3
According to the title of a Muddy Waters song, “The Blues Had a Baby and They Named It Rock and Roll.” By 1976, when that song was recorded, it was widely accepted that rock ’n’ roll was an offshoot of the blues—either the electric Chicago blues that Waters popularized in the 1950s or the Mississippi Delta blues that first inspired him in the 1920s.
Waters made the national R&B charts in 1948 singing pure Delta blues, accompanied only by his electric guitar and an upright bass. Lightnin’ Hopkins and John Lee Hooker charted the following year singing unadulterated rural blues with just their own acoustic guitars. In the early 1950s, Waters and a few other blues singers, among them Howlin’ Wolf and Elmore James, had R&B hits with electrified band arrangements of country-style blues. But with such exceptions as Big Boy Crudup’s “That’s All Right,” which Elvis Presley adapted into his first record, country blues was not absorbed directly into rock music until the 1960s.
About the closest thing to a blues-to-rock crossover before then was Chuck Willis’s “C.C. Rider,” a No. 1 R&B hit that made the pop Top 20 in 1957. Willis was surely familiar with Wee Bea Booze’s “See See Rider Blues,” a No. 1 R&B hit that made the pop Top 20 in 1943. Booze’s song is based on Ma Rainey’s 1924 classic “See See Rider Blues,” which also became a pop hit. The song was recorded in country-blues style by Blind Lemon Jefferson in 1926 (as “Corrina Blues”), by Big Bill Broonzy in 1934, by Leadbelly in 1935, and by Lightnin’ Hopkins in 1948, but neither Rainey’s version, featuring such musicians as Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson, nor Booze’s, with jazzy piano accompaniment by Sammy Price, comes close to country blues. And despite its twelve-bar form, Willis’s rendition, with its marimba introduction and gospel-flavored Gene Barge saxophone solo, sounds more like soul music than blues or, for that matter, rock ’n’ roll.[1]
Muddy Waters’s “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” a Top 5 R&B hit in 1954, made a quasi-crossover after the white songwriters Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller appropriated its distinctive doomsday vamp for the Robins’ “Riot in Cell Block #9” the same year. Just before two of its members left to form the nucleus of the Coasters, the Robins, a black vocal group, had a genuine crossover hit with Leiber and Stoller’s “Smokey Joe’s Cafe,” but “Riot” never charted nationally and was only later rediscovered by rock fans. Its lyrics, however, form the apparent basis for Presley’s 1957 smash “Jailhouse Rock,” also written by Leiber and Stoller. In any case, “Hoochie Coochie Man” is not a twelve-bar blues but a sixteen-bar song written by Willie Dixon, who despite having been born in Mississippi was influenced more by the urbane music of Nat “King” Cole and the Ink Spots than by Delta blues.
Another near crossover was “All by Myself” (not the 1921 Irving Berlin standard), which Big Bill Broonzy recorded in 1941 and Fats Domino updated in 1955. Not a true blues, Broonzy’s original harks back to the verse-and-refrain hokum songs of the late 1920s and early 1930s, while Memphis Slim’s accompanying piano anticipates Domino’s heavier second-line New Orleans beat. Domino substitutes teen-friendly lyrics (“Meet me in the parlor ’bout half past one / We’re going out and have some fun”) for Broonzy’s raunchy ones (“Cross-eyed Sue told Popeye Jim / All Uncle Sam’s soldiers, I can take care of them”). But though Domino’s “All by Myself” was a No. 1 R&B hit, it didn’t make the pop charts, unlike his previous release, “Ain’t It a Shame.” The Johnny Burnette Trio recorded a yelping rockabilly take on “All by Myself” on the same date they cut “The Train Kept A-Rollin’,” but it was issued only as an album track.
In the 1950s, few identified the blues, as distinct from rhythm-and-blues, as the root form of rock ’n’ roll. One of those few was the anonymous author of the 1958 paperback Who’s Who in Rock ’n Roll, who refers to “Rock and Roll, as a direct linear descendant of the old-time blues.”[2] Another was Big Bill Broonzy, who in 1957 said of Elvis Presley: “He’s singin’ the same thing I’m singin’ now, and he knows it. . . . When I was a kid I used to hear ’em call it rockin’ the blues. Well, that’s what he’s doin’ now. . . . Rock and roll is a steal from the old original blues.”[3]
Broonzy was introduced to the white listening public at John Hammond’s first “From Spirituals to Swing” concert at Carnegie Hall in December 1938, booked as a substitute for Robert Johnson, who had been murdered that August. The program notes identified Broonzy both as a “farm hand” from an “Arkansas plantation” and as “a laborer in Chicago,” while noting that “for years and years he has been the best-selling blues singer on Vocalion’s ‘race’ records.” In 1959, when a recording of the concert was released on a long-playing album, Hammond reminisced that “Broonzy was prevailed upon to leave his Arkansas farm and mule and make his very first trek to the big city.”[4]
In fact, the Mississippi-born Broonzy had left Arkansas in 1920 and moved to Chicago, where he learned guitar with help from either “Papa” Charlie Jackson, the first self-accompanied solo bluesman to make records with any degree of success, or Jim Jackson, best known for “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues.”[5] From 1927 until his death in 1958, Broonzy recorded prolifically while holding various nonmusical day jobs. In 1930, he recorded with Georgia Tom Dorsey in the Famous Hokum Boys, one of several Hokum Boys groups that sprang up after the huge success of Dorsey and Tampa Red’s “It’s Tight Like That.” Discovered by Lester Melrose, Broonzy didn’t come into his own until the mid-1930s, when he was about forty years old. Yet he became one of the most popular and widely imitated bluesmen of that decade, recording hundreds of sessions as a leader and sideman, his output rivaled only by his friend Tampa Red.
Many of Broonzy’s ostensibly original compositions simply rework other musicians’ country-, vaudeville-, or hokum-blues hits. Often accompanied only by a piano and his own guitar, he also recorded with instruments ranging from washboards, jugs, and kazoos to trumpets, clarinets, and saxophones. In January 1937, he cut “Let’s Reel and Rock,” featuring the jazzy trumpet of Alfred Bell. The song—apparently based on the Harlem Hamfats’ “We Gonna Pitch a Boogie Woogie,” recorded a couple of months earlier—contains only a brief snatch of boogie piano and does not rock in any modern sense. In 1941, Broonzy played guitar on Lil Green’s “Why Don’t You Do Right?” which became Peggy Lee’s first hit after she recorded it with Benny Goodman’s band in 1942. That song was based on “Weed Smoker’s Dream,” recorded in 1936 by the Harlem Hamfats, a Chicago-based combo whose blend of blues and jazz paralleled the country-jazz fusion of Bob Wills and prefigured the sound of postwar urban blues.
After his “From Spirituals to Swing” appearances in 1938 and 1939, Broonzy performed for white audiences at nightclubs such as Cafe Society in Greenwich Village while continuing to tour and record for the rhythm-and-blues market. Leadbelly had preceded him on the folk circuit, and Josh White and the team of Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee followed shortly, Terry having also performed at the “Spirituals to Swing” concerts. But unlike these other bluesmen, Broonzy did not become a full-time folkie until the early 1950s, when his R&B career petered out.
In 1951, Broonzy made his first tour of Europe, particularly impressing a circle of British trad-jazz fans who would launch the London blues scene that nurtured Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones. It was the Stones who made rock fans aware of Chicago blues, covering Muddy Waters’s “I Want to Be Loved” on the flip side of their very first British single in 1963. And it was Clapton who brought Delta blues into the rock scene three years later when he recorded songs by Robert Johnson with John Mayall’s Blues Breakers and with the trio Cream.
In his last years, Broonzy became a folk icon, recording some two dozen albums in the United States and Europe. Dutifully assuming the role of rustic folk singer, he added older songs such as “John Henry” and “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” to his repertoire and gave interviews where he reminisced about his rural childhood and discussed, among other matters, the origin of the blues.
In 1959, the year after Broonzy’s death, Samuel Charters published his pioneering study The Country Blues, bringing to light Broonzy’s early career as a commercial blues singer. In conjunction with the book, Charters released an album by the same title on Folkways Records’ subsidiary RBF label—the first twelve-inch, long-playing, various-artist reissue compilation of country blues. Title notwithstanding, both book and record included musicians who, like Broonzy, spent most or all of their careers in cities. But Charters and his fellow folk enthusiasts had little use for electric blues and less for rock ’n’ roll.
No one, not even John Hammond, had more influence on the attitude of the folk establishment toward the blues than Alan Lomax, the son of the renowned folklorist John A. Lomax. At the age of seventeen, Alan Lomax had accompanied his father on the 1933 Library of Congress–sponsored expedition where they discovered Leadbelly at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. The following year, explaining why they made field recordings in segregated southern prisons, the Lomaxes wrote, “Our purpose was to find the Negro who had the least contact with jazz, the radio, and with the white man.”[6]
White scholarly interest in African American folk music dates back at least to the 1860s.[7] In 1925, just after the first country blues records appeared, Howard W. Odum published The Negro and His Songs, in which he classifies the blues together with “modern ‘Nigger songs’ [and] popular ‘hits’” rather than with genuine folk songs.[8] Two years earlier, Dorothy Scarborough had published her essay “The ‘Blues’ as Folk-songs,” in which she first speculates that “Blues, being widely published as sheet music in the North as well as the South, and sung in vaudeville everywhere, would seem to have little relation to authentic folk-music of the Negroes.”
“But in studying the question,” she continues, “I had a feeling that it was more or less connected with Negro folk-song, and I tried to trace it back to its origins. Negroes and white people in the South referred me to W. C. Handy as the man who had put the blueing in the blues. . . . To my question, ‘Have blues any relation to Negro folk-song?’ Handy replied instantly. ‘Yes—they are folk-music. . . . They are essentially racial, the ones that are genuine . . . and they have a basis in older folk-song. . . . Each one of my blues is based on some old Negro song of the South, some folk-song that I heard from my mammy when I was a child.’”
Accepting Handy’s explanation, Scarborough adds, “Even though specific blues may start indeed as sheet music composed by identifiable authors, they are quickly caught up by popular fancy and so changed by oral transmission that one would scarcely recognize the relation between the originals and the final results. . . . Blues also may spring up spontaneously, with no known origin in print, so far as an investigator can tell. . . . The Texas Negroes are especially fond of blues, and have . . . been singing them for years, before Handy made them popular in print.”[9]
Handy had been promoting himself as the composer of the first published blues since at least 1916, when he wrote an article for the African American weekly newspaper New York Age titled “How I Came to Write the ‘Memphis Blues.’”[10] The year after that, the Indianapolis Freeman, an African American weekly that covered the national black entertainment scene, reported that “Mr. W. C. Handy . . . ushered into musical composition a new form. A style to which no man can lay earlier claim—the blues style.”[11] And it is largely to Handy that we owe the idea that the blues originated as African American folk music in the Mississippi Delta.
Born in Florence, Alabama, in 1873, Handy was a classically trained African American musician who toured as far as Cuba, Canada, and Mexico with Mahara’s Minstrels before assuming the leadership of a black Knights of Pythias band in Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1903. Performing mostly for white social functions, “I came to know by heart every foot of the Delta,” Handy would declare in his 1941 autobiography, Father of the Blues, although from the context it would seem that his knowledge was limited to the local railroad stops.[12]
Handy experienced a musical epiphany at a train station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, where “a loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept.” Fretting his guitar with a knife, the man sang, “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog,” referring to the junction of the Southern Railway and the Yazoo Delta Railroad, the latter known as the Yellow Dog. “The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard,” Handy recalled. “The tune stayed in my mind.”[13]
Writing fifteen years before the publication of Handy’s autobiography, his friend and collaborator Edward Abbe Niles, a white lawyer who moonlighted as a pop- and folk-music critic, describes the same incident with slight differences. He gives the words of the song as “Gwine where de Southern cross de Yaller Dawg” and says that Handy jotted the tune down rather than simply remembering it. In his autobiography, Handy, never specifying exactly when the event took place, mentions it just after telling how he became familiar with the Delta and before relating a different incident in Cleveland, Mississippi, where he discovered that his white patrons would pay handsomely to hear raw African American folk music. Niles tells the Cleveland story first, placing the “Yaller Dawg” affair “a few weeks later.”[14]
In his 1916 essay for the New York Age, Handy describes his Tutwiler and Cleveland experiences as follows: “On a plantation in Mississippi I was awakened by a Negro singing a typical ‘Blues,’ accompanying himself with a guitar tuned in a Spanish key and played in true Hawaiian style with a knife. It was entrancing. . . . Later, while playing an engagement in this same state, with a firstclass [sic] orchestra using New York hits, we failed to please. The local band was called in, only three in number, but how they could play the ‘Blues!’ They received more for the hour than we for the night. I then saw that the ‘Blues’ had a commercial value.”[15]
In 1914, Handy wrote “Yellow Dog Rag,” later renamed “Yellow Dog Blues,” including the line “He’s gone where the Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” The song was recorded with jazz band accompaniment by Lizzie Miles in 1923 and by Bessie Smith in 1925. In 1927, Crying Sam Collins recorded a different, country-style “Yellow Dog Blues” with the line “I’m goin’ where [the] Southern cross the Yaller Dog.”
Born in Louisiana in 1887, Collins lived in southern Mississippi, far from the Delta, but on “Yellow Dog Blues” his plaintive falsetto and keening slide guitar—played with a knife, as in Handy’s story—anticipate the classic Delta stylings of Robert Johnson and even Muddy Waters.[16] Collins’s repertoire also included hokum and vaudeville-style material, and he made the first recording of “Midnight Special,” which Leadbelly turned into a folk standard and the Weavers turned into a pop hit. On “Riverside Blues,” from 1927, Collins sounds like the missing link between jazzy female blues singers like Bessie Smith and the father of modern white country music, Jimmie Rodgers, who made his first recordings a few months later.
In 1929, Charlie Patton, whom some have credited as the originator of the Delta blues, recorded “Green River Blues,” repeating the line “I’m goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog” three times, just as Handy said he heard it. Born sometime between 1887 and 1891, Patton began his career by 1909; although Handy did not publish his own music until after moving to Memphis, Patton knew of Handy’s band when it was touring the Delta and must have heard Handy’s famous compositions later on.[17] In their 1988 Patton biography, King of the Delta Blues, Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow point out that Patton was a highly original musician whose guitar accompaniment on “Green River Blues” was particularly inventive. They argue that he was unconcerned with carrying on any folk tradition and note that he occasionally sang lyrics that had appeared earlier in published blues compositions.[18]
If Patton, Collins, or Handy took the line about the Southern crossing the Dog from African American tradition, it was not a very old tradition, since the Southern Railway was first established by J. P. Morgan in 1894. More importantly, Handy claimed to have used the tune that the “loose-jointed Negro” played as the basis for his first published song, “The Memphis Blues,” which he said he wrote in 1909 under the title “Mr. Crump.” Although “the melody of Mr. Crump was entirely my own,” Handy said, “it was a weird melody in much the same mood as the one that had been strummed on the guitar in Tutwiler.”[19]
Stack Mangham, a bank clerk in Clarksdale who played clarinet in Handy’s band, had a slightly different recollection when he was discovered by Alan Lomax’s colleague Lewis Jones in the early 1940s during their survey of folk music in Coahoma County. “I didn’t pay much attention to the blues and that music until Handy came here. He didn’t either at first,” Mangham recounted. “I remember when we first became conscious of it. We were playing down at Cleveland for a dance and the people had been dancing, but they had gotten tired and sleepy and nobody was dancing much except a few couples on the floor. We took intermission and three fellows came in there with a guitar, a mandolin, and a bass violin, and started to play and the people began to get wild. Everybody woke up and got interested and began to dance. Handy got the idea. He went back in the corner and took his pencil and a piece of paper and copied a part of what they were playing. When Handy went from here to Memphis, he finished the piece after working on it for a couple of years and called it Mr. Crump, and later the Memphis Blues. It’s the same thing we heard that night at Cleveland.”[20]
After maintaining for many years that “The Memphis Blues” was the first published blues composition, Handy eventually conceded that “Baby Seals Blues” and “Dallas Blues” had been published slightly earlier.[21] Nonetheless, his unverifiable assertion that he wrote “Mr. Crump” three years before the publication of “Memphis Blues,” basing it on a bluesy strain he heard in the Mississippi Delta around 1903, became the starting point that blues historians have referred to ever since.
Handy’s claims did not go unchallenged. In 1938, after Robert Ripley’s Believe It or Not radio show named Handy as the originator of both jazz and the blues, Jelly Roll Morton responded with an angry letter that was published in Down Beat magazine. In it he writes that “when I was eight or nine years of age, I heard blues tunes entitled Alice Fields, Isn’t It Hard to Love, Make Me a Palate [sic] on the Floor—the latter of which I played myself on my guitar. . . . Mr. Handy cannot prove that he has created any music. He has possibly taken advantage of some unprotected material that sometimes floats around.”[22]
In his native New Orleans, Morton adds, he had heard the blues “when I was knee-high to a duck. . . . I used to hear a few of the following blues players, who could play nothing else—Buddie Canter, Josky Adams, Game Kid, Frank Richards, Sam Henry and many more.” He also names Happy Galloway (Morton spells it “Galloways”), Tig Chambers (he spells it “Tick”), and Bab Frank (he spells it “Bob”) among the blues musicians of that time. “Later Buddy Bolden came along. . . . This man also wrote a blues that lived a very long time . . . under the name of St. Louis Tickler [actually ‘St. Louis Tickle’].”
Besides these musicians, Morton mentions that “Tony Jackson used to play the Blues in 1905, entitled Michigan Water Tastes Like Sherry Wine. He never sang anything else on the stage but Blues, such as Elgin Movements in My Hips, with 20 Years’ Guarantee. Blues just wasn’t considered music—there were hundreds, maybe thousands who could play blues and not another single tune.” At least ten years older than Morton, Jackson—a popular New Orleans ragtime pianist, singer, and songwriter whose best-known tune is the pop standard “Pretty Baby”—was Morton’s early idol.
In the same letter, Morton says he wrote “New Orleans Blues” in 1905 and “Alabama Bound” in 1907 but neglected to publish them, adding that “the first publication with a title ‘blues’ as far as I can remember was a tune written by Chris Smith.” The reference is probably to Smith and Elmer Bowman’s “I’ve Got de Blues,” a coon song from 1901, but possibly to Smith and Tim Brymn’s “I’ve Got the Blues but I’m Too Blamed Mean to Cry,” from 1912. (Other songs with the word “blues” in the title date back at least as far as 1850, when Gustave Blessner and Sarah M. Graham published “I Have Got the Blues To Day!”)
Handy indignantly responded that he had “had vision enough to copyright and publish all the music I wrote so I don’t have to go around saying I made up this piece and that piece in such and such a year like Jelly Roll and then say somebody swiped it.”[23] But Morton’s letter, which also contained his famous boast that he invented jazz in 1902, helped revive public interest in his music, which by then was considered old hat.
Also in 1938, Alan Lomax recorded his historic interviews with Morton for the Library of Congress, in which Morton mentions other early blues musicians such as Brocky Johnny, Skinny Head Pete, Old Florida Sam, and Tricky Sam. Introducing his performance of “Mamie’s Blues,” Morton says, “Here’s was among the first blues that I’ve ever heard, happened to be a woman that lived next door to my godmother’s in the Garden District. Her name was Mamie Desdunes.”[24] The following year, on a commercial recording of “Mamie’s Blues” for the General label, Morton says, “This is the first blues I no doubt heard in my life. Mamie Desdunes, this is her favorite blues. She hardly could play anything else more, but she really could play this number.”[25]
Trumpeter Bunk Johnson confirmed the existence of Mamie Desdunes, telling Alan Lomax that he’d “played many a concert with her singing those same blues,” but Johnson often embellished his memories.[26] To judge from Morton’s recordings, “Mamie’s Blues” is too modern for the turn of the twentieth century; unlike other early blues, including Handy’s, the song is in twelve-bar form throughout, complete with blue notes and a habanera bass line.
Morton did not get around to publishing “New Orleans Blues” until 1925. “Alabama Bound,” which Morton told Lomax he wrote in 1905, was published in 1909 as “I’m Alabama Bound” by Robert Hoffman, a white Alabama native who lived in New Orleans. The same tune appears as part of “Blind Boone’s Southern Rag Medley No. Two,” published in 1909 by the African American piano prodigy John William “Blind” Boone.
Hoffman’s composition (not to be confused with the 1925 Tin Pan Alley standard “Alabamy Bound”) was recorded in 1910 by Prince’s Band, Columbia Records’ white house ensemble, and sung by both white and black vaudevillians after John J. Puderer added lyrics the same year.[27] In the 1920s, versions of the song were recorded in country-blues style, including Papa Charlie Jackson’s “I’m Alabama Bound,” Papa Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed’s “Don’t You Leave Me Here,” Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas’s “Don’t Leave Me Here” and “Don’t Ease Me In,” and Charlie Patton’s “Elder Greene Blues.” The words differ, but the melody stays close to Hoffman’s, especially on Jackson’s 1925 rendition, the earliest to be recorded.
Although “Alabama Bound” is not a blues in structure or harmony, a parenthetical note on the cover of the first edition of Hoffman’s song says that it is “also known as the Alabama Blues.” This is perhaps the earliest printed reference to the blues as a musical genre, albeit a genre yet to be strictly defined, and it indicates that the tune existed before Hoffman wrote it down. Several variations of the song’s text collected in 1915 or 1916 and published by the folklorist Newman I. White show some similarity to the later recordings, though not to Puderer’s lyrics.[28] But one reported to Will H. Thomas and published in 1912 contains the couplet “Why don’t you be like me, why don’t you be like me / Quit drinking whisky, babe, let the cocaine be” in place of Puderer’s “I done told you nigger for to be like me / Just drink good whiskey, let your cocaine be.”[29] And Roy Carew, a white jazz fan who lived in New Orleans in the early years of the twentieth century and who later became Morton’s friend and song-publishing partner, remembered an office boy in Gretna, Louisiana, singing, “Why don’t you be like me? / Why don’t you be like me? / Drink good whiskey boy, let the cocaine be” in 1904 or 1905.[30]
Other Morton claims are similarly moot. “Michigan Water Blues” was copyrighted in 1923 by Clarence Williams; although Williams had lived in New Orleans and was influenced by Tony Jackson, he later wrote, “I got the idea for the ‘Michigan Water Blues’ from a turpentine worker in Louisiana.”[31] In an interview with Alan Lomax, Morton attributes the song “I Got Elgin Movements in My Hips, with a Twenty Year Guarantee” to String Beans May, a black vaudevillian billed as the “Elgin Movements Man,” who performed the song as early as 1910.[32]
W. C. Handy appropriated the title line of “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” for the chorus of his 1924 composition “Atlanta Blues.” Howard Odum collected a folk text of “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor”—without the obscene verses Morton sang for Lomax—and published it in 1911, before the song was copyrighted or recorded.[33] A semblance of the melody appears in Blind Boone’s “Southern Rag Medley No. One,” published in 1908. “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor” is also said to have been performed by the New Orleans cornetist Buddy Bolden, whose career ended when he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1906.[34] But even if Morton heard the song as a child, it is not a true blues.
Several witnesses confirm that Bolden played blues, but his smutty theme song, “Funky Butt,” which Morton recorded as “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” is not formally a blues, even though Morton told Lomax it was “no doubt . . . the earliest blues that was the real thing,” having been written “about nineteen-two.”[35] It does appear as a strain in “St. Louis Tickle,” a ragtime hit published in 1904 by the white songwriter Theron Bennett, as well as in “The Cakewalk in the Sky,” published in 1899 by Ben Harney, a white singer-pianist who claimed to have invented ragtime. But it may have been composed by Willie Cornish, who played trombone in Bolden’s band between 1897 and 1906.[36] On his 1939 General recording of “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” Morton sings the line “Thought I heard Judge Fogarty say, / Thirty days in the market, take him away.” In his 1928 book American Negro Folk-Songs, Newman White claims to have heard a similar line in Statesville, North Carolina, around 1903.[37]
Known as the Mother of the Blues, Ma Rainey was perhaps the greatest of the early blues singers. She began her career in 1900, at the age of fourteen; touring with minstrel troupes, she became a favorite on the southern black vaudeville circuit before making her first record in 1923. Rainey told the musicologist John W. Work that she first heard the blues in 1902 at a tent show in Missouri where she was performing. As Work relates in his 1940 book American Negro Songs: “She tells of a girl from the town who came to the tent one morning and began to sing about the ‘man’ who had left her. The song was so strange and poignant that it attracted much attention. ‘Ma’ Rainey became so interested that she learned the song from the visitor, and used it soon afterwards in her ‘act’ as an encore. The song elicited such response from the audiences that it won a special place in her act. Many times she was asked what kind of song it was, and one day she replied, in a moment of inspiration, ‘It’s the Blues.’” Later, Rainey added, she often heard others sing such songs, although they were not yet called blues.[38]
In 1927, the year before he cut such jug-band classics as “Minglewood Blues” and “Viola Lee Blues” (later transformed into rock songs by the Grateful Dead), Gus Cannon recorded “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home” under the name Banjo Joe, accompanied on guitar by Blind Blake. In the early 1970s, Cannon told the researcher Bengt Olsson that he’d learned the song from an older guitarist, Alec Lee, in Clarksdale, Mississippi, around 1900. Howard Odum collected a version of the text that he published in 1911, commenting that the song was “sometimes sung with . . . knife instrumental music” and that “each stanza consists of a single line repeated three times.”[39] Like others who recorded “Poor Boy”—including the Georgia bluesman Barbecue Bob Hicks, who cut the song a few months earlier in 1927—Cannon roughly adheres to Odum’s model, fretting his banjo with a metal bar instead of a knife. In Cannon’s version, as in Hicks’s, the song follows the twelve-bar format but lacks the flatted third and seventh notes that give the blues its distinctive modality.
Other black Mississippi guitarists born around 1900 who were interviewed in the 1960s and 1970s by Calt and Wardlow did not recall hearing the blues, at least by that name, in the first years of the twentieth century. Sam Chatmon remembered songs such as “Bucket’s Got a Hole in It” from his youth but said, “I ain’t never heard nobody pick no blues till my brother Bud and Charlie Patton.” Skip James heard songs such as “Alabama Bound” between 1908 and 1910 but said, “I hadn’t heard of blues then.” Robert Wilkins likewise heard only songs such as “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor,” which he called rags, beginning around 1904.[40]
In 1942, Alan Lomax interviewed a blind gospel songwriter in Clarksdale, Mississippi, named Charles Haffer Jr., who recalled square dances where “the old fiddlers played Old Hen Cackle; Shortnin Bread; Mississippi Sawyer; Bill Bailey, Why Don’t You Come Home; It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo and all that stuff.” Haffer said that before he embraced religion in about 1909, “I used to sing all the old jump-up songs—blues weren’t in style then—we called them reels.”[41]
In his autobiography, A Blues Life, Henry Townsend, a St. Louis musician born in Mississippi in 1909 and raised in Missouri and southern Illinois, says that in his childhood, “that word wasn’t used, blues. I never heard that word used. They called them reels back then.”[42] And in a taped interview that was included on his 1969 album I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll, Mississippi Fred McDowell, who was actually from Tennessee, says, “the blues came from a reel. They changed it, just to say ‘blues.’”[43]
But the distinction between blues and reels—the latter apparently a catchall term for various ballads and dance tunes—was not altogether semantic. On April 17, 1908, a white classical musician from New Orleans, Anthony (or Antonio) Maggio, published an “Up-to-Date Rag” titled “I Got the Blues” (no relation to Smith and Bowman’s “I’ve Got de Blues”).[44] The first section prominently utilizes minor-third blue notes within a twelve-bar structure, making “I Got the Blues” the earliest known tune to link the word “blues” with music a modern listener could readily identify by that name. As Maggio recounted in 1955, he had been on the levee in the Algiers district of New Orleans in 1907 when “I heard an elderly negro with a guitar playing three notes. He kept repeating the notes for a long time. I didn’t think anything with only three notes could have a title so to satisfy my curiosity I asked what was the name of the piece. He replied, ‘I got the blues.’”[45]
Maggio based his “I Got the Blues” on the three-note figure (A#-B-G) and performed it with his quintet. “To my astonishment, it became our most popular request number,” he said. “In a very short time all the negroes in New Orleans with street organs were playing the Blues.” Maggio went on to say that W. C. Handy visited New Orleans in 1910 or 1911, when “I Got the Blues” could still be heard in the streets, and subsequently used the three-note figure in his own songs. Handy, who had previously said he’d heard a church elder sing the figure in Florence, Alabama, denied Maggio’s claim, saying, “I haven’t been in New Orleans since 1900.”[46] But there is an unmistakable resemblance between the first section of “I Got the Blues” and the opening of “Jogo Blues,” Handy’s second blues composition, which he published in 1913. “Jogo Blues” sold disappointingly, so in 1914 Handy transferred the same basic motif to the chorus of his next published song, “St. Louis Blues,” the sensational hit that entrenched the blues as a popular musical genre.
Roy Carew wrote of hearing R. Emmet Kennedy perform “Honey Baby,” which Carew called “the first complete blues song I ever heard,” at a concert in Algiers around 1906. Kennedy, a white man who collected African American folk songs, published “Honey Baby” in his 1925 book Mellows: A Chronicle of Unknown Singers. Responding to Carew’s query, he wrote, “I feel certain that it goes back farther than 1905. I had known it for a long time before I arranged it for the piano.”[47]
Charles Thompson, a ragtime pianist from St. Louis who was rediscovered in the 1960s, said that Louis Chauvin, an older St. Louis pianist, “was a ragtime player and he was a blues player too. He played real blues.” Thompson must have heard Chauvin before 1906, by which time Chauvin had left St. Louis. But none of Chauvin’s three published compositions—the best-known being “Heliotrope Bouquet,” written in Chicago with Scott Joplin in 1907—shows the influence of blues. Thompson also named the obscure St. Louis pianists Conroy Casey, Raymond Hine, and Willie Franklin as “boys who played nothing but the blues—no songs, no rags, only blues. They played in the buffet flats and at the sporting houses you see, and in those places it was strictly blues all the way.”[48]
A recognizable blues strain appeared in print as early as 1904, when the black St. Louis songwriters James Chapman and Leroy Smith published a “RagTime Two-Step” called “One o’ Them Things!” Only the slightest blues modality can be heard, but the first section follows the twelve-bar form and approximates the typical harmonic progression of the blues (I-I-I-I/IV-IV-I-I/V-IV-I-I). Chapman died in 1905, just before the publication of his Scott Joplin–orchestrated march “Military Parade,” but Leroy Smith continued to perform “One o’ Them Things!”[49]
The British pianist and scholar Peter Muir points to an even earlier song, “I Natur’ly Loves That Yaller Man,” from 1898, as “the only known example of the standard blues progression in published music before 1900.” Written by the East Coast pianist “Jack the Bear” Wilson (whom James P. Johnson credited for the Latin-tinged rag “The Dream”) and his vaudeville partner Lawrence Deas, it contains lyrics more typical of coon songs than of blues, such as the opening line, “White folks all say, and think they’re right / all coons, to them, they look a-like!” But Muir maintains that the twelve-bar opening section—with its blues chord progression, minor-third blue notes, falling melody line, slow tempo, and call-and-response vocal-and-piano pattern—qualifies the song as an incipient blues.[50]
John Jacob Niles, a classically trained white singer from Louisville, Kentucky, who helped bring folk music to the concert stage, claimed to have heard a medicine show vocalist, Ophelia “Black Alfalfa” Simpson, perform a blues in 1898. But Niles would only have been about six years old in 1898, and the text of “Black Alfalfa’s Jail-House Shouting Blues” that he supplies in his 1930 Musical Quarterly article “Shout, Coon, Shout!” is that of a relatively modern blues in both form and content.[51]
The author and educator William Barlow has pointed to the transcription of a work song titled “Nobody There,” collected in 1890 by the folklorist Gates Thomas and published in 1926, as “the first written record of a blues song in Texas.” But the song, as notated by Thomas, is not really recognizable as a blues.[52]
The first known newspaper account of a blues performance appeared in the April 16, 1910, edition of the Indianapolis Freeman, describing the intoxicated-dummy routine of a twenty-two-year-old ventriloquist, “Professor” Johnnie Woods, at a vaudeville theater in Jacksonville, Florida. “He uses the ‘blues’ for little Henry in this drunken act,” the reviewer wrote.[53] On July 16, 1910, the Freeman reported that “Mr. Kid Love is cleaning with his ‘Easton Blues’ on the piano” at the Palace Theatre in Houston. In 1908 and 1909, H. “Kid” Love and his wife, Gussie, had performed together at theaters in Memphis, including the Lyric on Beale Street, just a couple of doors down from Pee Wee’s Saloon, where W. C. Handy hung out.[54]
Another early vaudeville blues artist was the pianist and comedian H. Franklin “Baby” Seals, whose “Baby Seals Blues” is the only one of the groundbreaking blues published in 1912 to include lyrics. A native of Mobile, Alabama, Seals was performing on the southern black vaudeville circuit by 1909. In early 1910, he published “You Got to Shake, Rattle and Roll” in New Orleans, then moved on to Houston and Greenville, Mississippi, where he ran the Bijou Theater until the spring of 1911. On April 27, 1912, the Indianapolis Freeman, covering a performance of his in Louisville, Kentucky, noted that “Seals features ‘Blues.’” The same edition contained an opinion piece by the vaudevillian Paul Carter dismissing the blues as “smut” and “junk.”[55]
Chris Smith and Tim Brymn copyrighted “I’ve Got the Blues but I’m Too Blamed Mean to Cry,” on January 12, 1912, but it is basically a rag with a faintly bluesy tinge. (The title is nearly identical to a line from a folk song, “I got the blues, but too damn mean to cry,” collected by Howard Odum and published in 1911.)[56] On August 3, Seals copyrighted “Baby Seals Blues,” subtitled “Sing ’Em, They Sound Good to Me,” in an arrangement by Artie Matthews, who is sometimes mistakenly credited as the songwriter. Seals performed the song with his wife and stage partner, Floyd Fisher; by 1913 it had been taken up by other black vaudevillians, including Charles Anderson, a yodeling female impersonator who dressed as a “colored mammy,” and Edna Benbow, who would record a couple of dozen blues in the early 1920s under the name Edna Hicks.[57]
Anderson’s October 1923 recording of “Baby Seals Blues” (under the title “Sing ’Em Blues”) with pianist Eddie Heywood offers an eccentric example of the early vaudeville blues style.[58] Strident and histrionic, it sounds hopelessly dated today, possessing none of the timeless majesty that distinguishes the Delta blues at its best. But while the song is not in twelve-bar form, its lyrics (“I’ve got the blues, I can’t be satisfied . . . / I’ve got ’em bad, I want to lay down and die”) and modality mark it as at least a quasi-blues.
On August 6, 1912, Hart Wand, a white violinist and bandleader from Oklahoma City, copyrighted “Dallas Blues.” According to Samuel Charters, Wand had already published the song in March but did not copyright it until its third printing. Wand claimed that the melody was his own but that the title was suggested by a black porter who heard Wand play the tune and commented, “That gives me the blues to go back to Dallas.”[59] With some irregularities, “Dallas Blues” roughly follows the twelve-bar form and standard blues chord pattern, complete with blue notes. Lloyd Garrett added lyrics in 1918, and the song became a belated hit in 1931 when it was recorded by the white bandleader Ted Lewis, with Fats Waller singing (one of his first recorded vocals) and playing piano.
In September 1912, W. C. Handy copyrighted “The Memphis Blues,” which is melodically similar to “Dallas Blues” but contains both twelve- and sixteen-bar sections. Within weeks, Handy said, he was tricked into selling the copyright for fifty dollars to Theron Bennett, who commissioned George Norton, the lyricist of “My Melancholy Baby,” to write new words extolling Handy and his band.[60]
On November 9, 1912, Lee Roy “Lasses” White, a white minstrel trouper from Texas who performed in blackface, copyrighted “Negro Blues,” which was published in Dallas in July 1913 as “Nigger Blues.” The song, also melodically similar to “Dallas Blues,” not only follows the standard blues form but contains several verses that turn up on later country blues recordings. Among these are: “Oh! the blues ain’t nothing but a good man feeling bad, / Oh! that’s a feeling that I’ve often had”; “You can call the blues any old thing you please, / But the blues ain’t nothing but the dog gone heart disease”; and “I’m goin’ to lay my head down on some railroad line, / Let the Santa Fe try to pacify my mind.” “Nigger Blues” was recorded in 1916 by George O’Connor, a white lawyer and minstrel singer in Washington, D.C., who is said to have entertained every American president from McKinley to Truman.[61] Lasses White went on to perform his burnt-cork comedy with the Grand Ole Opry and later appeared on screen as a sidekick to the movie cowboys Tim Holt and Jimmy Wakely.
The first blues recordings were of “The Memphis Blues,” which was cut as an instrumental by the Victor Military Band on July 15, 1914, and by Prince’s Band on July 24. Morton Harvey, a white minstrel-show entertainer, became the first singer to record a blues when he cut “The Memphis Blues” for Victor on October 2, 1914. The white minstrel comedy team of Arthur Collins and Byron Harlan recorded a more successful version the following year.
The fox trot, introduced in 1914, was danced to “The Memphis Blues” by Vernon and Irene Castle, who had brought the tango to the United States the year before. This dance connection helped propel the blues to mass popularity: between 1912 and 1920, more than seven hundred blues songs were copyrighted and over four hundred issued on sheet music. More than one hundred blues were captured on some four hundred records, with many songs recorded by more than one artist. In addition, hundreds of blues piano rolls were made.[62]
Many early blues recordings were instrumentals, including “Livery Stable Blues,” which was cut by a white quintet from New Orleans, the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, on February 26, 1917, and issued on what is considered to be the first jazz record. While some instrumental blues recordings were by black bands such as James Reese Europe’s, Wilbur Sweatman’s, and Ford Dabney’s, nearly all the early recorded blues vocals were by whites, among them Arthur Collins, Billy Murray, Vernon Dalhart, Al Bernard, Nora Bayes, Marie Cahill, and Marion Harris. Of Harris, W. C. Handy said, “She sang blues so well that people hearing her records sometimes thought that the singer was colored.”[63]
The first blues recording featuring an actual black singer was made in England by the Ciro’s Club Coon Orchestra, an African American ragtime combo led by the Jamaican-born pianist Dan Kildare that entertained British high society at Ciro’s Restaurant in London until scandalized authorities shut the place down. In September 1917, the group recorded a snappy version of “St. Louis Blues” on which the vocal, probably by Louis Mitchell or Seth Jones, is smothered by a banjo and banjoline, an instrument with a mandolin neck and a banjo-like body.
The first American recording of a black man singing the blues was made by Bert Williams, the most famous African American entertainer of the early 1900s. A minstrel comedian who always wore burnt cork on stage, Williams popularized the cakewalk in the late 1890s with his vaudeville partner, George Walker, and became a Broadway star on his own after the ailing Walker retired in 1909. On November 24, 1919, Williams recorded the “I’m Sorry I Ain’t Got It You Could Have It If I Had It Blues,” a faintly bluesy thirty-two bar song in typical vaudeville style. Three weeks later the song was recorded as an instrumental by the Louisiana Five, a white New Orleans jazz band.
In August 1920, Mamie Smith became the first African American woman to record a blues. Smith was a protégée of the vaudeville veteran Perry Bradford, who persuaded OKeh Records to take a chance on a little-known singer at a time when black female recording artists were almost unheard of.[64] Accompanied by white musicians at her first session, in February 1920, Smith cut a pair of pop songs that Bradford had written. Backed by a black band at her second session, on August 10, she sang Bradford’s “Harlem Blues,” a song she’d performed in his 1918 review Made in Harlem. In an attempt to broaden the record’s appeal, Bradford changed the title to “Crazy Blues.”[65]
Though not as popular as Marion Harris’s recording of “St. Louis Blues,” made a few months earlier, “Crazy Blues” was a sizable hit. Like “St. Louis Blues,” it includes both twelve- and sixteen-bar verses, with the twelve-bar sections containing three different lines of text rather than a repeated first line. But Smith’s voice is recognizably black, and the raggedly improvised accompaniment, filled with slurs and growls, is authentically jazzy. Despite such provocative lines as “I’m goin’ to do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop / Get myself a gun and shoot myself a cop,” the song enjoyed sufficient mainstream popularity that the rising white vaudeville star Cliff “Ukulele Ike” Edwards featured it in his act.[66]
But it was the song’s overwhelming success among blacks that revolutionized the recording industry, prompting major companies to establish subsidiary “race” labels and black entrepreneurs such as W. C. Handy’s former publishing partner Harry Pace to create their own independent labels. Ultimately, “Crazy Blues” so completely overshadowed all previous blues recordings that it is often inaccurately cited not only as the first blues vocal record but as the first blues record, period.
The new race labels scrambled to sign black women saloon and vaudeville singers who could record blues songs, among them Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter, Edith Wilson, and Ethel Waters. The vogue for blues records kicked into high gear in 1923, when Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey cut their first sides; but while these southern singers brought an earthier flavor to the blues, they were still accompanied mainly by jazz musicians. The jazzy, female-oriented vaudeville style dominated the blues market through the mid-1920s; in his influential 1946 jazz history Shining Trumpets, Rudi Blesh dubs it “classic” blues, a refined version of the “archaic” folk blues he presumes had preceded it. “The blues had undoubtedly appeared in their established form by 1870,” Blesh asserts, adding that “the blues are a naturally evolved form and sophistication acts like a blight upon them.”[67]
Bert Williams recorded two other blues-tinged songs, “Unlucky Blues” and “Lonesome Alimony Blues,” in 1920. The same year, singer Noble Sissle recorded the barely bluesy “Broadway Blues” with his vaudeville partner, pianist Eubie Blake; the two made several other such records over the next couple of years, both before and after the 1921 Broadway première of their landmark musical comedy Shuffle Along. Similarly bluesy songs (“Cornfield Blues,” “Monday Morning Blues,” “Preacher Man Blues,” and the twelve-bar “Jelly Roll Blues”) were recorded in 1921 by the Norfolk Jazz Quartette, a black male vocal-harmony group.
On October 25, 1923, the day after he’d accompanied Charles Anderson on “Sing ’Em Blues,” pianist Eddie Heywood backed vocalist Guilford “Peachtree” Payne on “Peach Tree Blues,” a stagy number where Payne sings, talks, yodels, and mimics a child’s voice, all while following the standard blues pattern. In early November 1923, a black male singer from the East Coast named Reese Du Pree recorded “Long Ago Blues” in New York for the OKeh label, with piano accompaniment.[68] While Du Pree’s clear enunciation suggests a vaudeville background, the song itself is a fully developed blues in structure and harmony.
Around this time, record companies began to show an awareness of folk-style blues. In 1923, Harry Pace’s Black Swan label advertised Josie Miles’s record “Love Me in Your Old Time Way” with the copy: “Have you ever heard the snatches of songs sung by Negro section hands on Southern railroads? . . . Generally termed blues, yet how strongly contrasted are these songs springing from the depths of the laborer’s soul to the commonplace dance tunes that we are accustomed to call BLUES.”[69] Yet Miles’s song is precisely such a “commonplace dance tune,” sung in vaudeville style with jazz band accompaniment.
The first guitarist to record with a blues singer was Sylvester Weaver, who backed Sara Martin on “Longing for Daddy Blues” in October 1923. The following month, Weaver recorded a pair of slide guitar solos, one of which, “Guitar Rag,” would become a country music standard after Bob Wills recorded it as “Steel Guitar Rag” (featuring guitarist Leon McAuliffe) in 1936. Weaver was not a rural musician—like Martin, he hailed from Louisville, Kentucky—but his unpolished, ragtime-influenced playing anticipates the style of country-blues guitarists who recorded after him.
In March 1924, the Pruitt twins—guitarist Miles and banjo player Milas—recorded the accompaniment for two blues by Ma Rainey, two by Ida Cox, and three by Lottie Kimbrough (recording under her married name, Lottie Beaman). But the Pruitts’ jangling sound bears as much resemblance to old-time white country music as to country blues. In February 1924, Reese Du Pree became the first black male singer to record a blues with guitar accompaniment when he cut “Norfolk Blues” with a guitarist who sounds like Jimmie Rodgers.
The first black male singer-guitarist to record a blues was Ed Andrews, who cut “Barrel House Blues,” backed with “Time Won’t Make Me Stay,” for OKeh in Atlanta in late March or early April of 1924. His simple strumming and thumb-picked bass runs on a twelve-string guitar are hardly distinguishable from the type of playing found on early white country recordings, but the songs are in orthodox blues form, and Andrews’s down-home tenor has a hardscrabble purity that owes nothing to vaudeville. The earliest true country-blues record, it was a breakthrough for the genre but not for Andrews, who never recorded again.
In May 1924, Daddy Stovepipe, whose real name was Johnny Watson, cut “Stove Pipe Blues” for the Gennett label, accompanying himself on guitar and harmonica. Watson was born in Mobile, Alabama, on April 12, 1867, earlier than any other recorded bluesman, but “Stove Pipe Blues” is not particularly archaic. With its choppy strumming and lilting melody—not quite in twelve-bar form—it sounds like a folk musician’s take on vaudeville blues. Daddy Stovepipe never got much recognition, though he continued to record occasionally until 1961, two years before his death at the age of ninety-six.
In August 1924, Papa Charlie Jackson, accompanying himself on a six-string banjo, recorded his first two sides, “Airy Man Blues” and “Papa’s Lawdy Lawdy Blues.” Although neither song is actually a blues, Paramount Records advertised him that month as “the famous Blues-singing–Guitar-playing Man” and the “only man living who sings, self-accompanied, for Blues records.”[70] Said to be from New Orleans, Jackson was living in Chicago by the early 1920s; judging from his polished technique and ragtime-era repertoire, he was a veteran of the minstrel- and medicine-show circuits.
Jackson’s second record, from September 1924, pairs “Salt Lake City Blues,” a genuine twelve-bar blues, with “Salty Dog Blues,” a string of eight-bar verse-and-refrain couplets that became a standard of jazz and country music alike. His biggest hit, “Shake That Thing,” recorded in May 1925, uses twelve-bar couplets but is otherwise similar to “Salty Dog Blues,” with lyrics not nearly as salacious as Jackson’s leering delivery makes them seem. In the same vein is “All I Want Is a Spoonful,” from September 1925, which Charlie Patton adapted into “A Spoonful Blues” in 1929; that song was the basis for Howlin’ Wolf’s 1960 “Spoonful,” written by Willie Dixon, which Cream turned into a blues-rock anthem in 1966.
Jackson’s records sold well, and he kept recording into the 1930s, on his own and as an accompanist to Ida Cox, Lucille Bogan, Ma Rainey, and others. In 1926, Jackson sang but did not play on a slowed-down version of “Salty Dog” by Freddie Keppard’s Jazz Cardinals. A cornet player from New Orleans, Keppard was one of the founding fathers of jazz, with a style said to be like Buddy Bolden’s; his collaboration with Jackson illustrates the close relationship between early jazz and blues as well as Jackson’s essential urbanity.
Although his music was closer to vaudeville than to country blues, Jackson’s success opened the door for other, more rural self-accompanied blues singers. His style inspired a lingering fad for bawdy, humorous songs, dubbed “hokum blues” after the Dallas String Band recorded a song by that title in December 1928. Rather than a typical verse-and-refrain hokum song, “Hokum Blues” is a mostly instrumental twelve-bar blues (with only two sung verses) that’s given a hokum treatment with minstrel-like joking and a jug-band-style arrangement. The same month, Paramount began crediting Tampa Red and Georgia Tom’s records to the “Hokum Boys.”
One of the first hokum-style recordings after Jackson’s was Ukulele Bob Williams’s rendition of “Go ’Long Mule,” a comic song published in 1924 by Henry Creamer, a black Broadway lyricist, and Robert A. King, a white Tin Pan Alley composer. By the time Williams cut his version in November of that year, the song had already been recorded by at least half a dozen other artists, including Arthur Collins, the Goofus Five, and Fletcher Henderson’s Orchestra, featuring Louis Armstrong on trumpet. “Go ’Long Mule” entered the country-music tradition with a 1927 recording by Uncle Dave Macon and was eventually cut by Johnny Burnette at his very first studio session under the title “Go Mule Go.”
Williams’s ukulele accompaniment contains a four-note, one-measure riff (I-II-IIIb-II) that is also found in Anthony Maggio’s “I Got the Blues” and on a 1921 recording of “There Ain’t No Nothin’ (Gonna Take the Place of Love)” by the Black Swan Dance Orchestra, with Fletcher Henderson on piano. The riff shows up on at least three solo piano records of the period: Eddie Heywood’s “The Mixed Up Blues” (1923), Hersal Thomas’s “Suitcase Blues” (1925), and Jimmy Blythe’s “Jimmie Blues” (1925). It’s also found on singer Pearl Dickson’s “Little Rock Blues,” from 1927, with twin-guitar accompaniment by Richard “Hacksaw” Harney and his brother Maylon. In simplified form (I-II-I-II), it provides the chugging beat of Johnnie Temple’s “Lead Pencil Blues” in 1935 and of Robert Johnson’s “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” “Sweet Home Chicago,” and “Rambling on My Mind” in 1936. The simplified figure became one of the rhythmic foundations of rock ’n’ roll, courtesy of Chuck Berry, while both riffs endure as fixtures of modern electric blues.
The next male blues star to emerge after Papa Charlie Jackson was Lonnie Johnson, who was also from New Orleans and whose technique was even more refined. Johnson maintained that he was born in 1900, but other sources give the year as 1899, 1894, or 1889. In 1963, Johnson told Valerie Wilmer: “When I was fourteen years old I was playing with my family. They had a band that played at weddings—it was schottisches and waltzes and things, there wasn’t no blues in those days, people didn’t think about the blues.”[71]
In 1960, he told the British blues scholar Paul Oliver, “Early days of the blues—as far back as I can get is 1914.” Sometime after that, Johnson struck out on his own. “The blues was all the go and from then on I loved blues and I just continued to playing them. . . . Strictly blues all the way—on the violin. And I made several numbers on the piano—I used to play piano for a while, but only blues, no popular songs. Then I bought my guitar. I bought it in 1917.”[72] After World War I, he moved to St. Louis, performing in nightclubs with his brother James and on Mississippi riverboats with trumpeter Charlie Creath’s jazz band.
Johnson made his recording debut with Creath’s Jazz-O-Maniacs in November 1925, singing and playing violin on “Won’t Don’t Blues.” Days later, Johnson made his first record under his own name, playing violin on “Falling Rain Blues” and guitar on “Mr. Johnson’s Blues.” Immediately successful, he recorded prolifically into the early 1930s. He was a fine singer and songwriter with a distinctive voice and melodic feel, but it was his dazzling virtuosity as a guitarist that made his reputation. He recorded as a soloist with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five in 1927 and with Duke Ellington’s Orchestra in 1928. He cut a series of duets with the white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang and recorded with Lang, King Oliver, and Hoagy Carmichael in a group called Blind Willie Dunn and His Gin Bottle Four. He accompanied “classic” blues singers such as Clara Smith and Victoria Spivey as well as the country blues singer Alger “Texas” Alexander.
Johnson had a profound influence on other guitarists, from Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt to T-Bone Walker and B. B. King. Henry Townsend first saw him perform at a theater in St. Louis around 1920. “I wasn’t playing no guitar then, and he was one of the people that made me really want to get into it,” Townsend recalled.[73] Robert Johnson’s 1937 recordings “Malted Milk” and “Drunken Hearted Man” clearly reflect Lonnie Johnson’s style; Robert, whose middle name was Leroy, reportedly so admired the older guitarist that he told friends his middle initial stood for Lonnie.[74]
But while Lonnie Johnson helped shape the country blues, he was no country bluesman. “I sing city blues,” he told Wilmer.[75] After the Great Depression interrupted his career, Johnson made a comeback, topping the R&B charts in 1948 with the ballad “Tomorrow Night,” a 1939 hit for the pop bandleader Horace Heidt. Elvis Presley recorded the song for Sun in 1954, but his version was not released until 1965, when it appeared on the RCA album Elvis for Everyone, with overdubbed vocals by the Anita Kerr Singers.
The artist who established the country blues as a viable commercial genre was Blind Lemon Jefferson. Born in East Texas, he worked the streets and dives of Dallas, then traveled throughout the South, including the Mississippi Delta, before cutting his first blues records in March 1926. The second one to be released, “Got the Blues,” backed with “Long Lonesome Blues,” was a race-market smash, and Jefferson went on to record nearly a hundred sides before his death in 1929. His high, penetrating vocals and dexterous guitar work, alternating rhythmic strumming with intricate single-note runs, virtually defined the country blues, inspiring bluesmen as disparate as Lightnin’ Hopkins, T-Bone Walker, John Lee Hooker, and Howlin’ Wolf.
Although Jefferson’s rough-hewn style betrays little trace of jazz or vaudeville, he shared material with more sophisticated performers. One of his biggest hits, “That Black Snake Moan,” which he first recorded in November 1926, may have been adapted from “Black Snake Blues,” recorded in May of that year by Victoria Spivey, a classic blues singer from Houston who had previously crossed paths with Jefferson in Texas. “Black Snake Blues,” with the haunting line “Some black snake been suckin’ my rider’s tongue,” was popular enough to be covered by Martha Copeland, Clarence Williams, and King Oliver, and Spivey redid it as a duet with Lonnie Johnson in 1928 under the title “New Black Snake Blues.” “Black Snake Moan,” with the more prosaic lyric “Black snake crawlin’ in my room,” was in turn covered by the classic blues singer Martha Copeland, who also recorded “Black Snake Blues” (and by Hack’s String Band, a white group from Kentucky).
Another of Jefferson’s hits, “Match Box Blues,” from March 1927, takes its title line from “Lost Wandering Blues,” recorded by Ma Rainey with the Pruitt twins in March 1924, where Rainey sings, “I’m standin’ here wonderin’, will a matchbox hold my clothes.” Near the end of “Match Box Blues,” Jefferson plays the same boogie-woogie run he’d used to open “Rabbit Foot Blues” three months earlier—the first recording of a boogie guitar line, which Jefferson evidently borrowed from piano boogies.
In 1934, Larry Hensley, a white Kentuckian, recorded a remarkably faithful copy of Jefferson’s “Match Box Blues”; in 1935, the Shelton Brothers, from Texas, recorded a jazzier country version, reworded and heavily influenced by Jimmie Rodgers. Another Texas group, Roy Newman and His Boys, recorded a western swing version in 1938, closer in spirit to Big Bill Broonzy’s “Match Box Blues” (from 1935) than to Jefferson’s. In 1957, Carl Perkins recorded his classic rockabilly adaptation, “Matchbox,” retaining only the title line from Jefferson’s original. But Perkins’s song did not become a hit until the Beatles covered it in 1964.
Jefferson rerecorded “Match Box Blues” in April 1927, adding the line “Brown ’cross town going to be my teddy bear / Put a string on me, I’ll follow you everywhere.” In June, accompanied by pianist George Perkins, he recorded “Teddy Bear Blues,” with the line “I said, fair brown, let me be your teddy bear / Tie a string on my neck and I’ll follow you everywhere.” In January 1957, Elvis Presley recorded “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear,” by the Philadelphia songwriters Kal Mann and Bernie Lowe, with the line “Baby, let me be your lovin’ teddy bear / Put a chain around my neck and lead me anywhere.” By summer, the song, featured in Presley’s movie Loving You, was a No. 1 hit, the third of four Presley would have that year.
In June 1926, three months after Jefferson’s first blues session, Freddie Spruell made what is considered to be the first Mississippi Delta blues record, “Milk Cow Blues.” According to his widow, Spruell had moved to Chicago as a boy from Lake Providence, Louisiana, just across the Mississippi River from the Delta.[76] His only musical links to the Delta are his crudely Charlie Patton–like guitar strumming and his 1928 recording “Low-Down Mississippi Bottom Man,” which contains the lines “In the lowlands of Mississippi, that’s where I was born” and “Way down in the Delta, that’s where I long to be.”
Spruell sold far fewer records than Blind Blake, a brilliant guitarist from Florida or Georgia who made his first solo recording—the Lonnie Johnson–styled “Early Morning Blues,” backed with the instrumental rag “West Coast Blues”—in August 1926. Other popular country bluesmen of the period were Barbecue Bob Hicks and Blind Willie McTell, both Georgia natives who began recording in 1927; Hicks covered Blake’s “Diddie Wah Diddie” as “Diddle-Da-Diddle,” while McTell covered Blake’s “Wabash Rag” as “Georgia Rag.” Blake, Hicks, and McTell all had varied repertoires that included spirituals and rags as well as blues.
In 1928, Tommy Johnson became the first major Delta-style bluesman to record, followed by Charlie Patton in 1929, Son House in 1930, and Skip James in 1931. In terms of record sales, only Patton had much success, although Johnson was locally popular and widely influential. But though Delta blues were not recorded until some twenty years after blues compositions were published in St. Louis and New Orleans—at a time when the first generation of Delta bluesmen were in their teens or younger—the notion persists that the Mississippi Delta was the cradle of the blues.
In the early years of the twentieth century, the Delta was not an isolated backwater where old traditions were likely to be preserved. On the contrary, the region had only begun to be settled in the late nineteenth century, as swampy woodlands were cleared for farming. The rich soil brought relative prosperity, attracting African American migrants and sojourners from poorer parts of Mississippi, such as Charlie Patton and Tommy Johnson. Barrelhouses, where sharecroppers could drink, dance, gamble, and consort with prostitutes, provided employment for musicians.
Virtually alone among blues historians, Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow contend that, rather than originating on the plantations, “the so-called ‘country blues’ were ruralized blues, early ‘country blues’ being their adaptation as dance music by performers who took their musical cues from barrelhouse transients.”[77] They speculate that these barrelhouse musicians included the kind of itinerant performers that W. C. Handy describes as having hung around Clarksdale—“blind singers and footloose bards that were forever coming and going.”[78]
The consensus continues to be that the blues is of rural provenance, an outgrowth of earlier folk forms such as spirituals, work songs, and field hollers. The evidence for this is tenuous, since the earliest surviving noncommercial field recordings of African American folk music were not made until the mid-1920s, and most scholarly recordings are from subsequent decades.[79] Some black spirituals but hardly any work songs or field hollers were notated before such music was recorded in the field.
Stephen Calt has theorized that the blues derives from a single eighteenth-century British hymn, “Roll Jordan,” written by Charles Wesley, the younger brother of the Methodist leader John Wesley. Calt bases his hypothesis on structural similarity, pointing out that each of the four-bar lines that make up “Roll Jordan” consists of a ten-beat verse followed by a six-beat refrain (“Roll, Jordan, roll”) and that each of the three four-bar lines that make up a typical blues stanza consists of ten vocalized beats (blues lyrics, like Shakespeare’s plays, being in iambic pentameter), followed by a six-beat instrumental fill. He observes that “Roll Jordan” was published in a Kentucky camp-meeting hymnal during the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century, when many black slaves were Christianized. While acknowledging that the well-known African American spiritual “Roll, Jordan, Roll,” although based on Wesley’s hymn, does not retain its original structure, he notes that the same or similar beat patterns were used in other spirituals. But even if one accepts the highly speculative premise that “Roll Jordan” is the source of what Calt calls the “blues phrase,” there is no particular reason to believe that this line structure is the kernel from which all other blues characteristics sprouted.[80]
Field hollers, also called “levee camp hollers,” “moans,” and “arhoolies,” are generally considered to be even more influential than spirituals; Alan Lomax wrote that “these songs were directly antecedent to the blues of the Delta country.”[81] Son House lent credibility to this theory when he told the writer Julius Lester: “People wonder a lot about where the blues came from. Well, when I was coming up, people did more singing in the fields than they did anywhere else. . . . We’d call them old corn songs, old long meter songs. . . . Then they called themselves, ‘got the blues.’ That’s what they called the blues. Them old long meter songs.”[82] But House, born in Mississippi in 1902, was raised in Louisiana and did not work in the cotton fields, play guitar, or listen to the blues until he moved back to the Delta as an adult. Any field hollers he may have remembered from childhood were sung after the first commercially published blues strains had already appeared.
What has been cited as the earliest description of a field holler was given by Frederick Law Olmsted, the great landscape architect, who in 1853 observed a black worker in South Carolina delivering “a long, loud musical shout, rising and falling and breaking into falsetto.”[83] The same vague description could apply to the “Levee Camp Holler” sung by a Mississippi convict called Bama and recorded by Alan Lomax in 1947. But like other recorded field hollers, Bama’s is an individual expression, whereas Olmsted’s Carolina shouter was part of a train-loading gang, and the other loaders took up the same wail, even singing it in chorus.
Many of the hollers that Lomax and other folklorists recorded contain lyrics found in songs that were commercially published or recorded earlier. And though they often contain commonly used floating verses, hollers did not follow a prescribed format; as Howlin’ Wolf recalled, “They’d make these songs up as they go along. . . . They made up the work songs as they felt.”[84] It is simply a leap of faith to assume that field hollers at the turn of the twentieth century, when the blues had barely begun to emerge, sounded the same as those recorded decades later, when the blues was at the height of its popularity.
While excavating Native American artifacts near Clarksdale, Mississippi, in 1901 and 1902, the Harvard University archaeologist Charles Peabody was intrigued by the singing of the black diggers he employed and the black farm workers tilling the surrounding fields. In 1903, he described their songs in the Journal of American Folk-Lore, giving examples of words and music. Peabody took some of “the long, lonely sing-song of the fields” to be “strains of apparently genuine African music. . . . Long phrases there were without apparent measured rhythm, singularly hard to copy in notes.”[85] Nevertheless, Peabody gave sketchy notation for five of what are presumably field hollers. He observed that they were “based for the most part on the major or minor triad,” and in fact only two of the five contain flatted third or seventh blue notes. Yet Alan Lomax maintained that Peabody’s transcription unquestionably “contains the cadences peculiar to the levee-camp holler that my father and I so frequently recorded all across the Deep South during the 1930s and ’40s.”[86]
Among the other kinds of songs Peabody heard were “ditties and distichs” such as “They had me arrested for murder / And I never harmed a man.” Practically the same couplet, “They have accused me of murder / And I haven’t harmed a man,” appears in “Levee Camp Moan Blues,” a commercial recording made in August 1927 by the country blues singer Texas Alexander, accompanied on guitar by Lonnie Johnson. With its drawn-out, melismatic notes and free tempo, Alexander’s song sounds like a field holler, and Elijah Wald identifies it as such in his book Escaping the Delta, although Peabody does not associate the “murder” couplet with the “lonely sing-song of the fields.”[87]
Peabody recognized some of his workers’ songs as popular “‘ragtime’ melodies,” including “The Bully Song,” introduced in 1895 by the white coon shouter May Irwin, and “Just Because She Made Dem Goo-Goo Eyes,” written in 1900 by the white team of Hughie Cannon and John Queen and recorded in 1902 by Belle Davis, the first black woman to make records.[88] (Curiously, both of these songs use the twelve-bar form.) But Peabody listed the following verse among the folk texts he’d collected: “Some folks say preachers won’t steal; / But I found two in my cornfield. / One with a shovel and t’other with a hoe, / A-diggin’ up my taters row by row.”
In 1896 or 1897, a similar verse—“Some folk say that a nigger won’t steal, / But I caught a couple in my cornfield. / One had his shovel and the other had a hoe. / If that ain’t a-stealin’, why, I’d like to know”—had been recorded as the opening stanza of the song “Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield” by the Manhansett Quartette, a popular white vocal group. In 1894, “Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield” had been recorded by the Standard Quartette, a black group that gained fame with the touring show South before the War, but it is not known whether the singers substituted the word “preacher” for “nigger,” because no copy of the wax cylinder has surfaced.[89]
“Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield” (not to be confused with a song by the same title written in 1901 by Gus Edwards and Will D. Cobb) was popular enough around the time of Peabody’s excavations to have been recorded in 1900 by the Haydn Quartet (as part of their “Cornfield Medley”) and in 1901 by the baritone J. W. Myers, two of the biggest acts of the day. Several other artists also recorded the song between 1895 and 1925; according to the black-music scholar Lynn Abbott, “‘Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield’ was the ultimate early barbershopping vehicle.”[90] Carl Sandburg’s 1918 poem “The Singing Nigger” contains the line, “I saw five of you with a can of beer on a summer night and I listened to the five of you harmonizing six ways to sing, ‘Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield.’”[91]
Several variations of the opening stanza, most collected around 1915, appear under the title “Some Folks Say” in Newman White’s American Negro Folk-Songs; another appears in Howard Odum’s 1926 book Negro Workaday Songs.[92] This “cornfield” verse turns up in a number of other folk songs, especially “Run, Nigger, Run!” which was collected without the verse by Newman White and Dorothy Scarborough and with it by John and Alan Lomax.[93] Another folklorist, E. C. Perrow, published both the cornfield verse and “Run, Nigger Run!” in 1915.[94]
Alan Lomax made at least two field recordings of “Run, Nigger, Run!” one in 1933 with Moses “Clear Rock” Platt, a black Texas prison inmate, and another in 1937 with W. H. Stepp, a white Kentucky fiddler. But the song had already been recorded commercially in 1924 by Fiddlin’ John Carson, one of the first white country musicians to make records; in 1925 by Uncle Dave Macon, the first star of the Grand Ole Opry; in 1927 by Gid Tanner and His Skillet-Lickers, a country string band whose rollicking version contains the cornfield verse; and in 1928 by Dr. Humphrey Bate and His Possum Hunters, the first string band to perform on the Grand Ole Opry.
Joel Chandler Harris, the white Georgia journalist who refashioned African American folk tales into children’s stories narrated by the fictional Uncle Remus, mentions “Run, Nigger, Run!” in his first book, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880), and gives a full text, including the cornfield verse, in Uncle Remus and His Friends (1892).[95] In 1876, Lafcadio Hearn, the journalist, folklorist, and Japanologist, published a version of the cornfield verse (“Some folks says that a rebel can’t steal”), attributing it to a “colored laborer” in Cincinatti.[96] The inclusion in the 1867 compilation Slave Songs of the United States of a brief “Run, Nigger, Run!” collected in Arkansas and consisting largely of the cornfield verse, would seem to confirm the song’s folkloric provenance.[97]
Newman White and the Lomaxes maintain that “Run, Nigger, Run!” originated after antebellum slave rebellions. But White cites as the possible source of the cornfield verse an early minstrel song, “Whar You Cum From,” published around 1846 by J. B. Harper, “the Celebrated Delineator of Comic and Aethiopian characters,” which contains the line “Some folks say dat niggers won’t steal, / I kotch one in my cornfield.”[98] And “Run, Nigger, Run!” without the cornfield verse, was published in 1851 in White’s Serenaders’ Song Book, by the prominent blackface minstrel Charles White.[99]
According to Robert Toll’s 1974 history Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America, “early minstrels used Afro-American dances and dance-steps, reproduced individual Negro’s songs and ‘routines’ intact, absorbed Afro-American rhythms into their music, and employed characteristically Afro-American folk elements and forms.”[100] Other writers have discounted the influence of genuine African American folk music on blackface minstrelsy because the early minstrels were northerners who had little or no contact with the plantation life they parodied. But in their book Way Up North in Dixie, Howard and Judith Sacks argue that Dan Emmett appropriated “Dixie,” perhaps the most famous minstrel song, from the repertoire of the Snowden Family Band, free black neighbors of Emmett’s in his home town of Mount Vernon, Ohio.[101]
If only because of its racist character, one can say with some confidence that the cornfield verse is of white authorship, a product of blackface minstrelsy. Adopted by blacks despite its derogatory nature, it passed back and forth between folk and commercial music over the course of a century. Charles Peabody was not the first to mistake minstrel songs for folk music: the Swedish novelist Frederika Bremer, after hearing a black banjo player sing such compositions as Stephen Foster’s “Oh! Susanna” and “Old Uncle Ned” on a visit to South Carolina in 1850, described them as “negro songs universally known and sung in the South by the negro people, whose product they are.”[102] The particular significance of Peabody’s observations is that they were made at around the same time and place that W. C. Handy had his Tutwiler revelation and that they have since been used to buttress the case for the Mississippi Delta origin of the blues.
While the birthplace of the blues is debatable, virtually no one today disputes that the music was created by African Americans and that it contains at least some African component. To the contrary, it is currently fashionable to believe that the blues was transplanted from Africa almost intact, a view stemming from the Western discovery, or rediscovery, of African music in the 1970s and 1980s. Westerners have studied African traditional music since the nineteenth century, and African songs such as “Skokiaan” and “Wimoweh” (“The Lion Sleeps Tonight”) found their way onto the American pop charts as early as the 1950s. But Alex Haley’s Roots, both the 1976 book and the 1977 television miniseries, awakened new interest in the Manding griot music of the Senegambia region. And the international emergence a decade later of Ali Farka Touré, a Malian guitarist who admired John Lee Hooker, gave the connection between Africa and the blues a contemporary human form.
The compilers of Slave Songs of the United States regarded the mostly religious material they collected as “the natural and original production of a race” whose members had “become imbued with the mode and spirit of European music—often, nevertheless, retaining a distinct tinge of their native Africa.” They felt that some songs, especially the secular ones, contained passages that “may very well be purely African in origin.”[103]
The idea that African American music came from Africa was challenged by the Austrian critic Richard Wallaschek, who wrote in 1893 that “these negro-songs . . . are mere imitations of European compositions.” The numbers in Slave Songs of the United States, he added, “are unmistakably ‘arranged’—not to say ignorantly borrowed—from the national songs of all nations, from military signals, well-known marches, German student-songs, etc.”[104] The French musicologist Julien Tiersot likewise denied the African derivation of African American spirituals, writing in 1911 that “these songs have no distinctive character.”[105]
The American critic Henry Krehbiel responded in 1914, declaring that “the songs of the black slaves of the South are original and native products. They contain idioms which were transplanted hither from Africa, but as songs they are the product of American institutions.”[106] Krehbiel analyzed over five hundred African American songs, mostly spirituals. “For the majority of them,” he concluded, “I have found prototypes in African music.”[107]
The debate (outlined in some detail by D. K. Wilgus in his book Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898) went on for decades, with European academics such as Erich von Hornbostel arguing that the essential character of African American music was European and Americans such as Melville Herskovitz insisting that it was African.[108] In 1943, George Pullen Jackson, an American scholar of southern hymnody, published White and Negro Spirituals, in which he demonstrated that many black spirituals were of white origin. Jackson maintained that virtually all the distinctive features of black spirituals were rooted in the British folk tradition. “I do not deny the possibility that there are . . . certain African hang-overs,” he wrote. “I would merely state that I haven’t found any yet.”[109]
Still, American musicologists generally continued to believe that African American music contained African ingredients. In 1952, Richard Alan Waterman wrote that “Metronism [the keeping of a strictly regular pulse] . . . is present in all Negro sacred and secular styles, as is the importance of percussion . . . and the overlapping call-and-response pattern.”[110]
Waterman, like most of his colleagues, thought that African Americans had preserved musical elements from the coast of West Africa rather than the interior. But in his 1970 book Savannah Syncopators, Paul Oliver claimed that the African roots of the blues could be found in the griot music of the western Sahel, a semi-arid region south of the Sahara stretching from Senegal and Gambia through Mali and Burkina Faso. This was the music that Alex Haley’s Roots brought to the attention of the American public.
Around the time that Roots came out, Ali Farka Touré’s first albums were released. Born near Timbuktu in 1939, Touré learned to play traditional music in his youth, although he was not a member of the griot caste of professional musicians. Hearing John Lee Hooker’s records in the 1960s, he thought they sounded Malian; although he later denied that Hooker had influenced him, his music occasionally resembles Hooker’s. Hailed as a living link between Africa and the blues after cutting his first internationally distributed album in 1987, Touré later recorded with such American bluesmen as Gatemouth Brown, Taj Mahal, and Corey Harris. His meeting with Harris in Mali, during which Touré opined that African American music came from Africa, was captured in the Martin Scorsese–directed video documentary “Feel Like Going Home,” part of the PBS series The Blues.
In 1977, Alan Lomax interspliced a Senegalese harvesting song with a Mississippi field holler on the same album track to demonstrate the kinship of African music and blues.[111] Since Touré’s emergence, a number of albums have made the same point by different means: juxtaposing American blues and African tracks, staging collaborations between African musicians and American bluesmen, recording African musicians who have been influenced by American blues, or simply compiling bluesy-sounding African songs.
No one imagines that the twelve-bar structure of the blues originated in Africa—in his book In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali, Banning Eyre describes how even highly accomplished and versatile Malian musicians struggled to follow blues chord changes—but in its use of blues-like notes and scales, some African music sounds amazingly similar to the blues.[112] Even so, the Mali-to-Mississippi theory of blues origins is problematic, to say the least.
Blues-like music can be found not only in Mali but throughout the Sahel region, from Mauritania to Ethiopia, suggesting that a bluesy modality resulted when sub-Saharan Africans were exposed to the Islamic music of North African Arabs. Some of the bluesiest-sounding African music is made by the Tuareg, or Kel Tamashek, a nomadic people of the Sahara, related to the Berbers, whose caravans formerly transported West African slaves to North Africa. It was Tuareg music in particular that Ali Farka Touré reportedly identified as resembling John Lee Hooker’s blues.[113]
But the bluesy feeling of Sahelian music may not come entirely from Islamic contact. While acknowledging the influence of Islamic music in the Sahel, the Austrian musicologist Gerhard Kubik identifies the use of pentatonic scales, similar to those found in Delta blues, as native to the region. In his book Africa and the Blues, Kubik writes that “Arabic-Islamic musical concepts were superimposed on a local pentatonic stratum that had flourished perhaps for several thousand years in the pearl millet-growing savanna cultures of West Africa.”[114] Kubik’s theory, based on his own field recordings in isolated villages in Nigeria and Cameroon, is plainly speculative, but pentatonic scales without obvious Arabic inflections can also be heard in the Wassoulou region of southern Mali, whose music has been popularized internationally by female singers such as Oumou Sangare.
Most of the slaves who were taken to the United States are thought to have come from areas near the West African coast, where the music is more percussive and less bluesy, but at least a few came from as far inland as Timbuktu.[115] It is possible, as Kubic asserts, that the musical style of even a small minority of the slaves could have come to be preferred by the majority. And in the United States, as he points out, the drum-dominated music of the coastal Africans was more harshly suppressed than the string-based styles of the savanna peoples.[116] But it is hard to explain why the blues-like savanna strain is virtually never heard in parts of the Caribbean or Latin America where African music survived in much purer form. The bluesy sound is absent even in former British colonies such as Jamaica or the Bahamas, where slaves were often brought before being shipped to the United States and where the folk music otherwise resembles that of African Americans.
Still harder to explain is the time lag between the end of the slave trade and the emergence of the blues. The United States outlawed the importation of slaves as of 1808, and though some slaves were brought in illegally until 1859, the blues did not appear until fifty years after that. According to Kubik, blues-like strains “were not reported . . . because they were among the most strikingly African . . . expressive forms that had survived in the United States. . . . They symbolized the core of everything that the established elements of society were deeply afraid of.”[117] Yet white observers did not hesitate to describe African American songs and dances that they considered savage and barbaric, and those who first reported the blues seemed to find the music more curious than frightening.
Paradoxically, the blues songs published before 1920 sound less African than those recorded afterward. The pentatonic minor scale that gives the Delta blues of Charlie Patton and Son House its ancient, African feeling is not explicit in the vaudeville-style blues of Bessie Smith or Ma Rainey and is only vaguely suggested in earlier published blues. Even in Delta blues, the pentatonic minor scale—a natural minor scale with the second and sixth notes missing, or C, Eb, F, G, Bb in the key of C—is not heard in pure form, as it is in some African music.
Blues historians have assumed that the Delta style was created before the vaudeville style but not recorded until later, and that the Delta blues records of the 1920s and 1930s preserve the music as it was played in previous decades. But there is no evidence that the Delta blues originated earlier than about 1910, and though one musician who met Charlie Patton around 1907 claimed that “he’s playin’ the same kind of music [then] like he did when he put out them records [some twenty years later],” it is scarcely credible that the style emerged full-fledged and remained static thereafter.[118] Early country blues recordings show the influence of jazzy “classic” blues, and country bluesmen were quick to copy one another’s records.
As the blues gained popularity, the pentatonic mode became more prominent, and flatted third and seventh notes were added to songs that predated the blues. On a 1928 recording, Louisiana bluesman Ramblin’ Thomas transforms “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home” into “Poor Boy Blues,” a Delta-like lament with a melody similar to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s 1926 “Jack O’Diamond Blues.” Similarly, Charlie Patton’s 1929 recording of “Frankie and Albert” is much bluesier than Mississippi John Hurt’s 1928 version, titled “Frankie,” not to mention earlier pop and jazz versions by ’Gene Greene, Al Bernard, Frank Crumit, Isham Jones, Fate Marable, and Ted Lewis, all titled “Frankie and Johnny.”
Based on the 1899 murder of Allen Britt by Frankie Baker in St. Louis, the song was apparently in circulation as “Frankie and Albert” before being published as “Frankie and Johnny” in 1912, with words by the brothers Bert and Frank Leighton, a white vaudeville team, and music by Ren Shields. But the now-familiar melody, which Patton largely ignores, had already appeared in the Leightons’ 1908 composition “Bill, You Done Me Wrong,” an adaptation of Hughie Cannon’s 1904 composition “He Done Me Wrong.” That song was a follow-up to Cannon’s 1902 smash “Bill Bailey, Won’t You Please Come Home?” which in turn is based on John Queen and Walter Wilson’s 1901 “Ain’t Dat a Shame?”[119] But the African American St. Louis pianist and balladeer Bill Dooley apparently wrote the first version of the song, “Frankie Killed Allen,” the day after the killing, including the enduring line “he was my man, but he done me wrong.”[120]
As it happens, all the variations of “Frankie and Johnny” are wholly or partly in twelve-bar form. According to Peter Muir, the twelve-bar structure entered American commercial music with “The Bully Song” in 1895 and appeared in a number of popular coon songs, including several by Hughie Cannon, but was associated exclusively with the blues after 1912 (Muir either ignores the many twelve-bar verse-and-refrain hokum songs or lumps them in with the blues). Muir assumes that the “Frankie and Johnny” melody was adapted from folk sources, and the South African musicologist Peter van der Merwe traces the tune to the Scottish folk song “Tattie Jock.”[121]
Besides “Frankie and Johnny,” a number of folk songs that are regarded as precursors of the blues—among them “John Henry,” “Ella Speed,” “Stagolee,” and “Joe Turner”—apparently derive from British ballads, at least in their music. The texts, however, are based on contemporary events: the construction around 1870 of the West Virginia tunnel where the legendary John Henry labored, the murder in 1894 of the New Orleans prostitute Ella Speed, the killing in 1895 of Billy Lyons by the flamboyant St. Louis pimp “Stack” Lee Shelton, and the transportation of convicts in the 1890s by the prison agent Joe Turney [sic], whose brother was the governor of Tennessee.
Abbe Niles cited “Joe Turner” as “perhaps the prototype of all blues.”[122] In 1915, W. C. Handy adapted the song into his own “Joe Turner Blues,” changing the story into one of unrequited love. Big Bill Broonzy, in his autobiography and in taped interviews, dated the song to around 1890 but identified Turner as a mysterious white benefactor who supplied food and other provisions to poor black sharecroppers.[123] Broonzy’s recordings of the song, made near the end of his life, simply repeat the line “They tell me Joe Turner been here and gone,” without the convict-related reference to “forty links of chain” that Handy recalled (but left out of his published song) and that Howard Odum reported in 1911 as part of a folk text.[124]
Peter van der Merwe observes that traditional British folk music shares certain characteristics with the blues, including the use of lowered third and seventh notes and occasionally even twelve-bar structures.[125] As early as 1907, the English musicologist Cecil Sharp observed that British folk singers used “neutral” thirds and sevenths, pitched between major and minor, as well as hexatonic, heptatonic, and other nondiatonic scales, with the pentatonic found mainly in Scotland.[126] George Pullen Jackson later described the use of neutral thirds and sevenths among both black and white folk singers in the American South.[127]
But neutral third and seventh notes are common in West Africa as well; as Gerhard Kubik points out, Erich von Hornbostel noted the African use of neutral thirds as far back as 1913.[128] African music also employs pentatonic, hexatonic, and heptatonic scales; in fact, the pentatonic, Islamic-inflected African music that sounds most like Delta blues bears less resemblance to British folk music than does the heptatonic music of the Manding griots. Manding music, descended from the court music of the medieval Kingdom of Mali, sounds strikingly similar to some Appalachian folk music and to the pre-blues material of African American songsters such as Mississippi John Hurt.
African slaves surely found familiar elements in the British-based folk songs they were exposed to in the United States, just as African musicians today find familiar elements in contemporary Celtic music. “I used to buy some tapes in England of Irish music,” the Senegalese star Baaba Maal told the writer Don Palmer, “and when I listened to them, I could easily sing with them without changing anything of my melodies.”[129] This musical affinity has even produced a successful world-music fusion band, the Afro Celt Sound System, made up of Irish and West African musicians.
Van der Merwe surmises that the similarities between West African and British folk music resulted from mutual contact with Islamic culture. The Arab conquests took in not only North Africa but parts of Europe as well, and Middle Eastern music and instruments were disseminated throughout Western Europe, their influence lingering longest in isolated areas such as Ireland and Scotland.[130] It’s an intriguing theory, but it fails to explain the virtual absence of blues-like music in Spain or Portugal, which remained under Arab rule for centuries, or in Latin America, where African and Iberian musics blended.
Black and white musicians in the United States freely borrowed from one another, intermingling British- and African-based styles. “Before the Civil War there did not exist in America two distinct bodies of music, one white and one black,” asserts the American musicologist Richard Nevins in his liner notes to the three-album compilation Before the Blues. “Both groups shared a common tradition and repertoire. Indeed, the divergence of white music and black music into two separate genres doesn’t really become clear until the turn of this [the twentieth] century.”[131]
Of the musical examples offered on Before the Blues, the two that most persuasively support Nevins’s thesis are “Jack O’Diamond Blues,” recorded in May 1926 by Blind Lemon Jefferson, and “Reuben Oh Reuben,” recorded around 1931 by Emry Arthur, a Kentucky country singer best known for his 1928 recording of “Man of Constant Sorrow.” The Texas folklorist W. H. Thomas published a text of “Jack of Diamonds” in his 1912 pamphlet Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro, but the song, thought to derive from a British ballad, is more commonly found in white country music, often conflated with “Rye Whiskey.”[132] Jefferson, however, sings it to the tune of “Reuben Oh Reuben,” a variation of “Reuben’s Train” often conflated with another train song, “Nine Hundred Miles.” While not in blues form, Jefferson’s version, his only recording with slide guitar, sounds much bluer than Arthur’s.
The early development of country blues can be heard in the two dozen recordings of Henry “Ragtime Texas” Thomas, made between 1927 and 1929. An obscure figure in his own lifetime, Thomas eventually earned a footnote in rock history after his songs were revived by Bob Dylan, Canned Heat, the Lovin’ Spoonful, and others. Born in East Texas in 1874, he was one of the oldest bluesmen to record, with a style that apparently dates back to the 1890s. Thomas’s recorded repertoire comprises mostly “reels”—square dance tunes such as “Old Country Stomp,” country breakdowns such as “Charmin’ Betsy,” folk ballads such as “Bob McKinney,” and vaudeville songs such as “Honey, Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance?”—along with a couple of gospel numbers and a few actual blues. Among the songs he interpolates are “Alabama Bound,” “Liza Jane,” “The Bully Song,” and “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor.”[133]
Thomas takes a somewhat archaic approach to the blues, singing conventional blues verses only on the first half of “Cottonfield Blues.” Each stanza of “Bull Doze Blues” and “Texas Worried Blues” consists of the same line repeated three times (as on Gus Cannon’s “Poor Boy, Long Ways from Home”), and every stanza of “Texas Easy Street Blues” ends with the same third line. But all of Thomas’s blues are in twelve-bar form, with standard blues chord changes and conventionally placed blue notes, suggesting that he adopted the blues later in his career. His style reflects the musical milieu from which the country blues emerged, but he is not quite the missing link between blues and reels.
The blues does not appear to have been created by any single person or at any one place or time, nor did it emerge merely as the commercial appropriation of a folkloric idiom. The twelve-bar form first appeared in commercial coon songs in the 1890s; the flatted third and seventh notes that give the blues its melodic character were introduced by professional songwriters and vaudeville performers during the following decade. These blue notes had long been a fixture of African American folk music, a carryover from African tradition reinforced through contact with similarly inflected British-based ballads and hymns. As D. K. Wilgus puts it: “To America from Africa the Negro brought a song tradition differing from and yet in some respects resembling the European folk tradition. . . . From the songs of the whites, the Negro borrowed what was congenial to him, and the whites were debtors as well as creditors. The resulting hybrid is a folk music which sounds African in the Negro tradition and European in the white tradition.”[134]
The structure of the blues gradually became fixed as the genre established itself. In a process analogous to the increased use of melisma in R&B singing in recent decades, the blue notes became more prominent, while other notes were omitted, producing modes resembling those found in Mali and other parts of West Africa. Like the story of Kunta Kinte in Alex Haley’s Roots, the notion that the blues was transported directly from Africa to the antebellum South is a latter-day invention.
The widespread belief that the country blues preceded the vaudeville blues is understandable, even though the reverse seems to have been the case. Just as nineteenth-century minstrel songs written by northern whites had been presented as the authentic expression of southern blacks, the newfangled country blues of the 1920s were promoted from the start as folk music from the distant past. Blind Lemon Jefferson’s first blues record, for example, was advertised as “a real, old-fashioned Blues by a real, old-fashioned Blues singer,” although the two songs—called “old-time tunes” in the ad copy—are apparently original, and Jefferson was not yet thirty-five years old.[135]
If Jelly Roll Morton’s account has any credibility, songs such as “Alabama Bound” and “Make Me a Pallet on the Floor”—the immediate precursors of the blues—were as familiar to the first generation of New Orleans jazz musicians as to the first generation of Mississippi bluesmen. From the inception of jazz, the blues was an integral part of it, and the earliest recordings of both white and black jazz bands include blues numbers. A few country-blues songs were taken up by jazz bands in the 1930s and 1940s, but jazz—besides preserving Handy’s tunes and other early blues compositions—continued to generate its own blues material, and it was from this bluesy side of the jazz repertoire that rhythm-and-blues and rock ’n’ roll ultimately derived. To the extent that black country blues found its way into rock ’n’ roll at all, it may be as much through white country music as through R&B.
1. Jelly Roll Morton, “See See Rider,” disc 4, track 4, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotation is transcribed on p. 65 of the PDF file on disc 8; Big Bill Broonzy, portion of a taped interview with producer Bill Randle, July 12 or 13, 1957, included as track 3 of disc 2 on the three-CD set The Bill Broonzy Story, Verve 314 547 555-2 (1999 [orig. released as a 5-LP boxed set in 1960]). Although the authorship of “See See Rider” is credited to Lena Arrant (or Lina Arant), it is thought by some to be of folk origin. Jelly Roll Morton said he heard the song in his youth, and the version he recorded for Alan Lomax in 1938 contains verses—including bawdy ones—not found in other recordings. Big Bill Broonzy likewise said he heard the song as a youngster; in his interview with Bill Randle, Broonzy claimed that its originator was a former slave actually called See-See Rider, but he had earlier told Alan Lomax that this musician had taken his nickname from the song. Broonzy’s 1934 recording also includes different verses, but later Broonzy recordings add still other verses, indicating that Broonzy, in true country blues tradition, simply threw in whatever lines came to mind at any given time. The song was also recorded by Ray Charles in 1949, at one of his first sessions, and by two traditional New Orleans jazzmen—clarinetist Emile Barnes in 1951 and trumpeter Kid Clayton in 1952—but it is unlikely that Chuck Willis heard those records. After Willis’s hit, the song was recorded by dozens of blues, rock, pop, jazz, folk, R&B, and country artists—everyone from Lightnin’ Hopkins, Muddy Waters, and B. B. King to Fats Domino, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, Joey Dee and the Starlighters, Ian & Sylvia, Yusef Lateef, Cher, and Elvis Presley. A version by LaVern Baker made both the R&B and pop charts in 1963, as did one by the blind soul singer Bobby Powell in 1966; later in 1966, Eric Burdon and the Animals took the song to the pop Top 10.
2. Vic Fredericks, ed., Who’s Who in Rock ’n Roll: Facts, Fotos and Fan Gossip about the Performers in the World of Rock ’n Roll (New York: Frederick Fell, 1958), 73. Although no writer is identified, the author is probably publisher Frederick Victor Fell, who takes editor’s credit under a transparent pseudonym.
3. Big Bill Broonzy, interview with Bill Randle, included as track 8 of disc 1 on The Bill Broonzy Story.
4. James Dugan and John Hammond, program notes from the December 23, 1938, “From Spirituals to Swing” concert, 5, 11, and John Hammond, liner notes from the 1959 double album From Spirituals to Swing, 8, both reproduced in separate booklets in the three-CD boxed set From Spirituals to Swing: The Legendary 1938 & 1939 Concerts Produced by John Hammond, Vanguard Records 169/71-2 (1999).
5. Charles Edward Smith, foreword to the American edition, Big Bill Broonzy with Yannick Bruynoghe, Big Bill Blues: William Broonzy’s Story (New York: Oak Publications, 1964 [orig. Cassell & Co., 1955]), 13; William “Big Bill” Broonzy, “Baby, I Done Got Wise,” The Jazz Record, March 1946, 9; Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 1st pbk. ed. (New York:The New Press, 2002 [orig. Pantheon, 1993]), 438, 443. Smith cites Papa Charlie Jackson as Broonzy’s guitar mentor, although Jackson played six-string banjo, not guitar; Broonzy himself mentions Jim Jackson but not Charlie Jackson in the body of his sketchy “autobiography.” In his article for The Jazz Record, Broonzy writes that he met Charlie Jackson in 1924 and that “Charlie first got me started on guitar.” In a letter quoted by Lomax, Broonzy says he met both Jacksons in the early 1920s, but in a taped interview from the 1940s he tells Lomax that the one who “taught me how to make my music correspond to my singing” was Charlie Jackson, whom he identifies as the man who “had the first big blues hit with ‘I’m Gonna Move to Kansas City.’” That, however, would have been Jim Jackson. Broonzy did record a couple of sides with Papa Charlie Jackson in 1935, but they were not released.
6. John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs (New York: Macmillan, 1934), xxx.
7. Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (Baltimore: Clearfield, 1996 [orig. G. Schirmer, 1914]), viii.
8. Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs: A Study of Typical Negro Songs in the South (Westport, CT: Negro Universities Press, 1968 [orig. University of North Carolina Press, 1925]), 149.
9. Dorothy Scarborough, “The ‘Blues’ as Folk-Songs,” Coffee in the Gourd, ed. J. Frank Dobie (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1969 [orig. Texas Folklore Society, 1923]), 52, 53, 58, 59. Scarborough published a slightly revised version of her essay as the “Blues” chapter of her 1925 book On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs.
10. W. C. Handy, “How I Came to Write the ‘Memphis Blues,’” New York Age, December 7, 1916, quoted in Elliott S. Hurwitt, “W. C. Handy as Music Publisher: Career and Reputation” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2000), 113, 114.
11. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me’: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues,” American Music 14, no. 4 (Winter 1996): 425.
12. Stephen Calt and Gayle Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton (Newton, NJ: Rock Chapel Press, 1988), 105, 107; W. C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography, pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991 [orig. Macmillan, 1941]), 73. Calt and Wardlow quote Willie Moore, an orphan who became Handy’s ward, as saying that Handy “never played for no colored. . . . The colored folks didn’t hire him ’cause they didn’t have the money.”
13. Handy, Father of the Blues, 73, 74; Max Haymes, “‘This Cat’s Got the Yellow Dog Blues’—Origins of the Term Yellow Dog,” www.earlyblues.com/Yellow%20Dog.htm. Haymes, a British blues historian, suggests that the “Yellow Dog” rail line that Handy mentions was not the Yazoo Delta Railroad, as Handy believed, but the Yazoo and Mississippi Valley Railroad (a subsidiary of the Illinois Central Railroad), which had acquired the short-lived Yazoo Delta line by 1903.
14. Abbe Niles, “The Story of the Blues,” in W. C. Handy, ed., A Treasury of the Blues: Complete Words and Music of 67 Great Songs from Memphis Blues to the Present Day, rev. 2nd ed. (New York: Charles Boni/Simon & Schuster, 1949 [rev. expanded ed. of Blues: An Anthology, New York: Albert and Charles Boni, 1926]), 17, 18 .
15. Hurwitt, “W. C. Handy as Music Publisher,” 113, 114.
16. Gayle Dean Warlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music: Searching for the Blues (San Francisco: Backbeat Books, 1998), 36.
17. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 48, 85, 108. Calt and Wardlow say that Patton’s parents gave the 1991 date to a census taker. Other sources date Patton’s birth to 1887.
18. Calt and Wardlow, 87, 107, 307.
19. Handy, Father of the Blues, 99.
20. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 165, 166.
21. Niles, “Story of the Blues,” 13.
22. Jelly Roll Morton, “I Created Jazz in 1902, Not W. C. Handy,” Down Beat, August 1938, 3, 31; Jelly Roll Morton, “Jelly Roll Says He Was First to Play Jazz,” Down Beat, September 1938, 4; Howard Reich and William Gaines, Jelly’s Blues: The Life, Music, and Redemption of Jelly Roll Morton (New York: Da Capo Press, 2003), 152, 153. Reich and Gaines say that Morton’s letter was actually written by Roy Carew, a white jazz fan who befriended Morton in 1938. They claim that “the mangled dates, spellings, and musicological errors affirm that the letter was Carew’s handiwork,” although letters known to have been written by Morton contain similar errors.
23. W. C. Handy, “I Would Not Play Jazz if I Could,” Down Beat, September 1938, 5.
24. Jelly Roll Morton, “Mamie’s Blues,” disc 7, track 4, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotation is transcribed on p. 113 of the PDF file on disc 8.
25. Jelly Roll Morton, “Mamie’s Blues,” track 12, Jelly Roll Morton: Last Session—The Complete General Recordings, Commodore CMD-403 (1997); Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2001 [orig. Pantheon Books, 1950]), 21. In his book, which weaves Morton’s Library of Congress interviews into a sort of autobiography, Lomax quotes Morton as saying, “Although I had heard them previously I guess it was Mamie first really sold me on the blues”; but this quotation does not appear in the Library of Congress transcripts.
26. Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll, 21; Alan Lomax, letter to The Record Changer in June 1949, cited by Peter Hanley, “Portraits from Jelly Roll’s New Orleans,” www.doctorjazz.co.uk/portnewor.html, as verifying the date of Lomax’s interview with Bunk Johnson.
27. Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 407. Some sources place the recording of “I’m Alabama Bound” by Prince’s Band (or Prince’s Orchestra) in late 1909 rather than 1910.
28. Newman I. White, American Negro Folk-Songs (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1928), 306–308.
29. W. H. Thomas, Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro (pamphlet) (Austin: Folk-Lore Society of Texas, 1912), 12.
30. R. J. Carew, “New Orleans Recollections” The Record Changer, May 1943, 11; Roy J. Carew, “Of This and That and Jelly Roll,” Jazz Journal 10, no. 12 (December 1957): 10–12, www.doctorjazz.co.uk/thisthat.html.
31. Clarence Williams, Clarence Williams Presents: The “Boogie Woogie” Blues Folio: First “Boogie Woogie” Tunes of Clarence Williams, George Thomas and Charles “Cow Cow” Davenport, with Annotations by Clarence Williams (New York: Clarence Williams Publishing, 1940), 11.
32. “Unrecorded Interview Material and Research Notes by Alan Lomax, 1938–1946,” PDF file, disc 8, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005), 189; Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 435, 452.
33. Howard W. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 24, no. 93 (July–September 1911): 278.
34. Donald M. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden: First Man of Jazz, 1st pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1980 [orig. Louisiana State University Press, 1978]), 107, 108.
35. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 100, 101, 105, 107–109; Jelly Roll Morton, “Buddy Bolden’s Blues,” disc 3, track 11, Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax, Rounder 11661-1888-2 (2005). The quotations are transcribed on pp. 51 and 52 of the PDF file on disc 8.
36. Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 2, 3.
37. White, American Negro Folk-Songs, 410.
38. John W. Work, American Negro Songs: 230 Folk Songs and Spirituals, Religious and Secular (Mineola, NY: Dover, 1998 [orig. Crown Publishers, 1940]), 32, 33.
39. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry,” 270.
40. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 63, 64, 275.
41. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 55.
42. Henry Townsend as told to Bill Greensmith, A Blues Life (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1999), 5.
43. Mississippi Fred McDowell, I Do Not Play No Rock ’n’ Roll, Capitol ST-409 (1969).
44. Peter C. Muir, “Before ‘Crazy Blues’: Commercial Blues in America 1850–1920” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2004), 404 [publication date of Maggio’s “I Got the Blues”]; Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 405 [an “Up-to-Date Rag”]; “Stage,” Indianapolis Freeman, August 30, 1902, quoted in Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, Ragged but Right: Black Traveling Shows, “Coon Songs,” and the Dark Pathway to Blues and Jazz (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007), 252, 412. The Indianapolis Freeman mentions that the African American singer Will Goff Kennedy was performing a song called “I Got the Blues” in the traveling minstrel show A Rabbit’s Foot in 1902, but it is not clear whether this is the same song as Smith and Bowman’s “I’ve Got de Blues.”
45. Anthony Maggio, quoted in the Personal News Notes column of Overture (journal of Local 47, American Federation of Musicians, Los Angeles) 35, no. 9 (December 1955): 13.
46. Abbe Niles, “Notes to the Collection,” in Handy, ed., A Treasury of the Blues, 242 [“Handy . . . said he’d heard a church elder sing the figure”]; W. C. Handy, letter to William Grant Still (December 20, 1955), “Handy Letters to Still,” part 2, Black Perspective 8, no. 1 (Spring 1980): 107, 108, quoted in Elliott S. Hurwitt, “W. C. Handy as Music Publisher: Career and Reputation” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 2000), 479–481 [“I haven’t been in New Orleans since 1900”].
47. R. J. Carew, “New Orleans Recollections” The Record Changer, May 1943, 11.
48. Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues (London: Cassell, 1965), 96, 97; David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, That American Rag: The Story of Ragtime from Coast to Coast (New York: Schirmer, 2000), 36.
49. David A. Jasen and Trebor Jay Tichenor, Rags and Ragtime: A Musical History (New York: Dover, 1989 [orig. Seabury Press, 1978]), 71.
50. Peter C. Muir, Long Lost Blues: Popular Blues in America, 1850–1920 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010), 207.
51. John Jacob Niles, “Shout, Coon, Shout!” The Musical Quarterly 16, no. 4 (October 1930): 519; Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints: Vocal Traditions on Race Records (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 260–263.
52. William Barlow, “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 64; Gates Thomas, “South Texas Negro Work-Songs: Collected and Uncollected,” Rainbow in the Morning: Publications of the Texas Folklore Society Number V, J. Frank Dobie, ed. (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1975 [orig. 1926]), 160.
53. Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 413.
54. Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 416, 429, 430.
55. Abbott and Seroff, “‘They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me,’” 414–416.
56. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry,” 272.
57. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry,” 418, 421.
58. Charles Anderson, “Sing ’Em Blues,” Eddie Heywood & the Blues Singers, Document Records DOCD-5380 (1995). Heywood, who accompanies Anderson on piano, was the father of Eddie Heywood Jr., a jazz pianist of the 1930s and 1940s who turned to pop music in the 1950s.
59. Samuel B. Charters, The Country Blues, 2nd pbk. ed. (New York: Da Capo Press, 1977 [orig. Rinehart, 1959]), 35, 36.
60. Handy, Father of the Blues, 106–110.
61. “George H. O’Connor Papers,” Library Associates Newsletter, February 1986, Newsletter 18, http://old.library.georgetown.edu/advancement/newsletter/18/oconnor18.htm.
62. Muir, “Before ‘Crazy Blues,’” 2, 74.
63. Handy, Father of the Blues, 200.
64. Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry 1890–1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 17, 26–28, 254, 255, 486, 487; Rainer E. Lotz, “Belle Davis and Her Piccaninnies: A Preliminary Bio-, Disco- and Filmography,” ARSC Journal 25, no. 2 (Fall 1994): 179–183. Black male singers had been recorded since 1890, when George W. Johnson waxed “The Whistling Coon.” The first black woman to record was Belle Davis, an American coon shouter who made a few recordings in 1902 while touring England, beginning with the operetta piece “The Honeysuckle and the Bee.” Other early black female recording artists include Daisy Tapley, who recorded the hymn “I Surrender All” in a 1910 duet with the baritone C. Carroll Clark, and Florence Cole-Talbert, who recorded an African American spiritual and a French art song in 1919.
65. David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930 (New York: Schirmer, 1998), 259–263.
66. Jasen and Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around, 267.
67. Rudi Blesh, Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz (New York: Knopf, 1946), 108–111.
68. Tony Russell, liner notes to Male Blues of the Twenties, Vol. 1 (1922–1930), Document Records DOCD-5482 (1996). Russell writes that a photograph of Du Pree appeared in the New York Age in 1912 and that “by the 1930s, if not earlier, he was based in Philadelphia.” Other sources identify Du Pree (sometimes spelled Dupree) as a Philadelphia music promoter or booking agent who claimed credit for writing the song “Shortnin’ Bread.”
69. Jeff Todd Titon, Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 210.
70. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 213.
71. Valerie Wilmer, “Lonnie Johnson Talks to Valerie Wilmer,” Jazz Monthly 9, no. 10 (December 1963): 6.
72. Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 78, 79.
73. Townsend, A Blues Life, 19.
74. Stephen C. LaVere, liner notes to Robert Johnson, The Complete Recordings, Columbia Records C2K 46222 (1990), 20.
75. Wilmer, “Lonnie Johnson Talks to Valerie Wilmer,” 5.
76. Wardlow, Chasin’ That Devil Music, 72.
77. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 64.
78. Handy, Father of the Blues, 87.
79. Robert M. W. Dixon, John Godrich, and Howard Rye, Blues & Gospel Records 1890–1943, 4th ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 966; Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1926), 252; Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues (New York: Basic Books, 2008), 29, 45; Dorothy Scarborough with Ola Lee Gulledge, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs (Hatboro: PA: Folklore Associates, 1963 [orig. Harvard University Press, 1925]), 264, 265. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye cite the “phono-photographic” recordings made in North Carolina and Virginia in 1925 by Milton Metfessel and Howard Odum as “the earliest non-commercial field recordings of which we have knowledge.” Odum describes these records in Negro Workaday Songs. According to Hamilton, Odum, using a type of phonograph called a graphophone, had recorded African American folk songs on wax cylinders as early as 1907 but lost or discarded the cylinders in the 1920s. Dorothy Scarborough also made recordings, which Ola Lee Gulledge transcribed for their book On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs. Lawrence Gellert, a left-wing activist best known for his book Negro Songs of Protest, made field recordings in the Carolinas as early as 1924 that were discovered in the 1980s and released on the 1998 Document CD Field Recordings, Vol. 9: Georgia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky (1924–1939). And Natalie Curtis-Burlin made recordings of students at the Hampton Institute in Virginia, which she published in 1918 and 1919 in her four-volume series Negro Folk-Songs.
80. Stephen Calt, I’d Rather Be the Devil: Skip James and the Blues (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1994), 34–46; Dena J. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals: Black Folk Music to the Civil War (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 270. Lucy McKim first collected “Roll, Jordan, Roll” in the South Carolina Sea Islands in 1862 and published it at the end of that year. In 1867, her transcription, together with one collected by Charles Pickard Ware, was published as the first number in Slave Songs of the United States. But according to Epstein, “Neither version . . . has the tune now usually associated with ‘Roll, Jordan, Roll’ . . . That tune appears in Slave Songs as number 15, ‘Lord, Remember Me.’”
81. Alan Lomax, liner notes to Negro Prison Songs, Tradition Records TLP 1020 (1957), reproduced in the CD booklet of Prison Songs: Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm 1947–48, Vol. 1: Murderous Home, Rounder Records CD 1714 (1997).
82. Son House, “I Can Make My Own Songs” (tape recorded and edited by Julius Lester), Sing Out! 15, no. 3 (July 1965): 45; Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 172; George Pullen Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals: Their Life Span and Kinship (Locust Valley, NY: J.J. Augustin, 1943), 252, 253. According to Epstein, the term “corn songs” usually refers to corn-shucking songs sung in chorus. According to Jackson, “long meter songs” are usually hymns or spirituals sung in slow tempo.
83. Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey in the Seaboard Slave States in the Years 1853–1854, with Remarks on Their Economy . . . (New York: Putnam’s, 1904 [orig. 1856]), 19, 20, quoted in Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 182.
84. Pete Welding, “‘I Sing for the People’: An Interview with Bluesman Howling Wolf,” Down Beat, December 14, 1967, 21.
85. Charles Peabody, “Notes on Negro Music,” Journal of American Folk-Lore, Vol. 16, (Millwood, NY: Kraus Reprint Co., 1979 [orig. Houghton, Mifflin, 1903]): 151, 152.
86. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 231.
87. Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2004), 77.
88. Lotz, “Belle Davis and Her Piccaninnies,” 183.
89. Dixon, Godrich, and Rye, Blues and Gospel Records, 859; Brooks, Lost Sounds, 92–102. Brooks says that the Standard Quartette rerecorded “Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield” for the U.S. Phonograph Company in 1896 or 1897, and that the Columbia Phonograph Company, which had produced the original 1894 recording, then had the Manhansett Quartette “remake a number of the Standard Quartette titles,” presumably including “Way Down Yonder in the Cornfield.”
90. Lynn Abbott, “‘Play That Barber Shop Chord’: A Case for the African-American Origin of Barbershop Harmony,” American Music 10, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 304.
91. Carl Sandburg, Cornhuskers (Mineola, NY: Dover 2000 [orig. Henry Holt, 1918]), 30.
92. White, American Negro Folk-Songs, 370–372; Odum and Johnson, Negro Workaday Songs, 174.
93. White, American Negro Folk-Songs, 168, 169; Scarborough, On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs, 12, 24, 25; John A. Lomax and Alan Lomax, American Ballads and Folk Songs, 228.
94. E. C. Perrow, “Songs and Rhymes from the South,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 28 (1915): 135, 136, 138.
95. Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1921 [orig. D. Appleton, 1880]), 32; Joel Chandler Harris, Uncle Remus and His Friends (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1892), 200, 201.
96. Lafcadio Hearn, “Levee Life,” Cincinnati Commercial, March 17, 1876, reprinted in Henry Goodman, ed., The Selected Writings of Lafcadio Hearn (New York: Citadel Press, 1949), 224.
97. William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: Dover, 1995 [orig. A. Simpson, 1867]), 89.
98. J. B. Harper, “Whar You Cum From,” The Negro Singer’s Own Book (Philadelphia: Turner & Fisher [1846?]), 411, cited in White, American Negro Folk-Songs, 370.
99. White’s Serenaders’ Song Book (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1851), 66–68, reproduced in the liner notes to Gid Tanner and His Skillet Lickers, “Hear These New Southern Fiddle and Guitar Records!” Rounder Records 1005 (1973).
100. Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 50.
101. Howard L. Sacks and Judith Rose Sacks, Way Up North in Dixie: A Black Family’s Claim to the Confederate Anthem (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).
102. Epstein, Sinful Tunes and Spirituals, 241.
103. Allen, Ware, and Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States, vii, viii.
104. Richard Wallaschek, Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances and Pantomimes of Savage Races (New York: Da Capo Press, 1970 [orig. Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893]), 60, 61.
105. Julien Tiersot, La musique chez les peuples indigènes de l’Amérique du Nord (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher), cited in Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 32.
106. Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 22.
107. Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs, 69.
108. D. K. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1959), 345–364.
109. Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals, 293.
110. Richard Alan Waterman, “African Influence on the Music of the Americas,” Acculturation in the Americas, ed. Sol Tax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 207–18, quoted in Paul Oliver, Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues (London: Studio Vista, 1970), republished in Yonder Come the Blues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 26.
111. Henry Ratcliff/Bakari Badji, “Louisiana/Field Song from Senegal,” Roots of the Blues, New World Records 80252 (1977).
112. Banning Eyre, In Griot Time: An American Guitarist in Mali (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2000), 55, 56.
113. Lucy Duran, liner notes to Ali Farka Touré, Radio Mali, Nonesuch Records 79569 (1999 [orig. World Circuit 044, 1996]).
114. Gerhard Kubik, Africa and the Blues (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 94.
115. Paul Oliver, Savannah Syncopators, 81–85.
116. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 97–100.
117. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 102.
118. Calt and Wardlow, King of the Delta Blues, 96.
119. Muir, Long Lost Blues, 195.
120. Cecil Brown, “We Did Them Wrong: The Ballad of Frankie and Albert,” in The Rose and the Briar: Death, Love and Liberty in the American Ballad, ed. Sean Wilentz and Greil Marcus (New York: Norton, 2005), 126, 143, 144.
121. Peter van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style: The Antecedents of Twentieth-Century Popular Music, 1st pbk. ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992 [orig. Oxford University Press, 1989]), 185, 186.
122. Abbe Niles, “Notes to the Collection,” 244.
123. Broonzy, Big Bill Blues, 53–59; Big Bill Broonzy, tracks 13 and 14 on disc 1 of The Bill Broonzy Story.
124. Handy, Father of the Blues, 145–147; Howard W. Odum, “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes—concluded,” Journal of American Folk-Lore 24, no. 94 (October–December 1911): 351.
125. Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 171–183
126. Cecil J. Sharp, English Folk Song: Some Conclusions, 4th rev. ed. (London: Mercury Books, 1965 [orig. Simpkin, Novello; Barnicott and Pearce, 1907]), 47–91.
127. Jackson, White and Negro Spirituals, 236–239.
128. Kubik, Africa and the Blues, 120, 121.
129. Don Palmer, “Baaba Maal and Ernest Ranglin: Fanta Seers,” Rhythm Music, September 1998, 33, 34.
130. Van der Merwe, Origins of the Popular Style, 11–13.
131. Richard Nevins, liner notes to Before the Blues: The Early American Black Music Scene as Captured on Classic Recordings from the 1920s and 30s, Yazoo Records 2015, 2016, 2017 (1996), 2.
132. Thomas, Some Current Folk-Songs of the Negro, 11.
133. Tony Russell, Blacks, Whites and Blues [orig. Studio Vista, 1970], in Yonder Come the Blues (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 178. Russell notes that Uncle Dave Macon cut some of the same material that Thomas did and speculates that Brunswick, the company they both recorded for, “was attempting a sort of comparative issue programme—Macon for the Whites, Thomas for the race.” However, most of the songs they shared, such as “John Henry” and “The Fox and the Hounds” (also known as “Fox Chase”), were commonplace, and their renditions were, for the most part, radically different. The only song they performed similarly was “When the Train Comes Along,” and Macon did not record that one until 1934, seven years after Thomas’s version.
134. Wilgus, Anglo-American Folksong Scholarship Since 1898, 363.
135. Titon, Early Downhome Blues, 215; Bruce Roberts, “‘Blind’ Lemon Jefferson Memorial,” www.thebluehighway.com/blues/amazonx.html; Bruce Roberts, Blues and Rhythm 119 (May? 1997): 4, 5; Jonathan Black, “Draft Card Blues: A Newly Discovered Document Sheds Light on Blind Lemon Jefferson,” Living Blues, October 2007, 66. Some sources give Jefferson’s birth date as early as 1880, but the year 1897 was generally accepted until 1996, when Bruce Roberts discovered census records that gave the date as September 1893. More recently, a 1917 draft card was discovered in the National Archives that gives Jefferson’s birth date as October 15, 1894.