Joseph Machlis says that the blues is a native American musical and verse form, with no direct European and African antecedents of which we know. (p. 578) In other words, it is a blending of both traditions. Something special and entirely different from either of its parent traditions. (Although Alan Lomax cites some examples of very similar songs having been found in Northwest Africa, particularly among the Wolof and Watusi. p. 233)
The word 'blue' has been associated with the idea of melancholia or depression since the Elizabethan era. The American writer, Washington Irving is credited with coining the term 'the blues,' as it is now defined, in 1807. (Tanner 40) The earlier (almost entirely Negro) history of the blues musical tradition is traced through oral tradition as far back as the 1860s. (Kennedy 79)
When African and European music first began to merge to create what eventually became the blues, the slaves sang songs filled with words telling of their extreme suffering and privation. (Tanner 36) One of the many responses to their oppressive environment resulted in the field holler. The field holler gave rise to the spiritual, and the blues, "notable among all human works of art for their profound despair . . . They gave voice to the mood of alienation and anomie that prevailed in the construction camps of the South," for it was in the Mississippi Delta that blacks were often forcibly conscripted to work on the levee and land-clearing crews, where they were often abused and then tossed aside or worked to death. (Lomax 233)
Alan Lomax states that the blues tradition was considered to be a masculine discipline (although some of the first blues songs heard by whites were sung by 'lady' blues singers like Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith) and not many black women were to be found singing the blues in the juke-joints. The Southern prisons also contributed considerably to the blues tradition through work songs and the songs of death row and murder, prostitutes, the warden, the hot sun, and a hundred other privations. (Lomax) The prison road crews and work gangs where were many bluesmen found their songs, and where many other blacks simply became familiar with the same songs.
Following the Civil War (according to Rolling Stone), the blues arose as "a distillate of the African music brought over by slaves. Field hollers, ballads, church music and rhythmic dance tunes called jump-ups evolved into a music for a singer who would engage in call-and-response with his guitar. He would sing a line, and the guitar would answer it." (RSR&RE 53) (author's note: I've seen somewhere, that the guitar did not enjoy widespread popularity with blues musicians until about the turn of the century. Until then, the banjo was the primary blues instrument.) By the 1890s the blues were sung in many of the rural areas of the South. (Kamien 518) And by 1910, the word 'blues' as applied to the musical tradition was in fairly common use. (Tanner 40)
Some 'bluesologists' claim (rather dubiously), that the first blues song that was ever written down was 'Dallas Blues,' published in 1912 by Hart Wand, a white violinist from Oklahoma City. (Tanner 40) The blues form was first popularized about 1911-14 by the black composer W.C. Handy (1873-1958). However, the poetic and musical form of the blues first crystallized around 1910 and gained popularity through the publication of Handy's "Memphis Blues" (1912) and "St. Louis Blues" (1914). (Kamien 518) Instrumental blues had been recorded as early as 1913. Mamie Smith recorded the first vocal blues song, 'Crazy Blues' in 1920. (Priestly 9) Priestly claims that while the widespread popularity of the blues had a vital influence on subsequent jazz, it was the "initial popularity of jazz which had made possible the recording of blues in the first place, and thus made possible the absorption of blues into both jazz as well as the mainstream of pop music." (Priestly 10)
American troops brought the blues home with them following the First World War. They did not, of course, learn them from Europeans, but from Southern whites who had been exposed to the blues. At this time, the U.S. Army was still segregated. During the twenties, the blues became a national craze. Records by leading blues singers like Bessie Smith and later, in the thirties, Billie Holiday, sold in the millions. The twenties also saw the blues become a musical form more widely used by jazz instrumentalists as well as blues singers. (Kamien 518)
During the decades of the thirties and forties, the blues spread northward with the migration of many blacks from the South and entered into the repertoire of big-band jazz. The blues also became electrified with the introduction of the amplified guitar. In some Northern cities like Chicago and Detroit, during the later forties and early fifties, Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, John Lee Hooker, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James among others, played what was basically Mississippi Delta blues, backed by bass, drums, piano and occasionally harmonica, and began scoring national hits with blues songs. At about the same time, T-Bone Walker in Houston and B.B. King in Memphis were pioneering a style of guitar playing that combined jazz technique with the blues tonality and repertoire. (RSR&RE 53)
In the early nineteen-sixties, the urban bluesmen were "discovered" by young white American and European musicians. Many of these blues-based bands like the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, the Rolling Stones, the Yardbirds, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Cream, Canned Heat, and Fleetwood Mac, brought the blues to young white audiences, something the black blues artists had been unable to do in America except through the purloined white cross-over covers of black rhythm and blues songs. Since the sixties, rock has undergone several blues revivals. Some rock guitarists, such as Eric Clapton, Jimmy Page, Jimi Hendrix, and Eddie Van Halen have used the blues as a foundation for offshoot styles. While the originators like John Lee Hooker, Albert Collins and B.B. King--and their heirs Buddy Guy, Otis Rush, and later Eric Clapton and the late Roy Buchanan, among many others, continued to make fantastic music in the blues tradition. (RSR&RE 53) The latest generation of blues players like Robert Cray and the late Stevie Ray Vaughan, among others, as well as gracing the blues tradition with their incredible technicality, have drawn a new generation listeners to the blues.
The Blue Tonalities And What Defines The Blues
There are a number of different ideas as to what the blues really are: a scale structure, a note out of tune or out of key, a chord structure; a philosophy? The blues is a form of Afro-American origin in which a modal melody has been harmonized with Western tonal chords. (Salzman 18) In other words, we had to fit it into our musical system somehow. But, the problem was that the blues weren't sung according to the European ideas of even tempered pitch, but with a much freer use of bent pitches and otherwise emotionally inflected vocal sounds. (Machlis 578) These 'bent'pitches are known as 'blue notes'.
The 'blue notes' or blue tonalities are one of the defining characteristics of the blues. Tanner's opinion is that these tonalities resulted from the West Africans' search for comparative tones not included in their pentatonic scale. He claims that the West African scale has neither the third or seventh tone nor the flat third or flat seventh. "Because of this, in the attempt to imitate either of these tones the pitch was sounded approximately midway between [the minor AND major third, fifth, or seventh], causing what is called a blue tonality." (Tanner 37) When the copyists attempted to write down the music, they came up with the so-called "blues scale," in which the third, the seventh, and sometimes the fifth scale-degrees were lowered a half step, producing a scale resembling the minor scale. (Machlis 578) There are many nuances of melody and rhythm in the blues that are difficult, if not impossible to write in conventional notation. (Salzman 18) But the blue notes are not really minor notes in a major context. In practice they may come almost anywhere. (Machlis 578)
Before the field cry, with its bending of notes, it had not occurred to musicians to explore the area of the blue tonalities on their instruments. (Tanner 38) The early blues singers would sing these "bent" notes, microtonal shadings, or "blue" notes, and the early instrumentalists attempted to duplicate them. (Kamien 520) By the mid-twenties, instrumental blues were common, and "playing the blues" for the instrumentalist could mean extemporizing a melody within a blues chord sequence. Brass, reed, and string instrumentalists, in particular, were able to produce many of the vocal sounds of the blues singers. (Machlis 578-9)
Blues lyrics contain some of the most fantastically penetrating autobiographical and revealing statements in the Western musical tradition. For instance, the complexity of ideas implicit in Robert Johnson's 'Come In My Kitchen,' such as a barely concealed desire, loneliness, and tenderness, and much more:
You better come in my kitchen, It's gonna be rainin' outdoors.
Blues lyrics are often intensely personal, frequently contain sexual references and often deal with the pain of betrayal, desertion, and unrequited love (Kamien 519) or with unhappy situations such as being jobless, hungry, broke, away from home, lonely, or downhearted because of an unfaithful lover. (Tanner 39)
The early blues were very irregular rhythmically and usually followed speech patterns, as can be heard in the recordings made in the twenties and thirties by the legendary bluesmen Charley Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Robert Johnson and Lightnin' Hopkins among others. (RSR&RE 53) The meter of the blues is usually written in iambic pentameter. The first line is generally repeated and third line is different from the first two. (Tanner 38) The repetition of the first line serves a purpose as it gives the singer some time to come up with a third line. Often the lyrics of a blues song do not seem to fit the music, but a good blues singer will accent certain syllables and eliminate others so that everything falls nicely into place. (Tanner 38)
The structure of blues lyrics usually consists of several three-line verses. The first line is sung and then repeated to roughly the same melodic phrase (perhaps the same phrase played diatonically a perfect fourth away), the third line has a different melodic phrase:
I'm going to leave baby, ain't going to say goodbye. I'm going to leave baby, ain't going to say goodbye. But I'll write you and tell you the reason why. (Kamien 519)
Construction Of The Blues
Most blues researchers claim that the very early blues were patterned after English ballads and often had eight, ten, or sixteen bars. (Tanner 36) The blues now consists of a definite progression of harmonies usually consisting of eight, twelve or sixteen measures, though the twelve bar blues are, by far, the most common.
The 12 bar blues harmonic progression (the one-four-five) is most often agreed to be the following: four bars of tonic, two of subdominant, two of tonic, two of dominant, and two of tonic. Or, alternatively, I,I,I,I,IV,IV,I,I,V,V,I,I. Each roman numeral indicates a chord built on a specific tone in the major scale. Due to the influence of rock and roll, the tenth chord has been changed to IV. This alteration is now considered standard. (Tanner 37) In practice, various intermediate chords, and even some substitute chord patterns, have been used in blues progressions, at least since the nineteen-twenties. (Machlis 578) Some purists feel that any variations or embellishments of the basic blues pattern changes its quality or validity as a blues song. For instance, if the basic blues chord progression is not used, then the music being played is not the blues. Therefore, these purists maintain that many melodies with the word "blues" in the title, and which are often spoken of as being the blues, are not the blues because their melodies lack this particular basic blues harmonic construction. (Tanner 37) I believe this viewpoint to be a bit wide of the mark, because it places a greater emphasis on blues harmony than melody.
The principal blues melodies are, in fact, holler cadences, set to a steady beat and thus turned into dance music and confined to a three-verse rhymed stanza of twelve to sixteen bars. (Lomax 275) The singer can either repeat the same basic melody for each stanza or improvise a new melody to reflect the changing mood of the lyrics. (Kamien 519) Blues rhythm is also very flexible. Performers often sing "around" the beat, accenting notes either a little before or behind the beat. (Kamien)
Jazz instrumentalists frequently use the chord progression of the twelve-bar blues as a basis for extended improvisations. The twelve or sixteen bar pattern is repeated while new melodies are improvised over it by the soloists. As with the Baroque bassocontinuo, the repeated chord progression provides a foundation for the free flow of such improvised melodic lines. (Kamien 520)
One of the problems regarding defining what the blues are is the variety of authoritative opinions. The blues is neither an era in the chronological development of jazz, nor is it actually a particular style of playing or singing jazz. (Tanner 35) Some maintain (mostly musicologists) that the blues are defined by the use of blue notes (and on this point they also differ - some say that they are simply flatted thirds, fifths, and sevenths applied to a major scale [forming a pentatonic scale]; some maintain that they are microtones; and some believe that they are the third, or fifth, or seventh tones sounded simultaneously with the flatted third, or fifth, or seventh tones respectively [minor second intervals]). Others feel that the song form (twelve bars, one-four-five) is the defining feature of the blues. Some feel that the blues is a way to approach music, a philosophy, in a manner of speaking. And still others hold a much wider sociological view that the blues are an entire musical tradition rooted in the black experience of the post-war South. Whatever one may think of the social implications of the blues, whether expressing the American or black experience in microcosm, it was their "strong autobiographical nature, their intense personal passion, chaos and loneliness, executed so vibrantly that it captured the imagination of modern musicians" and the general public as well. (Shapiro 13)
Kamien, Michael. _Music: An Appreciation_. 3d Ed. N.Y.: McGraw Hill, 1984.; Kennedy, Michael. _The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Music_. N.Y.: 1980.; Lomax, Alan. _The Land Where the Blues Began_. N.Y.: Pantheon Books, 1993.; Pareles, Jon and Patricia Romanowski, eds. _The Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll_.N.Y.: Rolling Stone Press, 1983.; Priestly, Brian. _Jazz On Record: A History_. N.Y.: Billboard Books, 1991.; Salzman, Eric and Michael Sahl. _Making Changes_. N.Y.: G. Schirmer, 1977.; Shapiro, Harry. _Eric Clapton: Lost in the Blues_. N.Y.: Da Capo Press, 1992.; Tanner, Paul and Maurice Gerow. _A Study of Jazz_. Dubuque, IA: William C. Brown Publishers, 1984.
by Daniel Leary
Mythic Narrative, 1st Variation:
Story of the bluesman, the Devil, and the deal at the crossroads, as retold in Stephen Davis's Hammer of the Gods.
In the delta of the Mississippi River, where Robert Johnson was born, they said that if an aspiring bluesman waited by the side of a deserted country crossroads in the dark of a moonless night, then Satan himself might come and tune his guitar, sealing a pact for the bluesman's soul and guaranteeing a lifetime of easy money, women, and fame. They said that Robert Johnson must have waited by the crossroads and gotten his guitar fine-tuned.
I went to the crossroad, fell down on my knees
Asked the Lord above "Have mercy, save poor Bob, if you please."
Mmmmm, standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Standin' at the crossroad, I tried to flag a ride
Didn't nobody seem to know me, everybody pass me by
Mmm, the sun goin' down, boy, dark gon' catch me here
oooo ooee eeee, boy, dark gon' catch me here
I haven't got no lovin' sweet woman that love and feel my care
You can run, you can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
You can run, tell my friend-boy Willie Brown
Lord, that I'm standin' at the crossroad, babe I believe I'm sinkin' down
The mythic narratives I have chosen to examine, and which I will attempt to interpret, are the stories of crossroad deals between rural Mississippi bluesmen (Robert Johnson in particular) and the Devil. These are deals that Johnson and others supposedly made for virtuosic chops, fame, and fortune, provided by the Devil, in exchange for the bluesman's immortal soul. These are Faustian pacts consecrated in midnight meetings on deserted country crossroads by having the Devil tune the bluesman's guitar. These are contracts made by poor rural black men on the haunted byways of the Mississippi Delta in the 1920's and 1930's.
These stories, birthed by an oral narrative tradition, still seem to carry the hushed tone of late-night Delta roadhouse confessions and the sticky hot atmosphere of a Mississippi night, north of New Orleans, with its ties to Spain, Haiti, and Voodoo. It is not hard to believe that stories of a Faustian nature would grow out of such fertile mythic soil. With the murky, primordial bayou country of the Delta as the backdrop for these tales, the land itself becomes a living testament to things ancient, mysterious, and powerful. The bayou country setting, compelling as it may be, is only one part of a mythological construction that stretches across time, cultural barriers, and vast geographic distances.
To accurately interpret meaning from these tales, one must examine all the actors involved. You have to know who the blues people are (Robert Johnson specifically and blues people in general). You have to know who the Devil is, what the crossroads are, and why they dealt there. One has to have a grasp of the broader social issues of the region and deduce any effect that they may have had in the shaping of the myth. Who propagated the myth and what was gained by doing so? Did the teller believe the story? Did the listener? Who keeps telling the story today and why? Once you start answering these questions, what may at first seem a simple tale of greed and it's consequence becomes an incredibly complex social commentary, mythic syncretism, and act of cultural resistance.
I will use Johnson's lifetime as a road map for my discussion, addressing social, political, economic, cultural, and mythological issues as they are introduced into or impact upon Johnson's life. It is my hope that this chronologic structure will make a manageable forum for this large group of complex ideas.
On May 8, 1911, Robert Johnson, the product of a union between Julia Dodds and Noah Johnson, was born into a world not of his making (LaVere 1990, p. 7). Johnson, like all humans, was a victim of both fate and history. He was a victim of fate with regard to his God-given (read genetic make-up) physical and mental capacities, and a victim of history with regard to the nature of the environmental, economic, and social conditions in which he was raised. Johnson was both blessed and cursed by his inherited qualities and conditions.
Born with the potential physical and mental capacities needed for musical virtuosity and a mind capable of great transcendent vision, Johnson was indeed a very gifted individual. Fate also dealt Johnson his lean frame, the timbre of his voice, and perhaps the most overriding component of his personal make-up (historically speaking), his black skin color.
Had Johnson been born in west Africa, the land from which Johnson's ancestors had been forcibly taken, his inherent characteristics would have made him a prime candidate to be a griot or other spiritual leader of some capacity. Had he been born elsewhere in the New World, a son of Brazil or Haiti, his obvious talents would have made him a fixture of his community rather than a fatalistic outcast, drifting though the dark recesses of a criminal and spiritual underworld. But, alas, Johnson was not born to these worlds. A true "victim" of history, Robert Johnson was born in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, in the heart of the Mississippi Delta.
If there were areas of the world in the early part this century that were harder on a black person than the southern United States, I have neither read nor heard of them. To this day, the Mississippi Delta area is one of the most impoverished regions in the country, and in 1911 its bottom-of-the-barrel standard of living was only rivaled by the very worst immigrant ghettos and the tragic plight of native peoples living on reservation lands. To be black in Mississippi during these days can be likened to living under the rule of a hostile invader.
White southerners, beaten in the Civil War by the industrial might of the North, carried with them what can be described as an unresolvable vendetta with their northern adversaries. The black population of the South became a living reminder of the defeat of the old southern way of life, which, for most whites in the South, had never been that great.
Pre-Civil War living conditions were forgotten, and poor southern whites were satisfied to blame their black neighbors for their low standard of living, lack of upward mobility, and the limitations of available employment. Led by the false visions of a once utopian Dixie, orchestrated by old southern hierarchies, and fueled by the anger of the disenfranchised poor white underclass, the white South directed its frustration and hate at something that false history and defeated tradition demanded, black people.
Beaten in battle, the braintrust of the old South manipulated Reconstruction through legislative and policy decisions. Enter the feudalistic system of sharecropping to maintain the pre-emancipation paternal hierarchies of master and slave under the guise of planter and tenant. Enter Jim Crow with its two separate regimes of truth and justice, the county farm, and legislated racially segregated housing.
The economic plight of poor white southerners birthed the KKK, whose message of racial hatred fueled thousands of lynchings and mutilations, causing areas like the Delta to become places of fear and loathing. An argument can be made, and a strong one at that, that the main seed of worry in Johnson's Cross Road Blues is not some moment of Faustian regret, but the fear involved in being a traveling bluesman, with no place to go and no one to befriend, in a land where you could just as easily be killed, beaten, or tortured as be left in peace. These were the issues that blacks in the Deep South had at the front of their minds every day of their lives.
Within 30 years of the passage of the 16th Amendment, it became obvious that the African-American population of the South was to be beaten, re-enslaved, and, if need be, annihilated until such a time when satisfaction could be gained from the jaws of cultural, political, and military defeat. This was the world into which the infant Johnson had the bad luck to be born -- the world that would shape his God-given abilities into one of the most dynamic bluesmen to ever live.
At the time of Johnson's birth, the musical traditions of African-Americans had already passed through many phases of development. African and European musical traditions had been mixing for many hundreds of years, manifesting themselves in the field holler, the spiritual, the Hoodoo -- encoded passages of Creole work songs, as well as an unknown number of time-lost styles that were unceremoniously dumped with the shackles of slavery. It was not until the early 1900's that what would become know to the world as "America's Music" began to make its way into the American mainstream.
The dissemination of jazz, ragtime, and the blues in the early 1900's was occurring at a rapid pace. All three had important mainstream contributors: jazz's Buddy Bolden, ragtime's Scott Joplin, and blues' W.C. Handy. It was during this time that much of America was hearing these new sounds of ragtime and jazz for the first time, be it in their parlors or urban red-light districts. The styles of music that we classify today as classic and country blues were just beginning to make their first steps toward fame and recognition beyond certain segments of the African-American community. Classic and country blues were the blues traditions that were most active during Robert Johnson's lifetime, and aside from the influences of Mississippi Delta Hoodoo, they were the two guiding forces to which his music would both absorb and contribute to the most.
The classic blues singer was, nine times out of ten, a woman who had honed her skills singing in all-black, traveling minstrel shows. These minstrel shows were, in fact, an outgrowth of a pitiful tradition in which white musicians/comedians donned black face paint and sang "traditional nigger folk songs." These "Nigger Minstrel" shows were all the rage in Europe in the mid-19th century. One of the most popular songs preformed by these troupes was a little number called The Jim Crow Jump, written about the strange gait of a crippled black stable hand's walk (Oakley 1976, p. 20-21). The broad-based success of these "burnt cork" minstrel shows opened the door for many African-Americans to perform in their own right, but at the same time, they set the standards by which all dark-skinned performers would be expected to follow. For most black performers, that was no easy pill to swallow, nor should it have been.
The black-run minstrel shows of the 1910's were a combination of song, dance, theater, comedy, circus, and freak show, oftentimes traveling the country by train and always playing for predominantly segregated audiences. The road was very hard on these performers (as it was on all traveling African-Americans), but the comraderie of the collective group gave these singers a strength and kinship that would follow them out of the minstrel show and into the spotlight of 1920's blues singer stardom. The unity displayed in the classic blues community is in stark contrast to the brooding isolation expressed by most country blues players of the same era. These two alternate reactions to a similarly hostile world by what would seem to be two closely related groups raises some questions about gender and how it affected the coping devices of the African-American community.
Why was it that women blues singers aligned themselves into this sort of church-based, supportive sisterhood? What made Hoodoo so attractive to the lone bluesmen? I hope to sort out some of these issues as we go along. I feel comfortable pointing out one of the main contributing factors right now, that being the economic fall out of the 1920's blues boom.
The blues boom of the 1920's grew as a result of three major political, social, and technological forces which converged in the mid- to late 1910's. In 1914, World War I broke out in Europe, causing the demand for war-related goods to outstrip the supply that Europe could produce on its own. To meet this demand, European militaries looked to America to provide. It did, and northern industry boomed. Unfortunately, the war that was responsible for this economic boon also presented American war profiteers with a problem. Up until 1914, northern industry had relied heavily upon fresh European immigrants to work in the factories, mills, and mines of the North. During World War I, European immigration into the United States dropped from a pre-war 1914 high of 1.2 million a year to a 1918 low of 10,000 a year, an 83-percent drop in four years (Oakley 1976, p. 83). So much demand for war goods and so little variable capital (read workers) drove industry to search for a new supply of labor. They found it in southern blacks.
Word of northern jobs and a better life flooded into the South via black railroad porters and northern-based, black-run newspapers like the Chicago Defender. And though many southern African-Americans (from 20 percent living in the North during the 1890's to 35 percent in 1920) moved northward, these years of greater economic opportunity were far from days of wine and roses (Oakley 1976, p. 81, 88). Most of these new arrivals lived in the rat-infested ghettos of northern and southern cities. And with many more applicants than jobs available, unemployment and crime in many cities grew to epidemic proportions.
Women tended to do better than men, employment-wise, during this transition. Cooks, nannies, and domestic help of all sorts where always in demand, regardless of how the mills or factories were doing. Black women could be hired on to these jobs when black men typically were not. Women became the breadwinners and family leaders of many urban households, while a large percentage of men, with their options limited by race, industry, and gender, began to drift into a quagmire of depression and alienation. You can start to see the divisions within the black community along both gender and later urban and rural lines. The African-American community, while faced with many universal problems, was not a homogeneous society. It would be inaccurate to portray it so.
In addition to the economic pitfalls facing blacks, the traditional problems of racism haunted their every move. Southern whites, who still thought of African-Americans as "theirs," resented the departure of so many "possessions" into the hands of their traditional enemy, the North. More than one African-American was lynched by southern whites for a practice reported by the Atlanta Constitution in October 1919 as: SUMTER NEGRO FOUND DEAD AFTER SPREADING PROPAGANDA (Oakley 1976, p. 84).
In the North, whites, who conditionally supported the 16th Amendment (as long as they didn't have to live with "them"), began welcoming their new neighbors with shouts of "nigger go home." In 1919, 25 major white-initiated race riots ignited in cities both North and South (Oakley, 1976, p. 88).
Getting heat from both sides, black Americans struggled to establish footholds in urban centers all over the United States, many of which would become centers of African-American musical innovation and employment. Examples of these are the blues scene of Atlanta's Decatur Street, Memphis's Beale Street jug band scene, and later, the depression-born blues scenes of East St. Louis and the south side of Chicago.
Gathering steam alongside these socio-political trends were the great leaps being made in the availability and technology of sound recording and audio reproduction. It was in the late 1910's that the record player began to be something that the average American could afford to own and operate. All segments of America began to purchase phonographs, and the demand for music to fit all tastes led to the creation of hundreds of regional record labels, selling music as diverse as hillbilly and Wagner. But just as with housing, schools, and the military, the recording industry was segregated (Oakley 1976, p. 133).
Records of African-American performers, regardless of content, fell into a category called the race record. Unlike most regional recording companies, which recorded works of performers from in and around their area of distribution, the vast majority of race records were produced by northern, white-run labels which would import performers to the North to record and then sell their product to the African-American community all over the country.
Race records sold big in the twenties. Mamie Smith's August 10, 1920 recording Crazy Blues sold 75,000 copies in its first month on the shelves, and that was only the beginning (Oakley 1976, p. 63). Classic blues singers Ma (Mother of the Blues) Rainey, Paramount Records' biggest selling star in the early 1920's, and Bessie (Empress of the Blues) Smith, who sold millions of "sides" before her tragic death (the result of a car accident in 1937), were the biggest stars of the race market and made a great deal of money for both themselves and northern record executives. I guess it should be no surprise that the biggest blues stars of this period were women. Commercial art tries to appeal to the folks with the money, and in the race record market those folks were often women.
There can be no doubt that a young Robert Johnson, who from the time of his birth until the mid-1920's, had been shuffled around between relatives and family friends, rural Mississippi and Memphis, Tennessee, would surely have heard and been influenced by both the style and message of the classic blues singers. It would not be until the late 1920's, while living in Robinsonville, Mississippi, that Johnson would be exposed to his greatest musical influences -- the great country blues players Charlie Patton, Willie Brown, and Son House, all of whom lived and worked on the nearby Dockery Plantation (LaVere 1990, p. 9).
In February 1929, Johnson and 16-year-old Virginia Travis where married in Penton, Mississippi (LaVere 1990, p. 9). The newlyweds moved in with Johnson's older half-sister Bessie and her husband, Granville Hines, on the Klein plantation just east of Robinsonville. Johnson took up farming Bessie's share and began learning the skill of playing the guitar on the side. With his wife, and a child on the way, Robert's life was beginning to take on the look of a career sharecropper. That "look" would not last long.
In April 1930, Virginia and child died in childbirth (LaVere 1990, p. 11). Robert would marry once again, but only for convenience. Those who knew Johnson have said that he never spoke much about Virginia's death or personal matters of any other sort. We will never know the extent of his feelings on this loss, but I think one can safely say that Virginia's death must have played a major role in Johnson's leap into the blues. The blues tradition that Johnson entered was that of the country bluesman.
From the 1890's through the 1940's, traveling bluesmen worked the plantation, barrelhouse, logging camp, and roadhouse circuits of the Deep South. They played guitars (6, 8, and 12 string), harps, and in the case of most barrelhouse players, the piano (Jelly Roll Morton and Big Joe Williams, for example). Their songs were patchwork quilts of women (read sex), poverty, the county farm, isolation, violence, and Hoodoo. In short, they were the realities of their own personal lives. The country bluesman was the bard of an extremely violent African-American underworld -- the songster of the Devil, if you were to believe the rhetoric of the day's black Christian church (Finn 1986, p. 153).
A few of the great early contributors to this genre were the likes of Charlie Patton, Henry "Ragtime Texas" Thomas, and Johnson's neighbors, Willie Brown and Son House. All four of these players had done some recording for the race record market by 1929. Players like Son House traveled to northern studios to record, while many others had their songs captured by an operation know as field recording. Field recordings were made in mobile recording studios all over the South. Studios set up in hotels, private homes, and (God forbid) churches were the sites of many historic country blues recordings, including Johnson's own. In 1929, the bottom fell out of the race record market, but that should be no surprise.
By 1929, the U.S. economy was primed for disaster. Industry, fueled by an orgy of stock market speculation, was plain and simply, overproducing goods (read supply), outstripping the buying power of world markets (read demand) and causing the stock market to crash. Black Monday would send a tidal wave of economic disaster across every segment of the American population, ushering America into the Great Depression of the 1930's.
There are historians who maintain that the Depression had little impact on the condition of black America. To a certain extent, this is correct. For example, many black businesses were so far outside the "loop" of mainstream American business that the domino effect of bankruptcies and bank failures hardly touched them. One can also argue that so many African-Americans were in poverty in the 1920's that any additional suffering could not have been significant. While both points certainly have their merits, it is my belief that things got significantly worse for black Americans during the 1930's, particularly in the Deep South.
First, African-Americans, who had always been the last hired, were the first to be fired during the Depression. Any economic input via mainstream white America was yanked out of black communities, throwing many African-Americans into poverty.
Second, the policies of FDR's Agricultural Adjustment Administration hurt tenant farmers tremendously. The AAA's so-called "Cotton Contract," which had intended to raise the price of cotton by paying growers to cut production, ended up lining the pockets of landowning planters and devastating thousands of sharecroppers. Most planters kept all the federal monies for themselves. At the same time, they demanded payments from their tenants, who had just plowed under their share. Without a crop, how could they have possibly paid such a bill? The introduction of this huge cost into the already debt-laden finances of most sharecroppers resulted in thousands of tenant farmer evictions. Whole families were kicked off their shares and hit the road like so many others in the 1930's (Oakley 1976, p. 204).
An interesting sidebar to this screw job (I can't think of a better way to say it.) was the birth of the Southern Tenant Farmer Union. Many of the STFU's tactics and organization were used as the blueprints for the civil rights movements which followed in the 1950's and '60's (Oakley 1976, p. 204).
It's ironic that America's "long dark tea time of the soul" would coincide so closely with Johnson's. The Depression became the ideal tragic backdrop for one man's journey into the murky depths of his own sorrow and psyche. In late April 1930, filled with a rambling spirt, Johnson wandered southward, into the heart of the Piney Woods.
Between April 1930 and sometime in 1932, Johnson lived in Martinsville, Mississippi (LaVere 1990, p. 12). Martinsville, carved out of a thick wilderness known as Piney Woods, lies 40 miles south of Jackson and a mere 60 miles north of Louisiana. The logging and turpentine camps of the Piney Woods had provided traveling bluesmen with work since the late 1890's, and it was in these camps that Johnson got his first taste of a bluesman's life and craft. During Johnson's tenure in Bayou country, he studied the blues from guitarist Ike Zinnerman. It is also likely that Johnson studied the secrets of the Hoodoo root doctor.
I think if you examine the evidence, you will find the possibility of Johnson partaking in a venture of this nature highly probable, as well as very important to his musical development. Martinsville's close proximity to New Orleans would be the first clue to any investigation of this nature.
In the 18th century, when the French took control of New Orleans, thousands of Haitian slaves came with them. Unlike the slave populations of North America, Haitian slaves were not severely discouraged from practicing their traditional religious beliefs. West African religions which had been transplanted to Haiti, were transplanted to New Orleans. All people of African decent who lived in and around New Orleans had a working knowledge of voodoo, or hoodoo, as it would become known in the United States.
In the centuries before the Civil War, the root doctor was the healer, fortune teller, and primary source of African truth and wisdom on plantations and urban centers all over the South. It was only in New Orleans that their presence was so visible (with its Voodoo Kings/Queens and Congo Square). The African beliefs deposited in the mind of the Hoodoo man or woman were the spiritual strength behind resistance displayed by slaves in their bondage. Tragically, Hoodoo was thrown off with the yoke of slavery in an effort to enter the mainstream of America and was at the very least forgotten by most African-Americans, save the bluesman (Finn 1986, p. 151-172).
As a part of my investigation, I decided to contact someone at the University of Minnesota's Afro-American Studies Department who could recount the role of Hoodoo in the development of jazz, the blues, and the dances at Congo Square. To my surprise, I could not find one person who thought themselves qualified to discuss this topic. When I spoke with Dr. Ron McCurdy (head of the jazz studies program) about Hoodoo and its role in the development of African-American music, his reaction was a blank stare, followed by the apologetic reply, "I've not heard of that (Hoodoo in music)." The deeper I dig into the huge literature of American blues history, the more I find this strange dichotomy of texts that have no mention of "Crossroad deals" or Hoodoo whatsoever and texts that celebrate these phenomena. The liner notes accompanying the CBS compact disc set of Johnson's recordings go out their way to make no mention of a deal with the Devil and use a Websters definition to define the word crossroads and its usage in Cross Road Blues.
It is this portion of authors who seem to do everything in their power to portray all blues as a purely secular music. They were not. Many blues are as sacred as any Baptist hymn, as any Gregorian chant, or as a Hindu's Rig Veda. Why are they not treated so? Well, this blind spot has many historical and social contributors ranging from white Americans' fears of "sinister" voodoo magic to the black Christian church's campaign to eliminate all competition for the hearts and minds of free African-Americans to the nonexistent role of "superstition" in our modern, science-driven world. With these factors in mind, I would like to suggest that the biggest roadblock holding most people back from a clear vision of Hoodoo and its role in black America's music and history is a lack of understanding of its vocabulary.
Now, I'm no jazz guy, but I have enough musical knowledge to know that if you know your II-V-I and I-IV-V changes, your diatonic chord scales, your modes, and what Miles Davis called the "cliches of jazz," you'll have a pretty good start on speaking and understanding the language of jazz. Likewise, if you don't know the nuts and bolts of your II-V-I and I-IV-V changes, your diatonic chord scales, your modes, and haven't studied your "cliches of jazz," you'll have a very hard time understanding jazz, let alone make sense speaking of it. The same thing applies to Hoodoo and its languages of rhythm, dance, ritual, and mythological metaphor.
Due to the underground stature that Hoodoo was forced to take (first by whites in the late 1700's and then by free black Christians in the late 1800's), the chances of spotting hoodooisms becomes extremely problematic due to their heavily coded nature. So if you don't know what to look for, chances are, you are not going to recognize Hoodoo when you see it. As to the extent to which Johnson was influenced by Hoodoo, I offer the following thoughts.
Many of Johnson's songs are filled with hoodoo-encoded lyrics. References to the "mojo hand," the "crossroads," the "stones in his passway," and the "Devil" all speak volumes in Hoodoo lore. That's provided that you have the Hoodoo vocabulary to spot and understand them. Judging by the manner in which Johnson used these mythological metaphors in his songs, I have to believe he knew a considerable amount on the topic.
I believe that Hoodoo was a means by which Johnson dealt with and resolved his own personal feelings and abilities with the hard, sad world in which he lived. Hoodoo became a means of empowering this "victim" of fate and history. I believe the way that Johnson empowered himself was his deal at the crossroads.
The first clue I found that pointed to this possibility was a story another country bluesman told his brother. Tommy Johnson (no relation) told his bother that he had made a deal with a man named Legba at some deserted Mississippi crossroads (Barlow 1989, p. 41). I tracked Legba through Haiti and back to Africa, where Legba is a god known to the Yoruban people as Esu or Eshu.
Esu is an extremely dynamic god. Above the bounds of ethical judgement, Esu, the lord of the crossroad (the place where heaven and earth meet for the Yoruban people), carries messages and sacrifices to and from the gods. No communication to the gods can be made without Esu's help, so he plays a role in virtually every Yoruban or Voodoo ritual (Euba 1989, p. 4). In addition to being this cosmic go-between, Esu, whose wisdom and humility are the greatest of all Yoruban gods, has command of a supernatural force know as ashe. Ashe is the force to make all things happen and multiply (Thompson 1983, p. 18). The manner in which Esu uses it is entirely up to Esu.
I found the second major clue interpeting Johnson's situation when I ran across the role of supernatural possession in both the Yoruban religion and its New World descendants. When I think of supernatural possession, the first thing that comes to my mind is the film The Exorcist. In The Exorcist, a young girl's mind and body are taken over by Satan. This (being possessed), I discovered as a youngster who had, against the better judgment of my parents, stayed up late and watched The Exorcist, was not a desirable thing to have happen to you, and fear of its possibility scared the crap out of me for years. To a child raised in Bahia, Brazil, however, supernatural possession might just be the best thing that could happen to you. To be possessed is to be chosen by a god, to be shown much favor (Finn 1986, p. 222). To have a god choose your body for its earthly manifestation speaks volumes about a person, and after some careful considerations, it speaks volumes about Johnson.
For whatever reasons, psychological, social, or environmental, Johnson's genius could not manifest itself until it became Legba's possession. Full of ashe, Johnson acquired confidence, discipline, and vision beyond that which he had ever demonstrated before. I believe Robert Johnson's soul was possessed by the Devil (read Legba), or at least that Robert Johnson believed it was. By truly believing in his fate, Legba enabled Johnson to resolve the conflicts between his great talents and his miserable environment.
If it was Hoodoo that empowered Johnson, and I believe it was, it did one hell of a good job. When Johnson first arrived to the Piney Woods, he was a broken man and a horseshit musician (ask Son House) (Finn 1986, p. 212). When he left, relocating to Helena, Arkansas, less than two years later, he was a powerful, charismatic man, a passionate visionary, and the best blues player in the world (ask Son House once again) (Finn 1986, p. 213).
The final six years of his life would amount to Johnson's entire musical career. Using Helena as a base of operations, Johnson followed the footsteps of all the country bluesmen who went before him. He rambled all around the Delta area, from Baton Rouge to Memphis, playing jukes, roadhouses, country picnics, and the hundreds of other places where blues was played and appreciated.
In 1935, desiring to record, like his idols Son House, Lonnie Johnson, and Tommy Johnson, Robert contacted the famous Jackson-based, "race" talent scout H.C. Speir. Speir had nothing for Johnson at the time of his inquiry, so he passed Johnson's name on to Ernie Oertle. After an audition, Oertle, a talent scout for Vocalion Records, decided to take Johnson to San Antonio, Texas, to record (LaVere 1990, p. 15).
On November 23-27, 1936, Johnson recorded 16 sides for Vocalion Records in a San Antonio hotel room. This session would include Johnson's only hit (and a marginal hit at that) Terraplane Blues. Johnson recorded one year later, June 19-20, 1937, a two-day session in Dallas for Vocalion that resulted in 13 additional sides. These 29 song are the only audio record of Johnson's playing. He would never record again (LaVere 1990, p. 46-47).
Robert Johnson's recordings became some of the most influential in all of American music. His complex, three-part playing style would set the precedent for future R&B and rock & roll orchestration, with the drums and bass mimicking his rhythmic, walking bottom strings; the guitar filling in the chord changes and playing blues lead lines; and the voice, singing full of passion and speaking the truth.
Johnson wasn't the first player to use a walking baseline. Nor was he the first to use a I-IV-V chord progression. Johnson wasn't even the first to write blues songs with lyrics of such vision or sing with so much heart. What made Johnson so special was his combination of so many of the strongest elements of blues tradition under the direction of a singular genius.
It was also during the mid-1930's that John and Alan Lomax would record the likes of Leadbelly, Booker White, Son House, and Blind Willie McTell for the Library of Congress. Johnson's Texas recordings and those pulled off by the Lomaxes are some of the most important recordings in all of American music.
During the little more than a year between his final recording date and his death, Johnson would continue to play in Delta jukes and would take trips that took him a thousand miles away from the Delta. Johnson, Johnny Shines, and Clavin Frazier traveled from Helena northward, playing as far away as Windsor, Ontario; Chicago; and New York City. I have read that Johnson is said to have occasionally played with small combos during this trip (LaVere 1990, p. 15). If this is so, I would bet money that Johnson, had he not been killed, would eventually have ended up in Chicago where Big Bill Broonzy, Tampa Red, and Sonny Boy Williamson were reinventing the blues via the small amplified combo. Others have speculated that Johnson might have jumped out of the blues altogether and into jazz, or something new and different.
Musically speaking, Johnson was a very young 27 years old (having only been playing seriously for eight years), but he already had chops comparable to a Franz Liszt, a Charlie Parker, or an Andres Segovia and the creative vision of a Miles Davis, a W.E.B. Dubois, or an F. Scott Fitzgerald. His loss, like those of Jimi Hendrix and Emily Bronte, have provided a host of "what if" type questions for the generations that would follow. I really believe that Johnson had just scratched the surface of his musical capabilities at the time of his death. But any treasures untold, he took with him, leaving only his 29 sides, his crossroads deal, and stories told by his peers for people to remember him by.
On August 13, 1938, Robert Johnson was killed at a juke near Greenwood, Mississippi. It is believed that he was poisoned by a jealous husband. His mother and brother-in-law attended his burial in a wooden coffin furnished by the county at the old Zion Church graveyard near Morgan City, Mississippi, a stone's throw off Mississippi Highway 7 (LaVere 1990, p. 18). And with that, it would seem that Johnson's final request was granted.
You may bury my body, down by the highway side.
You may bury my body, down by the highway side.
So my old evil spirt can catch a Greyhound bus and ride.
-- Robert Johnson, Me and the Devil Blues
Robert Johnson Songs
Most of the collection, minus one song (Traveling Riverside Blues), is available on The Complete Recordings (1990, 1996)
"Come on in My Kitchen"
"Cross Road Blues"
"Dead Shrimp Blues"
"Drunken Hearted Man"
"From Four Till Late"
"Hellhound on My Trail"
"I'm a Steady Rollin' Man"
"I Believe I'll Dust My Broom"
"If I Had Possession over Judgment Day"
"Kind Hearted Woman Blues"
"Last Fair Deal Gone Down"
"Little Queen of Spades"
"Love in Vain"
"Me and the Devil Blues"
"Milk Cow's Calf Blues"
"Preachin' Blues (Up Jumped The Devil)"
"Rambling on My Mind"
"Stones in My Passway"
"Stop Breakin' Down Blues"
"Sweet Home Chicago"
"They're Red Hot"
"Traveling Riverside Blues"
"When You Got a Good Friend"
Misogyny and Respect in
Robert Johnson Songs
by: Anne Lemon
Robert Johnson displays two attitudes toward the women in his songs. In songs such as "Terraplane Blues," Johnson shows a misogynist attitude when he uses the sexual metaphor of a car as a woman' body. In other songs such as "When You Got a Good Friend," Johnson shows a high degree of respect for the woman about whom he is singing, by deferring to her judgment and appealing to her mercy.
In "Terraplane Blues," Robert Johnson has stripped a woman of her humanity and likened her to a machine for his sexual use. One of the differences between Johnson's treatment of the woman in "Terraplane Blues" and the woman in "When You've Got a Good Friend" is the degree of autonomy he acknowledges. In "Terraplane Blues" Johnson speaks of all the things he plans to do to this woman, even though it appears that she is not interested in doing anything with him. Even though Johnson acknowledges that "your horn won't even blow," that doesn't deter him in his plans: "I'm bound to check your oil"; "I'm 'on' get deep down in this connection, keep on tanglin' with these wires."
In "when You Got a Good Friend," Johnson grants this woman a high degree of autonomy. Even though she has left him, Johnson is not bound and determined to make her take him back. He is in fact hesitant about approaching her ("Wonder could I bear apologize / or would she sympathize with me") and acknowledges that it's her decision: ("babe, I may be right ay wrong / Baby it's yo'y opinion").
Another way in which Johnson's treatment of the two women differs is in his level of respect for them as evidenced by how he refers to them. In "Terraplane Blues" Johnson says "Somebody's been runnin' my batteries down on this machine" and then asks the woman, "Who been drivin' my Terraplane for you." He doesn't ask, "who have you been with," but instead, "who has been with my property." These lines evidence that, in Johnson's opinion, not only is this woman just a machine for his sexual pleasure, she is also merely his property.
In contrast, Johnson refers to the woman in the other song as a "good friend." Anyone familiar with Johnson's work will recognize the weight that the title "good friend" carries. This is probably the highest degree of respect Johnson has granted anyone in his songs. Indeed, "When You Got a Good Friend" is almost a statement of reverence. Johnson practically declares himself not worthy of this woman when he acknowledges how sweet, good and loyal she is ("just as sweet as a girl friend can be"; "a good friend that will stay right by your side"), and how he mistreated her ("I mistreated my baby / I can't see no reason why.")
Johnson's treatment of the woman in both of these songs is moving. Although "Terraplane Blues" may be dismissed as a harmless joke, a feminist analysis will recognize this song as a powerful, graphic, and terribly destructive, dehumanizing statement about women. When "You've Got a Good Friend" is equally powerful in an entirely different way. This song is one of Johnson's most open vulnerable statements about a love relationship, and I reveals a deep and genuine feeling about women that is not evidenced in so many of his misogynist songs.
One of the reasons these two songs are so fascinating in juxtaposition is that they seem to reveal the essential issue on which Johnson's alternately misogynist and loving attitudes toward women turn. The issue is loyalty. In his collected works Johnson sings about woman after woman treating him wrong and "doggin' him round"-cheating on him. These fickle relationships bring out Johnson's misogynist attitudes-he reveals in these songs that he is abusive, he treats these women equally badly, and he feels little emotion toward them beyond sexual attraction. "When You Got a Good Friend" is a good representative of the few songs in which Johnson reveals his sincere feelings of love for women. Johnson loves the woman in this song as a good friend precisely because she "will stay right by your side"-because she does not cheat him.