Hard Times Blues (1929–40): Downhome Blues Recordings as Oral Documents

Abstract

Faced with competition from radio in the early 1920s, phonograph recording companies began searching for new buyers. They found an untapped market in black Americans. Advertising their releases as race the companies began issuing recordings by gospel singers, jazzmen, and blues performers. The earliest blues releases featured women vocalists accompanied by jazz bands and pianos. Generally, they sang vaudeville blues which were composed by professional songwriters. But after 1924, the companies also began recording blues sung by male and female vocalists who accompanied themselves with guitars and pianos. These downhome blues musicians often composed their own songs by drawing from a body of traditional formulaic verses or by commenting on widely-shared experiences in the black community. Thus, downhome blues were commercial folksongs which were sung in a folk idiom and which expressed the interests of the folk-in this case, working class blacks.' The thousands of downhome blues recordings issued between 1924 and 1941 constitute a significant body of social documents from the interwar years. Although black workers from this period have left few written records, blues musicians, who served as the spokespeople for working class blacks, have left these oral records.2 Mistreatment and hard times were the subjects of most downhome blues. Admittedly, most blues dealt with mistreating lovers, but other blues commented on topical problems in black life: farming; migration to the cities; crowded urban life; factory work; and unemployment.3 And unlike interviews collected from elderly in-