questions raised by the music and life of Gus Cannon TT needs helP!
tonythomas
asked, but to me there are more questions
Gus Cannon seems to be the only African American banjoist who was
recorded extensively who played finger style banjo. He got pulled
into record largely by the record companies desire to record bands
that could follow up on the success of the Louisville Based Jug
Bands.`
Cannon played a rich combination of banjo styles including
frailingg, but his main style on his recordings seems to be a four
finger style (he used every finger but the pinkie) that mixed a
classic approach with banjo rolls and plucking several strings at a
time in unison. He says that he first played clawhammer as a child,
then learned two finger style, and later developed the four-finger
style In a new interview that I have unearthed with the help of
David Evans, Cannon explains that he used finger picks, fairly rare
for banjoists of his epoch, and may have even used a flat pick on
some tunes.
There seems to be a broad range of recorded Black banjoists playing
tenor and mandolin banjo doing the mixture of Blues and pop ragtime
Cannon performed, including mandolin banjoists who appear on
several cuts of Cannon's Jug Stompers recordings. However, there
are no five-string players.
Paul Oliver and others who have examined Cannon's recordings believe
the bulk of Cannon's original tunes may have been in his repertoire
for about 15-20 years before he was recorded in the late 1920s.
They allude to events in the early 1900s and contain allusions to
and response to popular songs that were in vogue during this period
with relatively few references to the kind of recordings that had
succeeded them in Black popular music in the time they were recorded
including more more of what some call Raggy Blues, other Call Bluesy
Rag, or Raggy Blues Country pop. The contrast is more pronounced
when we consider that Cannon's band and the Memphis Jug Band were
pulled together by the recording companies to latch onto the
popularity of the Louisville bands.
However, the Louisville jug band's music was closer to 1920 Jazz,
usually with pianos, clarinets, and often with saxes and trumpets
and tenor banjo. One could expect Louis Armstrong or Coleman
Hawkins in the 1920s guises to come in for a chorus on most
Louisville recordings.
If Cannon's music reflects what he might have been doing
1905-1915 or even 1910-1920, it reflects music he was doing when
there were few or no tenor banjos being used especially by African
American entertainers. Tenors were not invented until 1905. They
did not become generally popular until a tango craze that started
around 1910, and there is evidence that while they may have featured
pretty strong in James Reese Europe's bands of that period, South
Black Jazz bands did not adopt the tenor until around 1919 /1920 and
often used six string banjos, rather than tenors because they had
used guitars.
Other Black five-string banjoists were certainly
involved in commercial entertainment at the time, although none seem
to have been recorded(actually the book _Lost Sounds_ sounds on the
cylinder and early disc recordings of Black folk reports that a late
1890s New Orleans Black banjoist was recorded but none of his
cylinders have been found) because relatively few Black musicians of
any type were recorded until the 1920s. So Cannon may be a link to
five string banjo styles that were prevalent among Black
entertainers in first twenty years of the 20th Century. While in
latter years Cannon was mainly approached for his links to older
Black banjo traditions, and tended to take whatever advantage he
could out of Memphis's desire to produce "old Black banjoists" and
1960s and 1970's desires to venerate old folk "sources," his
significant work had been part of commercial entertainment, playing
dances, jukes, and then working for more than a decade in Medicine
shows that traveled the South and the Midwest. Some of his songs
sought to keep up with what had been "the latest thing" on Broadway
when they were written in the early 1900s.
To me what I have found out so far about Cannon poses
more questions than it answers. We seem to have a set of ideas and
continuities about folk banjoists, white and black, but it seems we
know very little about the many banjoists who were involved in
commercial entertainment in the late 19th and early 20th Century.
Anyone with ideas please write me.
Tony Thomas
u
j_ns...@msn.com
semi-pro sounds, five-string or not:
Boone Reid sort of says semi-pro-ish to me. He was born about 1877.
Percy Darensburg (Louisiana, Texas) was born about 1882.
Sam Cousins, born in about the 1870s judging from a photo, may be the
banjoist on "Who Broke The Lock" by Cousins and DeMoss, available on
CD.
Do any of the pre-1920 banjo recordings of Pete Hampton, born in KY in
1871, survive?
I think the "white" musicians who said they learned from "black"
musicians when they were young are a criminally underrated recorded
resource re "black" sounds; one of those many fellows was Edgar
Cantrell, born in 1864 in KY, whose "Mississippi River Song 'Tapioca'"
is good and available on CD. Ollie Oakley learned from the Bohees, and
it's believed Alfred Kirby learned from one of the Bohees also.
Of the Clef Club crowd, and similar, guys who were born in the South
include Tony Tuck (Virginia about 1879), Gus Haston (St. Louis 1880),
and Seth Jones (Waco 1888).
Arnold Ford (Sweatman) was born in the West Indies. Joseph Meyers
(Kildare) was born in 1888. Vance Lowry was born in KS in 1888.
Buddy Christian really was born in New Orleans in 1885 (i.e. he's not
one of those many guys like Cripple Clarence Lofton who exaggerated by
5 or 10).
Hokum Blues 1924-1929 on Document is worth listening to for general
perspective imo. And it's one of those Document CDs that's worth
putting on while you're cooking anyway, worth much more than the steak
dinner you could have instead.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
Thanks
I aim to be very conservative about Cannon. He happened to have
been recorded much more than any other African American five-string
banjoist. He seems alone in his genre of five-string banjoists. He
also lived a long long time, although it seems unfortunate that no one
really tried to get his playing style down when it could have been
done. Moreover, it seems when he was interviewed and recorded in the
revival period, which for him started with Charters visit in the
1950s, the emphasis was on his older folkier material, not the more
remarkable and distinct repertoire of raggy and bluesy songs he used
in the medicine shows and country dances that were on his commercial
recordings. No one who knew much or cared much about banjo playing
seems to have interviewed him.
By conservative, I mean to say that Cannon was probably NOT unique,
but was unique insofar as he was recorded and lived into a period when
urban folk and blues enthusiasts became interested in him. It seems to
me that the approach of most of us interested in him centers on links
to things that he was marginally involved in--the old time banjo
repertoire and "pure" blues. Sad to say there is not much interest or
knowledge in the bluesy pop country ragtime that made up the bulk of
Cannon's recorded repertoire. There seems to be even less interest in
the several different styles of banjo playing Cannon used on his
recordings, other than those that link to old time down picking, the
first style Cannon learned, but a style he discarded apparently when
still a teenager for two, three, and four finger picking.
One big question I would have loved to ask is why he stuck with the
banjo when he also played what became the dominant instruments of the
music he played, the piano and the guitar.
Another would be to find out what he meant by quitting fiddling
because it was "old fashioned" in 1920. Why didn't he consider the
five string banjo "old fashioned" to.
This is interesting given that the fiddle and five string banjo were
linked in the old time dance repertoire that Cannon certainly knew on
both instruments. However, the fiddle continued to adapt to the new
repertoire of the 1920s including Blues and Jazz. One of the best
features of the Louisville Jug bands with their Jazz oriented music is
the fiddling.
Finally, IF THERE WERE NO JOSEPH SCOTT WE WOULD HAVE TO INVENT HIM.
WHAT GOOD THINGS HE DOES AND WRITES!
Tony Thomas
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]
> By conservative, I mean to say that Cannon was probably NOT unique,
What that brings to mind is yeah, it's far more dangerous to
extrapolate from what one guy did and recalled than from what ten or
twenty did (even if those ten or twenty only had so much in common).
It's like having a sample size of 1 vs. having a sample size of 10 or
20. One good thing about consciously trying to "average" what various
people did and recalled (as it were) is that eccentric personal
agendas tend to get lost, on the balance. And in practice they often
didn't even know each other. For instance, it's very unlikely that
Lucius Smith and Charlie Love knew each other, so when we observe that
they both ran down blues in interviews as young people's music that
they believed had a negative impact on people, and that they were from
different states and both born in 1885, that gives us evidence that
they probably were describing a viewpoint that was fairly common,
rather than, if they had been part of particular clique, eccentric
conventional wisdom within that clique.
Another good thing about thinking this "average"-minded way is that it
has a tendency to prevent one from accidentally cherry-picking the
person who said whatever one tends to be biased towards oneself. For
instance, a partisan for blues beginning in Missouri could point to Ma
Rainey saying she first heard it here, a partisan for it beginning in
Louisiana could point to it first being published there, etc., but if
you average out various evidence from various people you get a broader
and more sensible viewpoint.
Common sense, of course, but fun to think about.
he was recorded and lived into a period when
> urban folk and blues enthusiasts became interested in him. It seems to
> me that the approach of most of us interested in him centers on links
> to things that he was marginally involved in--the old time banjo
> repertoire and "pure" blues.[...]
Well imo "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" melodically and harmonically
is idiomatic of what people generally think of as early purist blues.
He was there and observing and could play what is generally thought of
as golden-age emerging purist blues -- however much interest in it he
happens to have had himself.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
Joseph's point is extremely important not just for me but for everyone
who delves into such topics.
Cannon's relationship to other banjoists of the type I mention is
something WE DO NOT KNOW ABOUT, because not much work has been done
about such banjoists, so we have nothing to compare them to now. One
can only conjecture
that it is possible that Cannon was a representative of a group of
banjoists we do not know about. On the other had because we do not
know about it, we may find that Cannon was unique.
Averaging of the type you critique is extremely dangerous. I am aware
of it least one banjo and old time music scholar who seems to be on a
campaign to take vestigial old time Black bands that persisted into
the 1930s and 1940s to claim that the 1920s was the high point of
Black old-time string band music, when close examination shows them to
be local remenants becoming more and more isolated from vernacular
Black culture even where they were. Similarly, many of us at the
start of the Black banjo online group believed that the absence of
Black string band music and especially banjoists in the recordings of
the 1920s reflected racism on the part of the recording industry and
of folklorists, whereas, evidence seems to indicate that old time
string bands simply were not popular among African American record
buyers or the Black dancing public in the late 1920s. We also ignored
that the recording industry recorded plenty of Black string bands in
the 1920s and 1930s, but these bands played the blues and raggy
country dance music that had replaced the old-time repertoire among
African Americans.
We have to concentrate on the limits of our knowledge. My attempt to
study Cannon points to big questions about banjoists that we simply do
not know because no one has bothered to delve into potential sources
and find out about it.
In fact, I cannot say to what degree Cannon was unique and to what
degree Cannon was a representative of a larger group of five-string
banjo players. I do not have sufficient information to say anything
about it, only to point to what we need to find out to make such
statements.
In regard to his music, my concern was not his early recordings, but
his musicial activities from the 1930s until his death, particularly
his recording by Charters and Stax and his repertoire in "folk"
performances in the 1960s and thereafter. They seemed to be slanted
toward songs thought to be part of the folk repertoire, rather than
the raggy and bluesy songs Cannon performed as a solo ore in bands.
There is lots of frailing and strumming and little of the finger style
banjo that was his forte and where he was unique among recorded Black
banjoists. I would suggest this may have had something to do with the
nature of his new audience was and what they wanted out of a banjo
playing old Black man.
Cannon learned "Poor Boy" from a Mississippi slide guitarist long
before he moved to Memphis. As Joseph points out it was clearly an
authentic early blues
Bob boGadro
of a Yazoo anthology.
To my ear, Gus Cannon's banjo playing sounds more like what I
know of folk guitar than of 5-string banjo. Melodies
and runs sound either 2-fingered or flat picked.
When he does use 4 fingers (actually, 3 fingers -
not using the thumb) it sounds like an upstroked chord,
neither broken nor arpeggiated.
I am hard pressed to identify a banjo
roll in any of the tracks that I have. Similarly,
I do not hear what I would identify as the fifth
string in his picking. I would find it informative if someone
pointed me to some easily accessible examples of his using
banjo rolls and obvious use of the 5th string.
Here is a photo showing 3 finger picking with his ring
finger resting on the banjo head. He certainly has his
thumb on the 5th string here.
http://i171.photobucket.com/albums/u297/harrylaufer/gusnew.jpg
Here is a photo showing 4 finger picking, a non-typical
posture.
http://tangiersound.files.wordpress.com/2007/12/gus.jpg
Best regards,
BobPalasek
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Bob boGadro
Although not in the context of Cannon's Jug Stompers,
it does show Gus frailing and using the 5th string.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdGR9duRZ78
> I would find it informative if someone
> pointed me to some easily accessible examples of his using
> banjo rolls and obvious use of the 5th string.
Bob P
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tonythomas
My knowledge of Cannon comes not only from listening to him on all of
his published work represented in the two document volumes, although
you get more clarity on the Banjo Joe sides on JSP's memphis series,
on the 1950s Charters recording on the 1950s "Skiffle" album, on the
Walk Right In Stax recording, on an unpublished outake from the FOTM
concerts in the 1960s, on what people who watched him play the banjo
say, and on several published and one unpublished interview about the
subject that Dave Evans and I uncovered recently, and especially from
a banjoist in Memphis whom Cannon tried to teach his style to who
spent hours with him and until recently possessed Gus's last banjo,
the Gretsch (Apparently a Gretsch bacon like I used to own) shown in
the pictures you link us to.
Gus played in a variety of styles in the recent interview which was
hampered by his interviewer's total ignorance of banjo playing and ?
Cannon, he plays the banjo in three or four different styles depending
on how you count them and talks about playing in styles that until now
I and other people who have followed his playing much longer than I
have had never heard of. Remeber he was playing the banjo from around
1900-1902 until 1979. He was recorded twice that we know about in the
twenties and in 1970s, although Cannon claimed someone made cylinder
recordings of his playing in the early 1900s.
He said he first learned the kind of frailing he records on "Feather
Bed" and on Charters 1950s recording and the _Walk Right In_ Album.
He says he learned two finger picking when he was a teenager,
although I know of no recordings of his music where he is playing this
style. A the turn of the century two-finger picking was probably as
wide-spread among folk Banjoists Black and white in the South as down
picking. Later he learned three and four finger picking. He was
adamant about saying that why not use all the fingers. In the Hurley
interview that recently surfaced, he appears to say (he was not clear
and the interviewer did not know enough about the banjo or have any
interest in this) he sometimes played the five string banjo like the
tenor which would mean with a straight pick.
Cannon's banjo playing poses problems for the contemporary listener.
For one thing, he is one of the few five-string banjoists of any kind
who recorded during the 1920s and early 1930 who used finger picks. Of
course, he is the only five-string banjoist who was recorded playing
his genre of music. He also may have sought to get a much more
strident and staccato metallic sound much like those that tenor banjos
recorded about the same time got. We are used to talking about past
things in terms of what we know or are familiar with now, not in the
musical context that existed at the time.
For example, in my writing here and elsewhere about Cannon, I have
often said that Cannon sounded like a tenor banjoist and must have
been influenced by tenor players. When I wrote that, I did not take
into account that Cannon learned to play the banjo and entered show
business and crafted many of the songs he recorded before the tenor
banjo was widely played especially among African Americans in the
South. Thus I discounted the possibility that Tenor banjoists playing
the kind of music Cannon played could have developed their approach
from hearing their predecessors on the five string banjo, people like
Cannon. I also discounted the fact that Cannon was the major five
string banjoist recorded playing this kind of music in this kind of
band and had his banjo set up so that the banjo played in a similar
pitch and timbre to what the tenor played. So, there would have been
similarities in what any musician playing this kind of music with an
instrument that fit into the pitch and timbre place of the banjo fit.
Of course, Cannon does not chiefly sound like tenor players. He never
tries to be the time keeper on the recordings and seems to have a bit
of trouble doing that on his one or two solo sides. As Dom Flemons
explained to some of us a year or two ago, Cannons' music demanded the
guitar and the jug and in unrecorded tunes in his repertoire, the
Guitar banjo, to keep time and provide bass. This is probably what
except for one cut, they brought Blake in to play his masterful guitar
on the Banjo Joe sides. He was able to deal with the problem that the
banjo had producing bass that dancers needed. You can hear that same
problem on the white classic ragtime recordings which sound masterful
but largely undanceable, although on a number of the cylinders the
classic masters tried to use pianos and drums to provide danceable
bottom.
Finally, we're in an epoch dominated by five string banjoists who play
in the tradition where thumbing and thumb lead are pretty standard and
where flat picking is dominant in guitar playing. If you have not
spent time listening to some of the recordings of ragtime banjo done
by the great classic banjoists, the only reference you may have to
this kind of music may be blues guitar playing or flat pick banjo
playing. My first impression hearing Cannon before I knew much about
the banjo was that he was using either a flat pick or thumb lead for a
lot of the runs he played. My perception changed when I heard the
classic banjo sides from the 1900s cylinder recordings. They were
changed much more spending time with several colleagues and friends
who can play ragtime in the classic banjo style, especially watching
Bob Winans play tunes like St. Louis Tickle several times at his home
and at the Banjo Collectors gathering. This view was strengthened when
I talked to a Memphis banjoist who watched Cannon play and who sought
lessons from him on how to play his music. Of course, in discounting
or being totally ignorant of clasic banjo, I was ignorant of the fact
that it was the dominant banjo style for commercial performers and
many non-commercial performers in the years that Cannon learned the
banjo and developed his style.
Frankly, because I had the notion that finger picks were not common on
five string banjos in Cannon's time that the staccato runs he made had
to have been done with the thumb and perhaps with a thumb pick. Now
that I know he used finger picks, that he played four finger picking
seems much more reasonable.
There are aspects of his playing, especially his frailing and
strumming that resemble the oldest type of Black guitar playing that
has been recorded, the kind of work that Jim Jackson who worked with
Cannon on the medicine shows did and the kind that Henry Thomas did as
well. Yet, it is fair to say that such guitarists have always been
seen as incorporating banjo techniques and styles rather than the main
line of what became blues and raggy guitar.
However, even in his great recordings, Cannon cannot surmount the
problem that even the tenor banjo, which was widely recorded playing
h0is kind of music, faced and ultimately could not surmount: the same
high pitched metallic sound that cut through bands and producted
strident leads was not accompanied by bass strings that provided
bottom. In a dialogic music like the Blues, Cannon could only create
a dialog between single string playing and strumming. As an
individual player, he did not have the dialog that the guitar and the
piano can create between the bass and treble strings, The metallic
sound and the higher timbre he achieved made his banjo to slip bag
into a common rhythm section as a guitar can. It could not step back
and lurk or just swing the band, but had to break out whenever it was
played. At the more moderate (than old time banjo) rate that Cannon
played banjo obligatos and playing were a serious challenge to the
voice, especially if it tried to get low.
Now I do not doubt that Cannon was influenced by Blues and Country Rag
guitar players. He said he learned "Poor Boy" from a slide guitar
player. But my focus is on the unique ways his banjo fit into the
music he made quite differently than a guitar did. He shared many of
the problems that impacted not only the five string banjo but also the
four string, mandolin, and guitar banjos which led to their becoming
rarities ten years after Cannon's last recording on Black blues
recordings.
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]the problem that the
> banjo had producing bass that dancers needed.[...]
I don't think dancers needed bass. For instance, slaves danced to
fiddles, quills, banjos, handsaws, bones, with very little use of bass
instruments.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
The dances that were done
by African Americans to the Blues and the Black spin-offs from ragtime
needed bass which was quite
different than the dances where "> fiddles, quills, banjos, handsaws,
bones," and hand slapping were sufficient
accompaniment. I am generally unacquainted with which music and
dances used hand saws and I am mainly speaking
of where the instrument was the fundamental music that one danced to
as in the way fiddle continued to be a lead
instrument in Blues, trad Jazz, and Swing though no one danced these
musics to solo fiddle even though solo fiddle or the fiddle along with
percussion was among the most common accompaniments of Black dancing
in the 18th and 19th centuries.
However, banjo, fiddle, and quill led dancing was generally to fast
music or music where rapid playing of the instrument
filled in and provided a basis for dancing. The slow drag and other
slow and moderate dances became the dances to which the blues was
danced. This required strong bass notes with sustain to hammer out
the beat. Therein lies the end of the five-string banjo as a dance
instrument among Black folk. The guitar with its bass notes and
sustain and the pinao with even greater bass notes and sustain became
the major instruments for dance. Both provided a basis for the
dialogic
nature of the blues for a dance player and lead player to provide call
and respones between treble and bass.
That African Americans tended to dance to different beats as the Blues
crept in while Southeastern whites continued dancing at paces that
sustained the five-string banjo is why African Americans discarded the
five-string banjo over the first forty years of the 20th Century while
the five-string to be sure retreated in the face of the guitar and the
piano, enough of it held on for Earl Scruggs to revive it with his new
banjo style in the postwar years.
Even if you listen to the great ragtime solos of the masters of
classic banjo, you find them not very danceable. The artists
recognized the problem by often adding drums, piano and other bass
instruments to their recordings.
Gus Cannon's recordings indicate the importance of bass playing to
making his tunes danceable and even listenable.
On his solo "banjo Joe" recordings, Blind Blake was brought in to play
guitar. I started to write backup guitar, but on several cuts, Blake
is really playing as much lead as Cannon does. When Cannon was asked
to produce band recordings he added not only guitar but jug to provide
danceable bass. Starting from the band that Handy recounts gaining
more tips than his band was played for a whole dance, a configuration
of mandolin or fiddle, tenor and/or mandolin banjo, guitar and bass
became known in bands that played blues and country ragtime.
We should not discount the dance issue in recordings. In Jeff Titon's
book on the Blues and other accounts, we have descriptions of how
African Americans bought blues records for dancing at home, dancing at
picnics, and dancing at parties and country suppers. Cannon like most
musicians of his time was a dance musician, not a concert or caberet
musician, working dances in the country outside Memphis as much or
more than he worked in Memphis. He drew his musicians not from those
he met in Memphis, but people he gigged with in the surrounding
countryside, although it may be that some he actually gigged with in
Memphis had been enrolled in the rival Memphis Jug band.
But again, the great Scott is correct about the general statement
that bass is required to dance. Playing old time banjo for Rock,
Blues, and Jazz musicians not used to old time music, I have gotten
the question "how can people dance to that without bass."
I must say coming back to live old time music and attending festivals,
I find the greatest change since I left it in the 1960s is the
presence of basses in so many old time revivalist bands, even though
relatively few were involved in old time bands in the 1960s and not
that many in old time white bands of the 1920s and early 1930s. This
seems to have to do with the greater concentration on playing dance
tunes and actually playing dances for old time revival players today
than was true for bands I knew of in the 1960s where performances were
chiefly for concert or caberet performances at folk clubs or folk
concerts.
Peter Feldmann
> On Feb 8, 2:23 pm, j_nsc...@msn.com wrote:
>> On Feb 6, 6:26 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> [...]the problem that the
>>
>>> banjo had producing bass that dancers needed.[...]
>> I don't think dancers needed bass. For instance, slaves danced to
>> fiddles, quills, banjos, handsaws, bones, with very little use of bass
>> instruments.
>>
>> Joseph Scott
> Joseph is right about the extreme generalization dancers needed bass.
> The dances that were done
> by African Americans to the Blues and the Black spin-offs from ragtime
> needed bass which was quite
> different than the dances where "> fiddles, quills, banjos, handsaws,
> bones," and hand slapping were sufficient
> accompaniment.
< ... >
I recall several visits by Mance Lipscomb of Navasota, Texas to stay
with me in Santa Barbara when he either played a show for me or at my
music club the Bluebird Cafe. One thing that quickly became apparent
was that he was very much oriented to dance. He would talk about dances
being "all night long", about playing for a white dance one night, then
a "colored" dance the next (or them dancing in one hall, being separated
by a rope). But even had he not talked about it, you could tell about
the dance thing due to that amazingly strong thumb stroke on his guitar.
Those bass notes came booming out, no matter what. Mance never
mentioned cabarets, but did speak a lot about the proper setting of
fence posts, and how to best fry the fish we'd caught from the Goleta pier.
< ... >
> But again, the great Scott is correct about the general statement
> that bass is required to dance. Playing old time banjo for Rock,
> Blues, and Jazz musicians not used to old time music, I have gotten
> the question "how can people dance to that without bass."
>
> I must say coming back to live old time music and attending festivals,
> I find the greatest change since I left it in the 1960s is the
> presence of basses in so many old time revivalist bands, even though
> relatively few were involved in old time bands in the 1960s and not
> that many in old time white bands of the 1920s and early 1930s. This
> seems to have to do with the greater concentration on playing dance
> tunes and actually playing dances for old time revival players today
> than was true for bands I knew of in the 1960s where performances were
> chiefly for concert or caberet performances at folk clubs or folk
> concerts.
Now, I too have been struck by the prevalence of bass players in
"modern" old time bands, and find it a major difference between what was
happening then (the 1960s) and now. I did include a guitaronne player
in the Scragg Family for a couple of years, but it was more for
cosmetic, rather than musical effect.
But we can also turn the tables and look at the music from across the
river, so to speak. A lot of old time, blues, and even bluegrass music
was not intended primarily as dance music, except for the prosaic,
automatic "whooo-aaaah!" reaction that listeners unfamiliar with the
idiom bring forth from their inner hillbilly selves, when momentarily
encountering a string band. Yet the biggest hits that Bill Monroe had
were, interestingly, the ones closest in feel to dance numbers, back in
the 50s when accordions were ruling western swing. Certainly black
music has become almost completely dance music since the days of country
blues -- and maybe that's one reason you find hardly any black listeners
in contemporary blues performances.
Yeah, the _sustain_ of bass (especially electric) adds that danceable
beat, as do drums -- notably missing in old time, bluegrass, and country
blues (with apologies to Ed and Lonnie Young, Jr.). Acoustic guitar
also lacked that sustain, which is why electric guitars quickly
overwhelmed the others when they became available for dance bands. The
successful pop music in the USA has always been dance music, while at
bluegrass festivals, those that do get up to dance are booed away from
the stage.
--
Peter Feldmann
BlueGrass West
PO Box 614
Los Olivos, CA 93441 USA
+1 805 688 9894 // 805 350 3918 (cell)
www.BlueGrassWest.com
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]The slow drag and other
> slow and moderate dances became the dances to which the blues was
> danced.
What time frame do you have in mind here?
I believe blues were often played fast in the 1910s, much as bad man
ballads were often played fast in the 1890s (and in much the same
style as they had been, both not for dancing and for dancing, and with
much the same instrumentation). If you picture someone like Butch Cage
or Bob Pratcher or Son Simms playing a tune similar to "All Night
Long" or "Hesitating Blues" or "Joe Turner": I think that pace was
common for blues in the 1910s among musicians about Cage's age. One of
the reasons I've come to the belief that blues songs were often played
fast in the 1910s is that 16-bar blues songs (which in almost all
respects, e.g. lyrics, were very little different from 12-bar blues
songs) almost certainly peaked in popularity during the 1910s, and
musicians who were already active in the 1910s, whenever recorded,
when they played 16-bar blues songs with lyrics that apparently are of
1910s vintage tended to play them fast a lot.
I believe blues songs generally slowed down during the 1920s, to some
extent, because many pro performers (not rural early blues performers
so much) assumed unhappy lyrics and slow pace naturally went hand in
hand, and thus the Bessie Smith type sound was invented within the
entertainment industry -- largely by them, not by rural early blues
performers so much. If I'm right about that, then, for instance, we
can possibly associate Jaybird Coleman's blues style with some
familiarity with Bessie-Smith-ish sounds of the 1920s and the blues
style of Freeman Stowers, 12 years older than Coleman, with less
familiarity. (To give a random example.)
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
>
> Now, I too have been struck by the prevalence of bass players in
> "modern" old time bands, and find it a major difference between what was
> happening then (the 1960s) and now. I did include a guitaronne player
> in the Scragg Family for a couple of years, but it was more for
> cosmetic, rather than musical effect.
>
> But we can also turn the tables and look at the music from across the
> river, so to speak. A lot of old time, blues, and even bluegrass music
> was not intended primarily as dance music, except for the prosaic,
> automatic "whooo-aaaah!" reaction that listeners unfamiliar with the
> idiom bring forth from their inner hillbilly selves, when momentarily
> encountering a string band. Yet the biggest hits that Bill Monroe had
> were, interestingly, the ones closest in feel to dance numbers, back in
> the 50s when accordions were ruling western swing. Certainly black
> music has become almost completely dance music since the days of country
> blues -- and maybe that's one reason you find hardly any black listeners
It should be remembered that Monroe's start in show business was not
as a singer or a mandolin
player but as a dancer. The mix in Bluegrass and the Monroe Brother
repertoire always included
songs descended from sentimental parlor songs of the 19th Century as
well as dance tunes, the kind of songs
most people remember from the Carter Family, although OTM folk tend to
ignore that hundreds of religious songs
that were a big part of the Carter Family's recordings. Moreover,
Bluegrass evolved in the era when dance was receding
before television as a past time.
At the same time, a lot of Bluegrass music is danceable and is dance
music. I think
this was truer in the 1940s and 1950s when Bluegrass was more closely
connected to Country music and did not try to be as "folkie" as it has
become, although the folkiness has been expressed by the adoption of
more dance tunes.
Still, it is hard for me to imagine playing real Bluegrass without a
bass. It is a big part of the sound and frankly for me and others I
have talked about the pleasures of Blugrass singing, having thatr big
bass beat behind you is one of the best things about it.
Probably my concerns about the basses in OTM come from my experience
mostly as a guitarist in OTM until quite recently when I have begun
playing banjo too. When you are picking in a jam and or playing in
band and bassist is there, I have to think of something else to do
with the guitar so I do not get in the way of the bass.. On the other
hand when I have raised this question with bass players or bands with
basses, they say it helps a lot playing for dances which they do a
lot.
>
> Yeah, the _sustain_ of bass (especially electric) adds that danceable
> beat, as do drums -- notably missing in old time, bluegrass, and country
> blues (with apologies to Ed and Lonnie Young, Jr.). Acoustic guitar
> also lacked that sustain, which is why electric guitars quickly
> overwhelmed the others when they became available for dance bands. The
> successful pop music in the USA has always been dance music, while at
> bluegrass festivals, those that do get up to dance are booed away from
> the stage.//
That is sad. On the other hand, I have gone to more local-oriented
venues in the South and to the Carter Family fold and seen people
regularly dancing to Bluegrass groups. In my last visit to the Fold,
there were a good number of young people in their teens or early
twenties (to me at 61 people in their thirties look like teenagers to
me so maybe I am off) dancing as well as some old timers who I have
seen a other festivals and even in Mike Seeger;s "Dancing Feet." In
fact, when the band started to do an uptempo sacred song, several of
these teens started dancing until one of their friends stopped them.
There is a lot of dancing going on as part of the old time revival and
the continued interest in Black traditional music. As many of us are
the kind that were in the house practicing the guitar, the banjo, and/
or the fiddle and memorizing the long liner notes on Folkways records
when the other kids were out dancing, I think anyone who wants to play
old time music and Blues needs to know as much about dancing and even
try to dance, even if you are an oafish club footed stumbler like me.
Regarding the Blues, I think for most working rural Southern Blues
players, the ability to play music that folks would dance to was at
the center of what got you work. This does not mean that other
situations were not part of playing Blues. People often busked in the
streets and would often play in the streets to advertise their
appearance at a juke joint or country supper. However, the caberet
experience which so many of us folkies identify with the Blues is more
the product of our point of view seeing Blues in folk clubs, folk
concerts, folk festivals and their descendants than how the blues
operated or what working Blues musicians aimed when the Blues was a
living movement among African Americans.
tonythomas
> On Feb 9, 5:49 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> [...]The slow drag and other
>
> > slow and moderate dances became the dances to which the blues was
> > danced.
>
> What time frame do you have in mind here?
>
> I believe blues were often played fast in the 1910s, much as bad man
> ballads were often played fast in the 1890s (and in much the same
> style as they had been, both not for dancing and for dancing, and with
> much the same instrumentation). If you picture someone like Butch Cage
> or Bob Pratcher or Son Simms playing a tune similar to "All Night
> Long" or "Hesitating Blues" or "Joe Turner": I think that pace was
Cage and Brown are a very good example of what I am talking about.
Brown was actually a superb five string banjo
player and still had his banjo when the recordings were made, but he
rarely played the banjo because the music they were making was in a
blues-influenced rhythm, not an old time rhythm even though Oster did
record some tunes that were in the old time repertoire.
\Especially in that generation, few Blues singers played only blues
because the Blues was not the only and exclusive form of dance music
that Black folk enjoyed. There was a lot of music that were
essentially folk or popular versions of Ragtime, much deluted to be
sure, and their was faster dancing than slow steps. As Joseph Scott
explains here, when one talks about dance blues musicians, we
generally ARE talking about people who played music faster than the
slow
blues, not just in the early days, but as late as the 1930s, before
the music started to speed up again under the influence of swing.
Cannon's Jug Stompers are a very good example of what Joseph is
talking about. Cannon seems to have perfected much of his repertoire
between 1905 and 1910. At the same time, despite boasts he made about
playing with Handy (in reality Gus did mention he tried to take a
music lesson with Handy and it did not work out at all, much less
playing in Handy's band) Cannon made very much of his music out in the
country for dances and jukes, even when he lived in Memphis City.
When he assembled a band for his recordings, he did not get musicians
who lived in Memphis, although part of that was that several musicians
he normally played with had already been enlisted in a rival recording
band, the Memphis Jug Band. He assembled musicians with whom he had
worked playing country dances.
Our view of what the blues is can be very incomplete if we neglect the
many string bands that played blues dance music
and related countryish forms of pop, ragtime, and Jazz in the era of
the Blues. If you listen to their recordings, you will find a lot
more fast and medium tempo dance songs than the early Blues singers
recorded, probably because dancing was even more a part of their work
than it was for solo singers. Cannon's band played very few slow
songs including the Blues he recorded.
One of
> the reasons I've come to the belief that blues songs were often played
> fast in the 1910s is that 16-bar blues songs (which in almost all
> respects, e.g. lyrics, were very little different from 12-bar blues
> songs) almost certainly peaked in popularity during the 1910s, and
> musicians who were already active in the 1910s, whenever recorded,
> when they played 16-bar blues songs with lyrics that apparently are of
> 1910s vintage tended to play them fast a lot.
>
> I believe blues songs generally slowed down during the 1920s, to some
> extent, because many pro performers (not rural early blues performers
> so much) assumed unhappy lyrics and slow pace naturally went hand in
> hand, and thus the Bessie Smith type sound was invented within the
> entertainment industry -- largely by them, not by rural early blues
> performers so much. If I'm right about that, then, for instance, we
> can possibly associate Jaybird Coleman's blues style with some
> familiarity with Bessie-Smith-ish sounds of the 1920s and the blues
> style of Freeman Stowers, 12 years older than Coleman, with less
> familiarity. (To give a random example.)//
I think the influence of the female Blues singers is vastly
underestimated by contemporary blues thinking.
Elijah Wald showed that most of Mississipi Blues singers like Son
House considered them the greatest
Blues performers. Their recordings always outsold native Blues
singers among Mississippi Blacks and were probably more directly
consider "the Blues" than anything else. In late 1920s blues
recordings there are lots of versus that
come out of the most famous of these Vaudville Blues singers.
On the other hand, the massive success of Bessie Smith flowed from the
closeness of her singing to African American
traditions of Blues singing and lead to the recordings of other Black
female singers with more of a "Southern" sound like
Ma Rainey. It opened the door for the initial recordings of Southern
Blues performers who were not part of established show business like
the female Blues singers and folk like Lonnie Johnson and Charlie
Jackson. So, it would be quite surprising if Bessie and other female
performers did not have a direct impact on how others sang the Blues
and especially on what recording company folk wanted from Black
singers.
Stearns and Paul Oliver among others point to a whole series of dances
that came out of the Black rural South between the late 1890s and the
1920s, the most famous being the Charleston aka the Geechee (know I
spelled that wrong) Dance, although this was one among many others.
Almost like rock and RB in the late 1950s and early 1960s, a big part
of song writing and publication and performance was hooking up with
these new dances or creating artificial new dances to advance a song.
(Some of these dances like the Hully Gully were revived again in the
1950s and 1960s, at least in name)\. To make a living among Black
folks, Blues performers must have had to play this music as well as
the Blues.
We know that Blues singers, especially the older performers like Gus
Cannon or Charlie Patton, had a much wider repertoire than simply
Blues songs, but the recording industry tended to focus on recording
Blues and not on recording the rest of their repertoire. Cannon was
not chiefly recorded as a Blues singer, and actual blues are a
minority of his recordings both in the Banjo Joe records and in the
Jug Stompers recordings. Much of what they do records the kind of
faster music and faster Blues that even those who recorded slow blues
must have been playing.
It should also be observed that Cannon continued to be able to play
music from the old time banjo and fiddle repertoire that he had
learned coming up in Mississippi and which he probably played more
during his giggs in the country, especially before 1920, when Cannon
gave up playing the fiddle as :old fashioned."
It still interests me that although Cannon played the guitar and the
piano and may have also played the tenor banjo from remarks on an
interview with him David Evans and I unearthed earlier this month, he
stuck with the five-string banjo when others around him had abandoned
it for other instruments Cannon could have played. Why did he stay
with the five string banjo? As a banjoist I am glad he did, of
course.!
>
>
Lyle Lofgren
Tony Thomas wrote: "At the same time, a lot of Bluegrass music is
danceable and is dance
music. " True, but much of what distinguished BG from OT consisted of
changes to make it a stage show with microphones, mainly the piercing
singing and flashy solos. You wouldn't be able to clap for each solo
if you were dancing (at least I wouldn't -- dancing for me is an
anaerobic exercise: I'm out of breath). I've mentioned this before,
but not for a few years, so I'm repeating it: when Bill Monroe & his
band were at the Chicago Folk Festival sometime in the 1960s, they
also played for an afternoon square dance. They sat in chairs, no one
took any solos, and they played only OT square dance tunes -- nothing
from their stage repertoire. Needless to say, it was one of the best
square-dance bands you could imagine. But it also demonstrated how far
Monroe and BG had moved away from dance music.
Lyle
Lyle
NOSPAM...@aol.com
me to eke out a (very small) livelihood as a fiddler is flexibility -
and that definitely includes playing music that folks can dance to.
Professional musicians like Gus Cannon, Robert Johnson, Memphis Jug
Band, Mississippi Sheiks, Memphis MInnie and probably also those
musicians for whom playing was more of a hobby and a way to supplement
their income -- they had to be able to play for parties, and at
parties, people like to dance! This is what Bob Brozman calls a
"service gig" -- you're providing a service for the client, it's not
"art" in the same way as playing a concert would be. A lot of people
put down these kinds of gigs but the "service gig" has always been a
mainstay of the working vernacular musician and as such, I regard it
as honorable work. You play for a wedding, bar mitzvah, or whatever
-- the people are gonna wanna dance. And you're gonna have to be able
to play requests -- this could be how Robert Johnson ended up with
repertoire as vastly different as "They're Red Hot" and "Hellhound on
my Trail".
I agree that the slow blues is a product of the great women "classic
blues" singers. They took one aspect of the black vernacular music of
the day and dramatized it as a stage show -- not in the corner of a
juke joint but up on a stage with elaborate costumes, dancers, etc.
Think of the difference between Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey etc.
and Louise Johnson or Memphis Minnie. It's pretty clear from
listening that the former women were coming from the stage show
setting -- with a big band, horns, etc (and the photos show them
dressed in as showy a manner as possible, all kinds of feathers,
jewels, etc.) while Louise Johnson and Memphis Minnie were clearly
more used to getting folks up and dancing in some rough little country
bar (or a city bar where there were country people). The "classic
blues" singers were very sophisticated, their music was related to the
jazz of the day (those horns!) and led directly to singers like Billie
Holliday. Memphis Minnie's guitar-based music developed in a
different direction which was towards what came to be known as
"Chicago" blues.
In some ways, this is analogous to what Lyle was talking about -- in
that the older style country blues (think Henry Thomas or Peg Leg
Howell) was more oriented towards dancing (like OT music) whereas the
classic blues of Bessie Smith et al (a 20th century invention) was a
stage show (like BG).
About the bass -- I think that the desire for bass may be related to
the connection between drumming and dancing -- and goes back to Congo
Square, etc. It's not that people can't dance without a bass or drum
-- but there is definitely something in that low end thumping that
encourages dancing. Actually, it also encourages marching -- think
military -- I guess drumming just makes people want to move. Maybe
there's some physiological explanation for this?? Anyway, I am sure
that in string band music, bass=drum. Personally I don't care for
bass in OT music but there's no doubt at all that in a noisy
situation, the OT band (or any band without drums) WITH a bass will
cut through all the racket better than one without. My husband Eric
says that the invention of the electric bass is right up there with
the atom bomb in terms of bad 20th century inventions, I don't know if
I'd go that far, but it certainly does flatten everything out and
erases nearly all subtlety no matter what it's added to. I really
cannot stand it with bluegrass, give me trombone any day. Anyone
remember the Bass-O-Matic skit from early Saturday Night Live? Too
bad they didn't puree an electric bass but it would have burned out
the motor.
Thank you Tony, Joseph, et al for this most interesting discussion,
Suzy T.
Peter Feldmann
> It should be remembered that Monroe's start in show business was not
> as a singer or a mandolin player but as a dancer.
That's if you don't count Bill's work as a guitar player, backing up
fiddlers like his Uncle Pen and Arnold Schultz. For _dances_. The solo
fiddle was America's dance orchestra for many years. And Monroe always
talked about the fiddle as "the king of the instruments".
The mix in Bluegrass and the Monroe Brother
> repertoire always included
> songs descended from sentimental parlor songs of the 19th Century as
> well as dance tunes, the kind of songs
> most people remember from the Carter Family, although OTM folk tend to
> ignore that hundreds of religious songs
> that were a big part of the Carter Family's recordings. Moreover,
> Bluegrass evolved in the era when dance was receding
> before television as a past time.
Well, Bill and Charlie Monroe recorded several songs that were also done
by the Carter Family, who in turn recorded Jimmie Rodgers' material.
Yes, _lots_ of gospel music. In fact, the Monroe Brothers' first big
hit was "What Would You Give In Exchange For Your Soul?". But I cannot
think that anyone danced to a Monroe Brothers show.
Did television replace dance? (I was never much of a dancer, so I can't
judge by my experience . . . I did try the Macarena to "Polly Put The
Kettle On". It didn't work.
> At the same time, a lot of Bluegrass music is danceable and is dance
> music. I think
> this was truer in the 1940s and 1950s when Bluegrass was more closely
> connected to Country music and did not try to be as "folkie" as it has
> become, although the folkiness has been expressed by the adoption of
> more dance tunes.
In my experience, bluegrass has moved more towards jazz, avant garde,
and virtuoso exhibition music than become "folksy". It was "folksy"
when Monroe, Flatt & Scruggs, etc. deliberately looked into issuing folk
song recordings to get college concerts. This was in the mid 60s.
Since then, it has splashed stylistically all over the place.
< ... >
> That is sad. On the other hand, I have gone to more local-oriented
> venues in the South and to the Carter Family fold and seen people
> regularly dancing to Bluegrass groups.
Dancing to bluegrass has a very limited audience, especially when you
compare it to all forms of pop music which is _designed_ to be danced
to. And I think that's why bluegrass (at least as a recognizable style)
will never "make it" as a true form of pop music, all of which is
primarily and intentionally dance music.
Yes, there are "folkies" that dance to bg and ot music, but we are
speaking of groups of a dozen or two, or maybe a hundred, as compared to
tens of thousands at rock festivals.
> Regarding the Blues, I think for most working rural Southern Blues
> players, the ability to play music that folks would dance to was at
> the center of what got you work. This does not mean that other
> situations were not part of playing Blues. People often busked in the
> streets and would often play in the streets to advertise their
> appearance at a juke joint or country supper. However, the caberet
> experience which so many of us folkies identify with the Blues is more
> the product of our point of view seeing Blues in folk clubs, folk
> concerts, folk festivals and their descendants than how the blues
> operated or what working Blues musicians aimed when the Blues was a
> living movement among African Americans.
Yes, I'm in agreement with this, Tony. And now that we have a black
president, perhaps we could look forward to the day when black audiences
will rediscover Gus Cannon, Peg Leg Howell, and Memphis Minnie.
-Pete "et al" Feldmann
tonythomas
More options Feb 6, 12:29 am
Newsgroups: rec.music.country.old-time
From: Bob boGadro <To my ear, Gus Cannon's banjo playing sounds more
like what I
know of folk guitar than of 5-string banjo. Melodies and runs sound
either 2-fingered or flat picked.
When he does use 4 fingers (actually, 3 fingers - not using the thumb)
it sounds like an upstroked chord,
neither broken nor arpeggiated. ///
These comments made me think and think and think, even if my response
was a little bit Hasty. I think it is quite possible that some of
Cannon's banjo Joe recordings were flat picked. The Banjo Joe
"Jonestown Blues" there sounds flat picked. You see the difference
very much when he plays a chord. As you write "When he does use 4
fingers (actually, 3 fingers - not using the thumb) it sounds like an
upstroked chord, neither broken nor arpeggiated," but this is not the
sound we get in the Banjo Joe "Jonestown Blues," "Can You Blame the
Colored Man," "My Money Never Runs Out,"
There are remarks in the interview we found that suggest that, though
the interviewer was too ignorant of the banjo and the significance of
what Gus was saying to clarify this.
We pay such a big price for ignoring these great artists when they are
live, to write tomes about them once they are gone.
TT
tonythomas
wrote:
> Well - speaking as a working musician -- what's made it possible for
> me to eke out a (very small) livelihood as a fiddler is flexibility -
> and that definitely includes playing music that folks can dance to.
> Professional musicians like Gus Cannon, Robert Johnson, Memphis Jug
> Band, Mississippi Sheiks, Memphis MInnie and probably also those
> musicians for whom playing was more of a hobby and a way to supplement
> their income -- they had to be able to play for parties, and at
> parties, people like to dance! This is what Bob Brozman calls a
> "service gig" -- you're providing a service for the client, it's not
> "art" in the same way as playing a concert would be. A lot of people
> put down these kinds of gigs but the "service gig" has always been a
> mainstay of the working vernacular musician and as such, I regard it
> as honorable work. You play for a wedding, bar mitzvah, or whatever
> -- the people are gonna wanna dance. And you're gonna have to be able
> to play requests -- this could be how Robert Johnson ended up with
> repertoire as vastly different as "They're Red Hot" and "Hellhound on
The general point is very excellent. Most musicians play for money.
Back when I was trying to gig back in the 1960s, we considered
musicians people who worked dances and weddings, not just the local
folk club. Dancing was an enormous part of even urban social life
before television killed it off and jazz became an "art" music that
was listened to, not danced to.
>
> I agree that the slow blues is a product of the great women "classic
> blues" singers. They took one aspect of the black vernacular music of
> the day and dramatized it as a stage show -- not in the corner of a
> juke joint but up on a stage with elaborate costumes, dancers, etc.///
We should be careful of this because there were two waves of the
classic blues players differentiated by their closeness to Downhome
Blues. The early singers stressed the vaudville repertoire, 16 bar
tunes often with a verse and other non blues aspects. It should be
said that this kind of Blues had been floating around and had a
popularity in the sheet music business and even among white vocalists
since around 1908 and was close to the recordings of Blues by white
vocalists and white "coon shouters," the immediate predecessors of the
Blues, that which many of the classic blues singers went by before
recording.
The second wave was led by Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. They shared
careers in Black minstrel shows and TOBA Vaudeville with some of the
earlier singers. Indeed Ma Rainey was one of the senior performers in
this Genre. However, their blues was based on Southern African
American folk blues, not Tin Pan Alley's Blues. If one reads the
biography of Tom Dorsey who became musical director of Rainey's first
big theatrical tour after she launched her recording career, you can
see the problems Dorsey had putting together a small core of a band
that would augment theater orchestras to play her music. Dorsey who
had not gotten very far as an arranger and composer or as a jazz
musician--things he aspired to this point in his career--was in a
unique place. He was familiar with the basic Southern blues having
developed a piano style that was swinging and bluesy that would still
not be too loud for small bordellos, buffet flats, and rent parties so
the police might not raid. However, he was a reading musician adept at
Southern Blues, and was able to bridge the gap between Rainey and
theater musicians. This gives you a picture of how different Rainey's
and Smith's Blues were from those who preceded them.
>
> Think of the difference between Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey etc.
> and Louise Johnson or Memphis Minnie. It's pretty clear from
> listening that the former women were coming from the stage show
> setting -- with a big band, horns, etc (and the photos show them
> dressed in as showy a manner as possible, all kinds of feathers,
> jewels, etc.) while Louise Johnson and Memphis Minnie were clearly
> more used to getting folks up and dancing in some rough little country
> bar (or a city bar where there were country people). //
It is not so much the music but the performing experience here.
Louise Johnson and Minnie came out of the country blues milieu in the
Delta and adjoining areas. Minnie was such a good guitarist and
singer that she was able to make it out of the country to work in
Chicago and later Memphis and had a fairly long and successful
recording career.
The "classic > blues" singers were very sophisticated, their music
was related to the
> jazz of the day (those horns!)// Yes, they sang with a small jazz band background which was more the norm for the music performed in Black minstrel shows abnd later Black vaudeville where they all worked. Very few, other than folks like Albert Hunter who had worked in Europe were ever part of white Vaudeville except after they made their way as Blues stars.
///and led directly to singers like Billie > Holliday.//
Holiday is often grouped with Blues singers by those without a
knowledge of her work, history, and development. Holiday was adamant
that she was not a blues singer. She recorded very few blues until
late in her career when there was sort of a Bessie Smith revival when
like other artists such as Dinah Washington, she covered numbers by
Smith and one or two cuts in which record promotors obviously trying
to break her into the R & B Market. She only recorded two blues
during her classic recording career in the 1930s and early 1940s for
Columbia/okeh. Both Billie's Blues and Fine and Mellow were products
of recording dates with extra time, no extra chart, so a blues could
be done quickly. Billie kept performing them throughout her career
because she had composers rights on the tunes.
Billie was a jazz singer and grew up in a family deeply enmeshed in
Jazz. Her father was a working musician as a big band guitar player
who famously complained billie hired every other guitarist but him.
Her mother was in the business of boarding Jazz musicians and catering
parties for musicians and other entertainers. Musicians were
attracted to record with her because she had such strong musical
sophistication that it was more like playing with another
instrumentalist than with a vocalist.
Memphis Minnie's guitar-based music developed in a
> different direction which was towards what came to be known as
> "Chicago" blues.
Yeah well Minnie and her husband moved to Chicago and became part of
the stable Ezra Melrose kept their of Blues recording artists whose
records became more and more alike.
>
More later I got to go home to my banjos!
Tony
j_ns...@msn.com
1910s can come from blues recordings made by "black" professionals in
the 1910s, such as
the "Joe Turner Blues" at
http://www.redhotjazz.com/wswjssbnd.html
the "St. Louis Blues" at
http://www.redhotjazz.com/clubcoon.html
and the blues at
http://www.redhotjazz.com/handy.html
and
http://www.redhotjazz.com/dabneysband.html
Apparently, in the 1910s the Original Dixieland Jazz Band played blues
at a pace that was common among "black" and "white" rural and urban
musicians at the time. Which apparently accounts for how fast people
such as Henry Thomas and Samantha Bumgarner still performed blues in
the 1920s.
Contrast the amount of dramatic theatrical pathos (or whatever) in the
musical presentation of "Bull-Doze Blues" to that in "Old Rub Alcohol
Blues." (Really do it, it's a remarkable contrast.) Now, Boggs admired
the Bessie Smith style singers, so there you go.
So it kind of all fits together that romantics who already adore the
most famous Billie Holiday material tend to be quicker to take to Son
House and Dock Boggs type sounds than to blues more like William
Moore, Daddy Stovepipe, and Sam McGee -- despite the fact that, for
example, McGee was playing blues before House was.
The real old blues is generally the stuff that sounds like "Bull-Doze
Blues," and there were a lot of folks in around Tennessee and Georgia
who were still playing like that in about 1930.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
Generally speaking, I disagree about this waves stuff. I don't think
Bessie Smith's _material_ tells us any more about folk blues than
Mamie Smith's material does. (Obviously Bessie was better at sounding
Southern vocally than Mamie was.) There were definitely a lot more
female blues singers recording about 1930 than about 1924 who were
ruralish in style, that trend happened big-time (because the record
companies gradually realized how much "blacks" wanted to buy rural-
style music on record, thanks to the success of people such as Lemon
Jefferson). I don't think that trend was furthered all that much by Ma
Rainey, though, and certainly not by Bessie Smith. As an early-rural-
blues nut, I wish Rainey's music could tell me as much about rural
blues as Samantha Bumgarner's can.
Billie Holiday's biggest influences were Louis Armstrong and Bessie
Smith, and on both her non-12-bar material and her 12-bar material she
generally sounded influenced by both of them. An example of the
"black" female show-biz vocal style on the move from Bessie Smith
style to Billie Holiday style is the 1928 live recordings by Martha
Copeland:
http://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/9526
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
>
> - Show quoted text -
Bluegrass pretty much follows the model of Jazz, especially combo Jazz
that was replacing the big bands in the mid 1940s when 52 St replaced
places like the Savoy and the Roseland Ballroom as the prime venues
for Jazz performers and when soloists became more than featured
players in larger bands, but individual acts of their own or in
combination with other soloists and rhythm players. This is pretty
much what a Bluegrass band is. As has been pointed out, particularly
the war time band with the accordianist tended in the direction of
swing, especially as it was referenced by Midwestern Swingers like Pee
Wee King. You can find video fon Youtube rom the early 1950s or
perhaps the late 1940s of Maybelle and her daughters playing this kind
of music with an accordian, sock rhythm guitar, and bass.
However, this rhythm went out when the UR Bluegrass band with Lester,
Earl, Cedric Rainwater and Chubby wise congealed, but the performance
style of playing the song straight and then featuring solos by your
prime soloists remained the basic approach of Bluegrass.
Blues really covers very much territory including a lot of music that
was really not blues, particularly in the early days. Paul Oliver
points out that the generation of Blues artists that included Charlie
Patton and Gus Cannon and the great Mance Lipscomb usually had a
repertoire that included old time songs, pop songs (love Mance's
"Harvest Moon"], counytry ragtime, and sometimes old time dance tunes
besides blues. It is only a later generation who are born AFTER the
blues had defined itself as a distinct genre who perform the Blues
predominantly outside of the recording studio.
The more folk-linked Blues performers used a variety of songs for a
variety of venues and performing situations. We tend to overemphasize
the degree to which Blues singers performed alone and the percentage
who played guitar, although they seem to havecaptured the attention of
post folkie blues enthusiasts. We forget that very much of the blues
wherever one could be found was done on piano. We tend to neglect
bands that existed that played blues for dancing. We also tend to
neglect that many, if not most single male Blues performers rarely
traveled alone, and usually performed with another guitarist playing
backup of "compliment.," especially in Jukes and country suppers where
dancing was the rule. Very much like old time dance tunes, we know
that the three minute songs we hear on commercial records were done as
15-30 minute dancing sets when performed in a juke. As much popular
music was in the age of dancing, the words were sung much less than
the notes were played. To be sure, part of the business of working a
juke or country supper or saloon involved players busking for change
where people gathered like the railroad station or markets to
advertise where they were playing on the weekend evenings,
particularly as town folk often when out to the country to jukes or
suppers on the weekends because there might be more action there than
in town.
A few Downhome blues singers were involved in commercial
entertainment. Folks like Gus Cannon worked the medicine shows. Blind
Blake and a number of other Blues musicians including Muddy Waters
played with major Black minstrel shows as they pasted through their
area, although the larger Black minstrel shows like the Rabbit Foot
Minstrels, the Georgia Minstrels, and Silas Green from New Orleans,
carried Jazz and classic blues singers. Incidentally, these
companies continued touring the Black south until the late 1940s and
the mid 1950s in the case of Silas Green whose owner said the show
finally died at the hands of television.
However, very few, if any folk or rural origined Blues musicians made
their money out the caberet setups that our generation of folk blues
lovers have come see as the blues performing situation
tonythomas
>
> - Show quoted text -
Joseph Scott's appreciation of this is quite different from those of
the contemporary record industry. Again, the best place I have found
about that is in the biography of ThomasA. Dorsey where ithe
difference between Smith and Rainey and the previous classic blues
singers is discussed in relation to the sales volume Smith produced,
and the practical musical problems Dorsey had to surmount in preparing
sheet music and organizing a band and working with theater orchestras
to make it possible for them to accompany Rainey.
I am not claiming that the content of Smith's music was any more
useful for those of us who encounter music as a way into rural life or
folkways. I never said that. I
said that the very different vocal and musical approach to the Blues
that Smith had changed a lot. Smith found it very hard to get
recorded and was turned down by several recording companies, famously
the black owned Black Swan records that thought she did not sound
"elevated enough" and was recorded by Columbia which was an upstart in
the race field. She outsold everyone among African Americans, not
only because of her technical prowess, but because of her approach to
the Blues. To see a full musicial explanation of why she belongs in
that company, explore Jeff Todd Titon's Downhome Blues, which shows
that it is the difference of musical tradition and approach, not
whether one is resident in a city or the country that is the essential
dividing line among Blues singers.
People who have heard the Billie Holiday concert that was linked with
the fictional biography Lady Sings the Blues keep repeating the
comments she made in that concert often picked up in documentaries for
all there is to say about Billie Holiday and then reduce it to
whatever simplification that they want to make about her music. They
forget this statement was made while her managers were trying to get
Billie's covers of Smith off the grown and when Armstrong was at the
top of his national and international popularity. These things
provide almost no real answers to the real music of Billie Holiday.
Such is unbecoming for Mr. Scott.
No one talks about the people Billie considered her closest
collaborators, none of whom were particularly known for any
association with the Blues viz Freddie Green, Walter Page, Chu Berry,
Lester Young, Buck Clayton, Teddy Wilson, Arty Shaw, Those who really
know about Billie know that she was essentially fired from the Basie
Band by John Hammond because she refused to change her repertoire to
feature blues songs. She was replaced by Helen Humes who had been
recording Blues tunes since the 1920s and after a brief hiatus during
WWII when she returned to Kentucky to take care of her ailing mother,
continued shouting the blues until she died. (see her performance of
a song with identical lyrics to " Fine and Mellow" at the first
Spirituals to Swing Concert.)
tonythomas
We should be careful about the Blues. Certainly most people who come
out of a folk blues or OTM background underestimate the importance of
the Classic Blues singers, particularly Bessie Smith and Rainey who
were always the best selling Blues artists once they were recorded.
When interviewers cared to ask, they found that "country blues"
musicians considered Bessie Smith and other female singers to be the
best Blues singers. Similarly, they looked to urban Blues singers
like Lonnie Johnsona nd Leroy Carr. Very quickly, and very early the
phonograph record became one of the keys ways Blues styles and
influences were shared throughout the US and beyond.
At the same time, if we simply say the slow blues was influenced or
formed by the vaudville/minstrel show singers, we are exaggerating
their influence as well as the slowness of their music and
underestimating the significant role that field hollers played in the
formation of the Blues. Indeed there is a whole strain of less than
danceable blues that seem directly taken from the field holler. Blind
Lemon Jefferson's "Jack of Diamoinds" comes to mind particularly as I
am used to contrasting it to banjo songs with the same lyrics. We
also know that many singers of relatively slow Blues like Charlie
Patton perfected their basic style and repertoire long before any
classic Blues singers existed or were recorded.
We should also note that students of African American music and
sociology have noted that especially during the early 20th Century, a
division existed between the audiences and players of Blues and those
of Jazz or Ragtime becoming Jazz. Jazz was primarily centered in
cities and among long-time urban residents, middle class people and
those who aspired to be middle class, whereas the Blues had a more
plebian base and was associated with urban immigrants who had not
broken from identification with their Southern rural roots.
Assessing the Blues by urban professional musicians playing in a
different genre playing composed and sheet published blues is not
useful in understanding the evolution and nature of down home Blues.
j_ns...@msn.com
> useful for those of us who encounter music as a way into rural life or
You wrote that the two waves of vaudeville blues singers were
"differentiated by their closeness to Downhome Blues," that "[the
second wave's] blues was based on Southern African American folk
blues, not [the first wave's] Tin Pan Alley's Blues," and wrote of
"how different Rainey's and Smith's Blues were from those who preceded
them." I don't think Rainey and Bessie made music that was close
enough to or based enough on folk blues, compared to Mamie, for that
claim to be very useful to someone specifically interested in folk
blues.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]if we simply say the slow blues was influenced or
> formed by the vaudville/minstrel show singers, we are exaggerating[...]
My claim included the wording "often," "largely," "not... so much,"
etc.; it was different from this simple straw man argument.
> their influence as well as the slowness of their music and
> underestimating the significant role that field hollers played in the
> formation of the Blues.
I think people generally overestimate that role.
Indeed there is a whole strain of less than
> danceable blues that seem directly taken from the field holler.
Which strain do you have in mind?
Blind
> Lemon Jefferson's "Jack of Diamoinds" comes to mind particularly as I
> am used to contrasting it to banjo songs with the same lyrics.
Is "Jack Of Diamonds" a blues song? I consider it a non-blues song.
We
> also know that many singers of relatively slow Blues like Charlie
> Patton perfected their basic style and repertoire long before any
> classic Blues singers existed
Ma Rainey said she first heard a blues in 1902. We don't know whether
Charlie Patton was yet playing blues in 1902.
>
> Assessing the Blues by urban professional musicians playing in a
> different genre playing composed and sheet published blues is not
> useful in understanding the evolution and nature of down home Blues.
I promise you it often is useful. Even back to "The Bully," for
instance, the existence of sheet music of it in the 1890s with 12-bar
helps gives us evidence about 12-bar in the 1890s.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
In the discussion of the Blues, the concept of Downhome Blues
eleaborated by Jeff Todd Titon in his book of the same title is a
musically concept based on the musical structure of Blues tunes, not
a geographical reference or reference to rural blues. Titon explains
quite well that the divisions were not between urban and rural blues,
but between which blues reflected a more Southern African American
musical structure and which did not. He orovides a rigorous analysis
of a variety of Blues, including work by Bessie Smith and those you
would consider "folk blues" musicians. I have referred you to this
analysis and it would be good to look at it.
This is a more scientific approach than the more or less useless one
of “Country” blues. I know that Sam Charters regrets he used that
title for his initial book and album or that the name stuck for a
genre of the Blues. Almost all Blues performers, regardless of their
origins, who recorded were recorded in cities. Those that were
actively professional Blues artists trying to support themselves
playing the Blues aspired to perform in larger and larger towns and in
cities, not remain in the country. There is pretty strong evidence
that even before the phonograph recording of Blues, there was a lot of
influence on Blues players who nominally lived in the country from
Blues musicians who had made it to the cities. The biographies of
Blues musicians, particularly in the cotton South where cultivation
could be carried out effectively by women and children except in
concentrated times, indicate musicians who might have had official
residences on some plantation, but spent much of their time gigging in
towns and cities. Even those who never got this opportunity were
known to look to singers with urban experience as models.
“Folk blues” is a useful category for a folklorist interested in
penetrating “folk” culture. However, it has to be looked at in a very
guarded way for any music after 1905-1910 when the Blues began to be
part of national commercial show business in general and especially
African American show business at all levels.
The interaction between “folk” blues and semi-professional and
professional forms of blues was intense and probably hard to
differentiate by the time that recordings began or research was made
into Blues. Since my concern is the evolution of banjo playing which
since the 1840s has been both a folk practice and a form of commercial
entertainment, I do not restrict myself to "folk" artists. Indeed, my
growing experience especially with Black music of the early 20th
century is that our ignorance of non-folk music and entertainment
limits our ability to understand the most important aspects of the
problem.
A good example of this problem was a performer like Gus Cannon. His
recorded music, as you (the great J Scott) have pointed out, had much
less Black “folk” content than a white old time player like Dave
Macom, even though Macom was probably much more knowledgeable of and
influenced by commercial show business than most of his peers. The
recordings were chiefly attempts at raggy music with a blues tint and
dance-paced Blues. This is not surprising since his recordings,
particularly the Jug Stomper recordings were part of the recording
companies’ response to the success of the Louisville Jug Bands which
were attempts at fairly modern Jazz with jugs added to the horns,
stride piano, and the wonderful Jazz fiddle of Clifford Hayes.
On the other hand, despite his attempts to identify himself
with Handy and other Memphis musicians after the 1930s, Cannon’s real
performing base was in the Mississippi countryside around Memphis.
This is where he usually gigged on weekends, and this is where he
obtained all of the musicians for his recording band. He maintain
contact with musicians in Ripley throughout the years that he was
cropping or working in other parts of the South. He had been playing
country dances since the early 1900s starting out playing banjo AND
fiddle in the old time repertoire. Yet, probably from about 1905, he
aimed at the then hip urban influenced sound of pop ragtime time that
the different rungs of the ladder of commercial Black music centered
on in those years before the onset of Jazz. The old string band
repertoire was slowly replaced by songs he wrote with allusions to the
pop ragtime tunes that were all the rage from medicine shows up to
Broadway. Blues, some of which he learned from guitar players and some
of which he may have heard on Black vaudeville and minstrel show
stages, also entered into the mix.
What can be added is that in his recordings for folklorists and
performances for folkie fan in later years, Cannon concentrated more
on his original old time dance material for the most part. To some
degree this may have been what folk-oriented audiences and
interviewers wanted and to some degree this may have been because as
he advanced in age it was easier to frail the banjo than to use the
elaborate finger and flat picking styles that adorn his commercial
recordings.
This mixture was not unique to Cannon, but was generally true
of Black Southern Blues artists of his generation. While emphasis on
this in Oliver’s work has centered on older “songsters” like Cannon
and Lipscomb, this kind of variation, brought up to date to their
times, was much more true of the next generation of Blues singers
represented by folks like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Johnson
performed versions of Gene Austin’s “My Blue Heaven” and in
Mississippi Muddy had a repertoire of Gene Autry tunes!
This is not to deny that blues was primarily a folk music
until sometime around 1900-1910 when it entered into popular
entertainment, especially for African Americans. The bedrock of my
understanding of the Blues and much else is my friend David Evan’s
great book _Big Road Blues_ whose subtitle is the development of a
local Blues tradition. This book belongs in every home!
However, we have to be careful what we are talking about
when we assign certain musicians to “folk blues” and certain others
not. Indeed, categories that have become popular in generalized
discussion of the Blues like “Country Blues” or “Delta Blues” simply
are not useful when we attempt to discuss the Blues seriously.
NOSPAM...@aol.com
definitely check it out. I imagine that you have probably read it
long ago, but if not, may I recommend Angela Davis' "Blues Legacies
and Feminism". I think it's a mistake to think of Bessie Smith in any
one way, city or country (and as you point out, those are probably
inaccurate terms to use anyway) - she evolved a lot musically -- not
artistically, she was a supremely great singer from the get-go -- but
in terms of style over the course of her truncated career. Of course
she recorded whatever she (or more likely Frank Walker) thought would
sell. Her last session was definitely starting to veer over into
swing -- and since she was a professional performer, I'm sure she
would have adapted to newer musical styles if she had lived longer.
Undoubtedly she would be the best-selling rap artist if she were still
singing today! Billie Holliday had her own type of genius, but I do
still hear and feel a connection between her music and that of Bessie
Smith. But we are getting pretty far away from the banjo here...
Listening to pre-1920s recordings of American popular music, I am
astonished at how much connection there is between it and the 1920s
string band recordings. I guess if I had stopped to think about it I
would have realized how many of the 20s string band songs were
actually recycled pop songs. I think the mistake is to imagine that
there is anything "pure" about the artists (both black and white) who
recorded during the 1920s and 30s. Yes, some of them did give us a
glimpse of what older music may have sounded like, but I think that
virtually all artists who managed to get recorded would have included
pop music in their repertoire. What I love is to hear how they
interpreted it!! Bully of the Town is a famous one, but there are
some great interpretations of Handy's Yellow Dog Blues (sometimes with
other names) and many many other pop tunes that had been recorded by
people like Billy Murray, Marion Harris, etc.
Categorizing the blues is a dangerous business -- but it is helpful
when discussing the blues to have terms to describe what we mean. The
word "folk" has way too much baggage to be useful, and aren't we all
"folks"? The "City" - "country" thing still feels useful to me, maybe
not in terms of the artists themselves, but in terms of the context.
However I can see that it's not accurate. Maybe "Northern" and
"Southern" would be more accurate. I think we're still okay with
"male" and "female" although maybe not (Frankie Jaxon?). Let's just
remember to "stop and listen" and not get too bogged down in this
nomenclature!
When you say that " blues was primarily a folk music
until sometime around 1900-1910 when it entered into popular
entertainment, especially for African Americans. " you are so right.
I'm not even sure that "especially for African Americans" is accurate
because it seems like aspects of the blues permeated popular song
writing pretty thoroughly starting in about 1910-1912. And hasn't
stopped since!
Thank you for a very thought-provoking discussion,
Suzy T.
tonythomas
wrote:
> Thank you Tony for the tip about Jeff Todd Titon's book, I will
> definitely check it out. I imagine that you have probably read it
> long ago, but if not, may I recommend Angela Davis' "Blues Legacies
I do need to read the book, but portions I have read of it, the way it
has been promoted and other things give me misgivings about it,
especially her manipulation of Billie Holiday on the cover to sell the
book and her lack of consideration of probably the main female Blues
singer Memphis MInnie. However, ignorance of the law is not a defense
and that book is now winging its way from some remaindered books
warehouse to my humble abode.
I think it's a mistake to think of Bessie Smith in any
> one way, city or country (and as you point out, those are probably
> inaccurate terms to use anyway) - she evolved a lot musically -- not
> artistically, she was a supremely great singer from the get-go -- but
> in terms of style over the course of her truncated career. Of course
> she recorded whatever she (or more likely Frank Walker) thought would
> sell. Her last session was definitely starting to veer over into
> swing -- and since she was a professional performer, I'm sure she
> would have adapted to newer musical styles if she had lived longer.
> Undoubtedly she would be the best-selling rap artist if she were still
> singing today! Billie Holliday had her own type of genius, but I do
> still hear and feel a connection between her music and that of Bessie
> Smith. But we are getting pretty far away from the banjo here...
>
I feel particularly concerned about the tendency to cram Billie
Holiday in as a Blues singer, since Billie herself would mad
if someone called her a blues singer, got fired from the dream lineup
in Jazz--Billie Singing with Count Basie of which we only have three
airchecks of her singing with them--because she did not want to sing
more blues. It should be said that the general complaint of Jazz
musicians of the Swing era about John Hammond and the fellow who
started Verve whose name escapes me this morning before coffee was
that they wanted too many recordings of Blues.
> Listening to pre-1920s recordings of American popular music, I am > astonished at how much connection there is between it and the 1920s > string band recordings. I guess if I had stopped to think about it I
> would have realized how many of the 20s string band songs were
> actually recycled pop songs.//
Abbott and Seroff's two tomes about African American entertainment
from 1889 to 1920 contains many cross references between pop songs of
African American show business and future recordings, many of which
were old time music. Someone familiar with the old time repertoire
will find more songs and lyrics mentioned in the book that are not
cross referenced but will be familiar to one. Paul Oliver's book
about the Songsters speaks about what he believes is a strong
connection between early 1890s and 1900s songs in what I call pop
ragtime and how they contributed to Blues origins.
Folkies--and when I write of this, I think of myself before I got into
studying all of this stuff critically--can be pretty much tainted by
the myth of pure folk music and usually are systematically un or mis
educated about other forms of music and their impact on "the folk."
After all, decades ago Charles Malone showed that so many songs of
the type that the Carter Family recorded were actually songs written
by commercial song writers on the East Coast in the mid 19th Century
that had passed into the repertoire of singers in the mountains of
Virginia where Pleasant Carter mined so many songs. Anyone with an
acquaintence with sentimental woman-generated literature of the
1850s-1870s like Susan Warner's _Wide_Wide_World, perhaps the first
million selling book (and I sincerely hope few people are as
misfortunate as myself to have had to read that book and analyze it
was not one of the joys of my life) will recognize the attitudes of
what was the mid 19th Century's mainline best-seller literature in so
many songs that folks think are traditional --Little Bessie" comes to
mind among the songs I love and sometimes perform.
On the other hand there are blues I would have told someone were by
Leadbelly that were big pop hits by Count Basie before Leadbelly
recorded them!
I think the mistake is to imagine that
> there is anything "pure" about the artists (both black and white) who
> recorded during the 1920s and 30s. Yes, some of them did give us a
> glimpse of what older music may have sounded like, but I think that
> virtually all artists who managed to get recorded would have included
> pop music in their repertoire. What I love is to hear how they
> interpreted it!! Bully of the Town is a famous one, but there are
> some great interpretations of Handy's Yellow Dog Blues (sometimes with
> other names) and many many other pop tunes that had been recorded by
> people like Billy Murray, Marion Harris, etc.
>
> Categorizing the blues is a dangerous business -- but it is helpful
> when discussing the blues to have terms to describe what we mean. The
> word "folk" has way too much baggage to be useful, and aren't we all
> "folks"? The "City" - "country" thing still feels useful to me, maybe
> not in terms of the artists themselves, but in terms of the context.
> However I can see that it's not accurate. Maybe "Northern" and
> "Southern" would be more accurate. I think we're still okay with
> "male" and "female" although maybe not (Frankie Jaxon?). Let's just
> remember to "stop and listen" and not get too bogged down in this
> nomenclature!//
To discuss things seriously, we need names. Having correct and useful
terminology is decisive to discussing and researching things
correctly. It requires serious and systematic thought. If this can
isolate us from a grossly miseducated public, so be it. I find
Tilton's concept to be the most useful. At least at this point it has
not been exploded and abandoned as "Delta Blues" or "Country Blues"
have been. When those words present incorrect or grossly mistaken
analysis and miseducate.
Blues is complicated in that it began as a folk music and evolved as a
folk music. At the same time there was a constant interaction between
professional performers of the Blues and its incorporation in entirely
commercial music and the folk community that created it. Moreover,
continually since the inception of Blues folk styles and approaches
have become dominant in commercial markets. From very early, a
transmission belt from local rural blues singing to commercial blues
singing to general popular entertainment has existed.
Perceptions of person in the folkie and post folkie music communities
can be quite warped because so many singers who were viable commercial
entertainers in the Black community at one time were recast as solo
acoustic "rootsy" performers to market them to white folkniks.
L:ightning Hopkins comes to mind. When I moved to Miami 25 years ago,
I had older urban coworkers who would mention Sam Hopkins as "what we
used to dance to," remembering his career playing electric blues and
organ in the late 1940s and early 1950s that achieved a great success.
My mind until then had been fixed on the image of Lightning created by
Sam Charter's Folkways recording. In reality, he was both a
commercial R & B and :Jump" performer and someone who continued one of
the oldest tradition of the Blues, especially given his family
connection with Texas Alexander, a survivor of the age before Blues
became primarily a dance and accompanied music.
>
> When you say that " blues was primarily a folk music
> until sometime around 1900-1910 when it entered into popular
> entertainment, especially for African Americans. " you are so right.
> I'm not even sure that "especially for African Americans" is accurate
> because it seems like aspects of the blues permeated popular song
> writing pretty thoroughly starting in about 1910-1912. And hasn't
> stopped since!//
Yes, that is certainly true. Abbott and Seroff's article published in
the mid or late 1990s that David Evans published in _New Perspectives
on the Blues__ says that Blues had become a factor in music
publishing by 1908!
Finally, let me make a simple qualification of something I said
earlier
I wrote:
" What can be added is that in his recordings for folklorists
andperformances for folkie fan in later years, Cannon concentrated
moreon his original old time dance material for the most part. To
somedegree this may have been what folk-oriented audiences
andinterviewers wanted and to some degree this may have been because
ashe advanced in age it was easier to frail the banjo than to use the
elaborate finger and flat picking styles that adorn his commercial
recordings."
It may also be that he simply preferred the older folk tunes and
performed them in old age because he was under much less stress to be
successful in a commercial market than in the 1928-30 recordings.///
j_ns...@msn.com
> On Feb 10, 9:15 pm, j_nsc...@msn.com wrote:
>
>
>
> > On Feb 10, 3:11 pm, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]
>
> > > I am not claiming that the content of [Bessie] Smith's music was any more
> > > useful for those of us who encounter music as a way into rural life or
> > > folkways [than the Mamie Smith-era wave]. I never said that.[...]
>
> > You wrote that the two waves of vaudeville blues singers were
> > "differentiated by their closeness to Downhome Blues," that "[the
> > second wave's] blues was based on Southern African American folk
> > blues, not [the first wave's] Tin Pan Alley's Blues," and wrote of
> > "how different Rainey's and Smith's Blues were from those who preceded
> > them." I don't think Rainey and Bessie made music that was close
> > enough to or based enough on folk blues, compared to Mamie, for that
> > claim to be very useful to someone specifically interested in folk
> > blues.
>
> > Joseph Scott
>
> In the discussion of the Blues, the concept of Downhome Blues
> eleaborated by Jeff Todd Titon in his book of the same title is a
I like Titon's work very much in general. In the first paragraph of
the preface of that book he says downhome blues is "folk music" and he
distinguishes it from vaudeville blues. In the second paragraph, in
his working definition of "downhome blues" for the book, he talks
about it having a certain "spirit," which I don't think is a useful
way of defining it. But I know what he's trying to say overall: there
were people who sounded like Rabbit Brown and lived in cities, that
sort of thing. And Sam Charters knows that.
[...] I have referred you to this
> analysis and it would be good to look at it.
I've read it.
>
> This is a more scientific approach than the more or less useless one
> of “Country” blues.
I don't think talking about "a spirit" is a very scientific
description of music. I think talking about "country" or "rural" style
music in terms of what was generally more popular in the country than
in cities is much more scientific. For practical purposes I think we
can call John Hurt style music "country" or "downhome" or "folk" as
long as we know what we're talking about -- after all, down home means
the South (where Italian-born opera musician A. Maggio lived, e.g.),
not whatever Titon feels like redefining it to mean.
I know that Sam Charters regrets he used that
> title for his initial book and album or that the name stuck for a
> genre of the Blues. Almost all Blues performers, regardless of their
> origins, who recorded were recorded in cities.
Recording location, when they were visiting for the convenience of the
record company, is irrelevant to where they developed their styles.
Those that were
> actively professional Blues artists trying to support themselves
> playing the Blues aspired to perform in larger and larger towns and in
> cities, not remain in the country.
Yes. Some such as Furry Lewis continued playing like country musicians
and unlike Douglas Williams (a great jazz musician who lived in
Memphis and was older than Furry) after they moved from the country to
cities. John Lee Hooker moved to Detroit but could still play "Rabbit
In The Log." Etc. Of course, the way we can understand how much the
style of "Rabbit In The Log" relates to the style of "Boogie Chillen"
is by backing up and understanding trends in rural and city music
generally, not by peering more closely at Hooker.
There is pretty strong evidence
> that even before the phonograph recording of Blues, there was a lot of
> influence on Blues players who nominally lived in the country from
> Blues musicians who had made it to the cities.
Yes, for instance a big example, generally speaking, of city influence
on ruralish blues is the influence of ragtime on blues pickers.
The biographies of
> Blues musicians, particularly in the cotton South where cultivation
> could be carried out effectively by women and children except in
> concentrated times, indicate musicians who might have had official
> residences on some plantation, but spent much of their time gigging in
> towns and cities. Even those who never got this opportunity were
> known to look to singers with urban experience as models.
Yep.
>
> “Folk blues” is a useful category for a folklorist interested in
> penetrating “folk” culture. However, it has to be looked at in a very
> guarded way for any music after 1905-1910 when the Blues began to be
> part of national commercial show business in general and especially
> African American show business at all levels.
Let's be careful about assumptions: I agree.
> The interaction between “folk” blues and semi-professional and
> professional forms of blues was intense and probably hard to
> differentiate by the time that recordings began or research was made
> into Blues.
That's what makes the research fun, that it's a challenge.
Since my concern is the evolution of banjo playing which
> since the 1840s has been both a folk practice and a form of commercial
> entertainment, I do not restrict myself to "folk" artists.
Me either.
Indeed, my
> growing experience especially with Black music of the early 20th
> century is that our ignorance of non-folk music and entertainment
> limits our ability to understand the most important aspects of the
> problem.
I think generally speaking that's true. Of course, most people who
view blues romantically don't want to pursue links between blues and
the likes of "The Siege Of Sebastapol" and Child ballads and
Praetorius as much as between blues and "hollers" and dirty
fingernails and griots. That's the main thing that makes the work
there uphill I think. People want Son House to historically be what
really Will Slayden is more. Which is inconvenient if they enjoy how
House sounds better than how Slayden sounds. And same with Dock Boggs
vs. John Carson.
>
> A good example of this problem was a performer like Gus Cannon. His
> recorded music, as you (the great J Scott) have pointed out, had much
> less Black “folk” content than a white old time player like Dave
> Macom
Specifically non-blues "black" folk is where Dave has more to tell us
than Gus. Folk blues I think Gus beats Dave.
Sort of. Many were far more rural in style than Cannon was. Even in
the 1980s, people such as Cecil Barfield were making recordings in a
less citified style than most Cannon.
While emphasis on
> this in Oliver’s work has centered on older “songsters” like Cannon
> and Lipscomb
"Songsters," there's a concept I'd encourage you to disdain. Almost
everyone played non-blues and blues. The purpose of the word
"songsters" in blues literature generally has been to exaggerate a
perceived divide between supposedly pure blues singers and people
along the lines of Mance Lipscomb -- who were playing blues around the
time a lot of those "pure" people were born.
, this kind of variation, brought up to date to their
> times, was much more true of the next generation of Blues singers
> represented by folks like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Johnson
> performed versions of Gene Austin’s “My Blue Heaven” and in
> Mississippi Muddy had a repertoire of Gene Autry tunes!
It was completely normal for rural musicians about Muddy's and Wolf's
age to know and respect Glenn Miller and Jimmie Lunceford's _sound_.
And that's the main thing that killed country-style blues over the
decades, the debasement (or improvement) of a Peg Leg Howell sound to
a Leroy Carr sound to a Louis Jordan sound and so on. That same sort
of thing was generally far, far less true of many people about Frank
Stokes' age, who learned much of their repertoires before (for
practical purposes in their case) the age of records and radio. Of
course, it was normal for artists about Frank Stokes' age to know
published pop songs (indirectly often), but not to have heard Billy
Murray's own _sound_ as much back then.
>
> This is not to deny that blues was primarily a folk music
> until sometime around 1900-1910 when it entered into popular
> entertainment
Only a tiny fraction of the "black" folk songs collected in the South
about 1908 had "blues" in the lyrics, roughly two percent. It's likely
that folk blues as such only started up about 1905. (As opposed to
stuff such as "McKinley" and "Joe Turner," which as Lucius Smith and
others pointed out started out as non-blues but over the years was
adapted into a blues approach. The general "McKinley" style was around
by about 1895.)
, especially for African Americans.
I think blues was primarily a folk music among "whites" before it was
a professional music among "whites," in much the same way as among
"blacks." That would explain, for instance, why there were far more
"white" folk musicians born around 1890 who were familiar with
earliest-style blues than "white" jazz musicians born around 1890 who
were.
The bedrock of my
> understanding of the Blues and much else is my friend David Evan’s
> great book _Big Road Blues_ whose subtitle is the development of a
> local Blues tradition. This book belongs in every home!
>
> However, we have to be careful what we are talking about
> when we assign certain musicians to “folk blues” and certain others
> not.
Yep.
Indeed, categories that have become popular in generalized
> discussion of the Blues like “Country Blues” or “Delta Blues” simply
> are not useful when we attempt to discuss the Blues seriously.
Depends on the way the discussion's done. I think "folk blues" is
probably safer than "country blues." Because sometimes folk musicians
such as Rabbit Brown and Furry Lewis live in cities.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
wrote:
> Thank you Tony for the tip about Jeff Todd Titon's book, I will
> definitely check it out. I imagine that you have probably read it
> long ago, but if not, may I recommend Angela Davis' "Blues Legacies
> and Feminism".
I know someone who use to know her and considered her intellectually
dishonest in person, which jibes with the fact that imo she often
pretty much makes the blues stuff up as she goes along.
I think it's a mistake to think of Bessie Smith in any
> one way, city or country (and as you point out, those are probably
> inaccurate terms to use anyway) - she evolved a lot musically
What do you think was most country style about her?
-- not
> artistically, she was a supremely great singer from the get-go -- but
> in terms of style over the course of her truncated career.[...]
The
> word "folk" has way too much baggage to be useful[...]
To my understanding it's generally distinguished between humble do-it-
yourself music and snobby pro music effectively for centuries. The
Joan Baez era got the meaning muddled (symbolist style poetry wasn't
considered folk before then!), but we're not concentrating on that era
in our discussions here.
[...]Maybe "Northern" and
> "Southern" would be more accurate.[...]
There was so much non-folk music in the South though.
I will say imo it's tough to find stuff from before 1945 that's really
folk country bluesish where the person wasn't at least born in the
South. That really is a regional thing. There apparently didn't happen
to be any region in the North where folk blues had significantly
caught on as of say 1918. "Jailhouse Rag" by David Miller is on the
edge of that issue.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]It should be said that the general complaint of Jazz
> musicians of the Swing era about John Hammond and the fellow who
> started Verve whose name escapes me this morning before coffee was
> that they wanted too many recordings of Blues.
That trend was true with regard to "black"-owned record companies,
e.g. Clarence Brown complained that Robey made him concentrate on
blues. And with regard to "black" music listeners, e.g. Gillespie
complained that his "black" audiences wanted to hear blues way too
much. Art Blakey remarked that "black" people in general "never heard
of [Charlie Parker] and care less."
Number of Top Ten R&B singles during the 1942-1959 period:
Louis Jordan 54
Muddy Waters 14
Lester Young 3
Buddy Holly 3
Billie Holiday 2
Dizzy Gillespie 0
Charlie Parker 0
That's getting far afield, but it illustrates how large a shadow the
"It's Tight Like That"-type fad cast (a shadow that included Buddy
Holly).
[...] Paul Oliver's book
> about the Songsters speaks about what he believes is a strong
> connection between early 1890s and 1900s songs in what I call pop
> ragtime and how they contributed to Blues origins.
Much of what he's doing there is identifying connections between sheet
music and _non-blues_ that were performed by "black" singer-
guitarists. Except for plenty of shards of lyrics here and there, I
wouldn't say non-blues popular sheet music was all that influential on
the earliest folk _blues_ as such.
> To discuss things seriously, we need names.
Amen.
Having correct and useful
> terminology is decisive to discussing and researching things
> correctly. It requires serious and systematic thought.[...]
When I moved to Miami 25 years ago,
> I had older urban coworkers who would mention Sam Hopkins as "what we
> used to dance to," remembering his career playing electric blues and
> organ in the late 1940s and early 1950s that achieved a great success.
> My mind until then had been fixed on the image of Lightning created by
> Sam Charter's Folkways recording. In reality, he was both a
> commercial R & B and :Jump" performer and someone who continued one of
> the oldest tradition of the Blues
Broonzy is a famous example, but still not famous enough, if you
listen to "You Do Me Any Old Way," "Good Gravy," or "Just Rockin'"
contrasted with some of the Son House style '50s stuff (in some cases
accompanied by ODJB-style band, talk about inventing folk music).
, especially given his family
> connection with Texas Alexander, a survivor of the age before Blues
> became primarily a dance and accompanied music.
Alexander was born in 1900. What era do you have in mind for blues
becoming primarily a dance and accompanied music? I think the way
"Railroad Bill" era songs were so often accompanied by ragtimish
picking helps suggest a continuum of accompanied uptempo "black" folk
music from the 1890s to 1910s blues. Or if you take Slayden, for
instance, he seems to represent an era when non-blues is blending into
blues, and he's playing it suitable for dancing (never mentioning the
word blues). John Carson's "Goin' Where The Climate Suits My Clothes"
likely ties in with the Slayden feel and era there I think.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
> > > Joseph Scott
>
> > In the discussion of the Blues, the concept of Downhome Blues
> > eleaborated by Jeff Todd Titon in his book of the same title is a
> > musically concept based on the musical structure of Blues tunes[...]
>
> I like Titon's work very much in general. In the first paragraph of
> the preface of that book he says downhome blues is "folk music" and he
> distinguishes it from vaudeville blues. In the second paragraph, in
> his working definition of "downhome blues" for the book, he talks
> about it having a certain "spirit," which I don't think is a useful
> way of defining it.
have a weegee board or a crystal ball,
there is not quantifiable way of distinguishing spirit
But I know what he's trying to say overall: there
> were people who sounded like Rabbit Brown and lived in cities, that
> sort of thing. And Sam Charters knows that.
> > This is a more scientific approach than the more or less useless one
> > of “Country” blues.
Location was not always what you might think it was. As J. Scott
points out orientation toward the country might be significant even
for the most urban and schooled musicians. James P. Johnson talked
about how much of his music and the evolution of the Charleston by New
York pianists and Jazzmen in the early 19th century came from playing
dance music for Black immigrants from South Carolina (and I would add
Georgia for others) who requested a specific dance they did
"Downhome." The Charleston under that name and the name of "Guichee
Dance" was fermenting among Black immigrants from South Carolina and
Georgia in New York for twenty years before it became a major national
fad. Was it an urban invention? No. Did it fall into music mostly
done by urban musians yes. In fact, it came to symbolize pop music
"jazz" dancing, where rural folk dancers who were dancing in the 20s
or 30s would distinguish their old time dances by saying that they
didnt do "The Charleston or anything like that."
Like the exampe of Furry Lewis that you give, Gus Cannon's
link to rural music are greater than his location might indicatet.
For 10-15 years before he recorded, Gus Cannon lived in Memphis.For
several years before that, he tried to live in Memphis farming in its
suburbs. During the 1960s revival he made an effort to identify
himself with the urban Memphis music scene beyond the blues. He
certainly aspired to relate his music to urban popular entertainment
music all the way up to Broadway. However, reality is that throughout
his musical life, no matter where he lived, often when he lived quite
far away, the center of Cannon's musical life was the country outside
of Memphis in Mississippi and Arkansas. This is where the majority
of his non-medicine show gigs were. This is where he found musicians
to play with on his record. In Memphis he never succeeded in working
as a full time musician. Involvement with Medicine shows really meant
performing in a venue where older country-oriented performance style
was emphasized and preserved marketed often to people in rural areas,
but even in their urban gigs, its appeal was of old-time country
entertainment. This contrasts with the major contemporary Black
minstrel shows and travelling stage shows that featured what was the
latest in urban entertainment and were seen as real transmission belts
to Black Vaudeville, white Vaudeville, and even Broadway for a lucky
few.
>. For practical purposes I think we> can call John Hurt style music "country" or "downhome" or "folk" as
> long as we know what we're talking about -- after all, down home means> the South (where Italian-born opera musician A. Maggio lived, e.g.),> not whatever Titon feels like redefining it to mean.//
Listening to Hurt, you have to be careful about to what degree his
music reflects the earliest transmission of urban music like Ragtime
to Country people.
Titon is very clear that he is talking about a development among
African Americans and within African American culture and music, not
in general. Actually, the use of the term among Black folk begins
with the second wave of migration in the early 20th Century (the first
wave of migration was to Southern cities in the late 19th century and
earlier in the 20th century) distinguishing something whose origins
were back in the Cotton South as opposed to northern origin. This was
not necessarily rural.
Despite his training in reading and composing music, Thomas A
Dorsey never made the cut in Chicago between Downhome music and urban
music of any kind, unless you want to qualify the Gospel Blues he
helped to invent or at least codify in the late 1920s as an urban
music. He wanted to be hired to play Jazz or arrange Jazz music but
he really lacked the chops for it, though he always maintained a
capacity to create Downhome Blues, a skill he honed in Atlanta and in
Chicago due to his particular skill at being able to play Blues and
dance music quietly enough that buffet flats and one-apartment
bordellos might not attract a raid or complaints from others in the
building. . His one pre-Gospel moment as a band leader and an arrange
of bands and orchestras came with the Ma Rainey tour because he was
able to use his reading, chart writing, and arranging skills to adapt
Downhome music to what reading musicians in theater orchestras could
handle.
>> Yes. Some such as Furry Lewis continued playing like country musicians
> and unlike Douglas Williams (a great jazz musician who lived in
> Memphis and was older than Furry) after they moved from the country to
> cities. John Lee Hooker moved to Detroit but could still play "Rabbit
> In The Log." Etc. Of course, the way we can understand how much the
> style of "Rabbit In The Log" relates to the style of "Boogie Chillen"
> is by backing up and understanding trends in rural and city music
> generally, not by peering more closely at Hooker.//
Yes, exactly. We also have to differentiate between country and urban
between towns in the South like Clarksdale which were towns but were a
gathering place for country people. Much of the Blues work in
Clarksdale was playing in the streets and saloons when cotton pickers
got paid. At the same time, the better musicians busked to advertise
which country juke they were playing in that evening, as a lot of
Southern urban people, especially in the smaller towns, found the
country jukes and suppers more fun than what was available in towns.
Yes, at least in broad cultural assumption among Black folk,that at
least as long as reference to Blues music was a viable part of Black
culture, a Blues lover was seen as someone who looked to what people
saw as Southern Black rural culture even if that person never went out
of a Northern city in their life. A Blues lover was seen as more
likely to be willing to eat things like chitterlings
. Those of us in our 60s and above can remember when Country music
was largely a music not only of Southerners, but perhaps more
intensely of the Southern, not necessarily rural, diaspora in the
industrial North, Midwest, and West. I think there is a similarity at
least in perceptions of who a Blues lover would be seen as among Black
folk at least into the 1950s and 1960s after which Blues as such was
no longer a very viable music among urban or rural African Americans,
but a holdover from the past.
>
> Yes, for instance a big example, generally speaking, of city influence
> on ruralish blues is the influence of ragtime on blues pickers.//
Yes, especially in the degree that Ragtime influence persists much
more strongly in music made by rural-oriented or based musicians in
the South in a period when Ragtime was being superceded by Jazz in
general popular music. Some of the hardest Ragtime-influenced music
comes through in recordings of people like Blind Blake in the late
1920s and you can find such music going on what was being performed
into the 1930s. Cannon is a good example of this as much more of his
music was more what I call country ragtime or pop ragtime than Blues
or old-time music. While it can be said that one source of urban
composed Ragtime was these elements in Black country music with a rag
being the name African Americans gave to country dances in Kansas and
Missouri where Ragtime came into urban muis, so that some of these
Ragtime elements may have just been part of African American rural
music, Paul Oliver shows that most of the songs Cannon composed had
allusions and aspiration that went all the way beyond African American
urban music to Broadway. My conjecture--in other words I have no
proof so this could be wrong--is that once Blues recordings came out,
Blues verses were flying back and forth from the most urban Blues
recordings and rural Blues performance.
>
> I think generally speaking that's true. Of course, most people who
> view blues romantically don't want to pursue links between blues and
> the likes of "The Siege Of Sebastapol" and Child ballads and
> Praetorius as much as between blues and "hollers" and dirty
> fingernails and griots. That's the main thing that makes the work
> there uphill I think. People want Son House to historically be what
> really Will Slayden is more. Which is inconvenient if they enjoy how
> House sounds better than how Slayden sounds. And same with Dock Boggs
> vs. John Carson.
Griots would not have fit in very well around field hollers, and dirty
fingernails and all of the stereotypes associated wrongly with rural
Black Blues. They were a specialized caste who chiefly performed
songs of praise for the wealthy and employed a fairly rituatized
repertoire that they guardedly kept within their caste. Contemporary
discussion of this issue which has mainly centered in research on the
African predecessors of the banjo suggests that very few Griots were
ever enslaved compared to players of African folk instruments that
were played by people and in venues more similar to both Blues and
Banjo music than anything griots did.
But the whole issue of griots which appeared in both Blues and OTM
writing speaks to a kind of almost metaphysical bent that folklorists
can tend to have. A folklorist can find a practice in Africa today or
in the past and identify it very superficially with a practice of
African Americans in the present or the early 20th century, and then
claim the Africanness of something. This is probably done even moreso
with the "Celticness" of various things among Southeastern European
Americans, particularly mountaineers. Yet, no reasonable means of
transmission are ever explored or proven.
I think that there is a certain pressure by someone engaged in
ethnomusicology and folklore to seek ancient roots and to
overemphasize in-family transmission. This is accentuated by the
degree to which useful sources are seen as people who hang onto old
music in vestigial redoubts where even that music is no longer a
viable part of the social life of the social layer the musicians
remain part of. Often a good source is someone like John Hurt or Dock
Boggs who gave up playing their instrument and playing for decades or
John Lomax's array of prisoners who reflected music at the time they
were imprisoned not contemporary music.
It is often the person who is most isolated that is prized. I know
white post folkie performers who tend to castigate Lonnie Johnson not
only because he was an urban (New Orleans and then St. Louis and then
Chicago) Blues player, but because when "rediscovered" he seemed more
interested in recording pop and Jazz tunes he did not get to record in
his career between the 1920s and the 1950s than recording Blues.
>
> Specifically non-blues "black" folk is where Dave has more to tell us
> than Gus. Folk blues I think Gus beats Dave.//
I think this is true for the commercial recordings. It
>> > What can be added is that in his recordings for folklorists and
> > performances for folkie fan in later years, Cannon concentrated more
> > on his original old time dance material for the most part. To some
> > degree this may have been what folk-oriented audiences and
> > interviewers wanted and to some degree this may have been because as
> > he advanced in age it was easier to frail the banjo than to use the
> > elaborate finger and flat picking styles that adorn his commercial
> > recordings.//
I would add to these qualifications that Cannon may have altered this
balance of performance because he simply
liked the older songs better than the 1920s songs, that were, after
all, created with aspirations for commercial success, and moreover,
his tastes may have simply changed in 30 or 40 years. Sometimes a
cigar is just a cigar!
>
> > This mixture was not unique to Cannon, but was generally true
> > of Black Southern Blues artists of his generation.
>
> Sort of. Many were far more rural in style than Cannon was. Even in
> the 1980s, people such as Cecil Barfield were making recordings in a
> less citified style than most Cannon.//
Yes, Cannon was a hybrid. On one side he aspired to an urban style,
particularly in his song writing and in his mastery of urban five
string banjo techniques. He certainly made efforts to present himself
as a Memphis person, not a country person. Yet, he performed music
largely in rural venues and often that music was music that must have
seemed completely old fashioned in Memphis that could still get some
play in the Country.
>
> While emphasis on
>
> > this in Oliver’s work has centered on older “songsters” like Cannon
> > and Lipscomb
>
> "Songsters," there's a concept I'd encourage you to disdain. Almost
> everyone played non-blues and blues. The purpose of the word
> "songsters" in blues literature generally has been to exaggerate a
> perceived divide between supposedly pure blues singers and people
> along the lines of Mance Lipscomb -- who were playing blues around the
> time a lot of those "pure" people were born.
>
> , this kind of variation, brought up to date to their
>
> > times, was much more true of the next generation of Blues singers
> > represented by folks like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters. Johnson
> > performed versions of Gene Austin’s “My Blue Heaven” and in
> > Mississippi Muddy had a repertoire of Gene Autry tunes!
>
> It was completely normal for rural musicians about Muddy's and Wolf's
> age to know and respect Glenn Miller and Jimmie Lunceford's _sound_.
Yes. This is an enormous difference between the fictional world that
Alan Lomax created fifty years after the fact in _Land Where the Blues
Began_ and the real world of the Delta in the early 1940s. Lomax
concentrates on archaic completely vestigial music, and simply ignores
what people were actually listening to or, worse, presents older music
as if it were more popular than it was. In the studies of Work and
his Fisk collaborators, they interviewed a lot of people across the
Delta, an area the research assistants and masters candidates involved
had just finished a multi-year sociological study under the direction
of Charles S. Johnson on youth in the Delta. They found that the
delta's Black population had always been one of the more dynamic and
culturally progressive in the rural south, with a higher percentage of
young people, greater interest in the lastest Swing and other Popular
music, and less patience with Jim Crow.
Because all that post folk blues fans know about African American post-
war music is about Charlie Patton to Son House to Robert Johnson and
Muddy Waters to Brian Jones, they tend to see the heritage of R & B
and other modern Black music in rural blues in general, or this narrow
sub regional line of Black blues playing in specific. Yet, a much
more fundamental strain in postwar Black blues leading to future music
were the urban Jazz influenced Blues starts of the postwar period. T-
Bone Walker's guitar style and singing probably had much more to do
with how Blues oriented guitar and R & B blues leading to rock than
Muddy Waters. Even in the Delta, from Clarksdale itself, Ike Turner's
first band for Sun and its Jackie Brison recording of "Rocket 88"
sounds closer to urban Jump music in the way the band was set up, and
the primacy of the saxophone than anything Muddy Waters recorded.
tonythomas
> > I know someone who use to know her and considered her intellectually
> dishonest in person, which jibes with the fact that imo she often
How can I agree with this and not make an adhominem argument! Given
that much of my acquaintence with intellectual study of Black culture
comes my graduate education in literary studies and desire at one type
to concentrate in that, I looked forward to being aided by the variety
of "Blues" oriented theories launched by my contemporaries in Black
studies. AT one point, my central plan was to do my Ph D with Houston
Baker when he was at Penn.
However, it seems that for that entire milieu even people of high
integrity and intellectual accomplishment like Baker, the Blues is
something they can manipulate and bandy about without any reference to
what factual, historical, and musicological knowledge has been
accumulated about the Blues. They can claim that the blues is
anything they want and can categorize everything they want as Blues,
including events, cultural approaches, and social practices that took
place decades before the Blues existed.
>
> I think it's a mistake to think of Bessie Smith in any
>
> > one way, city or country (and as you point out, those are probably
> > inaccurate terms to use anyway) - she evolved a lot musically//
Bessie Smith may have been born in rural Alabama, but she only
experienced country life as an infant. She grew up and began
performing from an early Age in the streets of Chatanooga before
following her brother up the rungs of Black minstrel and vaudeville
shows chiefly in the South. What was country was not her repertoire
as far as I know and I am not much of an expert on Bessie Smith, but
her musical approach, the way she used the volume of her voice and the
way her singing was much more within African American Southern scale
and rhythms than her predecessors in "classic" Blues. I am not
denying that Bessie' greatest distinction was her sheer vocal power
that would have distinguished her from other singers in any genre of
music
>
> What do you think was most country style about her?
> >
> > word "folk" has way too much baggage to be useful[...]
>
> To my understanding it's generally distinguished between humble do-it-> yourself music and snobby pro music effectively for centuries.
I never heard of such a distinction between serious people who discuss
music as opposed to the crowd in the local folk society. Generally, it
means distinguishing between culture that is transmitted primarily by
a "folk community." Folk communities are not necessarily rural.
Believe me in stories I have heard from collectors and folklorists and
musicians who have spent considerable time with musicians and singers
who are unassailably "folk" in that sense, being humble has nothing to
do with it it. Do it yourself concepts actually tend to contradict
the reality that some folk musicians have developed their music and
skills from long standing traditions and receive much education,
criticism, and direction from previous generations of folk musicians
or recognized highly talented artists.
Of course, some of us may have a particular affection for what Mike
Seeger calls "home made music," but often that music is a product of
what has been passed down to many, many homes.
In the recording age, and in other places and times even in the age of
sheet music, folk musics have been codifed and preserved and even
passed down within the folk community in various forms of musical
notation and recordings.
In the world since the Early Modern period, the sphere of pure folk
community and the sphere of commercially and professionally composed
music have slowly ended whatever separation they may have ever had
previously. Particularly in the late 19th Century and early 20th
Century where vast interaction went on between urban and rural areas
between different regions of the country and with the rapid expansion
of commercial music and entertainment of all kinds including folk
music, it becomes harder to distinguish what is folk and what is not.
After all, even some Child Ballads were largely circulated in Broad
sides in the UK, more songs that may be considered as purely folk were
distributed on songsters across the United States in the 19th and
early 20th Centuries, and one can hear songs originally written on Tin
Pan Alley and spread by recordings among music collected "in the
field" by the most scrupulous of folklorists.
> [...]Maybe "Northern" and
>
> > "Southern" would be more accurate.[...]
>
> There was so much non-folk music in the South though.
>
> I will say imo it's tough to find stuff from before 1945 that's really
> folk country bluesish where the person wasn't at least born in the
> South. That really is a regional thing. There apparently didn't happen
> to be any region in the North where folk blues had significantly
> caught on as of say 1918. "Jailhouse Rag" by David Miller is on the
> edge of that issue.//
First we have to look at the demographics. Very few African Americans
lived outside of the South in the period in question. While there was
probably as significant Black migration from the country to the
Southern towns as there was to the North, or often like Bessie Smith
and Thomas A Dorsey a two-stage immigration first from the country to
a town or city like Chattanooga or Atlanta and then to a Northern city
like Philiadelphia or Chicago, the predominance of African Americans
until World War II lived in the rural South and the pluraility of
African Americans were engaged in one or another aspect of the growth
and processing of Cotton, Tobacco, Rice, and Sugar. Moreover,
recordings are not such a good gauge of Black musical practice at
least before the 1930s. As I said, James P. Johnson has written about
how much of his work in New York in the early 1900s involved playing
country dance music his audiences had known in South Carolina and
Eubie Blake talks about playign the Blues in 19th Century Baltimore.
However, it is probably true that the latest in Black traditional
Southern culture probably was fairly weak in most Northern cities in
this era. We have to remember that the Blues probably only became
general in the Deep South around the turn of the century, even if we
can find local instances of it as far back as the 1890s. It starts out
in the Deep South, probably in Lousiana, Mississippi, East Texas, and
or the adjoining areas of Tennessee and Akansas and travels up to the
Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia later. In New York, Southern
migrants largely came from Virginia and the Carolinas. In 1918 it
would have been quite rare to come upon a serious concentration of
Black people from the country of Mississippi or Texas in New York.
Moreover, during the migration in the first part of the 20th Century
very much of the migration especially to the Northeastern cities was
from African Americans who lived in or had immigrated from the country
to Southern towns and cities.
So demographics alone would tell us not to expect much non-Tin Pan
Alley or Jazz Blues in New York in those years. Indeed, we can find
vestiges of music older than the Blues including the old time String
band repertoire in the New York of the 1890s and early 1900s.
However, another thing would be to assess the degree of Blues playign
at the same time in Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, St. Louis,
Atlanta, or New Orleans where we know much blues playing was going on
from the turn of the century on. Still another thing to compare
border cities like Cincinatti, and or cities where large numbers of
immigrants from the "Land where the Blues began" concentrated like
Chicago. Still another comparison might be places like Los Angeles
where there was relatively little rural Southern migration until the
second world war, but concentrated urban migration particularly from
New Orleans where country blues probably was not very prominent until
the war years, but where name Jazz musicans from New Orleans and later
from Chicago were nested quite early.
>
> J
tonythomas
> On Feb 12, 5:50 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> [...]It should be said that the general complaint of Jazz
>
> > musicians of the Swing era about John Hammond and the fellow who
> > started Verve whose name escapes me this morning before coffee was
> > that they wanted too many recordings of Blues.
>
> That trend was true with regard to "black"-owned record companies,
> e.g. Clarence Brown complained that Robey made him concentrate on
> blues. And with regard to "black" music listeners, e.g. Gillespie
> complained that his "black" audiences wanted to hear blues way too
> much. Art Blakey remarked that "black" people in general "never heard
All are completely right. Again, a significant number of Swing
musicans went into R & B in response to Bop
even the most friendly of the original swing organizations to Bop,
Lionel Hampton, became essentially a jump band for the Black record
market, that could play the old swing repertoire for white hotel and
society audiences. Even Basie tried to record very pop very R & B
sounding sides in the dying days of the Old Testament band in the
1940s. A very strong side of Bop was its desire to distinguish itself
as art music and not popular music and to fasten itself onto largely
white-populated club and concert venues as opposed to the great Black
dancehalls which were the central venues for Swing. Often the story is
told that swing led to Bop, but it is more that big band swing became
outmoded both by the progression toward bop and the demise of the
particular dancing audience it oriented to, but much of it turned in
the direction of R & B which is as much a descendant of swing as it is
of the Blues. Many of the early R & B stars like Wynonnie Harris had
been swing band singers. Louis Jordan who started out in Cab
Calloway's Band along with Dizzy, never really got beyond swing
musically, even though he is classed with R & B. There is a whole
Calloway feel about everything Jordan did.
>
> Number of Top Ten R&B singles during the 1942-1959 period:
> Louis Jordan 54
> Muddy Waters 14
> Lester Young 3
> Buddy Holly 3
> Billie Holiday 2
> Dizzy Gillespie 0
> Charlie Parker 0
>
> That's getting far afield, but it illustrates how large a shadow the
> "It's Tight Like That"-type fad cast (a shadow that included Buddy
> Holly).
In one of the Fisk studies of the delta from 1941-42 there is a list
of the most popular juke box tunes in Black venues in the Mississippi
delta at the time and there is much less Blues and African American
music involved.
> [...] Paul Oliver's book
>
> > about the Songsters speaks about what he believes is a strong
> > connection between early 1890s and 1900s songs in what I call pop
> > ragtime and how they contributed to Blues origins.
>
> Much of what he's doing there is identifying connections between sheet
> music and _non-blues_ that were performed by "black" singer-
> guitarists. Except for plenty of shards of lyrics here and there, I
> wouldn't say non-blues popular sheet music was all that influential on
> the earliest folk _blues_ as such.//
I think Oliver would agree with that. I also would think that those
he identifies as songsters represented a particular stream of
musicians who looked to urban oriented popular music even if they
remained in the country. I think he does give a good picture of what
many other neglect about the rural areas not being isolated from
developments in both white and Black popular music.
>
> > To discuss things seriously, we need names.
>
> Amen.
>
> Having correct and useful
>
> > terminology is decisive to discussing and researching things
> > correctly. It requires serious and systematic thought.[...]
>
> When I moved to Miami 25 years ago,
>
> > I had older urban coworkers who would mention Sam Hopkins as "what we
> > used to dance to," remembering his career playing electric blues and
> > organ in the late 1940s and early 1950s that achieved a great success.
> > My mind until then had been fixed on the image of Lightning created by
> > Sam Charter's Folkways recording. In reality, he was both a
> > commercial R & B and :Jump" performer and someone who continued one of
> > the oldest tradition of the Blues
>
> Broonzy is a famous example, but still not famous enough, if you
> listen to "You Do Me Any Old Way," "Good Gravy," or "Just Rockin'"
> contrasted with some of the Son House style '50s stuff (in some cases
> accompanied by ODJB-style band, talk about inventing folk music).//
Broonzy was outrageous. At the Spirituals to Swing concert he is
introduced as someone who bought his first pair of shoes to come to
New York for the concert when Broonzy had been cranking out Melrose
formula Blues from Chicago for at least a decade by then. He put on
the same act in the 1950s when he was rediscovered as a"real folk
artist" first in England and then in this country. Interestingly
enough he did begin as a fiddler. Someone recounted him picking up a
violin left in a British concert hall during one of his 1950s tour and
playing some magnificent fiddling and asking him why he never played
fiddle in his shows. Broonzy responded by saying it was too country
and old fashioned. Unlike urban blues man Lonnie Johnson who also
began as a fiddler who put out old time fiddle recordings that were
released under a pseudonym as white music, Broonzy waited until he
recorded with a very urban Jazz combo with a sax before letting his
fiddle be reocrded.
>
> , especially given his family
>
> > connection with Texas Alexander, a survivor of the age before Blues
> > became primarily a dance and accompanied music.
>
> Alexander was born in 1900. What era do you have in mind for blues
> becoming primarily a dance and accompanied music? I think the way
> "Railroad Bill" era songs were so often accompanied by ragtimish
> picking helps suggest a continuum of accompanied uptempo "black" folk
> music from the 1890s to 1910s blues.//
I think one root of the blues comes from field hollars and work songs
that Blended in with the dance music that came from other genres.
Certain int he first 30 years of rural blues, music that was closer to
ragtime or even the old time dance repertoire mixed with this music or
was present along with the Blues in blues repertoire.
Or if you take Slayden, for
> instance, he seems to represent an era when non-blues is blending into
> blues, and he's playing it suitable for dancing (never mentioning the
> word blues).//
Slayden is very interesting. Part of it is he represents someone who
was never much of a musician. Even though he was recorded as far back
as 1952, he still represents an African American banjoist who had
spent maybe the last 40 to 50 years of his life in a world where Blues
music and blues derived music dominated Black rural musical discourse,
playing the banjo and attempting forms of music that were socially
isolated. Another influence on him was clearly Black religious
singing that echoes in much of his work.
Howevr, he does give a great feel for when the Blues and the banjo
reprtoire were not that far apart. Slayden was from around the same
area that Gus Cannon began in. A wiser mind than mine has suggested
that he sounds like what Gus may have sounded like when he first
learned the banjo before he learned two-finger picking, when Gus's act
included old time music fiddle along with banjo.
John Carson's "Goin' Where The Climate Suits My Clothes"
> likely ties in with the Slayden feel and era there I think.
>
> Joseph Scott//
Thanks for that suggestion
j_ns...@msn.com
example, Titon would not call Kid Ory's or Teddy Wilson's blues
"downhome" blues, and they were from down home.
[...]Even in the Delta, from Clarksdale itself, Ike Turner's
> first band for Sun and its Jackie Brison recording of "Rocket 88"
> sounds closer to urban Jump music in the way the band was set up, and
> the primacy of the saxophone than anything Muddy Waters recorded.
Ike, Jackie and band were jumping on a bandwagon already invented by
Wyonie Harris ("Good Rockin' Tonight"), Jimmy Preston ("Rock The
Joint"), and others. Wynonie was from Nebraska and recorded in Ohio,
and Jimmy was born in and recorded in Pennsylvania. So guys around
Memphis wanting to sound like them, that all parallels the earlier
Wolf/Glenn Miller (and Robert Johnson/Leroy Carr) stuff. The peasantry
were supposed to be too good for slick commercial music, but a lot of
them didn't get the memo.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
There are several issues here.
The first is that most post-folkie people looking at all kinds of
music exaggerate the influence and significance of traditional, folk,
and rural music. The best minimize the influence of urban and
commercial music, while many are simply ignorant of it.
The second is the division among musicians regardless of their origins
about the degree to orient to urban or rural Southern music,
regardless of their geographic origins. Actually, members of the
Count Basie orchestra in the 1930s considered Teddy Wilson not to be
able to play the hard blues-based Southwestern Swing that was centered
in Texas and Kansas city that was the meat of the band's repertoire,
even though he was Billie's chief pianist and arranger on dates filled
with Baseities whenever the band was in New York. I remember either
Buck Clayton or Eddie Durham saying "he couldn't play with us" when
asked if they ever invited Wilson to any of their jams. On the other
hand a whole group of contemporary Jazz musicians I know in New York
who emphasize New York's own contribution to Jazz consider Wilson to
be one of the greatest Jazz musicians of any time.
While geographic origin may have been a factor, there were approaches
to the Blues that centered on the tradition that had developed in the
Black South influence to be sure by rural people and there were
approache to the Blues, mostly Jazz that centered on the New musicial
culture that developed among middle class and middle class aspirants
in the cities, especially in the Northern cities. Elijah Wald is
pretty good at proving that through the whole period of the 1920s and
1930s, Mississippi Blues singers like Son House and Robert Johnson
considered the classic Blues singers to be the best singers of the
Blues and that they were very popular among the audiences that they
played with. Robert Johnson as a second or even third generation Blues
player developed as much of his repertoire from his idealization of
Lonnie Johnson and Leroy Carr as he did from his association of with
the Lineage of Blues players Henry Sloan, Charlie Patton, Son House.
He is supposed to have wanted to go electric and include a sax in a
combo in his dying days.
Finally, despite the romanticism of folkies, rural people in general
tend to feel that urban people are superior to them, and try to
identify with urban things in everything that they do. The most rural
of blues singers and the most rural of old time string bands adopted
names and did songs that tried to identify themselves with hip urban
doings, regardless of whatever reality was about their roots. This
may have been a bit distorted in white country music where the "Hill
Billie" image was developed, largely for marketing old time music in
Midwestern cities and was largely adopted by the most commercial end
of the music, but this seems to ring through most rural based
musicians. That urban middle class people who think they are
progressive have developed ideas that mystify rural people, reflects
their paternalism and ignorance.
Barry M.
Tony, and you've left me curious, in particular, about which
performers, performances or repertoires you'd include within the
provocative description "Raggy Blues Country pop. "
Barry M
tonythomas
The term is inadequate and what I can come up with and I am hoping
someone has come up with a more definitive term. I have come upon
"Country Ragtime."
If you were to buy a "blues" recording by many artists from the 1920s
and early 1930s, to one degree or another a ceretain part of what you
would get would not
be Blues. There is a big range between artists, usually with older
artists having less blues, and younger artists more blues. Some of
them like Texas Henry Thomas and Jim Jackson really had a number of
tunes that were essential in the same dance repertoire that old time
banjo and fiddle supported. Others had tunes that were very similar
to pop songs of the Ragtime era and less developed rags. The
percentage of such tunes seems to be higher if we listen to non-old
Time string bands. Some artists like Blind Blake recorded many such
songs. To the extent of my deficient knowledge of such things, this
repertoire often included the kind of music that was popular in Black
stage shows, Black minstrelsy, and in medicine shows. Tunes like "In
the Jailhouse Now" which despite Ralph Peer's piracy with Jimmie
Rodgers was a staple song in Black entertainment from the 1890s on,
The version of "Rambling Man" popular with Pink Andersons which was
another tune often done on the Black stage are samples of that
repertoire. Almost all of the recorded Gus Cannon oevre save the
explict Blues and one or two old-time songs he recorded like
"Feather Bed" including his magnificent "Madison Rag" fit into this
repertoire, although Cannon seems unique that he was a songwriter who
wrote many of his own songs of this nature and did not record any of
the songs that were standard in that genre. It may be that he had a
Peer like contract where he had to record songs
that the recording company or the A & R person could publish.
AS I and more eloquently, J. Scott the Great have explained these
blues musicians could not have one kind of song, especially because
working a dance gig, which was where most money was, required
different dances. Faster dances to different progressions were
apparently what dancers wanted. Stearns and Paul Oliver point to an
explosion of dance crazes coming out of the Black rural south before
the Blues became as widely known an entertainment music and before
Jazz consolidated itself as a distinct genre. They were associated
with tunes like this and the repertoire of a musician who played in
areas where the Blues and Jazz had not conquered as entertainment
music or an older performer like Gus Cannon who was a young hot guy
when this music and those dances were the hip new thing who retained
this in his repertoire. Moreover, Cannon focused much of his
entertaining out in the country and he was apparently a favorite
performer from major medicine shows that kept him employed every year
until the depression broke them up. They tended to offer more "old
fashioned" entertainment and oriented rural and small town areas,
although Cannon did work shows that went to Chicago and other big
cities. The repertoire of someone like Poppa Charlie Jackson who was
apparently a professional ministrel performer had a higher percentage
than Cannon.
What I find interesting about Cannon is that he did not remain witha
rural musical vocabulary on the banjo, like his contemporary Jim
Jackson with whom he worked the medicine shows. Jackson played guitar
in an old0-country way that was good for the string band repertoire
very similar to the style and pace that Cannon frails the banjo. I
have two different non published recordings of Cannon doing "Old Blue"
in the 1960s. Both David Evans who sent me one and Dom Flemmons of
the Carolina Chocolate Drops who sent me the other said they sound
very much like Jackson's version of "Old Blue," which they sure do.
However, while Jackson's guitar style never really developed into the
more modern guitar styles associated with the blues (and steel string
guitars). Cannon mastered not only the down picking clawhammer style
he first learned and played in the country or the two finger style
that was becoming a dominant style for country musicians Black and
white in the early 1900s but went on to play in the urban three and
four finger picking styles and developed this pop ragtime capability.
Of course, it can be said that he never really master the semi-Jazz
style associated with tenor and six-string banjo players who were his
contemporaries, the kind of music you can hear from the Louisville Jug
Bands that was Jazz with a few acoustic instruments and a jug thrown
in, or evne the smoother Jazzer blues styles his friends in the
Memphis Jug Band were eventually performing.
On the other hand, it may well be that whatever Cannon performed for
the recording industry his heart was always into down picking banjo.
So much of what he choose to play in recordings in the 1950s and
1960s.
Of course, the next generation of Blues players like Robert Johnson or
Muddy Waters were likely to have little of this music in their
repertoires.
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]We have to remember that the Blues probably only became
> general in the Deep South around the turn of the century, even if we
> can find local instances of it as far back as the 1890s.
I don't know of any plausible evidence that blues music as such
existed in the 1890s. It existed by 1908.
It starts out
> in the Deep South, probably in Lousiana, Mississippi, East Texas, and
> or the adjoining areas of Tennessee and Akansas and travels up to the
> Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia later.[...]
Blues music may well have started in Missouri or Alabama, we don't
know. And not likely in Virginia, I agree with that. Odum had
collected blues music in Georgia by 1908, and IIRC I don't know of any
plausible evidence of blues music in Texas as early as 1908. We don't
know very well whether blues music was in South Carolina or Kentucky
by 1908.
>
> However, another thing would be to assess the degree of Blues playign
> at the same time in Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, St. Louis,
> Atlanta, or New Orleans where we know much blues playing was going on
> from the turn of the century on.
Not from the turn of the century, from about 1908 (as far as we know).
New Orleans in particular we know by 1908.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
> that Blended in with the dance music that came from other genres.
Me too. Work songs sometimes mentioned doing the Eagle Rock or balling
the jack, that sort of thing.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
[...]I have come upon
> "Country Ragtime."
To me that mostly means music along the lines of much of the secural
non-blues that Elizabeth Cotten and Gary Davis played.
Then there's the question of whether a 12-bar tune with ragtime-style
picking is something we'd call ragtime. Or how often it is. For
instance Hacksaw Harney playing a 12-bar, that's probably ragtime.
[...]> Of course, the next generation of Blues players like Robert
Johnson or
> Muddy Waters were likely to have little of this music in their
> repertoires.
Or little reason to play it, despite remembering it. John Lee Hooker
almost never had a good reason to play "Rabbit On A Log" (but not
never).
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
After I wrote this, I happened to play the second volume of Document's
Jim Jackson set. Except for a few obvious string band tunes and his
endless attempts to redo Going to Kansas City, it is a pretty good
sample of this kind of music at its least evolved. The real reference
to Ragtime is not to the composed and highly developed banjo and piano
compositions that were at the center of Ragtime, but to the long
succession of pop tunes from the 90s to the twenties that attempted to
reflect Ragtime, although some like Gary Davis were adept at playing
guitar versions of the great Joplin Rags. Again, I think the term
that I use is inadequate and search furiously in sources for a better
term and hope someone in these circles will find a more correct term
to use.
It is important to understand how everyone between 1897 and 1930s was
trying to dub all sorts of Black influenced or Black music with the
tag Ragtime. We have not only people like Irving Berlin with
Alexander's Ragtime band, Gus Cannon's Madison Street Rag, but the
GREAT FRANK HUTCHISON concluding his immortal Weary Blues talking how
"sing this Ragtime Song."
It is with broad brush not one of narrow science that I use the term
Ragtime. Pop Ragtime, Country Ragtime, the raggy music that
accompanied the Blues are among the inadequate terms I use for this
music.
Again, I beg someone to find a better term or definition
tonythomas
> On Feb 13, 7:47 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> [...]We have to remember that the Blues probably only became
>
> > general in the Deep South around the turn of the century, even if we
> > can find local instances of it as far back as the 1890s.
>
> I don't know of any plausible evidence that blues music as such
In My friend David Evan's Big Road Blues, he writes that the Blues was
first recognized from whatever underground it existed in 1890.
In my forthcoming Chapter for Hidden in the Mix edited by Dian
Pecknold, I wrote that the blues arose in the deep South in the 1890s
and was generalized across the South in 1900. David edited that
article by hand--not computer--twice. Jeff Todd Titon also
scrutinized the article several times. Elijah Wald also read the draft
and final versions closely. I believe they are sufficiently
knowledgeable about the Blues.
As I have repeated here Abbot and Seroff in an article published I
believe in 1996 and republished in David's New Perspectives on the
Blues, last year write that by 1908 the Blues had become a factor in
the commercial sheet music industry.
The argument was not with people who mistakenly believe the Blues
emerged in the 20th Century but people who want to claim the Blues can
be reported or discussed as part of Black music at an earlier phase.
I see no proof for that.
I do believe that the Blues reflected definite changes in the social,
sexual, economic, and cultural life of Black people in the South,
changes that were at first most advanced in the Cotton South, that
spread through the rest of the Black population North and South. In
addition to Georgraphical motion, we have changes that have to do with
the spread of those life changes that made the Blues appropriate to
the new life and pushed back older formers of music.
>
> It starts out
>
> > in the Deep South, probably in Lousiana, Mississippi, East Texas, and
> > or the adjoining areas of Tennessee and Akansas and travels up to the
> > Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia later.[...]
>
> Blues music may well have started in Missouri or Alabama, we don't
> know. And not likely in Virginia, I agree with that. Odum had
> collected blues music in Georgia by 1908, and IIRC I don't know of any
> plausible evidence of blues music in Texas as early as 1908. We don't
> know very well whether blues music was in South Carolina or Kentucky
> by 1908.//
Again, we know that people inthe Music publishing industry were
speaking of the Blues in 1908, a case of folklore collectors being out
of sync with what was happening in commercial entertainment. We know
that Handy was arguing with Jelly Roll Morton that a band could not
play the Blues in those years and that New Orleans musicians like
Morton, Louis Armstrong, and others talked about playing Blues in
these years or that Eubie Blake claimed he played Blues in the 19th
Century (I say claimed because Blake lied about his age especially
during his "redisovery" in later years claiming to be 10-20 years
older than he actually was!)
>
>
>
> > However, another thing would be to assess the degree of Blues playign
> > at the same time in Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, St. Louis,
> > Atlanta, or New Orleans where we know much blues playing was going on
> > from the turn of the century on.
>
> Not from the turn of the century, from about 1908 (as far as we know).
> New Orleans in particular we know by 1908.
>
> Joseph Scott//
Again the major scholars of the Blues and most accepted authorities on
the history of Black music like Eileen Southern think otherwise.
Perhaps you need to consult these sources rather than pontificating.
You are entitled to your beliefs, but I am enclined to accept the
work of people who have devoted their lives to the study of this
question
tonythomas
> On Feb 15, 10:03 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> [...]I have come upon
>
> > "Country Ragtime."
>
> To me that mostly means music along the lines of much of the secural
Elizabeth Cotton's music was much closer to the repertoire of parlor
guitar with a lot of five-string banjo music transposed to guitar
thrown in. She plays both of the signature piece of that style "The
Seige of Sebastopol" and the "Spanish Fandango"
Gary Davis had a full repertoire of Ragtime Pieces including the
Joplin Rags
>
> Then there's the question of whether a 12-bar tune with ragtime-style
> picking is something we'd call ragtime. Or how often it is. For
> instance Hacksaw Harney playing a 12-bar, that's probably ragtime.//
I think when I say Ragtime, except for those like Davis who had actual
Ragtime repertoires, we are talking about music that related to the
kind of beats that dances that were done to the music that emerged
1895-1915 before Blues and Jazz began to overcome them Many of the
dances that became national dance crazes in the cities even into the
1920s were dances that had started in the Black South and so there was
probably a reflexive relationship between their folk origins and their
echos in professional entertainment all the way from Juke Joints to
Broadway .
Again, if you think of musicians as playing for dances and dances
being what distinguished the different kinds of rhythms and paces of
tunes, even progressions, we can just say that a lot of dances from
non-Blues music were around in the first 25-30 years of the 20th
Century and they mixed in with the Blues and the Blues was adapted to
the pace of these different dances.
I think Ragtime's reach into popular and folk music among AFrican
Americans, but also among European Americans is one of the most
underestimated factors in the way the post folk group of music buffs
looks at things. I still feel grossly undereducated on this question
and find the terms that I use for this inadequate, except I cannot
find any that are better.
>
> [...]> Of course, the next generation of Blues players like Robert
> Johnson or
>
> > Muddy Waters were likely to have little of this music in their
> > repertoires.//
Yes because by then the music had died out. They were more likely to
have tunes that were part of white pop Jazzz (icky music as the swing
swingers would have said) Cowboy music, and Swing because these were
the other musics that both white and Black would have wanted to hear
street singing, singing at a dance, or in Muddy's case singing with
Silas Green from New Orleans travelling show.
>
> Or little reason to play it, despite remembering it. John Lee Hooker
> almost never had a good reason to play "Rabbit On A Log" (but not
> never).//
Exactly, as our working musician friend explained, working musicians
play for dancing and clubbing not folk festivals and folk cafes where
the historical value and diversity of one' repertoire were a factor.
They made music that kept people drinking, dancing, gambling, seeking
love for hire or love for free, and similar activity.
Tony Thomas
j_ns...@msn.com
> On Feb 16, 12:06 am, j_nsc...@msn.com wrote:> On Feb 13, 7:47 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]We have to remember that the Blues probably only became
>
> > > general in the Deep South around the turn of the century, even if we
> > > can find local instances of it as far back as the 1890s.
>
> > I don't know of any plausible evidence that blues music as such
> > existed in the 1890s. It existed by 1908.//
>
> In My friend David Evan's Big Road Blues, he writes that the Blues was
> first recognized from whatever underground it existed in 1890.
I've read Big Road Blues. In your opinion what plausible evidence does
he give in it that blues music as such existed in the 1890s?
> In my forthcoming Chapter for Hidden in the Mix edited by Dian
> Pecknold, I wrote that the blues arose in the deep South in the 1890s
What plausible evidence were you going on?
[...]
> > It starts out
>
> > > in the Deep South, probably in Lousiana, Mississippi, East Texas, and
> > > or the adjoining areas of Tennessee and Akansas and travels up to the
> > > Carolinas, Kentucky, and Virginia later.[...]
>
> > Blues music may well have started in Missouri or Alabama, we don't
> > know. And not likely in Virginia, I agree with that. Odum had
> > collected blues music in Georgia by 1908, and IIRC I don't know of any
> > plausible evidence of blues music in Texas as early as 1908. We don't
> > know very well whether blues music was in South Carolina or Kentucky
> > by 1908.//
>
> Again, we know that people inthe Music publishing industry were
> speaking of the Blues in 1908
A. Maggio in New Orleans was using "Blues" to describe music like
"black" folk blues in 1908.
, a case of folklore collectors being out
> of sync with what was happening in commercial entertainment.
I'm not sure what you mean here.
We know
> that Handy was arguing with Jelly Roll Morton that a band could not
> play the Blues in those years
No, we don't "know" that.
and that New Orleans musicians like
> Morton, Louis Armstrong, and others talked about playing Blues in
> these years
Louis Armstrong was born in 1901. Morton was an untrustworthy source
of information.
or that Eubie Blake claimed he played Blues in the 19th
> Century (I say claimed because Blake lied about his age especially
> during his "redisovery" in later years claiming to be 10-20 years
> older than he actually was!)
He was very likely born in 1887, and late in life claimed to have been
born in 1883. I agree with you that if he lied about exactly when he
was writing such-and-such rag then he easily could have lied about
when he first was around blues too.
>
>
>
> > > However, another thing would be to assess the degree of Blues playign
> > > at the same time in Southern cities like Houston, Dallas, St. Louis,
> > > Atlanta, or New Orleans where we know much blues playing was going on
> > > from the turn of the century on.
>
> > Not from the turn of the century, from about 1908 (as far as we know).
> > New Orleans in particular we know by 1908.
>
> > Joseph Scott//
>
> Again the major scholars of the Blues and most accepted authorities on
> the history of Black music like Eileen Southern think otherwise.
I don't agree with this generalization.
> Perhaps you need to consult these sources rather than pontificating.
I've read Eileen Southern. What plausible evidence do you think she
gives that blues music as such existed in the 1890s?
[...]
I am enclined to accept the
> work of people who have devoted their lives to the study of this
> question
I've been studying early blues seriously for a long time. I wouldn't
recommend you accept what I claim uncritically, or accept what anyone
else claims uncritically.
Joseph Scott
j_ns...@msn.com
> On Feb 16, 12:27 am, j_nsc...@msn.com wrote:
>
> > On Feb 15, 10:03 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > [...]I have come upon
>
> > > "Country Ragtime."
>
> > To me that mostly means music along the lines of much of the secural
> > non-blues that Elizabeth Cotten and Gary Davis played.//
>
> Elizabeth Cotton's music was much closer to the repertoire of parlor
> guitar with a lot of five-string banjo music transposed to guitar
> thrown in. She plays both of the signature piece of that style "The
> Seige of Sebastopol" and the "Spanish Fandango"
>
> Gary Davis had a full repertoire of Ragtime Pieces including the
> Joplin Rags
If I follow you here, you consider Joplin rags non-"parlor guitar
repertoire"?
>
> > Then there's the question of whether a 12-bar tune with ragtime-style
> > picking is something we'd call ragtime. Or how often it is. For
> > instance Hacksaw Harney playing a 12-bar, that's probably ragtime.//
>
> I think when I say Ragtime, except for those like Davis who had actual
> Ragtime repertoires
I take it by "actual ragtime" here you mean pro ragtime a la Joplin
and Kerry Mills. I would call "Wilson Rag" actual folk ragtime.
, we are talking about music that related to the
> kind of beats that dances that were done to the music that emerged
> 1895-1915 before Blues and Jazz began to overcome them
I don't entirely follow this. I think Ed Berlin defines ragtime well.
[...]
> Again, if you think of musicians as playing for dances and dances
> being what distinguished the different kinds of rhythms and paces of
> tunes, even progressions
That's an interesting topic -- what progressions were popular with
what kinds of dances? In some research I did on waltzes a while back I
was surprised how similar the progressions in ragtime-era waltzes were
to the progressions in rags.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
been written for decades by the major scholars of the Blues. They
have presented this information in scores of journal articles,
published books, and other documented and peer reviewed work. I keep
referring him to this work.
Scott's task is not to warble in a list but to do what those I refer
to have done. Do a fully documented, peer reviewed article or book
expounding his views, that takes up the approaches of the variety of
sources and authorities that I have referenced.
Until then, I will go with what those who have done this have said. I
also will go with what recent scholarship has said about a variety of
issues. As a scholar whose audience is beyond that of list serves
but is involved in a series of publishing products, it is my job to
keep up with current scholarship, not rest with what was said vaguely
in the past.
One example is Scott;s statement "Jelly Roll Morton was an
untrustworthy source of information." This was my opinion until a
year or two ago when I evinced that opion in an academic forum. It
was explained that recent scholarship has been done on this question
based on the recovery of Morton's archives that were in the hands of
one of his supporters and not discovered until the past few years.
Scholars have examined these archives in recent years and produced
work that confirms that Morton was highly reliable including on issues
he was formerly thought to be unreliable, especially his disputes with
Handy and ASCAP.
Being so informed, I read that scholarship. I changed my mind, I
found out many things previous writing about Morton had not disclosed,
not only about Morton but about other questions of my concern.
This is the pattern that I have learned once I began to do serious,
peer reviewed, work for academic publication.
Tony Thomas
tonythomas
> On Feb 16, 8:24 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
>
>
>
> > On Feb 16, 12:27 am, j_nsc...@msn.com wrote:
>
> > > On Feb 15, 10:03 am, tonythomas <blackbanjot...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> > > [...]I have come upon
>
> > > > "Country Ragtime."
>
> > > To me that mostly means music along the lines of much of the secural
> > > non-blues that Elizabeth Cotten and Gary Davis played.//
>
> > Elizabeth Cotton's music was much closer to the repertoire of parlor
> > guitar with a lot of five-string banjo music transposed to guitar
> > thrown in. She plays both of the signature piece of that style "The
> > Seige of Sebastopol" and the "Spanish Fandango"
>
> > Gary Davis had a full repertoire of Ragtime Pieces including the
> > Joplin Rags
>
> If I follow you here, you consider Joplin rags non-"parlor guitar
Not exactly, I imagine some parlor guitarists attempted them.
However, I would differentiate the ways that we have found
guitaristsm, banjoists, and pianists performing them different from
parlor guitarists. As I also pointed out Elizabeth
Cotton's repertoire included banjo songs like Reuben that she did not
play on the banjo but played on the guitar
in the tunings used for the banjo.
>
>
>
> > > Then there's the question of whether a 12-bar tune with ragtime-style
> > > picking is something we'd call ragtime. Or how often it is. For
> > > instance Hacksaw Harney playing a 12-bar, that's probably ragtime.//
>
> > I think when I say Ragtime, except for those like Davis who had actual
> > Ragtime repertoires
>
> I take it by "actual ragtime" here you mean pro ragtime a la Joplin
> and Kerry Mills. I would call "Wilson Rag" actual folk ragtime.
>
IWell, I think you raise a good question that my response was not
good.
First there is the issue of folk ragtime. Abbot and Seroff as well as
other sources indicate a signficant factor in the emergence of both
composed piano Ragtime and the wave of popular syncopated or pseudo-
syncopated music claiming to be Ragtime were based on patterns of folk
banjo and string band music that had been popular among African
Americans, particularly the variants known in Kansas and Missouri.
Other ancestors that have been cited include attempts at banjo
imitating piano pieces that had been known since the 1840s. >
These folk sources persisted.
However, so did the influence of the great wave of popular music and
song, particularly by Black performers and song writers that was
influenced by this and can be called Ragtime.
This music had big influence on all kinds of Folk performers. Paul
Oliver demonstrates that several songs attributed to Gus Cannon were
largely based or have major allusions to songs by Black pop ragtime
performers and song writers Irving Jones and Ernest Hogan. He shows
how other songs performed by similar artists like Jackson have similar
origins.
As we have discussed earlier, Abbott and Seroffs discussion of Black
entertainment largely presenting such music provides massive cross
references in tunes and verses with European American old time music.
What Oliver is very good at there, although I intend to try to cross
reference what he says with Stearns and other works on Vernacular
dance, is that these tunes were not abstract stage tunes by Hogan or
Jones, but tunes that were associated with popular dances. He
indicates as others have, that many of these dances originated in the
rural Black South.
I conclude, or at least suggest, that these dances remained popular
among African Americans rural and urban and that as long as they
existed, musicians who worked dances performed such music whether
these songs were old standards, slightly rewritten for copyright or
personal entertainment purposes, or new songs. All of these things,
as we have discussed, were much more fluid in those days than they are
now when they are pretty fluid. Songs that we often identify with Gus
Cannon, Cannon told Oliver, Charters, and other that he had actually
learned from other performers and from an older banjoist he knew in
the Delta around the time the music was popular.
, we are talking about music that related to the
>
> > kind of beats that dances that were done to the music that emerged
> > 1895-1915 before Blues and Jazz began to overcome them
>
> I don't entirely follow this. I think Ed Berlin defines ragtime well.
>
> [...]
>
> > Again, if you think of musicians as playing for dances and dances
> > being what distinguished the different kinds of rhythms and paces of
> > tunes, even progressions
>
> That's an interesting topic -- what progressions were popular with
> what kinds of dances? In some research I did on waltzes a while back I
> was surprised how similar the progressions in ragtime-era waltzes were
> to the progressions in rags.//
I will look. Dom Flemmons of the Carolina Chocolate drops wrote
something somewhere about what seemed to be the standard progressions
for a lot of this music. I will look for it somewhere, but perhaps
like all the things you remember as a perfect source in distant
memory, it might not be so good or even about the subject, LOL.
But back to the subject. I acknowledge that the terms that I used to
describe this seem porous and inadequate, perhaps because I am just
learning fully about this, but also because I think there is
insufficent work done on this, so a better mind that mine has yet to
come up with something adequate.
We have the composed ragtime, we have the folk music that composed
instrumental Ragtime was based on, we have the pop music that issued
from Ragtime, we have in particular the pop music and dances that
associated itself with Ragtime that many people saw as Ragtime. Then
we have whatever interaction with all of these forces that Black
musicians associated with the Blues and also with the old time dance
tradition like Jim Jackson and Gus Cannon had.
I think there is a lot of a similar type of music among white OTM
musicians, particularly Charlie Poole.
Returning to another question about a blues with a Ragtime like beat.
I think we are talking about forms of dancing determining the pace and
beat of different music produced by these performers who lived in a
dance ruled world. While recording history, particularly of Black
vernacular music, cannot be directly used to date the prevelance of
music in the community, it appears that some Black people wanted to
dance to ragtime-like beats well into the 1930s, even if they wanted
more up-to-date Blues lyrics to them, rather than somethign that
smacked of Hogan's coon songs.
One of my tasks is to return to the literature of Black vernacular
dance and try to cross reference dance information with information on
the songs and music.
Tony Thomas
>
j_ns...@msn.com
> Joseph Scott proposes a dating for the Blues that contradicts what has
> been written for decades by the major scholars of the Blues.
Tony, can you give us any plausible concrete evidence that blues music
existed in the 1890s, or not?
>
> One example is Scott;s statement "Jelly Roll Morton was an
> untrustworthy source of information." This was my opinion until a
> year or two ago when I evinced that opion in an academic forum. It
> was explained that recent scholarship has been done on this question
> based on the recovery of Morton's archives that were in the hands of
> one of his supporters and not discovered until the past few years.
> Scholars have examined these archives in recent years and produced
> work that confirms that Morton was highly reliable including on issues
> he was formerly thought to be unreliable, especially his disputes with
> Handy and ASCAP.
He claimed he invented jazz. Do you think he invented jazz?
>
> Being so informed, I read that scholarship. I changed my mind, I
> found out many things previous writing about Morton had not disclosed,
> not only about Morton but about other questions of my concern.
I'm glad you're able to modify your beliefs, I am too.
Joseph Scott
lowg...@ao1.com
I spent a lot of time yesterday refuting several "facts" which (in another
genre) had been published by several major "scholars" in the field.
Deciding what "scholarship" is true and what is bullshit requires
skepticism of course, and a recognition of the several human weaknesses
that drive people to make unjustified assumptions and turn logic on its
head.
For example, I'd bet most people on this board know that unnecessary
self-promotion and unwarranted peer attacks are reliable first alerts to
imminent hogwash.
Stay tuned for more...
j_ns...@msn.com
John Work: blues music arose about 1900
Paul Oliver: blues music arose in first decade of 20th century
Tony Russell: blues music arose in first decade of 20th century
Which of these scholars do you respect the least, Tony T.?
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
I am not interested in arguing the question of the date of the origin
of the Blues in what is supposed to be an old time music list. I have
work that I have to get done on deadline and do not want to distract
myself from this. It is sufficient that Joseph Scott believes the
Blues began in the 20th Century, an opinion shared by others including
people I work with intimately and respect. It is also true that there
are many people including people who are respected members of this
list who believe that the blues began in the 1880s or before and urged
me to reedit my article to say that. I have no interest in
polemicizing against that position or going through various works page
by page.
This is not any condemnation of anyone who wants to debate that here
or elsewhere. It is a question of wht I want to do with my time.
j_ns...@msn.com
j_ns...@msn.com
> of the Blues in what is supposed to be an old time music list.
Old-time music includes "black" folk music of about 1905.
[...] Joseph Scott believes the
> Blues began in the 20th Century, an opinion shared by others including
> people I work with intimately and respect. It is also true that there
> are many people including people who are respected members of this
> list who believe that the blues began in the 1880s or before and urged
> me to reedit my article to say that.
If any respected or non-respected members of this list would like to
provide plausible evidence that blues music existed in the 1800s, I'd
like to read it.
Joseph Scott
tonythomas
That will be interesting. I have no animus against you and I do not
believe said discussion is inappropriate, but when I found myself
pilling up sources to get into this, I realized that I had to be doing
other things to be responsible on work on a project that I have a
deadline on.
I look forward to any discussion on this issue.
Tony