Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
Wald places you in Johnson’s head for the San Antonio and Dallas sessions, and takes you song by song, in an extremely rigorous way (he’s another lifelong student of the music); he shows you what Johnson decided to play and when and puts forward convincing reasons why, explaining what sources Johnson was combining, how he changed them, honored them. Wald’s especially good at comparing the alternate takes, letting us hear the minutiae of Johnson’s rhythmic and chordal modifications. These become windows onto the intensity of his craftsmanship. By picking up certain threads, you can track his moves. Blind Lemon Jefferson sang, “The train left the depot with the red and blue light behind / Well, the blue light’s the blues, the red light’s the worried mind.” That was a good verse. That was snappy. Eddie and Oscar, a polished, almost formal country-blues duo out of North Carolina (Eddie was white, Oscar was black), had already copied that. Johnson probably heard it from them. But when he went,
When the train, it left the station, with two lights on behind,
Ah, when the train left the station, with two lights on behind,
Well, the blue light was my blues, and the red light was my mind.
All my love’s in vain
—that was something else. Johnson knew it was something else. He knew how good it was, knew the difference between saying “the red light’s the worried mind” and saying “the red light was my mind.” After all, he’s the same person who wrote the couplet “From Memphis to Norfolk is a thirty-six hours’ ride. / A man is like a prisoner, and he’s never satisfied.” Part of hearing the blues is taking away the sociological filter, which with good but misguided intentions we allow to develop before our senses, and hearing the self-consciousness of the early bluesmen, hearing that, as Samuel Charters put it in the liner notes to Henry Townsend’s
Tired of Bein’ Mistreated
(1962), the “blues singer feels himself as a creative individual within the limits of the blues style.”
It’s a remarkable thought-movie Wald creates for a hundred pages or so. If the jacket copy primed me to come away disabused of my awe for Johnson’s musicianship, instead it was doubled. Everything Johnson touched he made subtler, sadder. He took the mostly comical ravings of Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law, and smoothed them into Robert Johnson’s devil, the melancholy devil who walks like a man and looks like a man and is much less easily laughed off.
* * *
Whereas Wald wants to educate our response to the country blues away from nostalgia and toward a more mature valuation, by persuading us that all folk was once somebody’s pop, Marybeth Hamilton, an American cultural historian who teaches in England, looks back instead at that old sense of aura, asking where it came from, what it was made of.
In Search of the Blues
traces white fascination with the country blues to its roots in the mind of one James McKune, a weedy, closeted, alcoholic
New York Times
rewrite man turned drifter who kept his crates of 78s under his bunk at a YMCA in Brooklyn. Until now his tale has been known only to readers of the
78 Quarterly
. McKune came from North Carolina and in 1971 died squalidly after a sexual transaction gone wrong. In the early forties he was among the first to break from the world of hard-core New Orleans jazz collecting, which had developed in Ivy League dorms and was byzantine with specialisms by the late thirties. Hamilton proves deft on the progression of McKune’s taste. He started out an obsessive for commercial ethnographic material, such as regional dance songs from Spain on the Columbia label. He was interested, in other words, in culturally precious things that had been accidentally snagged and preserved by stray cogs of the anarchic capitalist threshing machine.
One of McKune’s few fellow travelers in this backwater of the collecting world was Harry Smith, who would go on in 1952 to create the
Anthology of American Folk Music
. Smith urged McKune to send to the Library of Congress for a curious index, compiled by Alan Lomax during his field recording days and held in manuscript there, of “American Folk Songs on Commercial Records.” That list is the real DNA of the country blues as a genre. Hamilton writes:
What [McKune] read there confounded everything he had ever assumed about race records. The dizzying variety of musical styles, the sheer oddity of the song titles … Most intriguing of all were Lomax’s mentions of blues recordings [that] promised something undiluted and raw.
A strangeness to notice here is that McKune’s discovery happened in 1942. Robert Johnson, described on Lomax’s list with the notes “individual composition v[ery] fine, touches of voodoo,” had been alive and recording just four years earlier. Already he existed for McKune as he exists for us, when we approach him through the myth, at an archaeological remove. The country blues has its decade or so and then is obliterated with a startling suddenness, by the Depression, World War II, and the energy of the Chicago sound. In 1938, John Hammond, an early promoter of American folk music (later to become Bob Dylan’s first producer), organized a concert called “From Spirituals to Swing.” He intended it as a statement on the aesthetic legitimacy of African American music. Hammond sent off a cablegram inviting Robert Johnson to come north and be in the show, to perform at Carnegie Hall. It’s a curious hinge moment in blues historiography—the second act, which would lead north and then to the festivals, reaches out to the first, which is disappearing with the onset of war, and tries to recognize a continuity. But Johnson had just died, at twenty-seven, either of poison or of congenital syphilis. He was employed to pick cotton at the time. At the concert they wheeled a phonograph onto the stage and played two of his records in the stillness. (Even the mediation we think of as being so postmodern, the ghostliness surrounding the recordings themselves as material objects, is present at the very beginning.)
McKune undertook to search out these records, to know them. Hamilton says he once rode a bus 250 miles from Brooklyn to the D.C. suburbs to hear Dick Spottswood’s recently turned-up copy of Skip James’s “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues.” He walked in, sat down, heard the record, and walked back out. Those who knew him recall his listening “silently. In awe.” James sings: “People are drifting from door to door, / Can’t find no heaven, I don’t care where they go.”
Spottswood was one in a circle of adepts who gathered around McKune in the late forties and fifties. They went on to become the Blues Mafia, the serious collectors. They didn’t really
gather
around McKune—he lived at the YMCA—but he visited their gatherings and became a
chef du salon,
according to Spottswood (this is the same Dick Spottswood who a few years later would play Blind Willie Johnson’s “Praise God I’m Satisfied” over the telephone for a young John Fahey, who’d called up demanding it, causing Fahey to weep and nearly vomit).
McKune was never an object freak: like Fahey—who went looking for Skip James largely in hopes of learning the older man’s notoriously difficult minor-key tunings—he wanted the songs, the sounds, though he searched as relentlessly as any antiquarian. His early “want lists” in
Record Changer
magazine are themselves now collectibles. Hamilton includes the lovely detail that occasionally in his lists, McKune would issue a call for hypothetical records. He might advertise for “Blues on black Vocalion, any with San Antonio master numbers”; that is, records made in the same studio and during the same week as Robert Johnson’s most famous sessions (Goethe looking for the Urpflanze!).
What McKune heard when the records arrived transfixed him. Hamilton shows her seriousness and should earn the respect of all prewar wonks by not reflexively dismissing this something as an imagined “primitive” or “rough” quality. Indeed, those were the words that would have been used at the time by jazz collectors who for the most part dismissed this music as throwaway hick stuff, novelty songs created by people too poor to get to New Orleans. We can make conjectures, as Hamilton does intelligently, about the interior mansions of McKune’s obscurantism—about, say, whether his estimation of Charley Patton as the greatest of the country-blues singers was influenced by the fact that Patton’s records are the muddiest and least intelligible, allowing the most to be read into them—but the rigorous attention underlying all of McKune’s listening stands as his defense.
Rarely did McKune attempt published aesthetic statements of any kind, but when he did he repeated one word. Writing to
VJM Palaver
in 1960 about Samuel Charters’s then recent book,
The Country Blues
, McKune bemoaned the fact that Charters had concentrated on those singers who’d sold the most records, such as Blind Lemon Jefferson and Brownie McGhee, whose respective oeuvres McKune found mediocre and slick. McKune’s letter sputters in the arcane fury of its narcissism of minor difference, but the word he keeps getting stuck on is
great
. As in “Jefferson made only one record I can call
great
” (italics McKune’s). Or, “I know twenty men who collect the Negro country blues. All of us have been interested in knowing who the
great
[his again], country blues singers are not in who sold best.” And later, “I write for those who want a different basis for evaluating blues singers. This basis is their relative greatness.”
When I saw that letter in Hamilton’s book, it brought up a memory of being on the phone with Dean Blackwood, John Fahey’s partner at Revenant Records, and hearing him talk about his early discussions with Fahey over the phantoms project. “John and I always felt like there wasn’t enough of a case being made for these folks’ greatness,” he’d said. “You’ve got to have their stuff together to understand the potency of the work.”
* * *
Before dismissing as naive the overheated boosterism of these pronouncements, we might ask whether there’s not a simple technical explanation for the feeling being expressed or left unexpressed in them. I believe that there is and it’s this: the narrative of the blues got hijacked by rock ’n’ roll, which rode a wave of youth consumers to global domination. Back behind the split, there was something else: a deeper, riper source. Many people who have written about this body of music have noticed it. Robert Palmer called it Deep Blues. We’re talking about strains within strains, sure, but listen to something like Ishman Bracey’s “Woman Woman Blues,” his tattered yet somehow impeccable falsetto when he sings, “She got coal black curly hair.” Songs like that were not made for dancing. Not even for singing along. They were made for listening, for grown-ups. They were chamber compositions. Listen to Blind Willie Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground.” It has no words. It’s hummed by a blind preacher incapable of playing an impure note on the guitar. We have again to go against our training and suspend anthropological thinking here; it doesn’t serve at these strata. The noble ambition not to be the kind of people who unwittingly fetishize and exoticize black or poor white folk poverty has allowed us to remain the type who don’t stop to ask if the serious treatment of certain folk forms as essentially high- or higher-art forms might have originated with the folk themselves.
If there’s a shared weakness to these two books, it’s that they’re insufficiently on the catch for this pitfall. “No one in the blues world was calling this music art,” says Wald. Is that true? Carl Sandburg was including blues lyrics in his anthologies as early as 1927. More to the point, Ethel Waters, one of the citified “blues queens” whose lyrics and melodies had a funny way of showing up in those raw and undiluted country-blues recordings, had already been writing self-consciously modernist blues for a few years by then (for instance, “I can’t sleep for dreaming…,” a line of hers I first heard in Crying Sam Collins and took for one of his beautiful manglings, then was humbled to learn had always been intentionally poetic). Marybeth Hamilton, in her not unsympathetic autopsy of James McKune’s mania, comes dangerously close to suggesting that McKune was the first person to hear Skip James as we hear him, as a profound artist. But Skip James was the first person to hear Skip James that way. The anonymous African American people described in Wald’s book, sitting on the floor of a house in Tennessee and weeping while Robert Johnson sang “Come On in My Kitchen,” they were the first people to hear the country blues that way. White men “rediscovered” the blues, fine. We’re talking about the complications of that at last. Let’s not go crazy and say they invented it, or accidentally credit their “visions” with too much power. That would be counterproductive, a final insult even.
* * *
There’s a moment on those discs of Gayle Dean Wardlow’s interviews, the ones in Revenant’s Patton set. Wardlow is talking with Booker Miller, a minor prewar player who knew Charley Patton. And you can hear Wardlow, who was a deceptively good interviewer—he just kept coming at a person in this
Rain Man
style that would leave anyone feeling the less awkward one in the room—and you can tell he’s trying to get Miller to describe the
ritual
of his apprenticeship to the elder Patton. “Did you meet him at a juke joint,” asked Wardlow, “or on the street?” How did you find each other? It’s precisely the sort of question one would ask.
“I admired his records,” answered Booker Miller.
THE LAST WAILER