The Blues: A Homegrown Story II
Under the aegis of the 92Y
Part two of Louis Rosen’s rich, remarkable series focuses on Blues “favored by female vocalists, primarily, though not exclusively, African American.” We begin by listening to Black songwriter and bandleader Perry Bradford’s “Crazy Blues” performed by Mamie Smith (1891-1946) and Her Jazz Hounds: I can’t sleep at night/I can’t eat a bite/Cause the man I love/He don’t treat me right… Okeh Records had to be convinced to gamble on the first recording by an African American. A million copies were sold in less than a year. (Gunthur Schuller- Early Jazz-It’s Roots and Musical Development.)
Rosen notes the last verse of the song is, “Intense, especially today.” I’m gonna do like a Chinaman/Go and get some hop/Get myself a gun and go and shoot a cop. Smith was a tuneful shouter out of Vaudeville, a sub-stantial woman in a conservative white collar with hands on her hips. She was billed as “The Queen of the Blues,” a title soon one-upped by Bessie Smith who was called “The Empress of the Blues.”
The success of the record prompted companies to look for other female blues singers, acknowledging a “colored market.” Smaller divisions for what they called “Race Records” were established. (The term was used until producer/journalist Jerry Wexler called it abominable in 1948, effectively naming the genre Rhythm and Blues.)
“Early jazz recordings were made in 1917. Before that, there was only the spoken word, some Vaudeville, Enrico Caruso and John Phillip Souza,” Rosen says. “African Americans were moving north in The Great Migration- to replace men conscripted into WWI. A new audience developed…From 1920-1932, there was a flood of African American artists including Ma Rainey, Victoria Spivey, Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson… By 1927, music executives recognized an untapped white market which brought in The Carter Family and expanded to Hillbilly Music, now Country Western.”
Distribution began in Black urban centers. The Chicago Defender, a Black newspaper out of the windy city, was particularly influential. The paper boasted such writers as Langston Hughes and Louis Lomax, who became the first African American television reporter. Running from New Orleans to Chicago, Illinois Central Railway was a conduit for the paper. Many first jobs open to African Americans were as railroad workers.
Suddenly, records did a booming mail order business in southern states. The door then opened to gospel and bluegrass. Victrolas didn’t need electricity, they were hand cranked allowing rural areas to play music without extra expenditure. “When the Crash came (The Depression), records were bringing in sixty million dollars a year,” Rosen says. “These were not albums, but rather double-sided 78s. By 1932, this plummeted to six million. Then radio emerged.” Smith, Rosen tells us, was typical of successful performers at the time. She made a lot of money, lived high, faced The Depression and died penniless.
Next is the singer we think of as The Mother of The Blues. Gertrude Pridgett aka Ma Rainey (1882 or 86 – 1939), was the daughter of minstrel show performers and grew up on stage. She achieved notice with The Rabbit Foot Minstrels or “Foots,” owned by F.S. Woolcott. First a vaudeville company, the troup noted as “authentic” (that is, using Black rather than blackface performers.)
Advertised as “The Greatest Colored Show on Earth,” it performed annual tours through the 1920s and 1930s presenting a wide range of comedy routines, skits, and song-and-dance numbers. “The W.S. Wolcott Medicine Show,” a song written by Robbie Robertson for The Band, was inspired by F.S. Wolcott. (Medicine Shows were horse-drawn carriages run by snakeoil salesmen who employed entertainment to warm up a crowd before pitching faux-cures.)
Though at least bisexual and later, openly gay, Pridgett met and married song and dance man William “Pa” Rainey becoming Rainey and Rainey, Assassinators of the Blues.” Their marriage would last 12 years and likely include a lesbian relationship with Bessie Smith whom Ma mentored. “Prove It On Me Blues” is clearly from the point of view of a lesbian.: They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me/Sure got to probe it on me./Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,/They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men…
Eventually, Ma graduated to a headliner on the vaudeville circuit of The Theater Owners Booking Association = TOBA, an acronym which performers explained as Tough On Black Asses. Travel and accommodation were rough, pay low.
“What today is called ‘classic’ blues style came into being when young Gertrude Rainey, impressed and moved by her first encounter with country blues, made this ‘folk’ music part of her more sophisticated, professional performance routine.” Dan Morgenstern, Chicago Tribune.
“By the time she recorded at age 37, Ma Rainey had been on the road for over a quarter century. When she was in front of an audience, she made them believe she was like them- but glorious,” Rosen says. Her band leader “Georgia Tom” Dorsey recalled, “She possessed her listeners: they swayed, they rocked, they moaned and groaned, as they felt the blues with her.” Rosen calls her the first Black female pop star.
The vocalist/songwriter made more than 100 recordings over five years which brought her fame beyond the South. She would influence singers from Bessie Smith to Janis Joplin. We listen to several Rainey songs beginning with the signature “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom.” Though sexually suggestive, it’s not explicit, a characteristic shared by blues songs of the era. “If spirituals were the documents of slavery, blues became the epitome of the Jim Crow world,” Rosen comments. (After the Civil War, black Americans were no longer enslaved but neither had they achieved equal status with whites.)
“This song’s 16 bar refrain is much the structure Gershwin would’ve used,” Rosen begins, introducing “See See Rider.” A classical sounding introduction is followed by fundamental 12 bar blues structure. It’s longlined with muted moan, trombone slide, and slow, undulating hips.
“Let’s talk about accompaniment,” Rosen says. “Female blues singers have an essentially small band, New Orleans approach. A chordal instrument (those that can easily play more than one note at time, such as piano, organ, guitar) makes the rhythm clear. Lead trumpet, faster, higher clarinet, and lower register, slower trombone improvise a three-part counterpoint like dialogue.” The combination of instruments can rise above a raucous crowd.
As an example, we listen to an excerpt from “Backwater Blues,” originally a Ma Rainy number recorded in 1927 by Bessie Smith (1834-1937) with Jimmy Johnson on piano. (Smith was known for presenting songs associated with other artists, assuming her version would be better and raise her popularity.) The song is about The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 covering 27,000 square miles in up to 30’ of water. More than 200,000 African Americans were displaced from their homes then lived for lengthy periods in relief camps.
Years later, Randy Newman would write “Louisiana” about that flood with the spit and fire of years past. President say, “Little fat man, isn’t it a shame/What the river has done to this poor cracker’s land?” For those who wish to delve further- John M. Barry’s non-fiction book Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How it Changed America
Unlike Mamie Smith, Rainey invested her money and retired to home town, Columbus, Georgia, where she ran three theaters until a heart attack. “Her successor, whom most people think is better, was Bessie Smith (1834-1937). More than the other blues singers, she reflects variety,” says Rosen. We listen to a terrific 1927 recording of “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” (Irving Berlin.) Vocal is bright and melodic.
“Starting in about 1926, electric recording became the norm. Before that, you were singing into a huge horn. Microphones offered dynamic flexibility; clearer, more precise sound,” Rosen says. We listen to “T’Aint Nobody’s Bizness If I Do, Do, Do, Do” with Clarence Williams on piano. If I should take a notion/To jump into the ocean/T’ain’t nobody’s bizness if I do, do, do, do…
“In many ways, the first successful blues song was W.C. Handy’s “The Memphis Blues,” Rosen reflects. Described by its author as having been written for a Democratic mayoral candidate, its name was later changed from that of the politician to “Memphis Blues.” Folks I’ve just been down, down to Memphis town,/That’s where the people smile, smile on you all the while…
In 1903, while waiting for a train, Handy had the following experience: “A lean loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept…As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars…The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard.” (WC Handy) The sound was Mississippi Delta Blues.
Handy was the first person to write down and publish this music, joining with wet behind the ears valedictorian Harry Pace to found Pace and Handy Sheet Music (and later, Black Swan Records). “I was under the impression that these Negro musicians would jump at the chance to patronize one of their own publishers. They didn’t…The Negro musicians simply played the hits of the day…They followed the parade. Many white bands and orchestra leaders, on the other hand, were on the alert for novelties. They were therefore the ones most ready to introduce our numbers.” (WC Handy)
“In 1950, Handy’s “St. Louis Blues” was the most successful song in American musical history. By combining the blues with ragtime, he originated a multi-thematic sound.” We listen to Bessie Smith accom- panied by Fred Longshaw playing a reed organ (metal reeds vibrating through a slot with close tolerance, operated by pedals.) The fabulous horn is that of Louis Armstrong. Smith made her only film appearance in a two-reeler based on the song.
This vocalist appealed to both Black and white audiences making her more popular than Ma Rainey. Smith was said to be able to ‘walk’ men. She’d hold a stranger in hypnotic gaze until he unconsciously got up from the audience and started walking towards her. Champions in New York Society included author/photographer Carl Van Vechten, a great supporter of the Harlem Renaissance. Van Vechten showcased Smith, Paul Robeson, Ethel Waters, and Langston Hughes among others. Rosen points out that “Today we’d call him an influencer.”
“In a parallel world Rogers and Hart and Ira Gershwin portrayed sweet love. The blues were tougher, more direct and real about emotion than that which was offered on Broadway and by Tin Pan Alley.” (LR)
Bessie smith died because she wasn’t able to get proper medical help after a dramatic car crash.
“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 of Mr. Rosen courtesy of Louis Rosen
Opening picture from Shutterstock
