Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Read online

  The man plays and Handy listens, growing increasingly interested in the informal performance. Handy, of course, has heard many people, black and white, play guitar before, but not the way this man plays it. He doesn’t finger the strings normally; instead, he presses a pocketknife against them, sliding it up and down to create a slinky sound, something akin to what Hawaiian guitarists get when they press a steel bar to the strings.

  But it isn’t just the unusual manner in which the poor black man plays his guitar. What he sings, and how he sings it, is equally compelling. “Goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog”: Most people around these parts know that “the Southern” is a railroad reference, and that “the Dog” is short for “Yellow Dog,” local slang for the Yazoo Delta line. The man is singing about where the Southern line and the Yazoo Delta line intersect, at a place called Moorhead. But something about the way the man practically moans it for added emphasis, repeating it three times, strikes Handy hard; the combination of sliding guitar, wailing voice, repeated lyrics, and the man’s emotional honesty is incredibly powerful. Handy doesn’t realize it yet, but this moment is an important one in his life, and an important one in the history of American music as well. The description of this incident, written about by Handy thirty-eight years later in his autobiography, is one of the earliest detailed descriptions of the blues ever written by a black man.

  Handy called his book Father of the Blues. It’s a good title for a book—but not, strictly speaking, an accurate one. What Handy did on that railroad platform in Mississippi a century ago was witness the blues, not give birth to it. But there’s no disputing that he was forever after a changed man. “The effect was unforgettable,” he wrote. Even so, he found it hard to bring the blues into his own musical vocabulary. Wrote Handy: “As a director of many respectable, conventional bands, it was not easy for me to concede that a simple slow-drag-and-repeat could be rhythm itself. Neither was I ready to believe that this was just what the public wanted.”

  But later, during a Cleveland, Mississippi, performance, Handy’s band was outshone—and outpaid—by a local trio playing blues similar to what he heard in Tutwiler. Shortly thereafter, Handy became a believer. “Those country black boys at Cleveland had taught me something… My idea of what constitutes music was changed by the sight of that silver money cascading around the splay feet of a Mississippi string band,” wrote Handy.

  In 1909 Handy penned a political campaign song, “Mr. Crump,” for the Memphis mayor. He later changed the title to “The Memphis Blues” and published it in 1912. The song was a hit. Entrepreneurially savvy, Handy delved deeper into the music, following it with “The St. Louis Blues,” “Joe Turner Blues,” “The Hesitating Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Beale Street,” and other blues and blues-based compositions. Their commercial success made Handy well-off but, more importantly, solidified the idea that the blues could exist in mainstream music settings, beyond black folk culture. The blues had arrived, thanks to W.C. Handy. American music would never be the same.

  No one really knows for certain when or where the blues was born. But by the time of Handy’s initial success with the music in 1912, it’s safe to say it had been a viable black folk-music form in the South for at least two decades. With a couple exceptions, ethnomusicologists didn’t become interested in the blues until later, thus missing prime opportunities to document the origins of the music and to record its pioneers. Still, there are enough clues to indicate that the blues most likely came out of the Mississippi Delta in the late nineteenth century.

  Like all music forms—folk, pop, or classical—the blues evolved, rather than being born suddenly. So to understand the origins of the blues, you need to take a look at what came before it. You need to go back to the early part of the seventeenth century, when African slaves were first brought to the New World. Europeans involved in the slave trade stripped as much culture from their human cargo as possible before their arrival in the New World. But music was so embedded in the day-to-day existence of the African men and women caught in this horrific business that it was impossible to tear their songs from their souls. In West Africa, where many of the slaves came from, virtually everything was celebrated with singing and dancing: births, marriages, war, famine, religious beliefs, hunts, death. To eliminate music from an enslaved West African was to kill him.

  Not that white slave owners in the New World permitted West African music rituals to exist without condition on early plantations along the Eastern Seaboard. Some slave owners forbade any music made by slaves, fearful that rebellious messaging could be encoded in the rhythms and chants. Other slave owners permitted limited music, particularly in the fields. Singing, the owners eventually realized, produced more and better work from the slaves. More liberal slave owners allowed singing and dancing during days of rest and holidays but often under the watchful eye of a work foreman or field master. Then there were those slave OWNERS, a minority to be sure, who actually trained some of their slaves in Western music theory so that they’d be able to entertain guests at white socials and other plantation events. These slaves played stringed, woodwind, and keyboard instruments and created ensembles that played both popular and sacred music.

  The earliest indication that slaves other than those specially trained were able to participate in music celebration beyond their own indigenous strains happened in the church. In the early eighteenth century, during the religious revival period known as the Great Awakening, there existed a desire to make Christians out of the pagan slaves. This missionary zeal swept the American colonies as slaves were taught the teachings of the Bible and spent much of their Sundays in church, albeit a segregated church. While white churchgoers sang hymns with stiff rhythms that required formalized responses from the congregation, Christian slaves sang hymns, too, but were unable to contain their enthusiasm when asked to sing God’s praises. Over time, swinging rhythms, hand clapping, foot stomping, and improvised shouts made black Christian music significantly different from the sounds emanating from white churches. The hymns might have been the same, but the singing surely wasn’t.

  Eventually, black sacred folk songs of redemption and salvation, and of the triumph of hope over despair, created a genre called the Negro spiritual. Songs such as “Go Down, Moses” and “Roll, Jordan, Roll” were sung in the church and in the fields, as slaves seldom regarded the separation of sacred and secular music. The Negro spiritual didn’t gain popularity beyond the black community until the 1870s, when Fisk University, a newly appointed black college in Nashville, sought to raise money via a musical tour by its choir. The Fisk Jubilee Singers played not only to white audiences in the United States but also in Europe, prompting attention to the Negro spiritual as a creditable sacred folk-music form.

  “THE ST. LOUIS BLUES”

  By W.C. Handy

  I hate to see the evening sun go down

  I hate to see the evening sun go down

  It makes me think I’m on my last go ‘round

  Feelin’ tomorrow like I feel today

  Feelin’ tomorrow like I feel today

  I’ll pack my grip and make my getaway

  St. Louis woman wears her diamond ring

  Pulls a man around by her apron string

  Wasn’t for powder and this store-bought hair

  The man I love wouldn’t go nowhere, nowhere

  I got them St. Louis blues, just as blue as I can be

  He’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea

  Or else he would not go so far from me.

  The blues would borrow from Negro spirituals as well as from field hollers, the most primitive of black music. Field hands didn’t exactly holler as much as they whooped, moaned, and sang in sudden and completely improvised ways. A rhythm might come to mind and a melody, too, and then made-up lyrics, perhaps reflecting an approaching storm, a Saturday social, or the resolute stubbornness of a mule. Work songs were more organized musical expressions. Actually, a worker, be it a slave or a post-Civil War share
cropper, could make any song into a work song, if he sang it while working. But many work songs were sung by groups of workers, particularly those picking cotton or laying railroad track or building a levee, who seemed to move in a rhythmic unison. Work songs didn’t make the work easier, just a tiny bit more tolerable.

  Black folk songs, some of which could be considered work songs, like “John Henry,” helped give rise to the blues too. In the song, Henry, a big, strapping black railroad worker, works himself to death trying to outdo a mechanized steel drill. Another song, “Stagolee,” (a.k.a. Stagger Lee) tells the tale of a black con man. These musical narratives created characters, outlined plots, and usually contained some kind of lesson for the listener.

  Spirituals, work songs, folk songs-these nineteenth-century black music forms were forged with the last of the major blues influences, the minstrel. No other American form is as wrapped in shame as the minstrel, yet there is no doubt of the music’s popularity in the nineteenth century, first with white audiences and then with black. Minstrelsy, born in the years before the Civil War, consisted of white singers and actors in corked blackface coarsely ridiculing black southern plantation life for white audiences, many of which were based up North. They lampooned black slang and superstitions, physical features, and virtually everything else connected to the black man’s condition in antebellum America. Dancing and singing songs inspired by black folk music, minstrel entertainers portrayed the typical black slave as little more than a clown or ignoramus. After emancipation and the end of the Civil War, whites grew less interested in minstrel shows. Rather than let minstrelsy die (which, admittedly, had created a canon of black-flavored music from the likes of Stephen Foster and other white composers), black singers and dancers eager for the opportunity to scratch out livings as entertainers adopted the form. Using burnt cork on their already dark-skinned faces, which, looking back today, seems to be the ultimate racial insult, black entertainers re-created minstrelsy by presenting the song-and-dance skits to their own people as a form of musical comedy. Black minstrelsy peaked in the late 1870s, and although the traveling minstrel entertainers were black, as were their audiences, the troupes were owned by whites, including Mahara’s Minstrels.

  “Music did bring me to the gutter. It brought me to sleep on the levee of the Mississippi River, on the cobblestones, broke and hungry. And if you’ve ever slept on cobblestones or had nowhere to sleep, you can understand why I began [‘The St. Louis Blues’] with ‘I hate to see the evening sun go down.’”–W.C. Handy

  With so many influences, it is surprising that the blues should be such a “simple” music form—at least on the surface. Lyrically, the blues is about repetition. A first line is sung and then repeated with perhaps a slight variation: “My baby, oh, she left me, and that’s no lie/Well, I said my baby, oh, she left me, and no way that’s a lie.” These two lines are followed by a third line that answers the first two: “Wish my baby’d get back to me, before I lay down and die.”

  Musicologists call this the “A-A-B” pattern. The best blues songwriters pack a whole lot of narrative into such simple lyrical patterns, as the blues has a way of telling its own story. Good love gone bad, evil women and worse men, alcohol, poverty, death, prejudice, despair, hope, the devil, and the search for better days figure into many blues songs. The great bluesman Mississippi Fred McDowell once

  said, “The blues, it jus’ keeps goin’ on, goin’ on…

  Know why? ‘Cause the blues is the story of life and the spice of life.” Mississippi Fred hit it right on the head.

  Musically, the blues introduced the “blue” note, one of the most significant contributions to American music made by black culture. These notes are usually made by flattening—lowering by a half step—the third, fifth, or seventh positions of a major scale. Presenting all kinds of emotional possibilities for the musician, blue notes give the blues its special feel, and when they are draped around a blues chord progression, the results can be so rich and human, that it satisfies the soul in a way no other music can.

  By the late 1890s, it is likely that the blues had taken all its influences and evolved into a form of its own on the plantations that thrived in the Mississippi Delta during this period. Since the blues was born black, the Delta provided the community support necessary for the music to flourish. In the summer, the most tortured of seasons in the Deep South, the large stretch of land known as the Mississippi Delta is as hot as it is flat. During the day, the sun bakes the landscape, much of it below sea level, with nary a rise or hill rump in sight. The seemingly endless fields of cotton, the Delta’s principal crop, and the scattered small hamlets, with names like Lula and Bobo, can be paralyzed by the heat and humidity.

  The Delta’s blues legacy is larger than its physical domain. Only 160 miles long from Memphis to the north, to Vicksburg to the south, and some fifty miles wide, it is not even a true delta, as in the area around the mouth of a river. Rather, it is a remarkably fertile alluvial plain, with soil as dark as the laborers forced to work it. The Delta has its rivers; one of them, the mighty Mississippi, is its western border. One of the more compelling stories of Delta history has to do with man’s attempt to keep the Mississippi River out. Long and high levees built by former slaves and sons of slaves in the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries kept, more or less, the river from overflowing onto the plantations that grew out of early Delta farms after the land was cleared of its old growth forest.

  During the years after the Civil War, known as the period of Reconstruction, the commercial success of cotton made many of the white southern plantation families wealthy. Acres and acres of cotton were planted and picked by black workers and then shipped to Memphis. Having so many fields that needed tending guaranteed work for thousands of black laborers, making the ratio of black to white in the Delta nearly ten to one. Although black workers now had their freedom, in reality they were bound to the plantation, because they worked for a pittance and often owed money to the plantation store for the high-priced goods sold there. Jim Crow laws, the rise of racist organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan, lynchings, and prejudice at every turn made it all but impossible for blacks to enjoy the freedom and dignity that whites did. It was a cruel existence, and the blues documented the black man’s woes better than any other form of cultural expression.

  The earliest places a person could hear the blues were probably at socials, parties, fish fries, and in juke joints, small shacks on the outskirts of the plantation, where blacks converged on Saturday nights to drink cheap whiskey and dance. The earliest bluesmen were probably local plantation workers who owned a guitar or banjo, had a knack for singing and entertaining, and played for tips. Later, as the blues matured and grew more popular, bluesmen became itinerant entertainers, going from juke to juke, living a life of whiskey, song, women, and wandering.

  With its large black population, the Mississippi Delta was the perfect place for the blues to grow, but it wasn’t the only place down South where the music thrived. By the turn of the century, the blues had surfaced in west Texas, the Arkansas Delta on the western side of the Mississippi River, Louisiana, and even in Georgia and the Carolinas. The spread of the blues was organic and irregular. The blues pioneers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had no clue as to the emerging importance of the music they played. There was no way for them to know or even imagine that the blues would have implications far beyond the juke joint, that it would become the foundation for virtually every popular-music form—jazz, rhythm & blues, rock & roll, soul, funk, hip-hop—of the new century. What these blues musicians did know was that when they played, people listened, threw some money into their hat, maybe bought them a pint of whiskey. And that was good enough for them.

  It’s important to note that in the early years of blues history, few of the musicians who played the blues played just blues. Most likely interspersed into their collection of songs were spirituals, folk standards, pop favorites, just about anything that
would make a crowd of people take note. The idea of specializing in a particular music form and calling oneself a blues musician was something that, like the music itself, occurred over time. Early bluesmen were really songsters, musicians who played a variety of songs, often in different styles. Their aim was to entertain—and to profit from it in some capacity.

  “WE WEAR THE MASK” E[1895]

  By Paul Laurence Dunbar

  We wear the mask that grins and lies,

  It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes—

  This debt we pay to human guile;

  With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,

  And mouth with myriad subtleties.

  Why should the world be overwise,

  In counting all our tears and sighs?

  Nay, let them only see us, while We wear the mask.

  We smile, but, O Great Christ, our cries

  To thee from tortured souls arise.

  We sing, but oh, the clay is vile

  Beneath our feet, and long the mile;

  But let the world dream otherwise, We wear the mask.

  The blues spread throughout the South in the early twentieth century, thanks to itinerant musicians carrying what they learned in one place to another. Traveling medicine and minstrel shows often used musicians who played the blues, thus giving the music a more structured entertainment platform. Not all black folks frequented juke joints, of course, but many showed up in the town square when a traveling troupe came by. They listened, laughed, and danced, and some of them even bought elixirs and potions guaranteed to cure whatever ailed you.

  The early blues musician accompanied himself on guitar, or occasionally on banjo or mandolin. Poorer musicians might have played only the harmonica or simply sang. Mostly, the blues musician was a solo artist, though duos were not uncommon. Also, black string bands or small orchestras, the kind led by W.C. Handy, began to play blues as the form grew in popularity. Handy’s sheet-music success with tunes such as “The Memphis Blues” and “The St. Louis Blues” enabled the music to expand beyond the poor black community. Black piano players who worked in saloons and whorehouses in southern cities also began adding blues to their repertoire. In New Orleans, where local musicians were more apt to play cornets and piano than guitars or harmonicas, thanks to the popularity of parades, marching bands, and social clubs, blues was one of the bases for “jazzing up” songs. As early as the 1890s, Charles “Buddy” Bolden, a gifted cornet player, had begun “jazzing” songs in New Orleans, as opposed to “ragging” them, which is what you did when you played ragtime, a black-created American music form popular in the 1890s and early 1900s. Bolden influenced a whole generation of horn players to do the same. Blues was a good foundation from which to jazz a song, and the black musicians who followed in Bolden’s footsteps—in particular, a young Louis Armstrong—were as much blues musicians as they were experimenters in this new sound, jazz.