Got a Mind to Ramble: the Story of the Blues from Clarksdale to Chicago

GOT A MIND TO RAMBLE: THE STORY OF THE BLUES FROM CLARKSDALE TO CHICAGO By Jared Berkowitz A thesis submitted to the History Department Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey for Undergraduate Departmental Honors Advised by Professor James Livingston and Professor Louise Barnett New Brunswick, New Jersey March 2008 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Professor James Livingston, my advisor, for allotting me the freedom and direction to complete such a project, Professor Barnett for bringing the close eye of an English scholar to my manuscript, the Aresty Research Center at Rutgers University for their generosity, Greg Johnson, curator of the Blues Archive at the University of Mississippi, for his help in navigating the collection, and my parents for nurturing my love of music and history—encouraging me to combine the two. CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 PROLOGUE 4 Chapter 1. Classic Blues: Race Records and Chicago, 1920-1924 5 Chapter 2. “It May Bring Sorrow, It May Bring Cheer,” Delta Blues, 1924-1930 16 Chapter 3. City Folk, Urban Blues, 1930-1935 33 Chapter 4. Standing at the Crossroads, Robert Johnson, 1935-1938 46 EPILOGUE: The Blues Continuum: Muddy Waters, 1941 -1943 64 APPENDIX: The Blues Statement 68 Bibliography 69 Discography 72 That specific remedy for the worldwide epidemic of depression is a gift called the blues. All pop music today—jazz, swing, be-bop, Elvis Presley, the Beatles, the Stones, rock- and-roll, hip-hop, and on and on—is derived from the blues. —Kurt Vonnegut, A Man Without A Country So long, So far away Is Africa. Not even memories alive Save those that history books create, Save those that songs Beat back into the blood— Beat out of blood with words sad-sung In strange un-Negro tongue— So long So far away Is Africa. Subdued and time-lost Are the drums—and yet Through some vast mist of race There comes this song I do not understand, This song of atavistic land, Of bitter yearnings lost Without a place— So long, So far away Is Africa’s Dark face. —Langston Hughes, Afro-American Fragment An Introduction: The history of the blues is a well-traveled subject. This indigenous American musical form of incalculable value has earned a cannon of scholarly literature, intellectual attention and recognition. But it has been at a certain expense. There is the issue of race. Before the Civil Rights Movement black men and women in this country walked a hard line trying to get a decent education. This plight was intensified in the apartheid American South. Consequently, early popular scholarship of the blues was limited to college educated white men who, despite their altruistic intentions carried with them and applied a preconceived notion, a stereotype of what black culture was in the United States. Samuel Charters’ early works: The Country Blues, and The Bluesmen; Alan Lomax’s later book, The Land Where The Blues Began, form unfair assumptions that the blues was the product of sorrow, of an uneducated populace, and consequently— a somehow inferior music. Such misnomers found their way into the Oxford Dictionary of Music where blues is defined as “a slow jazz song of lamentation, generally for unhappy love affair.”1 This cursory definition suggests the form is a type of jazz, ignoring its distinction as an independent form. In the definition of jazz there is further discussion: “Blues implies a largely vocal form and a depressed frame of mind on the part of the performer.”2 The problem is exacerbated in the OED that defines blues as “a melody of a mournful and haunting character, originating among the Negroes of the Southern U.S.” The key words of these definitions are “lamentation,” “depression,” and “mournful,” making for a 1 Michael Kennedy and Joyce Bourne, ed., (Oxford Dictionary of Music. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 101. 2 Ibid, 445. 1 pessimistic interpretation of the blues at best. If we follow these lines, then we are led to consider the blues as downhearted, sorrowful and melancholic jazz. And this is what blues musicians and writers have since struggled against. Blues was a way to get out from behind the plow, to escape the injustice of a segregated society. I do not make the case that the blues was invented in the Mississippi Delta, no, but there was a kind of blues invented there that became some of the most influential not just to blues itself, but to Rock and Roll and American popular music as a whole. The starting point that I chose is the Mississippi Delta, not because of its uniqueness but because of its importance. The blues came from the South—that is indisputable. It followed the migration of the American black population that since the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation and the end of the Civil War has steadily moved north barring any economic trauma, i.e., the Great Depression of 1929 that stalled internal migration across the nation. I chose deliberately not to start with West Africa, in fact to leave Africa out of the picture because although we can go back and trace polyrhythm to native African music, we can find the origin of the banjo in the African akonting, we can hear call and response in the African spiritual ceremony—the blues is too far removed from the African tradition for these comparisons to illuminate much about the music. I chose to start with the blues itself, with the music, as such, in the American South. Its origin as popular music, importance as a folk form, and function as a literary form—I emphasized the role of the talent scouts because without them we would not be hearing the blues. It is true that there was something in the desperation of an isolated life in an unjust society that gave birth to great music. But we do a disservice to the artists to focus 2 only on the sorrow and neglect the purpose of this work—jubilation, to rid him or her of depression. Albert Murray’s Stomping the Blues was one of the first to make the case for the blues as joyful music. The blues is in itself a process, an existential truth acknowledging the burdens of life while demonstrating and teaching us the will to persevere. The music holds the primary truth of the blues, the lyrics are secondary, a collection of borrowed folk phrases and idioms. The aesthetic of the blues, the spirit of improvisation, has a distinct purpose and that is to cure us of the affliction of the blues. Blues music is a gift—a humanist declaration of perseverance, a poetic and artistic statement. Albert Murray wrote: “The whole point of the blues idiom lyric is to state the facts of life.”3 I have the privilege of writing about this music in a time of racial emancipation. Charles Keil published the year following the assassination of Malcolm X, the same year the Voting Rights Act was passed. Samuel Charters wrote his early histories during the Brown v. Board of Education trials, the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, and the ensuing riots at Ole Miss. I am writing my history of the blues forty years after the March on Washington, after Martin Luther King’s I have a Dream speech, and while a black man is an exceptional and realistic contender for the presidency of the United States. I have attempted to peel back the political and racial dimensions of such a project in order to place my focus on the music itself. Musicologist Dr. John W. Work III writes in his preface to an anthology of African-American folk songs: “The fatal error made by many writers in this field is that in their analysis of these songs they rely altogether upon the verse, rather than upon the 3 Albert Murray, The Hero and the Blues, (University of Missouri Press, 1973), 87. 3 music.”4 To the best extent possible within the boundaries of both my musical knowledge and discipline, I have tried to avert this error. Prologue: American involvement in World War I, between 1916-1918, catalyzed the Great Migration, the mass-movement of black Americans from the South to the North in search of a better life.5 The Selective Service Act of 1917 conscripted all able-bodied males between eighteen and forty-five and sent millions overseas leaving an array of vacant jobs in the industrial North. Nearly half a million blacks who had not been drafted fled the oppressive, Jim-Crow South with the promise of better pay and living conditions in the urban North. Following the Great War, as America turned inward, there was a burst of xenophobia fueling the 1924 immigration laws that enforced new strict quotas on international migration to the United States. This caused a second labor vacuum that brought another million black Americans north. As African-Americans left the rural South for the urban North, black culture began to enter the American mainstream and the blues began its dynamic journey out of the South.6 4 John W. Work III, American Negro Songs and Spirituals, (New York: Bonanza Books, 1940.), 9. 5 Paul S. Boyer, The Oxford Guide to United States History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 789. 6 David M. Kennedy, The American People in the Great Depression: Freedom from Fear Part One, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 18, John W. Chambers II, ed. The Oxford Companion to Military History, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 181. 4 Chapter 1 Classic Blues: Race Records and Chicago, 1920-1924 The women get the blues from all the trouble those men give them, but these men don’t have the blues, hell no.

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