MASARYK UNIVERSITY

FACULTY OF EDUCATION

Department of English Language and Literature

From Down South to Chicago: Little Walter, Race and the Blues

Bachelor Thesis Brno 2017

Thesis Supervisor: Author: Michael George, M.A. Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda Bibliography Jiaxis Svoboda, J. From Down South to Chicago: Little Walter, Race and the Blues: bachelor thesis. Brno: Masaryk University, Faculty of Education, Department of English Language and Literature, 2017. 58 p., 10 p. appendices. Bachelor thesis supervisor: Michael George, M.A.

Bibliografický záznam Jiaxis Svoboda, J. From Down South to Chicago: Little Walter, Race and the Blues: bakalářská práce. Brno: Masarykova univerzita, Fakulta pedagogická, Katedra anglického jazyka a literatury, 2017. 58 l., 10 l. příloh. Vedoucí bakalářské práce: Michael George, M.A.

2 Abstract This bachelor thesis focuses on the life and work of Little Walter, an African American blues harmonica player. Reconstructing his journey from the Deep South, up the Mississippi river, to the urban space of late 1940s Chicago, the thesis views this journey metaphorically as a quest for personal freedom and a search for identity, both within the context of the Great Migration and the biracial space of urban Chicago. In addition to this the thesis inquires into the core circumstances leading to Walter's internal and external collapse, with regard to the notion of uprooting and migratory transplantation.

Anotace Bakalářská práce se zabývá životem a dílem afro-amerického bluesového hráče na foukací harmoniku Little Waltera. Rekonstruuje jeho cestu z hlubokého jihu na sever po Mississippi, do Chicaga konce 40. let 20. století. Na tuto cestu nahlíženo metaforicky jako na pátrání po osobní svobodě a hledání identity v kontextu Velké migrace a rasově smíšeného městského prostoru. Práce se dále zaměřuje na okolnosti, které byly klíčové ve Walterově vnitřním a vnějším krachu, s ohledem na koncepty vykořenění a migrační transplantace.

Key words

Little Walter, blues, harmonica, race, Chicago, migration, music, Muddy Waters, amplification

Klíčová slova

Little Walter, blues, foukací harmonika, rasa, Chicago, migrace, hudba, Muddy Waters, amplifikace

3 Declaration

I hereby declare that this thesis is my own, that I worked on it independently and that I used only the sources listed in the bibliography.

Prohlášení

Prohlašuji, že jsem závěrečnou diplomovou práci vypracoval samostatně, s využitím pouze citovaných literárních pramenů, dalších informací a zdrojů v souladu s Disciplinárním řádem pro studenty Pedagogické fakulty Masarykovy univerzity a se zákonem č. 121/2000 Sb., o právu autorském, o právech souvisejících s právem autorským a o změně některých zákonů (autorský zákon), ve znění pozdějších předpisů.

In Brno on 28 March 2017 ......

Jakub Jiaxis Svoboda

4 Acknowledgement

I would like to sincerely thank my supervisor, Michael George, M. A., for his patient guidance, invaluable insight and for keeping me focused. I would also like to thank my wife for always being out there for me.

5 Contents

INTRODUCTION...... 7 1 A QUEST FOR THE BLUES...... 9

1.1 NOT JUST THE DELTA...... 12 1.2 HARMONICA – THE PERFECT COMPANION...... 15 2 BORN IN LOUISIANA...... 18

2.1 PACK UP AND GONE...... 20 2.2 DESTINATION – CHICAGO...... 24 3 CHICAGO – A BLUE INSIGHT...... 26

3.1 FITTING MUDDY...... 30 3.2 CHESS AND THE BUSINESS...... 33 3.3 GOING ELECTRIC...... 36 4 TAKING A TUMBLE RIGHT FROM THE TOP...... 40

4.1 BANDLEADER EFFORTS...... 41 4.2 AN UNDEAD ICON...... 44 4.3 OBLIVION...... 49 CONCLUSION...... 52 LIST OF REFERENCES...... 54 APPENDICES...... 59

6 Introduction

When the Rolling Stones released their latest album “Blue and Lonesome”, which features covers of famous blues songs, in December 2016, they were asked by an American journalist whether the band's repertoire was not “an example of cultural appropriation”1. To this, Keith Richards, somewhat confusedly, responded that the blues was “quite Jewish” (possibly jestingly referring to the Chess brothers) and continued insisting that he was, in fact, black (ibid). Whether Richards actually is black or Jewish or whatnot is of little relevance: this whole incident, together with the fact that the legendary British rock and roll band took the time to record an album which features the songs of Afro-American performers such as Howlin' Wolf, Magic Sam and Little Walter, clearly demonstrates that the blues and its relation to race, is still, even in 2016, a world-wide phenomenon worthy of critical attention. The blues constitutes an inseparable part of American cultural heritage. Over the course of the African American struggle for equality, the blues was a medium through which Afro-Americans reflected the world around them, were it the hardships of life in the 1930s Delta or the struggles in the urban North decades later. The blues was the living voice of the African American, and its performers were the folks' cultural icons. Conversely, the chance of becoming a blues artist presented a unique opportunity for African Americans to rise above their station and, to a certain extent, fulfil their own American dream. This thesis revolves around the life of a single Afro-American blues musician – Little Walter. Having been inducted into the Rock&Roll Hall of Fame in 2008, he joined other prominent African-American blues performers such as Muddy Waters (inducted in 1987), Ma Rainey (1990) and Willie Dixon (1994). However, although Walter eventually became the most commercially successful artist to record under the Chess label, he still stands in the shadow of his senior colleague, Muddy Waters, despite of the fact that his amplified harmonica became an inseparable constituent of the Chicago blues sound. The thesis reconstructs Walter's journey from his Cajun background in

1 Petridis, Alexis. “The Rolling Stones: Blue & Lonesome Review – More Alive Than They've Sounded for Years.” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/nov/24/the-rolling-stones-blue-and-lonesome- review-covers-album-mick-jagger. Accessed 18 March 2017. 7 the Deep South, up the Mississippi river, to the urban space of late 1940s Chicago, viewing this journey metaphorically as a quest for personal freedom and a search for identity. As such, the reader may perceive it as an Afro- American case study in the form of a blues road trip. Owing to the speed at which everything happened with Walter, certain events and their effect on Walter are bound to be overlooked. As Ann Charters says in her introduction to On the Road by Kerouac, “the rush of events and personal encounters (...) move so swiftly that emotions are bypassed and short-circuited, submerged in Sal's feelings as he narrates the story” (xxi). Two crucial questions were posed. The first one is how the Great Migration was reflected in Little Walter's journey from Louisiana to Chicago and the extent to which the biracial context of Chicago influenced Walter's career. In addition to this the thesis attempts to inquire into the core circumstances leading to Walter's internal and external collapse, with particular regard to his Afro-American heritage, as well as the notion of uprooting and migratory transplantation. Attached to the thesis is also the author's original email interview with a current American harmonica player, Charlie Musselwhite, who was in frequent contact with Chicago bluesmen, including Little Walter, in the 1960s.

8 1 A Quest for the Blues

There are as many definitions of the blues as there are shades of black in the faces of the African-Americans who gave it birth. Although at the very beginning the blues was a black, Southern, musical form, over the years it has grown into a wide array of subgenres one can hardly all comprehend. Nowadays, blues is played virtually all around the globe: in Greece (rembetiko), Japan (emka) and Argentina (tango) (Wald 2). However, one question has puzzled scholars for decades – how and where did the blues actually start? If we start searching for the answer in dictionaries, a number of different possibilities are provided, with the most comprehensive in the Oxford Dictionary:

[the blues is] Melancholic music of black American folk origin, typically in a twelve- bar sequence. It developed in the rural southern US towards the end of the 19th century, finding a wider audience in the 1940s, as blacks migrated to the cities. This urban blues gave rise to rhythm and blues and rock and roll.2

This definition, which is in essence a brief overview of the genre’s history, points to the rural South as the birthplace of the blues, a view traditionally shared by some scholars (such as Palmer and Ferris). However, not even the most respected scholars can actually agree on where and how exactly the blues was born. Wald for instance argues that originally “the first music to be called the blues seems to have been [...] a sexy rhythm, popular with African American working-class dancers in New Orleans and other parts of the Deep South” (2). This strong initial link of the blues to dancing represents one of the key elements in understanding the role it has played in urban and non-urban contexts.

2 “Blues.” Oxford Living Dictionaries, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/blues. Accessed 23rd December 2016. For the purpose of drawing a comparison and showing the initial diversity with which the blues can be defined, two more definitions are provided:“a song often of lamentation characterized by usually 12-bar phrases, 3-line stanzas in which the words of the second line usually repeat those of the first, and continual occurrence of blue notes in melody and harmony” (Merriam-Webster) and “a type of music that began among African-American musicians in the southern US, often with lyrics (= words) about a difficult life or bad luck in love” (Cambridge Dictionary Online) 9 The fact that the blues is melancholic music is also sometimes disputed by several scholars – Wald argues that although the blues was predominantly marked by deeply emotional performances it was by no means limited only to these (2). In fact, in some of Little Walter’s tracks which deal with emotions and relationships, the underlying notion is that of a jesting hyperbole. For example, in Just Your Fool Walter threatens that if his girlfriend should leave he is going to buy a shotgun and shoot it at her. This is in fact a distinctive blues theme – unhappy love solved by a violent act from the singer.3 The above-mentioned definition contains yet another aspect regarding the origins of the blues promoted by scholars such as Palmer, who in his Deep Blues asserts that the blues derives from African music and that it is ultimately a kind of hangover which the first African slaves brought with them as they were shipped to Southern US (25). However, this is somewhat disputed in more recent writing on the subject – Davis for instance argues that the blues is to a certain extent what the Mississippians remembered but not transplanted from Africa. Davis tackles the traditional Afro-American link between the diddley bow and the blues by presenting the case of “the foremost exponent of slide guitar in the twenties and thirties”, Blind Willie Johnson, who presumably never even touched the diddley bow (32). If anything, the blues should be viewed as predominantly American music, rather than the white man’s debt to the oppressed African American. All these notions play an extremely crucial role in understanding the subject: one has to take into account that the blues should be perceived as a phenomenon rather than as a genre with delimited boundaries and that it is impossible to analyse the blues outside the respective socio-historical context, taking into account a multitude of interactions into which a blues artist enters. As Keil argues in his ground-breaking book Urban Blues, published as early as 1966, blues scholars share “a number of interests or preoccupations, first and foremost of which is the quest for the ‘real’ blues” (34). Although adopting a slightly sarcastic approach to what constitutes a true bluesman (he has to be old, obscure and should have been tutored by some legendary figure) Keil

3 In essence, the blues has long been closely entwined with violence – not only the notorious Southern lynchings, but also other forms of violence and gun-related crime. This aspect of the blues is for instance discussed by Gussow in Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the Blues Tradition. 10 furthermore explains that despite his criteria may be somewhat exaggerated, the romanticising element “is omnipresent in blues writing” (35). It is interesting to note that these acutely critical observations were made right in the middle of the American folk music revival, during which blues was held in high esteem as a totem of Afro-American heritage. Therefore, following Keil's argumentation, this thesis partially adopts a phenomenological perspective of the subject with occasional focus on the way scholars viewed it from an inescapably subjective perspective. Any blues research cannot be limited a mere musicological study – it is on the other hand vital to employ a multidisciplinary approach such as Keil did. For this reason, the work and life of a single blues star was selected for the purpose of this thesis: Little Walter is viewed as a fleeting figure within a multitude of interactions, very much like that of Jacob Flanders in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room. In any phenomenon, choice is a necessity:

In short, the observer is choked with observations. Only to prevent us from being submerged by chaos, nature and society between them have arranged a system of classification which is simplicity itself; stalls, boxes, amphitheatre, gallery. The moulds are filled nightly. There is no need to distinguish details. But the difficulty remains—one has to choose. (…) Never was there a harsher necessity! or one which entails greater pain, more certain disaster; for wherever I seat myself, I die in exile4

The following sub-chapter, which deals with the Delta blues, takes into consideration the subjective perspectives from which blues researchers viewed the origins of the genre in the light of recent academic writing on the subject, aiming to strip away some of the myths which have evolved around it. All in all, the Delta is where Little Walter came from.

4 “Jacob's Room – Chapter 5.” Ebooks@Adelaide, https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/w/woolf/virginia/w91j/chap5.html. Accessed 2 March 2017 11 1.1 Not Just the Delta

The first-ever recording labelled “the blues” was not made by a bluesman, but by a blueswoman. When Mammie Smith recorded her “Crazy Blues” for OKeh Records, the pioneering blues record was an instant success: in the initial month after its release in 1920 it managed to sell 75,000 copies. Therefore, from the very beginning, blues showed both an incredible market, as well as marketing, potential. It did not matter so much whether it would fit in the musicological category created by the scholar, once it was labelled “blues”, it was likely to sell. These early recordings, to which Smith’s “Crazy Blues” belonged were referred to as “race records”, for the market in which they were sold was exclusively black. One of the reasons behind their popularity was the fact that these records could be played on electric or hand-wound 78 RPM turntables, such as the Victrola. Victrolas were first marketed in 1906 and they became an immediate hit – small models of this machine could be bought for as little as 15 dollars. This market was quickly tapped by African-American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, which published advertisements for new records (Hamilton 9). In the racially turbulent times at the wake of the Great Migration the blues was quickly finding a wide audience, both in the North and in the South. Consequently, mobile recording units were sent to the South by recording companies in search of talent which could be sold to the growing race record market: these “talent scouts”, predominantly white, recorded blues artists over “a few fleeting sessions in record-pressing plants, hotel rooms and warehouses (...) and sent them back on the road” (Hamilton 9). From the very beginning, the Deep South blues, as Palmer labelled it, showed a very solid business potential which Northern entrepreneurs did not want to miss. However, business aside, Delta blues always had a strange aura of uniqueness around it. One of the most totemic bluesmen of all was Robert Johnson, a solitary, haunting figure, who supposedly sold his soul to the devil in exchange for guitar skills. Johnson subsequently travelled around the United States, venturing as far as New York and Chicago, and managing to record a total of only sixteen songs until finally meeting his tragic fate at the age of 12 just 27. Despite his extremely short career and obscurity, or owing to it, Johnson became a synonym for the blues. As Sakakeeny argues in his article titled “Disciplinary Movements, the Civil Rights Movement, and Charles Keil's Urban Blues”, to the white researcher, country blues possessed all the qualities he was searching for: “a rural, acoustic (“primitive”) music that was linked to an imagined Africa by its vocal stylings and sparse arrangements” (149). To historians and ethnomusicologists, this simplified notion of a Delta bluesman as a solitary wanderer, with mystical powers to evoke the experience of millions of African Americans and their long suffering, is more than tempting. Marybeth Hamilton, who made an attempt to uncloak some of the myths frequently associated with the Delta blues in her 2007 book In Search of the Blues, quotes Robert Palmer: “How much history can be transmitted by pressure on a guitar string? The thought of generations, the history of every human being who’s ever felt the blues come down like showers of rain.” (Hamilton 10) Is this really what one can hear in the blues, essentially meaning that there is the blues and then there is all other music? Or might it be Palmer’s sublimated (white) conscience playing tricks on a historian? Seen from the same focal point, Palmer’s Deep Blues could be interpreted as exactly the same thing as the Delta blues itself – a lament, an act of personal confession. In fact, once Palmer established the Delta institution, with all the African fringes such as the diddley-bow, field hollering and the singer’s voice responding to the guitar’s melody, following the established call-and-response pattern (Davis 32), it become a staple which Palmer clinged onto even decades later when he made yet another journey to the South while shooting his ‘Deep Blues: A Musical Pilgrimage to the Crossroads’ (1991). The film’s footage shows a hipster-like figure of Palmer travelling south through Mississippi, selectively meeting bluesmen who would fall into the juke-joint category. Although most of the artists in the film had already gone electric, Palmer still manages to feed in the blues connections, even when he meets Jessi Mae, a lady who plays traditional fife and drum music, and asks her whether she can play the blues. She readily agrees and provides the researcher with what he had quested to the South for. Several decades before Palmer, Lomax’s portable recorder, heavy artillery as it was (it weighed 500 pounds), “gave voice to the voiceless” (Lomax xi).

13 After some time Lomax started using big acetate discs which enabled 15 minutes of recording time, describing his feelings in this way: “Every time I took one of those big, black, glass-based platters out of its box, I felt that a magical moment was opening up in time.” (xi) In retrospect, Lomax's words sound truly prophetic – his choice of artists to record was to shape the history of the blues genre forever. As Hamilton suggests, the raw material for every blues story, the only evidence of how the music sounded, is of course the recordings (7). The question thus is: to what extent was the moment magical to Lomax and to what extent did it really play a crucial part in the biracial history of America? Lomax claims the latter, saying that this was actually “the first time that Black people had a chance to tell their story in their own way” (xi). Yet still, as Schroeder claims in her book Robert Johnson, Mythmaking, and Contemporary American Culture, “historians create individual narratives of the past that are shaped by their own assumptions as well as by any 'facts' they have discovered” (60). Following Schroeder’s reasoning, it is not surprising that Lomax also seems to have fallen under the influence of the mythical blues spell when he readily admits that “as the work went on (...) it was a source of deep satisfaction that I, a white Southerner, could penetrate the Southern facade” (xiii). This would seem to go hand-in-hand with what Hamilton suggests above. For a scholar, discovering something like this becomes an obsessive quest pursued over the course of decades until, finally, one is able to write the ultimate line of the preface: “the Delta blues have found a world audience” (Lomax xv). Interestingly enough, the implications of such a statement mirror the passage from Jacob's Room in the previous sub-chapter, and they are far-reaching indeed. Nowadays there are flocks of European, Asian and even African tourists combing the Delta in search of the real folk blues, which has to follow the outlines drawn by the scholars: it has to be black and it has to be deep. According to local observers, these blues tourists tend to be “baby-boomers, well-educated, middle- to upper-class whites” (King 12), who are quite likely saddened by the lack of authenticity of the music they encounter. There is no such thing as the real blues any more. These assumptions are further complicated by the selectiveness of material to be labelled and marketed as the blues. Although the blues may have been born in the Delta, one of the most prominent slide guitarists in the

14 twenties and thirties, the already mentioned Blind Willie Johnson, was street evangelist from Texas. This discrimination of other regions in favour of the Mississippi Delta, as well as the 1920s record companies’ concentration on singer-guitarists, which quite possibly owed to the market’s demand of a certain style of music associated with African-American performers (Davis 30), adds to the general twisted image of early blues. Similar views are held by a British authority on the blues, Paul Oliver, who in his article “Blues Research: Problems and Possibilities” argues that Mississippi attracts a steady stream of enthusiasts (…); Arkansas does not. There has been little research done in Alabama, virtually nothing in Florida for over forty years. Border states like Kentucky and Ohio have received little attention, even though Louisville and Cincinnati have had long histories of black music” (388).

However, the fact that most of the field recordings were conducted in the Mississippi Delta and Memphis may simply result from the region’s relatively short distance from Chicago by train (Davis 31). It is interesting to note that it is exactly the same railroad that aspiring bluesmen took on their way North during the Great Migration. By providing an incentive in the South, white researchers and recording engineers contributed to the pull factors of the artists’ migration to northern cities. This focus on the Delta remained true even after the success of another Texas singer and guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson’s song “That Black Snake Moan” as early as 1926, both in the agricultural South and in Northern cities with high black population.

1.2 Harmonica – The Perfect Companion

The harmonica, sometimes also called mouth organ or harp, as we know it today, is a free-reed wind instrument which consists of two sets of pre-tuned reeds which are fitted to a wooden or plastic comb and covered by metal cover plates. It is played using the mouth, either exhaling or inhaling air, thus producing individual notes on the respective holes in its front. The notion of inhaling and exhaling and the various articulatory movements associated with producing sound in the oral cavity is what makes the harmonica the second most universal musical instrument to the human voice (Field 13).

15 Historically, the harmonica is a relatively modern instrument: although the concept of the free reed is an Asian invention, dating back to as early as 4500 BC China (Field 20), the harmonica evolved from an invention by the German Christian Friedrich Buschmann who in 1820 arranged a cluster of pitch pipes together to create a new instrument (Field 23). In 1821, Buschmann, then only 16 years old, registered a patent for the newly-invented mouth organ which he called the aura, measuring but four inches and providing as many as twenty- one tones (Field 24). As the mouth organ became more and more successful, new harmonica makers appeared and one of them in particular, Matthias Hohner, turned harmonica manufacturing into extremely profitable business. It was in 1862 that Hohner made a crucial decision to ship his instruments to North America when the company took its first major step to become a global giant: twenty five years after its initial foray into the overseas markets Hohner’s annual production exceeded one million instruments (Field 26). As the harmonica grew in popularity at the turn of the 19th century, Hohner started to supply mouth organs to British soldiers during the First World War (Field 28): it started to show that, owing to the instrument's compactness and relative ease with with a musician could learn to play it, there was great future ahead for it. Indeed, with a short break during the Second World War, Hohner kept expanding and, eventually, in the 1960s folk revival, production of Hohner harmonicas literally exploded with the ‘blues harp’ phenomenon (Field 29). In essence, ever since its initial stages of US marketing in 1862 when the first Hohner instruments to reach America were sent to Hohner's relatives who had emigrated to Chicago (Field 34), the harmonica has been a migratory instrument. Partially due to the fact that it was relatively and easy to carry and learning the basics which enabled one to easily accompany a guitar player, the harmonica grew in popularity. In fact, even major blues guitar figures actually first learned to play the harp – Muddy Waters played harmonica with the Silas Green minstrel troupe in the early 1940s (Davis 177) and Howlin’ Wolf learned to blow harp for some his songs including his signature piece “Smokestack Lightning”. However, the harmonica was not destined to play only an accompanying

16 role, as rural players began to experiment with it: initially, the harmonica’s amazing capacity to impersonate various sounds gave birth to a genre which is referred to as “the talking harmonica” (Field 34). As Charlie Musselwhite, American harmonica player who was in frequent contact with Chicago bluesmen (see Figures 7 and 8 in Appendix 2), including Little Walter, in the 1960s states in the appended interview, “Harmonica is the single most voice-like instrument, perfectly suited for the blues.” Thus, depending on the articulatory movements in the player’s mouth, the harmonica could easily replicate country sounds which the players found around them: fox-and-hound chases and even steam locomotives. Actually, ever since the first recordings which featured these sounds5, “train pieces” became a blues staple and they are still used all over the blues world (see for example the Czech harmonica player Matej Ptaszek’s rendition of “Midnight Special”6). There is yet another crucial invention with which American players took the harmonica to a completely different level of musical potential: bending. This is achieved “by making slight changes in the shape of the mouth and the direction of the airstream” (Field 35). Bending and the associated tonal changes enable the player to play the harmonica in a different key from its original design – a harmonica tuned in C is thus capable of playing in the key of G. This is referred to as “second position” or “cross harp” and it provides the player with opportunity to access more flattened notes on draw holes. Eventually, more cross harp positions emerged – in the 1960s Little Walter for example showed Charlie Musselwhite the 5th position, which “many harp players had no idea existed” (see the appended interview). Therefore, bending and “cross harp” notes play an absolutely indispensable part in the blues – and it was none other than Little Walter who managed to squeeze the most of them.

5 J.J. Milteau, a French harmonica virtuoso, argues in his article “Harmonica, Blues and Locomotives” on planetharmonica.com that the first recording of the train whistle sound was by Deford Bailey’s “Pan American Blues” from as early as 1927. The train whistle was then mastered by Sonny Terry, who, together with his musical partner, guitarist Brownie McGhee, pioneered the acoustic Piedmont blues style (Ptaszek 13). 6 A video showcasing Ptaszek’s skill can be seen on youtube from “Dobré ráno s Českou Televizí” in which Ptaszek is accompanied by the Slovak guitar player Luboš Beňa. 17 2 Born in Louisiana

Early stages of Little Walter’s life are shrouded in fog of Southern myth: he was born Marion Jacobs on May 1st 1930, the son of Adam (better known as Bruce) Jacobs, a literate farm labourer and Beatrice Leviege, the daughter of Louis Leviege, a farm cropper of cotton in Marksville, Louisiana. The fact that the boss’s daughter stroke a romantic relationship with one of the farmhands came as no surprise to anyone (Glover et al. 3). No birth certificate was issued at the time, which was common practice in the rural South (Glover et al. 4). The first actual proof of Walter's existence originated with his social security application in 1940 (see Figure 2 in Appendix 2). At that time, Marksville was literally only a gathering of houses, with the Jacobs family populating such as big part of it that it could easily have been called Jacobsville (Glover et al. 3). Yet still, no matter how high the proportion of the black population in any given town, there was always an invisible hand to rule the lives of all the coloured people in the entire South (Wilkerson 31). This hand ensured that white people were those in charge and coloured people had to obey, much like children have to obey their parents, with one crucial difference: instead of love the relationship was based on fear and dependence (Wilkerson 31). The Jacobs marriage was not to last and when Beatrice gave birth to her second son, Marion, the parents had already separated. From very early on, Walter had a difficult time understanding where he actually belonged: three days after extremely difficult labour, the father visited the farm and took the new-born Marion with him. The son was placed with an uncle, Samuel Jacobs, in a nearby town of Alexandria – at that time, kinship was a relatively loose term and any abandoned child living with an older person could be considered family (Glover et al. 5). In fact, a similar occurrence marked the early stages of Muddy Water’s life, who was raised by his grandmother, Della Grant. This might have been one of the reasons why migration to the North was not accompanied by any major dilemmas – one simply did not have a place which they could really call home. Although the actual conditions in which Walter lived are not known, it

18 can only be guessed that the young Cajun boy shared some of his thoughts with Richard Wright's protagonist in Black Boy:

Dread and distrust had already become a daily part of my being and my memory grew sharp, my senses more impressionable; I began to be aware of myself as a distinct personality striving against others. (…) My imagination soared; I dreamed of running away. (28)

In a way, Walter’s early years very much mirrors one crucial symptom of the Great Migration: Wilkerson describes it as “leaderless” (9), which resulted in every individual having to deal with his or her personal vision of what awaits him or her in the North. To Walter, this vision revolved about his instrument of choice: the harmonica. Little Walter himself said in a later interview that he first started to play harmonica when he was 8 years old. This would place the initial phases of his contact with this instrument towards the end of the 1930s in Alexandria, at a time when the previously-mentioned genre of talking harmonicas was prevalent: Walter admitted that the first harp player he heard was a white musician by the name of Lonnie Glosson, a hillbilly and country musician, and one of the few white players who also sported the cross-harp position, a technique which was until then predominantly used by blues players (Glover et al. 7) Besides being brought up in a musical environment – his father Adam was a gifted musician who played several instruments, including the guitar, accordion, violin and harp – another major influence in Walter’s early years was the radio. In fact, it was partly due to the emergence of radio stations and radio shows such as the “Grand Old Opry”7, that many aspiring Southern bluesmen decided to strive for a career in the North. Eventually, Walter, as he came to be known while staying with his uncle (his father was not around much, he was even imprisoned in Angola prison for shooting Beatrice’s sister's boyfriend8), was displaced once again – at the

7 The Grand Old Opry was a show which was broadcast from Nashville, all over the South – one of the regular performers on the show was the already-mentioned harmonica soloist Deford Bailey, featured between 1926 and 1941. It is quite likely that Walter also heard him during his time in Alexandria. 8 Walter’s interest in guns and the fact that he frequently carried one around while he was working as a musician in Chicago thus probably came from the father: while serving his time 19 age of 11, he was to return to Marksville to stay with the Levieges. There, Walter’s early musical education continued – he would listen to Blind Lemon Jefferson and imitate the guitarist on his own guitar and practice the harp. Walter, stubborn as he was9, finds his parallel in Wilkerson’s R. J. Pershing Foster who, in order to survive in the South at that time (Wilkerson speaks about 1933 Louisiana), simply “had to put his mind somewhere else” (77). The notion of displacement was to become a crucial factor in Walter’s life, as will be demonstrated in the latter chapters of this thesis. As far as the harmonica is concerned, at this time, the Hohner Marine Band (basically the same model which Walter sported for most of his career when playing a diatonic harmonica) was the harmonica of choice for professional musicians: however, this was arguably out of Walter’s reach, as it retailed for 59 cents: at that time, Walter probably sported the entry-level ‘Regimental Band’ model (Glover et al. 6). Walter, already a keen experimenter, would frequently ask for money to buy new cheap harmonicas as he would often break the reeds while pushing the instruments to their limits. After a brief attempt at education (Walter shortly attended Holy Ghost, a local Catholic school), it was decided by the head of the family, Walter’s grandfather Louis, a popular Marksville figure, that Walter be shipped to New Orleans to stay with distant relatives (Glover et al. 11). In essence, Walter’s initial ordeal was not much different from that of an indentured servant – it was always up to the masters to decide how to dispense of the boy. It probably comes as no surprise that such life held little appeal to a young, passionate and, above all, ambitious harmonica enthusiast.

2.1 Pack Up And Gone

In New Orleans, Little Walter found himself surrounded by music: never before had he heard so many styles being played in a single location; the music

in Angola, Adam became one of the prison guards/trustees, a practice quite usual at the time, and once again demonstrated his aptitude for firearms when shooting a couple of escaped prisoners (Glover et al. 6). It is notable that one of the leading figures of the blues revival, Leadbelly, was discovered by Alan Lomax in the very same prison. 9 Walter is cited to have started playing the harmonica on account of everyone dissuading him from playing it (Glover et al. 6). 20 to be heard in the streets of this harbour town varied from gospel, blues and trumpet jazz to polyrhythmic Afro-Caribbean drumming beats (Glover et al. 13). The fact that later in his career, Walter was always searching for a different sound from the others, pushing the boundaries of the blues harmonica and finding overlaps with other genres, owed much to this ethno-musical melting pot of the Creole South. As a result, Walter had to adapt and expand his repertoire in order to be able to earn his dollar in the New Orleans streets. In fact, this de facto applied to a large number of street musicians who “featured blues as only a part of their repertoire10” (Glover et al. 14) Although details about Walter’s stay in New Orleans are by no means ample, it is certain that the city’s general atmosphere went rather stiff after the outbreak of the second world war in December 1941. However, Walter was not experience much of the army shuffle of 1942 in the area, for he was once again on the road: like thousands of other African Americans he decided to work his way north. For Walter, the pull factor was clear – he had to constantly look for opportunities to earn money playing the harmonica, and there was certainly more money to be made in the North. Travelling by train in the inexpensive hobo style, making money with his harmonica wherever he could, he eventually arrived in Helena, Arkansas. From early on Helena showed a solid money-earning potential for the young Walter: an aspiring African-American harp player was able to show his prowess in one of the many black saloons on Elm Street, just behind the white Cherry Street next to the levee. There was a crucial difference between Helena and similar towns in Mississippi: Cedell Davis, a Helena native bluesman, describes the scene as such:

“You see, Helena was wide open at this time. Wide open gambling and just about everything. (...) No, there wasn’t nothing like that is Mississippi. You see, now most of the things like that in Mississippi was happening was on the farms, see, it wasn’t too much happen in towns – not for black peoples anyway. They wasn’t allowed.” (Glover et al. 16)

Essentially, the further up the river Walter went, the looser the city 10 Glover et al. correctly note that some of these street musicians were recorded as “bluesmen” by record companies during field trips to the South in the 1920s and 1930s (14). This biased image was then presented to the public, with the blues playing a synecdochical repertoire role. 21 atmosphere became for African Americans. To a certain extent, Walter, just like most other Delta bluesmen, made a reverse Huckleberry Finn trip, as demonstrated in the appended map titled “The Great Blues Migration” (Figure 1 in Appendix 2). However, as the map shows, Walter was not a typical Louisiana blues migrant, who predominantly decided to settle in St. Louis. Nevertheless, besides being able to perform in a wider variety of establishments, Walter was also gradually being exposed to seasoned harp players who were a source of inspiration to him, as well as a direct source of learning material. Much of Walter’s early inspiration is derived from the Tennessee-born John Lee Williamson, better known as Sonny Boy Williamson, who was practically the father of the solo blues harp11. John Lee Williamson was not the only “Sonny Boy” to emerge on the blues scene – there was yet another harmonica virtuoso who begot local stardom in Helena – Aleck “Rice” Miller – who at some point in the 1940s adopted the stage name Sonny Boy Williamson, aiming to capitalise on the success of the real Sonny Boy. Miller appeared on the KFFA radio with his one- hour noon “King Biscuit Show”, five days a week. This broadcast was sponsored by the Interstate Grocery Company in order to promote the sales of the King Biscuit Flower: the show, as well as the product, was aimed at black audiences. At that time, the Mississippi-Arkansas delta areas were predominantly black – Phillips County, where Helena is located, was about 67 percent black (Glover et al. 18). For this reason, blending marketing with the blues once again proved a vital business strategy. While in Helena, Walter gradually managed to get on the real stage to perform. This usually happened either in-between Miller’s sessions or when the man took a break from playing to drink or gamble. Although only as young as twelve or thirteen Walter already showed remarkable playing potential – David “Honeyboy” Edwards, Walter’s future colleague, claims that “you could hear

11 John Lee Williamson was a generation younger than Walter – being born near Jackson, Tennessee in 1914. In his teenage years he performed for example with Sleepy John Estes in the country blues style around Tennessee and Arkansas. When he finally settled in Chicago in 1934 (20 years old at that time) he decided to abandon the country harp and took the instrument to a completely different level – in his hands, this novelty device, which was before used primarily either in jug bands and to imitate train or animal sounds (see 1.1), became a full-fledged instrument which accompanied the vocals (Davis 16). Sonny Boy met his tragic fate in June 1948 after being hit on the head during a mugging, in a chillingly similar fashion to Walter’s own passing decades later. 22 that he WAS a harp player. He had that Cajunly sound, that Louisiana thing.” (Glover et al. 20). By Cajunly sound, Edwards means harmonica sound which resembled the accordion, i.e. chromatic sound of the French “push-box” prevalent in the Louisiana area. On a harmonica, it is also possible to play octaves, that is play two notes simultaneously, with one an octave higher than the other. This is done by a technique called tongue-blocking, in which the player blocks two neighbouring holes on the harmonica with the tongue and thus acquires sound similar to that of the accordion. Walter sometimes employed this technique during his Chicago years as well – it can be for instance heard in the opening riff of his signature piece “Juke”. There is an absolutely crucial notion which resurfaced all through Walter’s early career (and virtually in every aspiring harp player’s career) – the notion of the master and apprentice. Due to the fact that many bluesmen were first exposed to stage music at a rather early age, if they showed potential and willingness to improve, the master sort of adopted him and functioned as his protector. However, the life of a protégé was by no means easy – Walter had to run errands for the seasoned player and offered to cook for them while they were away. In Chicago, the role of the master was taken on by others, such as Big Walter Horton and then Muddy Waters. In the appended interview, Charlie Musselwhite himself admits to the fact that he was Walter’s protégé during the beginning of his musical career in Chicago at the beginning of the 1960s. In addition, he mentions the importance of learning from the masters, especially as far as blues harmonica was concerned:

I really appreciated it as it gave me confidence when they would compliment me. And harp is an instrument where you can't see how it is played so to get input from the masters was awesome. Big Walter was very helpful too.

Eventually, Walter teamed up for a brief spell with Honeyboy Edwards, travelled to Memphis, met Big Walter Horton, stayed two or three weeks and finally left, yet again on his own, further up north with one destination on his mind only: the fabled Chicago.

23 2.2 Destination – Chicago

As it is usually the case when one sets one’s mind on achieving something, there are bound to be detours – in her book The Warmth of Other Suns, which primarily deals with The Great Migration, Wilkerson refers to these detours as “hyphens”, which “blurred together together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do” (7). However, Walter was never a stereotypical migrant – owing to his decision to become a musician, his hyphens hardly bridged things unrelated: wherever Walter went, there was music and musicians to be found. He was part of a widely dispersed, albeit a rather loose, “trade union”. Wilkerson also claims that many of the emigrating men travelled alone (7). Although this did apply to Walter, he was yet again unique – he would not scout out the North to settle and prepare the place for the rest of his folks. Over the course of the wartime years between 1943 and 1946, Walter travelled up and down the Mississippi river, frequenting the likes of Cairo, Illinois and St. Louis. In each of these towns Walter witnessed a constant flux of southern migrants which provided an expanding audience to his harmonica blues. In his book The Promised Land, which also deals with the Great Migration and how it changed America, Nicolas Lemann cites a Southern apologist, David Cohn, who, as early as 1947, wrote the following dire prediction regarding the massive displacement of people from the Delta:

The coming problem of the agricultural displacement in the Delta and in the whole South is of huge proportions and must concern the whole nation.The time to prepare for it is now, but since we as a nation rarely react until catastrophe is upon us, it is likely we shall muddle along until it is too late. The country is upon the brink of change as great as any that has occurred since the Industrial Revolution… (51)

In spite of Cohn’s scepticism, which coincided with the many blues journeys north, Walter seemed to be faring well. In St. Louis, which was the final destination for many southern musician who had moved north but decided to stay in the warmer climate of Missouri (Glover et al. 23), Walter was provided with even more opportunity to demonstrate his prodigal skills. However, in

24 order to survive, aspiring players had to find other means for sustaining themselves than just music. As it was regular practice with musicians at that time, Walter found a day job to provide for himself. Working at the laundry also provided clothing for his reunited partner Honeyboy Edwards (Glover et al. 24). After a few more trips back South Walter teamed up with James DeShay, a Mississippi guitar player with whom he played on downtown streets, managing to earn as much as 25 to 30 dollars in a matter of hours, the equivalent of half a week’s wages (Glover et al. 25). It seems that the further North one went the more money it was possible to make playing street music: it comes as no surprise that the richer city dweller had different opinions as to what constituted spare change and was willing to part with it less reluctantly. As far as playing in the street is concerned, there was one place in particular which was the centre of all buskers: Maxwell Street (see Figure 3 in Appendix 2). While still in St. Louis, Edwards and Walter probably heard of this Chicago’s bustling outdoor market heaven and they would waste no time getting there. Taking the trains headed North in the usual hobo fashion, earning enough spare money as they went, they finally arrived at Union Station in the city of the blues – Chicago. It must have been quite shock for the harmonica wunderkind to witness the pace at which this metropolis moved. It was the pace of the city which sucked Marion Jacobs right in.

25 3 Chicago – A Blue Insight

In order to understand the urban environment which Walter Jacobs found himself in at the time of his arrival in 1945, one has to reflect on the events which preceded it, especially those related to the so-called Great Migration. Due to manpower shortages during the First World War a fundamental change to the US African American population started to emerge. In fact, at that time, every third African American dwelled in the city and by 1940 a half of the country’s black population was urban (Davis 134). Below is a table which illustrates changes to the proportion of African Americans in Chicago between 1850 and 1930 (Spear 12):

Total African Per cent African American Date population American population population

1850 29,963 323 1.1

1870 298,977 3,961 1.2

1890 1,099,850 14,721 1.3

1910 2,185,283 44,103 4.1

1930 3,376,438 233,903 6.9

Table 1: African American Population of Chicago between 1850 and 1930

These population strata shifts obviously brought about racial conflicts: with the largest Ku Klux Klan chapters located in Indiana by 1930, race “had become a national, rather than an exclusively Southern, obsession” (Davis 135). Migrating Black Americans hoping to escape the terrors of the Jim Crow regime found themselves in a strangely familiar situation, with only the setting changed. To them, their old country was no longer Africa – it was the American South and the medium some of them chose to use in order to describe this odd schism was music, especially the blues. Originally an Indian trading post in the 1830s, Chicago has ever since upheld its reputation of being a city with arms wide open: by the 1920s, through political administrations such as that of the cowboy mayor Big Bill Thompson, who adhered to the ideal of Chicago as a city with a 'wide-open' philosophy, the

26 city “established a notoriety it hasn't since been able to shake off” (Rowe 40). Hence, during the 1940s, Black population of Chicago increased by as much as 77%, from 278,000 to 492,000 (Lemann 70), with the highest concentration of Afro-Americans being at the northern end of the South Side (Lemann 63). In order to accommodate the crowds of black migrants, landlords in this area converted many apartment buildings into small kitchenettes: thus, the neighbourhoods became even poorer and denser (Lemann 63). As a result, life for Afro-American newcomers from the South was far from idyllic. The pull factor of better job opportunities which originally motivated families and individuals to seek the promised land of Chicago turned out to be fringed with risks – there was the constant temptation to participate in wild and often illegal ventures (Lemann 65). And the world of the bluesman was rarely filled with virtue. In essence, the blues has been connected with migration ever since it first emerged in the Delta (Keil 60). Take any form of early blues, be it the travelling man, moving from town to town seeking yet another job or medicine shows and circus troupes in the South, and what it essentially entails is a man with a guitar or harmonica, trying to earn a living performing his repertoire. At the time of the Great Migration, these notions were simply transplanted from the rural South to major cities like Chicago. In Can’t Be Satisfied – The Life and Times of Muddy Waters, Robert Gordon portrays a vivid image of Chicago upon Muddy Water’s arrival there:

A rolling plain feels different from a cleared jungle. And then over the earth’s curve, unfolding like a wide highway, was the capital of this new kingdom, the tall, storied buildings of Chicago. Chicago was a prairie town, spreading like pancake batter, widening along lake Michigan, deepening in an endless absorption of farmland and ethnic settlements (reflected by the diversity of its modern urban checkboard). (68)

During the whole course of the first half of the 20th century The Great Migration, which young and daring Walter Jacobs was a part of, was an omnipresent feature of urban life (Wilkerson 10). As it is always the case, migrants brought with them tokens of their former ways, customs and ways of expression. As demonstrated in the opening chapter of this thesis, the blues was to Southern Blacks both a form of expression and a means of sustaining

27 oneself financially through a certain degree of freedom and mobility. Still, one has to be aware of the fact that given the magnitude of the population shifts during the Great Migration, a “harmonious, racially synthesised country” was hardly what followed, but that it on the contrary resulted in disrupting the society and generated hostility (Lemann 200). In the era before 1954’s Court challenge in Brown vs. Board of Education, Blacks could not hope to enjoy a great deal of individual liberty: in fact, the whole process took much longer, if it was ever completed. In spite of this, there was a substantial change Afro-American self-evaluation and self-respect as far as the urban North was concerned: in Chicago, there was “no omnipresent white man demanding obeisance” (Spear 226). Even if the white man was still there, running the factory, owning the clothes store or, in case of Chess, managing a record company, Blacks were presented with something they were not used to in the South: choice. It was obviously limited, and the white man was the one frequently benefiting from it, but it was there. And bluesmen were the pioneers of Afro-American choice-making. Thus, young, aspiring bluesmen found themselves in the lights of the Chicago metropolis. Migrants from the south, seeking to earn the extra dollar, first had to take their music into the streets. If a rookie bluesman could not manage to get help from the ‘blues fathers’ Big Bill Broonzy or Sonny Boy, he had to resort to playing at house parties and in the streets. Without solid connections, a bluesman simply could not find jobs in the clubs – he either had to attract the attention of a record producer such as one of the Chess brothers or there was the option of acquiring a master for whom he would function as a protégé. Gradually, he could move up the blues ladder, first sitting in for a number or two with the seasoned players during their live indoor performances and then slowly accumulating enough respect required for being offered a solo performance by the club’s booking agent. At any rate, though, the place to start a musical career in Chicago was out there, in the streets. The best place to perform outside of the clubs was the Maxwell Street market in Jew Town – this was the centre for amateur bluesmen (Rowe 47). Maxwell Street was located on the Near West Side: in essence, this eight-block long street was a two-tier cake: the first layer was occupied by various stores, including dry goods, textiles, jewellers, barbers and pawns shops, while the

28 second layer feature riskier forms of entertainment for both the proprietors and the patron such as card games or dice. This polarity of business was a typical feature of Chicago at the time: where there were opportunities for money to be earned, there were even more openings for money to be spent. At weekends The Market was filled with people: accompanied by a small band of three, one could easily earn more money than playing in a club for several nights (Gordon 85). However, one had to be wary when playing in the street: The American Federation of Musicians played a vital part in the lives of performers at that time. Union members were obliged to file in all their music contracts and pay the respective percentage of their income to the union. Playing Maxwell Street at the weekends was “in direct violation of union rules” (Glover et al. 60), for which anyone including Little Walter could be fined. The temptation, though, was probably too big to resist: according to Muddy Waters, Walter was able to make as much as 35 to 40$ (Glover et al. 60). Money was indeed flowing in: even a rookie bluesman could afford to purchase a car (be it a ’39 Buick), as demonstrated by Little Walter in the appended photograph provided in Glover’s biography Blues With a Feeling. In addition to the actual in situ earning, given the fact that Maxwell Street was frequented by other musicians who had already managed to establish themselves, one could also hope to form good connections. As opposed to blues in the South, the Chicago blues scene was very much concerned with the idea of community – both a consumer community and a performer community. Bluesmen were in frequent contact and helped each other when necessary, even when it came to moving house: when Muddy Waters was changing address for a more fashionable 4339 South Park Lane, Little Walter, Jimmy Rogers and Otis Spann were there to help him with the furniture (Gordon 125). As far as gathering places were concerned, fine clubs were in the minority in the South Side: these were “outnumbered by little taverns where the music was provided by nickelodeons or three-piece blues bands” (Lemann 65). Crime and gambling was abundant in these establishments and the police did not pay much attention to black-on-black conflicts. Blacks did not restrict themselves sexually either – out-of-wedlock childbearing was abundant (Lemann 65). All these issues found their places in the blues songs of the 1950s Chicago era – to name but a few Walter’s song titles, one does not need to dig very deep: “My

29 Babe”, “Stuff You Gotta Watch”, “Sloppy Drunk” and many more. It is clearly visible that together with a shift towards the urban North came a shift towards more aggressive topics. In the following sub-chapter, Walter's key musical partnership is analysed. Meeting Muddy Waters, Walter would enter a sphere which revolved around money-making, sexual freedom and violence, all of which Lemann (65) mentions: however, as far as bluesmen (and Walter in particular) were concerned, these vices were truly amplified. In his introduction to Native Son, Richard Wright provides an interesting parallel between Little Walter and the book’s protagonist, Bigger Thomases:

The urban environment of Chicago, affording a more stimulating life, made the Negro Bigger Thomas react more violently than even in the South. (…) It was not that Chicago segregated [blacks] more than the South, but that Chicago had more to offer, that Chicago’s physical aspect – noisy, crowded, filled with the sense of power and fulfillment – did so much to dazzle the mind (Wright 10)

3.1 Fitting Muddy

As it was already demonstrated in the previous chapters, the blues attracts myth with surprising capacity: it was also when one of the greatest co- operations in the blues business was formed that the process of mythicization started. Accounts regarding Muddy’s first encounter with Walter vary depending on who is telling the story. However, it was probably Jimmy Rogers who had heard Walter playing on Maxwell Street and recommended Waters to try the promising harmonica player out (Glover et al. 45). As demand for harmonica sound in Chicago was growing and Walter was still in his teenage years, eager to learn and without any real attachments in the city, it was only natural that the seasoned Waters (almost literally) adopted him. In many ways, one would think Marion Jacobs and McKinley Morganfield very much alike: they both came from rural South backgrounds, with Rolling Fork being some 200 miles down the river from Clarksdale, each of them was separated from the mother rather early12 and they both started playing

12 Psychologically, Muddy took an even more devastating blow, for his mother died after childbirth, while Walter was to be reunited with his mother, if only for a brief period of time. 30 their instruments at an early age. They also both adopted different stage identities through which they transformed from country players into full- fledged blues stars: this is a typical process which also applied to other bluesmen of the era – in Chicago, one has to reshape one’s original identity in order to become the persona which they choose for themselves, or which the record producers choose for them. However, there is one crucial difference between the two, a significant factor which was to play an indispensable part in their future solo careers: their age. When Muddy first met Walter, 17 at that time, he was twice his age. While Walter showed promise, he lacked Muddy’s life experience. While Muddy’s talent was mystically discovered13, Walter’s strong determination to become an entertainer ensured that he would not be missed. Although Walter was initially considered an extremely talented player, in the eyes of his superiors such as Muddy and Rogers, he lacked necessary timing in order to accompany the guitarist14. However, rather than not being able to pace his harmonica within the framework of the traditional twelve-bar sequence, Walter’s playing showed signs of a freer approach towards the genre – some scholars attribute this to his Creole background (Glover et al. 20). Be it as it may, Walter managed to adapt to Muddy’s style within a short span of time. Still, securing work as a musician in the Chicago South Side required a substantial time investment regarding band practice: the three (Waters, Rogers and Walter) spent considerable amount of time rehearsing, probably in Muddy’s apartment (Field 173). Muddy's first Chess recording session proper with Little Walter on harmonica, although still in the background, on August 15th 1950 produced

13 It is definitely worth mentioning how Lomax describes his first recording session with Muddy Waters. Lomax describes him as “low-key” and “grave to the point of shyness”, while his music is denoted as “with such a mercurial and sensitive bond between the voice and guitar (...) that he went right beyond his predecessors – Blind Lemon, Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson” (406). This immediate placement within a continuum of blues players was a privilege which Little Walter would not share in the eyes of the white scholars. Walter was probably too revolutionary for being placed between other players. 14 The fictive account of the first evening during which Walter fit Muddy’s guitar is presented in the “Cadillac Records” film. This particular scene, probably one of the movie’s closest representations of how Walter operated shows Walter taking over the leading role from Muddy who stops him quite abruptly to sort the youngster out. Although Walter would probably not have tried to take over from Muddy, he was surely eager to impress and showcase his own take on the blues. 31 “Sad Letter Blues”, “a classic example of the early poetic phase of the postwar Chicago blues” (Rowe 79). At that time, Chicago’s black style was still partly shaped by an older generation of migrants who wanted to be reminded of the music they associated with their youth: during the war years their numbers were amplified by the new waves of “folks from back home” (Wald 59). Muddy’s second record with Walter, ‘Louisiana Blues’, was their first collaboration to make it to the national R&B top ten, featuring rough, raspy sound and in one of its lines Muddy sings what was to become the basis of his signature piece “Got my Mojo Working”: “going down in New Orleans [to] get me a mojo hand”. This declaration evokes the image of Waters as a dark Delta hoodoo man” (Wald 61). On the contrary, Walter’s approach to the blues was different from Muddy’s; he wanted to dissociate with the south as much as he could. Polishing their show, with Walter having acquired a rougher sound, the trio came to be known as “The Headhunters”, due to their ability to steal shows from other musicians. “Chopping heads” was quite regular practice at the time: with so much musical competition within Chicago, any blues player had to be prepared to be challenged by virtually any musician who appeared in the audience. The clubs were usually quite small, therefore it was easy for the likes of Walter to simply take his harp out of his pocket and “chop the soloist’s head off” with his licks. If the crowd preferred his sound they could easily steal the show from the originally-billed performers, together with the money which the proprietor paid them. One can only assume that such situations created significant tension, even more so when there was drinking involved. In addition to alcohol abuse, the blues world was also propelled by frequent acts of violence. As suggested by Lemann in the previous chapter, law enforcement entities did not pay much attention to violence black folk inflicted on each other. Gussow terms this type of violence “intimate”, claiming that many blues performers including Honeyboy Edwards, Bessie Smith, Memphis Minnie, Leadbelly and Muddy Waters were “witnesses to, victims of, and sometimes propagators of such intimate violence” (196). Paul Oscher, the first white harmonica player to play with the Muddy Waters band, speaks of this constant threat, stating that Muddy always “carried a .25 automatic, plus a .22 in his shirt pocket” (ibid). Although Gussow leaves Walter out from his list, all through the artist's life there were

32 constant gun-related incidents involving other bodies, as well as his own. Jimmie Lee Robinson confirms the artist’s frequent involvement in violent acts: “Walter was always getting into some sort of trouble, was in and out of hospital a lot after getting cut, stuck, shot, beat up by the police, whatever…” (Glover et al. 163-164). However, although Walter had presumably acquired a gun before he met Muddy (as suggested in the home scene directly following Muddy's meeting Walter in “Cadillac Records”), in the early days of their collaboration, Walter did stay away from liquor: in Muddy’s words, “he wasn’t drinking nothing but Pepsi-Cola” (Gordon 87). Nevertheless, he was not an easy player to work with by any means – apart from the already-mentioned issue regarding timing, Walter had substantial difficulty settling down (ibid). This inability to stay focused, this restlessness, was to become another fundamental element in Walter’s future career and, eventually, one of the key ingredients in his downfall15. For the time being, though, Walter’s wild spirits were managed by the composed Waters, a man solidly rooted in the dirt of Mississippi, who had more experience at navigating the racially turbulent waters than his young harmonica companion. As Field argues, “Water’s quiet, firm dignity – an aura that would later make him the blues’ most successful ambassador to the world – serves a calming influence on Jacobs.” (173).

3.2 Chess and the Business

Chess Records evolved from the small Aristocrat label which the brothers took over from its original distributor, James Martin, who believed the brothers to be better-suited for running the label owing to their solidly-established network of Chicago connections (Rowe 79). After February 1950 the last Aristocrat session took place and in June the same year the newly-founded Chess label introduced its famous blue-and-white logo. As Mark Guarino points out in his article for The Guardian titled “Phil Chess, the Polish Immigrant who Brought Blues to the

15 In terms of later 20th century psychology, Walter would probably have been diagnosed with ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), for he demonstrated quite clear symptoms of the diagnosis: excessive activity, problems paying attention and difficulty controlling one’s behaviour.. Undiagnosed, adults suffering from ADHD tend to have a disorganised life and run a risk of using non-prescribed drugs or alcohol as a coping mechanism (Gentile 25). 33 World”, the Chess brothers predominantly targeted the black market, with little intention of selling their records to white buyers, due to the fact that radio remained segregated and offered “little opportunity for exposure”16. Among the first performers to record under Chess were Muddy Waters, and, eventually, Little Walter. In many ways, the lives of the bluesmen who recorded for Chess mirrored the challenges which the two brothers running the label, Leonard and Phil, also faced. Similarly to their African-American blues stars, the two Jewish brothers were also excluded from many commercial spheres and they had to resort to earning their living in the entertainment domain (Cohodas 3). Also regarded second-class citizens, the brothers managed to strike an incredibly powerful bond with the blues artists which completely disregarded boundaries of segregation (Cohodas 4). Blues artists were treated almost like family – sometimes they were even allowed to stay with one of the Chess if there was no other option. In some of the studio recordings, it is possible to hear Leonard frequently calling the artists “motherfucker” – this is the producer's attempt to position himself in the role of the 'white Negro', as suggested by Krin Gabbard in his review of “Cadillac Records” (323). Consequently, the bond between the artist and the producer was so tight that at times their roles overlapped: Chess would repeatedly enter the recording process and show the artists how he envisioned the particular song. For instance, in the first take of “Ever Think of Me”, Leonard instructs the band as regards its tempo: “Crazy 'bout you baby,', then WHAM!” (Glover et al. 77) In the studio, which was in itself a segregated space, with the (predominantly white) sound engineers and the producers behind the glass and the black artists in their sound-proof aquarium, boundaries of race were crossed, for the goal was shared on both sides of the glass – producing a successful record which would earn enough money for everyone involved. As a matter of fact, it is genuinely complicated to separate the cause from the effect – Rowe for example argues that this interweaving process started as early as 1950 when blues-recording became a “grass-roots operation” carried out by people

16 Guerino, Mark. “Phil Chess, the Polish Immigrant Who Brought Blues to the World.” The Guardian, 20th Oct. 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/oct/20/phil-chess- records-chicago-south-side-blues. Accessed 21 March 2017. 34 “with their fingers closest to the pulse of the black communities” (78). There was one phenomenon in particular which denoted mutual trust between the artist and the record producer which Chess records was to become famous for: Cadillac cars17. By signing up with Chess, Little Walter entered a world which would, all through his short life, be entwined with money-making. In his book Just My Soul Responding, which is predominantly occupied with black consciousness and race relations in Afro-American popular genres, Ward argues that Rhythm and Blues was a “lucrative commercial product”, which resulted in the record companies’ constant struggle to find out about the audience’s tastes (9). Another interesting factor which played an important role in how blues was perceived by those who produced it, is the fact that, according to statistics, blacks, regardless of their income, spend more money on records, record-playing equipment and entertainment in general than any other market segment group (Ward 9). Whether the Chess brothers were aware of this fact or not, they certainly did not want their artists to stay away from experiment: essentially, without Leonard opposing the studio technician who complained that Walter was “amplifying a fucking harmonica18” the Chicago blues sound may never have been born. Ward also (11) quotes Albert Murray who describes American culture as “incontestably mulatto” and claims that “black American music has been the classic dynamic hybrid”, constantly reinventing itself within a context of “overlapping influences and needs”. Little Walter's approach to harmonica playing followed exactly the same pattern – he refused to satisfy himself with the sound of the good old South days and decided to revolutionise the instrument once and for all, by cupping it as close to the microphone as possible so that the two blend into one and become yet another Afro-American hybrid.

17 The already-mentioned 2008 motion picture directed by Darnell Martin, herself of mixed Irish and Afro-American heritage, bears the very title ‘Cadillac Records’. Although Martin manages to capture the spirit of the era very skillfully and the film has its definite highlights, it does not always manage to escape the mythicization trap – rather than being discovered by Jimmy Rogers, who then introduced Walter to Muddy (Gordon 85), it is Muddy himself who meets Walter for the first time in the street (see Figure 4 in Appendix 2) and it is yet again Muddy himself who parts with the gravely wounded Walter the doorstep of his own house. However, Martin does achieve to strike the audience with some powerful biracial images, such as when Willie Dixon walks past Walter as he is sitting in his brand-new Cadillac which was given to him in the usual Chess fashion and hollers to Leonard: “Black folks riding around in Cadillacs – feels like I died and gone to heaven”. 18 Martin’s film “Cadillac Records” pictures this scene quite truthfully. 35 As suggested in Walter's Rock-and-Roll Hall of Fame inductee profile19, Walter may not have been the first blues artist to play amplified harmonica: however, he was indubitably the first performer to complete the hybridisation of the instrument into a unified whole with the microphone.

3.3 Going Electric

As Muddy’s cooperation with Walter became more and more tightly- woven, Walter gradually gained more confidence to step forward and test out some of his own ideas within the biome20 of the band. On July 11 1951, Muddy’s band had a scheduled recording session with Chess, on a day which later came to be called “Independence Day for the harmonica” (Gordon 110). It was during this session that Walter, arguably at his creative peak that day, plugged his harmonica microphone into a guitar amplifier and had the sound engineer put a microphone in front of it to record the distorted sound, which was then featured in Water’s song “Country Boy”. Although Walter had experimented with sound many times before and had been using a harmonica microphone plugged into the tape recorder at recording sessions (Davis 110), this was the very first instance of recording amplified sound, the very first time the harmonica was able to compete with Muddy’s electric guitar. The notion of amplification is a key element in Walter’s musical career – ever since he first plugged his microphone into an amplifier, the blues has never been the same as before. It is ironic that the song’s title should be “Country Boy”, for Walter’s harmonica sound is very far from being country: Walter’s riffs compete with Muddy’s electric slide and at times they are heard high above it. This was an obvious novelty for the blues market and it must have puzzled the listeners – the characteristic harmonica sound they associate with “down home” is twisted, distorted and transfigured to a something close to a howl. Walter’s intention was for the harmonica to sound different from anything it had been

19 “Little Walter.” RockHall, https://www.rockhall.com/inductees/little-walter. Accessed 20 March 2017. 20 The word biome is used here on purpose, for blues bands, especially at that time, were essentially collections of organisms with a shared background (i.e. southern origin, Afro- American or mixed heritage and, usually, both a diachronic and a synchronic migratory element). 36 associated with before: Walter’s innovative approach was modelled on Louis Jordan’s saxophone riffs21 (Wald 63). Owing to the urban context of the song, Walter was turning the sound of his instrument into something modern. Besides “Country Boy” the session also produced two Muddy Waters hits – “Still a Fool” and “She Moves Me”; the myth of the “Chicago sound” was given birth. It did not take much time before the whole blues community became electrified too – “Still a Fool” made the national top-ten charts in November 1951 (Gordon 113). During a May recording session in the following year, Walter finally made his breakthrough. As it is sometimes the case, legends are born rather incidentally and intuitively: and it was the band's musical intuition which lead to the recording of one of Walter's greatest hits, “Juke”. As the band had some studio time left after the main proportion of work had been done, it was suggested to try an instrumental which had proven popular with their audiences as a number which signalised breaks between sets and also functioned as a set opener. This simple market research, accompanied by Leonard's intuitive approach to releasing records, proved to be a very successful formula22. It also has to be noted that, as Marshall Chess, Leonard’s son, claims in Blues With a Feeling, “blues has always been a woman’s market” (77). By releasing a jump record of such dance potential, the Chess brothers were clearly targeting the female section of the African-American market, and Walter showed incredible faculty when it came to luring the women with his stage performance: he was young, handsome and already a master of his instrument. To black women, he must have had the attraction of a juvenile shaman, kind of a younger version of what was Muddy yet to become with his Southern masculine hoodoo. 21 Jordan was originally from Arkansas, the son of a musician in the Rabbit’s Foot Minstrels. He moved north in the 1930s and got a job with Chick Webb’s orchestra at Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom, and in 1938 he went solo, forming a hard-swinging band called the Tympany Five. (Tympani was misspelled, and the group tended to have more than five members, but he stuck with that name throughout his career.) Jordan was a hip musical comedian on the model of Louis Armstrong and Fats Waller, but after hitting in 1942 with Casey Bill Weldon’s “I’m Gonna Leave You on the Outskirts of Town,” he made blues a mainstay of his repertoire. (Wald 50-51) 22 Once again, there is a blues myth connected to the release of “Juke”. As it was sometimes the case, the song was not released immediately after the recording – Leonard kept it in his office at Cottage Grove and occasionally played it on his turntable. One day, as the record was playing, both the Chess brothers witnessed a peculiar scene outside in the street: an elderly black woman was, while waiting for the bus, joyfully dancing to Walter's record, which could be heard outside through the open door (Cohodas 69). Seeing business potential in the 'jump' record, Leonard decided to release it. This also demonstrates the already-mentioned importance of the blues as primarily a form of dance music. 37 Originally titled “Your Pat Will Play”, the song was later renamed “Juke”, which is a clear double allusion to both jukebox machines and juke joints – the record was to be released with a noticeable intention for it to become a dance hit. The song's title was indubitably one of the Chess' marketing triumphs – by now, the brothers had clearly become fully aware of the essential marketing potential a blues record could have, given the right chemistry. The record became an R&B hit practically overnight – a week after it had been released, Chess told the CashBox magazine that he had managed to sell over 500 copies of it almost instantly (Cohodas 70). Aiming to capitalise on the successful sales, Chess did not hesitate when Cash Box offered them an opportunity to be featured on the magazine's November issue cover23; this was the first Cash Box front page appearance for the Chess label. It was clear that the success of “Juke” was to have serious consequences as regards Walter's future career. Whether the 22-year old harmonica player was ready for such drastic changes in his lifestyle remains to be answered in the following chapter. While one can study “Juke” from a musicological angle, it is absolutely essential to place it within the network of relationships which the blues industry entailed. From the perspective of his future career, Walter’s undisputed harmonica craftsmanship in the record has to be put right beside the very photograph from Cash Box. The fact that a barely literate Cajun boy from Marksville, Lousiana, made a front page appearance must have put Walter’s mind to work. In his “Polemic With The Urban Blues” Matt Sakakeeny praises Keil’s Urban Blues for “interpreting musical meaning in the daily life of musicians and audiences” and relating operations within these networks to “broader political movements” (143). Furthermore, Sakakeeny presents views from the opposite angle, which criticise Keil: sociologist Benett Berger (1967), who came from the “poverty of culture” school, argued that “the path out of poverty for African Americans was through the adoption of white norms” (Sakakeeny 160). This extreme approach, which would eventually lead to the 23 The photograph (Figure 6 in Appendix 2) was taken in the WGES studio and it features the disc-jockey Alan Benson, together with Leonard and, sat between them, a smiling Walter with a harp in his hand. In this photo, not unlike in other photos taken at the beginning of his career in Chicago, Walter looks both pleased and slightly bewildered at what he has achieved (see also other photos such as Walter meeting the boxer, Ezzard Charles – Figure 5 in Appendix 2). One could easily read eagerness in the face of the young Afro- American, a boy who had pilgrimed all the way from Marksville, Louisiana, to make his mark in the musical world. 38 white majority absorbing the African American community, is, besides being hypocritically superior, absurdly impossible. In fact, in Walter’s case, the reverse process was true: the more he tried to be white the more detached and disillusioned he became with his identity. This detachment, as well as Walter's internal collapse, which lead to his tragic end, is discussed in the final chapter of this thesis.

39 4 Taking a Tumble Right from the Top

Following the success of ‘Juke’ Walter truly managed to fill the gap which was left on the Chicago scene after the passing of his mentor, the original Sonny Boy Williamson. At that time, there was no harp player in Chicago who could compete with him – only 20 years old, Walter was “at the pinnacle of his powers” (Rowe 88). This time brought about an exciting shift to the blues harp: while some 10 years ago the harmonica was considered an accompanying instrument, Billy Boy Arnold described the 1951 Chicago scene stating that both saxophone and piano players could hardly secure work, while “you couldn’t get a job without a harmonica player” (Rowe 88). Around this time, the harmonica came to be known as the ‘Mississippi saxophone’, surely partly due to Walter’s amplified playing. As Buddy Guy claims in his biography When I Left Home: My Story:

Before Little Walter, harmonicas cost a dime. Folks looked at them as toys. After Little Walter, harmonicas cost $5. Folks looked at them like instruments. (38)

It was thus only natural the young Southern migrant would not miss his chance loosen his connection with Muddy – while the band was on tour in Walter’s home state of Louisiana, Walter disappeared back north shortly after he had been exposed to “Juke’s” popularity in the jukeboxes. After a few more gigs back in Chicago, Walter was overcome by his urge to run his own band24. Just like the newly-released records playing on turntables in folks’ homes and bar jukeboxes, Walter’s world also started spinning at rapid speed on the brink of the 1950s. Although Walter’s cooperation with the Muddy Waters band would remain to be praised as one of the highlights of the Chicago blues genre, it in fact lasted no more than 2 years. Rowe (87) argues that although the exact

24 Myth has it that the last drop for Walter was when, after one of the patrons at the Zanzibar club in Chicago asked the band to play ‘Juke’, he put a quarter on both Waters’s and Roger’s knees, and only a mere dime on Walter’s. For a proud young man who believed that he was the one to take credit for the success of the jump blues hit, this was the ultimate insult. The truth is that by then Walter was probably fully aware of his potential and felt that it was only natural to put his own musical ideas into practice. It could have been that he felt that Waters and his well-polished, even though Chicago-fashioned, but still inescapably Southernly sentimental, approach to the blues, might be setting his creativity back. 40 date of Walter’s joining the group is not known – it was sometime around 1950, his leaving can be pinpointed to mid-1952. Therefore, it is certainly interesting that Walter’s cooperation with the Muddy Waters band would be, once again as it was the blues fashion, mythicised despite being so short-lived. After recording “Juke” and seeing its popularity in jukeboxes, Walter decided to abandon the Muddy Waters to form a band of his own. As bluesmen were frequently circulating between the bands, playing with different ensembles than their own if the situation called for it, it was not unusual that Walter joined The Aces, a band which was originally backing the harmonica player Junior Wells. However, it was necessary to change the band’s name: in yet another move which would presumably generate more bookings, it was suggested that the band be renamed to “Little Walter and the Jukes”.

4.1 Bandleader Efforts

Forming a band of one’s own is a major step in the career of any musician, and it does indeed require other skills than ‘just’ being the best blues harmonica player in the business. As compared in chapter 3.1, Walter was made of different material than Muddy: while Muddy had been able to secure a relatively stable band of his own even after Walter left, Walter created problems for himself even before his own band was formed. The fact that he literally pushed the band’s harmonica player, Junior Wells, out of his seat and positioned himself as the bandleader certainly did not aid the microorganism’s internal dynamics. The band’s biome was disrupted from very early on. In addition to this, it has to be taken into consideration that Walter was young and inexperienced as far as handling relationships and money, was concerned. He was repeatedly described by his friends and fellow musicians as a person who had, to put it mildly, a very loose approach to financial issues. Eddie “Jewtown” Burks, a former mill worker and a harp player who played regularly on Maxwell Street was one of those who remembered Walter’s car trunk cash vault:

(...) I was on my way to work at the steel mill. [Walter] flagged me down and told me to come on over and get some money. I went over there and looked in that car and saw all them tens and twenties stacked up in there. I said to myself, “This cat done robbed a

41 bank.”(Glover et al. 130)

Although only a fleeting episode, it clearly demonstrates that Walter was not capable of managing his financial affairs. Gradually, it started to show that despite Afro-American Chicago bluesmen were provided with an opportunity by the newfangled recording industry, they clearly lacked the skills to deal with the entailed challenges. What at first seemed as a blessing usually transformed into a curse: the more famous Walter became, the more money there was flowing in and the more difficult it became for him to cope with the resulting responsibility. Becoming an icon inevitably generates pressure and, sadly, Walter was only aware of the musical aspect of this pressure – as Billy Boy Arnold states in Walter’s biography, Walter did not like most of the harp players, he felt threatened by them (Glover et al. 132). Wherever Walter played, other harp players gathered around to witness him on stage, which generated a feeling of insecurity in Walter. As Rowe aptly states, it is complicated to separate Walter’s inherent toughness from toughness thrust upon him (92). It is complicated to separate cause from effect: we will never learn if Walter was pushed forward so quickly by his inner craving for success (as suggested by Gordon in chapter 3.1 of this thesis) or whether it was the blues industry, including both the producers and the audiences, which kept pushing the artist to his limits, constantly generating pressure for new ideas. The evidence gathered in Blues With a Feeling tends to point to the latter being the case – according to Dave Myers, Walter’s band-member, Walter was unprepared for the fame and fortune his talent brought him (276). What not only Walter’s ups and downs quite truthfully reflect is the already-mentioned dire prediction which David Cohn made about the Great Migration:

Most of this group are farm Negroes totally unprepared for urban, industrial life. How will they be industrially absorbed? What will be the effect of throwing them upon the labor market? What will be their reception at the hands of white and Negro workers whose jobs and wages they threaten? (Lehmann 51)

As far as ups were concerned, Walter managed to become the most commercially successful Chess artist, something the other “Chess cats”, including Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Sonny Boy Williamson II. never managed

42 to achieve: between 1952 and 1958, Walter scored a total of fourteen top-ten hits on the Billboard R&B charts. Two Walter hits topped the charts – besides “Juke”, Walter succeeded with “My Babe”, a song written by Willie Dixon, a remake of an old blues standard ‘This Train’. A similar formula was repeatedly used by the Chess A&R magician with other Little Walter songs – Dixon took the melody of a well-known blues standard, rearranged it so that it would fit The Jukes and gave a free hand to Walter to supply the harmonica as the flesh of the song. In this fashion, these remakes follow the call-and-response pattern and have the potential of becoming instant dance hits – after hearing the first verses, the dancers knew exactly what they need to follow. At the same time, though, a song like this sounded new both due to the band’s jazzier approach and Walter’s harmonica virtuosity. While Muddy’s aim was to remind the audience of their Southern heritage through sentiment, Walter’s music was focused on the future. In a way, Walter was the freedom rider of the blues harmonica. As Madison Deniro argues in an article about Walter for the Blues Harmonica Legends series “from the very start Walter paid homage to no tradition other than his own”25. However, Walter's leaving the Muddy Waters band also resulted in losing the protective shoulder of the seasoned bluesman, which had far-reaching consequences to Walter's self-esteem. Charlie Musselwhite suggests in an interview with Kim Field that Walter's perception of his identity became somewhat challenged:

Things became to Walter where he became ashamed of himself. When he left Muddy and went out on his own he found himself playing in places he wasn't used to, like The Apollo Theater in New York. He'd be backstage and the stagehands would be making little comments to him about how he was just a country boy. That really messed Walter's head up. (191)

Interestingly enough, Musselwhite mentions exactly the same concert which was described by Walter's guitar player at that time, Louis Myers, like this: “Walter was nervous and scared, that's what made him blow so hard.” (Glover et al. 86). Walter was certainly eager to impress. Yet the show was an

25 Deniro, Madison. “Little Walter.” Bluesharp, http://www.bluesharp.ca/legends/lwalter.html. Accessed 17 Jan. 2017. 43 immense success, and one of the organisers had to stop the show at one point to settle the audience down because the people, as Myers says, “went berserk”. Immediately after the hard-won success at The Apollo, during which Walter yet again heard the crack of the white whip, an opportunity to perform at the London Palladium, for as long as thirty-nine nights, arose (Glover et al. 87). Albeit a lifetime opportunity, Walter refused to travel, and Europe had to wait for him until over a decade later. There was certainly more happening under the surface than “the country boy” would admit. Nevertheless, Little Walter and The Jukes began gathering a wider audience, which resulted in repeated tours to various places both in the North and in the South in the course of the 1950s. Travelling to their audience constituted an inseparable part of any musician's life, including even the most successful bluesmen (Keil 150). In order to sustain the same level of financial independence in a world which put constant economic pressure on African Americans, the bluesman had to undergo the gruesome experience of migrating yet again. In a way, Walter's life was destined to be spent on the road, without a substantial base of operation to which he could return. Keil furthermore argues that this migratory nature generates constant struggles as to the expected roles he is to perform as “an adult male” (150). Although many of his friends and co- players agree that Walter was the prototype of the black hustler, and that he had a mistress in almost every town where he would play26, it is complicated to separate cause from result. Yet still, it is without doubt that the endless tours in the US, alcohol abuse and “conceit on the verge of megalomania” (Herzhaft 120) began taking its toll. The following sub-chapter analyses the consequences of this blues lifestyle.

4.2 An Undead Icon

Towards the end of the 1950s, the ever-turning wheel of the musical industry yet again becoming loose of its hinges. Sales figures and chart trends were shifting and the Chess brothers were certainly aware of this: the was now a

26 Walter was indeed a ladies' man, which frequently generated conflicts, sometimes resulting in physical injuries on both sides. Arguably, this was a trait inherited from the late Adam (Bruce) Jacobs. 44 large new market for Afro-American Rock&Roll records by the likes of Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry. The blues was, at least as far as record were concerned, stepping back from the limelight. Rowe attributes this paradigmatic shift in the audience's tastes partially to the increasing prosperity of the urban African-American population, which was less willing to dwell in the past. To the new generation of city-raised youth, who were to constitute the new majority in the Afro-American record-buying public saw little relevance in the blues (191). Walter was never able to deal with the decreasing popularity and gradually started to become immersed in his ego, detached from his band mates. However, this withdrawal from popularity did not apply so severely to live blues performances – Walter still remained “a big attraction in the clubs, especially with the women” (Glover et al. 180). Despite the fact that Walter managed to maintain roughly the same living standard, he was more and more frequently forced to rely on his live performance as a form of sustaining himself. According to Jimmie Lee Robinson, Walter’s old Maxwell Street colleague, this shift did not matter that significantly, for Walter’s best work was to be witnessed on stage, not from the turntable or a jukebox. Robinson claims that “you had more room to experiment and create [on gigs]” (Glover et al. 188). Basically, Robinson supports the notion that real blues is inseparably tied to live performance: every blues act has the potential to function as a ritual, with the frontman adopting the role of the shaman. Rowe also supports this view, this time from the perspective of the artists themselves, who perceive the recording business as “secondary to public performances” (192). At the beginning of the 1960s, there was a growing interest in blues among young white musicians as well, coming from varied class backgrounds. On the one hand, there was the blue-collar, Mississippi-born Charlie Musselwhite, on the other hand there were the likes of Paul Butterfield and Fred Glaser, who came from middle-class, well- to-do Chicago families. Glover et. al cites Glaser who would frequent blues gigs both in the South and West Side as a form of rebellion to their white-collar upbringing: “When [Walter] played man, he captivated the audience. He was like a mythological creature when he was on stage.” (217) During a live performance, boundaries of race and status are crossed, for the benefit of experiencing a moment of transcendence. Walter's mental displacement was transferred to the audience, and the captivation was augmented by the small

45 size of the clubs (Glover et al. 217), in which it was difficult to separate the players from the members of the audience. As a result, the attendees and the entertainers formed a single mass in which colour played hardly any role. As people quite naturally want to become transfixed and transfigured, it was only a matter of time when white audiences in Europe would begin to take notice of American blues. More and more European blues aficionados started to emerge in Chicago, in search of the real blues experience; after their return they began planting seeds of blues enthusiasm back in their home countries. As a result, European club owners and managers started taking notice that the European blues market was growing. Ironically, as shown in the Beatles anecdote above, it coincided with the time when the blues was being driven away from the clubs by R&R. However, the folks on the other side of the Atlantic were hungry for a genuine African-American experience. The crucial question nevertheless stayed the same as it was discussed at the beginning of this thesis: what constituted authentic blues? White European fans, usually coming from educated, middle-class backgrounds, possessed extraordinary capacity with which they were able to mythicise and idealise the blues. Yet again, the blues wheel had reinvented itself. Walter was first offered to come to England in 1964, following in the steps of Aleck Miller (aka Sonny Boy Williamson II.) who had made quite a star of himself on the continent, giving the European audiences exactly what they wished for: an eerie, mystical blues act, not devoid of humour. Miller, whom Walter grew to despise more and more because of his tricking the audiences as a Sonny Boy Williamson impostor27, was repeatedly introduced to the audiences as “Sir Sonny Boy Williamson” and “King of the harmonica” (such as in the video footage to ‘Keep It To Yourself’ from 1963), which clad him in an aura of authentic exclusivity. Interestingly enough, Muddy Waters was also planning to adapt his act during the 1963 trip – mindful of the negative press reactions which his amplified playing spurred after the previous overseas visit, he decided to bring along his acoustic guitar. Muddy was clearly willing to part with his

27 In Blues With a Feeling, Walter comments on Miller after his passing, still not willing to accept the harpist’s fraud who pretended to be the original Sonny Boy, never adopting a different stage name. This must have pained Walter, who held the real Sonny Boy in high esteem, even more so after he had heard that in Europe Miller was being sold simply as Sonny Boy Williamson. Walter would brush Miller off saying “I'll never know how could take peoples' money.” (Glover et al. 262) 46 signature slide-guitar sound for the sake of a better reception, and was only more confused when the audiences actually wanted to hear his “full-scale electric-band sound” (Glover et al. 226). This was in fact not a new notion: a similar role of a country blues musician, without the fringes of the city, was adopted by Big Bill Broonzy for the Carnegie Hall show organized by the wealthy record producer John Hammond, decades earlier, in 1938. Broonzy, a seasoned musician, with over a hundred records to his name, willingly parted with his sharp suits and agreed to be presented as a simple farm hand28. It comes as no surprise that the Carnegie Hall audience was predominantly white. By and large, Walter's first English tour did not meet with the same success as Miller's gentlemanly, pretentious infiltration, partly owing to the lack of musical understanding between the backing bands and Walter, partly because, as the tour progressed, Walter grew increasingly distant and isolated (Glover et al. 238). The tour was booked through Willie Dixon, who definitely got his share, as did the UK musicians union, while Walter received weekly wages, just like a factory worker. This transplantive schism of providing European audiences with an opportunity to experience “the real deal blues” had, in Walter’s case, unhealthy consequences. Essentially, as any transplantation’s success is conditioned by the host body’s willingness to adopt a foreign organ, and vice versa, if things go awry there is always the risk of inflammation. This mutual relationship between the audience and the entertainer is one of the keys to Little Walter: quite naturally, if the harp player felt that he was being supported by the audience, the performance shifted to a completely different level. While Charles Radcliffe from Blues Unlimited described the first half of the concert which he attended at the Broadside Folk Club as featuring “pleasant but undistinguished harmonica”, the second half, after Walter was surrounded by several British blues fanatics who knew his records and admired him, the harmonica was “riffing beautifully, bouncing and bubbling with vitality, energy and controlled power” (Glover et al. 236). Walter had also decided to cup his microphone before the second half of the show, which signalised a return to his original self, the amplified Little Walter, as he felt himself to be, not the acoustic, country boy transplant some of the white audiences wanted him to appear as.

28 “Blues America – Part 1: Woke Up This Morning.” Youtube, uploaded by Xander Platz. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hZMHLGMpzc. Accessed 11 March 2017. 47 The second European tour in 1967 generated yet another blues myth which had to be refuted by Keith Richards, that is the fact that Walter had toured with The Rolling Stones (Field 177). Myth aside, the tour did not please Walter to a great degree and he was then often heard complaining about the quality of the backing bands, which included Hound Dog Taylor (see Figure 9 in Appendix 2), of whom Walter spoke with disgust, using the ultimate insult “Southern coon” (Glover et al. 262). Truth be told, Walter's antagonism towards his musical colleagues partially derived from his advanced state of alcoholism: to Walter, drinking became both a social lubricant and a form of dealing with accumulated pressure from a fragmented relationship with his personal, as well as generative, past. Keil (198) offers an interesting correlation between Erikson's theory of personality development stages and the challenges an African-American blues artist faces in the course of his or her lifetime. As the ideal of an artist who has managed to deal with the psychological crises all through his career, with a solid degree of success, Keil presents B.B.King, whose career “hinges on his being totally himself and sharing that self with others day after day, night after night” (Keil 201). Viewed through the same prism, Walter passed most of the eight crises in relation to the harmonica, as opposed to entering a network of relationships within the family and peers. For him, the virtues acquired would be, in order: mistrust after being separated from the mother, autonomy and guilt as regards personal choice as an Afro-American bred in Louisiana, compensated by a sense of achievement when discovering his musical ability, followed by industry relative to other teenage boys. In a way, Walter was never truly a teenager, by becoming self-sufficient so early, he skipped the dependence phase. For the most of his life, he kept struggling with the crucial, fifth phase, which, after a period of being repeatedly pushed back into the voiceless, acoustic, country boy position, led to growing isolation. This pressure from the predominantly white audiences towards fossilisation of a blues career in a kind of musical stasis which would confirm the romanticising tendencies of the listeners about the blues deprived Walter of a key substance: his amplified voice. To an extent, during some nights of the European tours, Walter became an iconic zombie – a reanimated, speechless being, brought back to life as a part of an act, devoid of free will. Keil aptly summarises an English blues concert, which

48 the audience consumed with silent reverence:

An affair I witnessed in London featured an array of elderly bluesmen, a few of them quite decrepit; one scheduled performer had just been shipped back to the States with an advanced state of tuberculosis (...) Aside from a slobbery but impassioned harmonica by Sonny Boy Williamson (...), and an all to brief display of artistry by Lightning Hopkins, the concert might be best described as a third-rate minstrel show. The same show presented to a [black] audience in Chicago (...) would be received with hoots of derision, catcalls and laughter. (37)

Although Keil’s argumentation that such a show would not be received well by an Afro-American audience back home, it is quite likely that a knowledgeable white audience would share such a negative reaction. Ultimately, this is not a question of race but rather of wishful thinking on the part of the English, predominantly middle-class, spectators who longed for a transcending, totemic, African experience. It can only be guessed that the likes of Charlie Musselwhite and Paul Butterfield would join in the hooting, if it would not have been them who would call back to the artists first. Any blues performance is not a to be viewed as a token of a biracial relationship between a white audience and an Afro-American artist, but rather as an opportunity to cross the threshold of race or, ideally, a unique crossroads at which race is completely cast aside.

4.3 Oblivion

The dead do not wake up easily and neither did Walter. After returning from the second tour, he did not manage to keep a steady band and he would perform wherever they were willing to pay. In his final years, Walter had become dishevelled and insecure to the point of paranoia. In Can’t Be Satisfied, Paul Oscher remembers that every time he saw Little Walter “he was constantly looking over his shoulder” (202). Oscher compares Walter’s music from a diachronic point of view with Muddy’s, saying that Walter’s jump combo sound had become dated while Muddy’s Delta sound “rolled on like a freight train”. Interestingly, Muddy had somehow managed to adopt the role of the blues ambassador, he was never willing to adapt to white norms (as mentioned earlier in this thesis), while Walter strove for a rockstar career, with all the material

49 fringes. In the end, it was Muddy who would perform with the real Rolling Stones at Buddy Guy’s29 Checkboard Lounge in Chicago in 1981. Once again, the blues icon is used as a biracial tool for taking a trip back to the Delta. It would definitely be interesting to witness Walter join in and see how much Delta reverence is left. Little Walter died a few months after returning from his second European tour, following a street brawl over a dice game, on February 15th 1968, aged only 37. He followed the same fate as his past mentor, the real Sonny Boy Williamson, who had also sustained head injuries to which he succumbed, three years younger than Walter. Just like Sonny Boy, Walter had been a heavy drinker in his last years, and his face had been scarred, tattered and gloomy. He was already worn very, very thin: since “the harmonica is a breath away from the soul of a man” (Gordon 203), once one loses this crucial breath, one’s soul falls off its hinges. Race did not matter anymore, Walter dissolved without a trace – his grave remained unmarked until 1991 when his fans, Scott Dirks (the co-author of Blues With a Feeling) and Eomot Rasun had a tombstone designed and placed. As declared by historian and record producer in Confessin’ the Blues “Honor Little Walter, who gave us so much and, who like most bluesmen, received so little.”30 There is one last glimpse, though, which remains ingrained in the observer's memory, which does not, as Woolf said in the opening chapter of this thesis “become submerged in chaos, nature and society”. It is a series of photographs taken by a Chicago photographer, Raeburn Flerlage, at a concert show at the University of Chicago's Mandell Hall in 1966 (Figure 10 in Appendix 2). In his fascinating book of photographs from various blues events titled Chicago Blues As Seen From The Inside, Flerlage recalls this very show:

Little Walter was absolutely carried away that night. He performed like a man

29 Incidentally, the very same Buddy guy who would himself appear on stage with the Stones in Scorsese’s live rock documentary “Shine a Light” (2008), joining the band on solo guitar, to accompany Jagger’s vocals and somewhat uninspired harmonica for Muddy’s “Champagne and a Reefer”. Although Jagger acts up on stage in his usual fashion, the scene ends with Richards reverently giving his guitar to Buddy, crediting the elderly bluesman by saying “It's yours.”

30 Cohassey, John. “Little Walter.” Encyclopaedia, http://www.encyclopedia.com/people/literature-and-arts/music-popular-and-jazz- biographies/little-walter#D. Accessed 19 March 2017. 50 possessed, he was in ecstasy. I have never seen another performer so happy with himself and the response he was getting as Walter was that night. (114)

Walter did indeed manage to cross any and all obstacles which lay in his way. To him, the harmonica was the perfect tool to achieve personal freedom; freedom from race, freedom from prejudice, freedom from the burdens of the world. On that night, in that cubist series of photographs, Walter finally becomes whole.

51 Conclusion

The thesis showed that although it is indisputable that the blues as a genre originated in the American South, it was by no means limited to the Delta region only, as demonstrated by two Texan blues artists, Blind Willie Johnson and Blind Lemon Jefferson, as well as by Paul Oliver's polemic in “Blues Research: Problems and Possibilities”. In addition, it was discovered that in case of Little Walter the push factors of leaving the remains of the Jim Crow regime were gradually overcome by pull factors, which meant more opportunities to sustain oneself by playing the harmonica in the North. Eventually, this enabled Walter to completely abandon a steady job and become a professional harmonica player, which represented a fulfillment of the Cajun's American dream. Although originally the harmonica played an accompanying role to the blues guitar, Little Walter, following his mentor Sonny Boy Williamson, managed to transform it into a full-fledged solo instrument. The final chapters illustrated that Little Walter's blues frequently crossed boundaries of race, both between him and other players, as well as between him and the Jewish record producers, the Chess brothers. Essentially, Walter was a great inspiration to other harmonica players, regardless of their racial background, who strove to achieve the same level of musical virtuosity in the newly-developed genre of the Chicago blues. One of his protégés in the 1960s was Charlie Musselwhite, whom Walter tutored, and who would later become an internationally acknowledged harmonica soloist, performing with the likes of Bonnie Tyler, Ben Harper and Tom Waits. From a racial point of view, Walter's perspective was devoid of structuralist black versus white prejudice. He would happily invite a white harmonica player to take his place on stage as long as he could blow. By completely casting aside racial differences in such relationships, Walter was a true example of a multicultural approach to musical collaboration. From a musical perspective, Walter's role in the development of the blues genre is undeniable. In the short film which was screened before Walter's induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Jimmie Lee Robinson, a former member of Little Walter's band, claims that “Little Walter was the best blues

52 harmonica player in the world – he brought in something new to the world, a new style, new sound.”31 This new style was a combination of Creole influences from Louisiana, saxophone playing of Louis Jordan and Walter's revolutionary blending of the harmonica with the microphone into a single hybrid instrument, which resulted in a characteristic amplified tone. Walter’s influence effectively crossed racial boundaries, as it is acknowledged even by one of most prominent European blues performers, Eric Clapton32. While this thesis aimed to analyse the life and work of a single artist only, some key elements are bound to have been overlooked, such as Walter's sexual relationships and the role his family played in the latter years of his life. It would certainly also be beneficial to study the myth of the origins of the blues in more detail, especially as regards other regions than the Mississippi Delta. However, as most of the artists have already perished, and owing to the fact that Delta's dominant position in the history of the genre is so firmly rooted, such research would be as demanding as intriguing. The possibilities of further study are virtually endless, but unfortunately the limits of this paper are not.

31 “Little Walter R&R Hall of Fame Film.” Youtube, uploaded by checker 764, 6 February 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UUwfrj9aMNA. 32 (ibid) 53 List of References

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58 Appendices

Appendix 1: Interview with Charlie Musselwhite Appendix 2: Figures

59 Appendix 1: Interview With Charlie Musselwhite

This is an email interview with Charlie Musselwhite, conducted in February 2017, which was mediated by the artist’s wife and manager, Henrietta. Charlie Musselwhite is an American blues harmonica player, born in 1944 in Kosciusko, Mississippi, and is one of the non-black bluesmen who became prominent in the 1960s, alongside Mike Bllomfield and Paul Butterfield.

JJS: As a musician, what does the blues harp represent to you? CM: It is the most voice-like instrument and is perfectly suited for the blues.

JJS: Would you be able to recall your initial motivation in taking up the harp? CM: When I first heard it, it made me feel good and I realized it would probably make me feel even better if I could play it. Harmonicas were gifts when I was a child – it was an easy access instrument.

JJS: Did you think of becoming a professional musician in your early Chicago years? CM: As soon as people started hiring me, it got my attention and seemed way better way of life than the factory job I had at the time.

JJS: Do you remember the first time you met Little Walter? What impression did you have of him when he performed? CM: Yes – I remember how exciting it was to hear him for the first time live. He was always real nice to me. He often gave me a ride home or would wait with me until the bus came. He looked out for me.

JJS: In Little Walter's biography, Paul Butterfield presents Walter as a "nasty son-of-a-bitch" who "would not show you stuff" (219). However, apparently, he did share some harp hints with you (256). What were these? CM: He explained the 5th position to me – which many harp players had no idea existed. My experience with Walter was that he was really nice to me and helped me develop musically and personally.

60 JJS: How important was it for you at that time to learn from the likes of Walter? CM: I really appreciated it as it gave me confidence when they would compliment me. And harp is an instrument where you can't see how it is played so to get input from the masters was awesome. Big Walter was very helpful too.

JJS: Do you think that your background played any part in being approached by Chicago bluesmen, incl. Walter, more warmly (i.e. as suggested in the biography - "Musselwhite (...) was closer to the bluesmen in class and style" (219)? CM: They all seemed to like me for one reason because I was from “down home” in the South and I was making my own way without financial support from anyone.

JJS: Thank you. It was an absolute pleasure having this fantastic opportunity to interview you. CM: Thanks. Best to you and stay in touch.

61 Appendix 2: Figures

Figure 1 A Map of the Great Blues Migration Figure 2 Little Walter's Social security application Figure 3 Blues performers on Maxwell Street Figure 4 Muddy Waters meets Little Walter in “Cadillac Records” Figure 5 Little Walter with boxer Ezzard Charles Figure 6 CashBox magazine cover photograph Figure 7 Otish Rush at Pepper's Lounge, Charlie Musselwhite in the audience Figure 8 Charlie Musselwhite attending an Otish Rush performance, accompanied by Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield Figure 9 At the hotel during the American Folk Blues Festival Tour Figure 10 Little Walter at the University of Chicago's Mandell Hall

62 Figure 1 A Map of the Great Blues Migration

Source: “The Great Migration.” Community Building 2014, http://cb14.raimistdesign.com/2013/09/great-migration/. Accessed 2 March 2017.

63 Figure 2 Little Walter's Social security application

Source: Glover, Tony, et al. Blues With a Feeling: The Little Walter Story. Routledge, 2002.

Figure 3 Blues performers on Maxwell Street, c. 1940s to 1950s

Source: “Blues Performers on Maxwell Street, c. 1940s to 1950s, Chicago.” Pinterest, pinned by calumet412.com. https://cz.pinterest.com/pin/516788125966983752/. Accessed on March 29 2017.

64 Figure 4 Muddy Waters meets Little Walter in “Cadillac Records”

Source: Scott, A. O. “Got Their Musical Mojo Working.” The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/05/movies/05cadi.html. Accessed 21 March 2017.

Figure 5 Little Walter with boxer Ezzard Charles, autumn 1953

Source: Glover, Tony, et al. Blues With a Feeling: The Little Walter Story. Routledge, 2002.

65 Figure 6 CashBox magazine cover photograph: (left to right) Al Benson, Walter and Leonard Chess, 1952

Source: Cohodas, Nadine. Spinning Blues Into Gold: The Chess Brothers and the Legendary Chess Records. St. Martin’s Press, 2000.

Figure 7 Otish Rush at Pepper's Lounge, Charlie Musselwhite in the audience

Source: Flerlage, Raeburn. Chicago Blues As Seen From The Inside: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage. Edited by Lisa Day, ECW Press, 2000.

66 Figure 8 Charlie Musselwhite attending an Otish Rush performance, accompanied by Paul Butterfield and Mike Bloomfield (Charlie on the left)

Source: Flerlage, Raeburn. Chicago Blues As Seen From The Inside: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage. Edited by Lisa Day, ECW Press, 2000.

Figure 9 At the hotel during the American Folk Blues Festival Tour, 1967: (left to right) Skip James, Walter, Son House, Hound Dog Taylor, Koko Taylor

Source: Glover, Tony, et al. Blues With a Feeling: The Little Walter Story. Routledge, 2002.

67 Figure 10 Little Walter at the University of Chicago's Mandell Hall, 1966

Source: Flerlage, Raeburn. Chicago Blues As Seen From The Inside: The Photographs of Raeburn Flerlage. Edited by Lisa Day, ECW Press, 2000.

68