Anarchy 51/Blues walking like a man

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Blues walking
like a man

CHARLES RADCLIFFE

It is im­pos­sible to say with any certainty when the blues be­came a com­plete mus­ical form, re­cog­nis­ably dif­fer­ent from its ante­ced­ents—the songs of the farms and levee camps, the work songs, axe songs, arwhoolies, hol­lers and rags. It is equally dif­ficult to as­cer­tain in which of the south­ern states of the USA it ori­gin­ated. Many of the early sing­ers were mi­grat­ory la­bour­ers or blind men who trav­elled widely to beg and earn money by sing­ing, so it seems prob­able that it was a con­cur­rent de­vel­op­ment over large areas of the Deep South. What is quite cer­tain is that the blues was not a cre­a­tion of any one man (W. C. Handy’s self-inflat­ing claim to be Father of the Blues has al­ways seemed more than a little lu­di­crous to blues en­thus­i­asts). Neither was it a pro­duct of city life. Bessie Smith, for ex­ample, is fre­quently held to be the fin­est blues singer ever to re­cord but she re­corded Clas­sic city jazz-blues, which were a des­cend­ant, rather than a close re­la­tion, of the rural blues, al­though they found their way onto record earlier. Her style is most often praised by jazz critics, which cor­rectly in­dic­ates her posi­tion as the cre­ator of jazz-blues, rather than a blues singer per se.
  Al­though the pre­cise geo­graph­ical, his­tor­ical and mus­ical ori­gins of the blues are un­cer­tain, the so­cial con­di­tions which pro­duced it are well-re­corded, not least of all in the blues itself. In the white su­prema­cist so­ci­ety of the south the negro was in a situ­a­tion of ter­ri­fy­ing para­dox:

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iso­lated by race and colour, yet forced to con­form to the mores of a so­ci­ety in which he was de­nied a voice and from which he was rigor­ously ex­cluded. It is, in­cid­ent­ally, one of the most bit­ter iron­ies of the his­tory of Amer­ica’s negroes that they should have prac­tised their own form of ra­cial­ism—that of dis­tinc­tion based on Creole blood, “yellow-skins”, “brown-skins” and “black-skins”. Despite these con­di­tions being a prim­ary factor in the cre­a­tion and evo­lu­tion of the blues, it is not usu­ally a music of di­rect so­cial pro­test and the few mag­nif­i­cent pro­test blues are far out­num­bered by blues on women, men, cars, and rent, on the every­day life of an op­pressed min­or­ity.

  The blues has in­flu­enced jazz, “pop” music and even “seri­ous” music, yet its struc­ture is ex­tremely simple. In its de­vel­oped form it amounts to a three line stanza, with one line re­peated and a third line, rhymed or un­rhymed, in the form of call and re­sponse, a herit­age from work songs. Sleepy John Estes, one of the fin­est liv­ing rural sing­ers, sings:

Now I was sit­tin’ in jail wi’ my eyes all full of tears (repeat)

Y’know, I’m glad didn’t get life­time, boys, that I ’scaped th’ ’lectric chair

and Jaydee Short sang bit­terly:

So dark was the night now, people; cold, cold was the ground (repeat)

Me ’n’ my bud­dies in two fox­holes, had to keep our heads on down

  Earlier sing­ers drew more on the en­tire tra­di­tion of negro folk-song and less on a still in­com­plete blues tra­di­tion, and there was less fixed form. Bukka White, in a haunt­ing blues, sings:

I’m lookin’ far in min’, be­lieve I’m fixin’ to die,

I be­lieve I’m fixin’ to die,

I’m lookin’ far in min’,

I be­lieve I’m fixin’ to die.

I know I was born to die, but I hate to leave my chil­len cryin’

Mother, take my chil­len back, be­fore they let me down,

’Fore they let me down,

Mother, take my chil­len back,

’Fore they let me down,

And don’ leave them standin’ and cryin’ on the grave­yar’ groun’

  Another early singer, Skip James, sings in two line verses:

Hard time here, every­where y’ go

Time’s harder than they ever been be­fore.

If you cer­tain y’ had money, you bet­ter be sure,

’Cause these hard times will drive y’ from do’ to do’.

  Like Son House, the doyen of the Delta sing­ers, and the superb Charlie Patton, the “father” of the Mis­sis­sippi Blues, White and James were from Mis­sis­sippi, and played their gui­tars in the pecu­liar re­gional “bottle­neck” style. This in­volved the use of a knife, a steel ring or a smoothed down bottle­neck which was usu­ally placed on the thumb or little finger, and used as a drone on the strings of the guitar. It gave their in­stru­ments a high-pitched whin­ing sound which they were able to util­ise for lyric pas­sages, for simple rhythmic or melodic ac­com­pani­ment or as a highly dram­atic form of punc­tu­a­tion. Any blues looks rather bleak in print, be­cause it is lit­er­ally only half there. In the case of the

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early Delta sing­ers it gives a more than usu­ally hol­low effect.

  Al­though Mis­sis­sippi takes pride of place in any dis­cus­sion of blues, there were fine sing­ers from other areas. Jay Bird Coleman, a su­perbly fero­cious har­mon­ica player came from Bes­semer, Ala­bama, and was so suc­cess­ful that the local Ku Klux Klan took over his man­age­ment. Blind Boy Fuller came from Carolina, Oscar Woods (The Lone Wolf) from Louisi­ana, Peg Leg Howell and Blind Willie McTell from Georgia, Bill Broonzy from Arkansas, and Furry Lewis from Ten­nes­see. Also from Ten­nes­see came the two great jug bands—Gus Cannon’s Jug Stomp­ers and the Mem­phis Jug Band. The other great jug band—the Birming­ham Jug Band—was from Ala­bama.

  The early blues found its way onto re­cord in the early ’twen­ties, not through the de­vo­tion of eth­no­mus­ic­o­lo­gists but be­cause re­cord com­pan­ies real­ised that it was a com­mer­cial pro­pos­i­tion. Most of the early re­cord­ings were “field-re­corded” in rural centres like Mem­phis, Dallas and At­lanta, in small halls and bars, wherever space could be found to set up equip­ment, and the re­cords, by Skip James, Blind Lemon Jef­fer­son, Son House, Charlie Patton, Gus Cannon, Jed Daven­port and later Sonny Boy William­son, Bill Broonzy, Tommy McClennan, Blind Boy Fuller and Cripple Clarence Lofton, flooded through the mails and from the small-town stores into thou­sands of negro homes. The sing­ers soon found them­selves “race-heroes” and the de­ris­ively labelled “race-record” market was a boom­ing busi­ness. For­tun­ately men like Ralph Peer of Victor and Mayo Williams of Para­mount had ex­cel­lent taste and much of the early field re­cord­ing was of great inter­est and super­lat­ive qual­ity.

  It re­quires enorm­ous ef­forts of ima­gin­a­tion to under­stand the con­di­tions in the Deep South dur­ing the years in which the blues began. After the Civil War, when negroes had been given their “free­dom”, the white south, with em­bit­tered ruth­less­ness, set about the re-en­slave­ment of the negro pop­u­la­tion by “legal” means. The negroes soon found them­selves driven off their newly-gained land by former owners and the fast de­vel­op­ing rail­road com­pan­ies. They were in­creas­ingly the vic­tims of Jim Crow legis­la­tion, de­signed to keep them in their place re­gard­less of the Four­teenth Amend­ment. They were forced to work on the rail­roads; to work the land as tenant share-crop­pers, which meant in ef­fect re­ver­sion to slav­ery; to work on the levees, in the saw­mills or tur­pen­tine camps, which be­came sym­bols of ra­cial sub­ju­ga­tion. Wherever they went they were swindled and ex­ploited with soph­ist­ic­ated sav­agery, de­signed, con­sciously or not, to de­mor­al­ise as well as to en­slave. Often they were charged more for food and lodging than they could pos­sibly earn. It is a bit­ter com­ment­ary on the south that when Alan Lomax issued his superb Blues in the Mis­sis­sippi Night re­cord­ings in 1957, he still felt it neces­sary to hide the real iden­tit­ies of the three sing­ers whose remin­is­cences were con­tained on the record. The per­form­ers are listed simply as Sib, Natchez and Leroy but they were in fact the har­mon­ica player Sonny Boy William­son, the gui­tar­ist Bill Broonzy and the pian­ist Memphis Slim Chat­man. There was always the added risk of na­tural ca­lam­ity. Texas is sub­ject to floods and so is Mis­sis­sippi: when

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the levees burst in 1927, it was the negroes, forced to live very close to the banks, who died in thou­sands. Se­greg­a­tion af­fected every­thing. Even hos­pitals re­fused to treat negroes, and al­though the Bessie Smith death-legend is largely apo­cry­phal, many negroes died through lack of suf­fi­cient med­ical care.

  In the search for bet­ter work and liv­ing con­di­tions, thou­sands of negroes trekked north, from the ’twen­ties up to the pres­ent, in the sort of exo­dus which is a fea­ture of the his­tory of ra­cially tor­mented min­or­it­ies. They ar­rived in the north by road and rail. They had no right on either, but the rail usu­ally gave them a bet­ter chance. They could either walk the long straight lines—always risk­ing a fall be­tween them, and with it death, in­duced by the tir­ing and hyp­notic ef­fect of doing so—or they could “jump” a train. This was risk­ier, but quicker. The trav­el­ler stands on one of the few slow curves in the track and then, in Paul Oliver’s words:

  “. . . breaks from cover and dashes to­wards the track tak­ing ad­vant­age of the slow­ing of the train to make board­ing pos­sible, and of the bend to hide his move­ments. Crooked fin­gers clutch the coup­lings and he swings peril­ously on the sway­ing truck be­fore get­ting a firmer grip. He may make for the blinds if he can. These are the bag­gage cars next to the tender, which are ‘blind’ or, in other words, have no side door. Sit­ting on the step he is safe and out of reach of the brakeman’s club. . . . More dan­ger­ous, but out of sight and un­ap­proach­able, are the brake rods that run be­neath the freight cars. Risk­ing his life he may try to worm his way across these, or if he is un­usu­ally adept he may carry a small board to throw across the rods and then pre­cip­it­ate him­self upon it in the nar­row gap be­tween them and the under­neath of the truck . . . in icy winds, in chok­ing poison­ous fumes of the rail­road tun­nels, he may freeze to numb­ness or suc­cumb to ex­pos­ure and drop to cer­tain death . . .”

  There can be few worse con­dem­na­tions of a so­ci­ety than that it should make this method of travel ac­cept­able. Des­pite the risks the exo­dus con­tin­ued, and women and chil­dren, as well as men, risked road and rail to go north:

Oh, stop your train, let a poor boy ride.

Don’t you hear me cryin’?

Woo oo woo oo wooo . . .

Oh, fare you well, never see you no more.

Don’t you hear me cryin’?

Woo oo woo oo wooo . . .

Oh, train I ride, smoke­stack shine like gold.

Don’t you hear me cryin’?

Woo oo woo oo wooo . . .

  With them they took their blues, into rail­side hobo jungles where in hope­less pov­erty they could scratch a liv­ing, com­par­at­ively free from white inter­fer­ence, into the fast-de­vel­op­ing north­ern ghet­toes, into “New World”. The blues proved re­mark­ably re­si­li­ent to city life at first. There were re­fine­ments which have con­tin­ued up to the pres­ent: drums, basses and pianos were added to the more port­able, and more

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mu­sic­ally flex­ible in­stru­ments fa­voured by rural mu­si­cians, such as har­mon­icas (known as “harps”, viol­ins, gui­tars and jugs which, when blown into, acted as bass re­son­at­ors. How­ever it was not until just before the last war that the blues al­tered dra­mat­ic­ally and ir­re­voc­ably, and even today there are traces of Mis­sis­sippi in the blues of some Chi­cago sing­ers.

  From the blues re­cord­ings we have a record of negro life, its joy and laugh­ter—blues were prim­ar­ily to en­ter­tain—as well as its bit­ter­ness and sor­row. We have stor­ies of broken re­la­tion­ships, of rent parties, of work in the fields of the south and the mills and fac­tor­ies of the north. Much of it is fine folk po­etry, some of inter­est be­cause of its sub­ject, at its bext an in­dex of the sing­er’s feel­ings as well as a vivid pic­ture of so­cial con­di­tions and the des­pair of the negro’s brut­al­ised life, a des­pair usu­ally light­ened only by the spir­it­ual re­lease of re­li­gion, the erotic re­lease of sex or the phys­ical re­lease of vi­ol­ent pleas­ure. A much re­corded blues begins:

Rock me, mama, rock me all night long (repeat)

I want you to rock me, mama, till by back ain’t got no bone.

and Chester Burnett (Howling Wolf) sings:

Tell ole Pistol Pete, every­body gonna meet,

To­night we need no rest, we really gonna throw a mess,

We gonna break out all the win­dows, we gonna kick down all the doors,

We gonna fix a Wang Dang Doodle, all night long, all night long. . . .

Tell Fats and Wash­board Sam, that me ’n’ every­body gonna jam,

Tell Shakey, Box Car Joe, we got saw­dust on the floor,

Tell Jennie Mae, till I die we gonna have a time,

Well the fish scent fill the air, there’s love juice every­where.

We gonna fix a Wang Dang Doodle. . . .

  Race records catered for vari­ous au­di­en­ces and ranged from the harsh re­li­gious songs of Blind Willie John­son—once ar­rested for in­cite­ment out­side a Customs House, for sing­ing his Sam­son song, If I Had My Way I’d Tear This Build­ing Down—to the lilt­ing, leer­ing blues of Blind Boy Fuller, which were often simply strings of sex­ual meta­phores. John­son and Fuller epi­tom­ised two main sources of re­lief for the negro—re­li­gion and sex. There were also songs on the cata­logues about every­thing from co­caine snif­fing to men­in­gitis, and there were a large num­ber of blues about prison, suf­fered usu­ally as a re­sult of minor of­fences but fre­quently enough for more vi­cious crimes, and quite often for murder.

  Prison was a daily fea­ture in the lives of many fam­il­ies. It is some in­dic­a­tion of the vi­cious­ness of the pris­ons and prison farms that, as re­cently as 1951, four­teen pris­on­ers in the Louisi­ana State Peni­ten­tiary at Angola ham­strung them­selves rather than sub­mit to beat­ing with the “bat”, a par­tic­u­larly crude, four­teen pound leather strap which, ac­cord­ing to Paul Oliver, “can break a brick at a single blow”. Yet prison farms, like Angola, were pre­fer­able to the over­crowded, un­healthy, closed pris­ons. The prison system is, even by con­serv­at­ive judge­ments, totally in­ade­quate and ar­chaic and even where there have been Fed­eral

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Com­mis­sions the south has ig­nored them and their re­com­mend­a­tions. Des­pite the hor­ror, many negroes have test­i­fied that life in prison was less fright­en­ing than life out­side: at least in prison the next meal was as­sured, the tyranny rarely var­ied and there was less chance of the casual cruelty which typ­ified the lives of so many ra­cial under­dogs. The great folk singer Lead­belly sang his way out of prison, but not all sing­ers were so lucky—Big Joe Wil­liams did a term at Parch­man Prison Farm, Mis­sis­sippi, and so did Bukka White, who sang a fine blues about it. Hog­man Maxey and Robert Pete Wil­liams did time at Angola. More re­cently the great Chi­cago gui­tar­ist, Auburn “Pat” Hare got a ninety-nine year sen­tence for shoot­ing his mis­tress’s hus­band and a po­lice­man who tried to ar­rest him.

  Mur­der oc­curs fre­quently in blues, both as a threat and as an oc­cur­rence, an in­dic­a­tion of the every­day vi­ol­ence of Amer­ican negro life. Sonny Boy Wil­liam­son sang:

I got the mean­est woman, the mean­est woman you most ever seen,

She sleep with an ice pick in her hand, man, fights all in her dreams,

I’d soomer be sleepin’ with the devil, I’d sooner be sleepin’ with the devil . . .

  William­son died in 1948 on his way to hos­pital—his cran­ium split by an ice-pick—the vic­tim of the casual vi­ol­ence of his own people, killed either by a jeal­ous hus­band or young thugs after his money.

  The blues quoted above is also in­dic­at­ive of the dis­in­teg­rat­ive ef­fect the negro’s pos­i­tion in so­ci­ety had on the stab­il­ity of fam­ily life. Many sing­ers have re­corded blues about leav­ing women, or women leav­ing them; many have sung about their moth­ers, few about their fa­thers. The reason is not hard to find—in thou­sands of cases the mo­ther was left to bring up chil­dren on her own, the fa­ther hav­ing left in frus­tra­tion or in search of work. Not sur­pris­ingly jeal­ousy also looms large:

Lord, my hair is a-risin’, my flesh begin to crawl (repeat)

Had a dream last night, babe, ’nother mule in my dog­gone stall

  And so does se­duc­tion:

I am a back door man (repeat)

Well the men don’t know but the little girls under­stand

When every­body tryin’ to sleep, I’m some­where makin’ my mid­night creep.

I’m the mornin’ when the rooster crow, some­thin’ tell me I gotta go. . . .

  As an aid to sex­ual abil­ity and at­trac­tion, charms were used—mojo teeth, mojo hands, black cat bones, John the Con­keror roots. Muddy Waters sings:

I’m goin’ down Louisi­ana, baby, behin’ the sun (repeat)

Well, you know, I just found out my troubles just begun

I’m goin’ down in New Orleans—hmmm—get me a mojo hand (repeat)

I wan’ show all you good lookin’ women just how to treat your man.

  Even today maga­zines, like Rhythm ’n’ Blues, read by work­ing class negroes, carry ad­vert­ise­ments for these strange fer­til­ity sym­bols and charms—pro­duced in Louisi­ana voo­doo circles—along with pat­ent de­vices for straight­en­ing hair, strange medi­cines and other ne­ces­sit­ies of

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ghetto life.

  For the most part how­ever there was little re­lief and little as­sist­ance. The great Robert John­son, another Delta singer, ob­vi­ously haunted by the phan­toms of a di­vided so­ci­ety and using im­agery of con­sider­able rich­ness, sang:

I gotta keep movin’, I gotta keep movin’

Blues fallin’ down like hail, blues fallin’ down like hail (repeat)

I can’t keep no money, hell­hound on my trail,

Hell­hound on my trail, hell­hound on my trail

and again:

You may bury my body down by the high­way side

(Spoken: Babe, don’t care where you bury my body when I’m dead and gone)

You can bury my old body down by the high­way side

Lord, my ole evil spirit can catch a grey­hound bus and ride.

  John­son’s blues re­main the most per­sonal and fright­en­ing of negro folk music, with their sense of trans­ient ec­stasy and sor­row, height­ened by an abid­ing tor­ment and des­pair. In his work the blues lays its most seri­ous claim to be con­sidered an art form, and of all the great sing­ers he is the most likely to chill and elec­trify the listener, to make the agony of his life real, and to com­mu­nic­ate, from his in­tense, tor­tured private emo­tions, the situ­a­tion and con­di­tion of his people. John­son is fright­en­ing be­cause he is a vic­tim without real­isa­tion of the com­plete mean­ing of his vic­tim­isa­tion. His songs are, in the so­cial sense, in­ar­tic­u­late, and this gives them their pe­cu­liar elo­quence. It was not only so­cial con­di­tions which af­fected John­son: he was ob­vi­ously chained by his own shy­ness and frus­tra­tion. He is thought to have been poisoned by his common law wife or to have died from al­co­hol pois­on­ing; which­ever way, he died young in 1938. Howl­ing Wolf, who knew him vaguely, says he was about 25 at the time; Muddy Waters thinks he was about 30; he is gen­er­ally thought to have been about 19. John­son must have had more money than most negroes of his age and he seems to have had some trouble with women:

Got up this mornin’ to fin’ it was gone (repeat)

Got up this mornin’, all I had was gone

Well, leavin’ this mornin’ if I have to, gon’ ride the blinds

  And in another of his blues he sang:

Gonna stay roun’ Jones­boro, until my teeth crowned with gold (repeat)

She got a mort­gage on my body, got a lien on my soul.

  In John­son—the in­heritor of a tra­di­tion which stretched from the itin­er­ant timber­mill worker Charlie Patton, a beau­ti­ful, heavy voiced singer, re­put­edly half-Puerto Rican, who first re­corded I Shall Not Be Moved, Son House, Bukka White and Skip James, whose oddly ori­ental-sounding blues were amongst the strangest and most haunt­ing noises to come from the Delta—the blues reached its peak. Des­pite a hand­ful of superb sing­ers since, it has never again reached such an em­phatic state of art­istic unity.