Blues: A Homegrown Story VII

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“What I want to do today is play you lots of songs from lots of people in the 1920s and early 1930s in order to show blurred boundaries between folk and blues.” Host Louis Rosen begins with what he calls as famous an American song as there is, “Gonna Die with a Hammer in My Hand,” recorded by West Virginians, The Williamson Brothers & Curry in 1927. It’s the legend of folk hero John Henry, an African American man who’s not going to let a machine beat him. Arnold Williamson played fiddle, Ervin played guitar and sang, Curry played banjo.

The group accompanied neighbor Frank Hutchison to the St. Louis recording studio of Okeh Records. They were given the opportunity to lay down a few tracks. (Eventually, there would be 23.) The sound is up-tempo, old timey, and fiddle driven, with percussive guitar. Every verse is musically the same. Even Aaron Copeland was drawn to the John Henry tale, writing his own short piece in 1940.

Last week, we listened to “Frankie and Johnny” and “Frankie and Albert,” two versions of the same story which is based on a real murder. In 1899, 22-year-old Frankie Baker shot her 17-year-old lover Allen Britt when he returned from cake-walking at a dance hall with another woman. Britt died four days later. Baker was put on trial, claimed that her boyfriend had attacked her with a knife, that she acted in self-defense, and was acquitted. She died in a mental institution at 75.

“Stack-A-Lee,” recorded 1927 by Frank Hutchison (1897-1945), is based on the same story. Considered the first white rural guitarist to record the blues, the musician played guitar on his lap, sliding a knife up the strings to create the sound of a bottle neck and used a harmonica rack. It’s a nasal, hillbilly sound. Hutchison was a coal miner before and after recording, then owned a grocery store. Careers in this genre were short-lived.

Mississippi John Hurt (John Smith Hurt 1893-1966) grew up in Avalon, Mississippi teaching himself guitar from the age of nine. He was a share-cropper who played dances and busked on the side. Recording for Okeh was not successful, so Hurt returned to the fields. In the 1960s, his song “Avalon Blues” was rediscovered giving the artist a new lease on life. 

Suddenly he was playing the university circuit and recording for Verve. Performing at the 1963 Newport Folk Festival exposed him to musicians involved in the folk revival. Hurt, Rosen tells us, is known for his finger picking. The host demonstrates. His thumb moves between the three bass strings of the guitar while the second, third and fourth fingers cover the three high strings. Hurt’s version of “Stack-A-Lee” is mellower than Hutchison’s and far more vocally lyrical.

Cool, sandpaper vocal, and impressive guitar stand out on a sharp reissue of Hurt’s “Candy Man.” A second, raunchier version contains the lyric “You must be stuck on the candy man’s stick.” “It’s a far cry from Sammy Davis’ `Candy Man,’” (Leslie Bricusse, Anthony Newley) the host notes.

“Another story/song that becomes essential is that of railroad engineer Casey Jones.” John Luther Jones died in a 1900 crash when his train collided with another one on the tracks, but not before he told his fireman to jump to safety. The engineer remained on board, ostensibly to try to slow the train and save his passengers. He was the only person to die in the accident, legendarily with one hand on the whistle and the other on the brake. Wallace Saunders, an African-American railroad worker in Mississippi, wrote a ballad about the fallen engineer. Others followed.

We hear the 1928 Furry Lewis recording “Kassie Jones,” two sides of a 78. Walter E. “Furry” Lewis (1893 or 99 – 1981) was born in Mississippi and raised in Memphis, Tennessee. He made his first recordings for Vocalion Records in 1927. Another musician who played parties and busked, Lewis was otherwise a street sweeper. It wasn’t until 1968 that ethnomusicologist  Bob West recorded him on modern equipment. In the 1970s, Lewis was featured in the touring Memphis Blues Caravan and twice opened for The Rolling Stones. Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues” is on the album Heyjira. The sound is clean picked bottleneck guitar with a back strum.

A number of one and two chord songs with repetitive phrases follow: Charlie Patton’s 1929 “Mississippi Boweavil Blues” is a showcase for his percussive guitar playing. “Suck all the blossoms and he leave your hedges square, Lordie/ The next time I seed you, you know you had your family there, Lordie.” “It’s one of those songs to which you can add lyrics to keep going,” Rosen observes.

Texan Henry Thomas’ (1874-1930) was an itinerant songster who recorded for Vocalion between 1923-29. His “Honey, Won’t You Allow Me One More Chance” was reinterpreted by Bob Dylan under the title “Honey, Just Allow Me One More Chance.” The musician played guitar and quills. Tonight we hear “Old Country Stomp,” which is fast and rhythmic, like a Riverdance score. “Get your partner, promenade…” The host points out the song has no narrative coherence. “It serves its Saturday night function to get everybody up to dance.” 

Jim Jackson (1876-1933), another traveler, was a jugband musician who played on Beale Street in Memphis. We hear 1929’s “Old Dog Blue.” Raised on a farm, Jackson acted, sang, and danced in medicine shows, eventually joining The Rabbit Foot Minstrels with Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith. In 1927, he recorded “Jim Jackson’s Kansas City Blues” which was a big hit. The song was later covered by Janis Joplin and can be traced to influence “Rock Around the Clock” and “Kansas City”

Next is “James Alley Blues,” a 12 bar by New Orleans’ native Richard Robert Brown (1880-1937). Rosen tells us the dangerous neighborhood, nicknamed “the battlefield,” was actually called Jane’s Alley. Both Brown and Louis Armstrong grew up there. “The lyric is really interesting,” he observes. “Yes, I buy some groceries and I pay the rent/She try to make me wash her clothes but I got good common sense…Sometimes I think you too sweet to die/And another time I think you oughta be buried alive…”

Sleepy John Estes (1899-1977) lost one eye from a thrown rock and acquired his nickname. While working as a fieldhand, he began to perform professionally. Estes sang with a distinctive “crying” vocal style. 1930’s “Expressman Blues” features him with James “Yank” Rachell, who played guitar and mandolin. Rosen calls the cut “a proto-rock and roll shuffle.” It’s a wide-hipped sashay vocal with resonant strings. “These guys are playing in Memphis,” the host reminds us. “You could hear good music then for the price of a beer.”

Best known as a jug and skiffle band, Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers (with guitar player, Ashley Thompson  and harmonica player Noah Lewis) play 1928’s “Feather Bed.” “If you think you hear shades of Chuck Berry, you do,” Rosen remarks. Cannon (1883-1979) learned banjo on a Mississippi plantation having built himself one out of a frying pan and a raccoon skin. The Stompers were popular through the 1930s. His song “Walk Right In” later became an enormous hit  for The Rooftop Singers. The songwriter fought hard for royalties and got them, settling into a better life.

“Blind Willie McTell (William Samuel McTier 1898-1959) was a beggar in Atlanta for most of his 58 years,” the host tells us. “He was a journeyman bluesman.” We listen to “Mama T’Aint Long Fo’ Day” as sung by his plaintive, gritty tenor. The song captures an historical sweep of the times. Its melody is part of “St. James Infirmary.” McTell influenced Eric Clapton, Keith Richards and Greg Allman.

A bonus track tonight is Bob Dylan’s “Blind Willie McTell” with guitar and Dylan on piano. It ends, “I’m gazing out the window/Of the St. James Hotel/And I know no one can sing the blues/Like Blind Willie McTell.”

All unattributed quotes are Louis Rosen

“The Blues is the purest home-grown music that America ever produced, a complex, profound expression of life’s essential desires and struggles. It came from places as varied as the Mississippi Delta, the Texas panhandle, New Orleans, Chicago, the Eastern Seaboard and New York City. It is the essential musical language of artists as diverse as Bessie Smith, Robert Johnson, Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Jimmy Rodgers, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, Hank Williams, Howlin’ Wolf, B.B. King and Bob Dylan. Louis Rosen

This is a subscription Series from the 92Y

Photo of Mr. Rosen courtesy of Louis Rosen
Opening picture from Shutterstock