A Concise History of the Blues
 

In jazz and blues there is the phenomenon of the “blue note,” which is a lower note hit by a musician or singer that doesn’t quite belong in the major scale in which he is playing that causes an emotive response in the listener. It is called blue as in being out of sorts similar to being in pain or being sick is also being out of sorts. In fact, the blue note is sometimes referred to as the “worried note.” It may be a holdover from Africa where some work songs employ the blue note. Country blues is especially dependent on blue notes—often a flatted third or fifth but flatted somewhat less than a semitone. Due to the visceral impact of both the blue note and of blues music in general, both are called blue for the same reason.

Many assume that blues started before jazz and served as the basis of jazz. A close examination of the situation, however, proves this to be untenable. Jazz and blues were already being played sometime around 1900-1905 but good blues-players as Louis Armstrong had to be trained to play jazz demonstrating that these were two distinctly different styles.

Jazz and blues seem to have sprung up independently. Something else also becomes apparent—whites did not have anywhere near the aversion to jazz that they showed towards blues in the early days. The truth is, when one examines old photographs of very early jazz bands, there always seems to have been white groups who had already formed as society dance bands and marching bands from which jazz is partially descended. So whites were integrally involved in the formation of jazz—there from the beginning. The raggy-blues flavoring probably came from blacks (specifically Buddy Bolden) but white musicians seemed to have picked up on it quite early adding in their own modifications. In turn, black musicians picked up on these modifications and further modified them and so on.

This presents us with an incongruity being that “Dallas Blues,” the first published blues, came out in 1912 and was composed by a white Oklahoma City bandleader named Hart Ancker Wand (1887-1960). Apparently, Wand had heard the tune somewhere and played it for a pianist named Annabelle Robbins who wrote an arrangement. When a workman in Wand’s father’s employ heard the tune, he said it gave him the blues for his beloved Dallas and hence the name of the song, which became quite popular all along the Mississippi River. Since Wand’s father died in 1909, the song must been around at least that early. That a white man should publish the first blues is not that surprising since they had better access to publishing houses than blacks. The first published ragtime piece to have “Rag” in the title was written by a white man. The first jazz band to record was also white. If the story of how the piece was named is true, then Wand may possibly have set the tradition of using “Blues” in a title but the word itself had obviously been around for some time.

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The original sheet music for "Dallas Blues."

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Hart Wand, 1910.


Origins of the Blues *** Dallas Blues *** 1912, Hart A. Wand - YouTube

While a very pretty piece, “Dallas Blues” is a bit stiff and genteel rather than earthy. While the piece had a great influence (Jimmie Rodgers probably built his “Blue Yodel” from it), it is not possible that Wand could have invented blues as a genre. That illiterate sharecroppers from Texas to Mississippi could ever have heard of it much less build a huge variety of songs out of it is untenable. Like Handy (below), Wand heard blues somewhere and decided to capture it in written form which was a common practice in that day. But Wand obviously had a grasp of blues structure since “Dallas Blues” is in a true blues format but sounded like Wand was reluctant to play around much with the melody or structure fearing it would cease to be a blues. Regardless, it’s a nice piece and the first recording of it was by a black bandleader and composer, Wilbur Sweatman (author of “Down Home Rag”), in 1918 on the Columbia Graphophone label.


Wilbur Sweatman´s Original Jazz Band "Dallas Blues" 1918 - YouTube

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.

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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).

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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.”

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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.

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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.

I'm really enjoying these essays, LL. Keep up the good work. I adore the blues, and you are definitely knowledgeable about the form!

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Whites and blacks were tenant farmers in the sharecropping system. While the overwhelming majority of tenant farmers were black in the South, white sharecroppers were not all that rare. Every plantation had more than a few white families. This photo was taken in California in 1922 where virtually all the sharecroppers were white and not treated any better than the Southern blacks.

On the other hand, a poor black family at least had a place to live and some amount of food to eat however meager. If the Big Boss was a good man, he would build a juke joint for his farmers so they could loosen up and dance away their misery on a Saturday night. The entertainment often being other sharecroppers who knew how to play or sing up a storm. The Dockery Plantation where “the King of the Delta bluesmen,” Charlie Patton, farmed, had a brothel for the farmers to visit in case they were single or having some trouble with the missus. The Big Boss often let his farmers run stills, sell moonshine and gamble. The moonshine also stocked the juke joints. It was a good way to let them blow off steam and escape from the drudgery of their lives—at least temporarily.

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The important thing for the sharecropper to always keep in mind was to never get on the Boss’s bad side. If the Boss-man liked you, you might get sent to deliver something up at the Big House where you might get an extra pie or chunk of beef or a salad—possibly even a little whiskey or Southern Comfort—from the kitchen for your troubles. If you got tossed in the clink, the Boss-man would send someone to bail you out so you wouldn’t rot in there for the rest of your life. Come Christmas, the Big Boss might invite you into the Big House and give you a crystal goblet full of his best whiskey, maybe a cigar or some firecrackers for the kids, wish you and yours a merry Christmas and then steer you to a wheelbarrow full of silver dollars and let you dig your hands in and haul away as much as you could carry in your arms. If you ran a still and the revenuers were coming, the Boss-man would send someone ahead to warn you to hide your still and your hooch quick. If the Boss didn’t like you for whatever reason, well, let’s just say that things weren’t going to be quite that good for you. But nobody on the plantation other than the Boss-man and his family had it very good.

When the tenant farmer system came to an end, civil rights workers who came to places like Mississippi found the unemployed black farmers in an unbelievably pitiful state. One such worker came upon a tiny, rundown shack occupied by a woman raising several small, naked children by herself with no job and no money. She wore a ragged shirt and nothing else being completely naked from the waist down. It was the only piece of clothing in the place.

At the Stovall plantation where the Morganfield family ended up, the Boss-man was Colonel Howard Stovall III who never let his farmers go hungry. If they had no food or money, he’d tell them to go to the plantation store and get a full share. After all, what did it matter to him? The provisions were simply tacked onto the tenant’s bill to be worked off. The Colonel could afford to be generous under such circumstances but the farmers still appreciated the gesture and many who had worked for Stovall recalled him fondly.

There really was no leisure time even for the children. As soon as they could walk, they were put to work doing something such as burning corn stumps. Many started off as a water-carrier who went about the fields serving water to thirsty hands. A hand would call out, “Water-boy!” and the lad would haul the water in his direction. The water was in a keg set on a cart and had a dipper the hands drank from. Muddy was big for his age and at eight years was put to work picking cotton which was normally reserved for older boys. Kids had no real toys other than perhaps a barrel hoop and stick. No books, no bicycles, no dolls, no nothing.

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During breaks, the hands would crowd around a cheap radio and see what stations they could find. Muddy recalled that there weren’t many. If there was no radio, they would sing. As plantations became more mechanized, a boy would learn to drive a tractor. This was a coveted job which meant more pay and the work wasn’t nearly as back-breaking. B.B. King worked his way up to tractor-driver working on the plantation of Johnson Barrett and become Barrett’s best driver. In recompense, Barrett kept King from being drafted into the war.

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Dockery Farms employed hundreds if not thousands of sharecropper farmers during its time in operation. Nowadays, it is a museum preserving an era of American history. It is also touted as the birthplace of the blues. Since bluesmen as Charley Patton farmed here, then undoubtedly a lot of blues was born at Dockery Farms.

There was little in the way of health care other than homemade remedies. Many sharecroppers died of easily preventable diseases because medical care was nonexistent and the sick farmer could not afford to stay in bed and would work to exhaustion while trying to shake off some disease or other when he should have been resting. This was exacerbated by the use of arsenic as a pesticide against weevils. A burlap sack of arsenic was loaded on the back of mule which was led between the cotton rows by a man who beat the bag with a stick as the mule walked causing the arsenic powder to billow up in clouds and settle on everything. The workers and animals had no protection from the arsenic, they breathed it and wore it, and it must have caused all kinds of health problems for them.

Pregnancies were rampant among the tenants but there was nothing in the way of caring for the babies and so many of them also died from preventable and treatable diseases. Domestic violence was also a staple on the plantation. Few were the nights when couples weren’t heard fighting—often viciously.

In the end, the tenant farmer had to give half of everything he grew and made to the Big Boss—the more he got, the more he had to give to the Boss—and only then were his expenses and debts extracted from his half which often left him with nothing and frequently put him in the red. He would be obliged to stay another year in hopes of coming up solvent but this was rarely the case and even when he did, he was often swindled into signing up for another year. If one had gone back to the days of slavery, one would have seen little difference between then and a plantation in the 1920s.

And cotton was king. Ol’ King Cotton, they called it. It was the South’s major cash crop. Each farmer also used part of his land as a garden to grow whatever he could and many depended on their gardens to get them through the winter. They would preserve their fruits and vegetables in jars. Since the garden was on the Boss’s land, half of everything the farmer grew went to the Boss. On the rare occasion that ice was available, they would wrap the ice in burlap sacks and then wrap the sacks in sawdust and some foods could be kept a little longer instead of spoiling and being thrown away which many a farmer could ill afford. The Delta region flooded fairly frequently and tornadoes were common. Such storms could wipe out a family’s crop and frequently did. But the majority of the land was used for cotton. And so the floods and rains were useful. Cotton wore out the Southern soil quickly and floods and rains often brought in new loam or topsoil to replenish the fields.

Cotton is a perennial plant meaning it doesn’t die in winter but will continue to grow. Left alone, a cotton plant will grow into a tree. The plantation owners did not want the cotton plants to become trees and so they had to be specially cultivated. They were planted close together to maximize profit and the fields needed to be weeded on a constant basis. The weeding process was known as “chopping cotton.”

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Few people ever give any thought to what an important role cotton has played in the formation of American roots music and, ultimately, rock and roll.

Cotton truly was the king as it dictated the lives of all who grew and harvested it. The world needed cotton and nowhere on earth was more conducive to growing it than the American South and that is true to this day. Once while flying to Huntsville, Alabama, we passed over a cotton field in full bloom and it looked from above as though someone had dumped a gigantic box of popcorn over the land which was blanketed in fluffy white as far as the eye could see.

A sharecropper who was a musician had a chance to be somebody and also make some decent money. Son House picked up a musician’s guitar when he saw how much money and attention the man was getting and started playing right off and went on to become undoubtedly the best bottleneck player in the entire blues genre. Charlie Patton gave it a shot after watching Henry Sloan wow the crowd sometime around 1910. He became Sloan’s protégé and learned his blues from him. Like Sloan, Patton was a consummate showman—playing his guitar behind his head and with his teeth (and you thought Hendrix started that).

At the Dockery Plantation, Patton taught Son House and Willie Brown how to play the guitar. When House and Brown got famous, Robert Johnson began to follow them around. Johnson then taught his stepson, Robert Junior Lockwood, blues guitar and Lockwood went on to become one of the founders of electric blues.

Muddy Waters heard blues on a record as a boy and became hooked. He played a cigar box guitar and mastered the harmonica (much to his religious grandmother’s displeasure). Eventually, he took up a proper guitar and went to the juke joint to see Son House whenever he could. While everyone else danced and carried on, Muddy sat at House’s feet and watched every note he played. Even after both men became blues legends, Muddy would always ask Son to show him some bottlenecking techniques. Muddy admired Patton’s showmanship but he loved the beauty of Son House’s bottleneck
playing.

Black musicians played wherever they could land a gig. Today we think of the bluesmen as guys banging on old guitars while caterwauling in loud voices. Actually, most bluesmen were consummate musicians with large repertoires that included not only blues but rags, hillbilly, white and black dance numbers and even some Tin Pan Alley classics. The reason quite simply is because they might get hired to play at a white barn dance and had to know the kind of stuff white people danced to. Old field recordings have captured quite a number of black musicians doing country music rather than blues. Some had alternate repertoires meaning they played each and every song in a black style at black dances and a white style at white dances (although, in many cases, there was no difference). Black and white musicians traveled about constantly bumping into one another. Many struck up friendships, respected each other’s talent and taught each other songs and techniques.

The primary venue for the bluesman, however, was the juke joint (“joint” rhymes with “pint”). This was essentially a saloon or bar where people came to eat, drink and be merry—with “merry” being a euphemism for “drunk.” The city of Clarksdale had a high black population and so juke joints abounded with a different musician or band in each one every Saturday night.

The sharecropping bluesman played them all if he could. The joints in town were fairly tame because the townspeople were not about to let them get out of hand and they closed them early. For that reason, many musicians preferred the juke joints out in the country and on the plantations where they could play well into the early morning hours and make more money. These juke joints, however, were freewheeling, rough-and-tumble. People didn’t just drink there; they got plastered. They got rip-roaring “sh!t-faced drunk,” as they say. When they did, things got violent and dangerous. People were killed, stabbed, shot, beaten up, etc. in these places—including the musicians. The cops rarely if ever visited them.

To play a juke joint where there was no electrical amplification (or any electricity at all out in the rural areas), the artist had to play loud and sing loud. Since blues artists often traveled alone, he had to play like an entire band. Many took advantage of anything that gave him an edge. He would often resort to metal-body resonator guitars for more volume, would play the bass strings and higher-pitched strings independently to sound like two instruments and would stomp his foot loudly and drum his hands on his guitar for percussion. Bluesmen trained themselves to bellow out the melodies so they could be heard in a crowded, noisy room but without losing tonality in their voices. They had to shout above the crowd but still sound like they were singing and not just shouting. Consequently, when we listen to the recordings of early bluesmen, we can plainly hear the juke joint influence, especially in such artists as John Lee Hooker, Fred McDowell, Charlie Patton and Willie Brown.


John Lee Hooker - Roll N' Roll - YouTube

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Juke joints in town were closely watched by the police to ensure things did not get out of hand. They closed at midnight. The isolated jukes stayed open into the early hours of the morning and could get very violent.

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Colored Cafe juke joint, Mississippi, 1950.

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Poor Monkey's juke joint, Merigold, MS.

The alcohol served in the rural and plantation juke joints was often illegal hooch made by the more enterprising farmers on the plantation--moonshine, corn whiskey and the like. The Boss didn’t care since it saved him money. During Prohibition, all kinds of alcohol was consumed by the nation’s poor. One of the most popular sources was Sterno—jellied alcohol that could be burned in the can. For this reason, it was called “canned heat” which Southerners pronounced “candee.”

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Invented in 1900, Sterno contains ethanol which is consumable alcohol but the manufacturer added wood alcohol (methanol) to denature it (i.e. make it too toxic to consume). That didn’t stop people from drinking it during Prohibition. They extracted the alcohol—both the ethanol and methanol together since there was no way to separate them—and drank it. It was quite popular among the bluesmen. Some, as Tommy Johnson, continued to drink it even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933. Because of the deleterious effects of methanol, the Sterno alcohol earned the name “rotgut” which eventually came to be applied to any cheap alcohol.

With a belly full of this horrible stuff, a man could turn into a raving demon. Juke patrons would attack one another with little to no provocation. Men would pull out guns and simply start shooting. A man jealous by nature became an insane monster on rotgut if any man spoke to or even looked at his woman. Since the musicians were generally eyed by the women, they were the biggest targets of vengeance. The performers had to be careful what women they spoke to or flirted with. Even innocently smiling or waving at another man's woman could cost a musician his life. Many musicians packed heat and I know of at least one case where it may have saved his life (described later).

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A plantation owner and his sharecroppers in front of a general store in 1936 Clarksdale, Mississippi. Such was the power structure in the South at that time. The Big Boss stands almost triumphantly, foot planted firmly on his car looking immovable while his tenant farmers sit quietly, assuming passive, shrunken postures.

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Clarksdale, Mississippi today.

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.

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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

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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.

Blues music might have perished unnoticed by the world if not for the efforts of men who sought to capture it either for study or for profit. Today we owe them a debt of gratitude. Without their efforts, blues could have probably would died in an unmarked grave. One of the more enterprising was Alan Lomax who accompanied his father, John, to the sharecroppers’ fields and to the prisons of Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana with a field recording unit capturing the talent of the rural South who most likely would never have been heard otherwise. In this way, Lomax discovered extremely influential bluesmen—Huddy Ledbetter (Lead Belly), Muddy Waters (McKinley Morganfield) and David “Honeyboy” Edwards. He also made field recordings of Son House (Eddie James, Jr.) and Willie Brown although he was not the first. The prison recordings, released as Negro Prison Blues and Songs, is beautifully recorded and incredibly haunting. If Lomax had recorded nothing else, he deserved to be remembered for this one set of recordings alone.


Negro Prison Songs / "Rosie"1947 [RARE] - YouTube


Alan Lomax Recordings- Levee Camp Holler - YouTube

But Lomax recorded a great deal more. He traveled the world recording all kinds of folk music. He is partly responsible for the genre called “world music.” He conducted extensive interviews with influential artists of various genres around the globe. He authored a number of books on the cultural importance of music including Folk Song Style and Culture considered one of the most important works on the correlation of music and culture ever written (Lomax was a graduate of the University of Texas with a degree in philosophy). Lomax was a guitarist and songwriter himself. He and his father cowrote “The Days of 49” which Dylan covered on his album “Self Portrait” (1970). Regarded by the right wing as a communist, Lomax was frequently investigated by the FBI whom he grew to greatly dislike. Lomax’s prison recordings prove that blues has its origins in work songs and “hollers” whether in the prison yard or the cotton field. Lead Belly, after all, was an ex-convict who appeared to know hundreds of songs. I consider the prison recordings to be an essential blues document.

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Chain gang taken in August of 1910 at Pitt County, North Carolina. The blood hounds were for chasing down escapees. A man holds a guitar that appears to be a cheap Sears model. One man Lomax interviewed admitted that he was never able to go straight and hold down an honest job and took to fighting, stealing and robbing people. He was such trouble that when the cops arrested him for a crime for which he was innocent, he told them, “But I didn’t do nothin’,” to which the arresting officer replied, “Don’t matter. Sooner or later, you’re gonna do somethin’.” Some black men preferred prison because they had a roof over their heads and three squares a day which was more than they had on the outside. They may not have had freedom but blacks, especially in the South, were never really free anyway. As for sexual needs, once you’re behind bars for a couple of years, you tend not to be particular about who your partner is.


Rube Lacy - Mississippi Jail House Groan (1928) Blues - YouTube
Rube Lacy's "Mississippi Jailhouse Groan" is the deepest, darkest country blues I've ever heard.

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The man considered to be the Sam Phillips of blues was Henry C. Speir of Jackson, Mississippi who just preceded Lomax but whose recording endeavors overlapped. They appeared to never have met, their interest in music being entirely different. Speir ran a record store but also worked as a talent scout for various labels. Speir enjoyed blues and country music and sought out such artists throughout the South. Without him, America’s roots music past would be very poor indeed. A definitive list of his discoveries is not possible because, as Speir himself puts it, “I’ve found so many singers I can’t remember all their names, and I’ve forgotten about many others.” Speir once had an address book full of the names and numbers of his clients but it was tragically lost in a fire and would have given us pretty close to a definitive list. But among Speir’s discoveries are: Charlie Patton, Skip James, Tommy Johnson, Lucille Bogan, Son House, Willie Brown, Geeshie Wiley, Blind Joe Reynolds, the Mississippi Sheiks, Garfield Akers, Bo Carter, Blind Roosevelt Graves, Uncle Dave Macon, William Harris, Charley McCoy, Slim Duckett, Pig Norwood, Elvie Thomas, Elder Curry, Mississippi Coleman Bracey, Isaiah Nettles, Robert Wilkins, Ishmon Bracey, Minnie Wallace, Henry “Son” Sims, Robert Johnson, Rube Lacy and Booker White. Jimmie Rodgers also came to Speir’s record store to record but Speir told him he wasn’t ready and to go back to Meridian and work up a few more songs and then come back. Instead, Ralph Peer, another great A&R man for Victor (and friend of Speir) signed him up and Rodgers became a huge hit in the country circuit.

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Black folks had good reason not to trust whites especially in the entertainment business. In that sense, a recording artist signed to a big label was a type of sharecropper: with sharecropping you work your parcel of land and the Boss takes half of everything and then deducts your expenses and debts from your half and in the record business you write
and compile material and lay down the tracks and yet the label took back most everything in recording fees, publishing fees, engineers’ pay, studio time, etc. Bluesmen made nothing off their records. The records were good for exposure to guarantee good crowds at upcoming shows. This became a staple in the recording industry. But Speir was always a fair man to clients—black or white. Blacks trusted Speir. When any of Speir’s clients got in trouble, they usually called him for help before calling anyone else and Speir usually did help as much as he could. When Speir sent an artist to Wisconsin, Indiana or New York to record, he paid for the transportation. He always slipped the artists who came to record demos at a label’s request a few bucks for showing up knowing that they were probably in need. Blacks regarded him as a righteous man.

Speir’s setup that he kept on the second floor of his store cut test recordings onto a disc with an aluminum-based surface. For five dollars, Speir would take the artist upstairs and let him or her cut a record. If he liked it, he would pass the artist onto a label. Speir cut artists for Victor but Victor made sure the test cut went through Ralph Peer whom they trusted. Victor had its own race record division called Bluebird. Decisions had to be made which label best suited the artist in question. Bluebird tended to record lighter-veined and even comical blues numbers called hokum. Paramount recorded genuine lowdown, country blues. OKeh gravitated towards something in between.

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Unfortunately, the Paramount recordings were usually bad. They were noisy with a lot of hiss drowning out the intricate guitar work and subtlety of the vocals. With time, the old records became more brittle and so many of Charley Patton’s recordings on Paramount are barely listenable today.

When Speir sent artists to Paramount, they accepted them unheard because they trusted his ear for good music. Later, Speir scouted for the American Record Company or ARC—Columbia’s race record division. Speir also scouted talent for Gennett, Vocalion, and Decca. Speir stopped recording in 1942 when a fire destroyed his store. He never made another recording. So completely did he drop out of sight after the ’42 fire that Skip James and Son House thought he had died in it and were surprised to learn in the 60s that Speir was still alive. He died in Jackson, Mississippi in 1972. He has since been elected to the Blues Hall of Fame and most deservedly so.

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The most basic blues structure is 12-bar blues. To explain what this means, I must explain some rudimentary music theory. A bar is another name for a measure which is a specified grouping of notes, rests or beats between two vertical lines on a musical staff. A note on that staff represents a beat during which a tone is played while a rest is a beat during which no tone is played (the beat, however, is internal and not necessarily audible). Take a piece in common time, which is 4/4 time, which means there are four beats to a measure and that the quarter note (or crotchet) gets the beat. So a single measure or bar can have a maximum of four crotchets, which represent four beats, and then the next measure starts. A bar can also have eight eighth-notes (or quavers) since an eighth-note represents half a beat in 4/4 time so we can have twice as many quavers in a bar as we can have crotchets. A measure of 4/4 can also have two half-notes since a halfnote
is two beats or it can have a single whole note which represents four beats. We can combine various notes such as three crotchets and two quavers which total out to four beats (1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 +1/8 + 1/8 = 4/4). Or four quavers, one crotchet and one crotchet-rest which also totals out to four beats. Whatever note and rest combination totals out to four beats represents a bar of music in 4/4 time. In 3/4 time, there are three beats in a measure with a quarter note representing the beat. In 3/8 time, there are three beats in a bar with an eighth-note representing the beat and so on. But blues is in 4/4 time.

In the basic blues structure, the entire set of chord changes is contained in 12 bars with the changes occurring at I, IV and V or at tonic, subdominant and dominant. In the following table, each Roman numeral represents a bar of that scale degree. Follow from left to right for each successive row:

I I I I
IV IV I I
V IV I V7

This table is very basic. The V7 at the end indicates that the V chord should be played as a seventh-chord. The reason is that seventh chords have a bluesy sound that make them ideal for resolving the blues progression at the end. We are forced to substitute a dominant 7th chord (consisting of root, perfect 3rd, perfect 5th and flatted 7th) shown here instead of the “blues seven” which has an approximate 7:4 ratio which is not found in Western music theory is but is close to a dominant 7th. The last bar or two is called the “turnaround” because it starts the 12-bar cycle from the beginning although a turnaround can occur before each new progression within the 12 bars by using the dominant seventh (V7). The beauty of the blues structure is that it can be sliced up and diced up and reassembled in a nearly infinite variety and still sound like blues. Likewise, we don’t have to stick only to 12-bar blues. Some blues is 8-bar and some is 16-bar and still it sounds like blues.

Hart Wand’s “Dallas Blues” mentioned earlier was a standard 12-bar blues. So the form had been around for some time as it is doubtful that Wand invented it and “Dallas Blues” is a far cry from Delta blues and yet there are definitely similarities.

Bill Doggett’s 1956 hit “Honky Tonk” (which received a resurge in popularity after being featured in the movie Blue Velvet), is a 12-bar blues that uses the following structure:

I IV I I
IV IV I I
V IV I V7

Note the use of the subdominant in the second bar instead of repeating the tonic. Yet, who would argue that “Honky Tonk” is anything but a 12-bar blues?


Bill Doggett Honky Tonk Pts. 1 and 2.wmv - YouTube

The blues scale, which technically is not a scale, is quite different from the major scale because III, V, VII are flatted and are called blue (or bent) notes. They are approximated in theory as half-step flats when, in reality, they are slightly less than a half-step which can’t be shown in standard notation which does not allow for notes less than a half-step. For that same reason, the dominant 7th is substituted in theory for the "blues seven."

Even odder, while the flatted 3rd and 7th replace the natural 3rd and 7th, the flatted 5th does not have to replace the natural 5th in a blues piece but can alternate with the natural 5th throughout the course of the piece. The bent 5th can be inserted when it “feels right.” Blues is also unique in that playing two adjacent notes (a half-step apart) simultaneously is allowable and adds to the melodic line rather than sounding like a mistake. Then there
is the use of the slide to glide from note to note.

Blues, rock, jazz and country are often played in the minor pentatonic scale. In this scale, II and VI are removed (they are so seldom played that we can simply omit them altogether) leaving just five notes including the flatted 3rd and 7th but the 5th is listed as natural but, in reality, shares its position with the flatted or bent 5th. Strictly speaking, the blues scale is not a minor scale but what is called a “forced minor,” i.e. the blues scale is a minor scale “forced” or imposed over a major scale. The bent 5th gives blues its emotion. The flatted 3rd and 7th gives blues its raw, dark sound.

Just to further confuse you, even though I said earlier that blues is in 4/4 time, that isn't really true because the melodic lines of blues are generally arranged in triplets, which represent a way of dividing a measure of 4/4 time into four beats with eighth-notes grouped into threes. They are counted as “one-trip-let-two-trip-let-three-trip-let-four-trip-let.” For this reason, standard 12-bar blues time is usually 12/8 rather than 4/4 but it's easier to count as 4/4. Make sense?

To drive home the point, listen to the intro of T-Bone Walker's 1947 hit, "Bobby Sox Baby":


T Bone Walker - Bobby Sox Blues - YouTube

The guitar plays "one-triplet-two triplet-three" and the kick drum finishes it off with "triplet-four-triplet". The guitar and drum repeat this in the next bar. Then guitar plays "one-triplet-two-triplet-three-triplet-four-triplet-one-triplet-two-triplet-three". Then the song enters the main theme which is 12-bar blues with a scheme of

I IV I I
IV IV I I
V V I I

Walker doesn't end the last bar with a V7 because he then launches into a bridge rather start repeating from the first bar. However, he could have played a V7 and still gone into the bridge and it wouldn't screwed up the song. He probably avoided the V7 simply to avoid sounding too generic. As I said blues structure is quite malleable and still remains blues.

I'm going to let you in on a little writing secret called 'knowing what the words that you're using mean'.

Concise | Define Concise at Dictionary.com

I laughed.

The primary sources for blues vocalization is the work song and the field holler. Work songs are always of the call-and-response type where a crew leader sang out a line and the rest of the men responded by either repeating the line or with a standard line sung in response to each line sung by the leader. Sea shanties are also constructed this way (many of which are also of African-American descent such as “Rollin’ the Woodpile Down,” “Mail Day,” and “Whoop Jamboree”). These Southern work songs were sung in the cotton fields, the prison yards and chain gangs. Many church songs and hymns were also sung as call-and-response and likely descended from field work songs (this same phenomenon is noted in old coastal towns of England and New England where shanties were adapted as church hymns).

Hollers were sung by an individual and served various purposes. Hollers were long and drawn out. The record label called “Arhoolie” is called that because it is a phonetic rendering of a field holler: “Aaaaaaaarrrrrhooooooooooooliiiiiiiieeeeee!” where the pitch wavers, rises and falls in complex patterns. A man might do a field holler while working by himself but since it was so individualized, he often used it to identify himself and people in the area would know he was approaching without seeing him because they knew his holler.

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Arhoolie Records ad.

The original blues lyrics were simply four identical lines such as:

Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees

But as blues evolved, the four identical lines began to get stale in a hurry. 12-bar blues worked better with three lines. Rather than repeat the same line three times, 12-bar blues had a repeating line followed by a third that rhymed or what is called AAB lyrics. So the above lyrics would be modified to something like:

Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Lawdy, why won’t my troubles let me be

A typical example of blues lyrics is Charlie Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues” which rock fans may recognize due to its similarity to Canned Heat’s “On the Road Again”:

Down the Dirt Road Blues

I'm going away to where I’m known (2X)
I'm worried now but I won’t be worried long

My rider got somethin’ she try to keep it hid (2X)
Lord, I got somethin’ find that somethin’ with

I feel like chopping, chips flying everywhere (2X)
I've been to the Nation, lord, but I couldn’t stay there

Some people tell me, oversea blues ain’t bad (2X)
It must not been the oversea blues I had

Everyday seem like murder here (2X)
(My god, I'm no sheriff)
I'm going to leave tomorrow, I know you don’t bid my care

I ain’t going down no dirt road by myself (2X)
If I don’t carry my rider, going to carry someone else


Charlie Patton - Down The Dirt Road Blues - YouTube

(The line “I’ve been to the Nation” refers to the Territo which was the Cherokee territory prior to its being made part of Oklahoma in 1907. Quite a number of blacks had Cherokee forebears and references to the Nation or Territo turn up in a number of old Mississippi blues songs such as Skip James’s “Hard Luck Child.” Whether James had a Cherokee forebear is not known by me but we shouldn’t be surprised if he did. Patton definitely had a full Cherokee grandmother.)

Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie often performed AABA lyrics where the first line was repeated after the rhyming line:

Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees
Lawdy, why won’t my troubles let me be
Don’t that ol’ moon look lonesome shining through the trees

John Lee Hooker’s “Dimples” is a modification of the original style of blues lyrics. The first verse, for example, goes:

Well, I love the way you walk (5X)
You’re my babe, I got my eyes on you.

Note the first line repeats five times but a tag is added at the end and all the verses are structured this way giving us a clue to how the oldest blues may have sounded.

What we are really listening to lyrically in blues are prayers. Blues lyrics are founded on prayers which is ironic since so many black congregations were dead set against blues, calling it the Devil’s music. But the Devil had little to do with it. The repeating line sung in a variety of blues styles is a holdover of the African American church experience.

In the 19th century, many black congregations formed a “ring shout” also known as a “ring dance” or “ring play.” A line from a spiritual, for example, would be sung out by someone and everyone else would pick it up and the ring began to rotate slowly at first but would pick up pace and move faster and faster with the same line being repeated for hours until the participants eventually collapse in a state of ecstasy. But this form of religious expression was replaced by the type heard here:


Rev. E.D. Campbell
Reverend E. D. Campbell from the late 1920s with his congregation.

One can hear in Campbell’s recording that this was spontaneous. This is the meaning of the word “spiritual.” We think of spirituals of being hymns in a book because many spirituals were written down eventually (starting in 1867) but the original conception of a spiritual was that these songs were spontaneous and not written down. In the case of Campbell’s song, this type of hymn-singing was called “long meter” or “Dr. Watts” named after Dr. Isaac Watts, an English preacher who taught slaves to sing proper hymns early in the 18th century and encouraged clergy to do away with the more primitive forms of religious expression. Through reading the words of Watts, many African-American clergymen then did away with shouts and chants.


treemonisha,we're goin' around - YouTube
Scott Joplin including a ring shout in his 1915 opera “Treemonisha.” It partially gave birth to the square dance which was his reason for including in his opera—to show Americans where square dancing came from.

The spirituals prior to the Civil War always had a secret meaning. “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for example was a song of freedom to the slaves. The chariot referred to a train as in “underground railroad.” The term “swing low” meant for the train to come south and pick up the singer to carry him or her “home” which referred not only to heaven but to the North, to a land where they could live as free people. In this specific case, a town across the Ohio River called Ripley was the intended stop and the reference in the song to the Jordan River is really the Ohio. The song form and melody itself clearly taken from Africa. Blues and religious singing had its roots in Africa:


The African Roots of the Blues. Part 1 - YouTube


African Roots of The Blues Part 6 - Dagomba One String Traditions - YouTube


FOLI (there is no movement without rhythm) original version by Thomas Roebers and Floris Leeuwenberg - YouTube

Many blues songs contain “moan” or “groan” in title, e.g. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “Black Snake Moan” and “Long Distance Moan,” Little Papa Joe’s “Moaning Blues (Groan My Blues Away),” Rube Lacy’s “Mississippi Jailhouse Groan,” etc., this was not meant as an expression of pain or misery but is actually an expression of hope and bliss—a blotting out of ones miserable circumstances through humming and singing by drawing out notes spontaneously. It was born from the field holler. You might hear this done by a black singer doing the National Anthem before a ballgame although the church form of moaning is far more haunting. When I was in the service, I lived in the upstairs of a flat in my homeport. The downstairs was rented by a black family who held prayer meetings every week. They would commence to moaning and wailing but in a manner that was clearly an expression of music rather than people simply caterwauling in misery. I would sit in an easy chair or lie in bed and listen to them. I found it quite interesting.

The field holler was added to the blues by way of an introduction to each verse and often to each line. Blind Lemon Jefferson added a field holler to virtually every verse he sang. So when one listens to an old blues recording and hears the singer bellow out a long, drawn out kind of moan just before launching into a verse, that’s a field holler. Blues brought various aspects of African-American musical traditions together into a single expression and, in this way, preserved them.


Black Snake Moan - Blind Lemon Jefferson - YouTube

The early blues guitarists, when playing in open keys as E and A, relied on a pulsing bass monotone underlying the melody of the higher strings. The bass changed only to mark the change from I to IV to V. This is likely a holdover from the days of playing blues on banjos and cigar box guitars—both of which have sympathetic strings. A sympathetic string is never fingered but always strummed open to reinforce the fingered strings. Such instruments are not chromatic and so can only play in one key but the guitar is chromatic and can play in any key. So the early acoustic guitar blues mimicked a banjo or cigar box guitar by treating the bass strings as sympathetic. So the original blues must have sounded very melancholy and mesmerizing expressing what the people who sang it were feeling. The sub-genre of blues called North Mississippi was structured this way.

Another important part of blues structure is hambone otherwise known as the juba dance or “Pattin’ Juba.” It originated in West Africa. “Juba” derives from the Haitian word “Djouba” which derives from the Bantu word “giouba” which can mean “hour” or “peanut” or “the sun” or “to pat” or “to beat.” “Hambone” derives from “hand bone.”

Hambone was performed throughout the African diaspora including the Southern U.S. during slavery. The dance involved gathering in a circle stomping and clapping in unison as well slapping the chest, stomach and thighs also in unison. The dancers even patted their cheeks in unison. Hence the term “Pattin’ Juba.” The dance involves doing a step routine and then turning counterclockwise often with one leg raised and carrying out more steps called by such names as “pigeon wing,” “Jubal Jew,” “blow that candle out,”and “yaller cat” which all involve various patterns of stomping, clapping and patting. The dance ends with a step known as “the long dog scratch.”

The term “hand bone”imp lies the use of the hands on the body to supply percussive effects. The dance was done in places as Haiti and Congo Square in New Orleans during slavery when drums were not allowed for a time because whites feared secret messages encouraging organized rebellion were hidden in the drum patterns.

Over time, words were added to the dance in the form of rhymes chanted in time with the steps. For example:

Hambone Hambone where have you been
All ‘round the world and back again
Hambone Hambone what did you do
I got a train and I fairly flew
Hambone Hambone where did you go
I hopped up to Miss Lucy’s door

Or this one which appears to be directed at the white plantation owners:

Juba dis and Juba dat
And juba killed da yaller cat
You sift da meal and you gimme da husk
You bake da bread and you gimme da crust
You eat da meat and you gimme da skin
And dat’s da way my mama’s troubles begin.

African stories often involved talking animals who either help, hurt or deceive humans. The human characters show no surprise that the animals speak and even make deals with them. The point being that the animals are really humans who exhibit certain traits reminiscent of a certain animal. A thief might be personified in an African story as a monkey because monkeys will steal food right out of your hand. A sly person might be personified in the story as a snake because they slink and crawl about silently or sit immobile as though dead or inanimate until an edible creatures gets too close. So the origin of the following hambone rhyme is not hard to assess:

First come in was Mister Snake
He crawled all over that wedding cake
Next walked in was Mister Tick
He ate so much it made him sick
Next walked in was Mister Coon
We asked him to sing us a wedding tune

This form of Pattin’ Juba became closely associated with the ring shout or ring play.

A Concise History of the Blues
 

I've subscribed to this forum after spending a couple of hours reading Page 1 of your thread. Just wanted to say how much I'm enjoying the history of Blues that you've taken the time to post here. I'm always open to more information about the roots of music.

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.

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Gayle Dean Wardlow.

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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.

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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.

The Birth of British Blues

But the same passion that young American whites showed for learning and playing blues was simultaneously spreading across the Atlantic to Britain. People we think of as the great British rock legends were all blues players—Clapton (of course), Jimmy Page, David Gilmore, Jeff Beck, Kim Simmonds, Keith Richards, John Mayall, Brian Jones, Long John Baldry, Ritchie Blackmore, Tony Iommi, Marc Bolan as well as Ian Anderson, Jack Bruce, Robert Plant, Keef Hartley, Rod Stewart, Gary Thain, Mick Jagger and Ringo Starr. When Ringo was once offered a job to go to America to repair roads in Alabama, Ringo said he would go only if they sent him to Texas. Why Texas? the interviewer asked. “Because,” said Ringo, “that’s where Lightnin’ Hopkins lives and if Texas is good enough for Lightnin’ Hopkins, it’s good enough for me.” Starr didn’t get the job but two years later was touring America as a Beatle.

Mick Jagger was a young blues singer in the 50s who delighted in collecting rocknroll and blues records and couldn’t wait to play them for his friend, Keith Richards. One day, Mick ran into Keith who asked him what new records he had. “Oh, I’ve got a new Chuck Berry and a Muddy Waters,” Mick exclaimed.

“Muddy Waters?” asked Keith. “Who the hell is Muddy Waters?”

“You’ve never heard of Muddy Waters?” asked Mick, incredulous. “You have to hear this!”

They went to Mick’s house and he played the Chuck Berry and then the Muddy Waters. Keith took out his guitar (which he never went anywhere without) and started learning the licks. When the record ended, Keith ordered Mick to play it again. Mick started the record again. When it finished, Keith said, “Again!” and Mick played it again—and again and again and again. Jagger said Richards would listen to Muddy Waters records nonstop, playing them over and over and over for hours until he mastered every lick. Neither Mick nor Keith would dare to imagine that they would be playing onstage with Muddy by 1978.

Muddy Waters went to Britain for the first time in 1958. Big Bill Broonzy had gone there seven years earlier and encouraged Muddy to go but Muddy wouldn’t consider it. He couldn’t fathom that people across the ocean could possibly care about him or his music. Dixieland jazz had been in Britain for some time such as Chris Barber’s band. They were the closest thing they had to blues so they backed whatever jazz or blues acts toured the country including Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee and the Modern Jazz Quartet. But young guitarists as Alexis Korner began learning Big Bill Broonzy after he came through Britain. Soon a new crop of aspiring guitarists were looking for any blues they could find. Muddy decided to go to Britain after Chuck Berry had taken America by storm making his style of blues sound dated to American ears.

Their first concert was in Leeds. Most of the British had no idea what to make of Muddy Waters. They expected him to be like his friend, Big Bill Broozny, but Muddy was unlike anything they were used to. It was new and unexpected yet most of the Britons liked it but not all. Some thought Muddy was too raw, rough-edged and unpolished. The band featured Muddy’s longtime friend, Otis Spann, on the piano. The rest of the outfit was Chris Barber’s. Overall, Muddy took Britain by storm. A young man named Eric Burdon learned to play guitar by learning Muddy’s “Honey Bee.” Burdon was a student at the Newcastle College of Art. One day, he stood up in class and held up two tickets to a Muddy Waters show and asked who else was going. Another student named John Steel said he was. Burdon and Steel then formed a band called the Animals.

Soon Britons were crowding around Muddy and following him dutifully from town to town. Muddy, in turn, eased up and his shows got better at each stop. Young Brits would mob Muddy for his autograph and to ask him questions about other bluesmen they longed to see. Muddy was always the consummate gentleman and never treated his British hosts with anything but quiet, respectful behavior. He posed for photographs, granted interviews, encouraged young Brits to take up the blues and even asked some of them, such as Alexis Korner, to play a little for him and would praise their knowledge of and talent playing a music that was new to them but had also lit a fire in them.

Muddy, like other black American musicians who came to Britain, was a little stunned and pleased that the British girls would approach them so openly, asking for autographs, giving them hugs and kisses and would sit with them and chat with no self-consciousness whatsoever. The British men didn't get uptight about it. This simply did not happen in America and certainly not in Mississippi. Although, like many bluesmen, Muddy was quite the womanizer, he was smart enough to be a perfect gentleman on his tour and stayed cool and reserved but always smiling and friendly. Quite simply, the British loved him.

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19-year-old Mick Jagger sings the blues in the band Blues, Incorporated. The bassist is Jack Bruce (later of Cream), the harpist is Cyril Davies (the first British blues harpist) and the guitarist is Alexis Korner who was the original lead singer of the New Yardbirds (they recorded two numbers which have never been released before Robert Plant took over singing duties and the band changed its named to Led Zeppelin).

Korner is considered to be “the founding father of British blues.” Jagger would always credit Korner and Davies as being his mentors in blues but then so did the Yardbirds, Mayall, Zeppelin, Cream, Savoy Brown, Foghat, the Animals, etc. British blues gave birth to progressive rock when Keith Relf left the Yardbirds to form Renaissance along with John Hawken who went onto co-found Strawbs. Virtually any British rock band of the 60s or 70s was actually made up of bluesmen.

The original Jethro Tull was a straight-up blues band. The original Black Sabbath (then called Polka Tulk) played amplified blues. Fleetwood Mac was also originally a hardcore blues band under Peter Green. Pink Floyd was named after two bluesmen—Pink Anderson and Floyd Council—who were cohorts of Blind Boy Fuller whom Syd Barrett listened to quite a bit in his early days. We would not be far off to say that the blues forever changed Britain very profoundly. When Blues, Incorporated recruited younger members and started gravitating towards rock, the band transformed into the Rolling Stones who never fully shed their blues roots.

Why were the British so adoring of American bluesmen? Because they didn’t share the white American class disdain towards blacks. To them, these black bluesmen were musical saviors and cultural heroes (which was, in many ways, true). John Lennon stated in an interview that, to the British, America was this exotic foreign place where this great music was made and the whole thing reached mythic proportions in the minds of British musicians. This music was so honest and so visceral that British kids, in search of something far better than what their parents listened to, were utterly taken with it. And since the blues and rocknroll records were not easy to get, there was a sort of prestige in owning them. A lot of British musicians also had short wave radios to tune into American stations playing blues and rocknroll especially King Biscuit Time.

Many of these British kids felt that had the blues never entered their lives, they would have ended up dead or in prison and, in some cases, it was definitely true. Others had never even thought about taking up music until they heard American blues and then could not think of doing anything else. They grew so infatuated with the music that when they finally had a chance to see the true blues legends whose records they adored, such as Waters or Hooker, it was too much for them. They were overcome with emotion and wanted to properly greet these men who had so fundamentally changed their lives forever through the power of their music.

Both and Muddy and John Lee Hooker reported fanatical devotion among the British blues fans. People genuflected before them. Some would say hello and when the greeting was returned, would simply faint. Some even tossed rose petals in front of them as they walked. Once a posse of British blues fanatics followed Muddy down the street and when he stopped into a place to have breakfast, they all ordered the same thing he did. When Muddy was done eating, they bought the dishes, cup, silverware and anything he had consumed his breakfast from and wouldn't allow them to be washed. One man even bought the stool Muddy had sat on and had it removed from the establishment.

While there were certainly many white American artists into the blues--Canned Heat, Paul Butterfield, Mike Bloomfield, Charlie Musselwhite, Mose Allison--Americans as a whole did not know how to embrace blues. The British did though with every fiber of their being. The blues is so fundamental to the average Briton's approach to music that it is impossible to know what course British music would have taken without it.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS6vujo-958


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RBunD9pis6E


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkulcvRkd4I


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNsZNPyn23Y

This is an amazing thread! Thank you for taking the time.

Muddy Waters was having quite an influence in the recording industry and in music. Not only was he influencing them directly but he was spinning off other influences such as guitarist Jimmy Rogers and harpist Little Walter. Walter had a big hit among the rocknroll set in 1955 with “My Babe”—a straight up 12-bar blues. Rogers retired from music in the early 60s but his recordings are now being noticed.

After Little Walter left Muddy’s band, his place was taken over by Junior Wells. Although not quite the equal with Little Walter, Wells quickly starting making his own niche both with Muddy and blues music overall.

Inroads were being blazed and paved into the consciousness and tastes of the white public. Whites could no longer ignore Muddy Waters and they didn’t want to.

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Muddy at 21. He had just received a pressing of the recordings he made for Alan Lomax. Muddy found the occasion so special that he donned his best Sunday suit and posed holding his record. This is the first photo ever taken of Muddy Waters. Clearly the suit is a hand-me-down as the pants are a tad short.

With his star rising among the white public, Muddy had money now. He could buy things he could only have dreamed of from his sharecropping days—a decent house, a Cadillac, beautiful women—and Muddy did buy all those things. He wasn’t filthy rich but he wasn’t dirt poor anymore. In Britain, Muddy granted an interview to Melody Maker magazine. The interviewer, Max Jones, asked Muddy if his newfound wealth now made him less of a convincing blues figure. Muddy answered: “There’s no way in the world I can feel the same blues the way I used to. When I play in Chicago, I’m playing up-to-date, not the blues I was born with. People should hear the pure blues—the blues we used to have when we had no money. I’m talking about when you couldn’t even buy moonshine, a hot dog even. When you are making thirty-five cents a day.” Muddy then pulled a wad of cash from his pocket and waved it. “How can I have that kind of blues with this in my pocket?” So how, Jones asked Muddy, could he still be legitimately able to sing the blues? Muddy tapped his temple and said, “Cuz I have a long memory.”

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By 1954, rocknroll looked ready to plow blues under and suddenly, by 1960, it was over. The deaths of Richie Valens, Big Bopper and Buddy Holly the previous year, Chuck Berry being sent to jail, Little Richard becoming a preacher, and Elvis going into the army derailed rocknroll. Ray Charles and Fats Domino crossed over into country. In addition, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis and Bill Haley had all fled America for the greener pastures of Britain. Cochran would die in England later that year. To top it off, payola was declared to be illegal that year and it ruined Alan Freed, the man credited with starting the whole rocknroll craze in 1951. All that was left of rocknroll were lightweight entertainers making huge amounts of cash by covering the songs of black artists (in a nice, clean way, of course) who weren’t permitted to be broadcast on the same stations where their pale imitators were making killings off their material. That’s what it had come down to. What began with so much aggressive promise ended in a flat whimper.

Blues seized the moment to jump back into the spotlight. Blues revivals became all the rage in the early 60s. Son House, Skip James, Reverend Gary Davis, Mississippi Fred McDowell, Mississippi John Hurt and others were playing the old blues to new, enthralled audiences of young white kids. Some bluesmen, as Hurt and James, enjoyed a popularity at the revivals that eluded them when they recorded decades earlier mostly because of the Depression. Electric blues too was enjoying a rebirth with such artists as Otis Rush, Buddy Guy and T-Bone Walker enjoying revived careers—this time with an adoring white audience who hung on their every note while new bluesmen as Jimi Hendrix were arriving on the scene.

Muddy and the Chess Records executives were not about to let this bit of good fortune slip by. Suddenly, young white people, many of them disaffected rocknrollers, constituted the majority of the blues fans at every show. Muddy was a bit unnerved by it. He had grown up not really trusting white people—they always wanted something from him without ever giving him anything in return for it but trouble. At a place called Smitty’s Corner, three white men kept turning up at every show and made Muddy very suspicious. “Goddamn, they come to get me,” said Muddy. “That’s got to be them.” He meant the IRS because he owed taxes. Even white people got
screwed over by the IRS, a black man had no chance. Muddy would hide backstage after his sets to avoid the men. The men’s names were Paul Butterfield, Elvin Bishop and Nick Gravenites and they had nothing to do with the IRS and everything to do with the music business and they idolized Muddy.

When Muddy finally heard music from the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, he heard his own music. When he heard the English bands as Cream and Led Zeppelin, he heard his own music. Even Elvis was getting in on the act with his song “Trouble” from the movie King Creole, which blatantly used the beat from “Hoochie Coochie Man” and Muddy realized that white folks were not just fans, they were now imitating him in earnest. It wasn’t some affectation they were assuming, it was now their identity, they had embraced and internalized the blues. The new crop of bluesmen were becoming more and more white. They weren’t greenhorn hacks anymore, they were becoming serious competition. They had a deeper love and understanding of blues than an increasing number of blacks in the same age group who were now turning away from it and Muddy knew he’d better watch out.

By 1968, Waters and the Chess label did some experimenting with his Delta sound and came up with Electric Mud, which featured songs as “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” “Hoochie Coochie Man” and “Mannish Boy” done up with rock effects and production values. It sold very well initially until critics attacked it as a blatant attempt to make Muddy into an unconvincing hippy and cash in on the naïveté of young fans. While Muddy was aiming at the hippies with the album to bring a new audience into blues, the album certainly didn’t make Muddy into a hippy but simply made him more accessible to them. But the critics won the day and poisoned the album and sales of Electric Mud all but stopped. Today, the album is recognized as an evolution in electric blues but, soured by the experience of watching critics destroy the work, Muddy pronounced Electric Mud to be “dogs-hit” despite the fact that Jimi Hendrix loved it.

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Charlie Patton was discovered by Henry Speir and made his first recordings for Paramount in 1930. These recordings made him one of the most famous race records artists especially in the South where Patton performed exclusively (although he recorded up north and his last recordings were done in New York). He became famous enough that he did not have to tramp from place to place looking for a gig but had them set up in advance and he toured across the South on a schedule. Patton was a great showman as well as a musician and he influenced a lot of people. When he wasn’t touring Patton lived on a farm at Dockery’s plantation as a sharecropper. With his beautiful dexterity on the guitar and his gruff bellowing voice, Patton quickly acquired the moniker of “King of the Delta Bluesmen.” He spelled his name “Charlie” but Paramount changed it to “Charley” for some reason. Standing only 5’5” and weighing in at only 135 lbs., the women tried to tear his clothes off when he showed up. Patton bore many battle scars, especially the one on his neck that he suffered when he politely refused a drink bought for him by a drunken patron who took offense, dragged out a knife and viciously slashed Patton in the throat narrowly missing his jugular but inflicting a nasty wound that turned into a noticeable, pale scar. Patton also had a limp which he assumed after being shot in the leg at another juke joint. For a man of his diminutive stature to endure the worst juke joints had to offer, Patton must have been an extremely tough individual and he put on quite a show—playing behind his head, tossing his guitar in the air, etc. He sang blues and religious numbers indiscriminately. He wasn’t religious according to his sister, he just needed something to sing. While performing at whorehouses, Patton would perform a religious number and send many of the patrons fleeing, scared to death that God would strike the sinful place down with a lightning bolt with them still in it.

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The only known photo of Charlie Patton (1891-1934) taken about 1929. He was also known as Elder J.J. Hadley and The Masked Marvel. The photo is valuable because it shows us one of his guitar-picking techniques. Note the scar on the neck. Patton taught some of the most influential bluesmen including Son House, Willie Brown and Chester Burnett (a.k.a. Howlin’ Wolf) and influenced everyone from Muddy Waters to Jimi Hendrix. He not only taught blues guitar but also how to survive in the juke joint circuit. One of his more famous pieces of advice was to gorge oneself on fatty pork with a bit of lean on it before the show. The purpose was that one could then consume alcohol all night without getting drunk because the alcohol would go to work on the fat first. Patton learned the hard way not to turn down drinks bought by a fan. He wanted to save others from a similar or worse fate.

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Eddie James “Son” House, Jr. (1902-1988)—an unparalleled bluesman, one of the blues genre’s inventors. Born in Riverton, Mississippi about two miles from Clarksdale, he learned from Patton and was the teacher of Robert Johnson. In 1927, Son House was sentenced to 15 years at the Mississippi State Penitentiary then known as Parchman Farm—a very rough place to do time. Apparently, House was performing at a juke joint when a drunken man opened fire in the place. House was hit in the leg, drew his own weapon and killed the man. His sentence was drastically reduced and he was released from Parchman in 1929. He recorded between 1930 and 1943. He recorded some test pressings for Henry Speir and for Alan Lomax and the Library of Congress. He recorded only a few commercial sides. Despite his genius, he was not a dedicated musician and only did it for the money and eventually laid the guitar down. There is some confusion over when he retired from music and why. One source stated that House quit playing in 1948 when his best friend, bluesman Willie Brown, died. But Brown died in 1952. From his retirement until 1963, House did not touch a guitar. This infuriated Howlin’ Wolf, one of his chief disciples, who felt that House had thrown his career away for the bottle. House was located in 1963 living in Rochester, New York working for the railroad. He was persuaded to start playing again but was so long out of music that he could not remember how to play his own material. A 22-year-old Al Wilson (guitarist and founder of Canned Heat) was brought in to teach House how to play House. Wilson literally knew every note that House had played from listening incessantly to the old recordings. With Wilson’s help, House was able to perform a set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1964. House continued to perform all over the U.S. and Europe until 1974 when ill health forced him to retire for good. He moved to Detroit and spent the last 14 years of his life there, dying in 1988 at the age of 86. He had no family. The Detroit Blues Society held a series of benefit concerts to buy a proper headstone for Son House who is buried at Mt. Hazel Cemetery in Detroit.

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The grave of Son House at the Mt. Hazel Cemetery in the Brightmoor area (Lahser and Pickford)—an area so incredibly run down and squalid that I didn't feel safe parking my car anywhere when I went to visit his grave.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RK7M3n6Wwo0
Watch carefully, kiddies, this is how its done.

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Tampa Red (real name Hudson Woodbridge). Born in Georgia in 1904, Red’s parents died when he was very young. He was taken in by an aunt and uncle of the name of Whittaker who lived in Tampa and so he was thereafter known as Hudson Whittaker.

Red had an older brother named Eddie who played guitar so Red took up the instrument. He then met a busker called Piccolo Pete who took Red under his wing and taught him about playing and performing blues. In 1928, Red was hired by Ma Rainey to play guitar for her on the song “It’s Tight Like That.” This type of blues, called hokum, became Red’s trademark material for the rest of his career. Hokum is a form of light blues full of sexual innuendo and double entendres. Often a vaudeville dialog with musical accompaniment would serve as a song.

Also in 1928, Red got himself one of the first National tricone resonator guitars. It was gold-plated and so Red became known as “the Man with the Gold Guitar.” On these old recordings, Red’s guitar actually sounds like an electric. Red would go on to play with Georgia Tom (Thomas A. Dorsey who coined the term “gospel music”) and Frankie Jaxon under such names as the Hokum Boys or Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. Red’s recordings were distinguished by his trademark single string runs done with a bottleneck instead of full chords which prefigured the lead guitar playing of rocknroll.

By 1932, Red was a session man backing such notables as Sonny Boy Williamson (the original), Big Bill Broonzy and Memphis Minnie. By the early 40s, he began using the electric guitar. His band, the Chicago Five, backed many of the Bluebird solo artists and their sound was called “the Bluebird Sound.” He had another hokum hit in 1942 called “Let Me Play With Your Poodle.”

In Chicago, Red’s house was a bluesman’s mecca. Blues personalities coming from the Delta recently moved to Chicago often stayed there until they could get on their feet. Jam sessions, rehearsals and bookings were common at Red’s.

In 1953, Red’s contract with Victor was not renewed and his wife passed away. Red took to drink which plagued him for the rest of his days. He enjoyed a revival of interest in his music in the late 50s when Americans and Britons began to seriously consider blues.

Red made his last recording in 1960 but he was a spent force who lived in obscurity until his death in 1981 at the age of 77. By then, he was destitute and forgotten. His golden tricone guitar was recovered somewhere in Illinois in the 90s and donated to the Experience Music Project in Seattle.


Tampa Red - It Hurts Me Too - YouTube

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Booker T. Washington White a.k.a. Bukka White (1906-1977). Although frequently listed as “Bukka White,” he never used that name and disliked it, preferring “Booker White.” Born near Aberdeen, Mississippi, White started off playing the fiddle for square dances and was fairly adept on the piano but had learned guitar at age 9 from his father, a railroad worker. White eventually got himself a National steel box Duolian. White was greatly influenced by Charlie Patton whom he claims to have met.

Growing up around trains, White was adept at riding the rails—always a dangerous business—and traveled a large part of the Midwest and South this way. White got a contract with Victor in 1930 where he recorded 14 songs with Memphis Minnie. He had very limited commercial success. He went to Chicago as a boxer and then to Birmingham, Alabama to pitch for the Birmingham Black Cats—a Negro League team. In 1937, White shot a man during an altercation and was sentenced to Parchman Farm (Mississippi State Penitentiary). While incarcerated, he got a recording contract with Vocalian and recorded two sides including “Shake ‘Em on Down” which was a significant hit and has since become a blues standard. Alan Lomax discovered White in 1939 when he came to record prison songs at Parchman. With help from Lomax, White was released from Parchman the following year.

In 1940, White traveled to Chicago to record and 12 songs were the result. These are considered the best of White’s career covering everything from his prison experience to the injustice of Jim Crow. But before he could really enjoy his success, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy during the war. Even then, he would play juke joints whenever he could. After his release from the Navy, White settled in Memphis playing various gigs.

At this time, his younger cousin, a sharecropper from Mississippi, came to Memphis to perfect his blues playing. He stayed with Booker who gave him a Stella acoustic guitar to work with. He taught his cousin how to play, sing, hold his guitar and how to last a whole night bellowing out blues in juke joints with no amplification, no air conditioning in the summer and no heat in the winter. He sent his cousin out to busk on the streets and play with other musicians and learn from them. After about a year, the cousin went back to Mississippi to pay off his debt and get his wife. He absorbed the lessons White had taught him very well and went on to become one of the greatest bluesmen of all time under the name B. B. King.

Booker White was rediscovered the early 60s along with Son House, Skip James and Mississippi John Hurt during the blues revival and played the Newport Folk Festival among other appearances. He also appeared on television singing blues and giving demonstrations on how to play his Duolian with a steel bar. Booker White died of cancer in Memphis at the age of 70. Bluesmen Eric Bibb played White’s old National on his 2010 Telarc release Booker’s Guitar.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N0jRX69mxcE


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bsMpHHSLSlc

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Jimmy Rogers (1924-1997), real name James A. Lane, who came into his own backing Muddy Waters, was born in Ruleville, Mississippi. He started off playing harp but took up guitar in his teens. He went to Atlanta and then to Memphis. Jimmy took his stepfather’s surname of Rogers when he embarked on his musical career and lit out for East St. Louis to play with Robert Junior Lockwood.

By the mid-40s, Rogers was in Chicago playing harp under the name Memphis Slim and his Houserockers. In 1947, Rogers got together with Muddy Waters and Little Walter and they recorded as the Headcutters or Headhunters and founded the South Side Chicago Blues sound. When each band member released a solo project, it usually contained the other band members.

Although Rogers was primarily a guitarist in this band, sometimes Rogers and Walter switched around with Jimmy taking up the harp and Walter taking up the guitar. Rogers established himself as a solo artist by 1950 with such hits as “That’s All Right” and had another hit in 1956 “Walking By Myself” which featured some hot harp work by Little Walter.

Rogers stayed with Waters until 1954 and, after a few more hits of his own, he began to work less and less. The popularity of blues was on the wane and Rogers found fewer gigs and had no desire to switch over to rocknroll. By 1960, he was briefly part of Howlin’ Wolf’s outfit, which he had been during Wolf’s early days at Chess but then Jimmy stopped gigging altogether. For a few years, Jimmy drove a cab and ran a Chicago clothing store which burnt down in the 1968 riots following Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Rogers decided to go back into music when blues made a small revival in the early 70s thanks to B. B. King’s “The Thrill is Gone” hitting #1. In 1971, Jimmy toured Europe which is always interested in seeing American jazz and blues acts as well as early rocknroll. By 1977, he was reunited with Muddy Waters and became a full time solo act in 1982. Rogers continued to perform until his death in 1997 of colon cancer.

Jimmy’s son, James D. Lane, also plays guitar (his first, a Gibson acoustic, was given to him by John Wayne) and works as a recording engineer and producer for Blue Heaven Studios and has worked with old and new blues acts including Honeyboy Edwards, Hubert Sumlin, Pinetop Perkins, B. B. King, Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Taj Mahal, Mick Jagger, Jonny Lang, Van Morrison, Gary Moore, Robert Plant, Lazy Lester, Jeff Healy and Keith Richards. Not to mention his father.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qhjDXXEcocg

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John Lee Hooker (1912-2001) hailed from Clarksdale, Mississippi where the Ku Klux Klan marched passed his door on their way to a rally or a lynching. He was taught to play guitar by his stepfather, William Moore, who was famous in the area and used to jam with the top bluesmen in the area.

Hooker eventually left Mississippi and went to Memphis working odd jobs. He came to Detroit in 1943 working for the auto companies. In his free time, he played his guitar at the Hastings Street clubs such as Henry’s Swing Club, the 609 Club and the Horseshoe Club.

Stopping into a record store with a recording booth, Hooker cut a song that the storeowner thought had hit potential and played it for Bernie Besman of Sensation Records—a small Detroit indie label. Besman reportedly wasn’t all that impressed but met with Hooker only to learn the man had a stutter (although I’ve never noticed it having heard him speak). Nevertheless, Besman apparently had a hunch and signed Hooker to a contract.

In 1948, Sensation released “Boogie Chillen” which immediately shot to #1 on the R&B chart and rocketed Hooker to international fame when British blues fans took notice. Hooker had a haunting, mesmerizing sound. Some prefer his solo stuff with just his guitar and his stomping foot and others like his full band arrangements better. Either way, he was a very unique artist who, like Muddy Waters, created his own genre of blues.

One thing that set him apart was his total disregard for song form. Hooker would do whatever he felt like doing to a song—suddenly breaking into lead runs or going through unpredictable key changes, strange pauses and starts—and somehow make it come out sounding good despite the song having no apparent structure.

Hooker signed with a number of labels—Vee-Jay, Chess and Modern—recording under various aliases--John Lee Cooker, Texas Slim, etc.--to prevent legal wrangling saying it made no difference what name went on the record “as long as you get the money.” Hooker also recorded quite a number of sides for Detroit’s legendary Fortune label which helped his cohort, Eddie Kirkland, establish himself as a solo artist. Hooker was enormously popular with British blues fans and was given the royal treatment when he toured the country.

He has played with rock bands as the Animals and Canned Heat as well as Van Morrison. His influence in both blues and rock music is inestimable.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m9Sv-SNDqgo


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4pp02_GN9A


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4oRlhbjM59s
One of Hooker’s less known songs and yet one of his best.

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Lightnin’ Hopkins (1912-1982)—real name Sam John Hopkins—was born in Centerville, Texas and met Blind Lemon Jefferson at a church function. From that time on, Lightnin’ felt the blues welling up within him. Having relatives who played blues certainly helped. One cousin was blues singer Texas Alexander. Another was electric guitarist Frankie Lee Sims (with whom Lightnin’ would later record). Like T-Bone Walker, Lightnin’ became a protégé of Blind Lemon Jefferson and functioned as a guide playing at various church functions with him. Hopkins did time at the Houston County Prison Farm for an offense that has never been disclosed (of course in Texas during that era a man didn’t have to do anything to end up in prison except be black). He was discovered by Aladdin Records in 1946 and went to L.A. to record with pianist Wilson Smith. An exec there decided they needed dynamic, bluesy nicknames and named Hopkins “Lightnin’” and Smith “Thunder.” Hopkins liked his moniker and kept it the rest of his career. He returned to Texas and began recording for Gold Star Records. Even though he rarely toured outside of Texas in the 40s and 50s, Lightnin’ recorded anywhere from 800 to 1000 songs in his career. When Mack McCormick persuaded Lightnin’ to play at folk revival concerts in the late 50s both in Houston and California before integrated audiences (a first for Lightnin’) on the same bill as people as Seeger and Joan Baez, his popularity, already very high among blacks, now skyrocketed him to international acclaim culminating in a performance at Carnegie Hall in 1960. That same year, he released his biggest hit—“Mojo Hand” for Tradition Records. Throughout the 60s and 70s, Lightnin’ released at least one album per year and toured Germany where audiences, hungry for American blues, packed the halls to hear him and many fans followed him from town to town. He toured Holland some years later and Japan in 1978.

Both Stevie Ray and Jimmy Vaughan cite Lightnin’ as a primary influence. Lightnin’, like many acoustic bluesmen, traveled alone and so developed melodic, bass and percussion with his guitar. He picked, strummed and slapped his guitar in ways that set him apart for other bluesmen. His voice was powerful and could fill a room without needing a microphone. A true artist in every sense. In his later career, Lightnin’s backup band consisted of Dusty Hill and Frank Beard—two-thirds of Z.Z. Topp before the band existed—and they once asked Lightnin’ to give them cues when he was about to change so they could change with him. Lightnin’ just looked at them puzzled and said, “Lightnin’ change when Lightnin’ want to change.” As with John Lee Hooker, Lightnin’ played whatever he felt like playing as soon as the
moment struck him and did not know himself until it happened.

He has recorded more albums than any other blues artist. He died of cancer in 1982 and was memorialized in Crockett, Texas with a statue.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=keQR4_7DBnM


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lK5zYI86wIw


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCqEOboRctY

He played with BHT and the M's too.

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Tommy Johnson (1896?-1956) learned the rudiments of guitar from his older brother, Ledell. Their father had been born a slave. The seventh of 13 children, Tommy ran away from home at 12 with an older woman that Ledell believes only took up with him because he could sing and play and she hoped she could make money off him. Tommy later married a 14-year-old girl named Maggie Campbell and together with Ledell and his wife, Mary. moved to the Tom Sander plantation to live as sharecroppers. Tommy played guitar with Willie Brown and Dick Bankston during this time.

Later, Tommy played with Charlie Patton. Tommy moved around a lot and got into a lot of woman trouble. He had women all over the place. Tommy also got into fights with both white and black men. He also had an extreme fondness for alcohol and didn’t care what source he had to get it from—canned heat (his favorite), cough syrup, furniture polish, hair tonic, mouthwash, etc. Once he was recording at a studio and came across some bonded whiskey (unblended whiskey continuously aged in a barrel for at least four years). Tommy drank so much of it that the recording session was a disaster. Johnson also was busted frequently for public drunkenness.

Once, during the Depression, he was thrown in jail and bail was set at $150. He called Speir and begged him to bail him out. Speir did and Tommy promptly skipped town. In the Depression, $150 went a long way and Speir could not afford to lose it so he was forced to pursue Tommy and bring him back to Jackson. When he caught up to Johnson, Speir had no trouble slipping the cuffs on him and getting him in the backseat of his car—Tommy was out cold.

When Tommy came to, he found himself en route to Jackson handcuffed in the back of Speir’s car and begged Speir to leave him be but Spier said, “I’m sorry, Tommy, but I’ll lose my $150 and I can’t afford it.” Still, Speir had a soft spot for Tommy because he had other problems that weren’t his fault—such as a stutter so severe that he often had to break into song to make himself understood—that made his life that much tougher and stood by him, paid off some of his debts and tried to keep him out of trouble but Tommy and trouble seemed to have a knack for finding each other.

Tommy Johnson died in 1956 from the effects of ill-health brought on by his hard-living and excessive consumption of rotgut. That he even made it to 60 amazed many who knew him. Still, he was a blues genius with a distinctive guitar style combined with an equally distinctive smooth voice that broke into falsetto effortlessly and without a trace of a stutter. His recordings, however, are fairly rare. The above photo, probably taken before 1923, is the only one known of Tommy Johnson.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGuoOyeUj-w


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o808EmOukDQ

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Mississippi Fred McDowell (1904-1972). Despite using Mississippi in his name, Fred McDowell was born near Memphis. He was orphaned at an early age and took up guitar at 14 and played dances. He took up farming, same as his parents, and moved to Como, Mississippi around 1940 or 41 which was not officially in the Delta region but north of it. Fred was discovered in the early 50s by Alan Lomax. He first played slide with a pocketknife, then with a steak rib bone and, finally, a glass bottleneck. He settled on the glass slide for its clarity. He made his own but Buddy Guy borrowed it and it was lost somewhere in Germany. Fred recalled, laughing, that he next asked a fellow to cut the neck off the bottle for him. The fellow didn’t understand what Fred was asking and cut the neck off the bottle and brought the rest of the bottle to him.

“Whatchu handin’ me this for?” Fred asked. “I can’t do nothin’ with this!” So Fred went and cut his own bottleneck slide and used it for the rest of his days—always wearing it on his ring finger (as did Son House).

Fred became a regular at various blues festivals during the revival era and recorded several albums. His style is considered by bluesologists to be its own genre called North Mississippi which has fewer chord changes than regular Delta blues for a droning effect that is considered closer to its African roots played on instruments with droning sympathetic strings. His guitar-playing is top-notch.

Fred was famous for his statement, “I don’t play no rock and roll.” He did, however, praise the Rolling Stones for their straight-up blues version of “You Gotta Move” (which Fred wrote with another blues legend, Reverend Gary Davis). He also taught Bonnie Raitt how to play slide guitar. Fred also frequently played the electric guitar on his recordings and occasionally has a full band arrangement although it was usually just him on guitar and a bassist or harpist. His sound is hauntingly rural and viscerally arresting. His gospel recordings, sung with him and his wife, Annie Mae (shown with him in the above photo), are especially time-reversing—like one is sitting on a porch of a farmhouse in 1920s Mississippi in the cool of the evening listening to some folks playing blues after a hard day’s work in the fields.

While many consider Son House to be the premier slide player, many others insist Fred McDowell is. But Fred and House both admired each other greatly and both admired Patton whose slide abilities were nothing to sneeze at. Critic Art Tipaldi wrote of McDowell: “Few sounds on the planet are as emotionally urgent as McDowell’s bottleneck. The piercing effect of bottle on strings makes hairs tingle. Then his voice explodes in the seer [sic] passion that characterizes the first generation country blues.”

Fred’s last album was recorded at the Gaslight Café in Greenwich Village, Live in New York, in 1971. The following year, Fred McDowell died of cancer at the age of 68. He was buried at Hammond Hill Baptist Church near Como, Mississippi. Bonnie Raitt paid for a headstone. Fred kicked off a flurry of interest in North Mississippi bluesmen that were ignored during the early blues era, which resulted in the establishment of Fat Possum Records in 1992 based in Oxford, Mississippi. The label was dedicated to recording the North Mississippi sound and made blues stars of great artists as R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough (of whom Iggy Pop became a devotee), Asie Payton, King Ernest and Charles Caldwell—first generation blues artists who have all have since died.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtlVSedpIRU


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0L2aUSSfO38

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Blind Blake is almost a stereotypical blues legend. He began recording for Paramount in 1926, for which he recorded about 80 sides, which were very popular, and he single-handedly put Piedmont blues on the musical map. His real name appears to be Arthur Blake (his songs are attributed to this name and he stated his “right name” was Arthur Blake on one recording) and it is generally believed that he hailed from Jacksonville, Florida having been born around 1893. A check of the city’s records during that period, however, do not list an Arthur Blake. Blind Willie McTell said Blake’s real name was Phelps but this hasn’t yielded up anything useful either. In one recording, he breaks into a Geechee accent which is spoken along coastal Georgia but no city records in that region have yielded up an Arthur Blake or Phelps that matches Blind Blake’s description.

We are not sure of his travels other than being in Chicago. One boogie-woogie number he does, “Hastings Street,” is about Detroit and he performs the song with Detroit pianist Charley Spand. He mentions 169 Brady Street which gives every indication that Blake had toured through Detroit but there is no record of him ever setting foot in the city (the song was recorded in Chicago). John Lee Hooker mentioned Blake as jamming with his stepfather in Clarksdale and we should not too surprised if Blake had been in that area a time or two.

Blake played guitar for other artists as Irene Scruggs and his style is immediately recognizable--the use of the thumb to syncopate the beat, his tendency to switch back and forth between regular time and double time continuously, his improvisation skills on par with any jazz musician's (he composed with jazzmen as Johnny Dodds) as his passes are never repeated exactly but always vary from one another.

Blake was fond of gambling and drinking, which he did with his blind cohorts. Often times he would get into fights with them. His manager said Blake frequently turned up at the studio with bruises or a bloody lip claiming he had gotten into it while gambling. As time wore on, Blake drank more and more and it appears that his final recordings were not really him (one song, “Champagne Charley is My Name,” while a nice rag number, is definitely not Blake although it is attributed to him).

After 1932, Blake was heard from no more. He seemed to have dropped off the face of the earth. McTell said Blake fell under a train and was killed but no one knows anything about that. The above photo is the only one known of Blind Blake. White guitarist Eddie Lang (real name Salvatore Massaro) sometimes used the moniker of Blind Blake while recording with black bands and Lang died in 1933 so this seems to explain the whole mystery but actually only deepens it. Eddie Lang is definitely not the Blind Blake who did the amazing rags, blues and boogie-woogie numbers. Lang’s style is totally different and so is his voice. The voice of Blind Blake is not a white man “coon shouting” but is obviously a real black man. On all the recordings bearing the distinctive Blake guitar-playing, we hear that same voice indicating the guitarist and vocalist were the same person and that he was real.

But whoever Blind Blake really was, where he came from and whatever happened to him makes him one of the greatest mysteries in blues.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7921puvgf4


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04bvzgbPVYQ


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40OaCfiaEGI


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TTP-8VfIvn0

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Blind Lemon Henry Jefferson (1893-1929). Born blind as one of eight children in a sharecropping family, he was called Lemon due to his rotund build. He took up guitar in his teens and played picnics but eventually started busking in the streets of East Texas. In the early 1910s, Lemon frequently played in Dallas alongside Lead Belly. In 1917, Lemon took on a protégé, Aaron “T-Bone” Walker, who would act as a guide for Lemon whose busking netted him enough to live on comfortably and some say he even
supported a wife and child on this money (there is no definitive proof he was married or had children).

Lemon’s first release was on Paramount very early in 1926, two gospel numbers recorded under the name of Deacon L. J. Bates. In March, he began recording blues as Blind Lemon Jefferson and he immediately
became a very popular artist. Every blues fan had Lemon’s records in those days. Lemon was one of the earliest true bluesmen to record. From ’26 to ’29, Lemon recorded 43 sides and was a hot seller. The recordings earned Lemon the title of “The Father of Texas Blues.”

He played his guitar with it sitting flat in his lap but even when standing he held the guitar this way—perpendicular to his chest. Not surprisingly, T-Bone Walker played his guitar in the identical position. Other bluesmen of that time said Jefferson was a highly proficient guitarist and very difficult to match much less beat.

Life busking on the streets was not without its risks, especially for a blind man. Consequently, Lemon carried a handgun in case someone tried to steal his tip money. One might feel tempted to ask what good a firearm is for a blind man but those who knew Jefferson said he was a crack shot. One man said, “If he could hear you, he could hit you.” Assessments of his character range from that of a foul, womanizing drunk to a warm, polite man. Neither T-Bone Walker nor Lighnin' Hopkins, both protégés, seemed to have anything bad to say about him.

Rumors abound about Jefferson’s death but, as near as can be determined, he died of either a heart attack or he froze to death in a snowstorm in Chicago at the age of 36. He was a big influence on many bluesmen besides T-Bone and Lightnin’. B. B. King claimed Jefferson as an important influence as did Robert Johnson and Son House. His legacy is far-reaching. Many bluesmen as Billy Gibbons were inspired by Lightnin' but without Lemon there would have been no Lightnin' and hence no Billy Gibbons.

Incidentally, Jefferson Airplane took their name from Lemon indirectly. Guitarist Jorma Kaukonen knew a guy named Steve Talbot who made up funny names for people based on word association. Talbot loved Blind Lemon Jefferson and so called himself Blind Thomas Jefferson Airplane. Blind Tom was a very famous black pianist in the 19th century who was retarded but could play anything on the piano even after hearing it only once. Through word association, Jefferson was hooked onto Thomas and airplane was hooked onto Jefferson (a Jefferson airplane is a paper match that is split so as to hold a marijuana roach—a makeshift roach clip). The band decided to use the last half of Talbot’s name as their own.

To my knowledge, this is the only known photo of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Funny how all the blind artists of the Paramount label were able to sign their autographs and in the same handwriting no less.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JXC1jjRCXtg
And you thought Carl Perkins wrote this.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c3jG_tsTn_w

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Mississippi John Smith Hurt (1893?-1966). Born in Teoc, Carroll County, Mississippi and moving to the town of Avalon as a boy, John Hurt began playing the guitar at 9 by playing his mother’s boyfriend’s guitar whenever he stayed with them. The boyfriend showed little if anything to Hurt. He was completely self-taught.

While he encountered a great many blues artists later in life, he knew of few when he started playing. One was a local man named Rufus Hanks who never recorded. Hanks played a 12-string and a harp. The only other guitarist songster Hurt had heard was Jimmie Rodgers—the Singing Brakeman. Hurt said he played the guitar the way he thought a guitar it was supposed sound. Consequently, John Hurt sounded like no one else. While usually included with the Delta bluesmen, Hurt was not really one of them
as he didn’t play low-down blues. His was a light mixture of country, blues, folk, ragtime, bluegrass and a bit of jazz. Later on, he incorporated helpings of rocknroll. In 1923, he partnered with a fiddler named Willie Narmour who won a fiddler contest in 1928 for which the prize was to record some sides for the OKeh label. Narmour requested Hurt as his accompanist and the producer brought him in after hearing him play. The sessions were held in Memphis and New York. The records didn’t go anywhere and OKeh, teetering on the brink of bankruptcy due to the Depression, did not sign Hurt or Narmour to a contract (OKeh went bust shortly after).

Hurt returned to Mississippi and lived as a sharecropper. He hung around with Skip James and played the jukes on weekends but otherwise his musical career was nondescript. For over 20 years, nobody had given John Hurt a thought when suddenly his “Frankie” and “Spike Driver Blues” were included on an anthology of American folk roots music. This spurred an Australian fan to search out other John Hurt songs and located “Avalon Blues,” a song Hurt wrote about his hometown. In 1963, Hurt was located still living in Avalon and was persuaded to embark to Washington D.C. and revive his career while the interest in first generation blues was riding a wave of popularity. Hurt performed at the 1964 Newport Folk Festival and garnered the notice and attention that had eluded him so many years earlier. He recorded three albums on Vangard and played an endless string of coffeehouses, auditoriums and college venues where kids flocked to see a bona fide Mississippi bluesman. He played The Tonight Show as well.

A hero to a new generation of folk and blues musicians, John Hurt returned to Mississippi as a local boy made good. He died of a heart attack at the age of 74 or 75 in Granada, Mississippi. John Fahey, Tom Paxton and Wizz Jones have all written tribute songs to Hurt and the Jim Kweskin Jug Band recorded his “Richland Woman” in 1967 with vocals by Maria Muldaur (although she was Maria D’Amato at that time) who covered the song again in a solo release in 2001. The town of Avalon erected a memorial to Mississippi John Hurt along Rural Route 2 where he grew up.

Below, Mississippi John Hurt in his later years. Age did nothing to diminish his guitar proficiency:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vphs2YYBSr0
I play this one at open mics but I'm not quite a proficient as the master. At least I have the key right--G.

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Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James (1902-1969). His personality and beliefs were as intricate and complex as his superb guitar-playing. While many sharecroppers were illiterate, James graduated from high school. He worked in the 20s as a laborer building roads and levees and wrote his first song, “Illinois Blues” about his experiences. He later became a sharecropper on the Woodbine Plantation in the Bentonia area of Mississippi where he excelled at bootlegging. All the tenant farmers at Woodbine agreed that James made the best moonshine they had ever consumed. Bluesmen were a varied lot in personality—some were very friendly and others very hostile. James, while not precisely hostile, had a caustic personality. He griped a lot about everything and took no real pleasure in much besides seeing the bad side of things. Once while riding in a car past a marriage, James laughed bitterly and said, “Let’s see how happy they are when they get divorced in two years.” He once ran a blues school but referred to his students as “a bunch of dummies” and said, “They didn’t learn nothin’ cuz I didn’t want ‘em to!” While James is known for his innovative, complex guitar work, the organ was his first instrument (his father was a clergyman), took up guitar at 8 and he later taught himself piano.

He was discovered by H. C. Speir who signed him to Paramount and sent him to Grafton, Wisconsin to record. Unfortunately for James, the Depression hit and his records didn’t sell. No doubt this left him embittered. He was aloof and didn’t hang with many other bluesmen except for Mississippi John Hurt whose niece he married. Although called a misogynist because he stated he had little use for women beyond sex, James remained married to her for life. He was re-discovered in 1964 virtually at the same time as Son House and this is what kicked off the blues revival although James, now in chronic ill health, detested the folk scene and thought his new audience was just a bunch of empty-headed idiots who’d clap for anything. His song “I’m So Glad” was covered by Cream. Clapton’s guitar is far less complex than James’s 1931 version. When James heard Cream’s version, he laughed at it and said he knew that it would never measure up to his. Typical of James, his version of “I’m So Glad” was based on an older song called “I’m So Tired (of Living Alone)” done by Gene Austin and turned it into a man who was glad to be living alone because he was sick to death of that wretched woman and her ways—glad she’s gone and don’t come back. Speir said James went on a religious bender and refused to play blues anymore. Speir thought that Charlie Patton was the best singer he ever recorded but stated, “But you know James, Skippy James, was real tough. Catch Skippy on the right day—the right day, mind you—and he was as good as Patton…” an odd comparison since James sang in a mournful falsetto and Patton bellowed as gruff as an enraged bear. Skip James lived in a house in Philadelphia bought for him by Eric Clapton and died there of cancer in 1969 but has become a cult figure since that time.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=byZXD-AHg3g


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SgS6OZZ_KU
Skip James on piano. Maria Muldaur covered this one.

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Lizzie “Memphis Minnie” Douglas (1897-1973). Born in Algiers, Louisiana, Memphis Minnie recorded hundreds of sides over a 40-year period. Among the blues fanatics, she is well known and respected. Among the general population, she is all but unknown. Not only was Minnie unique as the only female blues guitarist of her era, her guitar-playing was excellent. While recording with her first husband, Kansas Joe McCoy, she supplied the leads while Joe played backing guitar. Moreover, she played with fingerpicks but with a volume many thought only possible with a flatpick. Minnie is thought to be the first blues guitarist to start using the metal-bodied resonator guitars that became such a craze in blues All the bluesmen I know of who switched over to them said they did so after hearing Minnie use one.

Minnie’s career began during the Depression when she was signed up to Bluebird Records. She got noticed because of her unique combination of Louisiana country mixed with Memphis blues. Minnie may have been the first of the Southern blues guitarists to journey to Chicago and switch her style over to the electric guitar—many believe Muddy Waters to have been the first but Minnie preceded him and is probably the true founder of Chicago blues along with Tampa Red and Big Bill Broonzy. She later lived in Indianapolis and then in Detroit. She returned to Chicago some years later and then to Memphis in the late 50s. Minnie played the toughest juke joints around and could handle her own with any man. If he made a play on her, she belted him. If he cussed at her, she cussed right back at him. She wasn’t afraid of anything and she knew how to fight. Memphis Minnie would die of a stroke in Memphis in 1973. Bonnie Raitt paid for her headstone.

Muddy’s hit, “Honey Bee,” was likely based on Minnie’s “Bumble Bee.” One of Minnie’s most famous songs was “When the Levee Breaks” due to being covered by Led Zeppelin. Joe McCoy sings the lead vocal on that one but Minnie was a perfectly fine singer. She could rank up there with the best blues divas of her day just on vocal ability alone (in fact, her niece was the great Chicago blues diva, LaVern Baker). Another song of Minnie’s that had a great influence was “What’s the Matter with the Mill” (again with Kansas Joe) which provided the framework by which Chuck Berry recorded many of his hits including “Johnny B. Goode,” “It Wasn’t Me,” “Roll Over Beethoven,” “Nadine,” etc. Some of her other outstanding songs are “Frisco Town” and “Frankie Jean.” Because of her gender, Memphis Minnie has been inexcusably neglected. When naming some of the finest blues guitarists and personalities of the day, Minnie is, more often than not, unmentioned despite having played with Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, Booker White and Little Walter among others. Had she been a man, she would have been far better known than she is, her genius proclaimed loud and clear.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IVb-An-R4-Q


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tVPyOA_e5eQ

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Blind Boy Fuller (1907?-1941). Born Fulton Allen in North Carolina, he was renamed Blind Boy Fuller by his manager, James Baxter Long, who wanted him to have as bluesy a moniker as possible. He was one of the main Piedmont artists of his era. One source said that he was blind from birth but he actually seems to have lost his sight in his mid-teens—no one is sure of the cause.

Long owned a record store and got Fuller signed to he ARC label. His earliest sides were recorded in New York in 1935 along with the accompaniment of a washboard player/guitarist/singer named George Washington. Long gave Washington, a partial albino from Durham, the moniker of Bull City Red—a name he kept to the end of his career. He was the only member of a great blues quartet that could see. The quartet consisted of Fuller, Red, guitarist Reverend Gary Davis and harpist Sonny Terry. Fuller recorded 120 sides in all for ARC leading up to 1940.

Known for his fiery temper, Fuller was jailed in 1938 for shooting his wife in the leg during an argument. He also played with another notable Piedmont artist Floyd Council. Fuller’s protégé was Brownie McGhee who later teamed up with Sonny Terry to form one of the most famous and enduring blues acts ever. Fuller died at the height of his popularity and so J. B. Long originally dubbed McGhee “Blind Boy Fuller No. 2” to continue to capitalize on Fuller’s posthumous popularity. A typical Piedmont bluesmen, Fuller played a lot of rags and raggy-flavored blues. He died of a kidney infection in 1941 at the age of 33.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGVShoAWp00
Nice hokum piece--What's That Smell Like Fish? Gee, I don't know. Bull City Red on washboard no doubt.