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[1]
Testimonials
“I encountered the blues when I was quite a child. I was born in Mumford, Texas,
and grew up in Bryan, Texas, in the 1950s. I performed as a musician at many of
the juke joints on the Moore Brothers farm and Allenfarm, local house parties
and suppers. I heard many stories about the life on these and other plantations, but not in the details this book provides. At this late date, Texas and America are
still trying to live down their morbid past. The cotton industry has long passed
and left these towns, villages and plantations to a bare minimal existence. Many are resorting to rebranding themselves by getting the state government to
designate them the Antique Capital of Texas or The Blues Capital. This book is
calling to the altar for all who contributed to Blood on The Cotton and is a must-read for all who are curious about Blues Music as it developed in Central Texas
along the Brazos and other rivers.”
– Nat Dove, film composer, musician and music historian
“The authors’ dedicated research, coupled with their skilled storytelling, has
produced an important work about the blues in the Brazos Valley. Whether you
are a music lover or a historian, this book is sure to please – this is one great
read!”
– Bill Page, Texas A&M University Library Coordinator and historian
“This book underlines an ongoing problem in the U.S. – white violence. Violence
kept the system going in Texas for a long time, and to some extent it continues,
but it is never dealt with publicly. This is strange here in the Brazos Valley,
which is quite prosperous, since this violence certainly contributed to prosperity.”
– Michael Kraft, PhD
[2]
Copyright © 2018 Glenn D. Davis
All Rights Reserved
Except where permitted by law, no part of this book may be reproduced or
transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, to include photocopying,
scanning, recording, or any storage and/or retrieval system, without
written permission from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).
First Edition.
[3]
Dedication
I dedicate this book to my long-suffering wife, Dorothy Traska-Davis,
who had to put up with my addiction to getting this book into print. Her
insights and proofing were also fundamental to the completion of this
work.
Photos are from Google Images or from the private photo collections of
Russell Cushman and Glenn D. Davis
[4]
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments 5
Preface 7
Introduction 11
Chapter 1: Reconstruction and Black Suffering 14
Chapter 2: Violence: Settling the Brazos Valley 24
Chapter 3: Brazos Valley Plantations 33
Chapter 4: Plantation Mentality 43
Chapter 5: The Tom Moore Farm 55
Chapter 6: Mance Lipscomb, Songster 69
Chapter 7: Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman 75
Chapter 8: The Chitlin’ Circuit 89
Chapter 9: The Austin Nexus 102
Chapter 10: Public Interest in Blues Rises 111
Chapter 11: Blue-eyed Blues? 123
Chapter 12: Internationalization of the Blues 131
Chapter 13: The Future of the Blues 141
Chapter 14: Conclusions 149
Epilogue: Blues in the Brazos Valley 153
Bibliography 155
About the Author 161
[5]
Acknowledgments
It would take a lot of space to name all the people who assisted in the
writing of this book, but I will just start by thanking Jay Brakefield for his
massive help with research and writing. It was largely because of Jay’s
encyclopedic knowledge of both the Texas blues and the blues in general
that this book came to fruition. It was a real pleasure working with him in
interviewing and researching the subject material herein. Jay contributed
materials from his own collection, including interviews with Mance
Lipscomb, Sunny Nash and Nat Dove. Jay also wrote the chapters on
Lipscomb and Hopkins.
I would also like to extend a hearty thank you to Russell Cushman, the
Brazos Valley artist and businessman who helped the small central Texas
city of Navasota become designated as the Blues Capital of Texas.
Russell, who at one time was the administrator of Navasota’s now-defunct
Blues Alley (museum), graciously allowed some of the photos on his Web
Site Blues Valley to be used in this book. He also sat for several interviews
which provided the author with facts and history concerning the history of
the Brazos Valley.
Another key interview was with Matt Moore, the grandson of Harry
Moore, one of the Moore brothers who owned and operated his part of the
Tom Moore farm (each brother owned a part), a central focus of this work.
Thanks Matt for making time for that interview.
This shout-out goes to College Station resident Lorenzo Grays for
providing information about the history of black juke joints in the Brazos
Valley, especially the stories he recalled about the now-defunct Green
Lantern, which stood near the south entrance to Texas A&M University.
How could I possibly forget the interview with Mama Nitt, an African-
American owner of the still-operating Big Wheel juke in Grimes County?
If you are still with us Mama Nitt, I just want to say thanks for that
interview and that you are one special lady.
[6]
A very special thank you goes to Bill Page, Texas A&M University’s
chief researcher on the history of the Brazos Valley. Thanks Bill, your
knowledge is breathtaking and you have offered so much help that I can
only give a great big thanks, although that seems inadequate.
And to all the others, especially to my good friend and compatriot Anne
Boykin, who offered help and moral support, I say thank you all very
much indeed!
[7]
Preface
The blues and I go back a long way. When I was growing up, my mother
would regale me with stories of John and Alan Lomax, the Texas father-
and-son folklore team that recorded and documented just about anyone
who was anyone, including Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and Lead
Belly. She’d met the Lomaxes while attending grad school at the
University of Texas in the early 1930s and recalled their tales, including
one about Lead Belly pulling a tooth with a pair of pliers he found while
waiting in their car, spattering the interior with blood. Tough guy, that
Huddie Ledbetter.
The first time I heard Lead Belly was when I ordered an LP about an inch
thick from Folkways Records in New York. It was kind of like tasting
really hot food for the first time; it took me a few listenings to decide that I
liked it. (Remember, this was the era of Perry Como, Snooky Lanson and
“How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”) But once I got a taste of that
strong, soulful music, I was hooked. The real breakthrough moment
happened, though, in the summer of 1962, when I was working in
downtown Houston and often spent my lunch break haunting the Sam
Houston Bookstore, which sold records in the basement. One day the
pleasant middle-aged saleswoman said, “Hey, let’s hear the new Lightnin’
Hopkins album.” The sounds of “Happy Blues for John Glenn” gave me
one of those life-changing “this is my music!” moments. I proceeded, over
the next several decades, to listen to and research jazz, blues and other
“ethnic” sounds.
While I was copy editing at The Dallas Morning News, I was always on
the lookout for a music-related story to peddle to the editors as a freelance
project. In 1986, when the movie Crossroads premiered in Dallas, I wrote
an article quoting Houston researcher Mack McCormick as saying he was
almost certain that Robert Johnson, whose legend was the basis of the
film, had made his Dallas recordings in a building on Park Avenue, near
[8]
the main public library. (Years later, another researcher established the
truth of this by finding a vital piece of correspondence.)
In 1989, while covering the funeral of local blues pianist and National
Heritage Fellowship winner Alex Moore, I met Alan Govenar, a folklorist,
writer and filmmaker. This led to a personal and professional relationship
that continues to this day. We started talking about the need for a book
about Dallas’ famous and infamous Deep Ellum section, which, back in
the day, as they say, had been a key spot in the development of blues and
jazz. Blind Lemon Jefferson, the first commercially successful solo male
blues recording artist, was discovered playing under a large oak tree at the
intersection of Elm Street and Central Track in the heart of Deep Ellum.
The book was published in 1998 by University of North Texas Press and
republished in 2013, expanded, updated and retitled, by Texas A&M
Press.
In researching the book, we interviewed a number of fascinating people,
including Jews who had catered to African Americans at Deep Ellum
pawnshops and stores. We talked to musicians and cabdrivers and found a
few people who had known Blind Lemon, including a 101-year-old black
man living in a nursing home in Mexia. “Blind Lemon! Blind Lemon!,” he
exclaimed happily, a huge smile lighting his face. “He was a gui-tar man!”
Alan got to know a couple of very hardy nonagenarians down in Lemon’s
home country, Limestone and Freestone counties, who had known him
and remembered his funeral.
When I moved to Brazos County (home of Texas A&M) in 2004 to work
for the local paper, one of my motives was to continue blues research in an
area that, I had postulated, was the Lone Star State’s near-equivalent of the
Mississippi Delta. The area had produced Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance
Lipscomb, Blind Willie Johnson, Albert Collins, Texas Alexander, and
many others. For one reason and another, the project dragged on, and my
research was sporadic and not well-organized.
[9]
But a picture began to form, and once I began to dig into the region’s
racial and political history, I realized that my previous research had
revealed only half the story. What was missing for the most part was the
context in which that great music had been produced. We’d touched on
this, of course, but the more I learned, the more I wished that I could go
back and re-interview some of the black folks I had talked to decades
before, people who were alive when some of these horrors happened.
One of the worst incidents ended up destroying the little town of Kirvin,
Texas, right down the road from where Lemon grew up. He had often
walked there to play and hang out, and he must have known about the
terrible events of 1922, when he was 29 years old and making a living as a
street musician, going back and forth between Dallas and his home
country, about 80 miles south.
The relationship between the music and the racism the musicians faced is
a tough one to suss out. B.B. King certainly alluded to slavery and post-
slavery in “Why I Sing the Blues.” Lightnin’ recorded a song called
“Slavery” and several versions of “Tom Moore’s Farm” or “Tom Moore
Blues,” about the notorious plantation owner who, with his brothers,
farmed thousands of acres in the Brazos bottom in Brazos and Washington
counties. (“Meanest men I ever seen.”) Mance Lipscomb told me that
sharecropping, which occupied much of his life, was just another form of
slavery. Mance would have been five years old when the White Man’s
Union Association, enraged by a racially progressive Populist-Republican
coalition, staged an armed takeover of Grimes County in 1900 that
presaged decades of power.
Lynching was a regular occurrence in Texas, as it was in other Southern
states. (And yes, Texas was a Southern state; the “Southwestern” image
came later, and not by accident.) Movies to the contrary, a lynching didn’t
consist merely of the “stringing up” of a suspected evildoer. Many of these
affairs were “spectacle lynchings,” in which hundreds or thousands
watched as African Americans, usually accused of harming or merely
talking back to a white person (often a woman), were subjected to fiendish
[10]
tortures before finally being allowed to die. People carried off body parts
as souvenirs and made postcards. In one particularly egregious example,
in Anderson County in East Texas, whites slaughtered an unknown
number of blacks simply because of rumors that they were going to cause
trouble.
For obvious reasons, blues lyrics don’t deal directly with this violent
legacy. Coded language is used. Even so, many younger African
Americans shy away from this music, which has largely been performed
and heard by whites since the blues and folk boom of the 1960s. And
suggesting that the blues reflects victimization can be touchy, too,
particularly when coming from a white researcher. Not that the blues is
always sad; quite the contrary. The African-American novelist Richard
Wright called it an exuberant melancholy, which provided the title of a
radio show I hosted for several years on a community station in Bryan.
But the fact remains that the music, especially the “deep blues” that came
out of the cotton fields and prisons before the advent of commercial
recordings in the 1920s reflected wounds so painful that perhaps only art
could express them. People were hurt into poetry, as Auden once said of
Yeats.
Jay Brakefield
Co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas
[11]
Introduction
Blues music seems to have emanated from river bottoms where cotton was
the main crop, particularly from the Mississippi Delta and from the Brazos
Valley of Texas. It was born around the end of the 19th century or the
beginning of the 20th
in a broad swath of the South, in those very areas
where slaves had harvested cotton and other crops and where freed
African-Americans continued to do so after Emancipation. The blues
incorporated elements of the field hollers and work songs heard in the
fields, but it also represented something new, an individual expression of
the complex feelings of a newly freed people. The blues went on to
become the bedrock upon which much popular music, including rock and
roll, jazz and rap, was built. But in its earliest incarnation, the music was
something quite different, a cry of pain mixed with wry humor in the face
of overwhelming repression.
This analysis focuses on the blues that was born in Texas, while drawing
on comparisons between Brazos Valley blues and the music that derived
from the Mississippi Valley. It also highlights blues performers from
Southeast Texas such as Mance Lipscomb and Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins.
Lipscomb had an important part to play in the development of the Texas
blues as his life span roughly paralleled the birth of the blues, its
rediscovery by whites in the 1960s and its revival as a popular form of
entertainment. Mance’s style also influenced many blues rock singers,
such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. The younger Hopkins, on the other
hand, is important because of his electrification of the Texas blues sound
in the post-WWII period. Another Texas musician, Aaron “T-Bone”
Walker, is credited with taking electrification a step further by
synthesizing hard down-home blues with the more sophisticated jump
blues, played by combos and big bands.
The small town of Navasota is a central focus as the nearby Tom Moore
farm and its repression of black workers became the catalyst for the
[12]
creative reaction that sprang up in opposition, in turn producing a unique
blues sound. Today, Navasota, the largest town in Grimes County, though
not its county seat, boasts an official state designation as the “Blues
Capital of Texas.” However, it might be more accurate to state that the
Brazos Valley and portions of East Texas (the old Cotton Belt), not just
Navasota, could be called the true blues capital of Texas.
Getting a state designation as the blues capital was a smart marketing
move on the part of the small Texas town, which has benefited from two
annual blues events held in honor of Lipscomb, a Navasota resident, black
sharecropper and community musician. Although Lipscomb did not move
out of Navasota, Hopkins, from Leon County, in the upper reaches of the
Brazos Valley, was one of the Texas blues singers who did move, but only
about 100 miles south to the big city of Houston. Sadly, the Navasota
Blues Fest in now defunct.
Another theme of this work is to analyze the relationship between violence
and the blues. As we shall see, blues lyrics often touched on violence,
though this has generally been obscured. The blues brought the African
musical traditions of bent or slurred notes, overlapping call and response
and complex polyrhythms to ramshackle Southern juke joints. It then
spread to nightclubs across the country, where it was played in
sophisticated arrangements. The blues of the Southwest – Texas,
Oklahoma and parts of Louisiana and Arkansas – often went west with
such migrants as Walker and Pee-Wee Crayton. In Southern California,
Walker, like Waters, plugged into an amplifier and thus changed his
sound. However, this created something very different, such as the playing
of jazzy single-string runs and jazz chords in tight call-and-response
interaction with the brass and the reeds of a big band. The pain and humor
of the blues was no less present, but in a swinging big-band format. As the
big bands faded away, blues musicians, like their jazz counterparts, often
worked in smaller combos.
The boom that fueled the late-life careers of many blues musicians
eventually diminished, though the blues still has many devotees at home
[13]
and overseas. Today, many of the fans and players are white, and “blues
tourists” from all over the world flock to spots such as Clarksdale,
Mississippi, which produced Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sam
Cooke and others. The small town still has a vital music scene. But what
happens to the blues in the future is an open question, one that is dealt
with in this work.
However, this work is not about only the blues. It’s as much about Texas’
bloody, racist history as it is about the blues music itself. The state’s
agricultural traditions are inextricably intertwined with the powerful and
enduring music produced by people who for many years were considered
less than fully human. That powerful mix has produced a musical message
that the whole world has come to recognize and appreciate. That blood on
the cotton was not shed in vain.
[14]
Chapter One
“There was never any moment in our history when slavery was not a
sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations
of the Constitutional Convention.”
John Jay Chapman, American writer and “Gilded Age” critic
Reconstruction and Black Suffering
othing scared white residents of the post-Civil War South,
including those former plantation owners in Brazos, Burleson,
Robertson, Washington and Grimes counties of Texas, more than
the idea that their newly liberated slaves might use their
newfound rights to organize into a voting bloc that would take over local
politics. Many black citizens had settled in Brazos County as a result of
slavery; they were brought in to work the plantation cotton crops in the
river bottoms. In antebellum Brazos County, there were almost as many
slaves as white people – 1,713 whites and 1,063 slaves in the 1860 census.
By the mid-1890s, blacks did outnumber whites 8,845 to 8,800. Cotton
was grown in the Brazos River bottoms (cotton needs a lot of water) and
was then processed in multiple gins in the Brazos Valley. Bales were
loaded onto trains in the railhead town of Millican in Brazos County and
N
[15]
shipped off to Houston and Galveston and on to various destinations,
including those overseas.
One such country was England, a staunch supporter of the South during
the Civil War, as the British needed the high-quality cotton for their
thriving textile industry. Called “white gold,” cotton was the currency
which kept the South afloat during the long Civil War. As black historian
James O. Horton, speaking in a PBS documentary about the Underground
Railroad called “Whispers of Angels,” said: “By 1840, cotton was
America’s most valuable export and by 1860 the total dollar value of
slaves was greater than the value of all American banks, railroads and all
manufacturing facilities in the United States put together. The ‘Peculiar
Institution’ (slavery) was no sideshow, it was the main event.”
When the Civil War finally ended in 1865, steel could once more be used
for the railroads and Millican’s significance as a railhead town of Texas
began to fade as railroad construction started moving northward again.
Where the railroad went, civilization followed. Stores that had started in
Millican, such as Sanger Brothers, moved northward with the railroad.
Sanger Brothers ended up in Dallas. Life was still good in Millican in
1865; the bustling town of about 6,000 had been the center of commerce
in Southeast Texas before and during the war since it not only shipped
cotton, but also was the training center for Confederate troops. Camp
Speight was the largest, but there were several other camps surrounding
the town. There were many stores catering to every need and there were
many saloons, several hotels and even a couple of houses of ill repute.
Plantation owners and other wealthy business people built lovely houses in
nearby Navasota, just across the Navasota River. Other nearby towns,
especially Anderson, had supplied ordnance and pistols for the
Confederate army. The famous Dance Brothers pistol had been
manufactured there.
But the South had lost the war. Federal troops began arriving in Millican
in June 1865 and Brazos County began almost eight years of
Reconstruction turmoil. U.S. Major General Gordon Granger had landed
[16]
in Galveston on June 19, 1865 to enforce President Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation. This was more than two months after General
Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the North. The auspicious day became
known as “Juneteenth” by blacks and has been celebrated every year
since.
It did not take long for trouble to start, however. Black workers and white
landowners struggled to work out their new economic and social
differences, and a series of Freedmen’s Bureau agents, occasionally
backed by small numbers of federal soldiers, attempted to mediate
between the groups. Some progress was being made on the educational
front as black children attended school for the first time at Millican and at
Wilson’s Plantation. However, whites and blacks quarreled constantly
over labor contracts, and interracial violence became increasingly
common. All hell broke loose when whites and blacks engaged in armed
combat in what became known as the Millican Riot (or Massacre), which
received nationwide attention at the time.
White Men in White Sheets
“By the late 1860s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) became one of the principal
forms of opposition to Reconstruction, and members were pledged to
support the supremacy of the white race, to oppose the amalgamation of
the races, to resist the social and political encroachment of carpetbaggers,
and to restore white control of the government,” stated the online version
of the Texas State Historical Association. The Klan made its first
appearance in Grimes County in June 1865 and racial strife started in
earnest there three years later. Seeing groups of armed black civilians
marching as if they were going to war sent a chill down the collective
spines of whites in the area.
The KKK was also active in the cotton-dependent towns of Bryan,
Anderson, Navasota and Wellborn in the late 1800s and early 1900s, not
to mention the much larger cities of Houston to the south and Waco to the
north. Residents, especially the black ones, were sometimes astonished to
[17]
see riders wearing bed sheets with eyeholes. Most knew the riders by their
horses, even though their faces were covered. But the idea was not to be
anonymous, but rather to strike fear into the hearts of the black population
to “keep them in their places,” especially around election time.
The KKK also did not hesitate to lynch blacks they saw as being guilty of
some crime or other transgression, such as making a pass at a white
woman, or worst of all, wanting to
vote. The “spectacle” lynchings of the
1890s featured a carnival-like
atmosphere in which the unfortunate
black man (nearly always a man) was
lynched, then burned and the
remaining parts and bones of his body
sold to the white crowd as “souvenirs.” The most highly prized was the
black man’s penis. It was said that these public lynchings were so popular
that gawkers from several states away would come by train just to see the
grisly carnival.
A book written by Cynthia Skove Nevels, entitled Lynching to Belong,
from the Texas A&M Press in 2007, claims that poor white immigrants
from Europe (Italians, Irish and others) tried to ingratiate themselves to the
local white establishment in Brazos County by volunteering to do the
actual lynching. In fact, there were so many lynchings of blacks around
Bryan in the late 1890s (at least 16) that the area became known as a
“White Man’s Town.” However, Brazos County was not atypical of that
time, Nevels writes. “On the face of it, Brazos County seemed typical of
rural communities in the Jim Crow South at the end of the nineteenth
century. Heavily dependent on cotton production, the county was also
burdened with memories of slavery and plantation agriculture, and the loss
and upheaval of war.”
To many antebellum white Southerners the black field hands not only
represented a conquered people, but also symbolized the pain of the
South’s loss in the Civil War. Nevels’ book added: “Historian Grace
[18]
Elizabeth Hale has argued that violence – particularly against black men –
was ‘a determining characteristic of whiteness in the South’.” A total of
3,513 blacks were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1927;
between 1885 and 1942 Texas lynched 339 blacks.
Sometimes lynching just wasn’t horrific enough to fit the seriousness of
the crime, in Southern eyes. In that case burning at the stake was required.
In her 1895 book called The Red Record, the famous black muckraker Ida B. Wells quotes the New York Sun of February 2, 1893:
“PARIS, Tex., Feb. 1, 1893. — Henry Smith, the negro ravisher of four-
year-old Myrtle Vance, has expiated in part his awful crime by death at the
stake. Ever since the perpetration of his awful crime this city and the entire
surrounding country has been in a wild frenzy of excitement. When the
news came last night that he had been captured at Hope, Ark., that he had
been identified by B.B. Sturgeon, James T. Hicks, and many other of the
Paris searching party, the city was wild with joy over the apprehension of
the brute. Hundreds of people poured into the city from the adjoining
country and the word passed from lip to lip that the punishment of the
fiend should fit the crime that death by fire was the penalty Smith should
pay for the most atrocious murder and terrible outrage in Texas history.
Curious and sympathizing alike, they came on train and wagons, on horse,
and on foot to see if the frail mind of a man could think of a way to
sufficiently punish the perpetrator of so terrible a crime. Whisky shops
were closed, unruly mobs were dispersed, schools were dismissed by a
proclamation from the mayor, and everything was done in a business-like manner.”
In the late 1960s, the editor of the Paris News still proudly displayed the
lynching photos he kept in his desk and bragged that the local blacks were too scared to fight back.
Strange Fruit
White Southerners complained of Yankee occupation and carpetbagger
excesses, but the white man’s pain paled in comparison to that suffered by
the blacks. The latter often sought relief and solace in music – their own
[19]
unique version called the blues. Although the blues, as a musical genre,
was no doubt born in the cotton fields and partly came from the work
songs of cotton pickers, there is never any mention of the word “lynching”
in blues lyrics – the word was just too scary to even say out loud. Perhaps
the closest mention was in Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of the song
“Strange Fruit.” But even then the ominous word was conspicuously
absent.
“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.
Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.
Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.”
Professor Adam Gussow (himself a blues player) of Ole Miss university
and author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence in the Blues
Tradition, argues in his book that Holiday’s song should not be considered
a true blues song, but rather as a protest conjoined with the blues spirit.
After all, he points out, the song was written by a white man named Abel
Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen) and was only sung by Billie Holiday, a
well-known jazz singer and songwriter. Holiday said that every time she
sang the song, she had to throw up.
[20]
Slavery Under Another Name?
Reconstruction was a difficult period in the Deep South, and in the Brazos
Valley. Former cotton plantation owners were faced with a dilemma in the
post-Civil War decades – they still had cotton to produce, but the outcome
of the war had freed their former slaves. What to do? Recreating slavery
under another name was the obvious solution. Ratified on December 18,
1865, the 13th
Amendment to the Constitution stated: “Neither slavery nor
involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party
shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any
place subject to their jurisdiction.” So there was the South’s escape clause
written in black and white: “except as a punishment for crime.” All
Southerners then had to do was arrest and imprison blacks on trumped-up
charges and then assign the “criminals” to the work force of a plantation
owner or other private business. It was not very difficult for former
Southern aristocrats to come up with ways to imprison defenseless blacks
or trick them into endless servitude.
Vagrancy Laws. Coming up with this subterfuge was just too easy. First
you charge an unemployed black with being a vagrant, since he or she had
no job, then throw the unlucky person in jail, then his future “owner” bails
him or her out. Then he or she becomes ensnared since the debt can never
be repaid.
The Peonage Laws (debt enslavement), which were officially outlawed
by Congress in 1867, were another way Southerners would entrap hapless
negroes into endless servitude. The PBS documentary “Slavery by
Another Name” explains:
“The most corrupt and abusive peonage occurred in concert with southern
state and county government. In the South, many black men were picked
up for minor crimes or on trumped-up charges, and, when faced with
staggering fines and court fees, forced to work for a local employer would
who pay their fines for them.”
[21]
These “convicts” literally owed their souls to the company store and
would never be able to repay their debts to their “massas” (masters). After
all, white men kept the books and they were not about to let their black
workers pay off their debts and go free.
Convict Labor. Careful not to run afoul of the 13th
Amendment, Southern
states also started leasing their convicts en mass to local industrialists. The
paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and
these men found themselves trapped in inescapable situations. This type of
labor “arrangement” was especially important for the rebuilding and
extensions of Southern railways that had been decimated by the Northern
Army during the Civil War.
Chain Gangs: Starting around the turn of the 20th century, the mass
production of automobiles brought a troubling problem to the surface.
Southern roads, severely damaged in the Civil War, may have been still
usable after the war by horses, wagons and buggies, but they could not
accommodate the faster-moving automobiles of Henry Ford. The U.S.
government tended to look the other way when some Southern states
began to use prison chain gangs for the repair of roads and railroads.
Washington wanted to bring the South into the democratic coalition, not
isolate it. The rising industrialization of the South was also a boon to the
whole U.S. economy, which was moving away from agrarianism.
Sharecropping (Tenant) Farming. “During the decade following the
Civil War, Negroes in Texas demonstrated little tendency to migrate from
the agricultural sections of the state. To be sure some blacks relocated in
counties in West Texas and others moved to towns and cities in the eastern
portion of Texas,” wrote William Brophy in his 1974 dissertation entitled
The Black Texan 1900-1950: A Quantitative History.
During slavery it had been illegal for slaves to learn how to read and write,
so after emancipation where were they to go and find jobs? Most hung
around the same plantations and worked the same jobs they had under
[22]
their former masters. Only this time (after 1865) it was called “tenant
farming.”
In post-1865 Brazos County, there were three types of tenant farmers:
cash, share and cropper. Cash types rented land from a landowner for a
specified sum of money. Share tenants, who provided everything
necessary for farming, except the land, normally paid the landowner one-
fourth of the cotton and one-third of the grain produced on the soil.
Croppers had only their labor to offer a landowner, and they received one-
half the harvest. In the peak tenant year of 1930, 75.9% of all Afro-Texan
farmers were tenants.
Oral contracts were common because the Landlord and Tenant Act of
1874 protected both parties. However, the Law of 1915 enabled the
landlord to secure a warrant from a justice of the peace to seize the
possessions of a tenant who did not fulfill his contract. Tenants were also
prohibited from subletting without the permission of the landowner.
Although many poor whites were also tenant farmers, the mostly illiterate
former slaves were “free” in name only.
“The Negro farmer probably viewed the crash of 1929 and the subsequent
depression as a curse. Cotton prices fell to shattering lows and the
Department of Agriculture under Henry A. Wallace instituted an
agricultural subsidy program that encouraged landlords to remove tenants
from the land. Hard times and the hope of relief work beckoned Negro
farmers to the towns and cities. Unskilled, uneducated, and with little to
offer the industrial segment of the economy, blacks from the soil cast
themselves upon an uncertain future,” concluded Brophy.
A Doomed Idea?
Reconstruction, or the idea of reuniting the South and North, was a lofty
idea that had little chance of succeeding, as both local and national politics
got in the way. The Southern interpretation of the eugenics theory stated
that blacks were unequivocally inferior to whites and that black genes
guaranteed that no intelligence could be passed on to their children.
[23]
Incredibly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision seemed to
confirm this eugenics theory version by stating that the ideals set forth in
the U.S. Constitution did not apply to blacks because they were not legally
citizens of the United States. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law stated that all
captured runaway slaves must be immediately returned to their owners,
who also were allowed to go into free states and capture their runaways,
since they were their “lost property.” Northern Abolitionists dubbed it the
“Bloodhound Law” after the dogs used in the hunts. Even some free
blacks living in the North fled to Canada in fear of being kidnapped. Uncle
Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 and 12 Years a Slave followed in
1853, both books reflecting prevailing fears of the Fugitive Slave Law.
At the end of the four-year-long, bloody Civil War fought mainly over the
issue of slavery, four million blacks were left to fend for themselves in an
unsympathetic and openly hostile South. They suffered unspeakable
misery and many died from sickness, beatings and other forms of torture.
In some places as many as 30-40% of the black workers died in a month’s
time; 9,000 or more died from the extreme rigors of forced slavery, even
though it was officially illegal.
[24]
Chapter Two
“The violence that pervades blues culture is over-determined, a subset of
southern violence, working-class violence, frontier violence, the violence
endemic among young single men – American gun culture as a whole.”
Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the
Blues Tradition
Violence: Settling the Brazos Valley
eeds of discord were sown at a small town near Navasota named
Anderson once white settlers arrived. These whites believed in
slavery and in many cases brought their own slaves with them. The
practice was so wide-spread it prompted historian Randolph B. Campbell
to call early Anglo Texas an “empire for slavery.”
The first white settlers in present-day Brazos County were Robert Millican
and his family, who emigrated from Missouri in December 1821. They
were members of the group known as Stephen F. Austin’s “Old 300” and
were a fractious clan, to say the least. According to some accounts, they
immediately got into a “shooting scrape” with the Holland family that was
resolved only when Austin assigned them to opposite sides of the Brazos
River: Millicans on the west, Hollands on the east. The Millicans received
a land grant in 1824 and settled in the southern part of present-day Brazos
S
[25]
County, where that settlement still bears their name. The family ruled just
about everything in the area; even militia elections were held in their
family home.
The family patriarch Robert Millican was born in South Carolina in 1750
and came to Texas in 1821. He died at the ripe old age of 46 in 1836, the
year Texas won its independence from Mexico and became a Republic.
Perhaps his medical condition was aggravated by the family’s having had
to flee south-central Texas as the Mexican army approached. This
evacuation of women and children during the latter part of the Texas
Revolution is known as the “Runaway Scrape.” Millican’s passing left his
wife, Nancy, and sons James, John, William, Daniel, Andrew, Elliot and
Diadem and a daughter, Letty.
But the family’s troubles were far from over. In late 1839, James Millican
was slain. Another relative, Willis Millican, was indicted on charges of
assault with intent to kill Cary White and William B. Dean. Although
White was acquitted in James’ death, the Millicans warred among
themselves. After the patriarch’s death, the sons successfully sued their
mother in a land dispute.
Like many other Texans jumping on the cotton-growing gravy train, the
Millicans owned a number of slaves, although not enough to entitle them
as “planters.” This official designation was usually reserved for owners of
at least 20 bondsmen. In the early 1840s, according to county tax rolls,
William, Elliot and Diadem each had one slave; John, eight; and Nancy,
seven.
Other family members went into law enforcement. Elliot served as sheriff
of Navasota County, which was split off from Washington County in
1841. He continued in that office when the county’s name was changed to
“Brazos” in the following year. By October 1844, William, Andrew and
Diadem Millican were dead, apparently of natural causes. Elliot, a doctor,
served as a state representative after annexation. His house, which was
described as “Millican, per se,” served as a restaurant, hotel and
stagecoach stop. Some remains of the old stagecoach stop can still be seen
[26]
in Millican. Press accounts of Elliot’s death in October 1860 are
contradictory; he was either murdered by one of his brothers or jumped
from the third story of Lott’s Hotel in nearby Washington-on-the-Brazos,
which had once been the capital of the Republic of Texas.
In 1858, the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph ran an ad for 300 men to work
on the Houston & Central Texas rail line progressing north from Houston.
Planters were invited to hire out slaves as laborers. The railroad bought up
the land on which the town of Millican stood. The line reached Millican in
April 1861, just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War. The town
remained as the railhead throughout the war, serving as a major
transportation hub for the Confederacy, and its population swelled to as
many as 6,000. In 1862, it boasted a rail depot, two hotels, three livery
stables, two or three stores, two brothels and as many bars. Among the
merchants were the Sanger brothers, who followed the line north and
eventually established a very successful department store in Dallas.
After the South surrendered, federal troops and a Freedmen’s Bureau
agent were posted in Millican. In July 1865, a soldier, John C. Gill,
writing to his mother in Ohio, called the town “a miserable cut-throat
hole” where “everyone carries a large bowie knife and revolver strapped
to him.” He referred to Texas as “an outlawed state” and said, “I wish our
army had gone through the entire state, and laid it waste. Yet there are
many honorable citizens to be found.”
Maybe Gill had a point that the Union army should have laid waste to
Millican, maybe not. However, Mother Nature did what the Northern
army had not. In 1866, Millican was ravaged by cholera followed by an
outbreak of yellow fever the following year. It was a one-two punch that
devastated the small town. The latter plight hit so fast that officials found
some residents dead in their front-porch rocking chairs. Some survivors
were in such a panic that they tore down their houses, loaded the lumber
on train cars and went as far north as they could. The railroad reached
Bryan (about 19 miles northwest) and the town of Millican began to dry
[27]
up. The local newspaper moved to Bryan and the post office was closed,
though some say it later reopened.
And then something even worse happened. A Freedmen’s Bureau agent,
Sam C. Sloan, reported that a Captain Richards, “an ex officer of our
service,” had been “murdered most foully about eight miles from this
place, in Washington County…Civil law is a farce here.” A detachment of
federal troops was ordered to Millican. On January 1, 1867, Sloan reported
that one freedman had been robbed by whites and another slain “without
any cause or provocation.”
The Millican Riot
Amid this volatility, a black man named Cary Holt was lynched near
Millican a year later, bringing the KKK into the picture. According to
Freedmen’s Bureau agent N.H. Randlett, “On the 7th of June a party of
about fifteen persons dressed and known as Ku Klux marched through
Freedmen’s village in Millican. The freedmen who were congregated at
their church rallied and commenced firing muskets and pistols at the said
Ku Klux who quickly dispersed leaving the ground covered with masks,
winding sheets and other wearing apparel, and two revolvers. Freedmen
immediately armed themselves and commenced drilling. This caused great
uneasiness among all classes of people. Several citizens (white) requested
me to disarm the freedmen. I informed them that I would stop the
freedmen from any warlike preparations when the Ku Klux would stop
their incursions. After some delay this was done, and I issued an order
informing all parties that organized armed gangs, societies, &c. not
authorized by law was prohibited by Genl. Orders Hd. Qrs. Dist. of Texas
no further trouble occurred.”
But further trouble soon erupted. The following month, according to the
San Antonio Express, an African-American blacksmith named Miles
Brown went to the Holliday plantation near Millican to talk about his pay.
(The family apparently was prone to withholding money. In December
1866, Sloan had ordered Leon Holliday’s cotton held until freedmen were
[28]
paid.) When Brown visited the farm, the male Hollidays were absent. The
blacksmith, who may have been intoxicated, spoke to the women he found
at home. The next day, he was told that he had insulted the women and
that the Hollidays had threatened to kill him. Brown took off for
neighboring Washington County without telling anyone, and a rumor
spread that he had been lynched in the Brazos River bottom. A group of
blacks went to the spot where the lynching was supposed to have occurred
but did not find Brown’s body, though by at least one account they found
another corpse. They broke into smaller groups and headed for home but
were confronted by a group of whites. Millican Mayor Wheat attempted to
calm the situation, but when someone discharged a gun, fighting broke out
and several blacks were killed.
Whites blamed the trouble on a minister, George E. Brooks, and a white
colleague, a schoolteacher, whom the Galveston Daily News called
Brooks’ “yellow adjutant.” The Texas Countryman referred to him as “a
white renegade named Hadley.” Brooks was a leader of the black
community and the local Loyal League, served as a federal voting registrar
and was associated with an Austin black newspaper, the Free Man Press.
A white backlash quickly followed. A train from Bryan brought 150 to
200 white men, and the Freedmen’s Bureau summoned additional federal
troops from Brenham. Sporadic fighting continued for several days, and
Brooks’ mutilated body was found in the river bottom. The violence
merited coverage in papers as far away as Boston and New York.
Coverage in most Texas papers was biased and racist, though the Express
sarcastically noted that “it is barely possible that even the Negro race may
object to being killed by the time they get fairly used to it.” A letter to the
Daily Austin Republican, signed by “A Colored Man,” proclaimed:
“During last summer, when the yellow fever was raging, these colored
men stood around the bedside of the sick and dying of these white men,
who have been murdering them in return. Mr. Brooks, a faithful servant,
was one of the main nurses, who proved worthy of his occupation. What
few of these poor, abused, and wronged people remain in that little city
[29]
will not forget this wickedness and inhumanity, which has been returned
for their faithfulness.”
The casualty toll has never been authenticated. Press accounts initially
said that as many as 50 blacks had been killed. According to Randlett, the
Freedmen’s Bureau man, five were killed, one was wounded and one was
missing. Racial confrontations occurred around the same time in a number
of other places in Texas, including Hempstead, Cedar Creek in Bastrop
County, in Houston and in Washington and Freestone counties. According
to historian Alwyn Barr in Black Texans, 468 freed blacks were slain
between 1865 and 1868 in Texas, 90 percent of them killed by whites.
That’s why some call the incident a “massacre.”
The Millicans’ violence continued even after the riots had ended. In 1871,
John Millican assaulted a black man in a saloon owned by a justice of the
peace, Col. R.C. Myers. Millican was arrested on Myers’ orders and
ordered to appear in court. Millican killed Myers and was subsequently
assassinated. Before he died, he identified his attackers as Myers’
children, Allen Myers and Nannie Baldridge. In 1875, according to the
Galveston Daily News, a jury brought in a not guilty verdict, “which
seemed to meet with general approbation.”
The 1869 Constitution
Even as the violence took place in Millican, a black man from the area,
Stephen Curtis, was serving as a delegate to the state constitutional
convention in Austin. The contentious gathering, which involved two
sessions lasting a total of five months, produced an incomplete document
approved by only 49 of the 90 delegates. But it was published under
federal government order and subsequently ratified by public vote. The
1869 Constitution enfranchised blacks, raised taxes to pay for schools,
roads and bridges and excluded many former Confederates from
involvement in politics.
Enactment of the constitution was followed by the election of Radical
Republican Edmund J. Davis as governor. He proved exceedingly
[30]
unpopular, and Texans soon moved to reverse the changes being made
under Reconstruction. In 1872, Democrats regained control of the
Legislature, which proceeded to repeal most of the programs enacted by
previous Republican rule. The new incumbents also moved to reduce the
governor’s powers. In December 1873, Davis was defeated by a
Democrat, Richard Coke, and in 1876, Texas adopted the current
constitution, which completed the work of undoing Reconstruction in the
state just as equivalent events took place on the national level.
A fiery black state senator, Matthew Gaines, was expelled from his office
on the grounds of questionable bigamy conviction. The former slave had
voted for a bill that led to the establishment of Texas A&M University in
Brazos County, one of two land grant colleges established under the
Morrill Acts of 1862 (the other was the University of Texas at Austin). An
effort in the 1990s to establish a campus memorial (statue) to Gaines
stalled despite the involvement of history professor Dale Baum, who has
written extensively about the Civil War and the postwar era in Texas.
Some saw lingering racism in the failed effort.
Settlers in Grimes County
The area that became Grimes County, neighboring Brazos County on the
east, had a somewhat similar history. Early white settlers included Jared E.
Groce, who brought 90 slaves from Alabama and established Bernardo
Plantation, near present-day Hempstead, in 1822. Three years later he built
one of the earliest cotton gins in Texas on the Brazos River in what is now
southwestern Grimes County. Other settlers included Anthony Kennard;
the family became prominent in the county, and the slain black Populist
leader Jim Kennard may have been connected through blood, slavery or
both. The county was created in 1846 and named for Jesse Grimes, a
North Carolina native who had arrived in the area in 1827, signed the
Texas Declaration of Independence, served in the Texas army and
represented the area as a legislator for both the Republic of Texas and the
state after annexation by the United States. The county’s final boundaries
were set in 1873, when Madison and Waller counties were created.
[31]
The population of Grimes County was heavily
black from the beginning. The 1850 census
showed that there were 1,680 slaves, two free
blacks and 2,326 whites. In 1855, there were 3,124
slaves. In 1858, the county tax rolls showed 42
slaveholders who had at least 20 slaves and thus
qualified as planters. Two years later, the number
of planters had swelled to 77. The county had
4,852 white residents, 505 of whom owned a total
of 5,486 slaves. In 1864, with residents of the
Deep South “refugeeing” their slaves to Texas, the
slave population of Grimes County had increased to 7,005. In a strange
twist of fate, the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of
the Ku Klux Klan, sent his mother to Grimes County to save her from the
ravages of the war in Tennessee. She stepped on a rusty nail, contracted
blood poisoning, and died.
Grimes County residents voted 907 to 9 for secession in February 1861.
During the war, the county was home to a Confederate training camp and
a pistol factory, operated by the Dance brothers, that turned out .36- and
.44-caliber revolvers modeled on the Colt Dragoon. In 1865, returning
Confederate soldiers, whose pay had been withheld, looted a cotton and
munitions warehouse in Navasota and sparked a fire that destroyed much
of the commercial district. The troops billeted at Millican had jurisdiction
over Brazos, Grimes and other counties; a company was also stationed at
Anderson, and at times the Freedmen’s Bureau had a presence in
Anderson and Navasota. This hardly prevented white attacks on blacks;
29, including 12 homicides, were recorded in the county in 1867 alone.
Grimes County, too, was ravaged by the yellow fever and cholera
outbreaks that had devastated Millican.
In 1870, African-Americans comprised 60 percent of Grimes County’s
population of 13,218. Despite white resistance, the county remained in
Republican hands, and Governor Edmund J. Davis garnered majority
Jesse Grimes
[32]
support in the county in 1873, when he was defeated by Coke. Particularly
galling to “unreconstructed” Democrats was the alliance of progressive
whites such as Garrett Scott with black Republicans. After the Greenback
Party faded in the 1880s, Scott and like-minded liberal whites found a
home in the People’s Party, which emerged from the Southern Farmers’
Alliance in 1892. This led to the campaign of terror that accompanied the
formation of the White Man’s Union Association and the resulting black
exodus from Grimes County. By 1910, the black population was down 30
percent, to 9,858. Today, a Confederate Memorial Plaza in Anderson, near
the site of the 1900 shootout, honors the Southern dead, and Rebel flags
still fly in the surrounding countryside. Although monuments to
Confederate generals and others are currently being taken down, there is
little danger that the Anderson memorial will suffer the same fate.
Books like James Ronald Kennedy’s The South was Right! (1991) suggest
that many southerners still feel that the Civil War (which they refer to as
“The War between the States”) was more about states’ rights than it was
about slavery. They still believe their cause was noble because the South
was just defending itself from strong Northern aggression. The past, as
William Faulkner once wrote, isn’t really past at all. Or perhaps we could
paraphrase Faulkner’s statement thusly: The past hasn’t really passed.
Farming and growing was certainly a way of life worth defending for the
settlers of the Brazos Valley. Some built great plantations with their newly
found, cotton-based riches. The great plantation homes, evidence of that
wealth, can still be observed in Bryan, Navasota and Galveston. The great
plantations of Texas gave way to huge farms in the post-Civil War period.
Slavery may have been prohibited by law, but the sharecropping that
replaced it bore a strong resemblance.
[33]
Chapter Three
“The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions
are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an
aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.”
Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
Brazos Valley Plantations
otton was not a very important crop for Southern planters before
1793, when Eli Whitney invented his hand-cranked cotton gin, a
simple machine that greatly speeded up the process of separating
cotton fibers from the seeds. This had been such a slow process
before the gin that it took one slave a whole day to produce a pound of
seedless cotton. That output increased 50x using the gin, so cotton became
a profitable business. In the first ten years of cotton gin use, output soared
by 800%. When the gin later became motorized, output skyrocketed and
Southern planters started to become very wealthy as a result.
By 1830, America produced half the world’s cotton and by 1850, when the
repressive Fugitive Slave Law was passed, that percentage had risen to
75%. No planter in the South wanted to miss the gravy train of growing
cotton. By 1850, there were more millionaires per capita in Nachez,
Mississippi than anywhere else in the world. The slave trade was also
C
[34]
propelling Galveston Texas to giddy economic heights during the same
period, giving the small Gulf Coast port the nickname “New York of the
Gulf.” And cotton was not the only thing escalating in value. Plantation
slave prices also skyrocketed from a pre-gin, per-capita $300 to nearly
$2,000 by 1860.
James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics
magazine, spoke to the subject in a documentary called
“America: The Story of Us,” saying: “Slavery was on the
decline before the invention of the cotton gin, but after
the gin had demonstrated its value every farmer in the
South wanted to plant cotton.” Could the first part of
Meigs’ statement explain why America’s founding
fathers were so ambivalent about the moral turpitude of owning slaves?
After all, slavery had been abolished in Britain by 1776 and had also been
outlawed across most of Europe. Never mind that the first American ship
fitted for bringing captured Africans to the colonies, the Desire, sailed
from Salem, Massachusetts.
A glaringly huge contradiction was that George Washington, James
Madison and Thomas Jefferson all owned slaves. When Jefferson penned
the preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence stating that “all men
are created equal” and that “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” was
he thinking at all about his own 135 slaves? Jefferson’s view that blacks
were inferior didn’t stop him from having a long-term sexual relationship
with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, after his wife’s death. Making this
inconvenient truth even more complicated was the fact that the beautiful
light-skinned Hemings was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister. The children he
fathered with Hemings were the only slaves Jefferson ever freed. Many
whites resisted this knowledge, claiming that DNA testing proved only
that a Jefferson fathered the children. But Harvard history professor
Annette Gordon-Reed, an African American who hails from Livingston,
[35]
Texas, used Jefferson’s travel records to establish that Hemings became
pregnant only when Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello.
Some authors suggest that these founding fathers were not too concerned
about slavery in the new United States of America since it was perceived
to be “on its way out,” a convenient way, nevertheless, to explain away
their seeming “hypocrisy” on the issue. This “hypocrisy” raised its ugly
head again once the South started rolling in the big bucks on the cotton
trade. The industrialized North quickly adopted a “look the other way”
approach to the slavery issue once the power loom came into widespread
use there. Raw cotton comes in (from the South) finished product goes
out, all under one roof, thus producing the modern mass-manufacturing
factory. Put another way, the North and the South had found a way to
mutually profit off the cotton trade, never mind the smoldering political
issue of what to do about the slaves.
By 1850, the manufacturing of cheap cotton clothing had become the
biggest industry in New York City. Cheap cotton, ready-made clothes
began to replace the made-at-home garments and buckskins of the past.
The U.S. Congress had just passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 that
declared Negroes non-citizens, and thus not subject to the terms of the
United States Constitution. Its effect was to give the green light to
continued slave use, even making it legal for slave owners to apprehend
their escaped “property” in other states.
Short-lived Optimism for Post-Civil War Blacks
Slavery came to Texas in the early 1800s. Texas had about 5,000 slaves at
the time of its revolution in 1836, but by 1845, when the state was
annexed to the United States, this grew to 30,000. But by 1860, on the eve
of the Civil War, the slave population had exploded to over 180,000 or
30% of the entire population of Texas. Many of these slaves had been
brought to Texas from other states, but some had been born there. Texas
had been admitted to the Union in 1845 as a slave state, and the
[36]
production of cotton supported the antebellum economy. The plantations
along the Brazos River were the engines of that economy. When the war
ended, these institutions were broke and gone with the wind.
A new optimism arose following the June 19, 1865 unveiling of the
emancipation document that freed Texas slaves. These enslaved workers
had never been allowed to leave their plantations (without special passes)
so being able to travel freely for the first time produced not only the
original euphoria of being free but also a desire to seek out better lives
elsewhere for themselves and their children. Many left their plantations in
search of jobs and long-lost family members.
“In the decade between 1867-77, during the period known as Radical
Reconstruction, the freedmen and women had the support of congressional
Republicans and Union troops stationed in the South in crafting an era of
unprecedented interracial democracy, during which blacks were granted
first citizenship and then the right to vote. The progress blacks made in
public life during Radical Reconstruction was nothing short of
remarkable; among the many profound changes in the South, black
schools and churches were established and around 2,000 African
Americans held public office,” opined an online article called “Race in
Blues Music History: Looking at the Past through the Lens of Race.”
(Schmoop.com)
More often labeled “Radical Republicanism,” the movement was
originated by House Republicans and was designed to be a punishment of
the South for seceding from the Union. Many of its aims failed due to the
resistance of the Southern-born President Andrew Johnson, an old-
fashioned Southern Democrat with strong states’ rights views. Radical
Republicanism, in its misguided enthusiasm and impatience, ran into other
blockades as well, mostly on the economic side.
“The first big disappointment of Radical Reconstruction had been the
failure of land reform in the South. The much hoped for ‘Forty Acres and
[37]
a Mule,’ suggested by General W.T. Sherman’s famed Special Field Order
15, never materialized. Former Confederate lands remained in the hands of
former Confederates, and freedmen found their diminishing hopes for
economic independence tied to southern boosters’ misbegotten dreams of
a new industrial South. Long before the New South dream sputtered,
before even Reconstruction could be considered a failure, most freedmen
and women had long since had to reconcile themselves to the ugly
economic reality that came to characterize southern agrarian life in the
absence of meaningful land reform. That reality was the system called
sharecropping,” concluded the online article.
Brazos Valley Plantations vs. “Farms”
Up until 1850 or so Brazos Valley farmers, were not really that interested
in growing cotton; their main cash crops were corn and sugar cane that
grew easily in the Texas heat and did not have to be processed like the
more difficult cotton. Corn and sugar cane did not need gins, and unlike
cotton, corn was a food that sustained life. No Texas meal at that time was
complete without cornbread, grits and molasses. Another cash crop was
indigo, a plant used to make a dark blue dye.
In fact, Brazos County produced only 142 bales of cotton in 1850, a mere
pittance compared to the cotton productivity in neighboring Grimes and
Washington counties. But the times had changed dramatically by 1860,
writes Professor Nevels in her book. “Ten years later, on the eve of the
Civil War, the county’s [Brazos] population had more than quadrupled,
largely spurred by the arrival of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad
and the certain prospect that the railroad would continue to build
northward through the county and beyond.”
However, the plantations of Grimes and Washington counties continued to
dwarf those of Brazos County, whose cotton plantation output had risen to
2,000 bales by 1860. Meanwhile, hundreds of white immigrants were
coming into the Brazos Valley from the Deep South, thanks to railroad
advertising for jobs, bringing their slave-driven plantation mentality and
[38]
cotton-growing expertise with them. “The change had vast implications
for the future,” explains Nevels. “This culture – which included the
ideology of white supremacy and the total domination of blacks – would
remain firmly in place through the end of the Civil War and far beyond.”
In other words, the Brazos Valley became tied to the slaveholding
mentality of the Deep South. It was on these plantations and post-WWII
“farms” that many black blues singers from Texas such as Mance
Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins got their starts, singing for both black
and white folks.
An old plantation home, the Lamar Calder House in Richmond Texas, is now rented by the Duck Dynasty TV franchise
Wherever the railroads went, civilization followed. This was especially
true in Grimes County during the 1850s. “The railroad first reached
Grimes County in 1859, when the Houston and Texas Central extended its
line to Navasota, thus bypassing Anderson, whose residents had rejected
the railroad, supposedly remarking that such an innovation ‘would scare
our mules and our Negroes.’ Though founded only in the early 1850s,
Navasota, with the aid of the railroad, rapidly grew into an important
commercial center,” states the Texas State Historical Association. “By
1856 six communities had acquired post offices: Anderson, Bedias,
[39]
Grimesville, Retreat, Prairie Plains, and Navasota. Two spas were
established in the county around 1850: Kellum Springs, ten miles north of
Anderson, and Piedmont Springs, seven miles west of Anderson.
Piedmont Springs, in particular, attracted guests from great distances, and
in 1860 a four-story, 100-room hotel was constructed there,” explains the
same article.
Differences between Plantations and Farms
Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between plantations and farms,
although most scholars agree that these differences include not only size
but also the type of labor employed therein.
“In the economic history and agricultural history literatures, the dividing
line separating farms from plantations is not sharply defined. On one side
of the spectrum, operations employing only free labor, which include all
northern units and about one-half of southern units—are clearly farms;
their operators are farmers. And those operations with only a few slaves
are rarely called plantations; the owners are hardly ever styled planters”
explained Alan L. Olmstead of the University of California and Paul W.
Rhode of Davis University of Michigan in their joint PhD dissertation
entitled Were Antebellum Cotton Plantations Factories in the Field?, later
published as a chapter in the 2015 book Enterprising America: Businesses,
Banks, and Credit Markets in Historical Perspective. “On the other side of
the spectrum, units with units with .50 or more slaves are clearly
plantations; the owners of these operations are undisputedly ‘planters.’ But
authors differ about where to set the dividing line between the largest
slave farm and the smallest slave plantation.”
Golliwoggs and Jim Crow
In her 1895 book Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in
the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher quotes an African
American housekeeper as saying, “I have seen very small white children
hang [lynch] their black dolls. It’s not the child’s fault; he is simply an apt
student.” These dolls featured raggedy clothes, black faces and large lips.
[40]
They were sometimes the target of rock-throwing white kids, who let their
racist sentiments fly, so to speak. What may be disturbing to some readers
is that many of these caricatures still exist in stores around the United
States and in other countries as well.
White racial hostility toward blacks abounded in the Jim Crow South.
Take the Golliwogg caricatures, for another example. In 1895, her book,
entitled The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, Florence
Kate Upton drew the illustrations, and her mother, Bertha Upton, wrote
the accompanying verse. The book’s main characters were two Dutch
dolls, Peg and Sarah Jane, and the Golliwogg. The story begins with Peg
and Sara Jane, on the loose in a toy shop, encountering ‘a horrid sight, the
blackest gnome.’ The little black ‘gnome’ wore bright red trousers, a red
bow tie on a high collared white shirt, and a blue swallow-tailed coat. He
was a caricature of American black faced minstrels – in effect, the
caricature of a caricature. She named him “Golliwogg.”
And, of course, there are also the “cute” statuettes, called
“lucky darkies,” still guarding the entrance gates to many
private homes in the South, as if to celebrate the plantation
years when black servants dressed likewise. These images
can now be found around the world: darky statues in
Europe and Thailand, “Darkie” toothpaste in Asia
(especially Japan) and in Australia. Robertson’s, the
manufacturer of such icons in the United States, finally
“retired” the Golly in 2002. Similarly, the children’s book
Little Black Sambo was deemed by some to be a slur to
Africans and African-Americans and was banned from
publication in the 1970s. Similarly, the Sambo’s restaurant chain failed
after attacks on its name and décor as racist.
Perhaps most offensive is the Tom caricature, encouraged by the Uncle
Tom character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great antebellum novel Uncle
Tom’s Cabin. The icon is best described on the Ferris University “Jim
Crow Museum” Web page: “The Tom caricature portrays black men as
[41]
faithful, happily submissive servants. The Tom caricature, like the
Mammy caricature, was born in antebellum America in the defense of
slavery. How could slavery be wrong, argued its proponents, if black
servants, males (Toms) and females (Mammies), were contented and
loyal? The Tom is presented as a smiling, wide-eyed, dark skinned server:
fieldworker, cook, butler, porter, or waiter…Tom is portrayed as a
dependable worker, eager to serve. Unlike the Brute, the Tom is docile
and non-threatening to whites. The Tom is often old, physically weak,
psychologically dependent on whites for approval.”
The debate continues over whether Golliwoggs are hated racial symbols or
just cute and lovable icons. However, campaigns have been conducted to
ban Golliwoggs in advertising, such as images of Aunt Jemima pancake
mix (Happifyin’ Aunt Jemima Pancakes Sho’ Sets Folks Singin’!”),
Uncle Remus tales, Uncle Ben’s rice, Rastus’ Cream of Wheat and the
dim-witted Buckwheat of the “Our Gang” film comedies (a.k.a. “The
Little Rascals”) television show. The Buckwheat character became
pejorative but, ironically, “Our Gang” was the only show on early
American television that showed whites and blacks as equals. Rastus was
portrayed as the perpetually happy black in minstrel shows whose name
went on to become a pejorative term for uneducated or under-educated
blacks. Some people find it hard to believe that many of these Golliwogg
images can still be found on the shelves of American supermarkets and
other stores.
In her excellent essay in the Journal of Negro History, Jessie W. Parkhurst
explains how the “Black Mammy” of antebellum plantations held an
honored position in the Southern aristocracy. She writes that most
aristocratic men in those days took pride in pointing out that they had been
raised by such slaves, who had real power within the plantation owners’
families. Mammies practically ran the everyday business of plantation
owners’ “big houses” and were even buried in special coffins instead of
the usual wooden boxes allotted to field hand slaves.
[42]
Black actress Hattie McDaniel
probably provided the best portrayal
of a “Black Mammy” in the 1939 film
Gone with the Wind. She became the
first African American to win an
Academy Award (best supporting
actress) and, ironically, had to walk
all the way to the stage from the back
of the segregated room. Some observers marveled that she had even been
invited to the 1940 ceremony held at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.
Demonstrators outside the building protested, holding up signs stating “no,
no mammy.” McDaniel’s long and slow walk to that stage paved the way
for black actors to receive academy awards, as did Sidney Poitier, Halle
Berry, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Basset, Danny Glover, Will Smith, Cuba
Gooding Jr., and others.
As Parkhurst observed, whites and blacks in the South differed on what
came out of slavery. The former often romanticized the Old South in
literature and films but the latter saw nothing good resulting from the
slavery experience. The Black Mammy became a hated symbol of
oppression to many African Americans, who tend to point out the uncanny
resemblance between the actress in Gone with the Wind and the
Goliwoggish Aunt Jemima character on Quaker Oats pancake mix boxes.
Any indicator of a “happy” or “contented” slave icon tends to irritate black
sensitivities. The last living person to play the iconic Aunt Jemima role
was Texan Rosie Hall, who was born in Robertson County, between
Hearne and Wheelock. From 1950 to 1967, Hall carried on the tradition of
traveling the country and serving pancakes wherever she went. She passed
in 1967 and a grave marker in her memory was finally erected in 1988.
[43]
Chapter Four
“The plantation mentality still prevails and policy tends too strongly
toward rehabilitation of the bankrupt planter.”
Journal of the Royal African Society, 1936
Plantation Mentality
orking-class blacks often define “freedom” as the battle against
plantation mentality, a pervasive Southern ethos promoting
white domination and demanding black subservience. This
mentality found fertile soil in the Brazos Valley in the 1800s, with its
cotton plantations and imported black slaves. In his 1969 PhD dissertation
entitled Black Texans 1900-1930, Bruce Alden Glasrud wrote: “Jim Crow
statutes grew more numerous [in the 1890s], Negroes were barred from
restaurants, hotels, bars, theaters, and other places where racial contact
might be possible.”
What, exactly, were Jim Crow laws? The term “Jim Crow” originated in
1830 when a white minstrel show performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice,
blackened his face with burnt cork and danced a jig while singing the
lyrics to the song, “Jump Jim Crow,” which was about a black stableman
of the same name:
W
[44]
“Weel about and turn about and do jis so,
Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.”
Beginning about the 1820s, white entertainers
began performing songs, skits, and dances in
blackface, often as the two stereotypical
characters of minstrelsy, Zip Coon and Jim Crow.
Schmoop.com explains further: “On the one hand, these routines, which
were tremendously popular throughout the United States—North and
South—for much of the 1800s and centered on blatantly racist, crude
caricatures of African-American language and life, played for white
laughs. But on the other, minstrelsy served as a vehicle for popularizing
Black secular music. The minstrel shows were, to borrow the phrase of the
historian Eric Lott, sites of ‘love and theft,’ and the racial dynamic of
showcase, appropriation, and ridicule became even more complicated as
Black performers—some of whom, such as W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey,
would become crucial blues figures—increasingly filled the ranks of the
white-owned touring minstrel companies after the Civil War.” Minstrel
shows were still being performed in Navasota as late as March 1963,
according to the Navasota Examiner.
The Draconian Jim Crow statutes followed closely on the heels of the
black codes passed in 1865-66. Although vagrancy was the central
concept of the black codes, Jim Crow statutes had the intent and the effect
of restricting African-Americans’ freedom, and of compelling them to
work in a labor economy based on low wages or perpetual debt, or both.
Both sets of laws formed the core of plantation mentality, which was
essentially a desire by Southerners to continue suppressing “inferior”
blacks as they had in the antebellum South.
Some would even argue that the roots of plantation mentality still have not
been completely eradicated. Lane Thibodeaux in an article entitled “Potent
Symbols of How Far We’ve Come” in the March 20, 2005 issue of the
Bryan-College Station Eagle, said the water fountains at the Brazos
[45]
County Courthouse spoke volumes about the lingering plantation
mentality. Until 2005, a sign above the fountains read “Out of Order,” but
they were not broken for whites. Before that the same sign used to read
something entirely different: “Whites Only.” White residents of the Brazos
Valley may have been poor, but they were determined not to be the lowest
rung on the sociological totem pole.
In the 1700s and 1800s, slaves working in the plantations knew mostly
picking cotton and other hard labor. There were few avenues for emotional
release – except in the mainly Baptist churches, which became the centers
of black communities. Not only for worship, these organizations provided
their congregations with social interaction, feasts, entertainment and above
all, singing. These black churches excelled at singing, and still do. Choirs
were not just providing the minister with a warm-up for the following
sermon, they were providing a form of high entertainment. Great singers
like Mahalia Jackson and Whitney Houston got their starts in church
choirs. One black singer famously stated: “We sang gospel hymns in
church on Sunday mornings and went to the jukes that night and sang the
blues. The words were different, but it was basically the same thing.” In an
online essay called “Rich Soil, Poor People: A Week in the Mississippi
Delta,” writer Daniel Warner says, “Before the blues, spirituals were sung
by the people as they picked cotton. B.B. King, a product of cotton
picking in the Delta himself, would say ‘Black folks were singing
spirituals so they wouldn’t drift into nothingness’.”
Times were hard in the Great Depression and hardly anybody had any
money, except the wealthy plantation owners along the Brazos River, in
the bottoms where cotton was grown. It had only been a couple of
generations since the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling in the
1890s. The attitude of most whites then was that African-Americans
should know their place in society, which in their opinion meant doing the
hard and dirty work and then discreetly staying a proper distance from
whites, while at the same time paying them respect. Jim Crow laws and
[46]
the Black Codes were still intact and blacks were expected to comply. The
KKK was very active then, always ready to make sure they did.
Suppression Gives Rise to Creativity
The river bottoms of the Brazos and Navasota produced hated symbols,
but they also produced artistic expression. Thibodeaux explains: “On the
northwest corner of West 55th and 9th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan is a
legacy of that expression. Opened in fall 2004, the building stands on
some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The building was
funded by some of the wealthiest individuals in this country. Ironically, its
existence can be directly attributed to the hardscrabble existence and
segregation experienced in the river bottoms of the Navasota and Brazos.”
The building is the home of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The
theater’s namesake, Alvin Ailey Jr., lived and worked in the Brazos Valley
before becoming America’s leading black expressionist dancer. He was
born in the town of Rogers, near Temple, but spent his formative years in
Navasota. Ailey’s mother worked as a domestic helper, while Alvin spent
time working in the cotton fields in the bottoms. Alvin Ailey left Navasota
in 1942 at age 12. He battled personal demons later in life and died of
AIDS in 1989 at age 58. In an attempt to avoid the stigmas associated with
AIDS at the time, Ailey asked his doctor to announce that he had a rare,
terminal blood disease called dyscrasia.
Like many others, Ailey’s experiences of observing and
living in the strict segregation and class distinctions that
existed in the Brazos Valley in the 1930s never left him.
His most celebrated work, Revelations, is an ode to the
passions and rhythms of his Deep South experiences,
especially the black churches of Navasota. There must be
something universal about the messages of Alvin Ailey
and his American Dance Theater, which has performed
for an estimated 21 million people in 48 states, as well as Alvin Ailey
[47]
71 countries on six continents. The company has often been an
ambassador for American culture, starting with President John F.
Kennedy’s Southeast Asia tour program in the early 1960s.
And, of course, there was the blues, the focus of this book. Many Brazos
Valley blues players went on to become legends of the blues genre: Mance
Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Texas” Alexander, Tom Cat Courtney,
Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson, to name just a few.
Navasota, Mance’s hometown, has been designated by Texas as the state’s
official Blues Capital. However, that is only one reason this work will
spotlight the many achievements of Mance Lipscomb, who liked to be
called a “songster” and not a bluesman because his repertoire included
songs from many different musical genres. Violence was often a mainstay
of blues songs, such as “Texas Blues.” This is definitely a blues song as it
adheres to the typical AAB repetition and I-IV-V chord progression.
“Walked all night long with my pistol in my hand. x2
When I found my woman she was with some other man.
Shot that woman, man I thought she’d die. x2
Yeah I hit her across the head, know’d I blacked her eye.
It’s a low down, low down dirty shame. x2
Have a half bad woman and you scared to call her name.
My babe done quit me put all my clothes outdoors.
My Woman done quite throw’d all my clothes out the do’ (door).
That’s all right mama you gonna reap just what you sow.
Late last winter when it was chillin’ cold. x2
My woman put me out didn’t have nowhere to go.
I didn’t have no money, my shoes had done worn thin. x2
I didn’t have a decent pair of pants to go to Sunday school in.
That’s alright things about to come my way. x2
Got change in my pocket, change of clothes every day.”
Most of the jukes in Brazos, Washington and Grimes Counties have long
since closed, but there was where much of the Texas blues was created.
What was it about the Brazos Valley that contributed to such artistic
[48]
creativity? Perhaps the downward pressure on the black population during
Reconstruction and afterwards created something special in the form of
the blues in this part of country, much as the Mississippi Delta gave the
world a string of master bluesmen such as B.B. King, Robert Johnson,
Muddy Waters, “Son” House, and many others. Although they probably
never had more than a casual encounter while sharing a bill, maybe Mance
Lipscomb and Muddy Waters were kindred spirits who shared a similar
kind of mojo. The way Ma Rainy, often called the mother of the blues, put
it: “White folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got
there.”
The Miss Kitty Problem
Black writer Sunny Nash, like Ailey, sensed that something was amiss in
society at an early age. In her book Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s,
the young writer finds her angst on a flickering TV screen. The 12-year
old growing up in north Bryan’s Candy Hill district (so-called because of
the “sweet” smell of its many wooden outhouses) was lucky enough to
have a TV at that age. She loved to watch westerns in the early 1960s.
“The washed-out television portrayal of the Old West didn’t intrigue me
as much as bother me, making me uneasy with myself and my world…I
sensed there was something wrong about the way it was spread out so
neatly before me.” Miss Kitty, the busty saloon proprietress, smiling from
one side of her mouth, was the character Sunny found the most irritating.
“Miss Kitty’s long black eyelashes stood apart like a frog’s toes. No
longer hearing what she said, I stared at the contrast between the
prominent round mole beside her mouth and the porcelain quality of her
very pale face.” Where were the black cowboys?
Perhaps this bewilderment with the way the world
operated and the lack of any real opportunities is what
drove black intellectuals like Sunny Nash out of Brazos
County. Sunny went to California, where she still lives
and works. Her cousin, singer Johnny Nash (“I Can See
Clearly Now”), still lives near Bryan. Sunny was quoted
Sunny Nash
[49]
as growing much more despondent of the black situation in an article
entitled “Shall We Overcome Our Racial Divide: Can We Bridge the Gap
between Blacks and Whites in Bryan/College Station?” in Insite Magazine
in February 1997, when the little girl from Candy Hill was much older,
writer Cynthia Nevels quoted her as much more despondent about the
racial situation. Sunny continues:
“But when the light is out, and the hope is gone, then people just
don’t try anymore. They actually give up. They throw up both their
hands, they’ll do anything. They don’t care about other people’s
property, because they don’t have any; they don’t feel like they
will ever have any. They don’t care about their physical bodies,
because they take drugs, they drink – why try to take care of the
body, why try to do anything right if none of that is going to make
your life better?”
What, then, would make life better? Education is the only force that can
break the vicious cycle, if applied in sufficient quantities.
“I was about your age when the Supreme Court used the railroad to
legalize what they called ‘separate but equal’ in 1896,” Bigmama
explained to young Sunny Nash. “Plessy vs. Ferguson made things
separate, but it sure didn’t make them equal.”
Part Cherokee Bigmama also told Sunny that a young black girl named
Linda Brown, who had sued her school district in Topeka Kansas for
forcing her to attend inferior schools, set fire to the school integration
movement. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1954; the
ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education laid the legal framework for the
dismantling of Jim Crow education by declaring that “separate but equal”
was inherently unequal.
However, anti-Jim Crow reformers found it tough sledding in Brazos
County. Schools, for example, fought integration for some 10 years until
finally opening their doors to blacks in 1971, making Brazos County
school districts some of the last in the nation to fully integrate.
[50]
“Was Jim Crow before or after the South lost the war?” The young Sunny
Nash was perplexed as she asked this question of Bigmama.
“The North may have won the Civil War in the history books, but the
South didn’t lose,” answered the old lady. “The North gave the South
everything the South was fighting to keep; because the North, the South,
the West, and the East all wanted the same thing – us in a low place.”
The Significance of the Gay Nineties
The “Gay Nineties” refers to a special era in American history in which
Northeastern industrialists were amassing great fortunes. Railroad
construction was sweeping the country and the Carnegies, Mellons and
Rockefellers were cleaning up. The rest of the country was not doing so
well economically, but “decadent” art, witty stage plays and women’s
suffrage movements were in full bloom. Businessmen and women of all
stripes look back nostalgically on a decade good for business because it
pre-dated the income tax. America’s dominance of markets in South
America and in the Caribbean meant that a new set of wealthy individuals
and families was coming to the fore in the Northeast. The “high life” of
these families was well documented in the novels of Booth Tarkington and
Edith Wharton. Mark Twain called the decade “The Gilded Age,”
referring to a period of great wealth that was also riddled with a lot of
crime. However, a serious economic crash called “The Panic of 1893,”
cooled off markets, setting off a deep recession that lasted until 1897.
Conversely, the agrarian economy of the South was depressed during the
entire decade. Cotton was still king, but the lofty reforms of
Reconstruction had run upon some serious difficulties, especially after the
Northern troops ended their occupation in 1877. The rapacious
carpetbaggers had mostly left, but the Supreme Court ruling in the Plessy-
Ferguson case of 1896 pretty much reversed the push for integration by
ruling that accommodations for blacks could be “separate but equal.”
Southern whites rejoiced by instituting the Black Codes and writing up
[51]
Jim Crow laws to control the blacks. The number of black men lynched
during the decade skyrocketed. Many Southern planters and plantation
owners in the antebellum period had lost much of their wealth because it
had been measured mostly by the number of slaves they owned. Of course,
the value of a slave had dropped to zero in mid-1865.
But why did the number of lynchings skyrocket during this giddy decade?
Why did white people lynch blacks at all? A Wikipedia article (from the
University of North Texas) on lynching seems to give a few hints:
“Historians point to the legacy of slavery, the cotton culture that relied on
exploited black labor, the frustrated aggressions of whites especially
where economic competition with blacks existed, the weak constraints
against white mob violence, and racist ideology. One of the most
important reasons why lynching increased in the 1890s was the economy.
In 1893 the nation suffered the worst depression in its history up to that
time; it lasted until 1897 and brought 20 percent unemployment. Cotton
prices plummeted to 5.8 cents a pound in some areas. Factories laid off
workers, displacing them from mill villages and creating real hardships.
There was a correlation between the price of cotton and lynchings. More
lynching occurred when cotton prices plummeted and when the economy
drove people from their jobs. Other causes for the increased number of
lynchings include the rise of the Populist party and agrarian threats to the
political status quo, the rise of radical theories and assumptions on the
savagery of the black race, and with cotton reaching its lowest point in
1895.”
“Honor was the ancient code, prevalent in the antebellum South, which
held the region together. It was also the cement that bound white
Southerners to the concept that they were “superior” and that black slaves
were akin to soulless animals, only good for working the fields and for
producing offspring who would continue the same oppressive cycle,”
explains the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. White slave owners felt
[52]
that way because slaves were their possessions, bought and paid for, fair
and square. Indeed, an owner’s net worth equaled the number of slaves he
possessed.
One ploy, used to justify many lynchings of Southern black men, was the
“black beast rapist” theory. Author Lisa Cardyn explains in an article
entitled “Sexualized Racism” in the Michigan Law Review: “If the iconic
white woman personified purity, sanctity, and virtue, all that was good
about the South, the imagined black man was her natural antithesis: base,
predatory and lascivious, a blight upon the region and its prospects. The
rape of the esteemed white woman by a black man of this description was
regarded with singular horror, for such an attack defiled not only its
proximate victim, but also the entire southland as well.” Joel Williamson
in Crucible of Race puts the matter this way: “In their frustration, white
men projected their own worst thoughts upon black men, imagined them
acted out in some specific incident, and symbolically killed those thoughts
by lynching a hapless black man. Almost any vulnerable black man would
do.”
Lynching, however, also required community support for its survival.
“Community support protected the lynchers from interference or
prosecution. The public statements of prominent citizens supported
lynching and thus boosted the morale of the lynchers. Primarily, public
support for lynching reflected the white man’s fear of the Negro. People
viewed lynching as a means of keeping the Negro ‘in his place’ — inferior
to the white man,” wrote David L. Chapman in his thesis called Lynching
in Texas at Texas Tech University in August 1973. Chapman later became
a historian and archivist at Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library.
[53]
Boll Weevils and Electric Chairs
The cotton fields of Texas were decimated by a boll weevil plague in
1890, explains author Rick Koste in Texas Music (1998), causing destitute
black workers to leave for big cities to find work, ironically spreading the
blues to Dallas and Houston. “These urban substructures each evolved
their own blues communities [Deep Ellum-Central Track district and Fifth
Ward, respectively] and it thus became possible for someone like Blind
Lemon Jefferson to become the first authentic Texas blues star.” One of
Blind Lemon’s hits, reflecting the fear of dying a violent death, was
’Lectric Chair Blues:
“I want to shake hands with my partner and ask him how come he’s here
I want to shake hands with my partner, ask him how come he’s here
I had a wreck with my family, they’re gonna send me to the electric chair.
I wonder why they electrocute a man at the one o’clock hour of night
And I wonder why they electrocute a man at the one o’clock hour of night
Because the current is much stronger, when the folks has turned out all the
lights.
I sat in the electrocutin’ room, my arms folded up and cryin’
I sat in the electrocutin’ room, my arms folded up and cryin’
And my baby asked the question, was they gonna electrocute that man of
mine?
Lemon, get me a taxi to take me away from here
Lemon, get me a taxi to take me all away from here
I haven't had a good friend in this world, since they lead Lemon to the
electric chair.
I feel like jumpin’ in the ocean, I feel like jumpin’ in the deep blue sea
I feel like jumpin’ in the ocean, and like jumpin’ into the deep blue sea
[54]
But nothin’ like that wrecked in my heart when they brought my
electrocuted daddy to me.
The White Man’s Union Association
By 1890, the times had changed dramatically from the lofty goals set
down by Reconstruction planners. “The goal of Reconstruction was to
readmit the South on terms that were acceptable to the North: full political
civility and equality for blacks, and a denial of political rights of the
whites who had been leaders of the secession movement. The main
condition for re-admittance was that at least 10 percent of the voting
population in 1860 take an oath of allegiance to the Union,” pointed out a
PBS documentary entitled “US Slave: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.” Of
course, these Southern whites resented the gains being made by blacks
during the military occupation and thereafter. In addition to the terrorist
KKK, the “White Man’s Union Association” began springing up in
several Brazos Valley counties in the late 1800s as the number of voting
blacks began to seriously threaten the strength of the white vote.
By the year 1890, Brazos County’s African-American population reached
8,845 making blacks the majority. Despite the majority (or most likely
because of the majority) local Anglo Democrats instituted a “White Man’s
Campaign” in 1890 in several counties bordering the Brazos River to
prevent African-Americans from nominating and voting for political
candidates, thereby preventing the possibility of victory by a black
candidate or even an Anglo “scalawag,” i.e. a white person who would
fight for the advancement of blacks. Scalawags were dealt with severely as
can be seen in a gun battle that broke out around the Anderson court house
on November 7, 1900. It is a cautionary tale of a white sheriff who stood
up for the 13th
14th
and 15th
Amendments (the last specifically gave black
Americans the right to vote) and nearly lost his life in the process in a
gunfight in broad daylight in downtown Anderson, the seat of Grimes
County.
[55]
Chapter Five
“Now you go out there and raise all the hell you want, kill who you want,
just so you don’t get killed. All you got to do is make it back here, back to
my place.”
Tom Moore, as quoted by a black Texas farmer
The Tom Moore Farm
tarting in the late 1920s, five Moore brothers (Tom, Harry, Clarence,
Steve, Walker) established a very large cotton farm of 15,000 acres
near Navasota that was operated more like a plantation than a
modern farm. Walker had bought land there as early as 1911. Texas
Monthly magazine described Tom, the most powerful of the brothers,
thusly: “Tom Moore was a notorious twentieth-century plantation owner
along the Brazos River, near Navasota, who ran his land and the mostly
African-American sharecroppers on it as if it were the nineteenth century
instead.”
Tom (1901-97) and his brother Harry (1903-88) were the one-two punch
of plantation mentality power in Grimes, Brazos and Washington Counties
in Texas for decades, a sort of white man’s law unto themselves. Tom
ruled the farm with an iron hand while Harry was the farm’s chief
politician, with his reach extending all the way to the Oval Office,
S
[56]
occupied during the late sixties by his good friend Lyndon Johnson. But it
was mainly Tom who received the brunt of black hatred aimed at the farm
and its chief administrator. A line from one blues song referred to Tom
Moore as the devil incarnate. The reference was in a song called “Three
Moore Brothers” by a black prisoner named Joseph “Chinaman” Johnson,
on a recording released in 1965. Here is how the song began:
“Well, who is that I see come ridin’, boy,
down on the low turn row?
Nobody but Tom Devil,
That’s the man they call Tom Moore.”
A fair criticism or not, Tom Moore became the chief antagonist for several
blues songs. “Tom Moore’s Farm” was recorded by at least six different
performers, with the words being slightly different, but the refrain
remaining the same.
The Tom and Harry Team
The brothers Tom and Harry were close to such powerful Texas
politicians of the day as (later president) Lyndon B. Johnson and
subsequent governor of Texas John Connally. Johnson was sometimes
seen on the Moore farm playing poker with “the boys.” Harry boasted that
he could walk into the White House and get a meeting with the president
anytime he wanted while Johnson occupied
the Oval Office.
Tom Moore also used paroled convicts as
workers on the farm. According to Bruce
Jackson’s 1999 book Wake Up Dead Man:
Hard Labor and Southern Blues, “Moore
once intercepted a letter and tracked down a
farm escapee who had run off to Mexico, and brought the man back to the
farm. Another story in the book focuses on how Moore gave men on the
[57]
farm the option to select any car they wanted. The problem was: Since
anyone driving a car on the farm was trapped, the car could never be
driven off the land.”
An article in The Houston Press entitled “Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance
Lipscomb and the Legend of Tom Moore’s Farm” suggests that Harry,
like his brother Tom, was not someone to be messed with: “Anna Mae
Hunt’s 1984 book I Am Annie Mae gives an account of hellish life on the
farm, which she claimed harkened back to slavery times. Mance
Lipscomb’s 1993 book I Say Me for a Parable, as told to Glen Alyn, also
gives a perspective on the Moore farm from Lipscomb’s home in
Navasota. By one account, Harry Moore was supposedly just as ruthless
and feared as Tom Moore, but since there isn’t much info about him
floating around and he isn’t a character in blues songs like his brother, that
part of the story is still more of a mystery.”
One of the few incidents of Moore brutality to break into public view was
the July 1948 beating of a black parolee named John Roe. According to
Roe’s account from his Austin hospital bed, he had asked Tom Moore to
use a farm truck to take his sick child to the doctor. Moore denied the
request and told him to get back to work. When Roe persisted, Moore
struck him with a shovel, then pistol-whipped him and chased him,
bumping him with a truck fender, as Roe ran for his life with a broken arm
and other injuries.
The farmworker managed to get to Austin, more than 100 miles away,
where he reported the incident to the state parole board. He was admitted
to Brackenridge Hospital and told his story to a Texas Ranger, the chief of
the parole division, a Salvation Army captain and a stenographer.
According to newspaper accounts, investigations were launched by a
Brazos County grand jury, the Rangers and the FBI, as well as the Austin
branch of the NAACP and the local Communist Party, to determine if
peonage was being practiced on Tom Moore’s farm. What if anything ever
came of these investigations is unclear, and Moore descendants say that
[58]
Tom Moore was cleared of any wrongdoing. An article on the Roe
incident in the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper, noted
that a similar incident had involved Harry Moore, a few months before.
The victim in that case was identified only as “Mr. Walker.”
Exploding Safes, Black Lovers
In their book From Can See to Can’t: Texas Cotton Farmers on the
Southern Prairies, authors Thad Sitton and Dan K. Utley quote a black
farmer named Bubba Bowser of Washington County, a friend of Mance
Lipscomb’s, about the Moore brothers:
“They wasn’t just white folks, they was the law. An American white man,
he is the law. An American white man is Uncle Sam. I say something
about the law to Mr. Tom [Moore], he say, ‘Hell Bubba, we the law, me
and the white people is the law. We Uncle Sam. We make the laws and
break ’em, we the government.’ This here’s American white man country,
and he rules it, just what he say go. Mr. Tom used to tell them old n*ggers,
‘Now you go out there and raise all the hell you want, kill who you want,
just so you don’t get killed. All you got to do is make it back here, back to
my place’.”
Sunny Nash, the black writer/singer from Bryan who migrated to
California, recalled that a lot of the blues songs were really work songs
from the farms. She also remembered hearing songs about Tom Moore
and his farm. “Everybody was afraid of those people, the Moore brothers.”
She played piano for a church on the Moore farm near Cawthon until her
dad told her he’d rather she wouldn’t go back. “I never heard anyone call
the Moores mean, just that it was dangerous after dark if you didn’t belong
there. People disappeared, and law had no power there.”
In an interview with Matt Moore at the old headquarters of the Moore
Farm, I was taken on a tour of the old Moore cotton gin there. Matt
showed me an old safe on the second floor which used to hold payroll
money as well as weapons of black workers. Just to make sure that nobody
[59]
broke into the safe, it was rigged with an explosive device and cyanide
gas, Matt explained. Ruthless, yes, but very effective.
It was an open secret that Harry Moore (Matt’s grandfather) had a black
lover named Mama Nitt, who lived near the Moore Farm. She told this
author that Harry was very good to her and that if she needed something
from Harry, all that she had to do was ask. Mama Nitt owned a juke joint
near Navasota called the Big Wheel, where many blues bluesmen gave
live performances during the Chitlin’ Circuit days, and thereafter.
White Violence at Work
John Shelton Reed, an authority on Southern violence, argues in The
Encyclopedia of Southern Culture that “the concept of justifiable homicide
is at the heart of the southern tendency to violence. One carries a gun or
knife because one might have to use it, and one uses it because the
occasion merits it. Much of the literature and popular culture of the South
revolves around violence, which is often viewed in a neutral or even
laudatory way. For Southerners, murder in defense of honor, after
sufficient provocation, is often tragic rather than simply wrong.”
If what Reed wrote is true, then would it be a stretch to argue that the
white man’s racism could be mimicked by his black workers? Especially
if their boss is telling them to go out and kill whoever you want, but come
back to the farm and I will protect you from the law?
Other writers carry this argument one step further. “One of the most
pernicious and dehumanizing effects of white racism has been the
gradations of skin color within the black population to take on
characteristics of a caste system,” wrote Giles Oakley in his 1997 book
entitled The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues. “The closer the color
was to white, the more attractive they were felt to be even among black
people.” Or as Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell sang, “A black man
give you a dollar, you won’t think it nothin’ strange, Yellow man give you
a dollar he’ll want back 95 cents change.”
[60]
Finally, one oppressed black worker decided to do something about all the
injustices. He wrote a song which became a classic Texas blues ballad. A
Texas Monthly article entitled “The Secret History of Texas Music, Tom
Moore’s Farm” stated: “In the mid-thirties, a young sharecropper named
Yank Thornton, fed up with Moore’s brutal methods—making the laborers
toil for long hours in the sun, keeping them in line with threats and
violence—began writing verses about him and singing them at local
dances: ‘Standing on the levee with his spurs in his horse’s flank, whip in
his hand watching his boys from bank to bank’.”
In the long run, it was the Thornton-Lipscomb song “Tom Moore’s Farm”
that survived the test of time, being re-recorded in at least six different
versions by other blues musicians. Its message goes to the core of the
white-on-black problem that has so pervaded the history of the Brazos
Valley. Here are the lyrics to the original.
Tom Moore’s Farm
Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing, you know
This black man done was wrong
Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing, you know
This black man done was wrong
Yes, you know I moved my wife and family down
On Mr. Tom Moore’s farm
Yeah, you know Mr. Tom Moore’s a man
He don’t never stand and grin
He just said, “Keep out of the graveyard, I’ll save you from the pen”
You know, soon in the morning, he’ll give you scrambled eggs
Yes, but he’s liable to call you so soon
You’ll catch a mule by his hind legs
Yes, you know I got a telegram this morning, boy
It read, it say, “Your wife is dead”
I show it to Mr. Moore, he said, “Go ahead, n*gger
You know you got to plow old Red”
[61]
The Texas Monthly piece continues: “Thornton sang unaccompanied,
though a guitarist named Mance Lipscomb—who was a sharecropper on a
farm next to Moore’s plantation—helped him shape the verses into an
actual song. Lipscomb began playing ‘Tom Moore’s Farm’ too, and his
version soon became popular at black gatherings.”
Publicly stating in a song that
Tom Moore would not give a
black worker time off even to
attend his wife’s funeral was a
dangerous road to travel. Both
Thornton and Lipscomb knew
the hazards of criticizing the
Moore family at that time.
Either of both could have
become targets for revenge. “If
he knew I put out a song like that,” Lipscomb once told musicologist and
blues historian Robert “Mack” McCormick, “I couldn’t live here [in
Navasota] no more. I wouldn’t live six months if he knowed that. He got
people out there come out here set this house on fire.” Mance did not think
he was exaggerating either as he had heard many stories of black bodies
found floating face down in the nearby Brazos River.
Of course, the existence of a 1933 recording brings into question the
origin story of the song. Since many blues songs were reworkings of songs
sung on farms or performed in prison, it’s entirely possible that Thornton
and Lipscomb refashioned an older a Capella song into a blues version
with guitar accompaniment, with the instrumental breaks filling the space
earlier occupied by the sounds of work and breathing.
It was McCormick who discovered Lipscomb and Hopkins, introducing
them to much larger audiences starting from the late 1950s. So Mack,
The Moore Brothers' Store
[62]
deeply aware of the Tom Moore song’s true meaning, wrote in the liner to
his Treasury of Field Recordings: “This is a true song of protest, but it is
important to appreciate exactly what it is protesting. It is not protesting the
evils of the sharecropping system on any broad economic level. It is not
protesting Tom Moore’s wealth gained from the sweat of others. It is
simply a brutally truthful characterization of one particular hardened
opportunist who had taken advantage and mistreated his laborers.”
It’s not just the contents of the song that irritated McCormick, he had
strong words about Tom Moore, the man. “Tom Moore is castigated not
because he is cruel and unjust, but because he is too cruel and too unjust,
more so than the status quo permits. His actions have been extreme, else
he would not have achieved this kind of recognition from the people of the
tenant farm culture.” Mack had many more blues stories to tell but his
master work The Blues Come to Texas is still unfinished and unpublished.
Mack passed away in Houston at the age of 85 in 2015. McCormick’s
collaboration with Paul Oliver ended acrimoniously. Texas A&M
University Press will publish the book in early 2019 as The Blues Come to
Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book, Compiled
by Alan Govenar with Documentation and Essays by Alan Govenar and
Kip Lornell.
The Farm Itself
Black activist and author Annie
Mae Hunt explained that
Washington County was free but
Grimes County preserved slavery,
probably referring to the Tom
Moore farm as it was the biggest in
the area. It was also where she was
raised, claiming that living there The railroad depot at Allenfarm
[63]
was a “nightmare.” While blacks like Hunt tended to vilify the farm,
whites often held more ambiguous views.
Take Russell Cushman, a local businessman and author who once
operated the Blues Alley Store and Museum in downtown Navasota. Until
recently, he was an organizer of the annual blues festival called “Blues
Fest” there every August in honor of Mance Lipscomb. Cushman not only
knew Tom Moore, but thought highly of the man. That affinity shines
through in some of his writing, but generally speaking, Cushman provides
a balanced and penetrating look at the Texas blues and at the notorious
farm and its owners who inadvertently helped create this music.
Cushman was a longtime Navasota resident, relocated to Bellville, who
maintains an Internet blog called Blues Valley, which extols the vast
beauty that was found on the Tom Moore farm. Also, a well-known local
artist, Cushman was commissioned to do a painting of the farm and was
given a “dime tour” of the property by Tom Moore himself. “The farm
coursed along 25 miles of the Brazos River and spanned over 15,000
acres,” explained Cushman. “I saw settlers’ ruins, purebred Brangus cattle,
oil wells, the Tom J. Moore gin, the Moore headquarters at Allenfarm, the
infamous Big Wheel juke joint, and Graball, an ideal ranching community
because everybody was trying to grab all they could of it. And Tom got
the most of it. He considered it to be the most beautiful, desirable land in
America.”
Of course, that viewpoint is debatable.
Anyone who has been to or lived in the
Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia
or the wine-producing fields of the
Northern California area would
probably beg to disagree. Moore was more likely expressing his pride in
having developed a rough Texas landscape into a beautifully manicured
The Moore cotton gin
[64]
farm. But perhaps it was more than pride that pushed Tom Moore to
succeed, where others had failed.
Cushman explains: “Like many old-time fathers of his generation, Tom
Moore seemed determined to prove that his sons would never be smarter
or tougher, and he never reached the day when he was ready to hand it [the
farm] over. No wonder some black people were afraid of him, even his
own sons deferred to him. Nobody had the guts to tell Tom to quit driving.
One day, while in his mid-nineties, after driving away unconsciously from
a little fender-bender, the Navasota cops finally respectfully followed him
home and just took his car keys from him.”
The power of the Moores went a lot further than intimidating their workers
or getting velvet-glove treatment from the local cops. Tom and Harry had
real political clout at very high levels. Local folklore contains many stories
of black workers dying while “trying to swim across the Brazos River” to
escape their bondage. These stories have it that the bodies of many of
those escapees were either riddled with bullet holes or wrapped in heavy
chains. The problem was that proof was hard to come up with as these
bodies were never found. “Harry Moore was an honorary badge carrier of
the Texas Rangers. Since many of the Moore bosses were armed prison
guards, problems rarely developed or lasted very long,” concluded
Cushman.
“The Moores ran their own Justice of the Peace
court, and to some degree, were the ‘Law East of the
Brazos,’ and enjoyed considerable influence on local
lawmen and notable Texas politicians like Senator
Lyndon Baines Johnson,” says Cushman. “Johnson’s
first job after marrying ‘Ladybird’ was to go to work
for his father-in-law at a creosote plant on the
northern outskirts of Navasota. He became a lifelong
associate of the Moores then.” Naturally, the Moores’
Russell Cushman
[65]
influence rose along with Johnson’s surging power first in Texas and then
nationally after being elected a Democratic Senator, t. hen Vice President
and finally President of the United States.
Johnson became President by default in 1963 after John F. Kennedy was
assassinated in Dallas. LBJ was elected president in 1964 and after signing
the Voting Rights Act in the following year, Johnson reportedly told two
senators on Air Force One that “I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic
for the next 200 years.” In any event, Texas flipped from being a blue
state, turning solidly red shortly thereafter. Many believe it was due to
Johnson’s civil rights actions during the mid to late 1960s. Whether or not
that statement is accurate, it is true that the “flip” coincided with LBJ’s
days in the Oval Office. Throughout the 1970s up until the present day,
the Republican Party has ruled supreme for Texans, meaning mostly white
Texans. According to some sources, including newsman Bill Moyers, who
served as an aide to Johnson, LBJ realized that when he signed the 1964
Civil Rights Act, he delivered the South to the GOP. Others question
whether the power-hungry Texan really uttered those words. If he did, he
proved prophetic.
A Lawless Hurricane
Geographically, Texas gets its fair share of hurricanes coming off the Gulf
Coast. But those high gusts of wind are due to atmospheric changes of
pressure. What can we say about psychological hurricanes caused by
lawlessness, social injustice, prejudice and ignorance? Perhaps we can say
that certain geographical areas, such as Texas’ Brazos Valley, have indeed
stirred up such hurricanes. Maybe we can even narrow our analysis down
to two main causes: violence and hardship.
“This intense violence and hardship made Navasota the eye of a lawless
hurricane that slung people in every direction. A heartless place of
heartbreak and injustice and psychological trauma, few who drank from its
poisonous backwater could stay long. Nobody clings to bad memories or
the ground that hosts them. Only the toughest of the tough could call it
[66]
home. Only those with a mountain of Faith could still find the hope or
strength required to stay. And those that stayed, generation after
generation, prayed a lot, and some sang a lot, and many of them sang the
blues,” writes Cushman.
The Tom Moore Farm Today
As soon as the Moore family moved into the Brazos Valley, they started
buying up the best properties in order to create their new farm. One of
their first purchases was Allenfarm, a large cotton farm utilizing prison
labor. It was then owned by John D. Rodgers, whose family was among
the early settlers in the valley. On this land, the Moores built their
company store and cotton gins, the core of the entire operation. At its
peak, Allenfarm had its own post office, railroad station, two churches and
three gins. Many of these landmarks can still be seen today, including the
old bell that called workers to work, told them it was time to eat and
signaled the end of the working day. I was told that Tom’s daughter has
the bell at her home, so it’s not really on public view.
In March 1887, the Dallas Morning News reported: “This farm
[Allenfarm] is worked on shares by the State, with second-class convicts,
consisting of old men, young boys and cripples – those whose physical
defects prevent their being first-class laborers, and the number is kept up
to an average of 100.” Old man Rodgers reportedly did not favor the idea
of hiring black workers, so that probably explains why they were not
mentioned in the above newspaper report about the farm. The Moores did
not have such compunctions, as they relied heavily on black labor. They
were not opposed to using prison labor though, even putting captured
Nazis to work during WWII (from a nearby concentration camp). Tom and
his brother Harry ruled their farm with an iron hand, but nobody lives
forever.
[67]
After the passing of Tom and
Harry, business as usual began
to change. Part of the vast
Moore farm was sold off to the
King Ranch, the largest of the
South Texas ranches. Cotton
and alfalfa growing gradually
morphed into the seed business
known as “Thomas Moore
Feed,” especially under the
tutelage of Texas A&M educated Matt Moore.
The next generation of Moores had an even more exotic plan; they
developed another part of the old farm into a facility dedicated to getting
people married. As the Moores’ own website states: “Harry’s great
grandfather, Harry H. Moore started the farm and ranch in 1928 and Harry
B. and Tara [wife] started hosting weddings and events on the property in
2010. Harry continues to work on the farm and ranch today with his
father, Jerry Moore.” These days, business as usual on the Tom Moore
farm has an entirely different ring to it. Perhaps the evils of the past have
finally been buried beneath the rich alluvial soil of the Brazos Valley
farm.
There can be little doubt that the original
Tom Moore farm, where many blacks saw
much evil lurking, became the main
antagonist for blues song creation in the
Brazos Valley. But some writers, like
Russell Cushman, see a great irony there as
well. “In some strange twist, it is many of
Navasota’s white population who are the
ones that have preserved the blues, loved
them and celebrated them, as if they know
just how important they are as documents of The old dinner bell at Terrell Farm
[68]
a time and a history locked up in the iron box. Every year I see a handful
of the great-grandchildren of these white plantation families, coming back
to Navasota to enjoy the Navasota Blues Fest. Ironically these are many of
the folks I must give the credit for reviving Trans-Brazos Blues and the
story behind them.”
[69]
Chapter Six
“Most of his repertoire seemed to be on like a computer disc in his head.”
Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records
Mance Lipscomb, Songster
n the afternoon of June 30, 1960, Mance Lipscomb was at work
supervising a crew cutting grass along the highway in Grimes
County, when two white men came to his house. They talked to
his wife, Elnora, and learned that her husband would be home soon, so
they waited. When he drove up, they introduced themselves as Mack
McCormick and Chris Strachwitz, folklore researchers looking for blues
players. They had driven up from Houston, where McCormick lived.
Lipscomb was wary. As he told a friend and fellow musician, Michael
Birnbaum, the two had first gone to the Navasota office of Tom Moore.
Moore, Lipscomb said, “was sorta jumpy
about all the bad things he done, thought
Chris and Mack was some Secret Service
men hunting him. He didn’t talk so good. He
said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to see nobody because
all my hands happy out yonder.’ If they were
Secret Service men, he thought they might let
O
Mance Lipscomb at home
[70]
him off that way. So, Mack insisted, wanted to take his picture, and he
wouldn’t do it.” Moore said he knew of a good guitarist but wouldn’t
name him and refused to go with them. “He kept saying his hands were
happy,” Lipscomb said.
Moore advised McCormick and Strachwitz to “go down on the colored
run and talk to old Peg Leg.” They found the one-legged man at a beer
joint, and he directed them to Lipscomb’s house on Piedmont Road.
When he returned from work, they asked him to play, and he sat on the
tailgate of his pickup truck and played “St. Louis Blues.” They dismissed
that as “white folks’ music” and said they wanted to hear the music he
played for Saturday night suppers in the river bottom. Lipscomb was
surprised to hear this request from the two white visitors, but agreed that
they could return after he had cleaned up and had eaten dinner.
His wife was angry, but he prevailed, and when they returned, they asked
him to get his guitar and play for them in the kitchen, where they set up a
microphone and a tape recorder—the first one Lipscomb had seen. “I
wondered what the devil them people was fixin’ to do,” he said. “Might
want to hurt me or something. I say, ‘Well, they here, all I can do is watch
‘em; if they make any crooked moves, it’ll be me and them. I might not
could whip them, but I be tryin’.” He figured he could head-butt
Strachwitz, a tall man, in the belly and get away from the shorter, stockier
McCormick. Elnora Lipscomb was pacified when her husband showed her
the money the men had given him.
As it turned out, of course, the two white men had “discovered”
Lipscomb, who commenced, at an age when many were ready to retire, a
musical career that involved getting paid more than the “fifty cents and a
fish sandwich” he had received for playing those Saturday night suppers
for decades. But Lipscomb was wise to be wary, and so was Tom Moore,
for Grimes County, 80 miles northwest of Houston and 20 miles south of
Texas A&M University, was a vestige of the Old South with a long and
bloody racist history that had gotten the Moores in trouble a few years
before.
[71]
Mance, having lived all his life with racial oppression, which he called
“the pressure,” knew how to get along with white people without being an
Uncle Tom and performed for the Moores and other local whites. He was
widely respected in the black community where he lived and was known
as “Daddy Mance.” He and Elnora raised numerous children, including
more than 20 sired by their son, a farmer known as Little Mance.
Mance Sr. had made the best of a tough life. His
father, a fiddler who played for local dances,
vanished when Mance was young, and he was
working by the time he was 12. When the town
fathers hired Frank Hamer in 1908 to tame the
wild and woolly place, the legendary lawman
recruited the teenage Mance to drive him around.
Lipscomb said “Mr. Hayman,” as he called him,
was a “bad man” – not evil but tough as a boot.
Hamer is remembered now largely for leading the
posse that tracked and killed outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow
near Gibsland, Louisiana, in May 1934. After a fusillade of gunfire stilled
the pair, Hamer stepped toward the bullet-riddled Ford V8 sedan. “Be
careful, Cap, they may not be dead,” another lawman cautioned. “If
they’re not, they soon will be,” Hamer shot back.
This, then, was the violent, racist atmosphere in which Mance Lipscomb
became a man at an early age. He also took to music as a child, and liked
to recount his acquisition of his first guitar, about the time Hamer came to
town. Around Navasota at that time, banjos and fiddles were the primary
instruments, but Mance’s brothers had guitars, and he wanted one. When a
gambler came walking through the field one day and offered to sell an old
beat-up instrument for $1.50, Mance’s mother, Jane, agreed as long as she
could pay the man when she got the money. Mance said he sat under a tree
and “whammed away,” without any idea what he was doing, and at night
could hardly sleep for dreaming of guitars. Mance learned songs from
Legendary lawman Hamer
[72]
itinerant musicians and, on a cotton-picking trip to North Texas around
1917, saw Blind Lemon Jefferson singing along Central Track in Dallas.
He admired Jefferson’s playing and singing but decided that, rather than
imitating anyone, he would “estimate my own style.”
A Wild Streak
Like many young men, Mance had a wild streak. As he told Allan Turner
and Jay Brakefield in an interview in his home in 1972, he once lost his
money in a game of “coon can” (or conquian, a card game of the rummy
family) on Christmas Eve. Sure that he had been cheated, he went home to
get his gun. His wife persuaded him to forget the money and stay home
and warned him that the gamblers were probably lying in wait for him,
guns at the ready. She was right, and the incident helped him settle down
and become the dignified figure who inspired both those in his community
and the young whites who later flocked to him.
While working at a lumber yard during his Houston sojourn in the 1950s,
Lipscomb was injured. He retained a lawyer. As he told Turner and
Brakefield, the lawyer invited him to have a seat and said, “Now, Mance, I
want you to tell me the truth.” Lipscomb added wryly, “Them lawyers
want you to tell them the truth so they can lie for you. Let them do the
lyin’.” Sometime later, the lawyer called to say that he had the money
from a settlement, and Mance drove his old truck to Houston. He returned
with $1,500 cash in a paper sack and didn’t stop till he got home, where he
poured the money on the bed. His wife exclaimed, “We can live like
people now.”
Navasota was rigidly segregated. Paul Oliver told Brakefield on a visit to
Dallas that once, after he had given a talk about his musical research, he
was approached by a woman from Navasota who allowed that she was
glad to have heard his stories because she had always wondered what
happened on “that side of town.” After a bad experience with local
[73]
workmen, Lipscomb finished the house itself. Everything wasn’t plumb,
but the atmosphere was warm and welcoming, and after the interview,
assured that the two journalists wouldn’t sell the tape for profit, he pulled
out his guitar and played and sang several tunes.
The recording that Lipscomb made at his
home that day in 1960 was released the
following year as Texas Songster, on the
Reprise label. One of the label’s owners was
Frank Sinatra, and lore has it that Lipscomb
entertained Sinatra on his yacht. The cover
featured a photo of Mance and his family on
the porch of their home. The photographer
was Ed Badeaux, McCormick’s brother-in-
law. Lipscomb went on to record and
perform extensively. He desegregated Threadgill’s, the Austin beer joint
where Janis Joplin and other folkies from the University of Texas hung
out. The owner, Ken Threadgill, who loved to sing Jimmie Rodgers songs,
complete with yodeling, told his patrons one night that the entertainment
would be provided by a black man who was a gentleman and that no one
was to cause any trouble. Nobody did. Members of the folkie set
journeyed to Navasota for guitar lessons, and Glen Alyn literally camped
out in a tent in Mance’s yard while starting to record the interviews that
became Mance’s oral biography: I Say Me for a Parable.
The first time Lipscomb traveled to California to perform, Michael
Birnbaum said, the club owner had to send him money for clothing and a
plane ticket. The Texan became a popular performer who would tackle
anything from a slide-guitar piece, played with a pocket knife, to pop
tunes such as “Shine on, Harvest Moon.” “Mance was very strong,” said
Birnbaum, who hung out and played with Mance when he visited
[74]
California. Birnbaum, who became a college professor, for years was a
regular performer at the Navasota Blues Fest, held in his friend’s honor.
Lipscomb told Texas Monthly magazine in 1973, “When I was young I
always prayed that He would let my last days be my best days – and here
they are.” When he died at 81, in 1976, his image, along with those of
musicians such as Jerry Garcia and Freddie King, adorned the walls of the
Austin hippie landmark called Armadillo World Headquarters. Another
gigantic replica of Mance decorates nearly a whole wall of the Blues Alley
building (now a coffee shop) in Navasota while a statue of the songster in
a nearby park reminds visitors of Lipscomb’s legacy. Mance’s tombstone
can be viewed at Navasota’s Oakland / Resthaven cemetery, not far from
that of R&B artist Joe Tex.
[75]
Chapter Seven
“I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer, I was born with the
blues.”
Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins
Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman
ightnin’ Hopkins (1912-82) embodied the blues, its country roots,
its move to the city, and the uneasy relationship between its black
practitioners and its white acolytes. With his gold teeth, fine
clothes and dark shades, he looked the part to a T. Hopkins who was born
John Samuel Hopkins in rural Leon County, in the upper reaches of the
Brazos Valley. He gave his birthdate as March 15, 1912, but, like much of
his biography, that is uncertain. He was the last of four children born to
Abe and Frances Hopkins. His father was a sharecropper; his mother
stayed home with the children. Abe Hopkins was a rough character with a
deep, powerful voice, who loved to drink and gamble. Lightnin’ said his
father would fight “right smart”; others said he was more bark than bite.
At any rate, he was killed over a dice or card game when Sam was three
years old. How much the child remembered of his father is uncertain,
though he later used his parents and their marital difficulties in his music,
L
[76]
even making up a comic song about “Mama got mad at Papa ‘cause he
didn’t bring no coffee home.”
Sam Hopkins was a storyteller, and to say that he embellished the facts of
his life would be an understatement. What is certain is that he took to
music at an early age, playing the piano and organ at church and making
the guitar his primary instrument. He
told interviewers that he fashioned his
own guitar out of a cigar box and
screen wire. Both his brothers, Joel
and John Henry, were musicians, and
their little brother said he defied their
injunctions to leave their instruments
alone. He told an interviewer that his
brother Joel caught him playing his
“guitar,” then relented when he
realized that the child had talent.
These stories parallel those of other
bluesmen, including those who grew up in the Mississippi Delta, another
cradle of the blues. They often made guitars from found materials,
sometimes nailing a wire to a wall and playing the one-string instrument,
called a didley bow, with a slide made from the neck of a glass bottle. And
the story of playing an older sibling’s instrument in contravention of
orders to leave it alone is also a familiar one. Whatever the facts of his
birth and upbringing, Sam Hopkins showed musical talent early. Frances
Hopkins lamented that her baby was never good for anything but playing
music, and the facts of his life reveal nothing so much as a prodigious
mama’s boy who, in many ways, never really grew up.
A Brush with Fate
A seminal event in Sam Hopkins’ life occurred when he was eight years
old, after Frances Hopkins had moved her family to a patch of ground near
Leona, another small Leon County town. As Sam often told the story, the
family attended a Baptist gathering in or near Buffalo, another small Leon
[77]
County town. Also, in attendance, playing and singing under a tree, was
Blind Lemon Jefferson, who later became a very popular recording artist.
When he met the young Sam Hopkins, though, Lemon Jefferson was a
community musician, walking the roads near his home near Wortham, in
Freestone County, playing on street corners in nearby towns and
sometimes taking the train 77 miles north to Dallas.
As Hopkins told it, he began playing along, impressing the blind musician
by following along. “I was so little and low, couldn’t nobody see me,”
Hopkins told one interviewer. When he learned that his accompanist was a
child, Jefferson had someone hoist him onto the bed of a truck, and the
two continued to play together. “You’re going to be good guitar player,”
Blind Lemon said, in Sam’s telling.
Encouraged, Hopkins continued to hone his musical chops growing up
near Leona. The oldest boy, John Henry, had struck out on his own, saying
that if he stayed, he might kill the man who had slain his father. Sam
didn’t see his brother for decades, and when he did, the reunion was
stormy.
Another of Hopkins’ oft-told tales
involved getting into fights and ending up
on a chain gang in Houston County. After
he moved to the city of Houston, in Harris
County, and attracted white fans, he
would even pull up his pant leg to show
scars from the manacles used to hold him
down. Researchers have found no
documentation of his time in prison, but
Hopkins, like many other healthy young
black men in the South, certainly did hard,
low-paid work on farms, and this provided
much of the material he performed and
recorded later. “I ain’t gonna pick no
[78]
cotton, ain’t gonna pull no corn,” he sang in “Going Back to Florida,”
“and if a mule run away with the world, I’ll tell that mule to go ‘head on’.”
The handsome young man with a guitar became a ladies’ man early on and
in the 1920s married Elamer Lacey. For a time, he lived near Crockett, in
Houston County, where he often performed on Camp Street, the main
stem of the town’s black community. Today, a statue of the Texas
bluesman, complete with hat, shades, cigar and guitar, stands across the
street from the Camp Street Café.
Hopkins said his outdoor musical career was interrupted by the police,
who let him finish a song, then jailed him, presumably for disturbing the
peace. He told of one day when he and a musician called “Jabo” toured
the countryside, stopping at little
crossroads communities and putting
down their hats for contributions. Music
was an escape route for many rural
musicians, white and black, as well as a
good way to pick up some spare change.
White fiddler Johnny Gimble said he
discovered at an early age that playing
the fiddle was easier than picking cotton,
and Western swing bandleader Cliff
Bruner recalled a musician who
auditioned for a job, saying, “Man, get me out of this cotton patch!”
Hopkins may have embellished his biography for awestruck white fans
later, but like other black workers, he certainly endured the brutal labor of
farm work for starvation wages. “I was getting’ 50 cents a hundred
[pounds of cotton], working for me and my wife, too; man, you don’t
know what I had to do.” Hopkins also vented about the rigors of cotton
picking in his song “Cotton.” Determined to make a living from his music,
he abandoned his wife and two daughters. However, it is unclear whether
Hopkins left his wife or she abandoned him. One of Hopkins’ songs gives
us a hint: “I Hate I Got Married.”
[79]
A Center of Texas
Centerville, as the name implies, is about halfway between Dallas to the
north and Houston to the south. It was here that Lightnin’ got his start by
playing and singing in the small town’s (pop. 388) church. When the
young and budding musician met Blind Lemon Jefferson in nearby
Buffalo, he realized that the blues was “in him.” It was reported that Blind
Lemon, after that initial meeting, would not let anyone except Lightnin’
accompany him at church performances. As the young musician
progressed, he did so with the help of his cousins, including the much
older Alger “Texas” Alexander. But then came the urge to ramble, which
took Hopkins as far west as Arizona and to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to the
northeast. But he always seemed most drawn back to Houston, then a very
Southern city of about 290,000 with a large black population concentrated
in the former Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. He said he had been
imprisoned there for an unspecified offense in the 1930s.
Hopkins didn’t serve in the military during World War II. In one of his
colorful stories, he said he was stabbed by a fellow gambler the night
before he was to report for the draft and sang to pretty nurses while others
went off to fight. After the war, Lightnin’ realized the financial limitations
of being a rural musician and was encouraged by an uncle, Lucien
Hopkins, who helped him buy a guitar. Hopkins made the move to
Houston, staying in a series of rooming houses in the Third Ward and
playing on the street and in neighborhood bars. He even played on city
buses, where he drank whiskey and created a party atmosphere.
Hopkins’ recording career began in 1946 when a music producer, Lola
Ann Cullum, took him and a piano player, Wilson “Thunder” Smith, to
Los Angeles to record for the Aladdin label, owned by the Mesner
brothers. Hopkins had wanted to bring “Texas” Alexander, whom he
always referred to as his cousin. However, Cullum, who was described as
a stylish, sophisticated African-American woman married to a prominent
dentist, rejected this idea because the rough-hewn Alexander had served
time in prison. Hopkins insisted on bringing Smith, however, and
[80]
apparently that’s how he got his nickname. An Aladdin producer
exclaimed, “If you’re ‘Thunder,’ you must be ‘Lightnin’!” Hopkins, of
course, told other versions of the story.
The late drummer, singer and songwriter Doyle
Bramhall said he was backstage with Hopkins
between sets when the bluesman cum
storyteller asked, “Doyle, do you know how I
got my nickname, ‘Lightnin’? I was sittin’ on
my porch and lightnin’ struck me.” The
awestruck young white musicians who
followed Hopkins and sometimes incurred his
wrath weren’t going to question his tall tales, at
least not to his face. At any rate, back in
Houston, nickname firmly in place, Hopkins continued to perform and to
record at Gold Star Studio, a modest affair just off Telephone Road a few
miles from his home ground. Gold Star was owned and operated by Bill
Quinn, a radio repairman who had expanded into recording. At Gold Star,
Hopkins established his singular method of recording: “Pay me $100 cash,
and I’ll sing you a song. Give me another $100, I’ll sing another.”
Enter a Man Named Mack
Hopkins’ life began to change when he met a transplanted Yankee named
Robert Burton “Mack” McCormick, who had begun writing for jazz
magazines as a teenager in Pittsburgh. Hopkins was stuck in Houston, for
family reasons. He didn’t much like the city, but set out to explore, trying
to find what made it interesting and vital. Working at various times as a
census taker and cabdriver, he soaked up information about the parts of
town where most white people didn’t go. He walked neighborhoods,
asking about local musicians, people who weren’t set on fame and fortune,
but made a living where they lived. As McCormick wrote in the liner
notes for a 1959 Hopkins album The Roots of Lightnin’ Hopkins:
[81]
“Houston’s Third Ward is a tiny kingdom. Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, is its
prophet and jester. Most of his 47 years he’s wandered a few blocks of
Dowling Street, a cocky, loping figure with a guitar slung across his back
pausing now and then to gather a crowd and coax their coins into his hat.
He is — in the finest sense of the word — a minstrel: a street singing,
improvising song maker born to the vast tradition of the blues. His only
understanding of music is that it be as personal as a hushed conversation.
“His lanky frame bent to the guitar, he virtually dances his songs, posing
with self-delight, at times contorting as if a man in the grip of a strong
purgative. For long introverted moments pain shades his puckered face,
then suddenly he bursts into a blazing gold-toothed grin. A rich moan
settles on the haze of exhaust fumes. A phrase hangs suspensefully [sic] as
he twirls the guitar, bringing it back to position precisely with the beat.
Over the dark sunglasses slipping down his nose, he winks at a friend and
makes up a line for him. He drifts from a prison work song to a mistreated
blues and then slips into a boogie-paced line of patter in which he gaily
mocks the bystanders. Lifting a limp hand in a sardonic command he picks
out a girl in the crowd and tells her, ‘Okay — now twist it.!’ And she
does.”
“Hopkins’ songs speak about railroads and
jails, fickle love and hard times, gaining
immediacy as the lines are newly melded at
each performance. Unpredictably wandering
through a song, Lightnin’ bends the
traditional blues to his purpose, adds his
own spontaneous rhyme, involves his
listeners with impromptu narrative and
asides tossed out with a knowing grimace.
Jeweled guitar phrases heighten the mood as
he formulates the verse to follow.
“The language of these blues is deceptively simple, casual in its honesty,
yet firmly in touch with the realities and primary emotions. In the hands of
the singer, the guitar is not accompaniment but corollary: the joy or pain
[82]
of the song's origin, the passion re-experienced. Caught in the flow the
metrical pattern strains or telescopes to fit the singer’s need.
Autobiographical fact and legendary wisdom merge in one complete
expression. For Lightnin’ it is a total expression. His personality is the
half-spoken blues line ending in a moan or an impish chuckle.”
Mack Productions
McCormick produced several Hopkins albums, including what is probably
his best, Walkin’ This Road by Myself, one of the few that actually have
the feeling of an album, rather than simply a collection of singles. It
included an electrified tune called “Devil Jumped the Black Man,” which
may have opened a window into his soul, and several acoustic numbers,
including a slyly devilish version of the blues standard “Good Mornin’
Little Schoolgirl.”
But the relationship soured, partly because McCormick was trying to
manage Hopkins, a virtually impossible task. In a sense, the men were
distorted mirror images, each driven to do things his own way, and damn
the torpedoes. Through McCormick and others, Hopkins was introduced
to white audiences, which propelled him into a different world, one in
which people sat politely while he played, then applauded at the end of
each song. Initially thrown (“Preacher don’t get no amens in this church”),
the bluesman developed a different act, in which he played the role of
Lightnin’ Hopkins. Gone was the close interaction with the crowds, and
with it much of his inspiration. By his later years, when decades of heavy
daily drinking had dulled his musicianship, Hopkins seemed to have
become a parody of himself.
For many whites, including McCormick, the blues artists
they “discovered” were folk artists who had been
corrupted by modern society, symbolized by the electric
guitar and flashy clothes. This obsession with “pure” folk
music would lead ultimately to Bob Dylan’s legendary
1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, in which
Big Bill Broonzy
[83]
he appeared with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and “went electric.” In
one of the many McCormick stories treasured by his friends and admirers,
Mack unplugged the band during a sound check when they wouldn’t stop
playing and vacate the stage to make way for a group of singing convicts
he had brought from Texas.
Another bluesman with rural roots who had gone to the big city, Big Bill
Broonzy, who had played electric guitar as a session man in Chicago for
decades, gladly donned overalls and played an acoustic guitar for adoring
white fans. Others, such as Muddy Waters, refused to play that role. But
Lightnin’ was in survival mode. He’d happily sign an exclusive recording
contract, then cavalierly disregard it. As he once explained when
confronted with this duplicity, “Well, this guy wanted to record me, and I
needed the money.”
McCormick said that when Lightnin’ played the juke joints in Houston,
he’d take a break sitting with the amplifier clamped between his knees,
lest some young hotshot upstage him, as Gatemouth Brown had done to T-
Bone Walker at the Bronze Peacock in 1947.
Hopkins and other blues players, country and city, had come face to face
with what Greenwich Village mainstay Dave Van Ronk called “the great
folk scare,” which produced such “pure folk” musicians as the Kingston
Trio performing songs by Lerner and Loewe. What the black musicians
really thought about all this is anybody’s guess and surely varied with the
individual, though Muddy Waters did once remark that you didn’t have to
be wearing overalls with a whiskey bottle hanging out of the back pocket
to be a blues performer and that you didn’t have to have a white face to be
a gentleman.
At any rate, in 1959 another folklorist, Sam Charters, went to Houston
looking for Hopkins, who wasn’t easy to find. He didn’t have a phone,
much less a manager, despite McCormick’s efforts. After a few days of
hanging around and letting it be known that he wasn’t a bill collector or a
cop, Charters succeeded. Hopkins pulled up beside him at an intersection,
rolled down the window of his car and asked, “Are you lookin’ for me?”
[84]
Hopkins owned two guitars, an electric and an acoustic, both of which he
regularly hocked in a Third Ward pawnshop. The amplified instrument
was his choice in the noisy jukes, where it allowed him to be heard above
the din. Charters insisted on recording him on the acoustic, and did so in a
long afternoon at the rooming house on Hadley Street in the Third Ward
where Hopkins lived. Taking regular pulls from his ever-present liquor
bottle, Hopkins produced powerful, searing blues about laboring in the
Texas sun and jokey songs about women (“She little and she low, she right
down on the ground…you know the way she acts make a rabbit hug a
hound”). The result, a Folkways album titled simply Lightnin’ Hopkins,
came with inserted liner notes describing Hopkins’ career and Charters’
search.
Performing for Whites
Performing for whites, Hopkins could be delightfully risqué. While
performing one of his standards, “Keep on Rubbin’ at That Same Old
Thing,” for a well-dressed crowd, he drew laughter with a perfectly timed
drawl, “That’s just a little song come out of the country.” At other times
he would drunkenly ramble and repeat himself. Perhaps the drinking was a
defense mechanism; he seemed lost and loaded playing a gig at Houston’s
Love Street Light Circus amid flashing strobe lights and stoned hippies
during the wild 1960s. He became a hit on the club and festival circuit,
even taking planes when he had to, though it took him several days and
quite a bit of alcohol to recover from the experience sufficiently to
perform. He developed a network of friends and relatives on both coasts
with whom he could stay and often took his favorite beer (Pearl) and foods
(sardines and crackers) with him. On those jaunts, when he had a night off,
he’d play for black audiences in joints similar to the ones back home,
making up songs, engaging in the ritual insult game called signifying or
playing the dozens, and generally letting his conked hair down.
Burning Bridges
Hopkins eventually broke contact with McCormick and Charters;
apparently the only white man he ever really trusted was Chris Strachwitz,
[85]
a German immigrant with a love for American music. He founded
Arhoolie Records in California, initially to record Hopkins, though he
went on to document a huge variety of American vernacular music.
(McCormick suggested the name as the onomatopoetic rendition of an
African American field holler, one of the building blocks of the blues.)
Strachwitz tracked down Hopkins, who invited him to a juke joint.
When the tall, lanky Strachwitz walked in, Hopkins paused in mid-song to
tell the crowd, “Man come all the way from California just to see po’
Lightnin’.” Strachwitz wasn’t judgmental or pushy, and he didn’t try to
control Hopkins. He loved hanging out, experiencing Hopkins’ warmth
and wit around his own people. If Sam wanted to play an electric guitar,
that was fine. And thus it was that when Hopkins recorded the definitive
version of the song about Tom Moore; he did so on portable equipment
Strachwitz brought to Lightnin’s Fourth Ward apartment. He’d recorded
the song before, calling it Tim Moore’s Farm. The version recorded for
Strachwitz, called “Tom Moore Blues” goes like this:
Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing
You know this black man he did was wrong
Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing
You know this black man he did was wrong
(Spoken: Say what was that?)
You know that’s when I moved my wife and family,
I moved ‘em down on Mister Tom Moore’s farm
Yeah, you know there were four Moore brothers: Tom, Clarence, Harry
and Steve
Do you know them four Moore brothers, boy
They’ll give you anything in the world you need.
You may ask Mr. Tom for a favor, he’ll tell you to go see Mr. Steve
[86]
Clarence say: “We ain’t puttin’ down nothing, Lightnin’ until Christmas
eve.”
Yeah, you know they done bought Washington County.
Now them fools done fenced it in.
Yeah, yeah, you know I got a telegram this mornin’
Saying my wife was dead.
Showed it to Mister Moore
He said, “Go ahead, Lightnin’
You know, boy, you got to plow a ridge.”
That white man said, “It’s been rainin’, yes, and I’m way behind
I might let you bury that woman, Sam
One of these ole dinner times.”
I told him, “No, Mr. Moore, whoa,
Somebody’s got to go!”
Yes, and he said, “If you ain’t able to plow, Sam,
Step down there and grab you a hoe.”
(Spoken): And I had to cry. I stepped off to myself and I cried like this
(instrumental passage, punctuated by spoken “Lawd, have mercy!”)
(Spoken): Man, listen to me good.
You know he had a little brown Jersey
(Spoken): I’m talkin’ about a cow, now.
She walk to the fence and low. Low cow!
Whoa, she walk up to the fence and low.
You know, she was lettin’ me know it’s gonna be hell to tell the captain,
Any way you meet that man, Tom Moore.
[87]
Tweaking the title to “Tim Moore” in an earlier version didn’t help. Tom
Moore or one of his hirelings once appeared at a Hopkins gig in Conroe,
north of Houston, to warn him about singing that song, as some surviving
Moores and other white farmers were (and still are) touchy about the
lyrics. But though he apparently had never actually worked for Tom or his
brothers, Hopkins had done his homework, naming them in the intense
version called “Tom Moore Blues.” On that Arhoolie album, called Texas
Bluesman, Hopkins also included a song called “Slavery,” his most direct
statement on racial history, and “Bud Russell Blues,” invoking a legendary
and feared “transfer man” who moved numbers of chained convicts from
place to place, stifling any rebellion with his powerful presence and the
big .45 revolver on his hip.
In his last years, Hopkins often complained of not feeling well and having
trouble eating, probably already suffering from the esophageal cancer that
killed him in early 1982. He had a steady companion in Antoinette
Charles, whom he referred to as his wife but who in fact was married to
another man and had a family home in the Fifth Ward. Hopkins lived his
way, drinking, smoking, gambling, hanging out with acolytes (McCormick
said Hopkins was the first performer he knew who had what would later
be called a posse), driving slowly through the neighborhoods, shouting to
people sitting on their porches. He didn’t, as promised, leave a substantial
sum to his daughter Anna Mae Box, whom he often visited in Crockett.
Some say Charles got him to change his will days before he died. Box and
others contested the will, without success.
Hopkins was a limited but powerful musician. As Austin guitarist Denny
Freeman said, he used the same simple licks in virtually every song, but
there was something magic about his playing. He may have been a more
sophisticated musician than he let on, surprising people in odd moments
with his knowledge of jazz chords, making up lyrics for neighborhood
children, drawing on old country dance tunes such as “Take Me Back,”
which may have been part of a larger repertoire of such tunes he forgot or
abandoned when he became exclusively a blues artist.
[88]
Mack’s Final Years
Mack McCormick spent his last years largely hiding in his house in the
Spring Branch area of north Houston, working on his vast collection,
which he called the Monster, trying to digitize half-century-old field notes
written on a cheap typewriter paper called railroad bond and trying to
write “serious” plays, such as one about an imagined conversation
between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He never published his
long-rumored biography of Robert Johnson, the man who, blues lore
would have it, sold his soul to the devil at a lonely Mississippi Delta
crossroads in exchange for an ability to play his unearthly guitar style.
Johnson died at 27, barking like a dog, by some accounts. It was said that
Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband, but others claim it was the
devil collecting his due. Much of this research, however, appeared in an
article and a book by respected author Peter Guranick.
After McCormick died in November 2015, age 85, friends and family
gathered for a memorial service. It closed with a recording of Lightnin’
Hopkins singing about sitting in a shack on a rainy day, unable to scratch
out of few dollars from the rich East Texas soil. The song closed with one
of Hopkins’ wry spoken asides, “That’s how it seem to me!” Everyone
laughed in one of those perfectly shared moments.
[89]
Chapter Eight
“The circuit was basically the African-American segment of the
entertainment industry during the days of segregation.”
Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’
Roll
The Chitlin’ Circuit
efining the Chitlin’ Circuit can be a daunting task, but the online
site Reverb did as good a job as any: “In an era when African
Americans sat at the back of the bus and were banned from
‘Whites Only’ establishments, the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit flourished.
Driven by the entrenched racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, the
circuit gave comics like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor their first shots at
infamy and it provided playwrights like August Wilson with an engaged
audience. It also gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll music.”
Named after an African-American dish prepared from fried pig intestines,
the Chitlin’ Circuit started off in the 1920s in Indianapolis, but quickly
spread nationwide. To describe all the various jukes that formed the circuit
is a task beyond the scope of this chapter, which will dwell on the jukes of
the Brazos Valley and circuit pubs in Houston, Dallas and Austin, the last-
named being known as the live music capital of Texas. The early circuit
D
[90]
featured mostly local blues singers, but shortly after the end of WWII, a
different kind of sound started to emanate from these small shacks calling
themselves juke joints (they usually had a juke box for music when live
musicians weren’t playing). This new brand of music was later named
“rock ‘n’ roll” by a Pittsburgh-based disk jockey named Alan Freed, or at
least he was the first to widely circulate the term.
“The circuit gave the architects of blues-fueled rock ‘n’ roll their start –
icons like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Tina Turner, Jimi
Hendrix and the Isley Brothers – in predominantly southern, black-only
nightclubs. Even Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit
early in her career, playing at what she called ‘roadside joints and honky
tonks’ across the South. No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy
selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters or pig ear sandwiches in a corner,”
continued the Reverb article.
Preston Lauterbach, author of the excellent The Chitlin’ Circuit and the
Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll explains that there were no idols or divas on the
circuit. “It was a real place to be a professional musician, to learn, to grow
as a performer, to evolve, to get better, to exchange ideas,” Lauterbach
says. “There was no such thing as a media-made Chitlin’ Circuit star –
there was no Chitlin’ Circuit idol, there was no corporation getting behind
an individual. They had to get out there and kick ass every single night or
they were screwed. It was a real survival-of-the-fittest type situation that
forced the artist to be good, to be competitive, in order to be able to make
a living.”
The Bronze Peacock
While Lauterbach was describing the national circuit scene, the Texas
circuit was also smoking hot during the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s.
One of the hottest stops of all was the Bronze Peacock in Houston’s Fifth
Ward. “The Bronze Peacock was the culmination of several years of
entertainment development by Don Robey, a Fifth Ward native. Robey
was a ruthless and wily businessman and gambler, who started opening
[91]
night clubs in his neighborhood in the 1930s. In February 1946, he opened
the Bronze Peacock, designed to be the finest upscale club in the Fifth
Ward,” wrote Andrew Dansby in the Houston Chronicle.
Robey was a fascinating character. He was mixed-race, white (possibly
Jewish) and black, and was given to utterances such as, “I’m a white man
and a black man. I’ll outsmart you, then I’ll kick your ass.” He was
ruthless too. He encouraged songwriters to a small flat fee rather than
waiting for royalty payments and often took a writing credit under the
alias “Deadric Malone” in order to get publishing royalties for himself.
This pistol-toting bad-ass grew up in the Fifth Ward, probably the toughest
of Houston’s historic black neighborhoods. It was known as the “Bloody
Fifth” and included an area known as “Pearl Harbor” and a neighborhood
called “Frenchtown,” settled by black emigres from Louisiana and
possibly the birthplace of zydeco, the lively, danceable fusion of white
Cajun music and rhythm and blues. Other than a California sojourn of a
few years, Robey spent his whole life there.
Not only were the Peacock’s premises posh,
but the black entertainers it attracted were at
the top of their games: Louis Jordan, B.B.
King, T-Bone Walker, Clarence Brown, Little
Richard, Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, Cecil
Grant, Amos Milburn and an endless list of
blues greats. If someone was looking for the
blues played on stage or just a great night out
on the town, the Bronze Peacock was the
place to go. It did not take long for owner Robey to realize that he was not
only sitting on a pot of gold, but that he needed to expand. Robey decided
to go into the music business with his own Peacock label. He eventually
became the owner of Duke Records, which helped develop the careers of
Bobby Bland and many other R&B artists in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A turning
[92]
point in the Bronze Peacock’s history occurred, by accident, at a 1947
dinner event there.
Dansby explains: “The venue became the launching point for blues great
Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, who stepped up on stage in 1947 and
dazzled on a night when T-Bone Walker was too ill to perform. Robey
signed Brown to a record deal, and had him record for the Aladdin label in
Los Angeles, but the recordings went nowhere. Frustrated, Robey decided
to enter the music industry himself. His interests quickly became grander
than being a club owner. Robey started to build a music empire in
Houston, as he realized the financial possibilities in music publishing and
recordings. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top called him ‘a mover and shaker on
the Houston blues, gospel and R&B scene’.” Robey did not own Aladdin.
As noted above, it was owned by the Mesner Brothers and was based in
Los Angeles. When the brothers were slow in releasing Brown’s records,
Robey launched Peacock.
One law of physics states that whatever goes up must come down. And
that’s what happened to Houston’s hottest blues pub as the new rock ‘n’
roll music began to push the blues into the background. Desegregation in
the ‘60s also meant that blues performers were no longer confined to the
Chitlin’ Circuit and that the more affluent black population was moving to
the suburbs. Meanwhile, the population of Houston began to rise and
competing pubs sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain. “By the
1970s the industry had changed such that Robey’s corner of the business
had been reduced significantly. He sold what was left of his music
business holdings in 1973. Two years later, he died of a heart attack,”
reported Reverb. The Bronze Peacock later morphed into the Charity
Baptist Church and the pub’s only memorial remains in a room of the
Houston House of Blues named in its honor. The original Bronze Peacock
has been razed, but it is not forgotten.
[93]
The Victory Grill
One of the greatest landmarks along the circuit was the Victory Grill in
Austin Texas, established by Johnny Holmes on Victory over Japan (VJ)
Day in 1945 to honor returning black servicemen who would not be served
at white establishments. A declining fan base and a drop-off in new
customers forced Holmes to close the performance part of the grill in the
mid-1970s, but thankfully it was reopened (with a stage) in 1996. Located
at 1104 E 11th street in Austin, it is still open for great down-home
cooking and even greater music.
Wikipedia explains: “The Victory Grill is one of the last remaining
original Chitlin’ Circuit juke joints. It is
listed on the National Register of
Historic Places, archived by the Texas
Historical Commission, and dubbed a
‘Texas Treasure’ by the statewide
organization Preservation Texas. During
its heyday in the 1950s, most of the
popular national blues, rhythm and blues,
and jazz acts that played Austin
performed at the Victory Grill. Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Etta
James, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry and Janis Joplin were some of the
artists who graced the stage. A resident of the area later quoted, ‘The [11th
]
street was so crowded you could barely walk. It was like New Orleans’.”
African-Americans living in or returning to Austin just after the end of
WWII were largely confined to the area east of I-35, which bisects the city
from north to south. Then came Brown vs the Board of Education
Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that declared segregation unconstitutional.
Many blacks then moved out of the E. 11th Street area, where the Victory
Grill was operating, along with many other blues-featuring establishments,
as they started finding opportunities elsewhere. Conversely, many white
music lovers (especially those attending the University of Texas, began to
[94]
frequent the grill in search hearing authentic blues music and tasting real
soul food.
Once rock started outpacing the blues in popularity in the ‘60s, white
establishments like the Continental Club on Congress Avenue and a host
of other pubs on 6th
Street began stealing the musical spotlight. The
Fabulous Thunderbirds, composed of blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan,
Kim Wilson, Keith Ferguson, and Mike Buck were big draws there.
Jimmie’s younger brother Stevie Ray, played in a succession of bands,
including the Cobras, before forming his own trio, Double Trouble. Sill
later, Stevie gained national and international fame as a top-notch blues
guitarist before his untimely death in a 1990 helicopter crash. Amidst all
this musical merrymaking in Austin, thankfully, the Victory Grill has
survived and remains one of the nation’s landmark Chitlin’ Circuit sites.
The Dallas Circuit
“Dallas’ black history became realized in the post-Civil War era. After
the war many blacks moved west to the DFW area looking for work in
the train yards of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Denton. Many others built
small rural agricultural communities outside these cities. As the area
began to grow with industry more and more blacks came looking for
opportunities,” says an article in www.blacksindallas.com. “By the
1950s blacks had been ‘redlined’ into certain sections of the city,
mainly South Dallas and Parts of Oak Cliff. But after forced
desegregation during the civil rights era most whites abandoned Oak
Cliff and it became home to a large portion of Black Dallas.”
It’s hard to realize now, even for those of us who lived through it, how
segregated America once was. Out of necessity, African-Americans
created their own society, parallel to, nested within, the larger one. Most
towns had a black business district where African-Americans owned
businesses ranging from stores, cafes and bars to insurance agencies,
churches, funeral homes and lodges. In larger towns, the diversity of
businesses was greater. Two Dallas black business directories published in
the early 20th
century are a trove of information; at one point, Dallas even
[95]
had a black detective agency. For decades, the center of black community
life in Dallas was the Elm Street state headquarters of the Colored Knights
of Pythias, a building designed by black architect William Sidney Pittman,
son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. Chicago had Bronzeville, while
Indianapolis, the birthplace of the Chitlin’ Circuit, had Indiana Avenue.
Dallas has had its fair share of chitlin’ circuit joints, especially in the
area nicknamed Deep Ellum (in the black vernacular) and what was
then called North Dallas. Blind Lemon and Lead Belly met in Dallas
around 1912 and played on the streets of Deep ellum and in juke joints.
T-Bone Walker, who grew up in Dallas and Fort Worth, said he once
served as a “lead boy” for Jefferson. Mississippian Robert Johnson
Made all his records in Texas, in San Antonio and in Dallas.
Later, the action moved to South Dallas, where “Big Bo” Thomas
owned several prosperous clubs. Thomas featured the top entertainers
of the say, including Ike and Tina Turner and Al Greene. Circuit clubs
often featured package that included comedians, singers and dancers, as
well as the main attraction. These shows were tailor-made for black
audiences, especially black women. “These Chitlin Circuit shows are
candy,” says the South Dallas Cultural Center’s Vicki Meek. “People
go to them because they’re sweet and easily digestible. The audience
expends no effort to ‘get’ the show, and there’s always a happy
ending.” She explained that the plays were probably somewhere
between Aesop’s Fables and a blaxploitation television show.
“It’s a question of how we want to feel when we leave
the theater,” she continues. “A lot of what our story is
in this country is painful. And people don’t want to be
reminded of that. So, if they can go and see something
that will make them laugh and forget, they are going
to opt to do it.” Some critics point out that Meek may
have been confusing the Chitlin’ Circuit with black
vaudeville as she uses the word “theater,” which was
not a feature of the circuit. Redd Foxx
[96]
It’s venues like Meek was describing, however, that launched the careers
of such black comedy stars as John Elrod Sanford, better known by his
stage name of Redd Foxx. He started out playing black nightclubs, then
teamed up with Slappy White on the chitlin’ circuit between 1951 and
1955, finally landing his own TV show called “The Redd Foxx Comedy
Hour.” Foxx was also featured in the 1970s’ “Sanford and Son” sitcom,
which was NBC’s answer to CBS’ immensely popular Archie Bunker of
“All in the Family.” Foxx was one of the black comedians practicing “blue
humor,” a style so bawdy it was considered unfit for white audiences. One
lighter example of this type of humor: “The definition of indecent – when
it’s in long, and it’s in hard, and it’s in deep – it’s in decent.” It wasn’t
until the social upheavals of the 1960s that Foxx’s recordings were finally
placed in white sales outlets. The more unleashed Foxx laid the
groundwork for the success of later potty-mouthed black comedians like
Richard Prior and Dave Chapelle, the latter of whom did not have to come
up through the chitlin’ circuit.
Brazos Valley Jukes
The Big Wheel. The juke featured in the movie The Color Purple is
somewhat of a template for the run-down, shack-like ambiance of most
country jukes, which usually featured a jukebox and a dance floor, but
little else. Some, particularly in rural areas, were in homes. One such juke,
located in Washington County near the original capital of Texas called
Washington on the Brazos, lies the Big Wheel. On a back road between
cotton fields, the Big Wheel’s unmistakable landmark is a large pair of
metal wagon wheels in front of the shabby entrance. It is owned and
operated by a salty, foul-mouthed black matron called Mama Nitt.
Inviting me into her living quarters just behind the dance floor, Mama Nitt
filled my ears with nitty-gritty recollections of brighter days spent in Las
Vegas as a singer and, er, entertainer. Her gruff manner and rather scary
appearance veil an inner heart of gold, however. She is quick to help the
needy and take in strangers that would no doubt be turned away by others.
[97]
Despite being well over 80, Mama Nitt also makes it clear that she puts up
with no nonsense. “I’m one mean SOB and I don’t take no shit off
nobody,” she says convincingly. “If you white boys want to see what a
real juke is like, come back here on a Saturday night about 8pm. That’s
about the time the music, dancin’ and cuttin’ starts.”
Lots of local talent played at the Big Wheel. One such black entertainer
was Nat Dove. “In his teens, before he could drive, Dove was playing in
places around the area: Smitty’s, the Black Cat, the Big Wheel, the Green
Lantern. He played with Houston bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins and Juke
Boy Bonner. He played at nameless juke joints in houses on the Moore
plantation, Allenfarm, the inspiration for the blues song ‘Tom Moore’s
Farm,’ recorded by both Hopkins and Navasota songster Mance
Lipscomb,” wrote Jay Brakefield in the Bryan-College Station Eagle.
The Green Lantern. When Texas A&M University in College Station
Texas was first built (1876), it featured four gates on its rectangular
layout: north, south, east and west. African-American employees
congregated near the south gate (which no longer exists), so black
entertainment was also located there, particularly the juke-like Green
Lantern along Wellborn Road. The Lantern was not like lower-ranking
country jukes in several ways: it was much cleaner and better-appointed, it
had a dress code, it had better food and drinks, it attracted better
performing talent and it also featured rooms for rent out back (so
customers could stay the night to sober up or just take a short “rest” with
females they had just met in the main entertainment area). Former
customers say that the Green Lantern was a “very classy” joint several
notches above the country jukes, which were nearly always more like
shacks. One such customer remembers top-notch, nationally known acts
like Bobby “Blue” Bland performing at the Green Lantern.
The Green Lantern’s former site is now occupied by a large Methodist
church on Wellborn Road in College Station, one county over from the
Wheel. Nat Dove, who grew up in the Brazos Valley, has lived and played
all over the world, in such disparate places as Paris and Japan. He now
[98]
lives in Bakersfield, California, but occasionally returns home to perform.
He notes, however, that with the demise of the Navasota Blues Festival
and the downsizing of the Bryan Blues Festival that Dove initiated in
2012, the number of venues are shrinking. Like the racial segregation that
fostered it, the Chitlin’ Circuit is fading into history.
It’s also a shame that the Green Lantern is no longer a landmark of
College Station, as the pub added class entertainment to a rather stale
environment, musically speaking. Ironically, the Lantern was located on
the school bus route from Wellborn and Peach Creek to the A&M
Consolidated public elementary school for whites (during segregation).
This author was one small kid riding that bus during the 1950s and I was
warned by my parents to “stay away from that ‘evil’ place.” White adults
(read parents) in those days were horrified by rock ‘n’ roll musicians like
Little Richard and James Brown, but black jukes featuring the blues were
pure evil to them. “No respectable white person should go anywhere near
them” was the prevailing attitude in that day.
Circuit Personalities from Texas
The Texas chitlin’ circuit featured many black performers who got their
starts at Houston’s Bronze Peacock. One such personality was Clarence
“Gatemouth” Brown (1924-2005), who was born in Louisiana, but moved
across the border to Orange, Texas at an early age. His nickname came
from his ear-to-ear smile that became a trademark. As noted earlier,
Gatemouth got his start from owner Robey. By 1961, however, the two
had fallen out over money. An article on Brown in the US edition of The
Guardian explains: “Reportedly, he [Gatemouth] asked for a royalty
statement and Robey pulled a gun on him. In Brown’s version, he
disarmed Robey and beat him up. A more prosaic account of the breakup
would acknowledge that Brown did not have the drawing power of two of
Robey’s other acts, Junior Parker and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.”
[99]
During his relationship with Robey,
Gatemouth had recorded such hits as
“My Time is Expensive” and “Okie
Dokie Stomp” on the Peacock label, but
Brown’s career went on the skids after
the confrontation with the Peacock
owner. Brown later claimed he was
“blackballed” by Robey and his career
did indeed nosedive for a decade.
Ironically, Gatemouth’s future fame was secured in Europe in the early
1970s, while performing there with well-known guitarists like Roy Clark.
The veteran circuit player later made a US comeback, culminating in his
Grammy Award-winning “Alright Again!” (1982). Gatemouth was more
versatile than many other blues players of his generation: he could play the
fiddle, piano, harmonica, guitar or mandolin, all while mixing a potent
musical cocktail of the blues, jazz and Cajun styles. “I refuse to be
labelled as a blues player, jazz player, country player,” Brown once said.
“I’m an American musician.” Maybe so, but Gatemouth had that Texas
chitlin’ circuit style written all over him.
Back when Nash Ramblers were still considered “cute,” a Houston-born
blues singer named Amos Milburn (1927-80) was tearing up the chitlin’
circuit, playing jukes anywhere in the U.S., from Myrtle Beach to
Houston. In 1950-51 Billboard named him best artist. Beach Music Hall of
Fame elaborates: “Born one of 13 children in
Houston Texas, he learned music as a 4-year-
old on a rented piano and danced at
Depression-era talent contests for groceries
and beer. Milburn somehow dug out of his
poverty to create a magical blend of cocktail
blues, jump blues and boogie woogie. That
magical blend would later be called R&B.”
After signing on with West Coast-based
Aladdin Records, Milburn produced a series
Gatemouth Brown
Amos Milburn
[100]
of dance hits with raucous lyrics that included “Down the Road a Piece”
and “Chicken Shack Boogie.” Perhaps his biggest hit was recorded in
1953. The song, penned by Rudy Toombs, was “One Scotch, One
Bourbon, One Beer.” It was surprising to no one who knew Amos that the
song was such a great match for his style, because he was a big drinker
when he was not belting out the blues. Milburn also caught the eye of
other black singers, like black crooner Sam Cooke.
“In later years he formed a close performing friendship with Charles
Brown, touring together. They even co-wrote a song, entitled ‘I Want to
Go Home’ which heavily influenced Sam Cooke. Charles Brown, known
to be a fast and loose gambler was the house player at the gangster-owned
Copa Club in Kentucky. Sam Cooke, a fan of Brown would hit the Copa
whenever he was in town. He became a big fan of Brown and Milburn’s
song. He rewrote the lyrics, changed the title to ‘Bring It on Home to
Me’ and asked Brown to accompany him on the piano and backup. Brown
turned him down and Lou Rawls took his place. The song became a
legendary hit,” Beach Music Hall of Fame explained.
Another great blues band from Texas that performed at the Bronze
Peacock a lot was Big Walter [Price] and the Thunderbirds. Walter’s
obituary on the News 92 FM Houston website entitled “Legendary
Houston Blues Singer ‘Big’ Walter Price Dies” says: “Price, who is being
remembered for signature style and vocal delivery was once quoted as
saying: ‘I don’t want to be rich. I want to go to heaven when I die. You
understand where I’m coming from, man? I just want to make a decent
living, have a decent family and treat people like they ought to be treated,
and make sure that they get the same decent life that I would like to live
for myself. That’s the bottom line’.”
Price (1917-2012), who was born in Gonzales (near San Antonio), had a
tough life in his youth picking cotton and later working for the railroad in
Fort Worth. Price was raised by his tyrannical aunt who beat him when he
did not pick enough cotton. Big Walter recorded his first song “Calling
Margie” for the TNT label of San Antonio in 1955, but gained little or no
money from the effort. He later ran away to Houston where he joined his
friend “Gatemouth” Brown, singing at the Bronze Peacock and recording
[101]
on the Peacock label. Price had little education, but learned to write and
record his own songs, such as “Shirley Jean,” which sounded like an early
swamp pop song and “Pack Fair and Square,” that was clearly inspired by
“Flip Flop and Fly.”
It was a short step from the music performed on the
chitlin’ circuit to rock ‘n’ roll. “Rocking,” after all,
was African-American slang for sex: “Rock me,
baby, like my back ain’t got no bone.” As a
Washington Post review of Lauterbach’s book puts
it: “What happened to the music that was nurtured
on the chitlin’ circuit was, of course, what has
happened to black music throughout American
history: Whites discovered it, fell in love with it
and adapted it — ‘covered’ it, to use the music-
business term — to suit their own gifts and tastes.
The great musical wave that brought rock and roll into being in the mid-
’50s certainly profited many black musicians, among them Little Richard,
James Brown, B.B. King and Ray Charles, but the greatest attention and
financial rewards mostly went to whites. After the rise of rock and roll,
black music moved into the mainstream as it never had before, but the
music business then, as now, was owned and operated by whites for
whites.”
That’s the business side of music, but what about the ageless and perhaps
unanswerable question: Can white singers actually sing the blues like
black people? Can they express the emotions that accompanied the black
experience of suffering discrimination at nearly all levels of American
society? Obviously, the chitlin’ circuit was not needed by white
performers because they could take their acts anywhere.
So, is Janis Joplin performing “Ball and Chain” or Eric Burdon singing
“House of the Rising Sun” really approximating the feeling that
accompanies black blues songs? Can white performers truly understand
the humiliation and pain that blacks had to endure? Then again, how can
any writer adequately explain the debut and success of Elvis Presley?
[102]
Chapter Nine
“We all sat around a big oak table reserved for musicians and there was a
microphone and a little amp and someone would sing a song and then pass
the mike to the next person.”
Tary Owens, recalling the beginnings of the Austin Nexus at
Threadgill’s
The Austin Nexus
ho would have ever thought that a nationally and
internationally known white singer of the blues would have
gotten her start in a gas station/beer joint that became a
restaurant/bar? “Threadgill’s was a converted gas station on the
northernmost edge of Austin…the bar’s owner, Kenneth Threadgill, had
been a bootlegger during Prohibition and is said to have acquired the first
beer license in Travis County after its repeal. He was also a Jimmie
Rodgers enthusiast whose jukebox was stocked with old 78s – every last
one a Jimmie Rodgers record,” states the official Janis Joplin website.
“Threadgill had purchased the gas station in the mid-thirties, and by the
mid-forties he was selling soda pop and beer out of some old coolers while
his friends played guitar and fiddle and sang hillbilly blues. By the mid-
W
[103]
fifties a group of local amateur musicians were showing up every week to
play, and Threadgill would pay them with two rounds of free beer. There
was no stage at Threadgill’s. Instead, the performers played right in the
middle of the customers.”
Nearby University of Texas at Austin was a hotbed of liberal thought and
anti-war sentiment during the ’60s and ‘70s opposition movement to the
Vietnam War. Singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Judy Collins
were adding their voices to the rising
multitude of opponents to “LBJ’s
War.” Many of the clientele coming
to Threadgill’s were “folkies” (lovers
of folk music) opposed to the war. It
was an atmosphere heavily laden with
anti-government and revolutionary
feeling. The answers really were
blowing in the wind during that
period of sweeping social change in
Texas and in the rest of the nation.
Every Wednesday was open mic night and would-be singers would bring
their egos and ambitions to Threadgill’s to try and impress the audiences,
composed mostly of University of Texas students and others seeking new
sounds. It was in the early 1960s that one UT student and artist named
Jack Jackson heard a new performer at the mic, who impressed him
deeply. However, Jackson thought she was one of the weirdest students he
had ever seen. “She was sad, dirty, and unwashed, with a bad complexion
and matted hair. She looked as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for
weeks, even sleeping in them. And she had these coonskin caps, ratty old
things – God knows where she got them.” The gravelly-voiced young lady
said her name was Janis Joplin.
Janis (1943-70) was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, then a scruffy
oil refinery town about 90 miles east of Houston. She attended school
[104]
there and was bullied by other students. They “laughed me out of class,
out of town and out of the state,” Janis said later on the Dick Cavett Show.
Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like
“pig,” “freak,” “n*gger lover,” or “creep,” reports Wikipedia. Joplin
stated, “I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn’t hate n*ggers.”
While a student at Thomas Jefferson High School, Janis turned to running
around with other students who were considered “weird.” A self-described
misfit, Janis was rumored to have once taken on the entire high school
football team on the 50-yard line of the school football field. One of her
“weird” friends provided her with blues recordings, including the songs of
bluesman Lead Belly. Listening to these blues recordings deeply
influenced the budding young singer.
Myra Friedman’s Buried Alive: Janis Joplin’s
Biography states: “Musically, Janis Joplin and her
friends gravitated toward blues and jazz, admiring
such artists as Lead Belly. Joplin was also inspired
by legendary blues vocalists Bessie Smith, Ma
Rainey and Odetta, an early leading figure in the
folk music movement. The group frequented local
working-class bars in the nearby town of Vinton,
Louisiana. By her senior year of high school,
Joplin had developed a reputation as a ballsy,
tough-talking girl who liked to drink and be
outrageous.”
Janis made no secret of the fact that Texas did not like her and that she felt
the same way about the conservative Lone Star State. “Texas is okay if
you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it’s not for
outrageous people, and I was always outrageous, she was quoted in
Rolling Stone as saying. “In Texas, I was a beatnik, a weirdo. I got treated
very badly in Texas. They don’t treat beatniks too good there.”
[105]
By “Texas” she was really referring to conservative cities in the state, such
as Port Arthur. That’s why she got out of the oil-drenched port city and
made a beeline to Austin, which was much more liberal. While a student
at the University of Texas, however, Joplin was voted “the ugliest boy on
campus,” which hurt the young singer-to-be deeply, scarring her for the
rest of her life. Much of the pain that seeps from the lyrics of her
emotional music can be traced to those bullying incidents. Probably
because of her lingering pain, she turned to drinking heavily and using
hard drugs (heroin), which eventually became her undoing. Joplin partied
as hard as she sang, and it was also rumored that she could match any man
drink per drink until she drank him under the table.
The Austin Nexus Forms
Once Janis became a regular at the Wednesday night open mics at
Threadgill’s, the place started to pack in new music lovers who had heard
about a “star” singing there with a band called the Waller Creek Boys.
Janis met many new friends at the Threadgill’s nexus, including Mance
Lipscomb, from Navasota. Mance later opened for Joplin at several
performances in California, when Janis was the lead singer for Big Brother
and the Holding Company. But Janis had no bigger fan than the owner of
the pub: Kenneth Threadgill, who was also a musician. Heavily influenced
by the yodeling of country singer Jimmie Rodgers and the singing actor Al
Jolson, Threadgill was such a good country singer that Texas
Congressman J.J. Pickle dubbed him “the Father of Austin Country
Music.” Threadgill even sang with Willie Nelson in the movie
“Honeysuckle Rose.”
When Janis first sang at his pub, Kenneth was blown away. The two
singers became instant best friends, a relationship that continued until
Janis overdosed on heroin and died in a California hotel in 1970.
Following her coming-out performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in
1967, Janis Joplin had become a blues-inspired rock legend known
internationally. She was called “the first real female rock superstar,” who
[106]
went on to record four albums, the last of which (Pearl) was released
posthumously in 1970.
Wikipedia sums up her career: “Joplin, highly respected for her
charismatic performing ability, was posthumously inducted into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Audiences and critics alike referred to her
stage presence as ‘electric.’ Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its
2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its
2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-
selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) certifications of 15.5 million albums
sold.”
Janis was also the subject of many film documentaries. One of the best is
the PBS American Masters series film entitled Janis: Little Girl Blue in
2015. “I’m thrilled that Janis Joplin is taking her rightful place in the
series alongside other music icons of the era like Jimi Hendrix and The
Doors,” said Michael Kantor, executive producer of American Masters.
The Whitest Bluesman
Some 26 miles northwest of Port Arthur lies Beaumont, another
conservative Texas city better known for its small-town flavor than for
good music. But Beaumont was the home town of the Winter brothers:
Johnny and Edgar, who both distinguished themselves as top-drawer blues
musicians, especially the former (and older) brother. Johnny Winter
(1944-2014) became known as one of the world’s greatest rock/blues
guitarists, with a world-wide following. A 1968 article in Rolling Stone
put all this into context: “The hottest item outside of Janis Joplin, though,
still remains in Texas. If you can imagine a hundred and thirty-pound
cross-eyed albino with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest fluid
blues guitar you have ever heard, then enter Johnny Winter. At 16,
[Michael] Bloomfield called him the best white blues guitarist he had ever
heard. Now 23, Winter has been out and around for some time. At one
[107]
time he and his identical twin brother, Edgar, had a group called the Black
Plague, Edgar on tenor and at the keyboard.”
Both brothers were born albino and legally blind.
Much like Janis Joplin, they were bullied by their
classmates in school because they were different. In
the autobiographical documentary about Johnny’s
life called Down and Dirty, he refers to this
treatment as “stupid.” Winter later said, “They
didn’t like African-Americans because they were
too black and they didn’t like me because I was too white.” The kids
would hurl insults at Johnny and he would respond by hitting them. “It
was nothing but stupid,” Johnny said. There can be little doubt that the
taunting the brothers had to endure in those days colored the lyrics of their
music in later years.
Brother Edgar echoed his brother’s sentiments in another Rolling Stone
article published in 2014: “Growin’ up in school, I really got the bad end
of the deal. People teased me and I got in a lot of fights. I was a pretty
bluesy kid.” That alienation, he believed, gave him a kinship with the
black blues musicians he idolized. “We both,” he explained, “had a
problem with our skin being the wrong color.”
Somewhat like “wild child” Joplin to the southeast, Johnny and Edgar
were attracted to black music. They would listen to the blues on the local
radio station and would also show up in a local black-only juke called the
“Raven.” It was there, says the documentary, that Johnny ran into B.B.
King, who was surprised that the young white kid asked him (through a
messenger) if he could perform a song there. “Ordinarily, I would have
said no, since I did not know the kid. And then I got to thinking,” King
says in the video. “If I walked into a white pub and asked the same thing
they might reject me just because I was black.” So King accepted, Johnny
played “fantastic” and got a standing ovation. “I never got one,” said
King. “And then I asked him to play more.”
[108]
Before Johnny signed with Columbia Records and became a big star
nationally and internationally, he was known as Johnny “Cool Daddy”
Winter along the Texas Gulf Coast. According to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons,
Cool Daddy had a string of records that sold well in those early days.
Winter started recording at age 15 with a song by his first band called
Johnny and the Jammers. “School Day Blues” was released on a Houston
label. In 1968, Winter released his first album, The Progressive Blues
Experiment, on Austin’s Sonobeat Records, and the Texas-born bluesman
never looked back after that.
Johnny’s biggest break came in December 1968 when he was invited to
play at a big concert at Fillmore East in New York City, which was
attended by representatives from Columbia Records. They heard Winter
perform B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault.” Impressed with Johnny’s
performance, Columbia Records offered Winter $600,000 to sign, the
largest advance ever paid by a record label to that date. The whitest
bluesman accepted on the spot. And Columbia records execs were not the
only ones impressed with Johnny. Janis Joplin met him while they were
both in New York City. They ended up living together for two months
before they both moved on.
Wikipedia sums up the rest of Winter’s career: “Best known for his high-
energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and
1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for
blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters,
Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he
was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was
ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists
of All Time.”
And Then There Was Stevie
Perhaps most representative of Austin and its sound was Stevie Ray
Vaughan (1954-90), who helped revitalize the blues rock genre in the
1980s, often playing at Austin’s Continental Club. Blues rock had peaked
[109]
during the ‘60s and ‘70s protests against the Vietnam War, but started
making a comeback in the more hedonistic 1980s. Janis Joplin and Johnny
Winter were known for their high-volume, high-intensity blues music.
Many, if not most, Vaughan fans came to his concerts to hear his guitar
riffs, which are still some of the most notable in the genre’s history.
Vaughan was also a showman on the guitar, often holding his Epiphone
Riviera or Fender Strat behind his head and continuing to play. Guitar
World once commented: “Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar tone was as dry as
a San Antonio summer and as sparkling clean as a Dallas debutante.”
As a matter of fact, Stevie was born in Dallas but dropped out of high
school there in order to move to the center of the Texas musical universe:
Austin. There he found a lively blues scene with musicians such as Denny
Freeman and Derek O’Brien and singer Lou Ann Barton. In 1975, another
Port Arthur native, Clifford Antone, opened Antone’s club on Sixth Street,
which was still quite funky in the years before yuppiedom. Antone
regularly brought in classic performers such as Muddy Waters and James
Cotton. Antone died in 2006, but the club still survives.
Accompanying Stevie there was his older
brother Jimmie, also an accomplished blues
guitarist. Interestingly, Stevie’s father had
dropped out of high school to join the US
Navy during WWII. “A shy and insecure
boy, Vaughan was deeply affected by his
childhood experiences. His father struggled
with alcohol abuse, and often terrorized his
family and friends with his bad temper. In
later years, Vaughan recalled that he had been a victim of his father’s
violence. His father died on August 27, 1986, exactly four years before
Vaughan’s own death,” states Wikipedia.
Stevie’s paternal grandfather had been a sharecropper. The Great
Depression years of the 1930s were tough times in which a means to
survival trumped a choice of the vocation one wanted. However, it is
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interesting to note that sharecropping was not a job that fell to blacks only.
Equally interesting is the role of domestic violence in forming the attitudes
that come to the fore after a child escapes the “prison” of his own home.
That concept seems to apply to both black and white families. As one
expert once said, “You can’t really understand what violence is like until
you have been on the receiving end of it.” That also applies to racial
prejudice. “The new racism,” states white comedian Bill Maher, “is
denying that racism still exists.”
After years of struggle, Vaughan finally caught the spotlight at the
Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982 and he was off and running. His first
album called Texas Flood hit the market in the following year, selling half
a million copies. After final conquering his alcohol and drug demons in
1986, Stevie performed with Jeff Beck and Joe Cocker in 1989 and 1990,
respectively. SRV also shared the stage with other blues legends like Eric
Clapton, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, and many others. It was Waters who
observed Vaughan’s substance abuse: “Stevie could perhaps be the
greatest guitar player that ever lived, but he won’t live to get 40 years old
if he doesn’t leave that white powder alone.” Muddy missed on the short
side by only four years.
By the mid-1980s, Stevie’s career was climbing into the musical
stratosphere, so to speak. In October 1984, his performance at Carnegie
Hall seemed to signal that he had reached the pinnacle of his career. After
that performance, he was quoted as saying: “We won’t be limited to just
the trio, although that doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing the trio. I’m planning
on doing that too. I ain’t gonna stay in one place. If I do, I’m stupid.” His
brother Jimmie, who joined the band on the second set that night added: “I
was worried the crowd might be a little stiff. Turned out they’re just like
any other beer joint.” After Carnegie Hall, Stevie became an international
sensation. He took his show on the road all over the world: England,
Japan, Australia, the Caribbean, you name it. Texas storms have a
tendency to suddenly rise up furiously out of the flat terrain, but then fade
away just as quickly. And so it was with Stevie’s life and career. They
[111]
both were extinguished on August 27, 1990 when SRV perished in a
helicopter crash just outside East Troy, Wisconsin. Extinguished, but
certainly not forgotten. Legends do not disappear, they are turned into
statues.
Stevie’s influence as a guitarist is hard to calculate since it is so
widespread, nationally and internationally. One current bluesman,
Grammy Award-winning Gary Clark Jr., told Texas Monthly: “He’s a
major influence on myself and so many others. You can still walk up and
down Sixth Street here in Austin and hear a bunch of young guitarists
playing Stevie Ray Vaughan licks. And then the other day, I met a 22-
year-old in Melbourne, Australia, that was hugely influenced by Stevie.
It’s a global thing. He’s one of the most powerful guitarists ever. He
changed the way people play [Fender] Stratocasters. I don’t know of any
young guitar player interested in blues who hasn’t studied his licks and
wanted to play as powerfully and dynamically as him.”
Wikipedia summarizes Stevie’s career as follows: “Vaughan received
several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1983,
readers of Guitar Player voted him Best New Talent and Best Electric
Blues Guitar Player. In 1984, the Blues Foundation named him Entertainer
of the Year and Blues Instrumentalist of the Year, and in
1987, Performance Magazine honored him with Rhythm and Blues Act of
the Year. He earned six Grammy Awards and ten Austin Music Awards,
and was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2000, and
the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2014. Rolling Stone ranked Vaughan as the
twelfth greatest guitarist of all time. In 2015, he was inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
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Chapter Ten
“The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.”
Nick Cave, Australian singer/songwriter and actor
Public Interest in Blues Rises
he folklore about the Mississippi Delta, about Muddy Waters,
Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson, is etched in the memory of
every blues lover worldwide. Especially compelling is the folk tale
of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a lonely crossroads in
exchange for an unearthly skill on the guitar. Meanwhile, the immense
popularity of the electrified Chicago blues has tended to obscure Texas
and its blues. There were stylistic differences, to be sure: it’s been said
that Mississippi blues pounds while Texas blues swings. But the story,
really, is much the same. Slaves, many of whom were brought to Texas
from elsewhere in the South before and during the Civil War, sang as they
worked and played, often to the amusement and astonishment of whites.
Some early researchers felt the need to improve on what they heard.
According to Alan Govenar’s monumental Texas Blues, the esteemed
Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb met “a young singer named Floyd
Canada in a Beeville, Texas, pool hall in 1915. Webb wrote that Canada,
T
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with guitar, banjo and harmonica accompaniment, sang a song to the tune
of ‘Dallas Blues’ that ran to a length of eighty stanzas of four lines each,
rhyming in couplets. From what we know about blues today, however, the
song collected by Webb seems absurd. It is likely that Webb, believing the
songs to be incomplete, simply reconstructed the true texts by combining
two AB stanzas to make the quatrains, and pulled together several blues
with the same or similar tunes to generate a text that, if correct, is the
longest blues song ever recorded. In any event, it is clear that Webb
recognized the importance of what he collected. He called the song ‘The
African Iliad’ because he believed that it told the ‘whole story of the
modern Negro….”
“Dallas Blues,” by the way, was the first
published blues, though it had only a tentative
relation to Dallas. It was an instrumental
piece by an Oklahoma City musician named
Hart Wand, who, while practicing his violin,
heard a black porter say, “That gives me the
blues to go back to Dallas.” Wand published
the song himself in 1912 and sold it for 10
cents a copy. That year also saw publication
of “Memphis Blues” by W.C. Handy. It also
marked the first known instance of people,
mostly white (Handy was an unusual
exception) making money from the blues. Handy, a trained musician,
initially was somewhat scornful of the music of his unschooled brethren,
but after seeing a local group pelted with money as they sang a seemingly
endless version of “East St. Louis Blues” in a Mississippi juke joint,
discovered the beauty of the music of his people, as he noted drolly in his
autobiography, Father of the Blues.
Blues Chroniclers
The best-known researchers to document and record the blues were John
and Alan Lomax, the father-and-son team from Texas who wore out cars
[114]
crisscrossing the country starting in the 1930s, recording folk music for
the Library of Congress – everything from cowboy songs to the blues.
John Lomax, in particular, born in 1867, just two years after the end of the
Civil War, was hardly immune to the racism of his time.
In 1933, he and Alan recorded the great African-American musician
Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, at Angola State Penitentiary in
Louisiana, where he was serving a five- to 10-year term for assault with
intent to kill. After he was released the following year, he and John Lomax
reached an agreement for Lead Belly to serve as his driver and assistant on
his recording trips. Ledbetter tired of this treatment and, no doubt, created
sensational headlines such as “Bad N*gger Makes Good Minstrel” in a
1937 Life magazine spread.
Lead Belly sued Lomax over money and, while living in New York City,
fell in with the lefty folk crowd that included Pete Seeger and Woody
Guthrie. In this company, Lead Belly wrote and recorded one of the few
blues songs to tackle racism head-on, “The Bourgeois Blues” (“The white
folks in Washington, they know how/To call a colored man a n*gger just
to watch him bow”). He wasn’t always above playing the white man-black
man game, even appearing in convict stripes in a short film in which he
pledged his loyalty to John Lomax before their falling out. Lead Belly was
a songster rather than a bluesman, though he sang blues, having learned
much about that form while singing on the streets of Dallas with Blind
Lemon Jefferson, whom he met about 1912, which in retrospect was a
significant year in blues history.
Attitudes Begin Changing
Whites’ attitude about African-Americans’ musical talent was often
fraught due to lingering racism and money. A common attitude among
whites was that blacks’ musical talent was innate and had little or nothing
to do with study or intelligence. Blacks were often portrayed as having
“natural rhythm” and their singing while at work was miscast as evidence
of an inherently sunny nature. As late as 1940, the WPA Guide to Texas
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could proclaim of the fertile Brazos Valley near Hearne, in a sense Texas’
equivalent of the Delta, “Today the Negroes of this region are a carefree
lot, singing in the fields—songs of their pleasures and sorrows, of the
simple life they know.”
When the blues boom began with Mamie
Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues” in
1920, plenty of whites saw dollar signs. The
Wisconsin Chair Company had begun
manufacturing Victrolas, then making
records. Its biggest star for a few years in
the 1920s was Blind Lemon Jefferson, who
hailed from the small farming community
of Couchman, Texas, in Freestone County,
about 80 miles south of Dallas. He was
born in 1893 and took to music at an early age. He was very independent
and often wandered the roads around his home, walking seven miles to the
booming little town of Kirvin to sing on the street or in front of a
barbershop.
Jefferson was surely aware of a riot that broke out in Kirvin in 1922. After
the murder of a young white woman, though no evidence pointed to a
black killer, local whites burned three young black men alive. A reign of
terror followed in which between 11 and 23 blacks were killed. African-
Americans began an exodus, and the town dried up. How much this and
other, similar racial horrors influenced the music of Jefferson and others is
difficult to ascertain. No one interviewed them to explore their feelings.
In any event, Jefferson also played in other small towns in the area,
including Marlin, where it’s said that on many Saturdays, he sang the
blues on one corner while Blind Willie Johnson growled his religious
songs across the street. Jefferson frequently took the train to Dallas, where
he played on the street, often under a big oak tree at the intersection of
Elm Street and Central Track, outside a record store and shoe-shine stand
owned by a black entrepreneur, R.T. Ashford. Musician Sammy Price
[116]
worked for Ashford and said he alerted the businessman to Jefferson’s
talent. Others question that account as self-promotion on Price’s part.
However, it happened. Ashford, who scouted for Paramount, negotiated a
contract and rode the train to Chicago with Jefferson in 1925 for his first
recording session.
Until his mysterious death in Chicago in late 1929, Jefferson made regular
trips to the Windy City to record at a studio used by Paramount.
Apparently, Jefferson actually received royalties, kept a small apartment
in Chicago and even owned a car and hired a driver. Most other black
performers recorded by Paramount and other labels fared less well. They
recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, for a flat fee, received no royalties and
returned home to hard work and playing on the front porch and at local
parties and juke joints until they were “rediscovered” during the folk and
blues boom of the 1950s and 1960s.
Johnson’s Texas Recordings
Robert Johnson, the most storied Mississippi bluesman, made all his
records in Texas in 1936 and 1937 before returning home and being
murdered in 1938. Johnson was recorded in a hotel in San Antonio and a
building owned by a movie studio in Dallas, a common arrangement for
black and white musicians at the time. Record companies sent engineers
and producers down South, usually in the cooler months, and put out the
word that they were recording—not just blues, but anything that might
sell, from cowboy songs to Mexican-American music.
The Dallas studio where Johnson recorded had been built for Western
swing pioneer Bob Wills. On one of the days when Johnson made his
Dallas sides, logs show that a wide range of music was recorded, including
that of the Light Crust Doughboys. Founders Wills and Milton Brown had
left the band, but it included Marvin “Smoky” Montgomery, who played
four-string banjo with the Doughboys off and on from 1935 until shortly
before his death in 2000.
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After the resurgence of interest in Johnson, Montgomery often wryly
remarked that if he’d known that black guy with a guitar would become
famous, he’d have paid more attention. Montgomery (real name Marvin
Wetter), had come to Dallas from Iowa and was introduced to the blues by
fellow white musician Dick Reinhart, who often ventured down to Deep
Ellum to sit in with black musicians. The building at 508 Park Avenue
where recordings were made has found its place in history in the last few
years thanks to a renovation by an organization called Encore Park.
The fragile 78-rpm discs
featuring black musicians were
aimed at black audiences in the
South and in the Northern
ghettos where they had fled in
what later was dubbed the Great
Migration. They were called
race records, and “race music”
endured as a commonly
accepted term until the late
1940s, when it was rechristened
rhythm and blues. African-
American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News
and Dallas Express carried ads for these records drawn and written by
whites, pandering to stereotypical images of blacks as lazy drinkers and
gamblers.
But white musicians such as Reinhart and Montgomery were listening,
too, and the blues was an essential component of Western swing, born in
Fort Worth after Wills migrated down from the Texas Panhandle in 1929.
In Cowtown, he performed in blackface in minstrel shows and formed the
Wills Fiddle Band, which included vocalist Brown and guitarist Herman
Arnspiger. The band played on the radio and was hired by W. Lee
“Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour salesman who later went on to become Texas’
Black newspaper Dallas Express building
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governor and a U.S. senator. O’Daniel was the only man to defeat Lyndon
Johnson in a political race.
The band, renamed the Light Crust Doughboys, became so popular that
virtually every radio in Texas was tuned to its popular daily radio show
(“The Light Crust Doughboys are on the air!”). Wills went on to found the
Texas Playboys, which had its heyday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before World
War II. Brown led the Musical Brownies until his death in a car crash on
Fort Worth’s infamous Jacksboro Highway in 1936. These and other
country, Western swing and “hot fiddle” bands played everything from
pop standards of the day to the blues. For that matter, away from the
recording studio, where white producers wanted blues because that’s what
was selling, many black musicians played a similarly broad repertoire.
Johnson astonished friends by playing note-perfect versions of songs he
had just heard on the radio.
After his “discovery,” Mance Lipscomb sometimes shocked his white
listeners by performing such standards as “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” It
was all just music to him. Even Gene Autry, early his career, recorded
blues songs as well as “The Ballad of Mother Jones,” a tribute to the fiery
labor organizer. These white performers, unlike those who came along a
generation or two later, made no attempt to “sound black” by roughing up
their voices because the blues fit well into a country format. “Deep Ellum
Blues” was created (stolen, actually) by the Shelton Brothers, white East
Texans who became radio stars in Dallas. They changed the lyrics to an
earlier song, “Georgia Black Bottom,” recorded in 1927 by the Georgia
Crackers. The message was the same: Watch out when you go looking for
some dangerous fun.
Great Depression and Collective Insomnia
The Great Depression crushed the black entertainment industry. Recording
of blues diminished from a flood to a trickle. Theaters and other black
venues closed or were bought out by whites. Tastes in music changed. Old
records gathered dust. Music historian Gayle Dean Wardlow recalled that
[119]
when he knocked on doors in black neighborhoods starting in the 1950s,
looking for old blues records, he once found several being used to edge a
garden.
It was in that decade, often stereotyped as an era of “collective
Eisenhower insomnia,” that young white Americans tired of the insipid
music on the hit parade began to rediscover their country’s trove of raw,
powerful music. One catalyst was the appearance in 1952 of an album
anthology of American folk music assembled by a Greenwich Village
character named Harry Smith. The Folkways Records set included
everything from “Georgia Stomp” by Andrew and Jim Baxter and “Dry
Bones” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford to long-forgotten African-American
gems such as “Old Country Stomp” by the East Texas songster Henry
“Ragtime Texas” Thomas to “John the Revelator” by Blind Willie
Johnson, who accompanied his powerful religious songs with slashing
blues slide guitar.
This music reappeared at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt that
targeted left-wing musicians such as Pete Seeger. Things were changing,
though. In 1954, when Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror
came to an end, the Supreme Court officially ended school segregation in
Brown vs. Board of Education. Elvis Presley then burst upon the scene
with a revved-up version of “That’s All Right, Mama,” originally written
and recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. When Dewey Phillips (no
relation to Sam Phillips, who recorded Presley at Sun Studios in Memphis)
played Presley’s record on his popular “Red, Hot & Blue” radio show, he
was careful to point out that the singer had graduated from Humes High
School—in other words, he was white.
In the 1950s and early 1960s, white kids in America were listening to
black music that scandalized their parents, who called it “the devil’s tool.”
They were tuning in to powerful stations across the Mexican border and
hence free from American governmental regulations. Those hot sounds
could also be found on Nashville’s WLAC; on WVON, “the Voice of the
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Negro,” owned by Chicago blues record moguls Leonard and Phil Chess;
and on Memphis WDIA, “the black spot on your dial.”
White Search for Black Music
Once they were able and old enough to do so, many of these young whites
of the ‘50s and ‘60s went in search of black music. Austin folkies learned
to play the guitar from Lipscomb in Navasota and they brought him to the
state capital to desegregate Threadgill’s, the beer joint where Janis Joplin
and her friends gathered to sing and play. Blues fans listening to old John
Hurt records heard him singing about “Avalon, my hometown” and drove
to the tiny Mississippi community, where they found Hurt, launching a
performing and recording career that lasted until his death in 1966.
English researcher Paul Oliver made regular trips to America, ignoring
warnings about going to “that part of town” and finding performers such
as Dallas’ piano-playing blues master Alex Moore, who recalled the great
days of Deep Ellum in the 1920s.
Mack McCormick, walking black neighborhoods in Houston, looking for
local musicians, found Lightnin’ Hopkins and promoted and recorded the
idiosyncratic musician. Chris Strachwitz, a German immigrant, founded
Arhoolie Records in California to record Hopkins, then branched out into
the entire panoply of American vernacular music. As noted above, when
Sam Charters recorded Hopkins in Houston in 1959, the white researcher
induced the bluesman to accompany himself on acoustic guitar.
Charters’ insistence on the unamplified guitar
illustrates another thread in the tangled skein of
blacks, whites and blues. Acoustic instruments
were viewed as part of a pure folk tradition,
while amplification signaled corruption, selling
out, going commercial, although many musicians
had used amplification for years. Folk music was
identified with Seeger and Guthrie, with fighting
for workers’ rights and riding the rails. This
[121]
controversy came to a head at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob
Dylan appeared with the electric (and loud) Paul Butterfield Blues Band
and already appalled those who wanted him to stay true to his folk/protest
origins—never mind the fact that he had recorded with electric bands and
had even led a rock band in high school. This controversy may seem silly
now, decades later, but at the time it was quite emotional. Alan Lomax
actually got into a fistfight with Dylan’s abrasive manager, Albert
Grossman.
The music business, of course, has long been rife with exploitation, and
black musicians were especially vulnerable to fast-talking whites. Many,
including the Chess brothers, when asked about royalties, often responded
by offering instead a new car or some fine clothes. Hopkins dispensed
with royalties for the most part and regularly signed and violated exclusive
contracts. Don Robey, the mixed-race record mogul in Houston, proved
that exploitation has no color, offering up-front cash in lieu of royalties
and garnering a share of the publishing royalties by adding one “Deadric
Malone” (pen name) as a co-writer.
Brazos Valley native Nat Dove
remarked in an interview: “The music
business in the United States is the
closest thing to sharecropping I can
think of.” He’s not the first to make
that analogy. Others have compared
Chess Records to a plantation where
musicians who had picked cotton
down south labored for white bosses
for relative chump change, picking
guitars instead of cotton. And yet, in
the complicated world of race and
music, many musicians such as Muddy Waters were quite loyal to the
Chesses, and pursued back royalties only after Leonard Chess was dead
and the company had been sold to GRT.
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And yet genuine friendships formed in this volatile environment. Muddy
Waters called Eric Clapton his “son” and used Johnny Winter to produce
his “comeback” albums in the 1970s. The image of the albino Winter with
Muddy and his dark-skinned musical compatriots is a powerful image, rife
with symbolism. All of which leads us, as T.S. Eliot said, to an
overwhelming question: However much whites love and cherish the blues,
can – and should – they play it?
[123]
Chapter Eleven
“White people can play the blues, but they can’t sing it.”
Muddy Waters, a truly great blues pioneer
Blue-eyed Blues?
n age-old question in the music industry is: Can whites play and
sing the blues with the same intensity and feelings as blacks?
Some say yes and some say no, but it is not an easy question to
answer. Chapter eight focused on three white players and singers from
Texas who at least came very close to matching the original blues sound.
Some would argue that they not only matched the sound, but even
surpassed it. Could a black blues singer really match the intensity of, say,
Janis Joplin’s “Cry, Cry, Baby?” Could Lightnin’ Hopkins out pick Stevie
Ray Vaughan on the guitar? Could anyone, black or white, equal the
finger speed of Johnny Winter on a Gibson Firebird?
Elvis Presley, as some observers have said, became the first “black” singer
to cross the racial divide. Elvis was brought up poor and white, so he knew
the misery of having nothing. But the key to understanding his youth was
that he was not averse to mixing with blacks. He often attended their
churches to listen and study the way the black choirs sang. He applied that
A
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style to his own. “In fact, Elvis didn’t really sound quite like anything that
had come before him, black or white. He sounded, above all, like the
future of American popular music, a future that would see white America
enthusiastically adopt black styles, whether——as Ma Rainey would
surely have pointed out——they got it or not,” stated an essay in
schmoop.com called “Race in Blues Music History.”
That’s really the question isn’t it? White performers don’t necessarily need
to be great players or singers to “get it.” Sometimes timing is far more
important. “If it is merely coincidence that Elvis Presley debuted the same
year [1954] that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education,
then it is one of the great coincidences of history. The advent of Elvis was
one of the early shots in the musical revolution of rock and roll,
and Brown marked the dawning of the social revolution of the Civil Rights
era. Both landmark events heralded a new era in the interaction between
black and white in America, and both hinted at the tumult that would
arrive with the next decade,” continued the “Race” article quoted above.
And the 1960s was certainly tumultuous enough to produce a tsunami of
“new” musical genres – blues/rock being one of them.
There can be no doubt that white artists
“borrowed” a lot of black blues music and
made it their own. Elvis lifted “Hound Dog”
from black blues singer Big Mama Thornton
and Eric Burdon and the Animals produced a
huge hit, “House of the Rising Sun,” from an
old New Orleans folk song originally recorded
by black bluesman “Texas” Alexander in 1928
(lyrics are different, however). Where the “borrowing” ends and the
original creativity starts is often hard to determine. Obviously, some
blacks get defensive when the issue is raised. “The blues is black man’s
music, and whites diminish it at best or steal it at worst. In any case, they
have no moral right to use it,” argued the late jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason,
who was also a founder of Rolling Stone magazine. On the other hand,
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whites can get just as defensive. They ask, for example, if black R&B
singer Ray Charles had the “moral right” to take a white church hymn and
convert it into the 1954 hit song “I Got a Woman.” And why did Ray
Charles, they might ask, turn to country and Western music at one point in
his career anyway?
Refrigerator Nabbers
One might answer that last question by pointing out that the blues and
country & western were two of the pillars on which rock ‘n’ roll was
built. Blues bassist Willie Dixon once said, “the blues is the roots,
everything else is the fruits.” And one could easily ask why a country
singer like Jimmie Rodgers, a yodeler no less, would sing blues songs too.
The Platters’ bass player, Henry Weinger, didn’t find either question
surprising. He maintained that “Because of our music, white kids ventured
into black areas. They had a sense of fair play long before the civil rights
movement. We were invited into a lot of homes by kids whose fathers
looked at us like we were going to steal the goddamned refrigerator.”
A better question might have been who was stealing what from whom.
Were the Rolling Stones stealing when they named their band after a
Muddy Waters song? Maybe the “stealing” worked both ways. It was
Muddy himself who pointed out that that the Rolling Stones stole his
music but gave him his name. After all, some critics point out, flattery and
high praise often share the same stage. Minstrels never convinced anyone
they were black, but that wasn’t the point anyway. Jefferson Airplane
named their band after Blind Lemon Jefferson, and that was paying high
tribute to a black Texas blues singer who never got the praise, or the
riches, the white band got. One has to ask: was this because Jefferson
Airplane (later Starship) was white or was it because improved technology
had given the white band a better sound? Maybe it was just because their
timing was better?
A June 1999 article in the Independent entitled: “Music: White Men Sing
the Blues” asked the question of whether white bands like the Rolling
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Stones could actually sing the blues like black singers. “Yet, although
black people were not seduced by the Stones’ artificial persona, many
white teenagers were. The group had embraced the rebellious stance of
black blues musicians, prompting Stanley Booth to describe Keith
Richards as ‘the world’s only blue gum white man, as poisonous as a
rattlesnake’. Brian Jones also initially called himself ‘Elmo Lewis’, an
allusion to the blues guitarist Elmore James.”
The same article points out that Mick Jagger studied the dance moves of
the incredibly athletic James Brown in order to perfect his own version of
the funky chicken. He also copied the moves of Ike and Tina Turner, in an
attempt to become a white singer with black moves. By doing so Jagger
succeeded in becoming an international sex symbol, but some observers
remained unimpressed. Ike Turner said that Jagger “could not sing” and
Truman Capote deduced that Jagger’s performances were “about as sexy
as a pissing toad.” Nevertheless, the Rolling Stones are still rocking and
making millions onstage despite being grandfathers and senior citizens.
One has to admire the tenacity of a band that can rock on for more than 50
years! But some music critics have little respect at all for rock ‘n’ roll
music. In the book by David Hatch and Stephen Millward called From
Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music, Albert Goldman
asserted: “Rock ‘n’ roll is basically institutionalized adolescence. And the
bottom line of rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a baby food industry.”
Croaking Bob Dylan
Whether Mick Jagger is a silver-haired adolescent or not, he does not have
a monopoly on yelling and shouting and then calling it “music.” Take folk
rock hero Bob Dylan (real name Robert Zimmerman), for instance. He
admits that he doesn’t sing but “croaks.” Fair enough, but Bob Dylan
never intended to be a singer. He wanted to be a poet, and that’s why he
took the name “Dylan” from the great Welsh poet and writer Dylan
Thomas. American folk rock folklore has it that Bob visited a poetry
publisher when he first traveled in Greenwich Village (then a Bohemian
hangout for beatniks and hippies) in New York City in the early 1960s.
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That publisher was impressed with his poetry, but suggested he sing it
instead because he could only pay $25 for the poem whereas a song could
get more publicity and sell more copies. The poem (song) was “Blowing
in the Wind,” which became an anthem for the civil rights movement and
for protests against the ongoing war in Vietnam. Others dispute the
veracity of this story by arguing that Dylan had been a musician since
childhood and had always intended to sing. His singing was far less
croaky on his early recordings, they point out, though one critic said Dylan
sounded like “a prairie dog caught in a barbed wire fence.”
Bob Dylan had also heard stories of a songster in
Texas named Mance Lipscomb and decided to visit
Navasota to meet Mance in mid-1962, just as Dylan’s
popularity was reaching the take-off stage. In Dylan:
A Biography, author Bob Spitz quotes Dylan as
stating that he had “picked up” songs from Lipscomb.
Spitz suggests this statement may have been false
since Dylan made it before he went to Texas. No
matter, there can be no doubt that Dylan was
influenced by the music of the Texas songster. On the other hand, Mance
claimed he had taught Dylan the song “Baby Let Me Lay It on You,”
although musicologists and others have suggested otherwise. Tim Dunn,
author of The Bob Dylan Copyright Files 1962-2007, states that
Lipscomb’s influence was “either downplayed or not mentioned.” In the
early 1960s (and before), original black singers were rarely given credit
for having influenced a white singer and Mance was not an exception.
A Question of Authenticity
When you get right down to it, the real question concerns cultural
appropriation, some critics say, which means using material from another
culture without giving credit or compensation. Freelance journalist and
editor of BBCNewsbeat Irahman Jones writes (2016) about Elvis Presley’s
cover of “Hound Dog,” previously recorded by black artist Big Mama
Thornton, though it was written by the white team of Leiber and Stoller.
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“With a song like this, it’s easy to see why Elvis often gets levelled with
accusations of appropriating black music. Why is he seen as the father of
rock ’n’ roll music when he didn’t invent it? Why did it take a good old
white boy to popularize a genre which black Americans had been playing
for years, and in the process become one of the richest people on Earth?
It’s clear to see cultural appropriation going on here; Elvis clearly stole
music from the black culture of the time, passed it off as his own, and
hugely profited from it himself.” The song stayed at No. 1 for 11 weeks in
1956, ultimately selling 10 million copies worldwide, making the young
Elvis (then 21) a very wealthy man. Thornton’s original version, recorded
four years earlier, had sold two million copies, though Thornton collected
only $500.
Perhaps many white singers are simply performing the blues and not really
putting black feelings into the music, some critics suggest. But at the very
least, a white performer trying to sing the blues should give recognition to
the original artist and make it plain what the content of the blues song was
originally referring to, as he or she is morally (but perhaps not legally)
supposed to do. However, when a musical genre like the blues suddenly
becomes “hot” legalities often get overlooked, all in the interest of making
as much money as possible before the market cools.
“Remember that, up until relatively recently, white people wouldn’t buy
music performed by Black people, and that Black culture was considered
‘inferior’, ‘strange’, or ‘exotic’. Then white performers repackaged the
Blues for a white audience, and suddenly they were respectable, and the
origins of the Blues as a culture of resistance and the expression of
a particular experience were often erased and denied. And remember that
this happened during or not long after segregation … I would say that was
cultural appropriation,” writes Yvonne Abburow in the online journal
Patheos. By “relatively recently,” Abburow probably meant anytime up
until the 1950s.
Like Abburow, a PhD candidate at the University of Florida, Howell
Evans, argued that there is something smelly about white discourses on
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blues history. In his work The Literature of the Blues and Black Cultural
Studies (2004), Evans wrote: “The literature of the blues is mostly a white
man writing about a black man’s art, and there is more than a taste of
paternalism …what this paternalism masks, this worship of the old
authentic bluesman, is the guilt that white musicians have in ripping it
off.”
Uncle Mac’s Influence
Eric Clapton is arguably the greatest blued-eyed bluesman living today.
As a kid growing up in England, he was mesmerized by a BBC radio
program called “Uncle Mac,” which was aimed at small children. Eric’s
ears really perked up, however, when Uncle Mac occasionally sneaked in
a blues song or two. It was just enough to encourage the young musician-
to-be to pick up a guitar and try to emulate the beautiful, yet strange,
guitar riffs flowing from the radio. To Clapton, it was all the more enticing
since the new rock ‘n’ roll music from America had been banned by the
BBC. From these humble beginnings, Clapton went on to become lead
guitarist for the Yardbirds, Cream and finally as a solo singer/songwriter.
He is the only musician ever inducted into Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame
three times (once for each role).
In his autobiography Clapton, Eric writes that the
bluesman who impressed him the most was Robert
Johnson, the black man who had, according to legend,
sold his soul to the devil to acquire his incredible
abilities on the guitar. “At first the music almost
repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no
attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or
play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever
heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some
level, I had found the master, and that following this
man’s example would be my life work,” Clapton wrote. “I tried to copy
Johnson, but his style of simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on
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the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings
while singing at the same time was impossible to even imagine.”
Clapton was not the only English guitar player (or singer) to emulate the
black bluesmen of the American South. That “copying” or “borrowing”
became a major element of the British Invasion of the 1960s. If one did
not know better, and closed his or her eyes when hearing Eric Burdon’s
version of the “House of the Rising Sun,” one might think Burdon was
black. On the other hand, maybe Muddy Waters was right after all: white
performers can play the blues but they can’t sing it. Perhaps Muddy had
Eric Clapton in mind when he said that.
However, all that brings us full-circle back to the question of cultural
appropriation. Are we hearing “real blues” from white singers or simply a
blues performance? Is it morally all right for singers or players to
“borrow” an original song without getting permission? Some sources go
even further, arguing that blues music and its performance by white
players and singers is a subtle form of social stratification.
“Once music is not understood in its historical and emotional context, it is
no longer a work of art, but a commodity. I would go one step further and
argue that the historical commoditization of blues perpetuated racial
stratification,” theorizes an article in FYImusic news.com in July 2017.
Extending that argument, could one accurately state that the reason the
blues became so international so quickly is that it really did become a
commodity being sold on the world market? Do young white performers
today sing “Hound Dog” thinking they are paying tribute to Elvis and
know nothing about Big Mama Thornton? What about blues singers in
Australia, Germany or Japan, for example?
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Chapter Twelve
“I can’t sing about picking cotton in Mississippi, but I can sing about my
experiences traveling to Brazil and my deep connections to Palestine.”
Big Harp George (George Bisharat), Palestinian-American blues
singer
Internationalization of the Blues
raditional blues, like Lazarus, was brought back from the dead in
the case of music by the British Invasion of the 1960s and the
rising popularity of protest-style folk music during the same
period. Blues-infused rock groups from England, which were greatly
influenced by the historic blues style, like the Rolling Stones or the
Animals, also brought new energy to an outdated, but still powerful, style.
However, the blues as we once knew it may be dying a second death.
Perhaps the only new trend that can save it (again) is internationalization.
Although they don’t always know the history of the songs they are
singing, blues artists from all over the world are tapping into the blues
style. Blues pubs are popping up from Tokyo to Berlin, from Toronto to
Sao Paulo and beyond.
T
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“One of the things that is really exciting in the blues world right now, here
in the [San Francisco] Bay Area maybe more than anywhere, is the
internationalization of the style,” Big Harp George observes. “One of my
songs is ‘Hey Jaleh,’ which happens to be the name of my Iranian-born
wife. I have had blues musicians tell me I should change that name, that
no one has ever sung a blues song to an Iranian woman.”
Is it really that strange that people from
other cultures and other nations can “get”
the American blues? No matter your
nationality or cultural upbringing, feelings
are feelings and they can be expressed in
song. George was educated in Beirut, but
did not need to work in a cotton field in the
American South to understand where the
blues is coming from.
“I have not picked cotton,” George points out. “I have not worked in a
steel mill. By comparison to many blues musicians, I’ve had a very
privileged life. But that does not mean I can’t tap emotions and contexts
that are consistent with the blues tradition, and that are genuine to my own
experience.”
Today, many American blues performers, black and white, find much of
their work overseas. Dallas’ once-hot blues scene has cooled, and
musicians such as Brian “Hash Brown” Calway, who moved to Dallas
because of the music, play a lot of solo gigs. Calway also supplements his
gig income by conducting music camps at the Shack Up Inn, in which
guests stay in refurbished sharecropper houses on the old Hopson
Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
Blues in Japan
Japan has been a mecca of musical sorts for blues and jazz players ever
since the US Occupation of Japan (1945-52). American GIs brought their
musical recordings with them, which they introduced to a new Japan
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hungry for anything American. Visiting singers and performers of all
musical stripes found eager audiences in Tokyo, Osaka and other cities in
the country. Some famous singers, such as Julie London, even recorded
some of her albums in Tokyo during the late 1950s and ‘60s. She did live
TV there, as well. For instance, London traveled to Tokyo in May 1964 to
record an hour-long TV special for TBS television.
Rolling Stone magazine reported that B.B. King’s “third 1971
recording, Live in Japan, went unreleased in the U.S. until 1999, and here
you can hear King spread out a little more than on those contemporary live
recordings. Extended, largely instrumental workouts like ‘Niji Baby,’
‘Hikari #88’ and the nine-minute ‘Japanese Boogie,’ showcase a looser
and jammier side of King that’s less frequently documented.”
Live performances by such American
performers were augmented by music in the
plethora of blues or jazz coffee shops, where
thousands of albums lined the walls and strict
silence was requested so that patrons could
hear the music played through huge speakers.
It seems strange, at first glance, for the
Japanese to take to American music like
ducks to water. But some foreign journalists
visiting Japan have come up with
explanations.
“It seems possible to argue that American blues offers a new solution to
the Japanese, an idea they maybe hadn’t encountered before, hadn’t
realized could work as a balm. It’s not merely a reflection of ennui or
despair or confusion, it’s a deep validation of it. It externalizes the internal
in a way that allows for catharsis,” writes Amanda Petrusich in “Feeling
the Tokyo Blues” in The Week magazine.
Japanese cities are composed of bustling clusters of humanity that can
only be believed if one actually has the experience. But for the open-
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minded and adventure-some individual, exploration of these mazes can be
an exciting and fulfilling exercise. Petrusich describes one such thrill
while tramping through the Golden Gai portion of Shinjuku, sometimes
jokingly referred to as Sin-juku, Tokyo’s main entertainment area. It is
usually populated at night by tired Japanese “salarymen” looking to let off
some steam by getting drunk or visiting the many “soaplands” (a cleaned-
up term for a place to buy some sex). She walked into one of the blues
joints in Shinjuku just to see what it was like.
“I wandered into a place called ‘Slow Hand,’ [Eric Clapton’s nickname] in
part because its sign read EVERY DAY I HAVE THE BLUES. Inside, I
surveyed the ephemera: posters for The Blues Brothers, Eric Clapton, the
Butterfield Blues Band, Frank Zappa. A giant, curling portrait of Robert
Johnson. I was the only patron. I ordered a Japanese whiskey, which
arrived in a heavy, cut-crystal glass. The bartender — and lone employee
— set out an ashtray decorated with peace signs and the words HAIGHT-
ASHBURY, and began fixing me an octopus and miso salad, although I
hadn’t asked for anything to eat. We tried to chat, but mostly we mimed,
laughed. He said his favorite piano player was Sunnyland Slim, who was
born in the Delta but moved to Chicago in 1942, part of the Great
Migration of black Southern workers to the industrialized North.”
Local Blues Performers
A small but energetic group of resident blues players, foreign and
Japanese, serve the domestic market for live performances of the blues.
Let’s take the Tokyo circuit, for example. There is the Blue Heat in
Yotsuya, Blues Alley in Meguro, the Jazz Blues Soul Bar in Dogenzaka,
the Club Quattro in Shibuya, the Cotton Club in Yurakucho and, of
course, the very upscale Blue Note (which sometimes has blues bands, but
is mostly for jazz fans) in the Akasaka area. For example, I saw Natalie
Cole perform “Unforgettable” there, along with her father’s video of the
same song that was showing on a large screen behind her.
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This author dealt with many resident players while I was entertainment
committee chairman at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ)
since one of my many jobs there was to hire bands for the weekly
Saturday Night Live event at the club. My best blues players there were
American blues guitarist/singer Steve Gardner, who lives and sings the
blues, and Kaz Minamizawa, who is considered to be one of Japan’s
greatest blues guitarists.
Steve is from Pocahontas, Mississippi where he learned to
sing and play the blues from black performers. After going to
Japan, he lived the blues lifestyle while performing at blues
clubs and at the FCCJ. His style is an authentic version of the
traditional blues (he even plays the rub board at some
performances), as sung and played by the masters of the Delta.
Steve is still singing and playing on the Tokyo circuit at some
of the above-mentioned clubs.
Conversely, Kaz traveled to the United States when he was only 18, to
learn to play and sing the blues. He visited black churches around the
nation for years, perfecting the sound he had heard from black church
choirs. He now performs and plays the blues to Tokyo
audiences in both English and Japanese. Nearly perfect,
accent-less English makes his singing a delight to hear. His
guitar playing is well beyond ordinary, as well. His talents
are so good that he once accompanied American bluesman
and rock pioneer Bo Didley on a blues tour of Australia.
The Blues Down Under
Much as in the case of England, early post-WWII musical trends in
Australia were greatly influenced and nuanced by American traditional
blues artists like Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Later, rock ‘n’
roll artists became more mainstream, but a handful of bands carried on the
blues tradition down under, with a decidedly local bent. “Oz Blues” was
the result and loyal followers of those groups still turn out for live
Steve Gardner
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performances and for blues festivals. Perhaps the most important of these
groups was (and still is) Chain, a band like the Rolling Stones in that it has
lasted throughout several decades.
“Phil Manning is one of the stalwarts of Australian blues, and a founding
member of one of its most influential bands, Chain. Formed in 1968, the
band brought blues music to Australia’s working class, fostering a
dedicated underground following before breaking into the charts in the
early seventies. Their success was unprecedented at the time, and
established them as an indelible name in Australian Blues, with the
Australian Blues Music Festival giving out ‘Chain’ awards each year in
the band’s honour,” writes Brandon John in an article entitled “How the
Blues Emerged from the Underground to Shape Australian Music” in the
online journal Tone Deaf. The year 2018 marks the 22nd
straight year of
the festival.
“In the mid-to-late sixties, some bands began to call themselves ‘Blues
Bands’,” Phil recalls, “and, while copying American blues acts, made their
attempts to earn a living with what was a very underground movement at
the time. The ‘purist’ acts were few and far between but Foreday Riders
and shortly after Chain are two of the notable ones. With Chain, we
realised that copying American blues was a dead-end street, so we began
writing our own material using the blues form as inspiration, with lyrics
that conveyed our experience. Eventually ‘Oz Blues’ became a term that
stated, well, it’s blues – but in a uniquely Australian way.”
A different kind of Aussie bluesman is C.W.
Stoneking, who specializes in a sub-genre of traditional
American blues called “hokum.” This style of blues
music uses extended analogies or euphemisms to make
sexual innuendoes. For instance, let’s look at a stanza
from a 1937 Lil Johnson recording in hokum style:
“Got out late last night in the rain and sleet,
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Tryin’ to find a butcher to grind my meat,
Yes, I’m lookin’ for a butcher,
He must be long and tall,
If he want to grind my meat,
Cause I’m wild about my meatballs.”
In an article for PRI World entitled “How an Australian Musician Evokes
the Southern Roots of the Blues,” writer Paulus van Horne explains that
the genre is pure entertainment, composed for the vaudeville shows and
rundown theaters home to minstrel shows in the 1920s and 1930s. “Both
black and white musicians sang hokum. It wasn’t only white people
making fun of black people, nor was it black people playing up
stereotypes for a white audience.”
Stoneking, for his part, sings his hokum songs with a strong American
southern accent, an accent specifically associated with African American
residents of turn-of-the-century Mississippi. It is doubtless that Stoneking
is sincere in his appreciation of this music. Yet, there are still obvious
markers of the minstrel roots of his music. References to ‘the jungle’ and
fictionalized voodoo practices abound in his lyrics,” concludes van Horne.
In the United States, the practitioners of political correctness would be
quick to jump all over Stoneking for reviving references to the black-faced
minstrels of days gone by. But C.W. himself is just as quick to respond
saying: “I don’t even think about that when I’m making the song. It’s not
part of my creative process to sift through the multitudes of politics and
just people being bad.” Stoneking’s record label is called “King Hokum.”
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American Blues in Germany and Europe
Germany is also a mecca for American blues, for many of the same
reasons as Japan. It was also occupied by US forces for years after the end
of WWII, and young Germans in the immediate postwar period were also
starved for new forms of music. They were influenced by their American
occupiers, as well. And it’s not only Germany, but many European nations
seem enthralled with American blues, the music and its violent history.
In fact, Germany’s connection with the American blues stretches far back
into history. “Not long after the American Civil War ended, a number of
Black musicians, fleeing the racist climate in the States, where the Ku
Klux Klan had just formed, came to ply their trade in Europe. Here, they
were exoticized but not terrorized,” says Amien Essif in a 2015 article in
Scalawag magazine called “Berlin, the Blues Ambassador, and the
Imagined South.”
Essif is not the only German writer to take note of the influx of black
American bluesmen in the post-Civil War period. “Given the extent of
violence and discrimination experienced by African Americans, it is not
surprising that an astounding and ever-increasing number pursued their
livelihood overseas,” writes historian Rainer E. Lotz, pointing out that in
1896 the German music publication Der Artist counted more than one
hundred Black performers touring the country that year.
“Whatever it is about blues that appeals to Europeans, it’s something deep
and persistent. The fact is, the music is now part of the European
mainstream. Historian Neil A. Wynn in his introduction to the book Cross
the Water Blues: African-American Music in Europe claims that Europe
buys 70 percent of blues records produced worldwide, and a big chunk of
that figure accounts for blues music produced by European artists,” claims
Essif.
It may or may not be ironic, but a lot of European modern-day blues
enthusiasts know the history of the blues, but tend to see the music in
another light. Europe, being that it is multi-cultural and that Europeans
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tend to learn several languages in school, appreciate the blues in a more
positive and open-minded way than many Americans. In fact, Europe sort
of looks at the blues through the idyllic eyes of detachment.
“But then there’s this other vision of the South as a mythic melting pot.
Frankie Jürgensen, lead guitarist for the German band Mhowl, told me he
associated blues music not with segregation but with the multi-cultural
aspect of Southern cities like New Orleans where all the world’s traditions
fused into new forms,” writes Essif.
The American Folk Blues Festival
Something magical happened to the blues scene in Germany in 1962,
when German music producers Lippman and Rau contacted Willie Dixon,
a mainstay of the Chicago blues scene, about setting up a blues festival in
Europe that would bring the great American bluesmen to the Continent.
Many had never been out of the United States, so they leaped at the
opportunity. The event turned out to be a rousing success and gave the
blues a lot of publicity there. It continued annually from 1962 to 1972,
took an eight-year hiatus, returning in 1980. It finally ended in 1985, but
had prompted the establishment of other blues festivals like it in other
European countries. Since its inception coincided with the peak of the
Cold War, the festival had political overtones as well.
“The organizers of the American Folk Blues Festival
made no references to civil rights struggles in the U.S.
until 1965, and then only did so from the safe distance
of an ostentatiously liberated, anti-racist West
Germany. However, conceptualizations of blues as
simple, raw and uninhibited but ultimately non-
threatening were occasionally challenged on and off
stage by the participating musicians. It is important to
acknowledge the local specificity of the blues in both Germanys and the
way in the music has been used in efforts to overcome the Nazi past and,
to a lesser degree, to resist East German authorities while simultaneously
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adhering to colonialist and primitivist traditions,” opined Ulrich Adelt in a
2008 article in the American Quarterly.
Fast forward to 2011, when something truly wondrous happened to the
blues in Europe. “In 2011, various blues organizations from around the
continent founded the European Blues Union and simultaneously created
the annual European Blues Challenge. Regional or national blues
associations, like the Baltic Blues Society and France Blues, hold annual
competitions modeled on the International Blues Challenge held in
Memphis, Tennessee, and send their local winners to the European event.
Sixteen countries competed in the first challenge, a live-music competition
held in Berlin. The fifth competition was held this March [2015] in
Brussels and featured representatives from at least 20 countries,”
explained Essif in the above-quoted article.
Indeed, Germany seems to be the main engine
for blues activity and recording sales in Europe.
It is home to Bear Family Records and its huge
collection of blues recordings and other
paraphernalia concerning the American blues and
other musical genres. Formed in 1975, it is the
gold standard for the reissuing of classic blues
recordings and is a large contributor to the sale of
blues recordings worldwide. The label issues lavishly designed box sets of
blues and other American roots music, with book-length liner notes.
Scalawag quotes black American blues promoter in Germany Ed Davis: “Here’s a German guy singing about ‘down home’ in America, but in
reality ‘down home’ for him would be in Bavaria or someplace, you
know? But that shows the influence the music has on people. Because you
can go anywhere you want in Europe—anywhere—and you’re going to
find a hundred blues bands.”
All this blues activity in Europe, Japan, Australia and many other
countries is encouraging, but is it really enough to save the American
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blues a second time? Since we are more concerned here with the Texas
blues, we must ask if Texas bluesmen like Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’
Hopkins, “Texas” Alexander, Blind Lemon Jefferson and many others will
be remembered as such. How about the late Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter
and Stevie Ray Vaughan? Will they be remembered as blues performers or
simply as rock ‘n’ rollers who were only influenced by the blues? Also,
will they even be remembered as Texans?
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Chapter Thirteen
“I worry about the future of blues music.”
“Buddy Guy, in an interview with NPR (8/2015)
The Future of the Blues
uddy Guy is perhaps one of the greatest blues guitarists alive
today. He is also a showman on stage who can even play the
guitar with his teeth. But he is worried. “I worry about the future
of blues music whether you are black or white. If they don’t hear it like I
did and listen to it and don’t know about it — you ever been to Louisiana
where they cook all this gumbo?” asked Buddy Guy of his NPR
interviewer. “So if you never tasted it, you wouldn’t love it. That’s what’s
happening with the blues. Now, the young people don’t know nothing
about it unless … Let the young people know where it all started.”
Buddy likes to talk about Louisiana cuisine because he was born and
raised in that state. When he was a child, he was so enamored with blues
music that he tore some wires off the screen door of his home to try and
make his own guitar. His dad got mad because mosquitoes are huge in
Louisiana, Buddy explained.
B
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His love of the blues needs no explaining, but he does it anyway: “Like I
said, the blues comes in all denominations, man. It comes with your
family, with your lover, with your friend. And I had some good friends
until I loaned them a lot of money; then I lost them. I’ve got a piece of
paper in my club, ‘You loan your friend your money, you finna lose your
money and your friend.’ And that’s the blues, sir.”
Buddy was a close friend of Muddy Waters
and visited the master bluesman shortly
before he died in 1983. “We heard he was
sick and he was hiding. He didn’t let us
know he had cancer. We rang him and he
said, ‘Aw, man, I’m fine.” He was profane,
I can’t say what he said. He said, ‘Y’all just
keep playing that em-effing blues and don’t
let that blues die. I’m fine.’ The next couple
days, that’s when I got the call from the media and asked me how did I
feel — he had passed.”
Many black youths today would argue that bluesmen like Muddy Waters
represented the past; they say the traditional blues of the Mississippi Delta
and Texas’ Brazos Valley are “old man’s music.” What is newer and more
exciting, for them, is the musical side of hip hop culture called rap – the
sound from the “hood.” Is it currently popular with such youths? Oh, yes.
In 2017, rap artists raked in the big bucks: Diddy pulled in sales of $130
million followed by Drake with $94 million, according to Forbes
magazine.
Rap Takes Over the Blues?
Let’s not forget, however, that the blues and rap started in very different
places. Instead of emerging from the cotton fields of the South, rap was
[144]
born in the concrete jungles of America, particularly in New York City.
Black youths with pre-Walkman boom boxes on their shoulders and a
microphone in hand created a noisy street version of putting a black
message to music. In that way, but few others, rap and the blues are distant
cousins.
“Hip hop as both a musical genre and a culture was formed during the
1970s when block parties became increasingly popular in New York City,
particularly among African-American youth residing in the Bronx.
However, hip-hop [rap] music did not get officially recorded for the radio
or television to play until 1979, largely due to poverty during hip-hop’s
birth and lack of acceptance outside ghetto neighborhoods,” explains
Wikipedia.
Besides being loud and crude, critics say rap is violent, vile and
misogynistic. For one, they point to gangsta rap groups like Body Count
and their 1992 song “Cop Killer.” Those lyrics are too vile to repeat here.
Ironically, then lead singer Ice-T now plays a cop on television’s “Law
and Order: Special Victim’s Unit.” For another example, these critics look
to best-selling rapper JZ’s (Beyonce’s husband) “99 Problems.” As the
2013 song extended the lyrics from “I got 99 problems and bitch ain’t
one” to “I got 99 problems and bitch ain’t one / She’s all 99 of ‘em; I need
a machine gun.” Eminem, a white rapper who starred in the movie “8
Mile,” has achieved multiplatinum success (220 million records sold
worldwide) with dark tales about murdering the women in his life — from
his ex-wife to his own mother. He is called the “King of Hip Hop.”
Supporters of rap, on the other hand, would argue that the lyrics for some
of the traditional blues songs were just as bad. In “Terraplane Blues,” for
example, the great bluesman Robert Johnson has stripped a woman of her
humanity and likened her to a machine for his sexual use. Consider the
following lines from Louisiana Red’s “Sweet Blood Call”:
[145]
“I have a hard time missing you baby, with my pistol in your mouth
You may be thinkin’ ‘bout goin’ north, but your brains are staying south.”
Rap and the Blues: Cousins?
Traditional bluesmen and today’s rappers would probably agree on at least
one point: both genres attempt to deliver a black message of feeling pain,
sorrow or elation, just in different formats. In both cases, it’s more about
the conveyance of feelings.
“Because, looked at in a lot of ways, this [rap] is the living blues. There is
a direct, obvious line that runs from Robert Johnson or Tampa Red
through Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, on to James Brown,
Kurtis Blow and Ice Cube. And though there are certainly ways in which
Bo or Muddy are more like Mr. Red than like Mr. Cube, in a lot of ways
they would sound more at home in N.W.A. (Niggas with Attitudes) than in
the Hokum Boys. Both had a tough, electric, urban style that pointed the
way towards what has come since,” says folk blues guitarist and music
historian Elijah Wald.
Perhaps the problem with rap is that it’s not the message of the lyrics so
much as the musical beat that delivers it, Wald suggests. “To readers
under thirty, the brilliance of hip-hop production is probably old news, but
for most of us older blues fans, the beats were always a stumbling block.
We could hear that rappers were descended from bluesmen (and, far more
rarely, blueswomen), but the sampled disco tracks and mechanical rhythm
machines had a sterility that seemed like the antithesis of everything we
loved about blues.”
[146]
Masters of Fusion
Maybe the road to the future of the blues was prepared by musicians such
as B.B. King, who had a talent for fusing the blues with other musical
genres, such as jazz, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. “Riley B. King (1925-2015),
known professionally and otherwise as B.B. King, was an
American blues singer, electric guitarist, songwriter, and record producer.
King introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string
bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues
guitarists,” states Wikipedia. Born into a sharecropping family in Itta
Bena, Mississippi, B.B. King became one of the best-known blues
performers of his time, an important consolidator of blues styles, and a
primary model for rock guitarists. His nickname was apt: “King of the
Blues.”
Biography online goes into more detail: “After serving in World War II,
Riley B. King, better known as B.B. King, became a disc jockey in
Memphis, Tennessee, where he was dubbed ‘the Beale Street Blues Boy.’
That nickname was shortened to ‘B.B.’ and the guitarist cut his first record
in 1949. He spent the next several decades recording and touring, playing
more than 300 shows a year. An artist of international renown, King
worked with other musicians from rock, pop and country backgrounds. He
won his 15th Grammy Award in 2009.”
King was the first bluesman to enter the pop mainstream, paving the way
for others to follow. In 1969, B.B. released his biggest hit “The Thrill is
Gone,” featuring a string section. He became the first blues performer to
sing and play in the Soviet Union, in 1979. It did not seem ironic at all that
the King of the Blues passed away in Las Vegas, a mecca for musicians of
all stripes and from around the world.
[147]
Straight from Austin’s 6th
Street
Music lovers from around the world congregate once a year in mid-March
in Austin, Texas for a huge festival (not just music any more, but much
more now) called South by Southwest (SxSW). Started in 1987, SxSW not
only features music but film and lectures as well these days. Over its 10-
day run in 2017, the festival attracted over a million music lovers, and
others. No doubt many came for the premieres of new movies and to catch
a glimpse of a movie star or attend a talk given by some of the many stars
who attended.
Austin is also home to the famous Sixth Street collection of bars and
restaurants where barhoppers may run into Willie Nelson jamming with
friends or k.d. lang just hanging out. Why? Because both artists still record
their music there. Austin is also famous for the television program called
“Austin City Limits,” which premiered in 1975 and can still be seen on
PBS. Austin has indeed earned its monicker: “Live Music Capital of the
World.” Strolling down 6th
street one might also run into Gary Clark, Jr.,
who grew up in Austin, and is now leading the movement to revive the
blues in the Lone Star State and elsewhere.
“I’ve always wanted to play from an earthy,
organic, toes-planted-in-the-soil place, says
guitarist Gary Clark Jr., who is singlehandedly
taking the blues into the future. Influenced by
rock, soul, and hip-hop as much as by the
Mississippi Delta blues, Clark, 28 [now 34],
started performing at age 14 in clubs in his native
Austin, Texas. Alicia Keys has compared him to
Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye. Eric Clapton
invited him to play at his 2010 Crossroads concert. Last February [2011],
Clark performed at the White House with B. B. King, Mick Jagger, Jeff
[148]
Beck, and Buddy Guy for President Obama,” wrote journalist Lisa
Robinson in the December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.
Past as Prologue
There is no doubt that the blues has become more flexible, making it
easier for performers from around the globe to put their bluesy style into a
recognizable blues form. “For the blues to have a future in which daring
artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues
with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built
on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues
isn’t merely a form. It’s a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in
decades past in so many ways, and you’re playing the blues, whether it’s
with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects,” wrote Jim
Fusilli in an article entitled “Lamenting the Future of the Blues” in the
Wall Street Journal.
Blues purists and non-traditionalists alike agree that the blues as we have
historically known it may be in trouble. “We’re all worrisome about
getting a young audience,” XM Satellite Radio’s Bill Wax said over sweet
tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: “I don’t believe the
blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around
with the form, but we don’t want people to mess with the tradition.”
Children of the Future
Performers from England once before resurrected the traditional American
blues from musical obscurity and a sensational British blues guitarist
named Toby Lee may be leading the way again. In 2018, he’s only 13
years old, but has shown a complete mastery of a Gibson Firebird guitar
and a deep understanding of blues music, despite knowing little about its
history. Lee is considered one of the hottest young guitarists on the
[149]
international scene and the next generation of great guitar heroes. Toby
says he was greatly influenced and inspired by B.B. King. In October
2014, when Toby was only 10 years old, he got the chance to perform with
his hero on stage.
In a March 2018 interview with Gibson.com,
Lee was asked why he sent a get-well video
to B.B. King, that went viral on the Internet.
“I think it was because it was really sad,
because he’s such a great musician, and we
didn’t want anything to happen to him. He
was keeping blues going, so I guess I wanted
to do it to give him a little bit of a boost,
because I love the blues so much and want to
be able to represent it when I’m older. So, sending a message to him was
quite a big deal to me, because he’s one of my heroes,” Toby said. “He’s
one of the greatest blues musicians in the world. He brought blues and jazz
together, and to be honest, he brought people together. He’s just a really
great musician, and he incorporates loads and loads of styles into blues.
He’s a really inspirational guy.” Toby was speaking retroactively as King,
unfortunately, had passed away three years before.
Perhaps the innocent act of a young boy applauding his blues hero is more
symbolic than he ever realized; like another young boy from Hope,
Arkansas who had the joy of shaking hands with his political hero decades
ago, then went on to become President. Perhaps the video was a passing of
the blues torch to the next generation of blues performers, no matter what
their race or nationality happens to be. Maybe Toby himself is an
embodiment of the blues future. There must be a whole lot of kids out
there with skills like Toby Lee, the U.K. Young Blues Artist of the Year
for 2018. Let’s greet them with open arms because blues music is too great
to die another death.
[150]
Chapter Fourteen
“The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.”
B.B. King, blues guitarist, singer and producer
Conclusions
he blues is becoming more and more institutionalized as a musical
genre: 2003 was declared the year of the blues and International
Blues Day falls on August 4th of each year. In other words,
traditional blues may be on the decline, but the musical style will never be
forgotten. “Blues can still be heard in forms close to the earliest folk blues,
showing that it is still in touch with its roots, and within modern jazz and
rock and roll, showing the enormous impact it has had over the last
century,” states the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. That may be an
understatement, as it was referring to an American reader. But what about
the millions of blues fans around the world who appreciate and try to
replicate the blues pioneers? They might not have ever picked cotton, but
that does not mean they cannot interpret the blues to fit into their own
cultural values. They can also understand what it means to be oppressed,
then find a way to resist by speaking (or singing) the truth to the powers
that be. A greater international appreciation of the American blues
therefore means an extended life for the musical genre.
T
[151]
Ole Miss Professor Adam Gussow, and many other analysts, agree on one
point: Violence was a large part of blues development. “African
Americans’ identity was shaped in an environment whose language,
society and political structure were created by the same people that had
denied them any right or dignity. Although the aesthetic and moral
standards were dictated by dominant white culture, blacks were able to
create their own, which diverged from the existing social order. Blues
music represented the opposing voice that refused to be silenced by
oppression and segregation. But what made the Blues such a powerful and
inspiring event was that it was not meant to be political. It was a raw,
authentic expression of intimate feelings of pain, love, pleasure and anger.
Blues music carried the very essence of humanity. This is where the social
significance of the Blues lies: In the recognition that some basic aspects of
human experience are universal. The Blues expressed this with
unprecedented clarity, honesty and simplicity,” states Susanna Steinfeld in
her 2015-16 thesis The Social Significance of Blues Music.
The oppression that existed on the old Tom Moore farm in the Brazos
Valley of Texas is only one example of widespread mistreatment of black
workers, and black people in general in the days of Jim Crow laws and
thereafter. Vestiges of white on black violence remain, even in the 21st
century: beatings and killings by police of unarmed black men and not
allowing blacks to stay in coffee shops to wait for their friends. Do such
examples recall the dark old days of Jim Crow? Like the blues of old, are
the black rap artists of today voicing the same sort of frustrations? Perhaps
that is why an anti-police attitude is so prevalent in rap songs like “Cop
Killer.” A bigger question to ask: might rap be a young black artist’s
version of the blues? But then how does one explain white rap artists like
Eminem?
And then there is the argument of whether the blues was born in the
Mississippi Delta or in Texas. Most observers believe it was the former,
[152]
but some disagree. “But almost 10 years before Johnson apocryphally sold
his soul at the crossroads — or even recorded a single song — the real
blueprint for modern popular music had been drawn in the state of Texas.
At least, that’s the theory. You can trace 90 per cent of the music that
came after back to three artists,” writes Rick Howe for the online
magazine Earshot, quoting Michael Corcoran, a Texas music historian.
“With Blind Willie Johnson you have the guitar hero, Arizona Dranes was
the crazy piano thumper, and with Washington Phillips you have the
introspective song writer.”
You can almost hear many blues purists, convinced that it was the Delta
that spawned the music, snickering. Maybe Mississippi was the first,
maybe not, but there can be no doubt that Texan Blind Willie Johnson left
a huge imprint on the blues. “The unknown Pentecostal preacher laid
down six tracks for Columbia Records which went on to sell millions of
copies in cover versions by Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton and
The Grateful Dead, to name a few. To this day, many guitar greats still
consider ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ to be the greatest
slide guitar performance ever recorded,” concludes the Earshot article.
In closing, the argument can be made that Texas blues is not being given
its due in the history of blues music, and it should be. It is true that John
Hurt and Muddy Waters get much credit, but Blind Willie Johnson, Blind
Lemon Jefferson and other blues performers from Texas were just as
great, if not greater. How many people realize that Jefferson Airplane
named their band in tribute to a black Texas blues singer? Or that B.B.
King considered Jefferson a major influence? Are Texas-born guitarists
like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Winter receiving their well-deserved
places as modern equivalents of Johnson? Is there a greater white blues
singer than Texan Janis Joplin? Let’s give credit where credit is due.
[153]
Epilogue: Blues in the Brazos Valley
This book is not a work of musicology on the origin of the Blues in the
Brazos Valley of Texas, but a good look at the history of the valley around
the town of Navasota. I know this history well, since my family arrived in
the area from North Carolina in 1833. They occupied a Mexican land
grant of 6,000 acres to the east of Navasota and in just a few years had
established a prosperous plantation. They had seven slaves. We quickly
became rich on cotton and by 1852 my great-great grandfather had a
fortune of 25,000 gold dollars. All this came to an end in 1865 with
emancipation, though several slaves remained on what was left of the
plantation as workers. They were paid in kind, molasses, cornmeal and
greens once a week.
Stories of slavery times came to me from my mother, who grew up on the
property with my great-grandmother. She alleged that we were not cruel
and that we did not whip the slaves at night. She recounted that the Scots
Irish families nearby did whip at night and that great-grandmother
frequently heard wailing from pain. Of course, emancipation was short-
lived and it was replaced by a system of extreme violence aimed at
keeping the former slaves and their immediate descendants terrified and
docile.
This was a system which my relatives accepted, and indeed they help to
create it. They helped to form the White Man’s Union in the area, which
began by simply murdering opposition figures in the fields as they were
working. They fixed elections in Navasota, and my great-uncle was mayor
for 30 years. During this time, anyone who got out of line was lynched or
simply thrown in to the Navasota River, which feeds the Brazos. Other
family joined the Klan and terrorized White as well as Black residents of
the area.
Growing up, we lived in a split world. We listened to Mantovani and
Lawrence Welk, never to local music. My mother detested Texas country
music. She certainly had heard the Blues, but we never listened to them,
though sometimes there was Black gospel music on the radio. Indeed, my
own exposure to the Blues came in college in California, where they were
[154]
part of the revival of American folk music, and of the invention of singer-
song writers.
Even in the 60’s, conditions in the Brazos Valley were oppressive. Field
workers were paid 25cents an hour for picking cotton and had no income
in the off season. Exchange existed on some plantations where the workers
were paid in scrip, which they could only spend in the company store.
They were held on the land until the 60’s, when the Federal Government
broke up the system.
Of course, everything has changed now and the Blues have gone
mainstream. They are on the NPR stations in the area and the PBS station
in the show Austin City Limits. The city of Navasota claims the to be the
Blues Capital of Texas because of the fame of resident Mance Lipscomb.
Until recently, a festival was held every year in honor of his memory.
This book does quite a good job of pointing out that the widespread
acceptance of the Blues is ironic. Even the families of those who had
plantations and perpetrated violence against the workers who created the
Blues, gather at festivals and enjoy the music.
Michael Kraft
(Dr. Michael Kraft grew up in Bryan and horrified many in the community
by not studying at A&M, instead attending college in California and
ultimately earning a Ph.D in philosophy. Now he spends his time reading
that subject.)
[155]
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About the Author
Glenn D. Davis graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo with an undergraduate
degree in English and a master’s degree in political science. After writing a 300-page
graduation thesis at Sophia called The Right Wing of Japan, he entered the Foreign
Correspondents Club of Japan (in Tokyo) in 1980 and was active on various committees
there for more than 20 years. Returning home to Texas in 2007, after a 40-year career in
Japan, Glenn taught at the prestigious Rice University in Houston (Japanese journalism),
at Texas A&M University in College Station (international relations) and at Blinn
College in Bryan (journalism).
Glenn has penned seven non-fiction (mostly history) books on various subjects and
published more than 500 articles in newspapers and magazines around the globe. His
widely acclaimed first book An Occupation without Troops (Tuttle Publishing Co.,
1996) was republished in Japanese by two different Japanese publishers (Kodansha and
Shinchosha), selling more than 30,000 copies in total. He also wrote How We Lived in
Wellborn before Television (CreateSpace.com, 2010), College Station (Arcadia
Publishing, 2011), Essays from the End of the World: Four Decades in Japan
(CreateSpace.com, 2013), and Oswald: Japanese Threads in the JFK Assassination
Fabric (Kadokawa Shoten, 2016). This book, Blood on the Cotton, is his eighth work.