Jim Crow's Counterculture Read online

  Sweet Home Chicago

  As excited as black southerners may have been to arrive in Chicago, it could be an intimidating experience. Jim Crow life was cruel and painful for them, but the South had been their home. Emerging from the underground platforms of Chicago’s Union station into the steel and concrete maze of the metropolis made for a jarring experience. The putter-putter of the tractor motor, the mooing of cows and braying of jackasses, the echo of field hollers floating across the cotton farm—these sounds were absent. Likewise missing were the smell of pine-pitch, the cotton in the gin house, the earthy smells of the furrowed, manure-laiden fields. Metropolises were complex places, physically and culturally; a certain duplicity thrived in the urban free market. For example, the Chicago Defender, having printed the editorials that had convinced so many southerners to move north in the first place, also advertised “beauty aids for dark complexions” to straighten hair and lighten skin, making migrants from the southern farmlands unsure of themselves. In the context of these ads, notes journalism historian Mark K. Dolan, “the effect was to mock the Defender’s migrants, browbeating them in editorials for their rough country ways, and by implication, their dark skin.” The southern blacks’ relocation was also a dislocation.70

  Walter Davis, a Mississippi blues musician, had already been living in St. Louis for six years before Bluebird Records talent scouts discovered him in 1930. One of his more than 160 recordings for Bluebird was “Cotton Farm Blues,” issued in 1939. Although he was fifteen years removed from his own migration to the city, he had witnessed the arrival of thousands more after him, and his “Cotton Farm Blues” captured the apprehension and vulnerability experienced by newcomers to the city.

  If I mistreat you, babe, I don’t mean you no harm,

  If I mistreat you, babe, I don’t mean you no harm,

  I’m just a little country boy, right out of the cotton farm.

  I’m just from the country, never been to your town before,

  I’m just from the country, never been to your town before,

  Lord, I’m broke and hungry, ain’t got no place to go.71

  In entitling the song “Cotton Farm Blues,” Davis figuratively kept one foot planted on the familiar ground of the southern countryside, but his subject had not yet found firm footing in the North; he had “no place to go.” But some blues musicians did have someplace to go when they arrived in the North because they could plug into a network of fellow musicians. Sometimes it was as simple as getting a record producer in touch with an aspiring musician, like the way Broonzy helped McClennan start his career, but the support could go well beyond that. In Chicago, Tampa Red established something of a blues hostel for fellow musicians, including the ever-connected Broonzy. At Tampa Red’s, Broonzy became a mentor to Memphis Minnie, and the company included other great artists: Georgia Tom Dorsey, Big Joe Williams, Sonny Boy Williamson, Memphis Slim, and Little Bill Gaither. These musicians ate together, rehearsed together, and roomed together. They helped each other get into nightclubs or gain notoriety through playing at house parties, and they created a general atmosphere of heightened expectations and success for the recently arrived migrants. Together, these musicians attained great success; Tampa Red and Broonzy were the top two recording blues musicians in the prewar era, recording more sides than any of their contemporaries—251 for Tampa Red and 224 for Broonzy. Memphis Minnie would come in at number eight with 158 sides recorded, and Gaither contributed 109 of his own. These were truly the stars of the Chicago blues scene and some of the most successful musicians of the Great Migration.72

  For the most part, blues musicians supported these high expectations by praising the northern communities to which their fellow southerners were migrating. “Cow Cow” Davenport, the Mississippi bluesman who sang about leaving the “Jim Crow Town,” sang about Chicago being a place where “money grows on trees.” Other singers, including Robert Johnson, recreated cold, faraway Chicago as “Sweet Home Chicago.” Johnson had been to Chicago on his travels, not to record, but just to travel and play. Recorded in November 1936 in San Antonio with ARC producer Don Law, Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” was a reworked version of Kokomo Arnold’s enormously popular “Kokomo Blues” (or “Old Original Kokomo Blues,” named after the town in Indiana), recorded just two years before. Arnold’s song was itself borrowed from guitarist Scrapper Blackwell, who had settled in Indianapolis. Beyond demonstrating the practices of borrowing songs and contributing to contemporary, “hip” sounds, Johnson’s “Sweet Home Chicago” also illustrates the hopefulness of migration and movement in general. He equates the “Windy City” with the riches, warmth, and freedom of “the land of California.” The song is not a linear story-narrative but rather a bric-a-brac of images, many of which have nothing to do with Chicago or California, and he includes a lot of counting for rhyme’s sake: “One and one is two, and two and two is fo’ / I’m heavy-loaded baby, I’m booked I got to go.” But resounding throughout the song is the following refrain, entreating his listeners to hit the road: “Ooh, baby don’t you want to go? / Back to the land of California, to my sweet home Chicago!”73

  “Sweet Home Chicago” and other blues songs, like the editorials and record advertisements in Abbott’s Defender, created a positive picture of life in the North. Revisiting Blind Blake’s “Detroit Bound Blues,” in which the singer is going to “get” a good job, bluesman Bob Campbell envisioned an even more active, empowered role in migration, singing “I’m goin’ to Detroit, build myself a job”74 Bluesman Peetie Wheatstraw grew up in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, but between the wars, he frequently moved up and down the Mississippi Valley, from Arkansas to Missouri and Illinois and back. As his career and music developed, his move from the rural South to the urban North was reflected in the way he jazzed up his music with increasingly larger instrumental combos, giving his 1940 recording, “Chicago Mill Blues,” a swinging, contemporary sound. Like the earlier musicians, Blake and Campbell, who sang about industrial work, Wheatstraw drew close connections between masculine labor, income, and romantic success.

  I used to have a woman that lived up on the hill,

  I used to have a woman that lived up on the hill,

  She was crazy ‘bout me, ooh well, well, ‘cause I worked at the Chicago mill.

  In correlating steady work to female adoration, Wheatstraw was maintaining old southern blues traditions, though the setting had changed—agriculture for industry, the countryside for the city neighborhood. Similarly, Wheatstraw was able simultaneously to draw on tradition while acknowledging new social environments. In the following verse, the singer reworks old imagery from Leadbelly—recalling the “Shorty George” and “Midnight Special” trains that brought wives and mothers to Sugarland and other prison farms to seek the release of their husbands and sons. In an ironic turn here, the prison has become the mill, and the train whistle has become the work whistle.

  You can hear the women hollerin’ when the Chicago mill whistle blows,

  You can hear the women hollerin’ when the Chicago mill whistle blows,

  Cryin’, “Turn loose my man, ooh well, well, please let him go.”

  And, finally, Wheatstraw was able to conjure some of the newfound freedom of city life. As itinerant bluesmen had long known, the freedom to move gave one the freedom to seek opportunity but also to break promises, break hearts, and move on. Perhaps the anonymity of the city provided the freedom to escape obligations and consequences as well.

  If you want to have plenty of women, boys work at the Chicago mill,

  If you want to have plenty of women, boys work at the Chicago mill,

  You don’t have to give them nothin’, ooh well, jest tell them that you will.75

  Economic, sexual, and social opportunity characterized the corpus of blues songs composed and recorded in the pre-World War II era that equated cityward or northward movement with individual uplift. But, just as many southern blacks experienced hardship in their migration north, so too did bluesmen refl
ect a more somber, cool mood toward their new urban lives.

  By the 1920s many of the utopian visions embedded in blues songs had failed against the harsh realities of African American life in the North. No “promised land” in the wake of World War I, the urban North, while free of the statutory limits placed on black life, shifted from seeming a land of promise and opportunity to being a site of widespread discrimination. It is now well documented that southern African Americans in the urban North encountered poor and segregated housing conditions and economic discrimination in the job market. The new African American populations of Chicago, New York, Detroit, St. Louis, and other industrial centers were consistently limited to deteriorating neighborhoods and burdened by the social problems endemic to residents of ghettos.76 While songs such as Ledbetter’s “Bourgeois Blues” highlighted the problem of housing discrimination, other blues musicians documented the unequal pay scales that black workers confronted in the North, as in this verse from Broonzy:

  Me and a man was working side by side, this is what it meant,

  They was paying him a dollar an hour, and they was paying me fifty cents.77

  As frustrating as housing and job discrimination could be, the most dramatic development in northern race relations—and perhaps the most surprising to southern blacks who had fled Jim Crow to escape lynchings—was the high level of racial violence in the North during the 1910s and 1920s. In rural Indiana, neighbor to Chicago, the Ku Klux Klan manifested its strongest incarnation since Reconstruction. Across the rural Midwest, small towns and villages became “sundown towns”—communities that ran out black residents and harassed black passers-through. By the 1910s the Midwestern and northern cities where blacks and whites did live in relative proximity began to feel the mob violence that had wracked the small towns and villages in preceding decades.78

  In 1917, East St. Louis erupted in a race riot in which marauding gangs killed nearly forty citizens. Two years later, in the Red Summer of 1919, racial antagonism again overwhelmed the society’s capacity to maintain domestic peace. Over eighty African Americans were lynched nationwide, and the townspeople of twenty-five American cities engaged in race riots.79 The most violent disturbance happened in Chicago, where white swimmers stoned some black boys at the de facto white-only Twenty-Ninth Street beach, causing one of the kids to drown. The result was a citywide clash pitting white residents and police against African American residents. Over five hundred Chicagoans were injured during the conflict, and thirty-eight people—fifteen white, twenty-three black—were killed.80 Southern whites used the news of the riots in the North to entice southern blacks to come back home. In Mississippi, the Jackson Daily Clarion-Ledger, the Meridian Star, and the Biloxi Daily Herald, among other papers, sensationalized the race riots and emphasized the threat to African Americans living in the North, reviving the old slave apologists’ argument that the paternalistic labor patterns of the South were more humane and socially stable than the freewheeling, uncaring, and anonymous labor system developed by the Yankees.81

  But the frightening events of 1919 did not significantly alter the course of the massive flow of migrants to the cities. Most African American newcomers remained in the urban North, and thousands of their old neighbors and friends in the South continued to join them in the decades following the Great War. However, deflated expectations and the riots of 1919 did prompt some blacks to return to their southern homes. Having seen Chicago, Detroit, and other cities, bluesmen could now sing their sad blues about the North; the South no longer had a monopoly on the title, “home of the blues.” There had been many successes, but the African American experience in the North was broad, and Chicago had proven it could be as much of a disappointment as it was a promised land. Blues pianist Sylvester Palmer was one musician who reevaluated the meaning of northern life. A newcomer to St. Louis in the 1910s, by the time of the Great Depression Palmer recorded an uprooted southerner’s lament in “Broke Man Blues,” singing “Lord, I don’t feel welcome, mama, in St. Louis anymore / ‘Cause I have no friends baby, and no place to go.” It would be speculative at best to attribute racial underpinnings to Palmer’s lyrics, but some musicians later recalled the racist mentality of many white northerners. In a 1972 interview, blues singer Lillie Mae Glover (Memphis Ma Rainey) euphemized the open hostility blacks could face in northern communities, especially small towns, where few African Americans had settled. Of one such “sundown” town, Ef-fingham, Illinois, she said, “They didn’t like colored people.” A decade later, she explained that the rural Illinois white folks were threatening because they were isolated: “We’d go to places where they’d never seen a colored person before. I remember once in Illinois, when we rolled into this little town, they thought we was no-tailed bears! Lawd, can you believe that? No-tailed bears!” Effingham oral historian Michelle Tate reported very recently that “it was well known that any black people arriving in town were not to venture beyond the block the bus stop or train station were in.” Furthermore, “the police would patrol the train station and bus stop to ensure black people did not leave them,” but it remained unclear “whether this was due to prejudice on the part of police, or to protect the black people from the [white] individuals residing in Effingham.”82

  Broonzy’s “Going Back to Arkansas” (1935) would have struck a chord with audiences anxious in their new northern homes and becoming homesick for the South. By emphasizing the good aspects of southern life that had been abandoned in the move north, Broonzy reversed the polarity of the North’s “pull” with the South’s “push” in a multilayered and nostalgic blues. In repeating the refrain, “I’m goin’ back, goin’ back to Arkansas,” Broonzy sings of living in happiness with his wife and mother-in-law in a romanticized and familiar South, contrasted against the less-friendly, colder North. Knowing that smell is a powerful stimulus to memory, Broonzy evokes the aromas of farm life:

  Oh, when my mother put on the ole fryin’ pan,

  And she starts to cook them ole collard greens,

  You can smell them ham hocks boilin’, if I tell you she could you know I ain’t stallin’,

  That’s why I’m goin’ back, I’m goin’ back to Arkansas.

  Between saxophone and trumpet harmonies, Broonzy’s lyrics develop the nostalgic imagery of the song. Though he may not have been aware of it, Broonzy revived the thinking of Thomas Jefferson; not so much that “those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God,” but rather that farmers could be independent in ways that city dwellers could not. In his verses Broonzy pays homage to the ideal of rural self-sufficiency.

  If I miss this train, I got a great big mule to ride,

  If I miss this train, I got a great big mule to ride,

  He’s standin’ at my gate, my .44 by my side,

  That’s why I’m goin’ back, I’m goin’ back to Arkansas.

  When I get home, I don’t have to pay no rent,

  I raise my own meat and meal,

  You can hear them chickens crowin’, you can hear them old cows mooin’,

  That’s why I’m goin’ back, I’m goin’ back to Arkansas.

  This trend of increasing nostalgia for the South continued throughout the era of the Great Migration. Roosevelt Sykes’s “Southern Blues,” a similarly wistful remembrance of the good southern life, was recorded and released much later, in 1948. But what these nostalgic songs—especially Broonzy’s—also revealed was that even if black southerners did return south, they would not be the same as before their migration north. The jazz-band ensemble (saxophone, trumpet, and piano in addition to guitar) and the swinging instrumental solos between verses in “Going Back to Arkansas” proved an indelible mark of city living and the northern black experience, as did the nostalgic lyrics. As novelist Thomas Wolfe’s character George Webber discovered, you can never go home again.83

  However, most southern blacks who had moved north did not want to go home again. For every person who returned to the South, there were more to come north. The flow of
African Americans out of the South in the 1920s almost doubled that of the 1910s. An estimated 555,000 blacks left the South in the 1910s, mostly after 1914. In the 1920s, after the race riots in Chicago, St. Louis, and elsewhere in the North, over 900,000 blacks left the South (net migration), and the North gained over 860,000 in net migration.84 The cities of the North may have left many migrating blacks disappointed, especially given their high expectations of city life, but African Americans continued to move about the country in increasing numbers after the initial rush north during the Great War.

  Movement away from the rural South proved both a boon and a bust, and southern migrants black and white—often found themselves as victims of a “divided heart.” Certainly, cities provided more jobs and entertainment than the countryside, but urbanity also brought the fear of anonymity and the separation from land and community.85 In the long run, migration proved no panacea for the social barriers faced by southern blacks. Political exclusion and economic discrimination in the 1920s and 1930s effectively buttressed Jim Crow against the black will for change in the South, and migrating African Americans found the North not as welcoming as they had hoped. Although northern chapters of the NAACP shifted from white to black control in the 1920s, the organization remained one of doctors and lawyers who were quite different from the masses of working-class southern migrants.86 Much of the migration’s potential benefit to African Americans as a group was at the ballot box; the national political arena by the 1940s had to take into account the potential power of large numbers of now-eligible black voters living in the North. In terms of their own identities, black Americans were exposed to new opportunities and roles outside of the South, and they absorbed these new ideas in their cultural expression.87

  Through the blues music counterculture, southern blacks celebrated their ability to move from place to place, for whatever reason—economic, romantic, or political. Desired yet denied under slavery, challenged during Jim Crow, and expressed in the Great Migration, mobility and movement preoccupied blues musicians. In exercising their ability to move or singing a blues about “ramblin,” African Americans celebrated their freedom on an individual level. Communal changes were afoot as well, however, as historian of black feminism Angela Davis explained: