The Blues – A Homegrown Story
“The Blues is a truly vast subject, one that goes back centuries,” begins host Louis Rosen in the first class of his fascinating new 92Y series. “It’s a genre unto itself, yet its character is at the essence of all African influenced American music -jazz, ragtime, spirituals, rock n’ roll… Talking about its roots takes us back to everyday life in Africa where there was a song for planting and harvest (the field song), vocals for getting water from the well… Music and dance were very much a part of overall spirit.”
Slaves shipped from West Africa had a world view that included a supreme God that Rosen conjectures aided acceptance of Jesus. The sufferings of Christ and ancient Jews drew blacks to Christianity. In their own language, he tells us, there was no word for religion. “It just permeated all aspects of life.”
“Early on, American slave owners banned drums thinking their captives would be able to signal across distances encouraging revolt.” Slaves resorted to homemade percussion, clapping, and stomping. Though little original film survives, there is some, and much early music has been recreated.
We watch the dramatization of a Plantation Ring Shout kept in groove by washboard and tambourine. The tradition is group-based, participatory, repetitive. At Congo Square in New Orleans, slaves would congregate to entertain themselves. One person kept rhythm while a leader called out. Those assembled responded in unison. Barefoot dancers performed in a circle stepping side to side, front to back, twirling; holding their aprons; singing “We’re gonna raise a ruckus tonight.”
The two most famous for traveling, collecting and preserving local music were ethnomusicologist, John A. Lomax and his son Alan (also a musician, folklorist, archivist, writer, political activist, oral historian, and film-maker) Alan Lomax’s 1995 memoir The Land Where the Blues Began (1995), links the birth of the Blues to debt, segregation, and forced labor in the American South. Among the artists the two are credited with discovering are blues guitarist Robert Johnson, activist singer Woody Guthrie, folk artist Pete Seeger and country blues icon Lead Belly. “Field recordings, or Hollers are essential building blocks of what became the Blues.”
Next we listen to “Rosie and Levee,” a 1947 work song recorded at Mississippi State Penitentiary. (Watch on YouTube.) The song is accompanied by evocative stills of prisoners. Any man with the best voice and the quickest head for improvising lyrics rose to an important position. “Pace had to be fast enough to meet work quota, but not too fast to wear out the group,” Rosen remarks.
“Lightning – Long John” follows with images of a chain gang on railroad assignment in North Carolina: Leader: O the long John/Response: O the long John/Leader: He’s a-long gone/ Response: He’s a-long gone/ Leader: Like a turkey through the corn/Response: Like a turkey through the corn/Leader: He’s a-long gone/Response: He’s a-long gone. Prisoners were hired out for manual labor at pennies a day.
Rosen performed in Zimbabwe in 2008 and tells us villages still took pride in their male singing groups, that music remained similar. “It’s remarkable that such rich tradition survived, but no accident that white folks ended up making this the core of American music.,” he muses.
In The Souls of Black Folks (1903), W.E.B. Du Bois wrote that Black spirituals often became “a complaint and a curse, a wail rather than a hope, a sneer rather than a faith.” The host observes that the songs often mocked their masters in code. Two types of spirituals emerged, the jubilee and the sorrow song. White protestant evangelists would travel the country preaching in tents. Rosen reads us an eyewitness account.
In the 1870s, Fisk University, founded by the American Missionary Association after the American Civil War to educate freedmen, sent the Black a capella Fisk Jubilee Singers cross-country on a fundraising tour. It was sponsored by Samuel Clemons aka Mark Twain. The program, which featured Black spirituals and songs by Stephen Foster (“Beautiful Dreamer,” Camptown Races,” “Jeanie with The Light Brown Hair”) was instrumental in spreading the genre. (The Jubilee Singers continue to perform as a touring ensemble of Fisk University students.)
We then listen to spirituals. A landmark 1925 performance from New York’s Greenwich Street Theater offers Paul Robeson and Lawrence Brown. In 1945, the concert was recreated at a recording studio. “By and By” – I’m gonna lay down my heavy load… the men sing. Rosen calls the lyrics a depiction of “people who have been stripped of everything and will themselves to hope.” The refrain comes back whole again and again. The song is a ‘jubilee.’ “By the way,” Rosen injects, “It’s a very small step to the Beatles’ “She loves you yeah, yeah, yeah.”
A second recording features “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” They couldn’t sing about bringing down the walls of a plantation – so this. The third deeply resonant spiritual, “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child,” epitomizes the ‘sorrow song.’
Whites enjoyed black music and began to arrange situations where it would be available. A popular harvest ritual was created in which two teams of slaves would shuck corn while singing. Audience seats were set up between the main house and slaves’ quarters. Afterwards, food and drink would be served. Masters got to play generous patriarchs and slaves had an opportunity to butter up those who had fate under their thumbs. “Before long,” Rosen says, “there were slave orchestras that got participants out of backbreaking work…”
A subtle satire on the elegance of white ballroom dances, The Cakewalk, developed from “prize walks” (dance contests with a cake awarded as the prize) held on plantations. “The twist came when whites began to imitate Black dancing styles.”
“The majority of Americans were introduced to Black music through Minstrelsy which is, in essence, the first unique form of musical theater. It was abhorrent, but important from a cultural point of view. White performers put on blackface and spoke Black vernacular.” Minstrel shows’ first star, Thomas Daddy Rice, popularized the racist character Jim Crow, a folk trickster storied among slaves. His signature number was a song called “Jump Jim Crow” borrowed from a local slave. We watch a mid-century recreation of the number where “going” is pronounced “gwan.”
Minstrel companies put their own spin on shows with songs, dances, and skits. Leads customarily included The Interlocutor, a dignified stand-in for the white master and a straight man, and on either side, Mr. Tambo (for tambourine), and Mr. Bones. (It was customary for Tambo to be slim and Bones to be fat.) “These three exemplify the beginning of comedy as it tends to be thought about. Most cliché African American stereotypes originated here.” We watch some corny repartee and a fully staged dance number in top hat and tails. White people wrote and performed.
In 1843, Edwin Chrysty founded The Christy’s Minstrels which extended shows to three acts. The company played seven years at New York City’s Mechanics’ Hall, then toured. Christy specialized in the work of Stephen Foster who would later regret selling his song “Old Folks at Home” to the impresario for his exclusive use.
Act I consisted of a song and dance number called a “walkaround.” Act II presented variety performers – the precursor of vaudeville. Act III was a one-act play, generally about a plantation. Foster’s story is depicted in Harmony Lane, a 1935 low-budget American film starring William Frawley, directed by Joseph Santley. “The shows were wildly popular, even among supposedly upper classes. They were the 19th century version of slumming.”
Al Jolson made his entire career as a minstrel. In 1927, the performer starred in The Jazz Singer, the first commercially successful talking picture. Later, he played himself in Rhapsody in Blue, a film biography of George Gershwin. There are also two fictional movies of Jolson’s life with Larry Parks, The Jolson Storey and Jolson Sings Again. Eddie Cantor picked up black attitude and material making cameo appearances in several films. A 1953 biopic The Eddie Cantor Story starred Keefe Brasselle.
“White people were more comfortable watching other white people perform even in exaggerated make-up. In 1881, the first time a Black man acted in a minstrel show, he was required to put on blackface. We’re into Pirandello levels of reality here”
The Coon Song – Black dialect dealing directly with down-and-out or overtly sexual situations – appeared everywhere. We listen to Bessie Smith’s rendition of Ben Harney’s double entendre, “You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon” …but you done broke down…with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Bert Williams’ “Nobody” by which Kander and Ebb would later be inspired. (Williams was the only Black man to appear in The Ziegfeld Follies.) It’s surprising how much of this made its way onto film long past the time when social mores started changing. Holiday Inn and Easter Parade have blackface scenes.
By 1898, Ragtime takes shape in St. Louis and Sedalia. “Syncopation, unexpected accents on beats, rapid figurations on the piano mixed with protest harmony…” Perhaps the most famous practitioner was Scott Joplin. We hear “The Harlem Rag” by Ben Turpin, whose father owned The Maple Leaf Saloon. (Joplin would write “The Maple Leaf Rag.”)
Rosen began by saying this subject is vast. “I’ve just begun to scratch the surface. There were urban strains of the Blues, rural strains, country strains. Blues became the essence of language that could be explored by American music in concert halls… The table is set…
This is a wonderful series. I can’t wait for chapter two.
“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.
It also became an essential building block in the American concert music of Gershwin, Copeland, and African-American composers such as James P. Johnson and William Grant Still, as well as important composers today. This semester we’ll explore all of these exceptional artists, rural and urban, folk and classical, past and present, and much more. Awaken—or reawaken—to the power of The Blues, our uniquely American story. “Louis Rosen
This is a subscription Series from the 92Y
Photo courtesy of Louis Rosen
