DOCSLIB.ORG

Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920S Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta.” T

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920S Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta.” T Prairie View A&M University From the SelectedWorks of T. DeWayne Moore December, 2018 “Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta.” T. DeWayne Moore, Prairie View A&M University This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC_BY International License. Available at: https://works.bepress.com/tdewaynemoore/8/ 154 ARSC Journal Figure 1. Ralph Lembo in the 1920s. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge. ORIGINAL ARTICLE | T. DEWAYNE MOORE Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta This essay examines newspaper articles, government documents, personal family collections, and secondary sources to refute and corroborate interviews about Ralph Lembo and restore the good name of the Mississippi talent scout and manager whose passionate, multi- faceted engagement with the entertainment world brought many artists to major recording companies, including Columbia, Paramount, OKeh, and Victor. Lembo drove Rocket 88 air- conditioned automobiles, wore alligator boots and Panama-brimmed hats, and he stepped up and offered his large plantation when several other potential sites had refused to support the establishment of Mississippi Valley State University. Lembo relished playing the drums in his band the Pot Lickers and operating several music stores in the mid-Delta, which brought him into contact with an immense well of talent, including such figures as Kansas City Jim Jackson, Bo Carter, Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Rubin Lacy. This article also explodes the negative and ongoing bias against Lembo and argues that he discovered the “King of the Delta Blues,” Charley Patton. alent scout Harry Charles had a piano store in Birmingham, Alabama. Polk Brockman was a furniture and music store proprietor in Atlanta, Georgia. R. T. TAshford operated a record store and shoeshine parlor in Dallas, Texas. Henry Speir was a phonograph technician and music store proprietor on Farish Street in Jackson, Mississippi. Each of these major southern cities boasted talent scouts who discovered recording artists for the major record labels prior to World War II. Each of these scouts dedicated time and energy to capturing southern musical culture and preserving the sounds that have both inspired and haunted musicians, scholars, and enthusiasts around the globe ever since. One of the most under-recognized and important talent scouts for the major labels during this time was a largely obscure grocery store owner and retail merchant who had immigrated from Comiso, Sicily, and found his way to the small town of Itta Bena, Mississippi, not far from Greenwood. Raffaele “Ralph” Lembo has never really interested scholars enough to warrant serious attempts to uncover evidence about him beyond a limited amount of oral testimony. In many accounts, he is portrayed like a character in a Horatio Alger novel whose inauspicious career started with selling dry goods from a pushcart and ended with his being a “part-time talent scout who focused most of his energies on building his retail emporium.”1 He is perhaps best known for his spoken interjection on Rubin Lacy’s “Ham Hound Crave,” his discovery of the Mississippi Sheiks, and his arrangement of Bukka White’s debut session on Victor in 1930. After the onset of the Great Depression, ARSC Journal XLIX / ii 2018. © Association for Recorded Sound Collections 2018. All rights reserved. Printed in USA. Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 155 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta Lembo seems to have faded into the background like so many of the unissued blues sides of the pre-World War II period. The works of Stephen Calt and Gayle Dean Wardlow have been a most salient influence on subsequent scholarship. Calt and Wardlow’s King of the Delta Blues: The Life and Music of Charlie Patton puts forward several incorrect assertions and gives an overall negative impression of Ralph Lembo, with Charley Patton supposedly refusing to stoop so low as to record for the “tricky” Italian and instead presenting himself as a recording prospect to talent scout H. C. Speir in Jackson, Mississippi.2 Their fantastic tales of Lembo’s unscrupulous management stem from their errant belief that he lost a lawsuit and paid “thousands of dollars in damages.”3 They also portray Lembo as an overzealous advertiser whose desire for valuable, exploitable recording properties outweighed his desire for success in local business. Strangely, Patton is said in King of the Delta Blues to have assessed all the rumors floating around Greenwood regarding Lembo and decided not to record for the Itta Bena talent scout. Even though Patton was a well-traveled musician by the late 1920s, the two authors do not tell about his auditioning for Speir on Farish Street in Jackson, as he had apparently done for Lembo in some fashion – either on the streets or inside his store. Calt and Wardlow tell us that Patton wrote a letter to Speir instead, requesting that he pay a visit to his home on the plantation of Will Dockery between Cleveland and Ruleville, about a hundred miles north of Jackson. The authors depict Speir as a man willing to take extraordinary financial risks on difficult and unobvious talents, and the Sicilian immigrant as never venturing outside Itta Bena, making several major finds for the recording labels but then withdrawing from scouting altogether amid what Ted Gioia interprets as a “maelstrom of accusations and recriminations.”4 Drawing on a wealth of previously unexplored newspaper articles and government documents, and interviews with the descendants of Ralph Lembo, this article re- examines the oral testimony of the informants who provided the bulk of information on the Italian immigrant to correct misinterpretations, highlight unreliable evidence, and reconstruct an accurate historical narrative encompassing his broad range of business ventures as well as his multi-faceted engagement with the entertainment world. While the rest of the state ignored some of its most influential cultural traditions, Lembo identified the torchbearers and sent them to major record labels, including Columbia (Rev. C. F. Thornton), Paramount (Rubin Lacy), Okeh (Mississippi Sheiks), and Victor (Bukka White). Lembo also played drums for his hillbilly band and the Itta Bena Orchestra, operated several music stores in the mid-Delta, and provided the land on which historically-black Mississippi Valley State University was built in the late 1940s. Having known the Itta Bena merchant in his youth, Mississippi Valley State University vice president of public relations Dr. Roy Hudson declared that Ralph Lembo “was always a man who walked out of step with the rest of the planter community.”5 He also had no problem walking in front of the planter community, taking the lead and confidently showing others a path forward. Francesco and Agata Lembo’s second child was born on June 28, 1897, in the town of Comiso, Italy. Francesco gave the child, a son, the name Raffaele. Not much is known of the boy’s life before age ten, when he received his Certificato di Compimento del Corso Elementare Inferiore, which certified that he had completed elementary school.6 In 156 ARSC Journal Figure 2. Ralph Lembo in the 1920s. Courtesy of Ralph Lembo Prestidge. 1910, he climbed aboard a ship called Liguria with his mother, younger brother Sam, and older sister Stella.7 The immigration experience of the Lembo family was typical of those of many Sicilian families in the early twentieth century, but it was markedly different than that of mainland Italians recruited to labor on the plantation. Most mainland Italians carried their entire families with them to work in the Delta, but Sicilian men often immigrated first, found work, and got settled, and then sent for their wives and children. Francesco Lembo immigrated in 1904 and established himself at Itta Bena, Mississippi, before sending for the rest of his family. Most Sicilian families arrived at the port of New Orleans, Louisiana, as did young Raffaele, his mother, and siblings. Soon they made their way to Itta Bena, Mississippi, where the family patriarch had made himself familiar with the fruit and vegetable business.8 Ralph Lembo recognized the incentives that came with American citizenship. Though he never shed all elements of his Italian identity and benefitted from the close- knit Italian community in Itta Bena, he fully engaged with the process of acculturation to the way of life in America. In August 1918, having changed his name, Ralph Lembo registered in the United States military to serve in World War I.9 His native country of Italy had recently completed its third year of involvement in the conflict, and U. S. General John Pershing had sent a regiment of his expeditionary force to Italy in June to unite Italian, British, French, and American troops along that front.10 Lembo did not see any action or return to his native land during the war. In 1920, one census enumerator recorded 22-year-old Lembo, by then a retail merchant, renting a home at 72 Main Street in Itta Bena, in which he lived with his wife Rosa and his mother-in-law, Rosie Battalio. They lived next to his parents on one side and a Chinese merchant on the other, and all were “alien,” or unnaturalized, Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, 157 the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian-American Experience in the Mississippi Delta residents.11 The following year, however, Ralph remedied that situation and petitioned for naturalization. On the petition is the first full physical description of the young man; he stood stout at five feet, seven inches, with dark hair and brown eyes, and he had somehow lost the tip of the little finger on his right hand.12 Ralph Lembo experienced serious losses in his early twenties.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Finding Aid for the Sheldon Harris Collection (MUM00682)
    University of Mississippi eGrove Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids Library November 2020 Finding Aid for the Sheldon Harris Collection (MUM00682) Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/finding_aids Recommended Citation Sheldon Harris Collection, Archives and Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library, The University of Mississippi This Finding Aid is brought to you for free and open access by the Library at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Archives & Special Collections: Finding Aids by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. University of Mississippi Libraries Finding aid for the Sheldon Harris Collection MUM00682 TABLE OF CONTENTS SUMMARY INFORMATION Summary Information Repository University of Mississippi Libraries Biographical Note Creator Scope and Content Note Harris, Sheldon Arrangement Title Administrative Information Sheldon Harris Collection Related Materials Date [inclusive] Controlled Access Headings circa 1834-1998 Collection Inventory Extent Series I. 78s 49.21 Linear feet Series II. Sheet Music General Physical Description note Series III. Photographs 71 boxes (49.21 linear feet) Series IV. Research Files Location: Blues Mixed materials [Boxes] 1-71 Abstract: Collection of recordings, sheet music, photographs and research materials gathered through Sheldon Harris' person collecting and research. Prefered Citation Sheldon Harris Collection, Archives and Special Collections, J.D. Williams Library, The University of Mississippi Return to Table of Contents » BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Born in Cleveland, Ohio, Sheldon Harris was raised and educated in New York City. His interest in jazz and blues began as a record collector in the 1930s. As an after-hours interest, he attended extended jazz and blues history and appreciation classes during the late 1940s at New York University and the New School for Social Research, New York, under the direction of the late Dr.
    [Show full text]
  • Colin Linden – Blow Biography
    Colin Linden – bLOW Biography “Got a coin in my pocket heavy and gold/It don’t own me I need to let it go/Cause having is wanting/Desire can make you weep” – “bLOW” Colin Linden’s tale is the stuff of legend, the kind told in the Coen brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou or Inside Llewyn Davis, both of which featured his guitar playing on the soundtracks. That film would begin with an 11-year-old meeting his musical idol Howlin’ Wolf at a matinee show in his native Toronto, accompanied by his mom, who took a picture of the two during a nearly two-hour long conversation before the gig, the legendary bluesman idling over coffee and cigarettes. “I’m an old man now, and I won’t be around much longer,” Wolf told him. “It’s up to you to carry it on.” Linden still carries that frayed photograph in his wallet, along with a Sears 5/8” socket wrench in his pocket to play slide guitar. He has taken Wolf’s plea seriously, performing since he was 12 years old, leaving home as a teenager to travel the south at the invitation of Mississippi Sheiks delta blues guitarist Sam Chatmon which took him to Detroit, Chicago, Indianapolis, St. Louis, Memphis and Hollandale, Mississippi, meeting and visiting the sites of his heroes – Brownie McGhee, Muddy Waters, Sippie Wallace, Tampa Red, Blind John Davis, the Rev. Robert Wilkins, Sleepy John Estes and Son House, visiting the landmarks and juke joints, many of which he’s played in during the course of a 45-year career producing and playing blues and roots music.
    [Show full text]
  • The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan Kindle
    THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO BOB DYLAN PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Kevin J. H. Dettmar | 204 pages | 20 Apr 2009 | CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS | 9780521714945 | English | Cambridge, United Kingdom The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan PDF Book Was he dying? There can be no doubt that Dylan saw Another Side as marking a shift in his career. At 65, Bob Dylan becomes the oldest living artist to hit the top spot. This song still feels contemporary in its sarcasm, and all the more devastating for its brightness. The conventional wisdom of the music business in the s and s was that artists toured only to support new albums. Tambourine Man. Their touchstones are the musicians, musical styles, and values of a folkloric past, all made relevant by the sheer conviction with which they are evoked. And why should there be? Moreover, he evades history by cloaking his songs in the avowedly timeless music of blues, ballads, and gospel. But he was also living in a moment of plagiarism — accused of plagiarizing Homer, in a culture that was generally plagiarizing ancient Greece — and, at 60, in the same age group as the Dylan of Modern Times, railed against the unfair forces that cast him away. The feeling of these arrangements, however, was closer to latter- day Elvis whose death in shook Dylan badly and interrupted the writing of the Street Legal songs or even Neil Diamond whose manager, Jerry Weintraub, was working with Dylan at the time. While his musical range shows the influence of virtually every sort of American popular music, he found this material more than sufficient for his purposes.
    [Show full text]
  • 1 in the UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT for the MIDDLE DISTRICT of TENNESSEE ESTATE of ARMETIA CHATMON, ) A/K/A ARMENTER CHATMON
    IN THE UNITED STATES DISTRICT COURT FOR THE MIDDLE DISTRICT OF TENNESSEE ESTATE OF ARMETIA CHATMON, ) a/k/a ARMENTER CHATMON, ) p/k/a “BO CARTER” or “BO CHATMON” ) ) Plaintiff, ) Case No.: ) v. ) Judge: ) WARNER MUSIC GROUP CORP., ) Magistrate: SONY/ATV MUSIC PUBLISHING, ) EMI MILLS MUSIC, INC., RHINO ) ENTERTAINMENT COMPANY, d/b/a ) RHINO RECORDS, VIACOM, INC., d/b/a ) VIACOM INTERNATIONAL, INC, ) FOLKWAYS MUSIC PUBLISHERS, INC. ) HAL LEONARD LLC, J.W. PEPPER & ) & SONS, INC., ERIC CLAPTON, AND ) JOHN DOE NOS. 1-10. ) ) Defendants. ) JURY DEMAND COMPLAINT The Plaintiff, the Estate of Armetia Chatmon, p/k/a Bo Carter1 (hereinafter sometimes collectively referred to the “Plaintiff”), by its attorneys, as and for its complaint, alleges as follows: 1 Armetia Chatmon is variously referred to in underlying documents as “Armenter Chatmon” or professionally as “Bo Chatmon” or “Bo Carter.” Mr. Chatmon is also referenced using the variant spelling of the last name “Chatman.” As used in the facts of this Complaint, the intention is to use either “Plaintiff” when referring to the estate and “Chatmon” when referring to the author/artist, Armetia Chatmon, p/k/a “Bo Carter” or “Bo Chatmon.” To deflect confusion, all of these names should be read interchangeably to refer to the Plaintiff or its interests. 1 Case 3:16-cv-02722 Document 1 Filed 10/13/16 Page 1 of 32 PageID #: 1 NATURE OF THE ACTION 1. In this action, Plaintiff seeks damages for, inter alia, copyright infringement, false designation of origin, violation of personal rights and the right to claim authorship, as well as multiple other common law claims for acts engaged in by Defendants under the laws of the United States and the State of Tennessee as more fully set forth below in the claims for relief.
    [Show full text]
  • Why Am I Doing This?
    LISTEN TO ME, BABY BOB DYLAN 2008 by Olof Björner A SUMMARY OF RECORDING & CONCERT ACTIVITIES, NEW RELEASES, RECORDINGS & BOOKS. © 2011 by Olof Björner All Rights Reserved. This text may be reproduced, re-transmitted, redistributed and otherwise propagated at will, provided that this notice remains intact and in place. Listen To Me, Baby — Bob Dylan 2008 page 2 of 133 1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................................................. 4 2 2008 AT A GLANCE ............................................................................................................................................................. 4 3 THE 2008 CALENDAR ......................................................................................................................................................... 5 4 NEW RELEASES AND RECORDINGS ............................................................................................................................. 7 4.1 BOB DYLAN TRANSMISSIONS ............................................................................................................................................... 7 4.2 BOB DYLAN RE-TRANSMISSIONS ......................................................................................................................................... 7 4.3 BOB DYLAN LIVE TRANSMISSIONS .....................................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • October 1-3, 2017 Greetings from Delta State President William N
    OCTOBER 1-3, 2017 GREETINGS FROM DELTA STATE PRESIDENT WILLIAM N. LAFORGE Welcome to Delta State University, the heart of the Mississippi Delta, and the home of the blues! Delta State provides a wide array of educational, cultural, and athletic activities. Our university plays a key role in the leadership and development of the Mississippi Delta and of the State of Mississippi through a variety of partnerships with businesses, local governments, and community organizations. As a university of champions, we boast talented faculty who focus on student instruction and mentoring; award-winning degree programs in business, arts and sciences, nursing, and education; unique, cutting-edge programs such as aviation, geospatial studies, and the Delta Music Institute; intercollegiate athletics with numerous national and conference championships in many sports; and a full package of extracurricular activities and a college experience that help prepare our students for careers in an ever-changing, global economy. Delta State University’s annual International Conference on the Blues consists of three days of intense academic and scholarly activity, and includes a variety of musical performances to ensure authenticity and a direct connection to the demographics surrounding the “Home of the Delta Blues.” Delta State University’s vision of becoming the academic center for the blues — where scholars, musicians, industry gurus, historians, demographers, and tourists come to the “Blues Mecca” — is becoming a reality, and we are pleased that you have joined us. I hope you will engage in as many of the program events as possible. This is your conference, and it is our hope that you find it meaningful.
    [Show full text]
  • Michael Downs Trying to Find My Li'l All 'N All (Sitting on Top of the World)
    Michael Downs Trying to Find My Li’l All ’n All (Sitting on Top of the World) campground in Mississippi, a cold December dawn: I climbed from a A sleeping bag, befuddled by the clarity of morning. Blinking into sun-glare off the steady surfaces of ponds. Stumbling across frozen, heaved ground that had been mud the night before. Coffee could have helped, but I didn’t have any. My old dog nosed through dry leaves for the best place to piss. For two weeks she and I had traveled, a road-trip start to my fiftieth year. I’ d envisioned back roads from Baltimore to Austin, campgrounds and books, barbecue, reunion with loved ones—my parents, especially, given Mom’s flagging health and chronic pain. Kaimin would gain canine prestige by marking territory at the Clinton Library in Little Rock and Faulkner’s Rowan Oak in Oxford. That had been the plan, and much of it had come to pass. But this day involved a different agenda. Today I’ d see a man about a song—and not just any song, but one that for more than two decades had held me with an inex- plicable grip. On its face, “Sitting on Top of the World” is just an old blues tune, first recorded in 1930 by the Mississippi Sheiks. But it’s a shapeshifter, too, having been performed or recorded hundreds of times in everything from jazz to bluegrass to Texas swing, folk, and rock. Ray Charles, Jack White, the Carter Family, the Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bill Frisell, The Grateful Dead—even the “Bye, bye, Miss American Pie” guy: they’ve all done it.
    [Show full text]
  • Smokestack Lightning”--Howlin’ Wolf (1956) Added to the National Registry: 2009 Essay by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman (Guest Post)*
    “Smokestack Lightning”--Howlin’ Wolf (1956) Added to the National Registry: 2009 Essay by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman (guest post)* Howlin’ Wolf Original release label “Smokestack Lightning” is the perfect distillation of what made Howlin’ Wolf such a powerfully unique artist. Built on a driving, hypnotic, one-chord vamp that subtly accelerates like a steam locomotive, Howlin’ Wolf sings an intense field holler vocal, interspersed with falsetto howls and blasts of raw country blues harmonica. The lyrics, a pastiche of traditional blues lines pared to the bone, are dark and cryptic conveying a mood of metaphysical agony. The musicians, accompanying Wolf with great skill on the recording, are Willie Johnson and Hubert Sumlin on guitar, Willie Dixon on bass, Earl Phillips on drums and Hosea Lee Kennard on piano. A small hit at the time, “Smokestack Lightning” has since become a classic of Chicago blues and an indelible part of the American canon of song. Howlin’ Wolf was born Chester Arthur Burnett on June 10, 1910 in White Station, Mississippi, a tiny railroad stop near West Point in the northeastern part of the state. His parents Leon “Dock” Burnett and Gertrude Young separated when Chester was very young and he was raised by his abusive uncle, Will Young. At thirteen, Wolf fled his uncle’s home, hopping a train to the Mississippi Delta where he reunited with his father and had a loving home at last. At the age of eighteen, Wolf learned to play guitar from Charley Patton the Delta’s first great blues star. A small man in stature and build, Patton was the best guitarist in the Delta, playing with a percussive aggressiveness that was astounding.
    [Show full text]
  • May/June 2017 Volume XIX, Issue III FOL Board Coming up at the Library 7:30 P.M
    BETWEEN THE PAGES A Publication of the Friends of the Allen Public Library May/June 2017 Volume XIX, Issue III FOL Board Coming Up at the Library 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 11,The Real Downton Abbey: Inside Highclere Castle President—Susan Jackson 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 12, Beatlemania64 VP - Noma Nabi 7:30 p.m. Friday, May 26, Memorial Day celebration with Allen Community Band and Iwo Secretary– Laura Wingler Jima survivor Clyde Jackson Treasurer—JJ Grilliette May 30—Beginning of Summer reading program, Adult and Youth Services Historian 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 8, Bo Carter discussed sports legend Dizzy Dean Sandy Wittsche 10-11:30 a.m. Saturday, June 10, Family Cultural Festival—Youth Services Programs and Marketing 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 15, Regina Merson discusses Latina beauty and cosmetics Tom Keener 7:30 p.m. Thursday, June 22, What to do When Stopped by Police 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 23, The Lone Star String Band performance Community Liaison Open 7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 1, Gator and Mudcat performance Hospitality Click on any item above and it will link you directly to the article. Karla Warborg Always forgetting events you want to see? Print this page and stick it on your fridge! Ongoing Book Sale Alison McCullough For updates, go to AllenFriends.org or to the library’s calendar at AllenLibrary.org, then “Calendar.” Membership Russ and Jo Schenck Friends of the Allen Public Library Annual Meeting ALLen Reads Anita Moghe Communications On April 13, 2017,the Friends held a short meeting to elect open officers for next year and give out awards.
    [Show full text]
  • Curriculum Vitae
    Curriculum Vitae Faculty Name: Tyler DeWayne Moore Work Address: P.O. Box 519; MS 1060 Prairie View, TX 77446 Position Title: Lecturer of History Office Location: 207 Woolfolk Bldg. / Phone: 936-261-2555 / twitter: @MtZionFund / Email:[email protected] Education: Degree and Area of Study Institution Name Degree Date Ph.D., History (African Diaspora, US) University of Mississippi 2018 M.A., Public History Middle Tennessee State University 2010 B.S., Mass Communications Middle Tennessee State University 2001 Teaching Position Title Institution Name Position Dates Experience (Beginning and End) Lecturer Prairie View A&M University Aug 2020 - Assistant Professor of History Bowling Green State University Aug 2019–May 2020 Graduate Instructor University of Mississippi Jan 2014-June 2018 Teaching Assistant University of Mississippi Aug 2010-Dec 2014 Professional Publications: 2021 In press, Old Time Mississippi Fiddle Tunes & the Segregation of Sound (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2021). 2021 In press, “‘Lightning Struck Him’: Walter Rhodes, the Delta’s Crowing Rooster, and the Influence of Accordion on the Blues,” The Frog Blues & Jazz Annual 6 (2021). 2020 In press, “‘Degrading ‘God’s Acre’: The Alleged Disinterment of Mississippi’s Only African American Secretary of State James D. Lynch,” The Journal of Mississippi History 82:2 (Fall 2020). 2020 “Worth Westinghouse Long Jr.: Creating Dangerously in The Land Where the Blues Began,” Southern Cultures 26:1 (Spring 2020): 54-77. 2020 “Ripped Spike, Tie and Rail from its Moorings’: Racial Reconciliation, Public History, and the ‘Yellow Dog’ of the Mississippi Blues Trail,” The Public Historian 42:2 (May 2020): 56-77. 2018 “Revisiting Ralph Lembo: Complicating Charley Patton, the 1920s Race Record Industry, and the Italian American Experience in the Mississippi Delta,” Association for Recorded Sound Collections Journal 49:2 (Dec 2018): 153-184.
    [Show full text]
  • The Haunted Continent and Andrew Bird's Apocrypha
    University of Mississippi eGrove Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate School 2013 Chasing That Ghost On Stage: The Haunted Continent And Andrew Bird's Apocrypha Mary Elizabeth Lasseter University of Mississippi Follow this and additional works at: https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons Recommended Citation Lasseter, Mary Elizabeth, "Chasing That Ghost On Stage: The Haunted Continent And Andrew Bird's Apocrypha" (2013). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1163. https://egrove.olemiss.edu/etd/1163 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at eGrove. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of eGrove. For more information, please contact [email protected]. CHASING THAT GHOST ON STAGE: THE HAUNTED CONTINENT AND ANDREW BIRD’S APOCRYPHA A Thesis presented in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Southern Studies The University of Mississippi by M.E. LASSETER May 2013 Copyright M.E. Lasseter 2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ABSTRACT This thesis traces the various physical and metaphorical journeys south of Chicago musician Andrew Bird. Using what historical record is publicly available, I examine Bird’s formal musical training. I then explore the years between 1995 and 2001, or what I call Bird’s period of apprenticeship. Next is an exploration of the canonical narratives surrounding the blues of the Mississippi Delta, especially the music of Charley Patton. When Andrew Bird encountered a canon, or dominant histories and meanings of Southern music that influence how musicians play and how audiences interpret that music, he began to react against that canon in his own compositions and performances.
    [Show full text]
  • Dockery Farms and the Birth of the Blues
    Dockery Farms and the Birth of the Blues Dockery Farms began as a cotton plantation in the Mississippi Delta. Although cotton was king in the post-Civil War South, it has been the music from the fields and cabins of Dockery Farms that make it famous as a birthplace of the blues. From its beginnings in the late 19th century through the rise of such unforgettable Delta bluesmen as Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Son House, and Howlin' Wolf, to the many legendary blues musicians today, Dockery Farms has provided fertile ground for the blues. The vivid poetry, powerful songs, and intense performing styles of the blues have touched people of all ages around the world. The music that was created, at least in part, by Dockery farm workers a century ago continues to influence popular culture to this day. It was a welcome diversion from their hard lives and a form of personal expression that spoke of woes and joys alike in a musical language all its own. Will Dockery, the son of a Confederate general that died at the battle of Bull Run, founded the plantation. Young Will Dockery had graduated from the University of Mississippi and in 1885, with a gift of $1,000 from his grandmother, purchased forest and swampland in the Mississippi Delta near the Yazoo and Sunflower Rivers. Recognizing the richness of the soil, he cleared the woods and drained the swamps opening the land for cotton. Word went out for workers and before long African-American families began to flock to Dockery Farms in search of work in the fields and, as tenant farmers (sharecroppers,) they cultivated cotton on the rich farmland.
    [Show full text]