Lord Larehip

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.


The original sheet music for "Dallas Blues."


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

Lord Larehip

Sometime in the early 1900s, bandleader W. C. Handy, who was interested in black-American musical stylings, saw an unnamed bluesman in Tutwiler, Mississippi playing a guitar using a knife-edge to glide over the strings. Handy had never heard anything like it before and began to incorporate the style into his own music. In 1909, he moved to Memphis where his blues career started.


William Christopher Handy (1873-1958) of Memphis (shown here with Louis in 1954). His song, “Mr. Crump” was published in 1912 a few months after Hart Wand published “Dallas Blues.” Crump was a complex rag-blues-jazz amalgam whereas Hart’s piece was a true form 12-bar blues. Handy later renamed “Mr. Crump” as "Memphis Blues.” His other famous blues songs were “St. Louis Blues” (a 1914 true 12-bar blues) and “Yellow Dog Blues” which were more jazz than blues and have been covered countless times by jazz bands but I've never heard them covered by blues artists.


Memphis Blues - W. C. Handy (1912) - YouTube

Race records, while a result of America’s institutionalized racist system, was ironically a less restricted medium. Artists released on race records could get away with lyrics and subject matter that mainstream labels would never allow. Consequently, old blues records contained songs dealing frankly with sex and drugs. Even “gay blues” were popular (Little Richard, in fact, got his start playing on the gay blues circuit). Marijuana songs were popular on race records long after marijuana was outlawed in 1937 as evidenced by Buck Washington’s number, “Save the Roach for Me” from 1946. But the most controversial song had to be 1935’s “Shave ‘Em Dry” by Lucille Bogan which contains lyrics so obscene that, to this day, it cannot be played on a commercial radio station although one could conceivably hear it on XM although I never have.


lucille bogan - shave 'em dry (1935) - YouTube
This will melt a few firewalls.

The Birth of the Blues

There has been speculation that blues may have descended from black spirituals. This is most likely not true. While there are gospel blues songs in the early blues period, most religious blacks utterly detested blues calling it the devil’s music. They also detested ragtime music and a musician did not dare play either style before a black congregation. We should be hard pressed to explain this religious hatred of blues if blues were a variation of the spiritual.

Where did blues music originate then? Bob Wills provides an answer. He was born into a white sharecropping family and picked cotton all day next to black field hands in Texas, many of whom he was quite friendly with. He described their work songs: “I don’t know whether they made them up as they moved down the cotton rows or not but they sang blues you never heard before.” His statement, based on firsthand experience as well as the fact that he was himself a highly skilled musician even at that time, tells us blues probably started off as field work songs (believe it or not, so did the barbershop quartet).


The great Bob Wills--King of Western Swing--who once rode 50 miles on horseback just to watch Bessie Smith perform.

Blues came then from the South. The primary area being the Mississippi Delta region covering Indianola, Clarksdale, Vicksburg and extending into Memphis. But different regions in the South had a distinctly different blues sound. For example, Delta blues sounded quite different from Piedmont blues. Piedmont is the geological term for the region occupied by the Carolinas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Virginia, Alabama, Georgia and Florida. The two styles mixed in Memphis which served as a gateway between the two regions and this mixture became a style all its own. Texas blues was different from Delta, Memphis or Piedmont. Piedmont blues was raggier and lighter-veined than Delta blues. Piedmont bluesmen were generally songsters who had many types of music in their repertoires. While this was true of the Delta bluesmen such as Robert Johnson, many of the Delta bluesmen played only blues whereas a Piedmont bluesmen was likely to play about anything.

That blues should originate among Southern blacks should certainly not be surprising. Blues was the sound of misery, pain, impoverishment, brutality, tragedy, loss, despair and certainly nobody felt these emotions and situations the way Southern blacks did. Not surprising that so many bluesmen were sharecroppers or grew up in sharecropping families. Sharecropping was a hard way to live. To a great extent, it was legalized slavery—backbreaking work that started before the sun was up didn’t end for the day until after the sun had set. While most whites could go out and enjoy a sunny day, the sharecropper was out toiling and sweating under that sun tending his garden or the Bossman’s cotton crop. At the end of the workday, there was enough time to eat, when there was anything to eat, and then hit the sack exhausted. Reverend Willie Morganfield, cousin of Muddy Waters, stated, “We’d get up early in the morning, we’d work all day, and the only sound I recall from nights were the crickets hollering. You really didn’t get much of a chance to hear anything because when you’d go to sleep, you’d just sleep.”



Sharecropping or tenant farming as it was also called, started in the era of Reconstruction with good intentions of helping poor and black farmers tend their own plot of land and pay some amount of rent to the plantation owner—the plantation being a small kingdom in its own right. Instead, the Big Boss used sharecropping to put his tenant farmers into indentured servitude. He was the king of his plantation and could do as he pleased—literally. Local laws and ordinances meant nothing (and certainly didn’t favor blacks anyway). When a tenant farmer started on a plantation, he was given a “furnish.” The furnish included 10 or so acres of land, a house (usually nothing more than a shack), seed, mules, tools and credit which was only good at the plantation store. The money was usually just “brozine” or tin scrip, coins or tokens that were essentially worthless and accepted nowhere but at the plantation store. A single plantation had hundreds of farmers.



Everything provided in the furnish had to be worked off, it wasn’t free. Work started at 4:00 a.m. to the ringing of a loud, clanging bell and calls to get up and get dressed for work. The tenant houses had no electricity. The plumbing was a single water pump for each shack that had to be primed and which barely worked on cold mornings. The bed was tick stuffed with raw, unshucked cotton bolls. The tenant had no control over his treatment or the arbitrary prices at the plantation store and did not usually have enough schooling to know when he was being cheated. Those that fled were tracked down, taken to the plantation store where a place was reserved for a good thrashing administered by a man in a big hat.

Blarobbarg

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

__________________

Lord Larehip

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.



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.



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.


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.”


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




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.


Colored Cafe juke joint, Mississippi, 1950.


Poor Monkey's juke joint, Merigold, MS.

Lord Larehip

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.”



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).


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.


Clarksdale, Mississippi today.

Lord Larehip

But something started to happen in the cotton fields in the 30s that no one had foreseen even a few years before: technology. Machines were developed that could harvest far more cotton in an eight-hour day than 400 farmers slaving sunup to sundown. By the 40s, the tenant farmers’ days were numbered. They should have been elated but many were fearful. What would they do now, they wondered. Many of the younger blacks moved to the cities but the older sharecroppers thought that living in the city meant starvation. Muddy Waters said that the sharecroppers were already starving but didn’t know it. The city was the place to be and he was ready to go.

Muddy and a large number of his fellow sharecropper bluesmen went to Chicago and he was hired by Caterpillar to build the machines that were taking the jobs of the field workers down South who were still chopping cotton by hand. Like many blacks, Muddy realized that city life was far better than the rural life. He made far better money working far less hours. The work was far less strenuous. He got raises and time off. Muddy had a four-room apartment for himself. He worked part time clearing out belongings of evicted tenants in various apartment buildings. They often left behind all kinds of appliances and knick-knacks. Muddy found chairs, sofas, paintings, alarm clocks, kitchen clocks, tables, bookcases, electric can-openers, mixers, silverware, dishes, cups, bowls, bottle openers, blankets, mattresses, canned food, clothing, radios—all kinds of stuff. No one wanted it, so Muddy took what he needed and set himself up in style without spending a cent. Muddy recalled his elation at his new rate of pay in Chicago:

“Work there eight hours a day—I never did that before. My paycheck was fortysomething bucks or fifty-something bucks a week. You got to be kiddin’, you know. Soon I put in some overtime, worked twelve hours a day and I brought a hundred and something bring-home pay. I said, ‘Goodgodamighty, look at the money I got,’ I have picked that cotton all year, chop cotton all year, and I didn’t draw a hundred dollars.” Not bad for an illiterate man.


On the plantations, slaves and the later tenant farmers made their own instruments such as the cigar box guitar also called a diddley bow (and, yes, that’s where Bo Diddley got his moniker and his square-bodied electric was made specifically to resemble the older instrument). The banjo also started off as a slave-built cigar box instrument that went on to become a “legitimate” instrument thanks to minstrelsy. There were also cigar box fiddles. Other homemade instruments included, jugs for blowing, washboards for strumming, kazoos, cowbells, tin cans, spoons and washtub basses. Most of the bluesmen started off on these instruments, all of which have antecedents in Africa. These instruments were supplemented with
cheap guitars, fiddles, harmonicas or just simple comb-and-paper. The barnyard dance music was played on these instruments that went on to become rags and blues. The black banjo tradition died in America before field recording units had a chance to capture much of it but many early blues and black folksongs done on guitars were clearly adapted from banjo or cigar box guitar format such as Tommy McClennan’s “Deep Blue Sea Blues” and Henry Thomas’s proto-blues “Run, Mollie, Run.”

Henry Thomas from circa 1929 doing something you may find vaguely familiar:


Henry Thomas- Bull-Doze Blues - YouTube

Tommy McClennan "Deep Blue Sea Blues" from the late 20s which was clearly originally written to be played on either a banjo or a cigar box guitar yet there is a chromatic guitar break in the middle that sounds out of place. A strange juxtaposition of archaic and modern country blues:


Tommy McClennan - Deep Blue Sea Blues- rare 78rpm blues record - YouTube


Another form of diddley bow. The string is fastened to screws at each end of a board and tightened over a bottle to add tension and lift the string from the body which was plucked and the tone controlled with a metal bar, a bottleneck or a smooth stick for a gliding effect. A cheap microphone or pickup could be added and plugged into an amplifier and, in fact, this was a common practice once electricity became widely available. This instrument gave birth to the slide guitar. This one is mounted with a pickup for electrical amplification.

Lord Larehip

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.

Lord Larehip

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.

Lord Larehip

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.



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.



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.

Lord Larehip

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.