Escaping the Delta (44 page)

15.
Chicago Defender,
November 3, 1951.

16.
Waters would recall: “He couldn't stand my playing because he wanted me to play like Johnny Moore which I wasn't able to play the guitar like. He wanted it to be a kind of sweet blues.” Quoted in Mike Rowe, “The Influence of the Mississippi Delta Style on Chicago's Post War Blues,” in Robert Sacre, ed.,
The Voice of the Delta: Charley Patton and the Mississippi Blues Traditions, Influences, and Comparisons
(Belgium: Presses Universitaires Liege, 1987), p. 259.

17.
Walter was by no means rough or down-home in his musical tastes. He listed his favorite blues singers as John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson, Big Bill Broonzy, Leroy Carr, Walter Davis, and Big Maceo. Outside the blues field, he mentioned Roy Hamilton, Dakota Staton, Red Prysock, Ahmad Jamal, and George Shearing (Interview with Jacques Demetre, cited in Tony Glover et al.,
Blues with a Feeling: The Little Walter Story
[New York: Routledge, 2002], p. 204).

18.
Nadine Cohodas,
Spinning Blues into Gold
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 2000), p. 162.

19.
Shaw,
Honkers and Shouters
, p. 299.

20.
Gordon,
Can't Be Satisfied
, p. 334.

21.
Wolfman Jack, with Byron Laursen,
Have Mercy!
(New York: Warner Books, 1995), pp. 143–44, 178–79.

22.
Guralnick,
Feel Like Going Home
, p. 100.

23.
Mark Humphreys, “Bright Lights, Big City,” in Lawrence Cohn, ed.,
Nothing but the Blues
(New York: Abbeville Press, 1993), p. 187.

24.
O'Neal and Van Singel,
The Voice of the Blues
, pp. 329–30.

25.
James Brown with Bruce Tucker,
James Brown: The Godfather of Soul
(New York: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 6, 17–18.

26.
McKee and Chisenhall,
Beale Black and Blue
, p. 213.

13
The Blues Cult: Primitive Folk Art and the Roots of Rock

1.
It could be argued that Bessie Smith is still in the pantheon, since her name is routinely praised by musicians and scholars alike, but the likelihood of hearing her songs covered at a present-day blues festival is relatively slim.

2.
Eileen Southern,
The Music of Black Americans: A History
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), p. 68.

3.
Robert C. Toll,
Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 195.

4.
Abbott and Seroff,
Out of Sight
, p. 361. Such presentations reached their logical extreme in the “Black America” theme park, organized in Brooklyn's Ambrose Park in 1895 by a producer from Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. This included “A Typical Plantation Village of 150 Cabins, 500 Southern Colored People, presenting Home Life, Folk Lore, Pastimes of Dixie…in Marvellously Massive Lyric Magnitude for the Millions” (ibid., pp. 391–92).

5.
Southern,
The Music of Black Americans
, p. 104.

6.
There were a few people already making this argument in the nineteenth century. After Antonin Dvo
ák made his famous statement that “the future music of [the United States] must be founded upon what are called the Negro melodies” in 1893, the African-American professor F. G. Rathbun of Virginia's Hampton Institute wrote that, while he agreed with Dvo
ák's basic position, he did not think that classical adaptations could improve on the “old time simplicity” of the original songs. The Hampton Folk-Lore Society published a plea that was reprinted in the African-American
Freeman
newspaper in 1894, with the heading: “Plea for Negro Folk Lore—We Must Imitate the Example of Other People's [sic] and Preserve from the Rust of Oblivion the Traditions, Habits and Sayings of our Forefathers” (Abbott and Seroff,
Out of Sight
, pp. 273, 308–9).

7.
“Stagolee” is alternatively spelled “Stack O'Lee,” “Stagger Lee,” and so on.

8.
Nat Brandt,
Harlem at War: The Black Experience in WWII
(Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996), p. 32.

9.
Albertson,
Bessie
, pp. 106–7.

10.
Ibid., p. 143.

11.
The novelist Fannie Hurst said that Van Vechten associated with African Americans only if they were celebrities, that he “pampered people like Leontyne Price, but he would never think of inviting a Negro elevator operator to his home” (ibid., p. 141). This reveals more about Hurst's racial attitudes than about Van Vechten's, since I would assume that neither of them were close friends with any elevator operators, black or white, while Hurst apparently
felt that there was something comparable about associating with an opera singer and an elevator operator if both were black.

12.
By this period, many New Yorkers had become used to the idea that jazz could be considered a sort of American art music. Paul Whiteman had presented jazz as a modern classical form in New York's Aeolian Hall in 1924, and by the late 1930s it was no longer considered daring to have jazz concerts in formal venues. In 1937, the veteran African-American show couple Charles Johnson and Dora Dean even had a show that “introduced popular songs, did their old fashioned Cake Walk, climaxing with Truckin, Souzie Que and the Boogie Woogie that absolutely rocked Carnegie Hall” (Abbott and Seroff,
Out of Sight
, p. 163). To bring blues or gospel to such a venue, though, and to present it as Hammond did, was completely new.

13.
“Big Bill Broonzy was prevailed upon…white audience,”
From Spirituals to Swing
(Santa Monica, Calif.: Vanguard Records 169/71–2, 1999), compact disc album notes, p. 8; “primitive blues singer…shuffled,” John Hammond with Irving Townsend,
John Hammond on Record
(New York: Summit Books, 1977), p. 158.

14.
Big Bill Broonzy
(Los Angeles: Everest Archive of Folk Music FS-213, 1967), phonograph album notes.

15.
Confusingly, there were two Columbias involved in this history, though by the time of “Spirituals to Swing” they were under one roof. Johnson's records were released on the ARC and Vocalion labels, which were part of the Brunswick Record Corporation. BRC bought the Columbia Phonograph Corporation in 1934. In 1938, these combined labels were bought by the Columbia Broadcasting System (Dixon and Godrich, in Oliver et al.,
Yonder Come the Blues
, pp. 308–9).

16.
The association of slide guitar with the Delta came only in later years. The most influential prewar blues slide player, far and away, was Tampa Red, a Chicago-based Georgian. Red generally soloed over piano or band accompaniment, and thus set the pattern for the electric slide style. Among the early electric masters, Robert Nighthawk came straight out of Red, and even Elmore James, who is universally cited as a Robert Johnson disciple, played more Red licks. (All his slow blues come out of Red's work, including direct covers like “It Hurts Me Too” and “Anna Lee.”) Muddy Waters may be the only important electric blues slide player of that generation who did not display Red's influence.

17.
It may seem gratuitous to provide a definition of folk music, or to couch this definition in the past tense, but so many people now consider the term to include urban intellectuals playing their own poetic compositions that I want to make it clear that such artists would not have qualified in this category before the 1960s.

18.
A striking example of this tendency comes in Lomax,
The Land Where the Blues Began
, pp. 387–94: Describing Jack Owens, a onetime neighbor of Skip James who sang a number of James's songs, Lomax does not even mention James's name, simply treating the songs as if they were Owens's own pieces.
Lomax was well aware of James, having filmed him in 1966, but thought of these songs as representative of a regional folk style and hence common property. Likewise, Lomax did not mention Tommy Johnson's name when he issued a note-for-note cover of Johnson's “Cool Drink of Water” by John Dudley, a convict at Parchman Farm, on his
Sounds of the South
album series.

19.
Lomax,
The Land Where the Blues Began
, p. 13. Lomax insisted on the Jefferson-Johnson link, tracing it through an anonymous Delta player who was nicknamed “Lemon” because of his devotion to Jefferson's work, who supposedly taught Son House, who taught Johnson. Whatever the truth of this pedagogical chain, Lomax is the only person who ever noted a strong resemblance between Jefferson's and Johnson's work.

20.
Waters recalled his first meeting with Lomax as follows: “He said, ‘Well I came down to see Robert Johnson. I heard Robert Johnson's dead and I heard you's almost as good or just as good…”' It is no surprise that, given this introduction, Waters would stress his links to Johnson. Nonetheless, despite all the historians who cite Johnson as Waters's main influence, Waters was by no means consistent in confirming this impression. He always named House as his principal inspiration, and often added Johnson's name only after prompting by interviewers, or as part of a longer list. For example, in an interview with McKee and Chisenhall, an edited version of which is in their book,
Beale Black and Blue
, he began a list of his influences on guitar with “a guy named James Smith, which he's never been heard of,” then mentioned House. Asked who else in the area played really well, he first mentioned Robert Nighthawk, and on further prompting added, “Robert, the two Roberts”—meaning Robert Johnson (“the number one Robert, he's passed on”) and Robert Lockwood. Clearly, he admired Johnson's work, learned a couple of his songs, and was inspired by his example, but there is very little in Waters's playing or singing that would have been different without Johnson's contribution, and to classify him as Johnson's musical descendant is at best an oversimplification.

21.
Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson,
The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South
(1925; reprint, with an introduction by Roger D. Abrahams, Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1964), p. 149.

22.
Lomax tried to persuade Son House to come to New York, writing him in December of 1941, and again a month later, to suggest that he come up and do some concerts. However, Lomax added that no money could be provided for transportation, and “the whole thing would be a gamble for you.” Lomax wanted to fix him up with a group of New York singers, who “need somebody who can make his own songs and play a good guitar, and who is experienced in Negro music.” This would most likely have been the Almanac Singers, and it is curious to imagine what might have happened had House accepted the invitation. Lomax was quite insistent, writing a third time in February to say that he was urging his friends to lend House the transportation money (Lomax-House correspondence, in the American Folklife Center, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.).

23.
“Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel,”
Life
, April 19, 1937, p. 39.

24.
Charles Wolfe and Kip Lornell,
The Life and Legend of Leadbelly
(New York: HarperCollins, 1992), pp. 138, 145.

25.
Brownie McGhee and Josephine Premice, in separate interviews with the author, mid-1990s.

26.
A 1963
Billboard
magazine poll of American college students listed White as the third most popular male folksinger, after Belafonte and Pete Seeger, and ahead of Bob Dylan (Ronald D. Cohen,
Rainbow Quest: The Folk Music Revival and American Society, 1940–1970
[Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002], p. 213).

27.
Brownie McGhee, interview with the author, c. 1997.