Escaping the Delta (40 page)

8.
David C. Morton with Charles K. Wolfe,
DeFord Bailey: A Black Star in Early Country Music
(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1991), p. 27.

9.
Stuart's band included the white Sam Sweeney, brother of the famous minstrel banjo star Joel Walker Sweeney, and a black man named Bob, the general's body servant, who played fiddle, bones, and guitar (Malone,
Singing Cowboys and Musical Mountaineers
, p. 19).

10.
Interview with the author, c. 1994.

11.
Neff and Connor,
Blues
, p. 12.

12.
In my experience, whenever a bluesman has told me that he or his father used to play square-dance gigs, if I asked whether he worked with white musicians the answer was at least a qualified yes. Having provided examples of such mixed groups from Georgia, Kentucky, Virginia, Tennessee, and Mississippi, let me add one from Texas: The pioneering black electric guitarist Eddie Durham recalled that his father worked there as a fiddler with hillbilly bands (James Sallis,
The Guitar Players
[New York: William Morrow and Company, 1982], pp. 97–98).

13.
It is occasionally suggested that Native American styles also had a place in the mix. There is little musical evidence for this, but Jim Baxter, for one, was Afro-Cherokee, so it may be a slight oversimplification to frame this discussion entirely in terms of black and white.

14.
Times Ain't Like They Used to Be: Early Rural & Popular American Music 1928–1935
(Newton, N.J.: Yazoo Video 512, 1992), video recording.

15.
This survey was conducted by Kip Lornell and Roddy Moore, sponsored by Ferrum College, Roanoke, Va. Some of the relevant recordings are available on the compact disc
Virginia Traditions: Non-Blues Secular Black Music
(Global Village CD 1001).

16.
Handy,
Father of the Blues
, p. 33.

17.
Whites did continue to “black up” a good deal longer than blacks. It was only
in 1979 that the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barber Shop Quartet Singing in America officially banned blackface performances (Abbott, “Play That Barber Shop Chord,” p. 301).

18.
Jesse Stone, who would go on to write the rock 'n' roll hits “Shake, Rattle and Roll” and “Money Honey,” got his first taste of show business in what he called a minstrel show, a rather informal affair produced by his father and featuring family members, in Kansas (Nick Tosches,
Unsung Heroes of Rock 'n' Roll
[New York: Harmony Books, 1991], p. 13). In Massachusetts, the white percussionist John “Mr. Bones” Burrell told me about learning to play the bones for a high school minstrel show in the 1940s, and such shows were apparently common at some New England prep schools at least into the 1960s.

19.
In such potentially race-sensitive markets, the record companies sometimes made conscious decisions about whose pictures got printed, and where. The black singer Carroll Clark recorded many light parlor ballads before 1920, but was told by his record company that they would print his picture only in advertisements for “coon” songs (“Records Racial Melodies as Sung by Members of the Race,”
Chicago Defender
, June 4, 1921, p. 6). Along with releasing African-American artists in “white” record lines, the companies also occasionally passed white artists off for black. Records by Roy Evans, Emmett Miller, and the Allen Brothers were advertised with pictures of black singers, and one Allens record was issued in Columbia's Race catalog. The Allens brought suit, fearing that this classification would hurt their chances in white vaudeville (Charles Wolfe, “The White Man's Blues, 1922–40,”
Journal of Country Music
, vol. 15, no. 3, 1993, p. 39).

20.
There were very few exceptions to this rule, though there is an exuberant 1927 record of “Ain't She Sweet” by the black guitar and harmonica duo of Bobby Leecan and Robert Cooksey. Some blues scholars would also list Charley Patton's reworking of “Some of These Days” and Kokomo Arnold's of “Paddling Madeline Home,” but these were so altered as to be almost unrecognizable, and cannot be considered pop covers.

21.
Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue: Life and Music on Black America's Main Street
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), p. 195.

22.
The term “musicianer” was, as far as I know, purely rural, but “songster” can also be found in period newspapers, used to refer to popular singers, with no genre implied. In the Delta, it was used routinely for blues vocalists. Rube Lacey, the Delta guitarist who taught Son House, would say, “I was a good songster in them days…Walter [Vincson] was a good songster. He could sing…Tommy [Johnson] was a good songster. Ishmon [Bracey] was a good songster” (David Evans,
Tommy Johnson
[London: November Books, 1971], p. 40). There are many cases of such vernacular terms acquiring new specificity in the hands of folklorists. For example, backwoods Southerners called all printed songsheets “ballads,” because it was common for topical story-songs to be sold in this form. Because folklorists use “ballad” to mean story-song, whether printed or not, it has become standard practice for them to
write “ballet” when a rural Southerner uses the word for a songsheet, and I have even had folklorists say to me “those are ballets, not ballads,” as if it were now incorrect to use the original term. Obviously, creating such a distinction is useful within the narrow context of academic folklore studies, but it is important to remember that it did not exist among ballad singers in the rural South. The same holds true for the use of “banjar” for the older, gourd-bodied banjos.

23.
Stephan Michelson interviewed Thomas and recorded him with his hotel band in Shreveport in April 1974 (Stephan Michelson, personal communication with the author, 2003).

24.
Tommy Johnson was not from the Delta, but from the Crystal Springs area, to the south. However, he spent time in the Delta with Patton, and much of his playing reflects this influence.

25.
The Tommy Johnson–Jimmie Rodgers connection provides interesting background to the work of later bluesmen as well. Howlin' Wolf's falsetto “howl” resembles Johnson's, and is usually traced to this source, but Wolf told a different story to the blues singer John Hammond: “He said he was inspired to play by listening to Jimmie Rodgers records…He said, ‘Yep. I wanted to yodel in the worst way, and all that I could do was make a howl”' (Jas Obrecht, ed.,
Blues Guitar: The Men Who Made the Music
[San Francisco: Miller Freeman Books, 1993], p. 65).

26.
From the folklorists' point of view, the eagerness of rural informants to sing pop material was a constant annoyance. For example, Alan Lomax wrote in a field notebook for his 1942 Mississippi trip: “recorded some very lovely contemporary spirituals from some 20 year old girls who wanted to sing ‘Blues in the Night.'” The winnowing process by which such material was excluded must always be kept in mind when assessing the work of such collectors. We will never know how many of the inmates on Parchman Farm were singing Fats Waller hits or show tunes to their mules, since such singers would have been of no interest either to Lomax or to his peers and successors.

27.
This list appears in Alan Lomax,
The Land Where the Blues Began
(New York: Dell, 1993), pp. 413–14. A few further titles appear in Work's field notes (reproduced in Gordon,
Can't Be Satisfied
, p. 5) and Lomax's original notes. The other Autry hits were: “Home on the Range,” “Be Honest with Me” (mistakenly attributed to Bill Monroe), “Jingle Jangle Jingle,” and “You Are My Sunshine.” The other pop songs were: “Dinah,” “I Ain't Got Nobody,” “Wang Wang Blues,” “Darkness on the Delta,” “Bye Bye Blues,” and two untraceable titles: “The House,” and “Texaco.” The blues included six originals, along with Sonny Boy Williamson's “Down South,” “Sugar Mama,” and “Bluebird Blues” St. Louis Jimmy's “Going Down Slow” Walter Davis's “13 Highway” and “Angel Child” “County Jail Blues” (mistakenly attributed to Davis, but probably from Big Maceo); and two songs in a more clearly Mississippi style: Robert Lockwood's “Take a Little Walk with Me” and Yank Rachell's “.38 Pistol Blues.”

28.
McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
, p. 231.

29.
The other recent record was Tony Hollins's “Crawling King Snake,” later covered with great success by John Lee Hooker. The Wheatstraw record was “Sweet Home Blues” b/w “Good Woman Blues” (which Lomax noted as “Sweet Woman Blues”). The Williamson was either “Bluebird Blues” or one of his many other releases on the Bluebird label. The gospel disc was “Preaching with Singing” b/w “Everybody Will Be Happy Over There,” by Elder Oscar Sanders and Congregation, of Christ Temple, Muncie, Indiana.

30.
Waters's accordion playing is mentioned in Gordon,
Can't Be Satisfied
, p. 19. Townsend recalls that his father played blues and sounded “something like Clifton Chenier” (Henry Townsend, as told to Bill Greensmith,
A Blues Life
[Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999], p. 5). The Homer Lewis information is from Evans,
Big Road Blues
, p. 194. Downriver in Louisiana, the instrument was even more popular, and Leadbelly recorded a couple of accordion tunes (Jared Snyder, “Leadbelly and His Windjammer: Examining the African American Button Accordion Tradition,”
American Music
, Summer 1994; and Jared Snyder, “Squeezebox: The Legacy of the Afro-Mississippi Accordionists,”
Black Music Research Journal
, vol. 17, no. 1, Spring 1997).

31.
Stephen Calt,
I'd Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), p. 3.

32.
Welding, “Ramblin' Johnny Shines,” p. 25.

33.
David “Honeyboy” Edwards, interview in
Living Blues
, vol. 1, no. 4, Winter 1970–71, p. 20.

34.
The “Bill Bailey” report is from Chris Albertson, “Bessie Smith,” in Pete Weldon and Toby Byron, eds.
Bluesland
(New York: Dutton, 1991), p. 53. John Hammond Sr. wrote that when he produced Smith's last recordings in 1933, she refused to sing blues: “I can remember her now, saying: ‘Nobody wants to hear blues—times is too bad.' Nothing I could say would sway her, and instead of blues she insisted on having Socks Wilson and Coot Grant write her pop-type tunes” (John Hammond, “Why Bessie Wouldn't Sing the Blues,”
ABC Hootenanny
, January 1963, p. 60). Three years later, interviewed during the seventh week of her extended run at a New York nightclub, Smith was doing swing numbers, and said, “Things have changed quite a bit, and I realize that we are living in an entirely new era of entertainment” (Allan McMillan, “New York Sees Bessie Smith; Wonders Where She's Been,”
Chicago Defender
, February 28, 1936, sec. 1, p. 10).

35.
Chris Albertson, “Lonnie Johnson,” in Weldon and Byron,
Bluesland
, pp. 42–43.

36.
Weldon's group was unrelated to the Washboard Rhythm Kings who recorded in New York and New Jersey, and it went on to make a half dozen records in the next two years as the State Street Swingers. It was basically a second-string Harlem Hamfats, and recorded covers of both “Oh! Red” and Tampa Red's “When You Were a Girl of Seven.” Its version of “Arlena” is a speeded-up and lyrically garbled reworking of a pop ballad previously recorded by Leroy Carr.

37.
Paul and Beth Garon,
Woman with a Guitar: Memphis Minnie's Blues
(New
York: Da Capo Press, 1992), photo section, plate 42. The guitarist Willie Moore also recalled that he, Minnie, and Son House's old partner Willie Brown sometimes substituted for the W. C. Handy band at white dances in the Delta, and that their songs included “You Great Big Beautiful Doll,” “Let Me Call You Sweetheart,” and “What Makes You Do Me Like You Do Do Do?” (Calt and Wardlow,
King of the Delta Blues
, p. 158).

38.
These performances were released only in 2002, on
Big Bill Broonzy in Concert with Graeme Bell
, Jasmine CD 3007, and
Big Bill Broonzy on Tour in Britain, 1952
, Jasmine CD 3011/2.

39.
While Dodds sounds quite at home with the Louisville players, Hines recalled hearing one of the records he made with them on the radio when he was sitting with Louis Armstrong, and being so embarrassed that he denied he was the pianist. He referred to them as a “hillbilly group,” mentioning them alongside Jimmie Rodgers, and one would not know from his telling that they were black, much less a popular blues group that had made a series of records with Sara Martin (Stanley Dance,
The World of Earl Hines
[New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977], p. 58).

40.
Carr's non-blues recordings include a 1930 pairing, “Let's Make Up and Be Friends Again” and “Let's Disagree,” and 1934's “Arlena.” There are also three songs—“I Know that I'll be Blue,” “Don't Say Goodbye,” and “Prison Cell Blues”—which start off as twelve-bar blues but finish with Tin Pan Alley pop codas, with Carr shifting his style accordingly.

41.
Jim O'Neal,
Crescent City Blues
(New York: RCA Bluebird LP 5522, 1975), phonograph album notes.

42.
Stephen Calt, “The Anatomy of a ‘Race' Music Label: Mayo Williams and Paramount Records,” in Norman Kelley, ed.,
Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music
(New York: Akashic Books, 2002), p. 93.

43.
There were many “covers” of hit songs recorded during the blues era, but usually by regular studio musicians, to meet commercial demands. For example, when Josh White was recording for ARC, a label that specialized in pressing twenty-five-cent records for department store chains, he seems to have been specifically assigned to make budget covers of songs that were hits on the higher-priced labels, especially ARC's sister label, Vocalion.