reengaging blues narratives: alan lomax, jelly roll morton and wc

209 Pages·2008·4.55 MB·English

REENGAGING BLUES NARRATIVES:
ALAN LOMAX, JELLY ROLL MORTON
AND W.C. HANDY
ByVicHobson
AdissertationsubmittedtotheSchool ofMusic,
Inpartial fulfilment oftherequirements forthedegreeof
DoctorofPhilosophy,UniversityofEast Anglia
(March2008)
Copyright 2008
All rights reserved
©
This copyofthethesis has beensuppliedonconditionthat anyone
whoconsults it is understoodtorecognisethat its copyright rests with
theauthorandthat noquotationfrom thethesis, noranyinformation
derivedtherefrom,maybepublishedwithout theauthor’s prior,
writtenconsent.
i
Acknowledgments
This for me has been a voyage of discovery and I count myself fortunate to have enjoyed the
process. This has been due, in no small part, to the support, help and encouragement that I
have received along the way. People who, in the early days of my research, had been only
names on the covers of books are now real; all have been helpful, most have been
enthusiasticandsome Inowcount as friends.
The School of Music at the Universityof East Anglia is a small school in a rapidlyexpanding
university which was led for many years by David Chadd who sadly died before the
completion of this work. Fortunately the foundations he laid are secure and I have benefited
from the knowledge and experience of all of the staff of the school, in particular my
supervisor Jonathan Impett. Among Jonathan’s contributions, above and beyond the normal
duties of a PhD supervisor is to have shown faith in a thesis that initially must have seemed
ratherunlikely.
I am also grateful to Nanette Nielsen, who inherited the role of deputy supervisor from
Anthony Gritten, to Sharon Choa, Simon Waters, Maiko Kawabata, Richard Lewis, Susanne
Francis and Vanessa Hawes of the University of East Anglia for time spent working through
drafts and for their thoughts and encouragement and to Anita Grimwood for her support
throughout. I am also grateful to Richard Middleton whose advice in relation to my upgrade
was most useful.
For the last three years I have enjoyed the financial support of the Arts and Humanities
Research Council, which along with Roberts Funding has enabled me to travel extensivelyto
conduct my research and to also attend conferences both in the United Kingdom and the
United States of America. Without this funding I would have been severely limited in the
scopeofmyresearch.
In November 2005 Iattended the Historic Brass SocietyConference, jointlysponsored bythe
Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University. I was grateful for the interest shown by Trevor
Herbert (Open University), David Sager (Library of Congress, Washington D.C.) and Ed
Berger(Rutgers University,NewJersey).This conferenceset inmotionaseries ofevents that
has been central to this work; including making contact with Bruce Raeburn, (Hogan Jazz
Archive).
The 2005 conference took place within months of Hurricane Katrina which devastated New
Orleans; fortunately the Archive had sustained little damage and plans were made to visit the
Archive the following spring. Bruce very generouslyallowed me to scan the oral historyfiles
of more than one hundred interviews conducted with early New Orleans jazz musicians for
myresearch.
ii
Bruce also advised me to contact Lawrence Gushee, who although we have not met, has
exercised a considerable influence over this work. His generosity in sharing his own
unpublished findings assistedmesignificantlyin mywork.
Through Bruce I met Lynn Abbott of the Hogan Jazz Archive, whose published work, in
conjunction with Doug Seroff, on the commercial blues and vaudeville, had already caused
me to significantly rethink myearlier work. Lynn’s importance to this dissertation is difficult
to overstate. He has read draft chapters and given critical advice, he has kept me supplied
withresearch material,shared his own research notes and encouraged metowrite fortheJazz
Archivist.
Through the Rutgers conference in 2005, I met Lewis Porter (Rutgers University). Lewis has
encouraged me to write for Jazz Perspectives and it is good that Lewis will be available to
examinethefinishedwork.
The proceedings of the 2005 Rutgers conference are to be published in 2008 edited by
Howard Weiner. I am grateful to both Howard and Jeff Nussbaum (President of the Historic
Brass Society) for enabling my fledgling efforts (which now seem hopelessly naive) to be
includedinthebook.
In February2007 IattendedtheSouthernAmericanStudies Conference (Oxford,Mississippi)
on the recommendation of Michael P. Bibler, (University of Mary Washington), who I had
met the previous year. The Mississippi conference enabled me to visit the Mississippi Blues
Archive and meet its curator Greg Johnson and the editors of Living Blues. The conference
also put me in contact with Paul Garon of Beasley Books, Patricia R. Schroeder of Ursinus
College and Azusa Nishimoto of Aoyama Gakuin University, who took an interest in my
paper to the conference. My paper to the conference went on to win the 2007 Critoph Prize
and I look forward to their assistance and advice in preparing this paper for publication in
AmericanQuarterly.
In the summer of 2007 I was awarded a scholarship to the Kluge Center of the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C. funded by the AHRC. I am very grateful to Carolyn T. Brown
and Mary Lou Reker and the other staff and scholars at the Kluge Center for making this
periodso rewarding.
I am especially grateful to Todd Harvey of the American Folklife Center at the Library of
Congress for guiding me through the Alan Lomax collection. Had it not have been for my
time at the American Folklife Center two chapters of my thesis could never have been
written. I am also grateful to Michael Taft, Jennifer Cutting, and all of the staff of the
American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress for their help. I am also grateful to the
otherstaffofthe LibraryofCongress,especiallythoseintheMusicDivision,theNewspapers
and Periodicals Division, the Copyright Office and the Local Historyand GenealogyReading
Room.
Thanks to Minnie Handy Hanson of Handy Brothers, I was able to obtain a copy of an
interviewconductedwithher grandfather,W.C.Handy, held bythe LibraryofCongress.
iii
I was able, during the summer of 2007 to visit the Historic New Orleans Collection, and with
thanks to Siva Blake, Mark Cave, and Daniel Hammer, I look forward to working with them
again on the “Fredrick Ramsey Jr. Papers.” Thanks too to Karl Koenig for access to his own
archive material; his hospitalityand his introduction into the mysteries of baseball. I was also
greatlyassistedinmyresearchbyJosephB. Borel oftheGretnaHistorical Society.
Thanks also to Ron Penn for his help in relation to John J. Niles (and for accepting a book
review from me in American Music) and to David Nathan at the National Jazz Archive in the
U.K., a resource that I am coming to realise I should have plundered rather more vigorously
than Idid.
iv
Contents
Introduction 1
PartOne
One TheFatherofthe Blues? 12
WilliamChristopherHandy 15
Goin’WheretheSouthernCross’theDog 20
TheBlues as Folk-song 32
Blues Ballads 38
TheGuitarandtheBlues 42
Blues HarmonyandStructure 45
Was HandytheFatherof theBlues? 49
Two The LandWheretheBlues Began? 51
CoahomaCounty 53
Robert Johnson andSonHouse 57
TheTent Shows 61
H.C.Speir 66
Blues intheMississippi Night 69
TheDallas Blues 79
OtherBlues Regions 91
Texas 92
Louisiana 95
TheRural NarrativeoftheBlues 99
v
PartTwo
Three TheOriginal JellyRoll Blues? 102
Mamie’s Blues 103
GameKidandTonyJackson 108
SeeSeeRider 111
NewOrleans Blues 113
TheJellyRoll MortonSymposium 114
Alabama Bound 116
MisterJellyRoll 120
Kenner and Lewis 124
Memphis andW.C.Handy 126
TheTri-StateVaudeville Circuit 129
BillyKersands 137
TulaneUniversity1982 142
Cantometrics 145
Four TheBirthoftheBlues? 147
IGot theBlues 149
OneO’Them Things! 153
Blues Harmony 155
That Barbershop Chord 157
BuddyBolden’s Blues 161
Careless Love 163
MakeMeaPallet onthe Floor 164
FunkyButt (BuddyBolden’s Blues) 167
JohnRobichaux 170
UptownandDowntown 173
R.Emmet Kennedy 180
vi
CaseyJones andSteamboat Bill 182
DeOl’Mule 184
HoneyBaby 185
MyBabyinaGuinea-BlueGown 188
ReengagingBlues Narratives 193
PrimarySources 196
Bibliography 197
vii
Introduction
This dissertation is about the development of the blues rather than the origin of the blues,
although origin is an issue that cannot be ignored. The distinction between the development
of the blues and the origin of the blues may appear subtle, but I would argue that it is an
important distinction. The development of the blues is knowable. The development of the
blues has left its imprint in the oral histories, in newspaper reports, in sheet music and in
other identifiable sources. The origin of the blues is speculative. Jazz and blues scholars have
long pondered the origin (or origins) of the blues, but nobody knows where or when the
blues beganor forthat matterwhetherornot theblues does have an origin.
The blues appeared as sheet music, in the repertoire of emerging jazz bands, sung on the
vaudeville stage and in the repertoire of rural songsters in the early years of the twentieth
century. I shall argue that none of these blues genres showed any clear primacy. Despite the
blues being performed for around a century and studied by folklorists, musicologists and
enthusiasts, we still don’t know where and when the blues began. If there is anyevidence that
couldleadresearchers backtotheoriginoftheblues it has eludedthosethat havetriedtofind
it.
The purpose of this dissertation is to bring together that which is known about the
development of the blues and to show how this impacts on speculative theories about origin. I
wouldarguethat unless wehave acomprehensiveknowledgeofhowthe blues developed that
any origin theoryis premature. Despite this a number of blues researchers have been tempted
tospeculate.
Both Samuel B. Charters in The Roots of the Blues: An African Search (1981)1 and Paul
Oliver in Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues, (1970)2 explore the idea
that the origin of the blues is to be found in Africa. Neither produced any compelling
evidence that Africa is where the blues originated and Charters finally concluded that the
blues “was essentially a new kind of song that had begun with the new life in the American
South.”3
Paul Oliver argues that the origins of the blues “are admittedly obscure,” but the roots of the
blues lie “buried deep in the fertile ground of the Revival hymns, the spirituals, the minstrel
songs, the banjo and guitar rags, the mountain ‘ballits’, the folk ballads, the work songs and
the field hollers.”4 This would suggest that the blues is a composite music made up from
elements ofanumberof pre-existing, predominantlyrural musical traditions.
1SamuelB.Charters,TheRootsoftheBlues:AnAfricanSearch(Boston:MarionBoyars,1981).
2PaulOliver,SavannahSyncopators:AfricanRetentionsintheBlues(NewYork:SteinandDay,1970).
3 Charters,127.
4PaulOliver,BluesFellThisMorning:TheMeaningoftheBlues(London:Cassell,1960;reprint,1963),5.
1
The assumption that the blues is essentially a rural folk-music is widespread. It is widely
assumed that the blues began as a rural folk-music and that subsequently it became
commercialised.This is a lineofthought takenup byDavidEvans.
Theblues didnot longremainpurelya folkproduct,passedorallyfrom oneperformer
to another, sung mainly in small groups, and drawn largely from traditional material.
Commercialisationandpopularisationweresoon tohavean effect onthem.5
Recent research has tended to suggest that the relationship is rather more complex than a
simple transition from rural to commercial blues. Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff demonstrate
in both “They Certainly Sound Good to Me”: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the
Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues, (1996)6 and also in Ragged But Right: Black
Travelling Shows, “Coon Songs” and the Dark Pathway to the Blues (2007),7 that the
commercial blues had begun to appear in sheet music and also in the repertoire of the
travelling shows in the first decade of the twentieth century. This was before we have any
compellingevidencetosuggest that theblues was beingplayedbyrural songsters.
Peter Muir in his dissertation Before “Crazy Blues”: Commercial Blues in America 1850-
1920 (2004)8 also identifies a number of early compositions which have some of the features
of the blues, but which pre-date named “blues” compositions by as much as a decade. What
this could suggest is that the commercial environment of the early years of the twentieth
century played a rather larger part in the consolidation of the blues than has until now been
assumed. Aspects of the development of the commercial blues are also considered in Elliot S.
Hurwitt’s W.C Handyas MusicPublisher:Career andReputation (2000).9
Sources and Methodology
In the early period of my research I found that there were three broad categories of blues
writers and scholars. There were the folklorists of the early years of the twentieth century;
thejazz writers inthe midcenturyandtherevivalist blues writers ofthe1960s. Because each
of these groups were writing at different times and were focusing on different aspects of the
blues, each group of writers had come to radically different beliefs about the origins and
development of the blues. Most of the early folklorists considered the blues to be principally
a commercial music and consequentlyfew took an interest in collecting early rural blues. For
the jazz writers the blues was seen as an essential and integral part of jazz. For the blues
writers of the baby-boom generation the blues was a folk music played by men on guitars.
5DavidEvans,BigRoadBlues:Tradition&CreativityintheFolkBlues(DaCapoPress,1982;reprint,1987),
59.
6LynnAbbottandDougSeroff,"'TheyCert’lySoundGoodtoMe':SheetMusic,SouthernVaudeville,andthe
CommercialAscendancyoftheBlues,"AmericanMusic14,no.4(1996).
7LynnAbbottandDougSeroff,RaggedbutRight:BlackTravellingShows,'CoonSongs'andtheDark
PathwaytoBluesandJazz(Jackson:UniversityPressofMississippi,2007).
8PeterC.Muir,"Before'CrazyBlues':CommercialBluesinAmerica1850-1920"(PhD,CityUniversityof
NewYork,2004).
9ElliotS.Hurwitt,"W.C.HandyasMusicPublisher:CareerandReputation"(PhD,CityUniversityofNew
York,2000).
2
There were three different narratives that had been constructed by these three different
constituencies about the origins anddevelopment oftheblues.
African American secular songs were not systematically collected in the early years of the
twentieth century, and consequently there is little hard evidence of the development of the
blues in the rural South from before this date.10 Most jazz narratives tend to focus on the
recorded history of jazz and the blues from 1917, by which time the blues was firmly
established within the jazz repertoire. The country blues writers of the 1960s focused
primarily on the rural singers that had begun recording the blues after 1926 and on their
rediscovery in the 1960s. By 1912 the blues began to appear regularly in sheet music of the
period, but all three narratives of the blues were unable to shed any significant light on the
development of the blues in this early period. Clearly a review of the secondary sources
wouldnot besufficient. It was thereforenecessarytoconsult primarysources.
PrimarySources
One issue I identified in this early stage of research, which seemed to have the potential to
shed light on the development of the blues before 1912, was the relationship between the
blues and jazz. To begin to explore this issue I used the oral history files held at The William
Ransom Hogan Jazz Archive in New Orleans. I was able to consult more than one hundred
interview transcripts and digests, and in a few cases the original audio tapes of interviews
conductedwiththeearlyjazz musicians ofNewOrleans.
The interviews that I selected were based upon the interviewee having been born before
1900, and in the majority of cases born outside of New Orleans, although I also included a
few of the older musicians born within New Orleans. In almost every case these interviewees
also appear in New Orleans Jazz: a Family Album,11 which provides a reference source to
nearly one thousand musicians that have influenced the musical life of the city. The purpose
was toseewhat evidence therewas tosupport the propositionthat theblues mayhave entered
jazz as rural musicians, from the outlying plantations of Louisiana and elsewhere, migrated
intoNewOrleans.12
I was also able to consult interview transcripts in the Mississippi Blues Archive and in the
American Folklife Center, of the Library of Congress, for evidence of the early blues
development in the rural South. I also looked at interview transcripts in the Alan Lomax
Collection, which included his interviews and notes from his visits to Coahoma County,
Mississippi inthe1940s.
10HowardOdum,"Folk-SongandFolk-PoetryasFoundintheSecularSongsoftheSouthernNegroes,"The
JournalofAmericanFolklore24,no.93(1911).;HowardOdum,"Folk-SongandFolk-PoetryasFoundinthe
SecularSongsoftheSouthernNegroes(Concluded),"TheJournalofAmericanFolklore24,no.94(1911).
11AlRoseandEdmondSouchon,NewOrleansJazz:AFamilyAlbum,thirded.(BatonRouge&London:
LouisianaStateUniversityPress,1984).
12Thepaperthatresultedfromthisresearch,“TheBluesandNewOrleansJazz:CominginFromtheCountry?”
andisbeingrevisedforJazzPerspectives.
3