Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast PDF
Preview Red River Blues: The Blues Tradition in the Southeast
Music in American Life Volumes in the series Music in American Life are listed at the end of this book. RED RIVER BLOES RED RIVER BLOES The Blues Tradition in the Southeast BROCE BASTIN M MACMILLAN PRESS Music Division © The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 1986 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied, or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First published 1986 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world. ISBN 978-1-349-09345-8 ISBN 978-1-349-09343-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09343-4 Contents Preface ix 1 . The Background of the Blues 3 2. The Emergence of the Blues 11 3. The Geographical Base 27 4. Noncommercial Recordings: The 1920s and 1930s 52 5. Noncommercial Recordings: The 1940s 72 6. Atlanta Strut: The Pianists 87 7. Goin' to Town 96 8. Down in Atlanta, G. A. 125 9. Goin' Down in Georgia: Georgia Blues Today 150 10. Greenville Sheik 166 11. On Up the Road 180 12. Bull City Blues: Durham, North Carolina 203 13. Blind Boy Fuller 214 14. Blind Gary Davis in North Carolina 241 15. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry 254 16. Other Blues in North Carolina 272 17. Goin' to Richmond: Virginia and the Northern Border Regions 294 18. Goin' Up the Country: The Migration North 315 19. Tricks Ain't Watkin' No More 345 General Index 349 Tune Index 373 Preface In a sense this book had its origins one hot August afternoon in 1969 in Atlanta when Pete Lowry and I were interviewing Buddy Moss. Moss's chance remark about two North Carolina blues men friends led us to take a day off from junking for old records on our way back to New Jersey and took us to a number of people involved with blues in and around Durham, North Carolina. A series of articles in the pioneer English blues magazine Blues Unlimited led to a request from Paul Oliver in 1970 to write a short book in his Studio Vista Blues Paperback series. In 1972 I returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to continue my fieldwork and to study the origins of blues in the southeastern states. This book is the outgrowth of all that plus subse quent work to which the unstinted assistance of a handful of selfless researchers has been added. Pete Lowry and I have spent countless days following leads, and he has recorded more examples of the blues tradition in the Southeast than everyone else combined. My section on Virginia could never have been written without the superb fieldwork undertaken by Kip LomelI. The survey on postwar blues in Georgia would have been patchy at best without the generous assistance of George Mitchell, while much of the detailed study of blues in Durham and elsewhere in North Carolina, especially since World War II, was gladly provided by Glenn Hinson. Karl Gert zur Heide and John Cowley constantly provided obscure but highly pertinent references in print. Jeffrey P. Green has kindly produced detailed indexes to facilitate use as a reference text. This survey is of the music of the people of the region, and revealing comments within the text were provided by some of the scores of x Red River Blues people who were good enough to be interviewed and recorded about the place of this music in their lives. This is a history rather than an ethnomusicological survey. A number of books already exist with detailed annotation and musical analysis of specific recorded pieces by bluesmen from the Southeast, and they are available for supplementary information.! However, the music is aural and not trans literal. It was never written down and it was never intended to be. The really relevant way to appreciate the music is to hear it-and that usually means on record. No written annotation will fully replace the aural reception necessary to comprehend the music. Brett Sutton had this to say about black gospel music, but it is so with blues too: Western music could not have achieved its current level of sophistica tion without written music as one of its fundamental tools. Yet even in this highly developed literate tradition, certain aspects of musical per formance, such as expressive variation in tempo and dynamics, tone qual ity and mode of attack, cannot be sufficiently represented on the printed page, and must be provided by the creative skills ofthe performer .... In folk music, where the absence of a written standard of reference and the natural fluctuation of the oral tradition place much artistic control in the hands of the performer, the personal component of the performance is perhaps even larger."2 We write about black folk music in the manner of western civiliza tion's insistence that all matters of significance be documented visu ally. Few of the people interviewed saw their music as anything other than transitory; none saw it as art for art's sake. Its very lack of self conscious expression, fundamental to its integrity, precludes its per manence in any form other than that in which it was created. The pres ent study attempts to collate known elements in a format which few of the people who created the music would have been able to appre ciate: it is an attempt to offer a literate study of a basically nonliterate form. Blues in its folk form was the expression of a nearly destitute, essen tially illiterate group of people. This study was not written along class lines, but it should be pointed out that black Americans did not think as a whole, any more than did white Americans. There were class divi sions with different groups seeking different goals, some consciously, some unconsciously. No single body spoke for all blacks. John Ham mond, well aware of a broad range of black music, has stated that' 'jazz and, particularly, primitive black music were too unfamiliar to the middle-class leaders of the NAACP to be anything they could take pride in. "3 Preface xi In any attempt to analyze in depth the blues tradition of the Southeast, one is always faced with the imbalance of documentation. Remarkably little contemporary written documentation has been uncovered. Where it exists, it has been incorporated in great detail, in an effort to shed as much light as possible upon the artists concerned. Thus the use of the welfare files of Blind Boy Fuller and Gary Davis enables a detailed documentation of their lives totally out of propor tion to information available on many other bluesmen but also pro vides rare insight into the lives of professional musicians-or probably as near professional in any sense as the East Coast provided. Only in recent years have anything like systematic studies taken place, and often they were localized or centered on a given group of musicians, so certain areas or aspects have been studied in detail, but large sec tions of the region have not been researched at all. My personal fieldwork was confined to summer vacations from a teaching post in England; therefore I was unable to visit many areas. Despite these limitations, disparate sources have provided sufficient information for us to draw a number of valid generalizations about a regional blues tradition. While writing this book I became aware of points made in unrelated texts which highlighted issues close to my research. One author found that "no-one remembers accurately what happened thirty or more years ago. Therefore I am not indebted for a single fact to anyone other than the authors of contemporary official letters, minutes, memoranda and records of meetings."4 If I were to work from such information, there would be no book. Georgia bluesman Roy Dunn, asked how he could remember so much local detail, replied, "It's OK for you, you can write it down. I can't write so I have to remember." The wealth of fascinating detail which emerged from the welfare files of Blind Boy Fuller and Gary Davis brought to mind the truism of Sir Lewis Namier that "a great many profound secrets are somewhere in print, but are most easily detected when one knows what to seek."5 Earlier use of death records had opened up an avenue of research which few had appreciated. Nothing can replace sheer persistence based on thorough evaluation in the field. A story from World War II confU'11lS the underlying premise of the need for practical experience: A British mathematical physicist and an American theoretical physicist, Dr. Charles Kittel ... had been set together ... to work on the problem of deducing the characteristics of German magnetic mines laid at sea .... The data from which characteristics were to be deduced were
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