Heaven and Hell Parties:Ministers, Bluesmen, and Black Youthin the Mississippi Delta, 1920-1942hy Adam Gussow

Editor's note: this is the second of a two partseries on Southern Religion and the Devil's Music;the first part was published in the August 2010 issueof Arkansas Review: A Journal of Delta Stud-

ies.

Deacon Jones's Blues

The idea that bluesmen, especially Missis-sippi bluesmen, "knew" the devil in some par-ticularly intimate and haunting way has been acore element of blues mythology at least sinceRudy Blesh offered his imaginative evocationof Robert Johnson back in the 1940s ("full ofevil, surcharged with the terror of one aloneamong the moving, unseen shapes of thenight") based on a close listening to "Hell-hound on My Trail" (Pearson and McCuUough2003, 22). "These men," wrote Greil Marcus,voicing this familiar view, "who had to re-nounce the blues to be sanctified, who oftensneered at the preachers in their songs, were theones who really believed in the devil; theyfeared the devil most because they knew himbest" (Marcus 1976, 24). In recent years, andthankfully, this overly romantic view has beencritiqued by Jon Michael Spencer and ElijahWald, among others. Dismayed by what he seesas the willingness of many scholars to take thereductive "devil's music" slur at face value.Spencer invokes the term "synchronous duplic-ity" as a way of getting at the sacred-secular,priestly-prophetic dialectic, a kind of DuBoisiandouble consciousness, tbat he sees as "charac-

teriz[ing] the lives of these great musicians"(Spencer 1995, 159-160). Wald extendsSpencer's attribution of double consciousnessto the bluesman's community, both those wholistened to the blues and tbose who preferrednot to. "If one believes the world is caught in aManichean battle between God and the Devil,good and evil, saved and damned," writes Wald,"it follows logically that the Psalm singers go toheaven and the fiddlers go to hell. But assumingthat Delta dwellers of the 1930s were humor-lessly Manichean about sucb matters is conde-scending bullshit" (Wald 2004, 275).

Yet the truth is, some Delta dwellers of the1930s—the preponderance of Baptist,Methodist, and Pentecostal preachers and manyof their adult parishioners--were humorlesslyManichean about such matters, as were theirpeers across the South. This is precisely why thephrase "devil's music" had such currency, andwhy it was backed up by whippings. But a sig-nificant number of Delta dwellers, especiallyyounger people and especially in cities likeClarksdale and, to the north, Memphis, werenot humorlessly Manichean. Where religionwas concerned, they were skeptical, mocking,playful. The loss of religious faith, the loss of re-spect for religious leaders, that black southernyouth exhibited during this period was some-thing noted with surprise by contemporary so-ciologists; the blues was the soundtrack to thisgenerational rebellion against parental andministerial rigidity. This is not to say that theirelders' ritual condemnation of the blues asdevil's music didn't engender a welter of nega-

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tive feelings-the blues, in a word-in a youngergeneration of blues musicians. Quite the re-verse: such condemnation, in a social environ-ment dominated by the heavy hand of the blackchurch, inevitably helped shape both the aes-thetic contours of the music and the life-jour-neys of those who chose to play it. But previouscommentators have paid far too little attentionto generational divergences in matters of blacksouthern religious faith and to the notablydestabilized social position of those black south-em preachers who were demonizing the blues.They have ignored the fact that Deacon Joneshimself had the worst kind of blues. He lashedout at the devil's music as a way of alleviatingthose feelings--and burying the competition.

Consider the familiar opposition ofpreacher and bluesman as articulated by an-thropologist John Szwed in an influential arti-cle, "Musical Adaptation AmongAfro-Americans": "Unlike the stable, other-worldly, community-based image of thepreacher (approved by Negro and white com-munities alike), the bluesman appears as a shad-owy, sinful, aggressive, footloose wanderer, freeto move between sexual partners and to pull upstakes as conditions call for it" (Szwed 1969,118). The first half of Szwed's formulation isprofoundly mistaken, at least if what we're talk-ing about is the Mississippi Delta between 1920and 1940. Delta preachers, as a group, were rad-ically destabilized by the Great Migration andthe disastrous diminishment it was wreaking ontheir membership rolls and collection plates.Struggling to deal with that loss in the contextof the church hierarchy, they were relentlesslyfocused, in a distinctly this-worldly way, ontheir repeated failure to deliver the bottom-linenumbers they'd been assigned. Although somepreachers stuck it out on the home front, manypulled up stakes and fled to the North alongwith their parishioners, attempting to reconsti-tute in urban settings the down-home congre-gations that had fled out from under them(Sernett 1997, 75). The phrase "community-based" fails to describe such a desperate context.

As for Szwed's claim about black southernpr(;achers being "approved by Negro and whiteCO nmunities alike," this is no more than a half-tri th, which is to say that half of it is flagrantlyuntrue. During the 1920s and 1930s, DeaconJoi les was being mercilessly lampooned by bluessir gers, mocked by gospel singers, heatedly crit-icized by his own peers, and laughed at or ig-nored by many young black southerners,churched and unchurched. In some ways, at"idst; rtlingly, Szwed's description of the bluesman

a shadowy, sinful, aggressive, footloose wän-de rer, free to move between sexual partners andto pull up stakes as conditions call for it"—is anapt description of a certain kind of Deltapriacher during this period. Certainly this ishe w he was represented in the black popular

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lture of the time.Exhibit A is "He Calls That Religion"

(1932), a recording by the Mississippi Sheiks.A guably the most popular blues ensemble everto come out of the state, the Sheiks were theC \atmon family band (with outside accompa-nies as needed): Bo (b. 1893), Sam (b. 1897),at d Lonnie Chatmon (b. 1890), all of them thesons of an ex-slave fiddler named HendersonCiatmon (1850-1934). The Chatmons didn'tjuit embody the transition from the pre-bluesworld of fiddle-driven string bands to the gui-tar-driven blues, but they fused the two stylesin a distinctive way. Bo Chatmon (whorecorded a number of lascivious, double-enten-die hits as Bo Carter) sings lead on "He CallsT lat Religion," and his cocky, declamatory

•nbasting of a lecherous preacher reveals notr ice of spiritual torment. Nor does it presume

attack religious hypocrisy from the stand-int of one who has aligned himself with thevil, or "evil." Quite the reverse: Chatmoneaks as a disillusioned true believer, a blues-eacher who consigns Deacon Jones to the

vil s precincts:Well the preacher used to preach to try to

save soulsBut now he's preaching just to buy jellyrollWell he calls that religion

Yes he calls that religionWell, he calls that religion, but I know be's

going to hell when he dies

Was at tbe cburcb last nigbt, bappy as Icould be

The old preacher was trying to take my wifefrom me

Well he calls that, etc.

Preacher always, he was a mighty true manHe gives his commands and they couldn't

understandWell he calls that, etc.

He will swear be's keeping God's com-mands

Have women fussin' and figbtin' all overthe land

Well be calls, etc.

Tbe reason that people stop going tochurch

They know that preacher was trying to dotoo much

But still he calls, etc.

Old Deacon Jones, he was a preachin' kingTbey caugbt him round the house trying to

sbake tbat tbingOb, be calls tbat religion, etc.

Oh yes, he calls that religion. (MississippiSheiks, 1932)

Blues becomes devil's music here, from the per-spective of institutionalized southem evangeli-cism, not because it advocates on bebalf offornication, dirty dancing, fighting, and other"sinful" jukehouse bebaviors, but because it ac-cuses Deacon Jones of engaging in and foment-ing tbose things. Its frontal assault onministerial bypocrisy and malfeasance dares toclaim tbe moral higb ground tbat tbe ecclesias-tical bierarcby itself hoped to monopolize, sub-verting public faith in preacberly autbority. Tbebluesman known for rauncby tunes like "Your

Biscuits Are Big Enougb For Me" speaks in tbevoice of sinned-upon monogamy! And thedevil, he would have us believe, is waiting toclaim Deacon Jones.

Given both the lascivious tenor of BoGarter's own bits and tbe frankly sexual ener-gies that it was the jukehouse performer's dutyto summon and manipulate in his audience, thecharge of sexual misbehavior leveled by "HeGalls Tbat Religion" surely struck tbose clericswbo heard it like the worst sort of devilish dou-ble-speak. By tbe same token, tbe charge wastrue enough that it stung. Here the devil's-music dispute was driven, among other things,by a sense of competition—including eroticcompetition. "For black men of tbe Depression-era Delta wbose intelligence, artistic ability, orsimply wanderlust exceeded tbe norm," writesblues bistorian Mark Humpbrey, "tbe roles ofpreacber or performer of social music were theprimary options to agrarian indentured servi-tude" (Humphrey 1996, 167).' Botb social rolesmade one the focus of the erotic attentions oflarge numbers of women, single and attacbed.It was generally understood tbat botb preacberand bluesmen acted on tbose attentions. Buttbere was a crucial difference: bluesmen couldflaunt tbat fact—flaunting it actually increasedtbeir cbarisma and earning power--wbilepreachers were forced to dissemble and denytbeir concupiscence in line witb Biblical in-junctions. West Goast bandleader Jobnny Otis(b. 1921) spoke of this competitive dynamic,framing it in terms of dollars and sex:

Not all of those who railed against ourmusic were white. . . . Many Black preach-ers carried on about wbat tbey called "tbedevil's music." Black cburchgoers, espe-cially the young, listened to tbe anti-bluessermons and went out and enjoyed them-selves anyhow. They understood tbat tbeanti-blues preachers saw the music as com-petition. If members of tbe congregationpartied witb tbe blues all Saturday nigbt,tbey probably wouldn't sbow up in cburchSunday morning. They were always preach-

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ing against out-of-wedlock sex, too, weren'tthey. And anybody knew that they wouldjump over the Empire State Building to getone of those pretty, big-legged sisters in thechoir. (Otis 1993, 60)

Or, as Delta bluesman James "Son" Thomas (b.1926) put it, "You can't go by what the preachersay, because he and the bluesman looking forthe same thing—some money, some chicken,and a nice-looking woman. That's all they look-ing for. He preaching the Bible but you can't goby that" (Eerris 1978, 86).

Contemporary sociological evidence con-firms this portrait, making clear that the mock-ery and skepticism expressed by bluesperformers towards their ministerial competi-tors was widely shared by younger AfricanAmericans, especially in the Mississippi Delta.In After Freedom: A Cultural Study of the DeepSouth (1939), sociologist Hortense Powder-maker reported on the striking lack of respectfor religious leaders that she'd discoveredamong black youth during her fleldwork in In-dianola between 1932 and 1934: "Old peoplecomplain that today the young join a churchwithout having any real experience, that theydo not know what true religion is. Young folks,they say, no longer take the minister's words se-riously, or look up to him. . . . Young peoplesnicker in church at the preacher's ungrammat-ical speech, and at home they openly jeer athim. His usual reputation for sexual looseness;the rumors, scandals, and jokes that circulateabout his relations with various women in hiscongregation, do not improve his standing.When he sermonizes about adultery, they donot take him very seriously" (Powdermaker1939, 269-270). Given the degree to which thisyouthful disdain dovetailed with the audiblemockery of blues recordings such as "He CallsThat Religion," and considering the extent towhich bluesmen were their (highly) visibleerotic and economic competitors, how couldDelta ministers not be tempted to project theiranger and frustration, and the anxiety bred bytheir eroding social status, as righteous con-

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dejmnation of the devil's music?Bluesmen had an unexpected ally in expos-

ing the malfeasance and hypocrisy of blacksojthern preachers: at least one sanctifledre ;ording that agreed with them. "The Devil'sG )nna Get You," (1941) by a jazzy, swingingqi artet called The Gospeleers, playfully savages

norally bankrupt preacher, dovetailing atti-tu linally with the irreverent snickers and jeersre jorted by Powdermaker. He's a dandyish, fast-ta king, Bible-toting extortionist:

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou one of these days

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou one of these days, by and by

He's a liar and a pretender too, if you ain'tcareful he'll conjure you

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou one of these days

You done let your beard grow out, and Iknow what it's all about

Keep that Bible out your hand, I knowyou're no preacher man

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou, etc.

You got on your frock-tail coat, and a collarhack around your throat

A high silk hat and a walkin' cane, looks tome like you're going insane.

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou, etc.

You better stop your gambling, and tellingall your big lies

Cause a lowdown hypocrite, I sure do de-spise

You better watch out, the devil's gonna getyou, etc.

You can't preach and you can't pray, and Idon't believe a word you say

You've done got yourself in Dutch, causeyou take up collection too much

You better watch out, the devil's gonna get

you, etc. (Gospeleers 1941)"Ministers with a keen sense of status wrestledagainst the widespread suspicion that men ofthe cloth were hypocrical charlatans," writes re-ligious historian Paul Harvey in his study ofblack (and white) southern Baptists between1865 and 1925, and no issue was subject tomore suspicion than the question of the collec-tion plate (Harvey 1997, 179). In a monographentitled "The Afro-American Pulpit in Rela-tion to Race Elevation" (1892), African Amer-ican minister Francis J. Grimke complainedthat "greed for money" was one of the three keydefining attributes of the post-Emancipationblack church. "Everything seems to be arrangedwith reference to the collection. The great ob-jective point seems to be to reach the pocket-books of the people" (Anyabwile and Piper2007, 132). "Preacher in de pulpit preachin'might well," went an old folk saying, "But whenhe gits the money yo' kan go to hell" (Harvey1997, 179).^ Here, too, the blues musicianscored both the moral advantage—since hefrankly acknowledged his pecuniary self-interestrather than cloaking it in assertions about"doing the Lord's work"—and, arguably, theworldly advantage in profits actually accrued;neither fact endeared him to his ministerialcompetitor. The average black preacher in arural or small-town church, according to onescholar, received an average salary of $250 to$350 a year by the dawn of the 20th century. In1932, when Honeyboy Edwards (b. 1915) firstbegan to travel with Big Joe Williams (b. 1903),he played a "good-timing house" in Greenwood,Mississippi and raked in considerably more thana preacher's daily wages. "Man, we played.Women was flocking, giving us nickels anddimes and quarters, and we was keeping thehouse lively." Ministers enjoyed ancillary bene-fits, of course, including free meals from theparishioners they visited, but so too did blues-men. "I'd just switch around, go to all them lit-tle towns at different times, so I could make thatmoney," remembered Honeyboy, describing anitinerant life that might see him shuttling be-

tween Clarksdale, Drew, Shaw, and Clevelandin the course of successive weekends. "Peopletreat you just like you was a preacher whenyou're playing the blues, 'Come on, go homewith me. My wife will fix dinner'" (Edwards1997, 73-74).

As Honeyboy makes clear, bluesmen werecompeting directly with preachers on multipleeconomic fronts: not just the Saturday-night-tips/Sunday-morning-coUections axis, but ascharismatic house-guests on whom "parish-ioners" might bestow indulgences. On rare oc-casions the competition was literallyhead-to-head. In 1967, Arthur Vinson ofRolling Fork, Mississippi told folklorist WilliamFerris that the devil's-music dispute-which bythat point also included rock and roll-could betraced to preacherly resentment in such cases:"I think that your highly religious people willbrand musicians that play blues and rock androll as being 'carriers of evil' for the simple rea-son that you can git your combo together—gui-tar, bass, and drums-and go out here and play.You can git up under the tree, anywhere, andthe people will gather around, you see. In mostcases you can draw more people out there whereyou're playing than the minister can draw inthat church house because he's preaching andyou're right across the street from him" (Ferris1978, 83).

If he happened to be pastoring in the Mis-sissippi Delta of the 1920s, Deacon Jones's"bluesman blues" were greatly exacerbated bythe damage being wrought on his and his fellowpastors' ministries by the Great Migration. Atprecisely the same moment that he was beingpublicly mocked by his blues-competitors anddisrespected by the young, his congregation wasdeserting him in record numbers to make a dashfor the promised land of Chicago and otherpoints North. "Since the typical small town orrural congregation numbered fewer than 100members," writes historian Richard Sernett,"the loss of key individuals or several familieswas a serious matter" (Sernett 1997, 76). Mis-sissippi, which had almost a tenth of America's

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black population in the 1910 census, helpedlead the northward charge. "In many placeshundreds have gone within the last fewmonths," wrote a Methodist Episcopal ministerin 1923. "Many churches have depleted mem-berships because of the exodus. Seventy-fivewere counted that left one community withintwenty-four hours" (Sernett 1997, 76). Thiscatastrophic loss of membership meant thatsome ministers no longer drew regular salaries;too, since district superintendents were respon-sible for extracting mission contributions fromthe individual churches within their multi-county purviews, the failure to meet these quo-tas linked Mississippi's ministers,superintendents, and ecclesiastical leaders in atroubled hierarchy, bruised—and bluesed—bydecimated church rolls, depleted coffers, and se-riously eroded influence in their national or-ganizations. - • '

One of the prime staging grounds for Dea-con Jones's comeuppance was the annual meet-ing of the Upper Mississippi Conference of theMethodist Episcopal Church, a forum at whicha series of district superintendents shared newsof the past year's pastoral successes and chal-lenges. The center of black Methodism in theDelta was the Clarksdale District, a territorycomprising most of six counties with a popula-tion of roughly 190,000, two-thirds of whomwere African American (Marsh 1923, n.p.).^ Toread the annual reports delivered by Clarks-dale's superintendent between 1917 and 1927is to be brought face to face with confusion,anxiety, and chagrin as ministerial ambition isrepeatedly blasted by facts on the ground, mostof which are intimately bound up with theblues. In 1917, N. R. Clay, the current superin-tendent, reported that "the ravages of the bollweevil, and flood rains" had caused "the great-est unrest and emigration of our people knownin years, to points in Arkansas, Oklahoma andthe North and West." He kept his eyes on theprize, regardless. "The delta, the garden spot ofthe state and the country, has a great future, inwhich our church ought to share in a large way

if God wills i t . . . . The fruitfulness of this grow-ir g country is abundant and the progress of ourchurch for the next few years ought easily todouble her rate of increase along all lines ofchurch and membership activities" (Clay 1917,

p.) Although this prophecy could hardly haveen more mistaken. Clay struggled to put a

positive spin on the bad news as it began to ar-ri /e. In his 1919 report he noted what he called

restlessness on the part of labor" due to "lackprotection and just treatment"—a reference

tc the wave of lynching that was spreadingÛ rough the Midwest and South during the so-called "Red Summer." This restlessness, and theccpnditions that provoked it, he said, "keeps thecmurch and mission peevish and nervous." Un-less something was changed, he concluded,1 îbor will be lost to the delta and members to

tl)e churches" (Clay 1919, n.p.).

If peevishness and nervousness character-iz ;d the collective spirit of black Delta minis-te rs in 1919, then 1920 was the watershed.S lperintendent Clay showed up at that year'smeeting with a litany of complaints that be-f oke economic desperation and spiritual crisis.

A catastrophe had overwhelmed his district'sministers, he told his Methodist brethren, bind-ir g them in a community of suffering with

irishioners who had chosen to stay bebind butalso causing them to lose their parishoners' re-sf eet:

[W]hile the exodus has left, and is stillleaving, many of the churches weak andready to die, these churches are still haiig-ing on to the old appointments, in mostcases with the same old rating as to mem-berships and assessments of five years ago.This whole situation has burdened the con-ference . . . [T]he pastor sornetimes flnds thecharge much weaker in membersbip thanhe was led to believe. Tben he sets out tomake his salary by doing other work. Al-most without exception a supplementaryjob lessens his efficiency as a pastor, as itrapidly becomes his principal means of sup-port. The psychological effects upon the

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membership is far from satisfactory. Ordi-narily they cease to give him their full sup-port and they finally lose interest in him

^ and the welfare of the church. . . . Many ofour pastors are cramped physically, men-tally, and, I fear, spiritually, because of thesmall salary with a large family to care forand children to educate. . . . The peoplewould have more respect for and look uponthem with more reverence and their ser-mons would have greater weight if theywere not often looked upon as objects ofcharity. (Clay 1920, n.p.)

Rev. N. R. Clay was, in his own way, as pro-found a singer of the Delta blues as the musi-cians who dominate the histories andmythologies of the region. Here he sings theplight of his people—above all, the impover-ished, anxious, humiliated African Americanministers who were trying to hold their brokenlives and parishes together amid the wreckagewrought by the boll weevil, the sharecroppingsystem, Jim Crow justice, and the epic disper-sals of the Great Migration. Nothing could befurther from the derisive, mocking portraits ofministerial misbehavior offered by the Missis-sippi Sheiks and the Gospeleers than the starkrealities of Delta ministerial life rendered here.Yet these realities can help us understand theenergies that drove the devil's-music disputefrom the preachers' side: not just a competitor'sjealousy of the bluesman's claimed erotic li-cense, but economic desperation and a keensense of status anxiety. When times are desper-ate, scapegoats serve useful communal func-tions. The words "blues" and "devil's music"never surface in the Clarksdale District Super-intendent's reports, but in his 1921 address,after delivering another round of bad news. Rev.Clay shunts some of the blame for his and hisfellow ministers' failures to meet financial goalsonto a familiar target:

This is a year of the greatest unrestamong the people I have witnessed. Theymove from landlord to landlord, and manymove to town from the farm, to Memphis;

St. Louis; Chicago; Detroit; Cleveland andthe north generally. This largely accountsfor our decrease in membership. We pleadwith them, we offer them solutions for theirdomestic and financial problems, but to noavail: The moving spirit is in the air. Theyseem to think moving is a panacea for alltheir ills, thus breaking up some of our mostsubstantially organized churches and cir-cuits. This condition embarrasses the dis-trict superintendent and pastors in puttingover a program handed down by thechurch. Providence can only tell where andwhen this state of things will end.

The Cause—There are many elementsentering into the cause of this disaffectionand dissatisfaction. Yet it seems to me theseare some of the causes: The drop in theprice of cotton; the lack of food stuffs; thefailure to make a crop of any kind in someplaces and a lack of settlement, in someplaces, all contribute to the cause. Some ofthese, I say, make no more cotton, and offto town they go. There to be preyed uponby the many slick devices and destructivediseases and unsanitary conditions knownin the slums of a town and city life. (Clay1921, n:p.)

"The moving spirit is in the air": One couldhardly ask for a more succinct definition of theblues, especially when that spirit is an in-tractable restlessness composed of equal partsdisaffection, dissatisfaction, and ambition.Robert Johnson sang, "I got to keep movin', Igot to keep movin, blues falling down like hail"and "Come on, baby don't you want to go."Honeyboy Edwards said, "The blues is some-thing that leads you, that lays on your mind.You got to go where it leads you" (Edwards1997, 212). And the blues evoked in Clay's re-port—the restless feelings driving black folk inthe Delta to abandon plantations in the ruraldistricts and resettle in the town of Clarksdaleor flee to the urban north—are literally destroy-ing, "breaking up," the Delta's black Methodistcongregations. The "program handed down by

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tbe cburcb" tbat be refers to is essentially afailed business plan: tbe restless condition of tbepeople has made it impossible for Glay and hispastors to raise their expected annual contribu-tion to tbe statewide cburch's missionary activ-ities out of their Sunday collections and tithes,much less grow their congregations and expandtheir pastoral outreach. "Tbis condition embar-rasses the district superintendent" is Glay's wayof confessing his own humiliation.

"Tbe moving spirit is in tbe air": It wasblues musicians, far more than any otber cul-tural agents, wbo voiced tbe "moving spirit" be-moaned by Glay, transforming it into poetry andentertainment. Blues performers sucb asGharley Patton, Son House, and SunnylandSlim provided tbe entertainment in tbe barrel-houses and juke bouses of Glarksdale's disrep-utable "New World" district that Glay indicts,albeit somewbat obliquely, in tbe final line ofbis lament. W. G. Handy described the NewWorld, which be worked witb his band between1903 and 1907, as a place of "sbuttered bouses"filled witb "soft cream-colored fancy gals fromMississippi" and "[b]oogie-bouse music." Tbeoldest and most respectable Negro families, ac-cording to Handy, lived not far from tbe NewWorld; "[o]n tbeir way to tbe Baptist andMetbodist cburcbes," be said, "tbey were re-quired to pass before tbe latticed bouses of pros-titution" (Handy 1941, 78-79). Glarksdalebluesman Will Moore, Jobn Lee Hooker's step-fatber, described tbe typical Delta barrelhouseof tbe 1920s as a place wbere folks "sboot thecraps, dance, and drink whiskey" (Gait andWardlow 1988, 59-63). Wben SuperintendentGlay, Glarksdale's voice of black Metbodist pro-bity, indicts tbe "slick devices and destructivediseases and unsanitary conditions" tbat preyupon tbe migrant parisbioners wbo bave van-isbed from tbe membersbip rolls in bis district,be is indicting tbat blues milieu: gambling,drinking, fast women, and sinful music. Devil'smusic. Part of a contemporary wbirlwind of rest-lessness, immorality, and youtbful irreverencetbat was actively working to destroy tbe black

cl urcb and its ministers in the Delta. "Many ofe churches have lost from one-third to one-lf of their membersbip," reported tbe new su-

tb

b;pi rintendent of the Glarksdale District, J. M.Marsh, at tbe 1923 meeting of Mississippi'sMetbodist Episcopal clergy (Marsb 1923, n.p.).N R. Glay bad stepped down, or been replaced.

The New Rising Devil Glass

Glarksdale and the surrounding Delta, in-cl lding Mempbis to tbe Nortb, are particularlygermane to the current discussion. Tbis is truenc t just because tbe preponderance of availableevidence comes from blues performers associ-ât id with tbose areas, but because the devil's-m isic dispute was a generationalccnflict—modern black youtb rejecting thestiictures of conservative black elders-and be-cause the sociology of tbe Delta was uniquelyconducive to such a breacb.

Tbis is not to say tbat tbe conflict didn'tmiterialize elsewbere. Many commentatorsbave remarked on the cynicism of black youtb,nc rthern and southern, in the decades betweentb ; World Wars. Sociologist Gunnar Myrdalidentified a clear point of attitudinal divergencein tbe late 1930s between African Americansyoüng and old over the question of cburcb-en-dorsed bebavioral proscriptions:

Tbe denominations to wbicb Negroespredominantly belong--Baptist andMetbodist—attempt to exercise strict con-trol over morals, and bave a ratber broaddefinition of morals. For want of a betterterm, we may say tbat they bave "puritani-cal" standards of bebavior. . . . [T]be prac-tices of gambling, drinking, drug-taking,smoking, snuff-dipping, card-playing, danc-ing and otber minor "vices" are con-demned. . . . These injunctions seem tohave an effect on middle class Negroes, es-pecially those wbo are ready to settle down.. . . . The bulk of the lower class, and theyouth of all classes, seems to pay little at-tention to tbem. (Myrdal 1944, 939)

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The attitudinal alignment between the blacklower class (which includes, presumably, boththe working class and the criminal underclass)and black youth is intriguing, suggesting as itdoes that blues culture, and the behavioral free-doms it endorsed, was also a kind of youth cul-ture during this period. Myrdal's finding issupplemented by the testimony of LeilaHolmes, a Holiness preacher in South Carolina,interviewed by the Federal Writers Project in1939, who thought pop culture-commodifiedsongs and dances—was the devil's way of claim-ing the young. "The younger generation in Co-lumbia is just ruined. The songs they sing areplumb outlandish. They dance somethin' scan-dalous, day and night, by these nickelos [nick-elodeon-style jukeboxes]. Instead of being inschool tryin' to leam how to be decent, they outcuttin' the buck day in and day out, steppin' inevery trap the devils got set for 'em" (Litwack1998, 436-437).

Jukeboxes came to the Mississippi Delta inthe 1930s, and their presence bespoke a secu-lar, urbane modernity—since they played thelatest hits by Louis Jordan, Fats Waller, and oth-ers-that was as alluring to the young as it wasunnerving to their parents. If the prewar Deltawas not, as it has sometimes been depicted inblues mythologies, a premodern backwater suf-focated by white sadism and veiled by hoodoomoons, neither was it quite as swimmingly up-to-date as Harlem, Chicago, and other urbancenters, although the currents of attitude andfeeling carried hy pop music helped narrow thedifference. This gradient helps explain some ofthe passion that drove the Great Migration, ahunger not merely to escape oppression but toembrace what was already half-known from ev-idence that had percolated into the Delta:sheet music and recordings, pop songs (such as"St. Louis Blues") covered by wandering gui-tarists, but also a more generalized attitude ofyouthful rebellion and devil-may-care sophisti-cation propagated by both the white bohemi-ans of the so-called Lost Generation and theblack bohemians known as New Negroes. Many

of the latter--Langston Hughes, Zora NealeHurston, Wallace Thurman—were themselvesmigrants from the hinterlands, but so too wereHemingway and Fitzgerald. Young black andwhite urbanités of the 1920s had their own no-table investment in devil-themed blues, onethat can't wholly be distinguished from thedevil's-music dispute in Mississippi and else-where in the South. Cultural currents flowedboth ways, and black youth who remained inthe Delta were not immune to the siren-song ofmodernity. Modernity just took a little longerto arrive down home.

The most detailed and insightful survey ofAfrican American life in the Mississippi Deltaduring this period is the Fisk University-Libraryof Congress Coahoma County Study made in1941 and 1942, a collaborative effort thatbrought folklorist Alan Lomax together with atrio of black academics: musicologist John W.Work, sociologist Lewis Wade Jones, andSamuel C. Adams, Jr., a doctoral student in so-ciology. It was a vexed partnership in certainways; Lomax's role as the study's official (white)figurehead remains a point of scholarly debate.But the study, parts of which show up inLomax's memoir. The Land Where the BluesBegan (1993) and the bulk of which shows up inthe manuscripts by Work, Jones, and Adamscollected in Lost Deita Found (2005), goes along way towards dispersing the gothic miststhat seem to shroud discussions of the pre-warDelta, particularly when the devil and the bluesare the subject at hand. Most notably, all fourmen agree on the rough outlines of a four-gen-eration schematic that helps explain why thedevil's-music dispute took such a potent formin the region. Adapting Jones's terms, I'll callthese generations "the river generation," "therailroad generation," "the automobile genera-tion," and "the young modems."

The river generation, according to Jones,were those who, by the early 1940s, had livedinto their 70s and 80s. They were the pioneerswho cleared and settled the Delta. Theydrained swamps, cut down trees, hauled out

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stumps, and built the levees. They were men,most of them, and they had a pioneer vitalityand rough-hewn, secular tastes. Lomax inter-viewed an eighty-six year old fiddler namedAlec Robertson, a survivor from this period. Hehad "fiddled for the devil for fifty-seven years,"he told Lomax, before suddenly getting religionwith the help of his Holiness ladyfriend at theage of 75. "The devil had his hands on me prin-cipally," he admitted. "I'd do anything a personcould do--dip snuff, chew tobacco, drinkwhiskey, cuss, and run around. . . . I used to berough, but, since I got religion, it changed allthem old habits" (Lomax 1993, 158).

The men of the river generation weretamed and supplanted by the railroad genera-tion, the men and women who came after thecountry had been opened up. "They are people,now between the ages of fifty and seventy,"writes Jones, "who found the frontier pushedback, the river dwindling in importance, andthe era of the railroad beginning":

People belonging to this second gener-ation [of black Delta residents] are now old,but they are still strong and vigorous. Hav-ing come with the first orderly regimes es-tablished after the frontier, they stillrepresent order. They frown alike on the vi-olence of the pioneer life they found andthe disorderly life of the present. Mrs. Reed,referring to one of the pioneer heroes, re-marked, "I just couldn't stand him. He wasthe kinda man didn't have no respect fornobody—for himself and nobody else. Hewas a devil." The present, in contrast to theorderly past which she helped to develop,seems confused and disorderly to her as wellas to her contemporaries. Their worldreached its flowering around the FirstWorld War and suffered a collapse laterwhich has never been quite understood. . .. In the active lives of the second genera-tion the church became the dominant in-stitution of the community. (Gordon andNemerov 2005, 34)

This second generation might just as well have

been called the church generation--or thedevil's music generation, since it was people ofthis age who leveled that charge at the songsand guitars favored by the generation that fol-io ved, and who whipped those blues-struckchildren into line. Rev. William Hooker (b.1571), who saw his daughter courted by a youngbl lesman named Tommy HoUins and lost bothhi i wife and his son John Lee to another blues-m in named Will Moore, is an exemplar of thera lroad generation. So, too, is Muddy Waters'sgr lndmother Delia (b. 1881), who told Muddy,wlien he first picked up a harmonica, "You'repi lying for the devil. Devil's gonna get you"(Ciordon 2002, 17). This generation built Bap-tiit and Methodist churches throughout theDelta, then watched their membership rolls dis-so ve as the Great Migration swept through intlie aftermath of the Great War. This genera-tion also demonized the blues, transforming there itless, good-timing music into symbol of allthat was wrong with the modern world.

The third generation in the black Delta wasth,e blues-inventing generation, the generationthat built the juke joints. Born between 1890ar d 1910, Charley Patton, Son House, TommyJohnson, Willie Brown, and Skip James be-lo "lged to this generation. Like their Lost Gen-er ition equivalents, the young people of thisgeneration lived in a rapidly changing worldthat had been liberated by the automobile and,in the war's aftermath, a sense that many of theol i rules were no longer in effect. "They have

I pleasant memories of the isolation and sta-ization before motor transportation arrived,"ites Jones. "[T]hey have enjoyed the freedommovement the 'good road' brought as they

ncbiwofrattled about in the second-hand cars their cot-ton money bought. . . . Electric lights in thecl

195

urch and electricity to make their nickelsbring music out of'Seeburgs' [jukeboxes] and ra-dios are their pride." Although their parentsmight see the church and the devil's music asiricommensurable, this generation wasn't quiteso sure: Patton, House, and James each founddifferent ways of preaching the blues, reconcil-

ing (or merely exchanging) the roles ofpreacher and bluesman.''

The fourth generation, the young moderns,consisted of black Delta residents born laterthan 1910, which is to say the 30-and-undercrowd. These are the familiar superstars of theDelta blues, many of whom ultimately ended upin Chicago as part of the second Great Migra-tion after World War II: Howlin' Wolf (b. 1910but coming into his own slightly late), RobertJohnson (b. 1911), Muddy Waters and SonnyBoy Williamson (1913), Willie Dixon (1915),Elmore James (1918), John Lee Hooker (1920),B. B. King (1925). To list those names now is tobe confronted with a pantheon of blues elders,the "old school," so it comes as a shock to seethem in social context as the teenagers andtwenty-somethings they were when Louis Jonescame to Coahoma County in 1941. "Youths andchildren," observed Jones, "try to get a grip onlife in the midst of a disintegrating past and afascinating present. . . . They pick cotton, playtheir games, follow their parents through a rou-tine of living, and go to school. They sing thesongs currently popular on the radio and thejuke boxes and learn others as they hear themsung by older people at home and in the fields"(Gordon and Nemerov 2005, 34-35). The truthis, the younger bluesmen were perched, in atti-tudinal and behavioral terms, on the cuttingedge of this generational cohort; they werestyle-setters among the young moderns. Noteverybody was happy about the style they set.Samuel C. Adams interviewed an unnamedwoman from the railroad generation whoviewed Clarksdale and its young people ashopelessly fallen and the contemporary churchas incapable of saving them:

When I was a girl I didn't go into townand stay out all of the night. Mothers justnot raising their girls right; allowing girls tosmoke cigarettes, ride automobiles, drink,and do everything. And the church don'tsay nothing about it. These younger folkscalling themselves having a good time.They drinks whiskey, they gambles, and

they goes to town. . . . They want to go totown to raise all kind of devilment. Andyou know there ain't very much right in ourcities now. There used to be special placesto raise the devil, now the whole city. Theygot a class now that oughta be called theNew Rising Devil Class. (Gordon and Ne-merov 2005, 279)

The King and Anderson Plantation, on whichAdams conducted most of his research, was ahuge enterprise located directly adjacent toClarksdale, a town of 12,000, roughly 10,000 ofwhom were black. Clarksdale, which accordingto Adams had nine Negro juke joints, eightNegro churches, and one hundred Negro min-isters, was treated in his study as "the seat ofurban influence" vis a vis the plantation. One ofJohn Work's informants, an elderly male Sun-day school teacher in Clarksdale and anothermember of the railroad generation, confirmedthe unnamed woman's claim that young mod-erns in the town--and the Delta as a whole-were manifesting far too much independence ofmind:

[T]he devil didn't seem to have muchof a chance in the hills. . . . But now youtake down here . . . Mobility is very great,and the ordinary community controls thatyou find up in the Hills . . . well, you don'tfind them here. . . .

Not so long ago I was teaching SundaySchool to a group of these boys and girlsaround here, and we was talking aboutusing one's talents. You know how Godgave every man certain talents, and someused them wisely and others used themfoolishly . . . .

Then several inquisitive souls began towant to know if a person could use his tal-ents successfully—and be a sinner? Theytalked about the gambler, the card shark,the policy operators, and finally they gotsettled down on Blues singers.

They wanted to know if it was a greatersin to let one's talents lay aside or to useone's talents in the wrong way, yet share the

196

proflts with the church. You can see whatsort of things these youngsters got on theirminds. Yes sir! They're getting all modern.They talked about Ella Eitzgerald whomakes her living singing the blues. Somethought that singing the blues was her tal-ent and they couldn't see how that waswrong, especially if she shared her profitswith the church.

No, the church ain't like what it usedto be-the days of eye-balls-a-drippin' andskuUs-a-bilin. (Gordon and Nemerov 2005,81-82)

A crucial point emerges from the testimony ofthese two members of the railroad generation:the devil was alive and well in the Delta in1940, but he lived primarily as a rhetorical strat-egy deployed by the old folks to express theirdisapproval of young moderns--including theDelta bluesmen--who simply didn't take reli-gion, much less hellfire-and-brimstone sermo-nizing, very seriously. To rhapsodize, as GreilMarcus famously did, that the blues singers"sang as if their understanding of the devil wasstrong enough to force a belief in God out oftheir lives," is to miss this point (Marcus 1976,24). What the blues singers of the automobilegeneration and the young modems understoodwas that their elders, struggling to maintaincontrol, were determined to smear them—theirmusic, their new freedoms, their comparativereligious irreverence or indifference-with thedevil's brush, including insults like "New Ris-ing Devil Class." What they took very seriouslyindeed, virtually all of them, was the need to in-sist that blues was not "devil's music," regard-less of what their elders and religiously-mindedpeers might say. A few, of course, decided tomock their elders not by fighting the charge butby embracing it, transforming it into a badge ofhonor, an emblem of insouciant modernity.

The word "irreverence" is particularly im-portant in this context: it contradicts prettymuch everything we have been taught to thinkabout Delta religiosity and the Delta blues, thelatter epitomized by the haunted figure of

fdfrdibluestwo2sbarply ;tbat

197

R Dbert Johnson. "He walked his road like aled, orphaned Puritan," insists Marcus, ". . .iming his tales with old echoes of sin andmnation. There were demons in his soiigs-

that walked like a man, the devil, or thein league with each other" (Marcus 1976,

Yet the contemporary evidence cutsagainst this portrait, suggesting instead

Johnson's peers-his audience-had light-he artedly dismissed threats of hellfire that were

lingering inheritance of the Great Awak-etling. "[TJhe Christianity of these Negroes,"

ites Hortense Powdermaker of her Indianolasu3jects in the early 1930s, "is in essence quitedi ferent from that of the missionizing period,

of most local Whites today. Benevolent:rcy rather than stern justice is the chief at-

of the Negro's God. . . . The accent hasifted from hell to heaven, from retribution togiveness, from fear to hope." Church affairs,added, were characterized by "gusto and hi-

ity" (Powdermaker 1939, 246, 284). Bothin Work and Samuel Adams remark on a sin-iar church event that took place in Clarks-le in the fall of 1941: a "Heaven and Hell"ty given by the YM.C.A and Y.W.C.A. Busi-;s Club of the St. John Baptist Church. "In

ad lition to its being a concession to the de-nds ofthe younger people for greater secularivity," notes Work, "the 'heaven and hell'ty represents temporarily at least a practicalndonment by the church of its former rigid

cotnmunity sanctions." The elder ofthe church.Deacon Jones [!], tells Adams that "[aJU the

icons . . . are going to stay away from thety. We are going to let them younger folks,1 understand, have their way." The party it-

is described by a young female school-cher:

Well, I'll tell you, it's costing a dime toget in. You buys a ticket, which tells youwhich way you'll be going—to Heaven, orto Hell. Now you can't gO to both of them.You got to do what the ticket says. Well, ifyou gets a ticket to Heaven they serves youice cream and cake, and you just sits around

aiidmtrilbute Ishfoshlai

Jogudapaneadm;acpaab

depayosel

and talks, and maybe plays games. But ifyou gets a ticket to Hell tbey serves you botcocoa and red hot spaghetti--and theydance, play cards, checks, and do most any-thing. (Gordon and Nemerov 2005, 83,243)

If it's hard for us to imagine a Baptist church inMississippi in 1941 allowing its young parish-ioners to carve a temporary party-space called"Hell" out of its sanctified interior and sell tick-ets to the shindig, then we don't know quite asmuch about tbe world tbat gave rise to tbeDelta blues as we thought we did. The after-math of the devastation wrought on the Delta'schurches by tbe great migration of the 1920s,plainly, was a new readiness on the part ofchurch elders to adapt to the needs and desiresof a youtbful, playful clientele.

The spirit of youthful irreverence indexedby the "Heaven and Hell" party and tbe agingGlarksdale informants quoted earlier shows upat various points in the blues tradition, refigur-ing the devil and hell in ways tbat subvert theold folks' Manicbean rigidities. "He Galls ThatReligion" (1932) is one example; it mischie-vously turns the tables on Deacon Jones, accus-ing bim of tbe money-bunger and lust that wereusually tbe bluesman's cross to bear and con-signing him to hell from the standpoint of right-eous indignation. Two additional examples willclarify my point. The flrst, Robert Jobnson's"Me and the Devil Blues" (1937), bas oftenbeen cited as Exbibit A in invocations of thebluesman's presumptive "closeness" to, spiritualalignment with, tbe devil and bis implacableevil, and for obvious reasons:

Early this moming . . . when you knockedupon my door

Early this morning, wboo . . . wben youknocked upon my door

And I said bello Satan . . . I believe it's timeto go

Me and tbe devil . . . was walking side byside

Me and tbe devil, wboo . . . was walking

side by sideAnd I'm going to beat my woman . . . until

I get satisfied

She said you don't see wby . . . tbat youwould dog me around

[spoken: Now baby you know you ain'tdoin' me right, dontcba?]

She said you don't see why . . . ooooo . . .that you would dog me around

It must've be tbat old evil spirit... so deepdown in the ground

You may bury my body . . . down by tbebigbway side

[spoken: Baby I don't care wbere you burymy body when I'm dead and gone]

You may bury my body .. . wbooo . .. downby tbe bighway side

So my old evil spirit . . . can get a Grey-hound bus and ride. (Johnson 1937)

Greil Marcus likens tbe opening stanza, witb its"eerie resignation," to "tbat moment wbenAhab goes over to the devil-worshippingParsees he kept stowed away in tbe bold of tbePequod" (Marcus 1976, 24). Russell Banks, inan essay entitled "The Devil and Robert Jobn-son" (1991), psychologizes the bluesman and isprofoundly disturbed by wbat he flnds:

This is tbe work of a disturbed malepsyche telling its frightening and frightenedsecrets. No apology, no rationalization, nodenial. Just tbe awful trutb of tbe sick needto beat a woman. By switcbing abruptly ina single verse from tbe flirtatious, sligbtlyheretical image of a man striding side-by-side with the devil to the image of tbatsame man making tbe terrifying promisethat he will beat his woman until he getshis satisfaction, Johnson imbues tbe figureof Satan witb radical sexual complexity andpower, and gives to bis raw little narrative achilling believability that utterly transformsthe romantic convention of the male figurein thrall to the devil. (Banks 1991, n.p.)

Eerie, frightening, awful, sick, terrifying, raw.

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chilling, and in thrall to the devil: nothing play-ful here! Or is there? Elijah Wald has arguedthat "an unbiased reader, unaware of the John-son legend, might see quite easily" that "as far asthe lyrics go, this is meant to be a funny song,"but much of the humor, I suggest, is containedin the two rapid-fire spoken asides (Wald 2004,274). Both of these asides are directed at thewoman that the singer claims he's going to beat"until he gets satisfled"; their combined effectis to undercut the seriousness of his threat byestablishing a kind of lighthearted, intimatebond with the woman over which his bravuraself-projections hover rather than loom heav-ily. Although the idea may shock some whiteintellectuals, the blues lyric tradition is rife withcomic braggadocio in which both male and fe-male blues singers threaten to wreak havoc onmembers of the opposite sex—a form of rhetor-ical play that purges aggression, entertains au-diences, and, not least, expresses the singer'sbruised affection for one whom he (or she) hasno intention of actually mistreating. Eerie res-ignation? A frightened young man? Marcus andBanks have, I think, completely misread John-son's tone, and they are not alone.

Any reading of the song must begin byframing it within the contexts I've elaboratedin this chapter-above all, the emergence of theyoung modems onto the stage of the blackDelta, animated by a restless irreverencethrough which they distinguished themselvesfrom, and tweaked, the humorless religiosity oftheir elders. According to Michael Taft's con-cordance of prewar blues, "Me and the DevilBlues" is the only blues song in which the name"Satan" appears, although it's quite common inthe spirituals ("Satan, Your Kingdom MustCome Down," etc).' Johnson's opening stanza,in other words, establishes intimacy with adevil-figure or devil-principle in a startlinglybold way, one calculated to offend religiouspieties and, not coincidentally, to accrue cool-points among young moderns. Since Johnson'sgeneration was already being slandered as theDelta's "New Rising Devil Class," the entire

semg-with its invocation of the devil-as-com-rede and its parading of the singer's "old evilspirit"-may be seen as a cocky declaration ofguilty-as-charged. "I'm bad, baby," the singer

, "and I don't care who knows it."'' Thevil-may-care attitude towards burial ex-

pressed in the final stanza is a direct affront tochurched elders, since they most definitely didexpect to be buried in their churches' grave-yards. The final line of the song again strikes ajarringly modem note, conflating spiritual con-c( rns with a relatively new mode of interstatetransportation. Greyhound buses, one that dis-ti iguished the restless young of Johnson's gen-eiation from the railroad generation and thest Ddgy Pullman coaches they aspired to.

Framed in this manner, "Me and the DevilB ues" begins to emerge not as the tortured ro-mantic confession Marcus and Banks would

ive us believe, but as something closer to at-on: a flirtatious dialogue between the singer

h;P'amd his "baby" edged with braggartry, com-plaint, and a modicum of tenderness, all of itenlarged in a slightly cartoonish way throughÛ e singer's calculated invocations of the devil.h/ ore precisely, I read the song as determined tok( ep both readings—romantic confession andput-on-in dialectical tension. The "you" in theopening stanza is the singer's woman, knockingon his door after a presumptive late night outCi rousing, but it's also his long-simmering rageat her misbehavior that suddenly crests as herises from his sleepless bed, prepared to slap herarbund. The "devil" is simply that rage, ac-knowledged and embraced. But the third stanzaupends this reading. The tortured syntax of theA line, with its repeated "you"'s, make it un-cl ;ar who is doing the dogging around and whois complaining about it--i.e., who is to blameh( re-and the singer's spoken aside is a tendercc mplaint rather than a furious threat. Truth betold, there is no rage in the song as Johnsonsimgs it. This becomes apparent when therecording is compared with another recordingfrém the same period, Roosevelt Sykes's "Hos-pi:al. Heaven, or Hell," where the singer is

199

trembling with audible fury at being two-timed:You shall surely die baby if I should happen

to liveYou shall surely die mama if I should hap-

pen to liveI'm gone take something from you baby

that I really ain't able to give

I can't forget you mama . . . and it ain't noneed of me tryin'

I can't forget you baby. . . and it ain't noneed of me tryin'

If I don't kill you right away, I declare I'mgonna leave you dyin' (Sykes 1937).

Johnson, by contrast, is cool, playful, almostflippant as his song moves towards its conclu-sion: a trickster flown with the wind. He carestoo little, not too much. The persona throughwhich he speaks here is in thrall to nobody-nothis baby, certainly not the devil—and couldn'tcare less about the religious folk whom his songis sure to offend. He is "evil" only in the senseof being contrary, self-directed, impossible topin down. Like John Lee Hooker's "Burnin'Hell," discussed in the flrst part of this two-partarticle, "Me and the Devil" is a young modern'sdeclaration of spiritual independence, one thatworks its magic spell by deliberately scramblingthe Manichean certainties of the elders whodominated the Delta's religious landscape.

The devil and woman-trouble both resur-face in my final example, "Whitewash StationBlues" (1928) by The Memphis Jug Band, asdoes a fearless irreverence. Memphis, wherecotton merchants presided, was often consid-ered the northern terminus of the MississippiDelta; in purely musical terms, the houncyhokum Stylings of "Whitewash Station Blues"have little in common with the recordings byHooker and Johnson, but philosophically thethree songs form a continuum of youthful mod-ern skepticism. Surveying the King and Ander-,son Plantation in 1941, Samuel C. Adamsnoted the "growing disinterested attitudes ofthe [black] plantation youth toward things reli-gious and sacred," highlighted hy a "pervasive

skepticism of the pretensiveness of the church"(Gordon and Nemerov 2005, 239). As theDelta's nearest large urban center, Memphis—and the city's young musicians—helped encour-age such attitudes:

Build a Whitewash Station two mile toglory . . . so the jug hand'U have a chance(2x)

You can toot your whistle, blow your hornThe Memphis Jug Band done been here

and goneBuild a Whitewash Station two miles to

glory . . . so the jug band'U have a chance,I say, the jug band'U have a chance.

Now if you want to get to heaven, I'll tellyou what to do

You put on a sock, a boot and a shoeYou place a bottle of corn in your right

handThat'll pass you right over in the Promised

LandAnd if you meet the devil, he ask you how

you doI'm on my way to heaven, don't you want to

go tooKnow there's a place that do just as wellThey call Whitewash Station ten miles

from hell

Build a Whitewash Station two mile toglory . . . so the jug band'U have a chance(2x)

Lord mama, what's on your mindYou keep me worried and bothered aU the

timeBuild a Whitewash Station two mile from

glory . . . so the jug band'U have a chance,I say, the jug band have a chance. . . .(Memphis Jug Band 1928)

White's Station, later White Station, was an in-dependent township within greater Memphis,roughly ten miles east of Handy Park on BealeStreet; it took its name from a small train sta-tion in that area. "Whitewash Station Blues"seems to be a play on that location and the

200

Christian idea of a "train to glory," with a mis-chievous twist: musicians, as W C. Handy'sminister-father reminded us, are rounders,idlers, dissipated characters, and need to be spir-itually cleansed--or, as a last resort, white-washed-in order to pass over into the PromisedLand. The song concerns itself with salvationsolely for the purpose of mocking those who aretruly concerned with such things. Chief amongthese were the local faithful of COGIC: theequivalent, for the Memphis Jug Band, of theBaptists and Methodists who demonized blues-men in the Delta.

The Church of God in Christ, the largestHoliness-Pentecostal sect, was based in Mem-phis, held huge annual gatherings there (the"National Holy Convocation of Saints"), andhad, in 1925, constructed their first NationalTabernacle not far from Beale Street. Thefounder of COGIC, Rev. C. H. Mason, madethe distinction between sacred and secularmusic "crystal clear," according to his successor:"He said blues was the Devil's music" (Young1997, 223). The behavioral and spiritual idealof COGIC members, as historian Anthea But-ler has noted, was sanctification, a word which"meant [that] the Holy Spirit would work tocleanse the sin away from a person's life, andthat cleansing produced visible signs that a be-liever's life was free from sin" (Butler 2007, 47).Plain, modest dress and a strict renunciation ofalcohol were two keynotes of the sanctified life.The Official Manual of the Church of God inChrist, for example, calls on believers to wear"attractive and dignifled attire" (Moore andWright 2008, 202). In its second stanza,"Whitewash Station Blues" burlesques thissanctification process, counseling the would-bepilgrim to wear one sock and two mismatchedpieces of footwear and to greet St. Peter with abottle of corn liquor in hand. If the devil is en-countered before St. Peter's gates are reached-well, bring hirn along on the Glory Train, too!Here, as in Robert Johnson's "Me and the DevilBlues," the blues singer invokes the devil in away that seems calculated to offend religious

sensibilities, allowing him a meaningful spacein human life yet granting him no real power tocUim the singer's soul.

The fruit of the devil's-music dispute, asth ese examples suggest, isn't just the pained wit-ness borne by several generations of blacksc uthern blues players who were chastised andsc metimes beaten by parents and ministers forthieir errant musical tastes. It is also the comic

re

"assetith

îponse offered by some of those musicians,rticularly the young moderns. Sometimes this

cc medy takes the form of harsh mockery ofministerial misbehavior and hypocrisy, as in"He Calls That Religion." Sometimes, as in

le and the Devil," it takes the form of playfuldes that undercut religious (or demonic) high•iousness. Sometimes it finds comic, redemp-'e middle ground between godly and devilishings-as in "Whitewash Station Blues," which

situates itself ten miles from hell and two milesfrom glory. All of these responses, along withHooker's signal proclamation, "Ain't nohe aven, ain't no burnin' hell," are consistent

th a rising tide of religious skepticism thatcharacterized black southern youth betweenIS 20 and 1940, especially those hailing fromthe Mississippi Delta. "The sacred-secular di-ch otomizing resulting from Christian dualism,"Jo -1 Michael Spencer has argued, "does not per-

t the option of ititegrating a church upbring-with blues strivings," but the blues artists

¡cussed here undermine the sacred-secular di-ch otomy with considerable success, refusing to

:ept the world into which they were born on; dualistic terms dictated by their Christian

elders (Spencer 1995, 159-160). Offeredheaven or hell by their ministers, they de-

nded a Heaven and Hell party, sold tickets.

mindi

acth

man

201

d enjoyed themselves mightily. A T A

Notes

'On the question of continuities betweenth; performance practices and ritual roles ofpr ;achers and bluesmen, see also Giggie 2008,2004, and Sacre 1996, ix-x, 14-16, 125-129.

^Bluesman Junior Wells complained in aninterview about the fundraising imperative ofthe preacherly calling. "Oh, 1 used to go tochurch until, you know, it's no disrespect to apreacher but I just don't like the idea of, whena preacher start tellin' me about 'I haven't sawyou in awhile and when you come in here nextSunday I want you to bring me such and suchan amount of money.' No, no. I didn't seenothin' in the Bible that say I'm supposed topay him to preach for me. Or pray for me"(O'Neal 1995, 12).

^AU of the Superintendent's Reports citedin this article can be found in the J. B. CainArchives of Mississippi Methodism at MillsapsCollege in Jackson, Mississippi.

"•My discussion ofthe third and fourth blackDelta generations-the blues generations-is in-debted to Elijah Wald. See Wald 2004, 86-92,esp. 90.

^Michael Taft's Pre-War Blues Lyrics - TheConcordance can be accessed online: <http://www.dylan61.se/michael%20taft,%20blues%2Oanthology.txt.WebConcordance/cl.htm>

''Ted Gioia has recently made a similarclaim: "Just as satanic rockers would find theirniche market a half century later, a group ofearly blues singers embraced the harshest at-tacks their critics leveled at them--deviltry,blasphemy, apostasy, call it what you will-andtried to turn them into marks, if not of distinc-tion, at least of notoriety" (2008, 116).

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