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, "Buddy"_Woods 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.