Escaping the Delta (4 page)

As Honeyboy Edwards, a friend and contemporary of Johnson's, puts it:

That “ragtime stuff” made up the core repertoire of older Delta players like John Hurt and Furry Lewis, and would be recalled by bluesmen like Big Bill Broonzy, a country fiddler until he moved to Chicago and learned guitar. It was not ragtime in the sense that Scott Joplin played ragtime. Though a few hotshot guitarists in the East had the technical skill to fingerpick piano rags on guitar, and black string bands from Dallas to the Atlantic seaboard played formal, multi-section compositions like “Dallas Rag” and “St. Louis Tickle,” Edwards uses the word “ragtime” much as a lot of people today use “blues”: as a catchall term for older African-American rural music. Someone who grew up in the rock era would call Mississippi John Hurt's music blues. Edwards, who grew up when blues was a hot new trend, calls it ragtime. I do not know what it would have been called at the turn of the century, when ragtime itself was a flashy new pop sound—probably “reels,” a term many older black people in the South were still using in the 1920s to describe any secular country music, blues included.
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Edwards includes songs that most modern listeners would classify as blues in the “ragtime” category, because the black audience of his youth already considered them outmoded, fit only for hicks, old
people, and white folks. As he recalls, “When I was in Mississippi, a lot of white people used to give dances, they used to keep me playing a lot of places, and I played a lot of ragtime stuff then, like ‘Alberta,' ‘Corinna,' ‘Saint Louis Blues.'” That last song, for those unaware of the fact, was W. C. Handy's biggest hit, the number that made blues an international sensation.

If Handy was the Father of the Blues—and his success in popularizing the term gives him a fair claim to the title—its mother was Ma Rainey, who may have been the first entertainer to stake her fortunes on blues singing. Gertrude Rainey was born in Georgia in 1886, and by 1904 she was touring as half of a song-and-dance team with William “Pa” Rainey. They appeared in minstrel troupes, tent shows, vaudeville theaters, and circuses throughout the southeastern United States. In her one known interview, Rainey told the folklorist John Work that she first came across what would become her trademark style in 1902, in a small town in Missouri. As Work recalled her story:

Rainey became a popular star on the Southern circuit, and by the early teens she and her husband were traveling with a circus and billing themselves as “Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” It is worth noting that this billing uses the word “blues” not for a
musical style, but in the old sense of misery, which their act would wipe out. It is not clear at what point she began calling her songs blues, and there is no evidence that she used the term any earlier than Handy did. Whether or not she gave the music its name, though, she did a great deal to put it on the map.

It is often argued that Rainey's girl in Missouri and Handy's railroad station guitarist are examples of the original blues singers, and that the professionals were just elaborating on and jazzing up a common rural style. Certainly, Handy and Rainey were building on earlier folk forms, and gave the credit where it was due. But they also created something new, a vibrant, theatrical expansion of the older moans and hollers, and it was this new creation that swept the country under the name “blues.” They were so popular and influential that, since recordings of black rural musicians would not be made until well into the blues era, we can never have a clear idea of what the music sounded like before the professionals came on the scene. A handful of amateur folklorists in earlier years had transcribed scattered lines that seem like proto-blues lyrics, and it is possible that by the dawn of the twentieth century the deep South was full of people playing something that sounded more or less like what would come to be called blues. It is at least equally likely that such songs were rare, regional, and followed no set structures until Rainey and her peers shaped them, polished them, and made them into showstoppers.

It is also far from clear that even these pre-blues styles were ancient, rural creations. There has always been a coterie of New Orleans patriots who claim that blues arose in that city's red-light district. Jelly Roll Morton, who was born there in 1885, said that the style was already common in his childhood. Introducing his recording of “2:19 Blues,” he recalled that it was the signature song of a whorehouse singer named Mamie Desdumes: “She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number. Of course, to get in on it, to try to learn it, I made myself the can-rusher [the kid who would carry a bucket down to the corner bar to buy beer].”
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This suggests that the style was already established in New Orleans almost a decade before Handy or Rainey came across it farther north. Since the city functioned as the main shipping center for the South and Midwest,
and especially for river states like Mississippi and Missouri, it is possible that a New Orleans style went feral in the countryside, and Handy and Rainey would have been in just the right places to rediscover it as rural folk music.
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Whatever the music's origins, by the time the first rural guitarists and singers began recording in the mid-1920s, blues had been a major pop style for over a decade, and all of them would have heard and been influenced by the polished work of the vaudeville and tent-show singers. When the record companies called their music blues, it was a commercial choice designed to link them to the popular recordings of the blues queens. The newspaper ads for their records might show an old man riding down a dirt road on a tired mule, or a wide-mouthed minstrel caricature, but to a young player trying to make a name in the entertainment world, the word conjured up pictures of good jobs, big money, and shiny cars. If someone had suggested to the major blues stars that they were old-fashioned folk musicians carrying on a culture handed down from slavery times, most would probably have been insulted.

W
HEN WE TRY TO SORT OUT THE EARLY HISTORY OF BLUES, WE
have to rely on the information available to us, but we need to keep in mind that this information is limited and potentially misleading. As Lewis Mumford wrote in
The Myth of the Machine
, “Material artifacts may stubbornly defy time, but what they tell about man's history is a good deal less than the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”
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He was pointing out that simply because all we can dig up in an archeological site are durable artifacts, this does not mean that these artifacts were especially important to the civilizations that produced them. All that has survived intact from the dawn of humanity are a few primitive stone tools, but that does not mean that the societies that produced those tools did not have elaborate social or religious structures that may have contributed far more to our ancestors' development and survival than the advance from unshaped pounding stones to sharpened flints.

Likewise, we are making a serious mistake if we assume that the recordings made during the first great blues era give us a good idea of what was played by Robert Johnson and his contemporaries. Records and sheet music give us an excellent idea of what was being sold in the commercial market for records and sheet music, but in many cases that would have had little to do with what musicians were playing at live performances.

Before discussing these limitations, though, it is necessary to have
some idea of what does survive, and of what the mainstream commercial blues world looked like over the years. This is particularly true because the popular perception of the early blues boom is so flagrantly out of sync with the facts. Over and over again, the most influential and acclaimed stars of the period have been belittled or ignored by later writers and fans who happen to find them boring. As a result, the popular notion of a typical prewar blues artist is a ragged guitarist wandering the dirt roads of the deep South, rather than the savvy, urban, smartly dressed vaudeville queens and piano-guitar duos that generally dominated the market and set the trends. Not only is this unfair to these successful stars, but it also obscures the motivations and influences of the lesser-known, folkier players who today are most admired.

Much as we moderns may enjoy concentrating on those artists we consider to be unique geniuses, we must not forget that they were part of a larger pop scene, driven by commercial fads and fashions. It was often bedeviled by formulas, conservatism and mediocrity, just like any later pop scene. Bessie Smith and Leroy Carr, as much as Elvis, the Beatles, or Britney Spears, were quickly followed by a horde of soundalike imitators churning out repetitive variations on their hits. These imitators were not great creative artists, but that was irrelevant at the time. No one involved in the blues world was calling this music art. It was working-class pop music, and its purveyors were looking for immediate sales, with no expectation that their songs would be remembered once the blues vogue had passed. And yet, out of this money-grubbing, hit-centered world came a lot of superb music, as well as sources for all the African-American popular styles that have followed. To the mainstream black audience, this was the blues boom, and it is worth taking a chapter to follow its evolution, tracking its main trends and stars.

 

A
S
I
HAVE ALREADY OUTLINED, THE WORD “BLUES” BECAME CURRENT
as a musical term in the early teens, largely spread by sheet music and vaudeville performers. Recording was still in its infancy at that time, so printed music remained the main way of disseminating new compositions, and the first published blues was a song called “I Got
the Blues,” which appeared in New Orleans in 1908. Its composer was an Italian American named Antonio Maggio, and it began with a twelve-bar section using a melody that is a clear predecessor of W. C. Handy's “St. Louis Blues.” It was described on its cover as “An Up-to-Date Rag,” which neatly places it in its historical context, on the cusp of the evolution from the ragtime era to the age of blues and jazz.
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This was an exciting period for African-American popular culture, and the musical evolutions are part of a larger picture. In 1905, the Pekin Theater opened in Chicago as the first major house owned and managed by African Americans and dedicated to presenting black performers in front of a mixed audience.
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Soon, such theaters were popping up throughout the South and Midwest, and a vibrant black vaudeville circuit developed. For black performers, this was an important breakthrough, because it meant that solo artists or small bands could tour nationally without having to organize and promote their own concerts or be members of minstrel troupes. This freedom encouraged innovation, as performers tried to come up with unique routines that would set them apart from the competition, and blues songs at first seem to have been presented as a sort of musical novelty. Indeed, it is an odd fact that the earliest surviving mention of blues being performed onstage is in a 1910 newspaper review of a ventriloquist's act that included a blues-singing dummy.
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The ascendance of blues on the commercial music scene is usually dated to the fall of 1912, when “Dallas Blues,” “Baby Seals Blues,” and “The Memphis Blues (Mr. Crump)” all hit the sheet-music market. “Memphis Blues,” in particular, was picked up by bands across the country, and it launched the career of W. C. Handy, who would be dubbed the “Father of the Blues.” Handy had been born in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, and worked for many years as a cornet player, music teacher, and minstrel-show musician before becoming a bandleader in Memphis, Tennessee. In his autobiography, he recalls that in 1909 his band was hired to drum up votes for E. H. Crump, a candidate for mayor, and Handy came up with a unique campaign song. It was based on the melody he remembered hearing at that railroad station in Tutwiler, including two twelve-bar blues sections and occa
sional blue notes, “attempting to suggest the typical slurs of the Negro voice.”
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Handy followed “Memphis Blues” with “St. Louis Blues” in 1914, which remains his most enduring composition. Then came “Yellow Dog Blues” (originally titled “Yellow Dog Rag,” an indication of how little these terms meant, except as eye-catching commercial rubrics),
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“Beale Street Blues,” and many more. Other composers leapt on the bandwagon, and soon every dance or vaudeville orchestra had to have its moaning novelty number in the new style.

It has been common for historians to mention this early blues craze, then jump directly to 1920, when Mamie Smith's “Crazy Blues” became the first major vocal hit by a black singer selling principally to black record buyers.
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This seems quite natural to those of us raised on the fiction that tastes evolved more slowly in the past than they do now, but not even the rock 'n' roll era saw faster and more dramatic changes in American music than the period from the teens to the thirties. This was the height of the modernist wave, with the world shaken by World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the Great Depression. Fashions changed at a dazzling clip, and musical styles swept in and out, or underwent complete transformations at a pace that makes five or six years a significant stretch of time.

The jump from Handy's sheet music to Smith's recording is particularly misleading, as is the frequent listing of “Crazy Blues” as the first blues record. As far as I can tell, this mistake grew out of the fact that so much of the early historical writing on blues was done by people with progressive political views, who were celebrating the music as a vital cultural expression of black Americans. Obviously, this approach is valid in many contexts, and blues has deep roots in black culture, but the story is more complicated than that. Blues was pop music, and pop music rarely fits a simple political or cultural agenda.

When the blues craze hit, the record companies were quick to react. The first recording of a blues composition was made in 1914, when the Victor Military Band cut a version of Handy's “Memphis Blues.” This was not a particularly innovative record, owing more to the Sousa ragtime march tradition than anything else, but it broke the
ice and was soon followed by more interesting performances. Many were instrumentals, and Handy himself traveled to New York to make his studio debut in 1917, with a twelve-piece band that included three violins and a xylophone.
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The first blues to be sung on record was also “Memphis Blues,” performed by a fellow named Morton Harvey in 1915.
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By the end of the decade there were dozens of vocal blues on the market, and a couple of artists were even making a specialty of the style. Al Bernard (“The Boy from Dixie”) was known for his interpretations of W. C. Handy numbers, and Marion Harris led off the long line of performers who have been billed as “Queen of the Blues.” What sets these singers apart from those enshrined in the history books is that all of them were white.
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Considering the number of white blues singers who have come along since the 1950s, and their influence on the modern audience, it is surprising that so little attention has been devoted to these pioneers. I would not overstate their importance, but they were significant figures in their time, and certainly are part of the larger story. It is true that their records are fairly unexceptional pop productions, and one could argue that they fit more into the novelty category than in a discussion of the music as a serious art form. Harris and Bernard made blues-inflected songs a mainstay of their careers, but performers like Norah Bayes and Marie Cahill recorded “Negro” material as part of broader careers as ethnic impersonators, alongside numbers like “How Can They Tell That Oi'm Irish?” and “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly? (From the Emerald Isle).” Such mimicry was a mainstay of early-twentieth-century vaudeville, both black and white, and it is difficult to sort out the degree to which blues in this context was treated as engrossing music rather than amusing theater.
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Even Bernard and Harris were often described in the contemporary press as clever impressionists, celebrated for their mastery of “Negro dialect songs.” Given this, it is easy to dismiss the early white blues singers as holdovers from the blackface minstrel tradition rather than heralds of a new era. Certainly, in some cases their presentation overlapped the older minstrel style. Marie Cahill's 1917 recording of “The
Dallas Blues,” one of the first pure twelve-bar blues on record, begins with the following spoken segment:

It is an open question whether Cahill was a blues enthusiast who framed the music with minstrel touches in order to bring it to a wider audience, or a vaudeville minstrel latching on to the new fad. Either way, her work gives an idea of how blues first came into many homes. What is more, one might suggest that her description of the song as something she had heard from a “quaint…darky” in Dallas is only a little more removed and superior than Handy's description of the ragged Negro, with feet peeping out of his shoes, who sang “the weirdest music I had ever heard.”

Handy himself was very appreciative of the white blues singers, numbering them among his earliest supporters. He writes that, in fact, white bands were often more receptive to his work than their black counterparts:

He immediately adds that “with Negro vaudeville artists it was different,” that they were always on the lookout for striking material and “these performers became our most effective pluggers,” but adds that he also hired a Greek and an Armenian singer to promote his songs and those of the other songwriters he published. Handy regarded Al Bernard with special affection, struck by the young singer's “good looks and his soft Southern accent as well as by the fact that…he could sing all my Blues.” Handy recommended Bernard to Thomas Edison as a recording artist, and also published many of Bernard's own compositions.

Of Marion Harris, Handy wrote that “she sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored.”
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Harris's best-known hit, “I Ain't Got Nobody,”
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was covered by an array of African-American blues queens, including Bessie Smith, and she continued to be popular throughout the 1920s, though her ethnicity has robbed her of a place in the history books and blues discographies. What makes this omission particularly silly is that Mamie Smith, generally hailed as the pioneer of vocal blues recording, must have been equally hard for a lot of listeners to place by race. Like Harris or Bayes, Smith was a polished vaudeville performer, and her diction was at least as “white” as that of the white singers who specialized in blues or “Negro” songs. She made her recording debut on the heels of her starring role in a musical revue called
Maid of Harlem
, and her first record had her singing a pair of standard Tin Pan Alley songs, backed by an all-white orchestra. It was precisely because of
her mainstream, relatively bland style that the composer Perry Bradford chose her to break down the color bar and become the first black blues singer on record.
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