Escaping the Delta (7 page)

Given their rural roots and the breadth of their non-blues repertoires, it is natural to refer to these artists as “folk” or “country” bluesmen, but it is important to remember that most of the successful ones were professional musicians, not farmers who played guitar on the side. As commercial entertainers, they were keenly aware of the
current trends, and once they became established as recording stars they used many of the same sorts of sales gimmicks as the vaudevillians who had preceded them. Unique and idiosyncratic as Jefferson was, he was not above recording sequels and holiday records that were as formulaic as anything on the Tin Pan Alley pop scene. Nor was he by any means alone in this. While he was the first male blues star to make a Christmas record, 1928's “Christmas Eve Blues” (backed with “Happy New Year Blues”), December of 1929 would find Blind Blake singing “Lonesome Christmas Blues” and Leroy Carr doing “Christmas in Jail.”
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A more typical example of the way Jefferson and his peers fit into the larger black music world of their time is the cycle of “Black Snake” songs. The first of these, “Black Snake Blues,” was recorded in May of 1926 by Victoria Spivey, a young singer, pianist, and songwriter who had known Jefferson in their native Texas. It was quickly covered by a vaudevillian named Martha Copeland, and then Jefferson weighed in with “That Black Snake Moan,” apparently an even bigger hit than Spivey's record. Within the next year there were at least ten more “Black Snake” records, most by blues queens but including instrumental versions by the jazzmen King Oliver and Clarence Williams. A pianist named Lew Jackson even produced a player-piano roll of the song, with printed lyrics included—that era's equivalent of karaoke. Jefferson took full advantage of this vogue, first rerecording his original version for another label, then cutting a sequel called “Black Snake Dream Blues.” Though this was advertised as “another of the same kind of Blues as ‘Black Snake Moan,'”
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it was written not by Jefferson but by a pianist named George Perkins, and Jefferson sang it over Perkins's accompaniment, proving his ability to meet the blues queens on their home turf. A year and a half later, when Spivey teamed up with Lonnie Johnson to cut a “New Black Snake Blues,” Jefferson responded with “That Black Snake Moan Number 2.”

This interchange between the more countrified singers and the vaudeville and dance-hall artists continued throughout the blues era. Texas Alexander, as raw a blues singer as ever recorded, used a range of accompanists that included Lonnie Johnson, the Mississippi Sheiks string band, and a King Oliver jazz trio, and there are numerous ex
amples of “country” bluesmen using songs or verses they had learned off records by the vaudevillians, and vaudevillians adapting rural material. While the street singers and the theater stars lived and worked in very different worlds, recording was the great equalizer. The last record ad to appear in the
Chicago Defender
, before Depression-era belt-tightening put an end to such expenses, was evenly divided between Louis Armstrong's version of “Stardust” and a double-entendre blues by the Mississippi guitarist Bo Carter.
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That said, there were also vibrant regional styles, and musicians whose local importance was far out of proportion with their success on the national scene. No other country-style guitarist matched Jefferson's overall impact, especially when it came to reaching listeners in the urban North, but many did very well in their home areas, and some—Blind Blake, Barbecue Bob, Jim Jackson—were hot sellers throughout the South. Dozens of great players were recorded between 1926 and 1930, and this is the period that is generally considered most exciting by present-day acoustic blues fans. If I mention only a handful of these artists, that is because they have been abundantly covered by other writers, and because I am trying to balance their importance against that of the blues queens who preceded them and the urban piano-guitar duos who would shortly come to dominate the scene. I must mention one further name, though, if only because it has been common to find him described as “one of the most important musicians twentieth-century America has produced,” and “the first blues superstar.”
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Charley Patton was one of the last recording artists in the wave of Jeffersonian lone rangers, the older players who accompanied themselves and were adept at playing hoedowns, ballads, and minstrel songs along with their more recent blues numbers. Born in rural Mississippi, he had developed a strong local reputation in the mid-Delta region and was in demand at both black juke joints and white picnics, prized for his flashy showmanship as much as for his music.
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Though now regularly hailed as
the
seminal figure in blues history—based on the notion that his corner of the Delta is the music's unique heartland—Patton had little success on the national market, and even in Mississippi his records were less broadly influential than those of the
younger, slicker musicians who recorded in the next few years as members of the Mississippi Sheiks and a variety of associated groups. Still, he is an outstanding example of the sort of little-known regional genius who briefly received some national attention in Jefferson's wake, a guitarist and singer with a varied, deeply personal style that encompassed a huge range of musics and reshaped them into something unique and timeless.

Unfortunately for those of us who enjoy such magnificent individualists, the record companies quickly outgrew the period of experimentation that had led to their exposure. For a moment, the talent scouts had been stumbling in the dark, recording almost anything they came across, in hopes of bumping into another hit style. By the late 1920s, they had worked out how to produce reliable sales, and no longer cared to waste their energy auditioning unpolished country eccentrics. (Patton was the exception that proved the rule, recorded in 1929 because a Jackson record dealer contacted Paramount and guaranteed a local market for his work.)
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The next generation of blues stars would be hip, urbane soloists or duos who sang clever twelve-and eight-bar compositions in a casually assured barroom manner. The two defining hits in this new style appeared in 1928, and made their performers into instant stars: “How Long—How Long Blues,” by the Indianapolis-based pianist Leroy Carr, and “It's Tight Like That,” by the Chicago-based guitar-and-piano duo of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom.

Virtually all popular blues for the next twenty years can be seen as flowing directly from these two records, though it is rare for these performers to be given anything like their due. It is not that they are unrecognized, exactly, but rather that the tastes of white musicians, collectors, fans, and blues historians have favored the more countrified players. As a result, although anyone who is knowledgeable about this period will grant that Carr was important, few have emphasized his unique and overarching influence. Simply put, he was the blues world's most influential male singer, at least until the 1950s, and his impact extended well beyond the boundaries of what is normally considered blues. Nat “King” Cole owed him a debt, and Ray Charles (who recorded two Carr pieces among his early sides) even more so.
As for Sam Cooke—who set the pattern for everything from the 1960s soul shout to today's smooth R&B—the R&B historian Arnold Shaw traced the following line of descent: “Cooke, who influenced Otis Redding, David Ruffin, and Jerry Butler…, was himself the culmination of a blues-ballad tradition that had its inception with Leroy Carr and numbered Cecil Gant, Charles Brown, and Dinah Washington among its celebrated exponents.”
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The same connection could have been traced by a different route: Cooke started out in the gospel world, as understudy to R. H. Harris of the Soul Stirrers, and Harris listed Carr among his most important models, saying, “He was my man. I just wished he'd been in the spiritual field.”
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Carr was born in Nashville, Tennessee, probably in 1899, but most of his performing life was spent in Indianapolis. He was a beautiful singer and a tasteful pianist, and was accompanied on almost all of his records by the guitarist Scrapper Blackwell.
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In a parallel to what was happening in the mainstream pop scene, he was the first blues “crooner,” a twelve-bar Bing Crosby. Unlike either the blues queens, whose voices had to be powerful enough to be heard over a band in a crowded theater, or the sidewalk singers, who needed to project over a busy street, Carr sang in a conversational tone. His work had a new intimacy, which was perfectly matched by the relaxed eloquence of his songwriting. Records like “Midnight Hour Blues” and “(In the Evening) When the Sun Goes Down” were covered by everyone from Count Basie to the Ink Spots and the Dominoes, and Carr's smoothly soulful phrasing formed the template followed by virtually every blues balladeer to follow. “How Long—How Long” was his breakthrough hit, a gentle eight-bar blues that became one of the genre's first ubiquitous standards. It is unlikely that there was any blues singer in the next twenty years who could not have managed a version of this song, and its lilting melody inspired hundreds of later compositions.
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Tampa Red and Georgia Tom were also a piano-and-guitar duo, and recorded quite a few ballads in the Carr style, but their trademark was the upbeat, risqué music that would come to be known as “hokum.”
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Georgia Tom had been Ma Rainey's pianist and a composer of vaudeville blues songs since the early 1920s. He had recently taken time off from the secular world to write religious music, and as Thomas A.
Dorsey would go on to be the “Father of Gospel Music,” writing dozens of gospel standards and acting as mentor to Mahalia Jackson. Tampa Red, meanwhile, was a slide guitar virtuoso with a thin, distinctive voice and a fondness for the kazoo. Together and separately, under their own names and various noms de guerre, they redefined blues as light, sexy party music. “Tight Like That” was basically a reworking of Papa Charlie Jackson's “Shake That Thing,” but they played it in a modern, uptown style, and followed its success with a string of hot double-entendre numbers. They even did a raunchy cover of “How Long—How Long Blues,” with the vaudeville comic and female impersonator Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon ecstatically moaning the words “how long, daddy, how long!” over and over, and eventually faking an orgasm. The record also included the immortal interchange:

It was a long way from Ma Rainey holding church in the black vaudeville theaters, but Carr-style ballads and hokum party music would dominate the blues scene until the arrival of R&B.

This musical shift reflected changes both in entertainment technologies and in the lifestyles of African-American consumers. Ever since the Civil War, black Southerners had been leaving the countryside and heading for urban areas, crowding the booming black districts of Dallas, Memphis and Atlanta. After World War I, this trend was greatly accelerated, and by the 1930s most of these emigrants were heading for industrial centers farther north: St. Louis, Detroit, Chicago, and New York. City life called for a hipper, more streamlined sound track. Dorsey would explain that the sparer musical approach, with just piano and guitar, was better suited to the urban environment than the big, horn-powered sound of the blues queens: The most frequent performing venues were now “rent parties” held in apartment buildings, and neighbors would get annoyed and call the cops if things got too loud.

Blues was also experiencing the same technological transformation that was affecting mainstream pop styles. The arrival of electronic
amplification meant that even in clubs and theaters it was no longer necessary to have a voice that could be heard over a full orchestra or cut through a crowded, noisy room. What was happening in blues was to a great extent part of the wider revolution in which Crosby-style crooners were replacing big-voiced stars like Al Jolson.

By the fall of 1929, there was also the Depression, which closed down a lot of the large touring shows and theaters. Record companies went bankrupt as sales plummeted, and for a while it seemed as if the blues boom might be finished.
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Instead, it became clear over the next few years that the hard times had only increased some people's yearning for music, and by 1937 there were almost as many new blues records being issued as in the peak years of the 1920s. Still, cost cutting was the order of the day, and few companies were prepared to spend money on Southern field trips, or to take chances on new and untried artists. For the next decade, the blues market would be overwhelmingly dominated by piano-and-guitar duets, sometimes fleshed out with a bass, harmonica, kazoo, or washboard, recorded by a small circle of professionals. These musicians routinely played on one another's sessions, and the resulting records would be released under the name of whoever happened to be singing. It was during this period that Chicago cemented its reputation as the capital of the blues, home to a crop of reliable players who ground out records as efficiently as the local slaughterhouses processed hogs into sausage.

I like sausage, and I like the Chicago blues sound of the 1930s, but one cannot deny its homogeneity. The studio-band system had no room for idiosyncratic artists like Lemon Jefferson, nor did it spawn the variety of writers, arrangers, and musicians that had dabbled in blues during the heyday of the vaudeville queens. Big Bill Broonzy, for example, played guitar on hundreds if not thousands of records, and had 224 sides released under his own name or pseudonyms. He was an expert player, singer, and songwriter, but even his most diehard fans will grant that he repeated himself a lot, and that a well-chosen forty or fifty songs would be enough to effectively sum up his work in this period. What is more, apart from a few exceptional sides, little distinguishes these records from others being recorded by the mix-and-match Chicago studio groups, aside from the shifting vocalists—Bumble Bee Slim, Sonny
Boy Williamson, Jazz Gillum, Washboard Sam, and on the women's side Memphis Minnie, Georgia White and Lil Johnson—and even the vocals tend to have a lot in common.