Sometime in the early 1900s, bandleader W. C. Handy, who was interested in black-American musical stylings, saw an unnamed bluesman in Tutwiler, Mississippi playing a guitar using a knife-edge to glide over the strings. Handy had never heard anything like it before and began to incorporate the style into his own music. In 1909, he moved to Memphis where his blues career started.
William Christopher Handy (1873-1958) of Memphis (shown here with Louis in 1954). His song, “Mr. Crump” was published in 1912 a few months after Hart Wand published “Dallas Blues.” Crump was a complex rag-blues-jazz amalgam whereas Hart’s piece was a true form 12-bar blues. Handy later renamed “Mr. Crump” as "Memphis Blues.” His other famous blues songs were “St. Louis Blues” (a 1914 true 12-bar blues) and “Yellow Dog Blues” which were more jazz than blues and have been covered countless times by jazz bands but I've never heard them covered by blues artists.
Memphis Blues - W. C. Handy (1912) - YouTube
Race records, while a result of America’s institutionalized racist system, was ironically a less restricted medium. Artists released on race records could get away with lyrics and subject matter that mainstream labels would never allow. Consequently, old blues records contained songs dealing frankly with sex and drugs. Even “gay blues” were popular (Little Richard, in fact, got his start playing on the gay blues circuit). Marijuana songs were popular on race records long after marijuana was outlawed in 1937 as evidenced by Buck Washington’s number, “Save the Roach for Me” from 1946. But the most controversial song had to be 1935’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” by Lucille Bogan which contains lyrics so obscene that, to this day, it cannot be played on a commercial radio station although one could conceivably hear it on XM although I never have.
lucille bogan - shave 'em dry (1935) - YouTube
This will melt a few firewalls.
The Birth of the Blues
There has been speculation that blues may have descended from black spirituals. This is most likely not true. While there are gospel blues songs in the early blues period, most religious blacks utterly detested blues calling it the devil’s music. They also detested ragtime music and a musician did not dare play either style before a black congregation. We should be hard pressed to explain this religious hatred of blues if blues were a variation of the spiritual.
Where did blues music originate then? Bob Wills provides an answer. He was born into a white sharecropping family and picked cotton all day next to black field hands in Texas, many of whom he was quite friendly with. He described their work songs: “I don’t know whether they made them up as they moved down the cotton rows or not but they sang blues you never heard before.” His statement, based on firsthand experience as well as the fact that he was himself a highly skilled musician even at that time, tells us blues probably started off as field work songs (believe it or not, so did the barbershop quartet).
The great Bob Wills--King of Western Swing--who once rode 50 miles on horseback just to watch Bessie Smith perform.
Blues came then from the South. The primary area being the Mississippi Delta region covering Indianola, Clarksdale, Vicksburg and extending into Memphis. But different regions in the South had a distinctly different blues sound. For example, Delta blues sounded quite different from Piedmont blues. Piedmont is the geological term for the region occupied by the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. The two styles mixed in Memphis which served as a gateway between the two regions and this mixture became a style all its own. Texas blues was different from Delta, Memphis or Piedmont. Piedmont blues was raggier and lighter-veined than Delta blues. Piedmont bluesmen were generally songsters who had many types of music in their repertoires. While this was true of the Delta bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, many of the Delta bluesmen played only blues whereas a Piedmont bluesmen was likely to play about anything.
That blues should originate among Southern blacks should certainly not be surprising. Blues was the sound of misery, pain, impoverishment, brutality, tragedy, loss, despair and certainly nobody felt these emotions and situations the way Southern blacks did. Not surprising that so many bluesmen were sharecroppers or grew up in sharecropping families. Sharecropping was a hard way to live. To a great extent, it was legalized slavery—backbreaking work that started before the sun was up didn’t end for the day until after the sun had set. While most whites could go out and enjoy a sunny day, the sharecropper was out toiling and sweating under that sun tending his garden or the Bossman’s cotton crop. At the end of the workday, there was enough time to eat, when there was anything to eat, and then hit the sack exhausted. Reverend Willie Morganfield, cousin of Muddy Waters, stated, “We’d get up early in the morning, we’d work all day, and the only sound I recall from nights were the crickets hollering. You really didn’t get much of a chance to hear anything because when you’d go to sleep, you’d just sleep.”
Sharecropping or tenant farming as it was also called, started in the era of Reconstruction with good intentions of helping poor and black farmers tend their own plot of land and pay some amount of rent to the plantation owner—the plantation being a small kingdom in its own right. Instead, the Big Boss used sharecropping to put his tenant farmers into indentured servitude. He was the king of his plantation and could do as he pleased—literally. Local laws and ordinances meant nothing (and certainly didn’t favor blacks anyway). When a tenant farmer started on a plantation, he was given a “furnish.” The furnish included 10 or so acres of land, a house (usually nothing more than a shack), seed, mules, tools and credit which was only good at the plantation store. The money was usually just “brozine” or tin scrip, coins or tokens that were essentially worthless and accepted nowhere but at the plantation store. A single plantation had hundreds of farmers.
Everything provided in the furnish had to be worked off, it wasn’t free. Work started at 4:00 a.m. to the ringing of a loud, clanging bell and calls to get up and get dressed for work. The tenant houses had no electricity. The plumbing was a single water pump for each shack that had to be primed and which barely worked on cold mornings. The bed was tick stuffed with raw, unshucked cotton bolls. The tenant had no control over his treatment or the arbitrary prices at the plantation store and did not usually have enough schooling to know when he was being cheated. Those that fled were tracked down, taken to the plantation store where a place was reserved for a good thrashing administered by a man in a big hat.