Escaping the Delta (32 page)

In the folk world, where he has remained an icon, Leadbelly is simultaneously treated as a major blues figure—though the black blues audience never even knew he existed—and as a pure folk artist who eschewed the commercial mainstream. (The folk world has always thrived on the myth of folk art for art's sake: Leadbelly's white coun
terpart, Woody Guthrie, is remembered as an Okie hobo rambler who somehow wandered onto the folk scene, rather than a popular hillbilly entertainer who starred on one of Southern California's most popular country radio shows before moving to New York.) In fact, Leadbelly was neither exceptionally devoted to blues nor unaware of the popular music around him, whether black or white. He consistently linked himself to Blind Lemon Jefferson, the biggest star in his home region, and once he discovered that he could attract a white audience, he began dreaming of movies and hit recordings. The Lomaxes chose to focus on his more traditional repertoire, but when left to his own devices he was a big Gene Autry fan, enjoyed singing pop and country tunes like “Dancing with Tears in my Eyes,” “Springtime in the Rockies,” and Jimmie Rodgers yodels, and imagined himself performing with Cab Calloway's band.
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While white folk fans of the time recall him as the most “authentic” and countrified figure on the New York scene, the black entertainers who worked with him inevitably recall him as a polished, serious professional. Brownie McGhee told of Leadbelly instructing him to wear a tie and buy a decent case for his guitar, and the Haitian dancer Josephine Premice described him as “a dandy,” noting his fine suits and gold-topped cane.
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McGhee had a particularly interesting slant on this issue. When he made his “folk” debut in Washington, D.C., as accompanist to Sonny Terry, he recalled that they were immediately surrounded by fans urging them to come to New York: “They said they didn't have any blues singers up there; that Josh White was the only one, and he'd gone white.” At the time, White had recently finished a run partnering Leadbelly at the Village Vanguard—the one time Leadbelly got a regular nightclub gig—and had taken up with the white Broadway singer Libby Holman, recorded an album with her, and started a residency at one of New York's fanciest cabarets, La Vie Parisienne. Though born in Greenville, South Carolina, and a successful Race artist in the early 1930s, White had moved to Harlem as soon as he got the chance, and had adapted his blues guitar technique to everything from leftist political songs to English ballads and pop hits. He paid lip service to the black folk tradition, and continued to sing old blues and spirituals, but had quickly realized that there was more money to be made from savvy
professionalism than rural purity. (Lomax understood this as well, though he was not happy about it, and he used White on some of his radio shows as a way of preparing audiences for Leadbelly.) As a result, he became America's defining black folksinger, a model for Harry Belafonte, and by far the best-known blues artist on the white market even at the height of the 1960s folk-blues revival.
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Equally, he became the hard-core folk and blues worlds' bête noire, condemned as a symbol of all that was fake, slicked up, and adulterated. When McGhee and Terry moved to Greenwich Village and became regulars on the folk circuit, they were treated as more genuine representatives of the African-American tradition. However, McGhee himself had a rather different view of White's artistic choices: “A little while after we got up there, I met Josh, and when I saw how much money he was making, I said, ‘Hey, show me how to go white, too.'”
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McGhee did not have White's cabaret charisma, but neither was he satisfied with a career in the white folk museum. While he and Terry worked for the rest of their lives as traditional country bluesmen, and white fans would see them doing their basic acoustic show at colleges, folk clubs, and formal concerts—or appearing as colorful rural characters in the Broadway production of
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
—he also managed a parallel career on the black R&B scene. He reached the number-two chart position in 1948 with “My Fault,” and recorded the pioneering rock 'n' roll hit “Drinkin' Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee” with his brother Stick McGhee. Whether by design or simply because the two worlds were so separate, these careers never overlapped. Many of the fans crowding the duo's folk gigs were there precisely to see “real” blues, the pure antithesis of the loud, commercial R&B on the radio, and would have been shocked at the idea that their heroes were equally comfortable playing contemporary electric pop.

Understanding this division between “folk” and “pop” is vital to understanding the emergence of the modern blues aesthetic. Van Vechten, Hammond, and Lomax, as well as later figures like Samuel Charters, were striving to establish the music they loved as a great art, deserving of serious, intellectual attention. In a way, their mission was like the attempt by acolytes of modern art to bring European academic sensibilities to bear on African sculpture, or of earlier folklorists to win
respect for medieval ballads. A great part of the battle was to separate important “folk art” from disposable everyday entertainment. All of these men were fond of music that was commercially popular, but they also believed that the best blues, jazz, or folk had enduring qualities that the vast majority of current hits did not. It was an article of faith for them that while Bing Crosby or Frank Sinatra might be passing fancies, a handful of unrecognized black artists were creating music for the ages, and they were trying to make the world aware of this, preferably while the artists were alive to enjoy the attention. This was no easy task in a world where such “artists” were poor, despised, and relegated to loud clubs and sweaty, crowded dance halls, working for audiences of drunken hell-raisers. Hence Carnegie Hall, sit-down concerts, lectures, and articles written in the most humorless, scholarly prose. Modern fans like myself, when we fantasize about going back to the 1930s and seeing the Count Basie band in its prime, dream of being transported to Harlem's Savoy Ballroom, surrounded by a hot, swinging crowd of dancers. At the time, though, the chance of a college professor or other solid white citizen showing up at the Savoy was comparable to that of their present-day counterparts turning up at a rap show in South Central L.A.—it happened, but was considered extremely daring. When the cream of New York intellectual society filled Carnegie Hall for the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts, sitting respectfully and recognizing the music of Basie, Broonzy, and the other performers as an acceptable form of modern art, that was a huge breakthrough. It was part of the broader movement that would eventually enshrine “popular culture” as an important academic discipline, so that today it is taken for granted that people can get doctoral degrees by writing about the poetic tropes of rap lyrics or the sociosexual implications of Madonna. It was also inextricably connected to the social movement for desegregation and Civil Rights, and the Hammonds and Lomaxes saw themselves as part of both an artistic revolution and a crusade for social justice.

Sometimes, the need to make popular culture sufficiently serious could be taken to extremes. When Lomax presented Josh White and the Golden Gate Quartet in a concert at the Library of Congress, a setting where classical music had been the norm, he arranged for each
song to be introduced with spoken commentary by himself or an African-American college professor (Sterling Brown and Alain Locke shared the honors).
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Even so, such efforts were chancy, and there was always a conservative columnist ready to sneer about “minstrel shows” coming to Carnegie Hall. Hence the constant insistence that valuable black cultural expressions not be confused with shallow entertainment. If white tastemakers were properly to appreciate the Ellingtons and Basies of the world—and the Leadbellys and Big Bill Broonzys—a clear divide had to be made between these important artists and the Louis Jordans, chart-topping musical comedians who were still singing minstrel-flavored lyrics like “Ain't Nobody Here But Us Chickens” and “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” This was not an easy matter, since even the purest and most artistic musicians often aspired to Jordan-style commercial success, but especially as they got older and their styles ceased to appeal to black pop buyers, many saw the advantage of playing along with a white connoisseur aesthetic.

There were essentially four groups of connoisseurs who nurtured the white blues cult: the jazz fans, the folk fans, the record collectors, and the beats. These groups overlapped a good deal, but each had its own fiercely defended standards of purity, and the hard core of each group was made up of people who at times seemed more interested in enforcing these standards than in the music itself. Each group also considered itself to be made up of people whose tastes were proudly outside the mainstream. They celebrated the romantic honor of going one's own way rather than slavishly following the current pop trends. Then as now, the work of poor black musicians had a natural outsider mystique. For white fans, an appreciation of black vernacular culture showed daring and individuality, as well as a virtuous respect for and solidarity with the downtrodden. Since, almost by definition, those musicians who were obviously, garishly successful were not outsiders, it is no accident that these groups routinely rejected the work of major, important artists simply because they were too widely appreciated—though the same artists might have been hailed as geniuses before they broke into the mass market, and might be hailed as geniuses again once their popularity faded.

The first white audiences to embrace blues as more than enter
tainment were the folk and “trad jazz” crowds. The record collectors would not have their day until the late 1950s, when reissue programs and rediscoveries of older bluesmen gave them a moment of tastemaking cachet. As for the beats, blues was only rarely their music of choice. However, at the dawn of the blues revival they were the most visible white “rebels without a cause,” and their literary and aesthetic stances were adopted wholesale by the hipper trad fans and folkies.

This is not the place to give a history of the trad jazz boom or the folk revival, but the former, in particular, probably needs some introduction for modern readers. It is now largely forgotten that, in the 1940s, a bitter battle developed between the traditionalist “moldy figs” who declared that jazz began and ended with the New Orleans music of the teens and twenties, and the supporters of swing and contemporary styles. Celebrating roots and good-time music over modernism and self-conscious artiness, the trad fans naturally embraced figures like Leadbelly and Broonzy as slightly older cousins of King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton. Rudi Blesh, in his jazz history
Shining Trumpets
, devoted two full chapters to blues, dividing the music into “archaic” (including everyone from Lemon Jefferson through Leroy Carr and Robert Johnson), “classic” (the blues queens), and “postclassic” (including later Roosevelt Sykes and Lonnie Johnson, whom he rather liked, but also Billie Holiday, whom he dismissed as “not a real blues singer but merely a smart entertainer”).
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In keeping with other white experts, Blesh showed a blithe disregard for whether blues artists had any particular standing with the black audience. The six “archaic” records he singled out for discussion included one by Jefferson, but also works by such obscure figures as Montana Taylor, Romeo Nelson—and Robert Johnson. In Johnson's case, Blesh focused on “Hell Hound on My Trail,” and it is worth presenting his description at length, both because it was the first piece to be written on Johnson's work and because of the degree to which it set the tone for decades of romantically purple blues criticism:

In France and England, in particular, blues was considered a basic adjunct to the trad scene. It was jazz fans who crowded clubs for Josh White's and Big Bill Broonzy's early tours, and by the mid-1950s it was not unusual to find British jazz bands including some jug-band, or “skiffle,” numbers as part of their sets. In 1954, Chris Barber, a trumpet player who was the reigning star of the English trad scene, released an album called
New Orleans Joys
that included versions of Leadbelly's “Rock Island Line” and “John Henry” performed in jug-band style by the band's banjo player, Lonnie Donegan (who had changed his first name from Tony in honor of Lonnie Johnson). Issued as a single in 1956, “Rock Island Line” made the pop top ten in England and then, to everyone's astonishment, repeated this feat in the United States. In the States, Donegan's record fit into the post-Weavers folk scene, which was dominated by Harry Belafonte and the series of clean-cut, sports-shirted young ensembles that reached its apogee with the Kingston Trio. In Britain, where the folk revival was as likely to consist of a cappella renditions of British ballads, many people filed Donegan alongside trad, blues, and the upbeat, countrified, guitar-driven R&B of Chuck Berry.
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