Table Of ContentMusic in American Life
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RED RIVER BLOES
RED RIVER BLOES
The Blues Tradition
in the Southeast
BROCE BASTIN
M
MACMILLAN
PRESS
Music Division
© The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois, 1986
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1986
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy, or transmission
of this publication may be made without written permission.
No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied,
or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance
with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended).
Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to
this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and
civil claims for damages.
First published 1986
Published by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 2XS
and London
Companies and representatives
throughout the world.
ISBN 978-1-349-09345-8 ISBN 978-1-349-09343-4 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-09343-4
Contents
Preface ix
1 . The Background of the Blues 3
2. The Emergence of the Blues 11
3. The Geographical Base 27
4. Noncommercial Recordings: The 1920s and 1930s 52
5. Noncommercial Recordings: The 1940s 72
6. Atlanta Strut: The Pianists 87
7. Goin' to Town 96
8. Down in Atlanta, G. A. 125
9. Goin' Down in Georgia: Georgia Blues Today 150
10. Greenville Sheik 166
11. On Up the Road 180
12. Bull City Blues: Durham, North Carolina 203
13. Blind Boy Fuller 214
14. Blind Gary Davis in North Carolina 241
15. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry 254
16. Other Blues in North Carolina 272
17. Goin' to Richmond: Virginia and the Northern Border Regions 294
18. Goin' Up the Country: The Migration North 315
19. Tricks Ain't Watkin' No More 345
General Index 349
Tune Index 373
Preface
In a sense this book had its origins one hot August afternoon in 1969
in Atlanta when Pete Lowry and I were interviewing Buddy Moss.
Moss's chance remark about two North Carolina blues men friends led
us to take a day off from junking for old records on our way back to
New Jersey and took us to a number of people involved with blues
in and around Durham, North Carolina. A series of articles in the
pioneer English blues magazine Blues Unlimited led to a request from
Paul Oliver in 1970 to write a short book in his Studio Vista Blues
Paperback series. In 1972 I returned to Chapel Hill, North Carolina,
to continue my fieldwork and to study the origins of blues in the
southeastern states. This book is the outgrowth of all that plus subse
quent work to which the unstinted assistance of a handful of selfless
researchers has been added.
Pete Lowry and I have spent countless days following leads, and he
has recorded more examples of the blues tradition in the Southeast
than everyone else combined. My section on Virginia could never have
been written without the superb fieldwork undertaken by Kip LomelI.
The survey on postwar blues in Georgia would have been patchy at
best without the generous assistance of George Mitchell, while much
of the detailed study of blues in Durham and elsewhere in North
Carolina, especially since World War II, was gladly provided by Glenn
Hinson. Karl Gert zur Heide and John Cowley constantly provided
obscure but highly pertinent references in print. Jeffrey P. Green has
kindly produced detailed indexes to facilitate use as a reference text.
This survey is of the music of the people of the region, and revealing
comments within the text were provided by some of the scores of
x Red River Blues
people who were good enough to be interviewed and recorded about
the place of this music in their lives.
This is a history rather than an ethnomusicological survey. A number
of books already exist with detailed annotation and musical analysis
of specific recorded pieces by bluesmen from the Southeast, and they
are available for supplementary information.! However, the music is
aural and not trans literal. It was never written down and it was never
intended to be. The really relevant way to appreciate the music is to
hear it-and that usually means on record. No written annotation will
fully replace the aural reception necessary to comprehend the music.
Brett Sutton had this to say about black gospel music, but it is so with
blues too:
Western music could not have achieved its current level of sophistica
tion without written music as one of its fundamental tools. Yet even in
this highly developed literate tradition, certain aspects of musical per
formance, such as expressive variation in tempo and dynamics, tone qual
ity and mode of attack, cannot be sufficiently represented on the printed
page, and must be provided by the creative skills ofthe performer .... In
folk music, where the absence of a written standard of reference and the
natural fluctuation of the oral tradition place much artistic control in the
hands of the performer, the personal component of the performance is
perhaps even larger."2
We write about black folk music in the manner of western civiliza
tion's insistence that all matters of significance be documented visu
ally. Few of the people interviewed saw their music as anything other
than transitory; none saw it as art for art's sake. Its very lack of self
conscious expression, fundamental to its integrity, precludes its per
manence in any form other than that in which it was created. The pres
ent study attempts to collate known elements in a format which few
of the people who created the music would have been able to appre
ciate: it is an attempt to offer a literate study of a basically nonliterate
form.
Blues in its folk form was the expression of a nearly destitute, essen
tially illiterate group of people. This study was not written along class
lines, but it should be pointed out that black Americans did not think
as a whole, any more than did white Americans. There were class divi
sions with different groups seeking different goals, some consciously,
some unconsciously. No single body spoke for all blacks. John Ham
mond, well aware of a broad range of black music, has stated that' 'jazz
and, particularly, primitive black music were too unfamiliar to the
middle-class leaders of the NAACP to be anything they could take pride
in. "3
Preface xi
In any attempt to analyze in depth the blues tradition of the
Southeast, one is always faced with the imbalance of documentation.
Remarkably little contemporary written documentation has been
uncovered. Where it exists, it has been incorporated in great detail,
in an effort to shed as much light as possible upon the artists concerned.
Thus the use of the welfare files of Blind Boy Fuller and Gary Davis
enables a detailed documentation of their lives totally out of propor
tion to information available on many other bluesmen but also pro
vides rare insight into the lives of professional musicians-or probably
as near professional in any sense as the East Coast provided. Only in
recent years have anything like systematic studies taken place, and
often they were localized or centered on a given group of musicians,
so certain areas or aspects have been studied in detail, but large sec
tions of the region have not been researched at all. My personal
fieldwork was confined to summer vacations from a teaching post in
England; therefore I was unable to visit many areas. Despite these
limitations, disparate sources have provided sufficient information for
us to draw a number of valid generalizations about a regional blues
tradition.
While writing this book I became aware of points made in unrelated
texts which highlighted issues close to my research. One author found
that "no-one remembers accurately what happened thirty or more
years ago. Therefore I am not indebted for a single fact to anyone other
than the authors of contemporary official letters, minutes, memoranda
and records of meetings."4 If I were to work from such information,
there would be no book. Georgia bluesman Roy Dunn, asked how he
could remember so much local detail, replied, "It's OK for you, you
can write it down. I can't write so I have to remember." The wealth
of fascinating detail which emerged from the welfare files of Blind Boy
Fuller and Gary Davis brought to mind the truism of Sir Lewis Namier
that "a great many profound secrets are somewhere in print, but are
most easily detected when one knows what to seek."5 Earlier use of
death records had opened up an avenue of research which few had
appreciated.
Nothing can replace sheer persistence based on thorough evaluation
in the field. A story from World War II confU'11lS the underlying premise
of the need for practical experience:
A British mathematical physicist and an American theoretical physicist,
Dr. Charles Kittel ... had been set together ... to work on the problem
of deducing the characteristics of German magnetic mines laid at
sea .... The data from which characteristics were to be deduced were
