The History of Jazz (3 page)

In the 1930s, researchers working for the Federal Writers’ Project undertook a comprehensive program of recording the memoirs of former slaves. This collection, housed today at the Archive of Folksong at the Library of Congress, provides telling insight into this distinctive African American ability—strikingly similar to native African practices—to extract music from the detritus of day-to-day life. “There wasn’t no music instruments,” reads the oral history of former slave Wash Wilson. Drums were fashioned out of a variety of discarded items: “pieces of sheep’s rib or cow’s jaw or a piece of iron, with an old kettle, or a hollow gourd and some horsehairs.”

Sometimes they’d get a piece of tree trunk and hollow it out and stretch a goat’s or sheep’s skin over it for the drum. They’d be one to four foot high and a foot up to six foot across. … They’d take the buffalo horn and scrape it out to make the flute. That sho’ be heard a long ways off. Then they’d take a mule’s jawbone and rattle the stick across its teeth. They’d take a barrel and stretch an ox’s hide across one end and a man sat astride the barrel and beat on that hide with his hands and his feet and if he got to feel the music in his bones, he’d beat on that barrel with his head. Another man beat on wooden sides with sticks.
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This ingenuity in creating percussion instruments was accompanied by a corresponding richness of rhythmic impulses. In African music, in both its original and its various Americanized forms, different pulses are frequently superimposed, creating powerful polyrhythms that are perhaps the most striking and characteristic aspect of these traditions. In the same way that Bach might intermingle different but interrelated melodies in creating a fugue, an African ensemble would construct layer upon layer of rhythmic patterns, forging a counterpoint of implied time signatures, a polyphony of percussion. We will encounter this multiplicity of rhythms again and again in our study of African American music, from the lilting syncopations of ragtime to the diverse offbeat accents of the bebop drummer, to the jarring cross-rhythms of the jazz avant-garde.

Theorists of rhythm often dwell on its liberating and Dionysian element, but the history of rhythm as a source of social control and power has yet to be written. The historian Johan Huizinga hypothesized that the introduction of drums into the ranks of soldiers marked the end of the feudal age of chivalry and signaled the beginning of modern warfare, with its coordinated regiments and precise military discipline.
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Perhaps the unobtrusive and steady rhythms of modern office music—and is not Muzak the work song of our own age?—serve today to exert a subtle control over the white-collar worker of postindustrialized society. In any event, both aspects of rhythm—on the one hand, as a source of liberation and, on the other, as a force of discipline and control— make their presence felt in African American music. The work song was the melody of disciplined labor, and even here its source could be traced back to Africa. “The African tradition, like the European peasant tradition, stressed hard work and derided laziness in any form,” writes historian Eugene D. Genovese in his seminal study of slave society
Roll, Jordan, Roll
.
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The celebration of labor, inherent in the African American work song, must otherwise seem strangely out of place coming from an oppressed race consigned to the indignities of slavery. But as soon as one sees the song of work as part of an inherently African approach to day-to-day life, one that integrates music into the occupations of here and now, this paradox disappears entirely.

If the work song reflects rhythm as a source of discipline, the blues represents the other side of African rhythms, the Dionysian side that offered release. More than any of the other forms of early African American music, the blues allowed the performer to present an individual statement of pain, oppression, poverty, longing, and desire. Yet it achieved all this without falling into self-pity and recriminations. Instead the blues offered a catharsis, an idealization of the individual’s plight, and, in some strange way, an uplifting sense of mastery over the dire circumstances typically recounted in the context of these songs. In this regard, the blues offers us a psychological enigma as profound as any posed by classical tragedy. How art finds fulfillment—for both artist and audience—by dwelling on the oppressive and the tragic has been an issue for speculation at least since the time of Aristotle. Simply substitute the word
blues
for
tragedy
in most of these discussions, and we find ourselves addressing the same questions, only now in the context of African American music.

Long before the blues became recognized as a distinct style of music, it lived a subterranean existence in African American communities. The blues would not emerge as a major force in the recording industry until the 1920s, but persistent scholars have uncovered earlier traces and hints of the music throughout the former slave states going back to the nineteenth century, especially in geographic settings with a high proportion of black sharecroppers and farmworkers. Unlike jazz, which first came to the fore in New Orleans and flourished in other large cities, early blues found its most fertile breeding ground in rural areas and the most impoverished parts of the country. This humble lineage is all the more ironic when one considers how much the financial well-being of the later entertainment industry in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, London, and elsewhere would depend on this rustic music and its many offshoots in rock, R&B, funk, and other assorted urban genres.

Blues songs began appearing in sheet music form as early as 1912, none with more staying power than W. C. Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” (1914), which would rank as the second most recorded song of the first half of the twentieth century, surpassed only by “Silent Night.” The term
blues
—often misused to refer to any sad or mournful tune—is more properly linked, as we see in Handy’s composition, to a precise structure that has come to be known as blues form. This repeating twelve-bar pattern is typically built on three chords—tonic, dominant, and subdominant—and would later serve as the foundation for countless jazz and popular songs, as well as take on a second life in the 1950s as a widely used recipe for rock-and-roll and R&B music. When sung, as it usually was in its earliest variants, the blues also employs a specific stanza form for its lyrics in which an initial line is stated, repeated, and then followed with a rhyming line. For example, Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” begins:

I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down
I hate to see that evenin’ sun go down
‘Cause my baby, he done lef’ this town.

Yet this type of lyric and chord pattern are not sufficient to convey the essence of the blues. The most characteristic component of this music is found in its distinctive melodic lines, which emphasize the so-called blue notes: often described as the use of both the major and minor third in the vocal line, along with the flatted seventh; the flatted fifth was a later addition, but would in time become equally prominent as a blue note. In truth, this stock description is also somewhat misleading. In early blues, the major and minor thirds were not used interchangeably; instead the musician might employ a “bent” note that would slide between these two tonal centers, or create a tension by emphasizing the minor third in a context in which the harmony implied a major tone. Sometimes this effect was achieved by means of a melismatic shift in the voice of the blues singer, but even instrumentalists made use of this approach—most strikingly in the slide guitar techniques that relied on moving a bottle, knife, or other object across the fretboard to stretch the individual pitches. After the arrival of the blues, notes were no longer just notes, but flexible sounds that could change in ways unforeseen by the most renowned nineteenth-century composers.

Much speculation has been offered as to the historical origin of this powerful and unique melodic device; some commentators, for example, have suggested that this tonal ambiguity originated when the newly arrived slaves tried to reconcile an African pentatonic scale with the Western diatonic scale. This musical mash-up resulted in two areas of aural potency, situated around the third and seventh intervals—sounds that evolved into the modern blue notes. In any event, this effect, which is impossible to convey in traditional notation, is one of the most gut-wrenching ingredients in twentieth-century music. Given its visceral impact, this approach to singing and instrumental performance inevitably spread beyond the blues idiom into jazz and a host of other commercial performance styles.

The most traditional style of blues typically relies on just a vocal line with guitar accompaniment. Handy was inspired by just such a performance back in the Mississippi Delta, when he heard a raggedy musician playing a guitar with a knife at a train station in Tutwiler, circa 1903. But this minimalist style of performance, often referred to as “country blues,” was slow in finding its way onto recordings. Not until the late 1920s, with the commercial success of Blind Lemon Jefferson, would this music demonstrate its clout in the marketplace. Jefferson, born near Wortham, Texas, in the closing years of the nineteenth century, employed a spare, riff-oriented guitar style behind his droning and resonant vocalizing. Although he was capable of raspy low tones, his voice was perhaps most admired for its thin, high tones—a stylistic device that, for many listeners, stands out as the most distinctive characteristic of the early Texas blues sound. Jefferson recorded around one hundred tracks for the Paramount label from 1926 through 1929, and his performances of songs such as “Long Lonesome Blues,” “Matchbox Blues,” and “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean” continue to delight fans today. Despite the efforts of various researchers, this artist’s life remains clouded in mystery, and even the circumstances of his death are a matter of contentious speculation. Yet Jefferson appears to have traveled and performed widely before his demise in December 1929, and his fame and example paved the way for many later traditional blues artists.

Paramount was anxious to build upon this success, and brought two now-legendary Mississippi blues artists to their recording studio in Grafton, Wisconsin, with hopes of making them into stars as well. Charley Patton’s powerful vocals and free-flowing guitar work captured the raw energy of the Delta tradition, but were combined with a slick showmanship that revealed how easily this often dark and introspective music could take on the trappings of commercial entertainment. Long before Jimi Hendrix and Stevie Ray Vaughan rose to fame on similar exhibitionist antics, Patton would play the guitar behind his back or between his legs, spin it round, or slap it like a drum. His “Pony Blues,” recorded in June 1929, was a hit for Paramount, and at a follow-up session for the label Patton brought along Eddie “Son” House, recently released from Parchman Prison, who would later inspire many important blues artists, most notably Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. House’s music was more foreboding than Patton’s, and at times almost apocalyptic in tone. His performances on recordings such as “Preachin’ the Blues” and “Dry Spell Blues,” with their quasi-biblical language and stark guitar accompaniment, may not have sold well at the time, but they eventually contributed to the now-pervasive image of the Delta blues as a haunted music sung by troubled souls.

This mythology of the blues as the music of salvation and damnation reached its highest pitch in the figure of Robert Johnson. Even people who know little about blues music have usually heard the story of Johnson selling his soul to the devil at midnight at a crossroads, in exchange for a preternatural ability to play the guitar. In recent years, blues scholars such as Elijah Wald, Barry Lee Pearson, and Bill McCulloch have tried to defuse this legend as an embarrassing example of the mythologizing tendency of overly zealous fans. Yet one cannot excuse Johnson himself of complicity in the diffusion of this oft-told tale. Some of his best-known recordings, such as “Hellhound on My Trail,” “Cross Road Blues,” or “Me and the Devil Blues” helped propel the attention-getting rumor, although this artist also left behind songs dealing with other time-honored blues themes: romantic love and its more carnal manifestations, revelries, infidelities, and especially rambling and life on the road.

Johnson’s travels started soon after he was born, the eleventh child of Julia Major Dodds, probably on May 8, 1911. As an infant he lived in various migrant labor camps with his mother and sister Carrie, or in Memphis under the same roof as Julia’s husband, Charles Dodds, or with her later spouse Dusty Willis back in the Delta. When he started performing as a guitarist, Johnson wandered even farther, throughout Mississippi, and around the South and up north as far as Canada, if various accounts can be believed. He may have used a half dozen or more aliases in these various settings, further complicating the task of any biographer but adding to the mystique of an artist who often seemed on the run rather than merely on the road.

But of the power of his music, as documented at two sessions in 1936 and 1937, there can be no dispute. More than any other artist, Robert Johnson codified the disparate strains of the blues guitar tradition into a coherent musical vision that could be assimilated and adapted by the broader stream of American popular music. Johnson had listened widely—not just to other guitarists in the Delta, but also to many recordings of artists from other parts of the country—and learned deeply, mastering a host of techniques later imitated by generations of followers: turnarounds, passing chords, boogie patterns, fills, vamps, licks, and the like. Moreover, Johnson forged these building blocks into compositions that sound more like crafted tunes than the hand-me-down blues favored by so many of his predecessors and contemporaries—as testified to by the success of frequently covered Johnson songs such as “Come on in My Kitchen,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom.” Less often noted, but equally important to the success of this artist, was the intimacy and flexibility of his voice. Johnson was known to use his singing to seduce women, and apparently some of that seductive power lingers on in recordings that have found a surprising crossover audience. Not only have rock icons such as the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton turned to Robert Johnson for inspiration, but their fans have also followed suit, so much so that
The Complete Recordings
, issued in 1990, which label execs only expected to sell a few tens of thousands of copies, eventually found an audience of millions. Johnson, for his part, never lived to enjoy the rewards of this success. He died on August 13, 1938, at age twenty-seven, apparently poisoned by a jealous husband.
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