Whites Discover Blues
Pure black blues did not have a white audience in the 20s or 30s and only started getting noticed by whites in the 40s due to pioneers as Ella Mae Morse, a white singer on the Capitol label who performed R&B and boogie-woogie numbers and became quite successful. Her “Cow-Cow Boogie” was the first million-selling R&B hit on the newlyformed Capitol label in 1942 when she was only 17. Blues records were sold as exclusively as “race records” and the consumers were virtually entirely black. There was a 30s blues guitarist named Bayless Rose who was rumored to have been white but no one knows for sure. White jazz artists were not sold as race records so whites from that period who were familiar with jazz appeared to be almost entirely ignorant of the blues genre and its bevy of artists.
Or so the prevailing wisdom goes. If whites were ignorant of blues in the early days of the 20th century, how did a white man end up publishing his blues piece in 1912? Another American composer and bandleader, Gus Haenschen, was also doing blues-based music in 1916--some of it straight 12-bar blues. One piece, "Sunset Melody," was an energetic, bluesy piano and drum duet bordering on boogie-woogie. While blacks undoubtedly bought these records, they were aimed at the white public which means the white public must have been familiar with blues and must have danced to it. Yet, by 1926, when Blind Lemon Jefferson's records were released as the first country blues, white blues listenership seemed to have dried up. In this decade long window, 1916-1926, something happened that turned whites away from blues. Hawaiian music became extremely popular about 1915 and perhaps the public abandoned blues for that but I really don't know.
Blues is a purely African-American music but jazz is a black-white American hybrid. Had whites any interest in blues by the 20s, more of the older recordings would have been preserved. We can only assume that blues was largely viewed by whites as low-class music made by low-class people fit only to be menial laborers and only allowed in the house if they were butlers or maids. Blues was their music and no self-respecting white person was going to lower himself or herself to that level by listening to this trashy, low-class cacophony.
We might think that we have these old 20s and 30s blues recordings thanks to the record labels who have all this stuff archived for posterity. And if we think that, we would be dead wrong. We have these old blues recordings today because of record collectors. In the late 50s, there was an American folk music renaissance. Young musicians, mostly white from middleclass and even wealthy homes, grew weary of the stuff their parents were listening to. They didn’t care about classical music or Frank Sinatra or Tin Pan Alley classics. There had to be more to American music than this. They became curious about American roots music in their endless quest for a database of influences from which to draw inspiration so they didn’t end up singing soulless renditions of “Tennessee Waltz” or “A Kiss to Build a Dream On.” The Appalachian songs were wearing thin. What else was there? Since most of these people were avowed leftists and even communists, they thought it was time white America tipped its collective hat to the blacks they so looked down on but whose musical ideas they freely borrowed from and even stole. They turned to performing blues and wanted to find as many old blues numbers as they could unearth.
Some of these musicians were avid record collectors or were in tight with avid record collectors and in their collections were old blues, mountain songs, hillbilly tunes and rags—some even recorded only on cylinders. Tape recordings were made and passed around while musicians listened intently trying to learn these old, forgotten songs—America’s true heritage. When the artists were known, some of these musicians sought these people out to learn directly from them. If the artist in question was dead, his closest associates and family members were sought out to fill in the details of this artist’s life and music.
Gayle Dean Wardlow and Max Tarpley, in search of blues records to sell to Northern record collectors who paid good money for them, went door-to-door through black neighborhoods in the South offering to buy old blues records. Wardlow developed a profile for others canvassers to follow: go to older black neighborhoods and look for houses owned by old ladies which usually had a profusion of flowerpots and the like outside. Knock on the door and also call out, “Anybody home?” because they were often hard of hearing. Then ask for blues records and mention people as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Leroy Carr whom most of them were familiar with and so would know what kind of stuff the canvasser was looking for.
The rarity of the recording and its quality would determine the price but Wardlow never paid more than a dollar for a rare one, 50 cents for a less rare one of good quality or 25 cents for a rare one of questionable quality. Wardlow estimates that only one in 10 had anything worth buying when she had anything at all. He discovered that if she had moved, she tossed her records instead of keeping them so it was important that the house look like it had been continuously occupied for decades. Black men were not good as potential targets because they generally moved around too much and didn’t (and usually couldn’t) carry records with them.
Many old records have simply been lost. Wardlow found one by an artist he had never heard of but the record was unlistenable because the lady who owned it had been using it to rest a flowerpot on for many years. Wardlow also scoured small antique stores and pawnshops and found some very good recordings in such places because the owners also went door-to-door looking for old stuff to buy. Some people were hip to the canvassers and demanded more money. Some didn’t like whites and would order them off their property. Wardlow was once threatened by a drunken man with a knife when he asked if he could see his mother’s records.
Gayle Dean Wardlow.
In 1973, underground cartoonist R. Crumb (Zap Comics) illustrated the life of a fictitious 1930s bluesman named Tommy Grady who fights with and then leaves his wife in rural Mississippi, journeys to the city where he records a couple of sides in a hotel room for an A&R man (probably based on Speir) but whose career is cut short when he is shot to death in a juke joint for messing with another man’s woman. His records fall into total obscurity during the Depression and he is forgotten for decades until a canvasser (based on Wardlow) runs across a single Grady recording in an old lady’s house. He plays it and realizes this lost bluesman is totally amazing but can’t any information on him. He discusses Grady with his contacts who also never heard of him. He sells the record to a collector probably based on Nick Perls (founder of Yazoo Records), who loves it, who then plays it for his fellow collectors who are at first skeptical. In the last panel, they are grooving to Grady’s sound who will finally get his due long after his death and “that’s life” which is the name of the strip. Crumb is a self-confessed old blues fanatic (see below). I used to have “That’s Life” which I acquired when I bought an
Arcade Comics when I was around 14.
I bought this for my nephew a couple of Christmases ago. Nice booklet with bios of each artist and a CD sampler with a song from each artist. I ripped the CD, of course, before wrapping it up.
Wardlow, Tarpley and other canvassers did their work in the 60s and 70s. Only a comparative few recordings were unearthed in the 80s. Nowadays, canvassing is a lost art. An old lady in her 80s is still too young to have bought any of the old blues recordings. At best, she might have gotten them from her parents or an older relative or neighbor but this was rare. Most people tossed their old recordings rather than pass them on. There is no telling today what has been lost forever as a result. Many recordings today are of bad quality but that is all that is available. The original owners might have taken better care of them had they known that white record collectors would eventually take such an intense interest in their blues recordings but at the time they bought them, blacks were virtually the only customers and they had no reason to believe that would ever change.
There might still be some undiscovered recordings laying around in attics or basements somewhere but they will be very sparse—too much so to make it worth the effort to canvass for them. The other problem that Wardlow discovered was that by the 80s, many of the neighborhoods he canvassed were becoming too dangerous to enter due to gangs and drugs. A white man walking through such a neighborhood was taking his life in his hands. So canvassing is all but passé but it served its purpose and rescued hundreds of old blues recordings that would otherwise be lost—probably forever once the old ladies who owned them died and their houses cleared out for new tenants.