The History of Jazz (4 page)

Many scholars have tried to link the blues convention of a singer accompanied by solo guitar back to earlier African traditions, envisioning the blues as a New World continuation of the West African performance practices associated with the griots, the musical bards of their aural-oral societies. Certainly some similarities can be seen in the two musical idioms. For example, the stringed accompaniment of the kora, a West African harp-lute characteristic of griot music, is somewhat reminiscent of the role of the guitar in early blues styles, especially in the use of the plucked string to continue and comment on the melody line of the singer. However, in traditional West African society the griot’s songs figured not as an outpouring of personal expression—something that is so essential to the blues—but as a way of preserving historical and folkloric stories for the larger tribal unit. Hence, in terms of function, the griot is perhaps closer to the singing bards who shaped epic poetry in Western cultures than to a Robert Johnson or Charley Patton, whose recorded performances reflect distinctly individualistic perspectives on the subjects addressed in their songs. Blues expert Samuel Charters undertook field research in West Africa in 1974, where he tried to document the connections between these musical currents of two continents, while other scholars have proposed linkages between American blues and the bardic tradition of East Africa, or the music of Yoruban priests or even the Islamic call to prayer. Despite these efforts, many key aspects of blues music—its distinctive bent thirds, its chord patterns, and its heady mixture of bravado and alienation— resist reduction into African antecedents. As Charters himself eventually concluded: “Things in the blues had come from the tribal musicians of the old kingdoms, but as a style the blues represented something else. It was essentially a new kind of song that had begun with the new life in the American South.”
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If the country blues tradition, with its emphasis on a solo singer, usually male, accompanying himself on guitar, shows the closest ties to these African precedents, a more acculturated variant of this music relying primarily on female vocalists would exert greater influence on early jazz. The songs of the great women blues singers of the 1920s and 1930s—sometimes referred to as “classic blues”—would find a commercial market several years before Blind Lemon Jefferson or Charley Patton made their first recordings. While the country blues singer would take liberties with the bar lines, the classic blues vocalist would strictly follow the twelve-bar form. While the Delta blues player would accompany himself on guitar, the classic blues singer would typically front a band. The classic blues came to draw more readily and obviously on other forms of music—from Tin Pan Alley and the jazz world (with many musicians performing in both the blues and jazz genres) as well as from minstrel shows, circuses, vaudeville, and other sources of traveling music in the South. As part of this process, the structural underpinnings of the music— arrangements, solos, introductions, the use of call-and-response—became more formulaic, and thus more easy for outsiders to assimilate.

Still other aspects of the blues were transformed under the influence of the classic blues singers. As Sandra Lieb, biographer of Ma Rainey, explains: “The Classic Blues revealed a specifically female awareness, especially about the nature of love.”
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Unrequited love, salacious love, abused love—these now emerged even more prominently as central aspects of the blues ethos, both amplifying and sometimes countering the more general spirit of alienation, loneliness, and desolation that permeated the country blues idiom. At the same time, blues performance was now moving from the happenstance surroundings of the street corner, train station, and juke house to formally designated locations—including theaters, tents, barns, and assembly halls—where paying customers came specifically seeking name acts and their well-known songs. In essence, the blues had evolved from a folk art to a form of mass entertainment.

This transformation was fueled in part by a tremendous growth in the market for blues recordings by black female vocalists. In 1920, the General Phonograph Company achieved an unexpected hit with a recording of “Crazy Blues” sung by Mamie Smith. In its first month of release, Smith’s debut sold 75,000 copies, and within a year sales had surpassed one million. This surprising success prompted several other companies to enter this nascent market. “One of the phonograph companies made over four million dollars on the Blues,” a writer proclaimed in
Metronome
magazine. “Now every phonograph company has a colored girl recording.”
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The “race records,” as these releases were labeled, encompassed a wide range of black musical forms, with both secular and religious material finding an enthusiastic audience. In 1926 alone, more than three hundred blues and gospel recordings were released in the United States, most of them featuring African American women vocalists. Priced at fifty or seventy-five cents, these records sold well, and by the following year the number of releases increased to five hundred. To meet the growing demand, companies sent talent scouts on field trips to find and record promising black musicians. No fewer than seventeen field trips, for example, were made by record industry representatives to Atlanta during the late 1920s, while Memphis, Dallas, and New Orleans were also frequent stopping points for these song-seeking expeditions.
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Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, who was born in Columbus, Georgia, on April 26, 1886, typified the first generation of blues divas. Together with her husband Will—or “Pa Rainey” as he was sometimes called—this immensely popular artist toured the South as part of a traveling minstrel show. She recorded extensively in the mid-1920s, and her throbbing contralto voice graced over one hundred records during a five-year period. In stark contrast to the country blues singers, who usually accompanied themselves, Rainey recorded with some of the finest jazz musicians of her day, including Louis Armstrong and Coleman Hawkins. Her career also reflected the sharp difference between the informal blues stylings of the Delta and other rural areas and the polished stage presentations that marked the classic blues as commercial fare for a mass audience. The Delta musician often traveled with little more than a guitar in hand; in contrast, Rainey brought four trunks of props, backdrops, lighting, and other show business trappings, as well as a lavish array of costumes and fashion accessories. Rainey’s performances served to entertain, indeed to dazzle; they incorporated humor as a characteristic element; and they revealed a more overt connection to the popular music, minstrel shows, and jazz of the day. But a deep artistry coexisted with the theatrical aspects of Rainey’s work. In a piece such as “Yonder Come the Blues,” recorded in 1926, the virtues of her singing are readily apparent: her straightforward declarative manner of presenting a lyric, her succulent held notes, which hang in the air like ripe fruit from the tree, and her sure sense of time, which propels the rest of the band. Rainey’s recordings span a scant half-decade. Like many musicians of her generation, Rainey’s career was irreparably hurt by the barren economic prospects of the 1930s. In 1935, Rainey retired from performing and returned to her native Georgia, where she became active in the Baptist Church. She died in Rome, Georgia, on December 22, 1939.

Bessie Smith, a protégée of Rainey’s, stands out as the greatest of the classic blues singers. Born in Chattanooga, Tennessee, probably on April 15, 1894 (although the 1900 census gives an 1892 date), Smith began singing and dancing on street corners for spare change around the age of nine. In her midteens, Smith went on the road as a member of Ma Rainey’s touring show, and though Rainey has often been credited as a mentor and teacher to the younger singer, the exact extent of this education is a matter of conjecture. Smith’s deeply resonant voice was probably evident from the start and may have been the key factor in getting her the job with the Rainey troupe. On the other hand, Rainey’s skills as a performer, as well as her mastery of the blues repertoire, must have been an inspiration to this teenage newcomer to the world of traveling shows.

Smith soon came to surpass her teacher in the variety of her melodic inventions, her impressive pitch control, and the expressive depth of her music. Inevitably the younger vocalist decided to leave Rainey to further her own career, and was initially employed as a singer for Milton Starr’s theater circuit, the infamous TOBA—which stood ostensibly for Theatre Owner’s Booking Agency, but which was often referred to by black performers, with grim humor, as Tough on Black Artists (or sometimes as Tough on Black Asses). In Smith’s case, the caustic acronym was well deserved: as a TOBA artist she joined Pete Werley’s Minstrel Show, where her pay, at least initially, was as little as $2.50 per week. However, in 1923, Smith’s recording “Down Hearted Blues” boosted her to widespread fame; the record reportedly sold over a half million in copies in a few months, and soon Smith was recording regularly and performing for as much as $2,000 per week. She toured extensively, entertaining capacity audiences in large venues—tents set up on the outskirts of town as well as in downtown theaters—in the South and along the eastern seaboard.

Smith, like the blues itself, had risen from the streets to the most spacious performance halls, a setting for which her talents were admirably suited. Her powerful voice could reach to the back row of the largest theater without the need for amplification, and her sure skills as a comedienne and entertainer, as well as her dominating stage presence, enabled Smith to captivate audiences who would have been put off by the troubled, introspective blues of a Robert Johnson or Son House. The poignant aspects of the blues here became tempered with humor and the use of sexual double entendre. Songs such as “Empty Bed Blues,” “Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl,” “You’ve Got to Give Me Some,” and “Kitchen Man” expounded on, with varying degrees of subtlety, the subject of copulation. This openness to sexual themes helped, on the one hand, to sell records, while on the other, it led to the condemnation of Smith in particular and the blues in general among many social and religious groups, including much of the black middle class.

Although Smith played a prominent role in the merging of blues and popular music, her ambitions could hardly have been realized without the complementary efforts of a host of songwriters, publishers, musicians, and record producers. This evolutionary process, still making its impact felt today, exerted an especially transformative influence on American music in the years between 1910 and 1930. Even before the first blues recordings were made, the blues idiom began filtering into the mainstream of American parlor sheet music, under the influence of Tin Pan Alley songwriters such as W. C. Handy. Alabama-born Handy drew on his experiences as a bandleader in Mississippi and his early apprenticeship with a touring minstrel troupe in his visionary efforts to expand the vocabulary of American popular song. His success in this regard is amply documented in milestone compositions such as “Memphis Blues” (1912), “St. Louis Blues” (1914), and “Beale Street Blues” (1916). Although his fame as “father of the blues”—as some have designated this composer—is an overstatement, Handy’s impact as an innovator and popularizer of this new genre justifies his prominent place in the annals of American music. After moving to New York in 1917, Handy was well positioned to champion African American popular music not only as a performer and songwriter, but also as a music publisher and owner of a record company. Many of the songs written by Handy and other blues-influenced songwriters became core components of Smith’s repertoire—a mutually beneficial collaboration in which Smith tapped the songwriting skills of the New York professionals and in which Tin Pan Alley profited in turn from the power and authenticity of Smith’s interpretations. At the same time, Smith’s work betrayed strong jazz ties, as demonstrated by her recordings with Louis Armstrong, Benny Goodman, Coleman Hawkins, James P. Johnson, Jack Teagarden, Fletcher Henderson, and others. These various links characterized an important evolution in the blues, from the idiosyncratic music of the Mississippi Delta to the syncretic music of the recording studios. This ability to evolve in tandem with changes in other spheres of popular music would continue to characterize the blues in ensuing decades.

Yet the blues has also retained a primal core that has resisted assimilation and change. When we listen to Smith in her 1925 collaborations with Armstrong on “St. Louis Blues” and “Reckless Blues,” we can already hear the different aesthetic sensibilities that, even at this early date, were beginning to distinguish the jazz and blues idioms. Armstrong favors ornamentation and elaboration; Smith tends toward unadorned emotional directness. In contrast to Armstrong’s baroque accompaniment, Smith’s singing is built around drawn-out tones, sometimes bellowed with authority, occasionally betraying a tremulous vulnerability. Smith preferred languorous tempos, while jazz music of this period increasingly relied on faster, dance-oriented rhythms. On “St. Louis Blues,” the tempo lingers around sixty beats per minute. Compare this with Armstrong’s recording of the same piece from December 1929, which jumps along at well over twice this pace. Even a comparatively fast Smith performance, such as her “Gimme a Pigfoot” from November 1933, barely breaks above one hundred beats per minute. In the final analysis, Smith’s music celebrated an intensity of feeling, rather than demonstrations of technique. The blues idiom, as it has developed, has mostly stayed true to this inspiring vision, while the jazz world has evinced a more fickle temperament, with its methods and vocabulary constantly changing, sometimes mutating into surprising new forms. Yet the two styles, blues and jazz, have remained intimate bedfellows over the years, despite these many fluctuations—an intimacy so close that, at times, it is hard to determine where the one ends and the other begins.

The most enduring myth of the blues culture is its fatalistic celebration of “dues paying,” of each musician’s need to internalize a blues ethos through the acceptance of—and ultimately the transcendence of—personal tragedy and disappointment. The details of Bessie Smith’s life fit in with this attitude, perhaps all too well; yet commentators have not been above embellishing the facts to accentuate its tragic dimensions. At the same time, the feisty, independent side of the singer’s personality is often minimized or ignored—this was, remember, a woman who flung society matron Fania Marinoff Van Vechten to the floor at a posh gathering, slugged pianist Clarence Williams in a dispute over cash, and, according to legend, stared down and ultimately intimidated the Ku Klux Klan when they tried to disrupt a performance.