogie-woogie craze, and made Turner the idol of white jazz fans who found Billie Holiday too thin for their blood and Josh White and Big Bill Broonzy too folky. He had a couple of R&B hits in the mid-1940s, but struck gold only after meeting Ahmet Ertegun, an erudite young jazz fan who was co-owner of the new Atlantic record label. It was 1951, and Turner had recently taken over Jimmy Rushing's chair in the Count Basie Orchestra, but felt hobbled by the big band's tightly tailored arrangements. Ertegun offered him a solo deal, and teamed him with small combos that were better suited to his tastes. Their first hit was a blues ballad, in line with Lonnie Johnson's “Tomorrow Night,” but Turner was not a ballad singer and he only hit his stride two years later, with “Honey Hush,” an original blues shouted over boogie piano. The basic pattern was unchanged from Turner's days in the K.C. barrooms, but Atlantic added a shuffling drumbeat, electric guitar, and honking sax, and the ebullience of Turner's vocal—the last two verses find him singing just the words “Hi yo, hi yo, Silver” over and over in various voices—put the record at number one for eight weeks. Eight months later, he topped the charts again with a soundalike sequel called “Shake, Rattle and Roll,” another slice of classic Turner, featuring verses like “You wear those dresses, the sun comes shining through/I can't believe my eyes all that mess belongs to you.” When it was covered—with cleaned-up lyrics—by a white country singer named Bill Haley who had formed a good-time combo in emulation of the Tympany Five, the forty-three-year-old Turner was suddenly a teen idol and leader of the rock 'n' roll revolution.