But something started to happen in the cotton fields in the 30s that no one had foreseen even a few years before: technology. Machines were developed that could harvest far more cotton in an eight-hour day than 400 farmers slaving sunup to sundown. By the 40s, the tenant farmers’ days were numbered. They should have been elated but many were fearful. What would they do now, they wondered. Many of the younger blacks moved to the cities but the older sharecroppers thought that living in the city meant starvation. Muddy Waters said that the sharecroppers were already starving but didn’t know it. The city was the place to be and he was ready to go.
Muddy and a large number of his fellow sharecropper bluesmen went to Chicago and he was hired by Caterpillar to build the machines that were taking the jobs of the field workers down South who were still chopping cotton by hand. Like many blacks, Muddy realized that city life was far better than the rural life. He made far better money working far less hours. The work was far less strenuous. He got raises and time off. Muddy had a four-room apartment for himself. He worked part time clearing out belongings of evicted tenants in various apartment buildings. They often left behind all kinds of appliances and knick-knacks. Muddy found chairs, sofas, paintings, alarm clocks, kitchen clocks, tables, bookcases, electric can-openers, mixers, silverware, dishes, cups, bowls, bottle openers, blankets, mattresses, canned food, clothing, radios—all kinds of stuff. No one wanted it, so Muddy took what he needed and set himself up in style without spending a cent. Muddy recalled his elation at his new rate of pay in Chicago:
“Work there eight hours a day—I never did that before. My paycheck was fortysomething bucks or fifty-something bucks a week. You got to be kiddin’, you know. Soon I put in some overtime, worked twelve hours a day and I brought a hundred and something bring-home pay. I said, ‘Goodgodamighty, look at the money I got,’ I have picked that cotton all year, chop cotton all year, and I didn’t draw a hundred dollars.” Not bad for an illiterate man.
On the plantations, slaves and the later tenant farmers made their own instruments such as the cigar box guitar also called a diddley bow (and, yes, that’s where Bo Diddley got his moniker and his square-bodied electric was made specifically to resemble the older instrument). The banjo also started off as a slave-built cigar box instrument that went on to become a “legitimate” instrument thanks to minstrelsy. There were also cigar box fiddles. Other homemade instruments included, jugs for blowing, washboards for strumming, kazoos, cowbells, tin cans, spoons and washtub basses. Most of the bluesmen started off on these instruments, all of which have antecedents in Africa. These instruments were supplemented with
cheap guitars, fiddles, harmonicas or just simple comb-and-paper. The barnyard dance music was played on these instruments that went on to become rags and blues. The black banjo tradition died in America before field recording units had a chance to capture much of it but many early blues and black folksongs done on guitars were clearly adapted from banjo or cigar box guitar format such as Tommy McClennan’s “Deep Blue Sea Blues” and Henry Thomas’s proto-blues “Run, Mollie, Run.”
Henry Thomas from circa 1929 doing something you may find vaguely familiar:
Henry Thomas- Bull-Doze Blues - YouTube
Tommy McClennan "Deep Blue Sea Blues" from the late 20s which was clearly originally written to be played on either a banjo or a cigar box guitar yet there is a chromatic guitar break in the middle that sounds out of place. A strange juxtaposition of archaic and modern country blues:
Tommy McClennan - Deep Blue Sea Blues- rare 78rpm blues record - YouTube
Another form of diddley bow. The string is fastened to screws at each end of a board and tightened over a bottle to add tension and lift the string from the body which was plucked and the tone controlled with a metal bar, a bottleneck or a smooth stick for a gliding effect. A cheap microphone or pickup could be added and plugged into an amplifier and, in fact, this was a common practice once electricity became widely available. This instrument gave birth to the slide guitar. This one is mounted with a pickup for electrical amplification.