{"id":97,"date":"2014-04-18T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T17:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/?p=97"},"modified":"2023-04-18T18:07:57","modified_gmt":"2023-04-18T18:07:57","slug":"jackson-blues","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/?p=97","title":{"rendered":"Jackson Blues"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

[Follow along with this Spotify playlist<\/a>]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

In them hills out there, them old colored women\u2019d slip off\u2026You don\u2019t catch nothin\u2019 but them old half-white boys and half-white girls out there\u2026There\u2019s more of that in the hills than in the Delta.<\/em>
(David \u2018Honeyboy\u2019 Edwards)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

The mythology of the \u2018Delta blues\u2019 requires that it sprang up more-or-less fully formed, a spontaneous, or at least prohibitively mysterious, distillation of blackness in that uttermost land of fertile black soil and desperate black folk. Among the less obvious problems with this fantasy is that the Delta itself was always far less a place of origin than a place of passage, a crossroads. The artists who assembled the blues brought its pieces there from elsewhere, as they chased opportunity onto the newly cleared alluvium during the first couple of decades of the twentieth century. Because that modest journey \u2013 the first leg, for many black Mississippians, of the Great Migration that would soon transplant millions of their kind much further up the Illinois Central \u2013 happened to coincide with the incursion of recorded music into the rural South, its story reads as a genesis. The Delta blues is the \u2018deep\u2019 blues only by virtue of historiographical convenience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behind it lurks, among other things, the older traditions of \u2018them hills\u2019 of central Mississippi \u2013 traditions that spawned Charley Patton (from Bolton), Tommy Johnson (Crystal Springs), and Robert Johnson (Hazlehurst), and that carried on as those anointed ones traveled north to do their residencies at places like Dockery Farms. If there has been a certain reluctance to do so, the problem is no doubt that for mythological purposes, these traditions are considerably more complicated and more awkward. Up in the Delta the archetypal figure is that of Johnson, obdurate loner genius wailing from a heart of darkness; down here, center stage goes to figures like the Chatmons, a sprawling Hinds County family of white, black, and Indian heritage who played opportunistic blends of blues, country, ragtime, and Tin Pan Alley for audiences of all colors. (The Chatmons both cashed in on their betweenness \u2013 naming their hugely popular string band the \u201cMississippi Sheiks\u201d in the wake of Rudolph Valentino\u2019s ad-hoc Arab \u2013 and problematized it, in songs like the unissued \u2018The Yellow Coon Has No Race.\u2019) Celebrating the former, in his liberally reconstructed post-revival guise, has always offered to certain white listeners a tantalizing dose of racial absolution; with the Sheiks we are on stickier ground.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But to Johnson or the Chatmons themselves, that supposed divide would likely have seemed nonsensical. The Sheiks were arguably the biggest act in the Delta as Johnson was coming into his own, and he would later brilliantly refashion their ubiquitous hit \u2018Sittin\u2019 on Top of the World\u2019 into his own devastating blues \u2018Come On in My Kitchen.\u2019 More importantly, to make too much of the divide is to underappreciate the key figure in bridging it. Charley (or was it \u2018Charlie\u2019?) Patton \u2013 born in 1891 (or was it 1887?), and rumored to be the Chatmons\u2019 illegitimate half-brother \u2013 was a light-skinned, wavy-haired enigma, a masterful musician who played with a calculated unkemptness, a powerful vocalist who sang with near-incomprehensibility, and an adept professional who presented himself so erratically that even his closest associates would never quite agree on just who or what he had been. Billed by Paramount as the \u2018Masked Marvel,\u2019 Patton transcended fault lines like a proto-Michael Jackson; yet if the latter was the King of Pop, the former was the ultimate pop trickster, forever resisting his assimilation into the cultural machine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though they traveled the same roads, the generation gap between Patton and Robert Johnson, born some twenty years later, was tellingly vast. Patton was first and foremost a live performer, his multifarious, unstable repertoire reflecting a career spent shapeshifting for a deceptively complex Mississippi audience. Johnson, who came of age just as \u2018race records\u2019 were rapidly catching on around the nation, was among the first to very consciously craft a persona as a recording artist. And while both men left behind considerable personal mystery, Johnson\u2019s music ultimately lent itself far better to a simplified white construction of \u2018the blues,\u2019 and it was Johnson, rather than his protean forerunner, who was explicitly enthroned as King.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though he credited the Devil, Robert Johnson apparently got his chops from an obscure mentor named Ike Zimmerman who lived south of Hazlehurst, one of countless local \u2018songsters\u2019 populating the towns of central Mississippi. (Zimmerman\u2019s surviving family remembers a couple of RJ\u2019s songs, including \u2018Walkin\u2019 Blues,\u2019 as first belonging to Ike.) Yet he was in the end a product of the Delta, or rather of its mythological image. Patton, on the other hand, though he honed his skills and made his name in Drew and Lula and Mound Bayou, forever embodied the more fluid milieu of \u2018them hills\u2019 in which he was immersed as a child \u2013 a tradition that left him with roguish hoedown tunes like \u2018Hang It on the Wall\u2019 and pre-blues slide rags like \u2018Spoonful,\u2019 in addition to the proto-blues that he would later refurbish into masterpieces like \u2018Down the Dirt Road.\u2019 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patton\u2019s repertoire hints at the astonishing variety of that stratum of black popular music that spanned the emergence of the blues, and it was arguably in the Jackson area, rather than the Delta, that that variety was best preserved into the recording era. The window of opportunity to capture it on wax was vanishingly short, as the Depression and the jukebox would conspire to put the average Mississippi performer out of work by the late \u201830s. That recording here began as early as it did \u2013 1927 \u2013 owes almost entirely to the vision of the extraordinary Henry Speir. An uncommonly intrepid white entrepreneur from rural Newton County, Speir opened a music store on Farish Street \u2013 the main artery of black Jackson \u2013 and soon realized from the popularity of \u2018race records\u2019 like Blind Lemon Jefferson\u2019s that a greater opportunity was afoot. Installing a recording machine upstairs to cut acetate demos (and charging the public $5 a pop to use what was an extreme novelty in the 1920s South), he set out to explore the area in search of talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For a prospector of sound like Speir, the street corners, honky tonks, and backwoods jukes of central Mississippi represented a gold mine: he could stroll down two blocks to Mill Street and discover Ishmon Bracey fooling around on a guitar (Bracey: \u2018I thought he was the law\u2019), drag him back to the store and cut a demo, ship it off to Victor Records, put Bracey on a train to Memphis for a hastily arranged session, and end up with a modest hit single like \u2018Saturday Blues\u2019 \u2013 all within the span of six months. A slightly more ambitious trip \u2013 just across the Pearl River two miles distant \u2013 would have landed Speir in the outlaw utopia known as the \u2018Gold Coast,\u2019 where some of the South\u2019s finest performers stopped in to play amidst knife fights, blackjack tables, and a sea of bootleg whiskey. Here and elsewhere, he quickly built a word-of-mouth network and soon enough crossed paths with Tommy Johnson, Charley Patton, Skip James, the Mississippi Sheiks, Geeshie Wiley, and a host of other local artists who would become, to varying degrees and over varying timeframes, legends of that great ecosystem of music known for convenience as the \u2018country blues.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though these figures in fact covered a tremendous range of styles and social positions, at one time or another they shared Jackson as a center of cultural gravity: a place ideally situated for cross-pollination, with jazz drifting upriver from New Orleans, country filtering in over the Piney Woods railroads, and blues innovations wafting down from the Delta, all acting upon a vibrant culture of idiosyncratic black artistry that dated back for generations. There are any number of anecdotes that illustrate the resultant frenzy of exchange. Among them we have Jimmie Rodgers \u2013 the brakeman from Meridian who borrowed from blues to found country \u2013 buttonholing Bracey and Tommy Johnson outside the King Edward Hotel in downtown Jackson, expressing his admiration, and inviting them straightaway to the rooftop to play for his select white audience. The latter may not even have been especially startled. Rodgers\u2019 yodel, itself a hybrid of black and white elements, had readily found its way back into black music through the cross-cultural popularity of his late-twenties records. It can be heard in several guises on this compilation, as just one among many drifting scraps that attest to a culture of collective authorship amidst a riot of individual creativity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To say that Mississippi had a rich creative culture is a banality, but one with a depth that may be hard for us now to fully appreciate. Could a Skip James exist today? James, who spent much of his life in minuscule Bentonia, fashioned himself into a sort of dark prophet, a part-time pimp and bootlegger and a full-time twisted, misanthropic genius. He spoke with a bizarrely refined vocabulary, wrote in an elaborate reversed script to confuse his \u2018enemies,\u2019 and may or may not have murdered a man in a lumber camp; he also left behind a body of recorded work that stands among the most hauntingly original of all American creations. Skip James\u2019 music has the wildness of a great mind working in a depth of isolation that perhaps no longer exists. When Speir set up shop in the mid-\u201820s, \u2018schools\u2019 or \u2018genres\u2019 of black music were still so diverse and dynamic as to render any labels virtually meaningless (and to forever frustrate searchers for the \u2018origins\u2019 of the blues); by the time he hung up his acetates in the late \u201830s, individual artistry was entering a dark age, and most everyone was listening to the latest record \u2013 swing, jump, boogie-woogie \u2013 out of Chicago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In evolutionary terms, these discs span from the archaic grotesquerie of minstrel songs like \u2018Mysterious Coon\u2019 to the citified proto-rock of the Harlem Hamfats. That the same people were involved in both is a striking tribute to the adaptive forces at work. Whether or not \u2018Alec Johnson\u2019 was in fact an older Chatmon brother, as has been surmised, he certainly used Chatmons as accompanists \u2013 as well as the ubiquitous McCoy brothers, \u2018Kansas Joe\u2019 and \u2018Papa Charlie,\u2019 Hinds County neighbors of the Chatmons who went on to find success in Chicago as the Hamfats. The Chatmon-McCoy circle shows up on record in a bewildering array of guises and names, including the Mississippi Blacksnakes and the Mississippi Mud Steppers in addition to those already mentioned. Joe McCoy alone recorded as the Mississippi Mudder, Mud Dauber Joe, Hallelujah Joe, Hamfoot Ham, and the Hillbilly Plowboy, while Armenter Chatmon established one of the most successful solo careers of the \u201830s under the pseudonym \u2018Bo Carter.\u2019 Though they are rarely given much retrospective attention, the popularity, versatility, and influence of these two families was virtually unmatched for a decade-plus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The rest of the compilation touches on ragtime, jazz, gospel, and hokum, while demonstrating the considerable structural and thematic variety within even the strictest construal of \u2018the blues.\u2019 If any one song epitomizes the futility of classification it is surely the transcendent \u2018Last Kind Words Blues\u2019 of Geeshie Wiley, the inscrutable provenance of both the work and its performer only accentuating its singularity.1<\/sup> Included as well are a few later recordings by relatively isolated artists: Scott Dunbar of Lake Mary (south of Natchez), Mott Willis of Crystal Springs, and Jack Owens of Bentonia. These men belonged to the same generation as those who made it onto wax in the Golden Age, and their highly idiomatic blues underscores the variety from which that era drew, while helping to undermine the contrived folk\/pop distinction that has so often muddled blues scholarship.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This was an age more of endings than of beginnings, and few of them were happy ones. Patton\u2019s, in 1934, and Johnson\u2019s, in 1938, were perhaps comparatively merciful. Bo Carter vanished by the end of the decade and was found by chance years later, blind and destitute, in a shared shotgun house behind Beale Street in Memphis. Charlie McCoy slowly lost his mind to neurosyphilis and died in an institution in Chicago, unable (like Scott Joplin before him) to play or even fathom his own music. As for Jackson itself, the city closed a chapter in the summer of 1939 when 150 National Guardsmen were trucked in with machine guns, bayonets, and axes to all but demolish the thirty-odd nightclubs lining the Gold Coast. They would eventually be back, but the music that would return with them would no longer be Jackson\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Tommy Johnson and Ishmon Bracey ran into each other on Jackson\u2019s South Street circa 1956, their days spent playing and recording together must have seemed like an antediluvian past. Bracey had long since hung up his guitar in favor of preaching and painting houses; when at last tracked down for an interview, he wouldn\u2019t so much as put on a blues record until his wife was safely out of earshot. As for Johnson, decades of whiskey had slowly consumed his mind and body, to say nothing of the leg-crippling Jamaica ginger (of Bracey\u2019s \u2018Jake Liquor Blues\u2019) and the poisonous Sterno cooking fuel (of his own \u2018Canned Heat Blues\u2019) that he and others had so often turned to in desperation. On South Street, an abject Johnson shared his longing to get right, to escape the demons, but both knew it\u2019d never happen; Bracey promised helplessly to pray for his friend, and they parted in tears. The next news of Johnson was that he was dead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Skip James, meanwhile, would survive long enough to be hunted down by sixties revivalists in a Tunica hospital and awkwardly feted in coffeehouses across the Northeast. Somewhat miraculously, Sam Chatmon would hang on into the 1980s, the light-skinned son of an ex-slave fiddler and last face of a complicated tradition, still compelling guests onto his Hollandale front porch to hear \u2018the old-fashioned music that first was handed down\u2019 (along with a few more provocative numbers like \u2018I Have to Paint My Face\u2019). But the subtleties of Chatmon\u2019s role had long since been flattened by a corporatized culture industry that needed its recruits to play definable parts. It was a pattern both new and old: his father the fiddler, who had once masterfully navigated the interstices of the plantation economy, had failed to satisfy the image of the moaning negro \u2018more plaintive than the lay of the whippoorwill or the call of the sorrowing dove\u20192<\/sup>; likewise, Sam and other central Mississippi bluesmen proved too slippery to conform to the modern archetypes, and thus found themselves stuck in the footnotes as the blues narrative emerged.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In many ways the Golden Age had been given its aptest conclusion of all back in December 1938, when John Hammond lugged a phonograph onstage at Carnegie Hall to play a couple of Robert Johnson records for a rapt audience. He\u2019d had Johnson himself lined up as the \u2018big surprise\u2019 to close out his big retrospective of black music in America, but the bluesman had of course run afoul of some poisoned whiskey in the meantime. Embellishing the story was already irresistible: in Hammond\u2019s version, Johnson had perished \u2018at the precise moment\u2019 he had learned from scouts of the New York booking. His facts already giving way to legend, Johnson was collapsed into an iota, the black speaker-hole that would forever emit his abstracted sound and absorb the projected desires of his listeners. A deal with the devil, indeed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

We are told of a research student who took a seat on a fence to listen to the singing of a negro work gang on a railroad. When he finally detected their words he found they were singing lines that sounded like, \u2018See dat white man\u2026sittin\u2019 on a fence\u2026sittin\u2019 on a fence\u2026wastin\u2019 his time\u2026wastin\u2019 his time.\u2019 <\/em>
(Carl Sandburg, The American Songbag<\/em>)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

1<\/sup> See John Jeremiah Sullivan\u2019s riveting essay \u2018The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie\u2019 for more on Wiley.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

2<\/sup> From a description of spiritual tunes in John Wesley Work\u2019s Folk Song of the American Negro<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Liner notes for my compilation of music from the golden age of blues in central Mississippi (1928-1937). Continue reading Jackson Blues<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":98,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-97","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=97"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97\/revisions\/101"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/98"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=97"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=97"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/matthewclarksmith.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=97"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}