Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
I was having an intense time of it in the old Toyota. But when I got back on the phone with Fahey, he was almost giddy. He’d scored one: blessèd. That’s what her mother told her, “Lord, blessèd daughter, don’t you be so wild.” I cued up to the line. It seemed self-evident now, impossible to miss. I complimented Fahey’s ear. He cough-talked his way through a rant about how “they didn’t care about the words” and “were all illiterate anyway.”
This reflexive swerving between ecstatic appreciation and an urge to minimize the aesthetic significance of the country blues was, I later came to see, a pattern in Fahey’s career—the Blind Joe Death bit had been part of it. It’s possible he feared giving in to the almost demonic force this music has exerted over so many, or worried he’d done so already. I’m fairly certain his irony meter hovered close to zero when he titled his 2000 book of short stories
How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life
. More than that, though, the ability to flick at will into a dismissive mode was a way to maintain a sense of expert status, of standing apart. You’ll find the same tendency in most of the other major blues wonks: when the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people (like the Rolling Stones) caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind everyone it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands. Fahey had reached the point where he could occupy both extremes in the same sentence.
He’d gotten as far as I had with the “boutonnière,” which remained the matter at hand, so we adjourned again. Came back, broke off. This went on for a couple of hours. I couldn’t believe he was being so patient, really. Then at one point, back in the car, after many more rewindings, some fibers at the edge of my innermost ear registered a faint “L” near the beginning of that last word:
boLtered
? A scan through the
OED
led to
bolt
, then to
bolted
, and at last to this 1398 citation from John de Trevisa’s English translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s ca. 1240 Latin encyclopedia,
De proprietatibus rerum
(On the Order of Things): “The floure of the mele, whan it is bultid and departid from the bran.”
Wiley wasn’t saying “flowers”; she was saying “flour.” The rich man’s flour, which she loves you enough to steal for you. If she can’t get it, she’ll get bolted, or very finely sifted, meal.
When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field.
If I don’t bring you flour,
I’ll bring you bolted meal.
Fahey was skeptical. “I never heard of that,” he said. But later, after saying goodbye for what seemed the last time, he called back with a changed mind. He’d rung up people in the interim. (It would be fun to know whom—you’d be tracing a very precious little neural pathway in the fin de siècle American mind.) One of his sources told him it was a Civil War thing: when they ran out of flour, they started using bolted cornmeal. “Hey,” he said, “maybe we’ll put you in the liner notes, if we can get this new thing together.”
The new thing was still in development when he died. On the phone we’d gone on to talk about Revenant, the self-described “raw musics” label he’d cofounded in 1996 with a Texas lawyer named Dean Blackwood. Revenant releases are like Constructivist design projects in their attention to graphic detail, with liner notes that become de facto transcripts of scholarly colloquia. Fahey and Blackwood had thought up a new release, which would be all about prewar “phantoms” like Wiley and Thomas (and feature new, superior transfers of the pair’s six sides). The collection’s only delimiting criteria would be that nothing biographical could be known regarding any of the artists involved, and that every recording must be phenomenal, in a sense almost strict: something that happened once in front of a microphone and can never be imitated, merely reexperienced. They had been dreaming this project for years, refining lists. And I’d contributed a speck of knowledge, a little ant’s mouthful of knowledge.
* * *
Almost six years passed, during which Fahey died in the hospital from complications following multiple bypass surgery. I assumed with other people that he’d taken the phantoms project with him, but in October 2005, with no fanfare and after rumors of Revenant’s having closed shop, it materialized, two discs and a total of fifty songs with the subtitle
Pre-War Revenants
(1897–1939)
.
Anyone with an interest in American culture should find a way to hear this record. It’s probably the most important archival release of its kind since Harry Smith’s seminal
Anthology of American Folk Music
in 1952, and for the same reason: it represents less a scholarly effort to preserve and disseminate obscure recordings, indispensable as those undertakings are, than the charting of a deeply informed aesthetic sensibility, which for all its torment was passionately in communion with these songs and the nuances of their artistry for a lifetime. Listening to this collection, you enter the keeping of a kind of Virgil.
To do it right entailed remastering everything fresh from 78s, which in turn meant coaxing out a transnational rabbit’s warren of the so-called serious collectors, a community widespread but dysfunctionally tight-knit, as by process of consolidation the major collections have come into the keeping of fewer and fewer hands over the years. “The serious blues people are less than ten,” one who contributed to
Pre-War Revenants
told me. “Country, seven. Jazz, maybe fifteen. Most are to one degree or another sociopathic.” Mainly what they do is nurse decades-old grudges. A terrifically complicated bunch of people, but, for reasons perhaps not totally scrutable even to themselves, they have protected this music from time and indifference. The collectors were first of all the finders. Those trips to locate old blues guys started out as trips to canvass records. Gayle Dean Wardlow became a pest-control man at one point, in order to have a legitimate excuse to be walking around in black neighborhoods beating on doors. “Need your house sprayed?” Nah. “Got any weird old records in the attic?”
Something like 60 percent of the sides on
Pre-War Revenants
are “SCOs,” single copy only. These songs are flashbulbs going off in immense darknesses. Blues Birdhead, Bayless Rose, Pigmeat Terry, singers that only the farthest-gone of the old-music freaks have heard. “I got the mean Bo-Lita blues,” sings the unknown Kid Brown (“Bo-Lita” was a poorly understood Mexican game of chance that swept the South like a hayfire about a hundred years ago and wiped out a bunch of shoebox fortunes). There’s a guy named Tommy Settlers, who sings out of his throat in some way. I can’t describe it. He may have been a freak-show act. His “Big Bed Bug” and “Shaking Weed Blues” are all there is of whatever he was, yet he was a master. Mattie May Thomas’s astonishing “Workhouse Blues” was recorded a cappella in the sewing room at a women’s prison:
I wrassle with the hounds, black man,
Hounds of hell all day.
I squeeze them so tight,
Until they fade away.
In what is surely a trustworthy mark of obscurantist credibility, one of the sides on
Pre-War Revenants
was discovered at a flea market in Nashville by the very person who engineered the collection, Chris King, the guy who actually signs for delivery of the reinforced wooden boxes, put together with drywall screws and capable of withstanding an auto collision, in which most 78s arrive for projects like this. The collectors trust King; he’s a major collector himself (owner, as it happens, of the second-best of three known copies of “Last Kind Words Blues”) and an acknowledged savant when it comes to excavating sonic information from the wrecked grooves of prewar disc recordings. I called him, looking for details of how this project had finally come to life. Like Fahey, King graduated college with degrees in religion and philosophy; he knows how to wax expansive about what he does. He described “junking” that rare 78 in Nashville, the Two Poor Boys’ “Old Hen Cackle,” which lay atop a stack of 45s on a table in the open sun. It was brown. In the heat it had warped, he said, “into the shape of a soup bowl.” At the bottom of the bowl he could read
PERFECT
, a short-lived hillbilly label. “Brown Perfects” are precious. He took it home and placed it outside between two panes of clear glass—collectors’ wisdom, handed down—and allowed the heat of the sun and the slight pressure of the glass’s weight slowly to press it flat again, to where he could play it.
Sometimes, King told me, he can tell things about the record’s life from how the sound has worn away. The copy of Geeshie Wiley’s “Eagles on a Half” (there’s only one copy) that he worked with for
Pre-War Revenants
had, he realized, been “dug out” by an improvised stylus of some kind—“they used anything, sewing needles”—in such a manner that you could tell the phonograph it spun on, or else the floor underneath the phonograph, was tilted forward and to the right. Suddenly you have a room, dancing, boards with a lot of give, people laughing. It’s a nasty, sexy song: “I said, squat low, papa, let your mama see / I wanna see that old business keeps on worrying me.” King tilted his machine back and to the left. He encountered undestroyed signal and got a newly vibrant version.
Strangest of the songs is the very oldest, “Poor Mourner” by the duo Cousins & DeMoss, who may or may not have been Sam Cousin and Ed DeMoss, semifamous late-nineteenth-century minstrel singers—if so, then the former is the only artist included on
Pre-War Revenants
of whom an image has survived: a grainy photograph of his strong, square face appeared in the Indianapolis
Freeman
in 1889. These two performed “Poor Mourner” for the Berliner Company in 1897. (Emile Berliner had recently patented disc, as opposed to cylinder, recording; discs were easier to duplicate.)
Dual banjos burst forth with a frenetic rag figure, and it seems you’re on familiar if excitable ground. But somewhere between the third and fourth measure of the first bar, the second banjo pulls up, as if with a halt leg, and begins putting forward a drone on top of the first, which twangs away for a second as if it hadn’t been warned about the immediate mood change. Then the instruments grind down together, the key swerves minor, and without your being able to pinpoint what happened or when, you find yourself in a totally different, darker sphere. The effect is the sonic equivalent of film getting jammed in an old projector, the stuck frame melting, colors bleeding. It all takes place in precisely five seconds. It is unaccountable. Chris King said, “That is not a function of some weird thing I couldn’t fix.” I asked if maybe the old machines ran slightly faster at the start. He reminded me that the song didn’t start with music; it started with a high voice shouting, “As sung by Cousins and DeMoss!”
When this song comes on I invariably flash on my great-grandmother Elizabeth Baynham, born in that same year, 1897. I touched that year. There is no degree of remove between me and it. I barely remember her as a blind, legless figure in a wheelchair and afghan who waited for us in the hallway outside her room. Knowing that this song was part of the fabric of the world she came into lets me know I understand nothing about that period, that very end of the nineteenth century. We live in such constant nearness to the abyss of past time that the moment is endlessly sucked into. The Russian writer Viktor Shklovsky said that art exists “to make the stone stony.” These recordings let us feel something of the timeyness of time, its sudden irrevocability.
* * *
If
Pre-War Revenants
marks the apotheosis of the baroque aestheticization of early black Southern music by white men—which has brought you this essay, among others—it’s only proper that the collection appear now, as we’re finally witnessing the dawn of a new transparency in blues writing: the scholarship of blues scholarship. Two good books in this vein have been published in the past few years: Elijah Wald’s
Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues
and Marybeth Hamilton’s
In Search of the Blues
(subtitled, in the American edition,
The White Invention of Black Music
). Both are engaging and do solid, necessary work. I approached them with something like defensiveness, expecting to be implicated, inevitably, in the creepy racial unease that shadows the country-blues discourse, which has always involved, with a couple of notable examples (Zora Neale Hurston and Dorothy Scarborough), white guys talking to one another about black music, and about a particular period in the music, one that living black American artists mostly consider quaint.
Both new books replace hoary myths with researched histories of far greater interest. Both seek to deconstruct the legend of the “Delta bluesman,” with his crossroads and hellhounds and death by poison, his primal expression of existential isolation. Both end up complicating that picture instead. Wald takes away the legend of Robert Johnson’s “inexplicable” technical ability, for which, rivals whispered, he’d sold his soul, and gives us instead Johnson the self-aware technician and student of other people’s records, including those of Skip James, from whom Johnson lifted the beautiful phrase “dry long so,” meaning indifferently, or for the hell of it. I don’t think the reviews of
Escaping the Delta
that appeared at the time of its publication went far enough in describing its genius. Partly this owed to the book’s marketing, which involved a vague suggestion that Robert Johnson would therein be exposed or even debunked as a mere pop imitator. What
Escaping the Delta
really does is introduce us to a higher level of appreciation for Johnson’s methods.