"People keep asking me where the blues started and all I can say is that when I was a boy we always was singing in the fields. Not real singing, you know, just hollerin, but we made up our songs about things that was happening to us at that time, and I think thats where the blues started." Son House, 1965

“Then one night in Tutwiler, as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.”

            This was how W.C. Handy described the occasion in 1903 that led him to see what we now call the blues ‘with the eye of a budding composer’. A lean, ragged and loose-jointed black with toes poking out of his shoes started playing the guitar as Handy slept on the tiny Mississippi station. As the sad-faced guitarist played he pressed a knife on the strings.

The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

Goin’  where the Southern cross the Dog

Goin’  where the Southern cross the Dog

Goin’  where the Southern cross the Dog.”

          It was the weirdest music Handy had ever heard, and the tune stayed in his mind. As a band-leader and music publisher, Handy was later to formalize and publicize this ‘earth-born music’ and to become known as ‘Father of the Blues.’

          W.C. Handy was one of the first to see the commercial possibilities of the blues. Handy directed the Knights of Pythias band of Clarksdale, Mississippi, and they traveled around the small towns and local communities in the area, playing for dances and socials, in night-spots and in the stately plantation mansions. The band played ‘respectable and conventional’  music, and as a trained musician, he had a good knowledge of European music.

          W.C. Handy’s real enlightenment came at a dance in the town of Cleveland, Mississippi. He was leading his orchestra in a dance program when a note was passed up with the request that they play some of ‘our native music’. The old time Southern melody they tried only led to a second note. Would they object if the local colored band played? Handy’s group graciously retired from the stand as the locals took over.

          They were a three- piece group consisting of a battered guitar, a mandolin and a worn-out bass. The music struck up on an over-and-over strain that had no very clear beginning and no ending at all. The strumming maintained a disturbing monotony, and on and on it went, a kind of stuff that had long been associated with cane rows and levee camps. Their feet thumped on the floor, their eyes rolled, shoulders swayed, and the strumming persisted.

          Handy wondered if anybody besides a few of the group’s friends would go for it, and his answer was not long in coming. A rain of dollars, quarters and halves poured on to the floor at the feet of the little string- band, and soon the three of them had collected more silver dollars than the nine men in Handy’s orchestra were being paid for the whole night. From this, Handy saw the beauty of primitive music. It had the stuff the people wanted, and it touched the spot.
         
          From that time on Handy started orchestrating local tunes, and went on to make a name for himself as a composer and publisher of blues tunes based on authentic folk strains. His place in blues history is as a popularizer and publisher, rather than as a blues performer.

          Blues historians agree that blues originated somewhere between the 1890’s and before 1910. It was in the Mississippi delta counties that the first blues were sung. By the 1890’s there was a greater concentration of black people in Mississippi than in any other part of the country. The land had been leveled and planted by slaves, who constituted a majority of the population. As railroads and roads were developed, larger and larger numbers of poor and illiterate blacks were attracted to the area, drawn by promises of higher pay made by labor agents working for the white planters. Raising cotton to the exclusion of everything else, was the essence of the black’s segregated social Isolation. The blues emerged as a result of the psychological impulses the blacks
inherited from the days of slavery, and also what cultural and artistic forms existed in those times- the spirituals, the plantation songs, work songs, banjo music, fiddle tunes and dances.

          The work song, with its steady rhythms and its short rhymed phrases, was a major source of the blues. Twenty or thirty years ago it was still possible to pass segregated gangs of black workers scattered alongside the dirt roads in Mississippi, Louisiana, or Texas chopping weeds or dragging away stumps and trash. As they worked they followed a song leader who kept them together by singing short improvised phrases that they answered with a single repeated line as a refrain. These loose chants were the work songs, and until the 1950’s it was possible to hear the rhythmic pattern of work-song styles in some of the blues recorded by Mississippi artists.

          In 1935, President Roosevelt established the Resettlement Administration (RA) to meet the problems of rural poverty by moving farmers from sub-marginal land to give them a fresh start. The plan was to resettle half a million families, but because of lack of government will and cash, only 4,441 families were resettled. The Farm Security Administration, created in 1937, created long term, low interest, rehabilitation loans to farmers to help them buy family size farms. The basic humanitarian concern of the FSA did bring benefits- the transient work camps, some sponsored co-operative ventures, the provision of a certain amount of rural dental and health care
and so on. They also funded a large group of photographers to record the living conditions of the poor in the rural area.

          At the same time there was a growing interest in the folkways of the American poor, and people like John and Alan Lomax, working for the Library of Congress, recorded folk music of every kind, including the blues from Lead Belly to Son House and from Blind Willie McTell to Booker
White.

Blues from the South

          During the first half of the 1900’s great blues artists came from the Mississippi Delta in part because the cities and larger towns in and near the region were also magnets for blues musicians. The people here had some cash, and would spend some for entertainment. Streets such as Beal Street in Memphis, Farish Street in Jackson, Fourth Street in Clarksdale, and Nelson Street in Greenville were centers of black commerce and entertainment. Pianists gravitated toward the cities, where they could find work in the saloons and at rent parties. The towns and cities all along the Mississippi River developed an especially strong piano blues tradition but pianists also found work in the levee camps along the river and in the lumber camps of the piney woods region of southern Mississippi and southeast Louisiana. Here the workers were often isolated far from town, and the companies had to import women and musicians for their entertainment on weekends. In Texas the towns and cities were generally spaced farther apart than in the states farther east. Blues musicians traveled by train, and the various railroads became prominent subjects in their songs.

Lead Belly

Perhaps the greatest blues artist from the Mississippi Delta region was Huddie Ledbetter, better known as Leadbelly. His repertoire included blues, church songs, breakdowns, children’s songs, work songs, folk ballads, and versions of popular songs. He accompanied his singing on the twelve-string guitar, using the instrument’s booming sound to advantage in playing rhythmic chordal backgrounds and bass lines. Leadbelly was a strong and rambunctious young man, used to having his way, and it wasn’t long before he got into trouble with the law. He served a term in a Texas county jail for assault, but escaped around 1916. Two years later, he was in the Texas State Penitentiary serving a life sentence for murder. In 1925, he was released after singing for the
visiting governor Pat Neff and impressing him with a song pleading for a pardon.

          He returned home to Louisiana, but by 1930 was in the penitentiary there, convicted of attempted murder. His fortunes took a turn for the better, however, when folklorists John and Alan Lomax visited the penitentiary at Angola, Louisiana, in 1933, seeking to record black folk music. Leadbelly recorded another plea for a pardon, which the Lomax’s played for the governor of Louisiana. A year later he was out of prison and working as a chauffeur and assistant to John Lomax, driving him to other prisons around the south in search of folksongs and giving college campus concerts, which Lomax set up. Leadbelly married and moved to New York City in the late 1930’s, where he continued to give concerts, make radio appearances and participate in labor and left-wing political causes. He was the first folk-blues artist to present this music in concert to white audiences outside the South. Shortly before his death in 1949 he made a short tour of France. Once again, the first artist of his kind to appear “in concert” in Europe. He could be said to have initiated the revival of interest in country blues and related folk music, and many of his songs have gone on to become standard items in the repertoire of folk singers in America and abroad.

          Among the best known of Leadbelly’s songs are “Goodnight, Irene,” “The Midnight Special,” “Rock Island Line,” “Cotton Fields,” “The Gray Goose,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton,” “Mr. Tom Hughes’ Town,” “The Bourgeois Blues,” and “Good Mornin’ Blues.”

Robert Johnson

          One legendary bluesman was Robert Johnson whose story holds that he stood at the Mississippi crossroads of Highways 61 and 49 , signed a contract with Lekba (the Voodoo devil). He sold his soul to Lekba, and then handed his guitar to Lekba who tuned it. After this meeting, Robert Johnson was given extraordinary ability on the guitar, and composed 29 songs- making him famous. Some of these songs include Crossroads, Sweet Home Chicago, I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom, Rambling on My Mind, They’re Red Hot, Walking Blues, Love In Vain, Come On in My Kitchen, and Hellhound on My Trail.

          Robert Johnson was born in 1911 in Hazlehurat in the southern part of Mississippi. He came under the musical influence of Son House and Willie Brown. He sang with slightly muffled diction in a passionate, agonized, and sometimes strained voice. His performed brilliantly on the guitar, playing percussive bottleneck pieces, and walking bass figures that suggested the rich sound of guitar- piano duets. Persistent themes in his blues were religious despair and pursuit by demons.

Crossroads Legend

          At the stroke of midnight, Robert Johnson walked down to the windswept crossroads at the junction of Highway 61 and 49 in Clarksdale, Mississippi. Reciting an ancient incantation, he called upon Satan himself to rise from the fires of Hell. In exchange for Johnson’s immortal soul, the devil tuned his guitar, thereby giving him the abilities which he so desired. From then on, the young blues man played his instrument with an unearthly style, his ringers dancing all over the strings, and his voice moaned and wailed, expressing the deepest sorrows of a condemned sinner.

Muddy Waters

          Hailing from the Mississippi Delta is one of the greatest blues singers ever, Muddy Waters (whose real name is McKinley Morganfield). Muddy was the direct inheritor of the 30’s blues of Son House and Robert Johnson. He has helped dozens of musicians, including whites like the blues harmonica player, Paul Butterfield, or Paul Oscher who was for a long time his own regular harp-blower. In the years around 1948, Muddy and two of his band members, Little Walter Jacobs and Jimmy Rogers, used to call themselves the Headhunters. They would turn up at clubs where lesser groups were playing in amateur blues contests and blow them off-stage, out of sheer relish for being the tops.

          After the mid 50’s, Muddys style of blues rapidly fell from favor, and it was partly through the influence of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones who deliberately drew attention to Muddy Waters, that he gained international renown. Probably his greatest band was the one which included Little Walter on harmonica, Jimmy Rogers on guitar, and Elgar Evans or Freddie Below on drums. On recordings, Muddy was often joined by Willie Dixon on his stand-up bass, and either Otis Spann or Pinetop Perkins, on piano.

          When British groups began arriving in America circa 1964, they proclaimed Muddy and other black bluesmen their sources of inspiration. The Rolling Stones were stunned by their first encounter with Waters. They walked into the Chess Studio in Chicago to record an album, and there were Phil Chess and engineer Ron Malo, and a guy in white overalls painting the ceiling. As the Rolling stones walked by into the studio, someone said, “Oh, by the way, this is Muddy
Waters”-(painting the ceiling).

          Muddy Waters often credited the Rolling Stones with helping to renew interest in his music. Keith Richards- guitarist of the Rolling Stones, said they started the Rolling Stones to turn other people on to the blues- to people like Muddy, Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf and John Lee Hooker. Muddy Waters would comment that it was “funny that somebody from out of another country let white kids over here know where we stand”. Muddy felt that some of the best ever blues singers, live here in the United States, but that there were great guitar players coming out of England.

          Students from the University of Chicago made pilgrimages to nearby South Side clubs and began duplicating what they heard. Paul Butterfield and his guitar playing pal Mike Bloomfield formed the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, while other Chicago blues acts were fronted by Charlie Musslewhite and Steve Miller. Jimi Hendrix told Rolling Stone magazine that the first guitarist he was aware of was Muddy Waters. He heard one of his records when he was a little boy and it “scared him to death”.

          The ‘King of the Blues’, B.B. King is today probably the most commercially successful blues singer with black and white audiences. B.B. King is proud to identify himself completely with the blues, and consciously works as a gentleman ambassador for the music. He graciously lists all those who have influenced him, from blues singers Blind Lemon, Lonnie Johnson and T-Bone Walker to jazz guitarists Django Reinhardt and Charlie Christian- and not forgetting his cousin Booker White. With the grace and precision of his electric guitar playing, the long swooping and winging notes, seem like a congregation answering the soaring voice of a preacher. He himself has been moved to tears by his own music. His guitar style has now crossed many boundaries to
influence blues and rock musicians, white and black alike.

          The dwindling black support for the blues has been a struggle for B.B. King. In the 1950’s and 60’s, before he reached his wider audience, it meant performing in probably more than three hundred different places a year, criss-crossing America through an endless stream of clubs, dance- halls and theaters, and on each occasion being expected to deliver the goods, to appear suave, in control and exciting.

          As a blues singer he is the complete antithesis of the illiterate shambling drunk of popular image, and feeling as he does the music as a personal commitment, he has been shun, like others of his generation, by black rejection of the blues. He feels that the blues are almost sacred to some people, but others don’t understand. His childhood faced race problems, and maybe some black people don’t want to be reminded that it happened to them too.

Blues Today

          Blues music and musicians are alive and well and with developments in musical instrument technology, modernization of musical styles, and especially studied musicians. Blues music has seen much development. Blues music has become a heartbeat of American music, shared by citizens of every class and color of skin. Legendary blues musicians including Muddy Waters, B.B. King and John Lee Hooker have collaborated new music and made recordings with modern rock groups including U-2, Rolling Stones, Bonnie Raitt, Eric Clapton, Van Morrison, Canned Heat and others.

          Blues music originated with Southern Blacks expressing agonized feelings of oppression, slave- working conditions, mistreatment by white bosses, racial oppression, and other deep-seeded feelings. The music remains straight from the heart; it is not music that can be played without feeling. Just as feelings and emotions do not limit themselves to class, and skin color, blues musicians are of all classes and races.

Alan Nathan

February, 2004