Jim Crow's Counterculture Read online

  To adapt to their new environments and to reflect their changing identities, Deep South migrants made significant changes to their music upon arriving in Chicago, Kansas City, St. Louis, Detroit, and other destination cities. In southern cities like Memphis, blues musicians had already begun to move away from traditional country sounds by adopting the rhythms of swing and the brass and percussion instrumentation of jazz. In the neighborhoods of the northern cities, southern musicians were encouraged to produce music that jived with the high-energy, fast-moving environment, like the jump blues. “This ain’t slavery no more,” remarked a fan of Broonzy, “so why don’t you learn to play something else? The way you play and sing about mules, cotton, corn, levee camps and gang songs. Them days, Big Bill, is gone for ever.”5 Broonzy and his contemporaries added fast-paced, raucous “boogie-woogie” elements to their guitar technique and piano playing. The loud, percussive style of piano, known as barrelhouse, could be heard over the din of noisy nightclubs. Later, these urban blues musicians would seek out electric guitars to plug in and energize their old country sound the way rural electrification lit up their farm shacks back home in Mississippi.

  Given the vast musical and lyrical range of Broonzy’s expansive repertoire of reels, levee camp songs, spirituals, jazz, ballads, blues, and rags, listening to his recordings is like hearing the soundtrack of America’s industrial, urban, and technological coming of age. Broonzy, who lived from 1893 to 1958, was the second-most prolific blues recording artist of the prewar era, cutting 224 sides between 1927 and 1942. His discography represents a long bridge spanning the gap between the traditional African American culture rooted in the agricultural South and the emergent African American culture sprouting in the urban North.6 Of the multitalented Big Bill, blues historian Mark Humphrey wrote, “Robert Johnson would become a country bluesman with urban aspirations, but Broonzy was a truly urban bluesman with one foot forever planted in the country.” Storyteller, blues guitarist, singer, accompanist, soloist, arranger, and composer, Broonzy was a dynamic and well-rounded musician. He was born to sharecropping ex-slaves in Scott, Mississippi, and later moved to Arkansas. He married at age twenty-two, was drafted into the army in 1918, then returned to Arkansas. In the 1920s, he migrated to Chicago. There he was active in the nightclub scene and race record industry until the 1940s, after which he made another migration—to Europe, where he returned to his country music roots to please audiences looking for “authentic” southern blues. Although heavily influenced by contemporaries such as Son House and Charley Patton, Broonzy did not adopt their haunting, brooding blues style. Instead, he was noticeably upbeat in his lyrics and his instrumental style, making use of rhythm sections and brass instruments in his ensembles. He played and sang delightfully raucous and urbane blues songs during the worst times of the Great Depression yet maintained in his repertoire many themes of country life, as evidenced by songs such as “Grandma’s Farm.” Always eager to innovate and please his audience— whoever they were—Broonzy represented the new wave of urban bluesmen who turned to percussion and piano, and eventually embraced electric guitar, thereby prefiguring some of the most popular post-World War II acts like Muddy Waters.7

  In addition to demonstrating a willingness to innovate and adapt to new audiences and their changing tastes, Broonzy, Ledbetter, Bukka White, and others represented a generation of musicians who discovered that their musical talent was a path to escaping the hard agricultural lifestyle of the Deep South’s plantation districts. In other words, these musicians exemplified the hopes and dreams of the millions of black southerners whose abandonment of the Jim Crow South resulted in what is remembered as the Great Migration.8 The migration, taken with the events of World War I, fueled a dynamic African American culture during the 1910s, 1920s, and beyond. Only recently shut out of the southern political arena, blacks in the Deep South saw inspiring manifestations of black life (the “New Negro” of the Harlem Renaissance) resulting from the mass movement of their race into new sectors of the country. Reflecting a multidisciplined fascination with the demographic upheaval, historians, sociologists, economists, and journalists have studied the Great Migration—an irregular, decentralized movement that saw some 3.5 million black southerners leave their old homes for new ones in the first half of the twentieth century.9

  Both white and black contemporaries recognized the tremendous movement of black southerners and mused on the importance of the migration. The local newspaper in Meridian, Mississippi, noted with alarm in 1917 that “it has proved impossible to check the exodus; the blacks are leaving in large numbers daily”—a sentiment echoed on the “receiving” end in Chicago:

  Some are coming on the passenger,

  Some are coming on the freight,

  Others will be found walking,

  For none have time to wait.10

  In prose and poem, authors described the mass movement of black southerners to the North, but Carter G. Woodson, writing in 1918, interpreted current events this way: “Many persons now see in this shifting of the Negro population the dawn of a new day, not in making the Negro numerically dominant anywhere to obtain political power, but to secure for him freedom of movement from section to section as a competitor in the industrial world.”11 In contrast to Woodson’s analytical explanation of the migration, individual southerners spoke of the harsh realities that were forcing them to the North. “I still seek for myself a section of this country,” wrote a black Floridian, “where I can poserably better my condishion in as much as beaing asshured some protection as a good citizen under the Stars and Stripes.”12

  Written accounts are just a few voices from the era of migration that help us understand the importance of the mass movement, as well as some of the “push” and “pull” factors that stimulated it, but how can we, as one reader of migrant letters urged, get “at the motive dominant in the minds of these refugees and in the real situation at the moment of upheaval”?13 In blues music we hear that migration was not only a function of economic and political factors but also that the desire to be mobile was itself an essential feature of the southern black experience and cultural expression. “It was a decision Negroes made to leave the South,” argued Amiri Baraka, “not an historical imperative. And this decision must have been preceded by some kind of psychological shift; a reinterpretation by the Negro of his role in this country.”14

  Blues music had sprung from and was commercially marketed to southern black workers, a class of folks who were facing the uncertain blend of anxiety and hope that marked many of their migration experiences. Limited job skills, poor education, and de facto segregation in the North were among the challenges native southern blacks faced, but having family or professional ties helped mitigate some of the pitfalls of displacement.15 Migrating black southerners left many traces, reflecting in blues music their agency in effecting this mass movement as well as the meaningful ways the migration changed their lives. For many of these laborers, Booker T. Washington’s regimen of agricultural thrift and industry had not paid off in the fertile plantation districts of the Jim Crow South; many black farmers, as Woodson had indicated, hoped to compete in what they imagined to be the more equitable world of northern manufacturing. In addition to the well-known metropolises of Chicago, Detroit, and New York, steel mill towns such as Pittsburgh, Gary, and Cleveland became popular destinations for black laborers.16

  At the most superficial level, blues music became a documentary of the Great Migration, recording in song the experiences of African Americans increasingly looking over their shoulders, back toward the South. When recording technology became widespread in the 1920s, the “blues documentary” of the migration could be preserved in new ways, and “Specks” McFadden’s “Harvest Moon Blues” (1929) became just such a documentary. McFadden’s song was fairly traditional in musical form, but his lyrics captured some of the migration’s dynamism. In the masculine voice, McFadden beseeches some kind of sexual favor or money—he wants to get what’s coming to him, or take ca
re of business, and then get out of town:

  Today! Mama, today! Tomorrow I might be away,

  Today! Mama, today! Tomorrow I might be away,

  Goin’ back to Gary, that’s where I intend to stay.

  But a later verse takes an interesting, more subtle and substantive turn on the migration. The “harvest moon,” a traditional agricultural motif and way of marking time in the preindustrial world, in this case becomes a signifier of the rejection of the rural setting and lifestyle:

  Shine on harvest moon, harvest moon shine on,

  Shine on harvest moon, harvest moon shine on,

  For you will be shinin’ after the days I’m gone.17

  More than merely documenting the migration in verse, songs such as McFad-den’s “Harvest Moon Blues” contributed to the culture of migration and helped black southerners make sense of the changes going on around them and their part in that change.

  Tommy McClennan, a Mississippi Delta native, likewise acquired a rearview mirror perspective on the South. During the 1920s and 1930s, McClennan was an itinerant bluesman in the Delta, but Broonzy helped Bluebird Records producer Lester Melrose find McClennan in the Delta cotton town of Yazoo. Mel-rose quickly convinced McClennan to relocate to Chicago to record. His role as an entertainer and promise as a commercial prospect for northern record companies gave him a comparative advantage among fellow black southerners who either made the trip north with less certainty or were unable to leave the South in the first place:

  I left my babe in Mississippi, picking cotton down on her knees,

  She says, “If you get to Chicago, please write me a letter if you please.”

  McClennan’s “Cotton Patch Blues” was recorded in Chicago in 1939 and captured the spirit of the migrant looking over his shoulder, like Ledbetter’s “tears runnin’ over the back of his head” as he left his parents’ home for Fannin Street. First and foremost, the singer-subject in McClennan’s verse is active—”I left my babe”—and liberates himself from a position that is both laborious and genuflecting—”picking cotton down on her knees”—for some brighter future. But there is uncertainty in McClennan’s lyric—”If you get to Chicago”—as well as the sadness of a mate who knows she is being left behind for something far more exciting than what she can offer on the farm. By leaving the door open, saying “if” instead of “when” you get to Chicago, she understands that the letter may never come, her resignation compounded by the knowledge that he may not “please” to keep her in his thoughts. Reading between the lines of blues lyrics in this fashion may seem speculative, but the tension between anxiety and hopefulness on display here makes “Cotton Patch Blues” a showcase of diaspora experiences.18

  For McClennan, musical proficiency—and having contacts with successful musical migrants like Broonzy—was a ticket out of the Delta and an opportunity to stretch his vocal cords with free speech and abandon some of the coded lyrics that had previously veiled his social commentary, as in his controversial song, “Bottle It Up and Go”:

  Now, the nigger and the white man,

  Playin’, set ‘em up.

  Nigger beat the white man,

  Was scared to pick it up.

  ‘He had the bottle up and do what?’

  Had to bottle it up and go on.

  McClennan’s mentor, the commercially savvy Broonzy, urged him to be more subtle and avoid strong racial language—the line “Nigger beat the white man” seemed needlessly dangerous in the commercial recording world. But the record was cut as McClennan wanted it, and the countercultural undercurrent of the blues came that much closer to the surface.19

  In this new cultural environment, innovation and creativity opened new doors. Musicians were not the only ones leaving the rural South, and fellow African Americans who had moved city-ward wanted a new music to commemorate their new experiences. Ledbetter was known to folklorists for his country style and rural dress, but that was for white audiences mostly; he knew from his trips as a young man to Fannin Street in Shreveport that local black audiences wanted to hear boogie-woogie and barrelhousing.20 When Bukka White left rural northern Mississippi and headed up the river to Missouri in the 1920s, he too found that he had to adapt his musical style, sensing that his urban audience in St. Louis wanted something new, fast, and exciting. In response he developed his own version of the popular dance song known as the “Shimmy,” or “Shake,” that had become popular in urban areas from New York to Atlanta to San Francisco in the 1910s. With his “shim-me-sha-wobble,” as he called it, White earned a nightly gig at a roadhouse in St. Louis: “I commenced to playin’, you know, and that [first] night I played into the night, and the next morning [the owner] give me $5.00. Whooo! I could stand on my head then, man, and I went wild then!” The shim-me-sha-wobble was a great start for White, who remained in St. Louis playing at the roadhouse for the next five or six years. His father, a railroad worker, would stop in and see him from time to time, and the roadhouse owner saw to it that White got some schooling during his time in employment there.21 Again, music was a pathway out of the Delta lifestyle of farming, logging, and levee building, and the musicians—even the adolescent White—knew that keeping current with developing musical trends was a key to success. Far from being a stable reservoir of traditional black consciousness, blues music and the musicians who created and remade it in the first three decades of the twentieth century were dynamic, innovative, creative, and mobile.

  Furthermore, it is quite clear that many of these musicians got from their musical successes the confidence to become itinerants or to attempt migration. Earning quick money on the street by playing a few tunes convinced many a bluesman to hit the road. Before White headed to the St. Louis area, he began his “professional” career playing at a place owned by his cousin near Houston, Mississippi: “He gave me $2.50 and I played all night. Two dollars and a half and two boxes of sardines—I’ll never forget that as long as I live . . . Well, that $2.50 made me want to go from then on. I just had that faith that I could make more. Then I left and went to St. Louis, you see.”22 White would later settle in Memphis where his younger cousin, a twenty-year-old sharecropper from Indianola named Riley “B. B.” King, joined him in the 1940s.

  King, like White, had the confidence to move because he realized that his guitar playing and singing afforded him self-employment—a major departure from his earlier dreams of being a tractor driver on the Johnson cotton plantation where he grew up. For King, it all began with his “first lesson in marketing.” One day as a teenager, he picked a nice corner off of Church Street in Indianola and began strumming a few gospel songs he had picked up in church. He made a few fans among the passersby, but his only payment was their praise. Later in the day, feeling frustrated that no one had given him any money, he switched from the sacred to secular tunes and began picking out blues songs on his guitar. To his amazement, a man who had praised his playing earlier in the day came by again, but something was different: “ ‘Sing those blues, son,’ says the same man who earlier praised my gospel song. It’s later in the afternoon but I’m the same and he’s the same; only difference is that ‘my Lord’ turned into ‘my baby.’ When I’m through with my blues, he’s smiling like he was before, he’s patting me on the shoulder, but—and this is one hell of a big ‘but’—he’s reaching in his pocket and looking for change. ‘Keep singing, son,’ he says as he slips me a dime.” Once he realized the market value of secular music, King was ready to go. One day, when a farm accident put him into a panic—the tractor he was starting up lunged into the barn and broke the smokestack and engine manifold—he went into “fight or flight” mode: