Blues Singers Research Articles

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

The Comics of R. Crumb and R. Crumb: Literature, Autobiography, and the Quest for Self

Representing Environmental Emergency as Social Emergency: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 in Blues Songs from Louisiana and Mississippi

The Great 1927 Flood ranks as the worst environmental disaster in American history. In the early 20th century, Mississippi floods had been worsening as the levee system progressed, in a period when the development of industrial plantations required the brutal exploitation and control of natural and human resources. While local elites and federal authorities declared war on the Mississippi River and on their black workforce, how did this region’s inhabitants process, interpret, and represent the 1927 flood? Because most of them had no access to publishing, researchers have to turn to their songs, particularly blues songs, to answer these questions.The present article argues that the fate of African Americans in the lower Mississippi basin was inseparable from that of the natural environment and that blues singers represented this environment as an active presence in their lives and saw it as a reservoir of metaphors and signifiers of their condition. Through their songs, they described how they experienced and perceived their interactions with nature, denounced the treatment African-American environmental refugees received, and raised awareness about an issue which is as burning today as it was then – environmental injustice, in a way that still seemed relevant to Hurricane Katrina’s victims almost a century later.

From Blue Horizon to Saydisc: Independent Record Labels in the British Blues Revival

After World War II, British jazz fans and critics looking to better understand the genre stimulated a demand for blues records; this market expanded further as first Trad jazz, then skiffle and British R&B launched a British blues revival. Major labels like Decca and Pye offered major US urban blues and soul artists, but the specialty market, dominated by connoisseurs interested in a wider variety of artists and eras, was underserved by the major labels. Thus, committed blues lovers took matters into their own hands. This paper will survey the turbulent independent blues record scene in Britain from the late 1940s to the early 1970s, an ever-changing kaleidoscope of labels with colorful names, shadowy origins, lofty goals, and often surprising founders. Dozens of British musicians, critics, and collectors founded labels, licensing (or bootlegging) materials for reissue, importing 45s from the United States and reselling them in Britain, or recording new material for exclusive release. Many of these small concerns, reissuing rarities and recordings by artists outside the commercial mainstream, were labors of love rather than serious commercial enterprises. Their limited-edition discs were marketed directly to their target audience, and label owners rarely did more than break even. Most only issued a handful of recordings, though in the process they revived the stalled careers of US blues singers, provided much-needed income and support to older artists, and introduced Britain to a wider variety of blues.

Fabricating black modernity: Fashion and African American womanhood during the first great migration

The early twentieth century was a time of great influx in America. Shifting demographics in the 1910s and 1920s, most notably the migration of thousands of African Americans from the rural South to the urban centres of the North, opened economic and leisure possibilities that provided new spaces to define black modernity and its role in shaping American identity. Debates over black women’s bodies, clothing, hair, and general appearance stood at the centre of public attention and political discourse over gender and race equality, forming a realm where African Americans could challenge white racist stereotypes regarding black femininity and beauty, as well as a means through which they could claim new freedoms and achieve economic mobility. Middle-class reformers, young black migrants, as well as new role models such as female performers and blues singers, all used dress and appearance to redefine notions of beauty, respectability and freedom on their own terms. For these women, fashions became intertwined with questions of racial progress and inclusion in American society, offering a way to lay claims for equal citizenship that moved beyond individual expressions and preferences. This article highlights the place of fashion as a critical political realm for African Americans, who were often barred from access to formal routes of power in the era of Jim Crow. Shifting the perspective beyond official forms of civil rights activism, it argues that fashion enabled black women to carve new positions of power from which they could actively participate in gender and racial politics, demanding their equal place in American society.

Male blues lyrics 1920 to 1965: A corpus based analysis

This study examines corpora comprised of 795 lyrics from 35 male blues singers, recorded between 1920 and 1965. The study uses the concept of literary foregrounding (Leech, 2008) and the computer program Wmatrix (Rayson, 2009) to identify key semantic domains and key words in the lyrics before engaging in a qualitative analysis of concordances to analyse patterns of language use. Lyrics recorded in the pre-World War Two period (1920 to 1941) are contrasted with those recorded in the post-war period (1945 to 1965). The results suggest that the male blues lyrics of the period under investigation, and in particular the way in which they differ between the pre- and post-World War Two eras, might reflect the demographic changes of the African-American community of the time and their relationship with aspects of the dominant ideology.

Rebooting the molecular computer

The fuzzy sound of a distorted electric guitar is, for rock fans, a thing of beauty. It has been a staple of music since the early 1950s, when guitarists strained the vacuum tubes inside their amplifiers to match the raw voices of blues singers. Later generations relied on digital devices: “effects pedals” with circuits built from silicon diodes and transistors. But last year, a completely new source of distortion hit the market—one that uses an electronic junction made from organic molecules (J. Phys.: Condens. Matter 2016, DOI: 10.1088/0953-8984/28/9/094011). Billed as the world’s first commercial device to rely on this form of “molecular electronics,” the Heisenberg Molecular Overdrive contains aromatic azo compounds strung between two electrodes just a few nanometers apart. This forms a molecular junction that only allows a current to flow once a threshold voltage is reached. It is an unlikely pioneer in a field that once hoped to

Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley

Reviewed by: Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism by Paige A. McGinley Brian J. Lefresne (bio) McGinley, Paige A. Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. Critics and scholars have begun to focus on the visual, gestural, and performative elements that comprise an indelible component of African American popular music such as traditional blues, jazz, and hip hop. This trend toward the non-sonic components of musical performance provides the opportunity to discuss how these artists crafted their stage identities, and in turn affected the reception and dissemination of their public personae and musical performances. Paige A. McGinley’s Staging the Blues: From Tent Shows to Tourism is one such example. Placing elements of the theater at the fore of her analysis, McGinley shifts the study of the blues away from that of a singular sonic medium and toward that of a diverse and cross-disciplinary performance practice. Spread over four chapters and segmented into short digestible sections, Staging the Blues is not a retelling of the history of the blues through a performance or theater studies framework, but rather an examination of key performers and moments that complicate and challenge commonly accepted narratives of blues performance. This text explores the ways in which staging and theatricality have shaped the performance and reception of blues performers from the early-twentieth century to the present day. Wrestling with accounts that reinforce divides along gender, geography, and genres, McGinley looks to overcome the surfeit of histories and accounts that “marginalize or sidestep histories of theatrical practice” (3). Opening with a survey of blues performance and historiography, the author asks succinctly “what happens when we subject the mise-en-scene of blues performance to critical analysis” (4). Using language and the terms of the theater to guide her narrative, McGinley deftly touches upon how issues of racial authenticity, working-class and vaudevillian entertainments, African American social uplift ideology, folklore, sound recordings, gender, and mobility have singularly or in combination shaped histories of the blues. Each one of these approaches to accounts of blues performance carries its own particular agenda for effacing theatrical and performative elements of blues performance. Returning the theatrical aspect of blues performance to center stage allows for a more rich and nuanced account of blues performers and performances. In chapter 1, “Real Personality,” McGinley details how early female blues singers such as Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith used trappings of the theater and theatricality in their [End Page 712] performances. Often seen as a footnote, the theatricality of Smith’s and Rainey’s performances are treated as a crucial component. As McGinley notes, omitting these aspects is problematic: “theatrical blues singing developed during a period when popular music and popular theater were deeply intertwined” (35). Generic divides did not exist for performers or for their audiences. McGinley highlights how Smith and Rainey incorporated theatrical trappings such as stage props, costuming, and technology into their public personae and performances to evade and resist dominant social and aesthetic codes of the era. Most intriguing about this chapter was calling attention to these artists’ deployment of recording technology and photography to enhance their performance careers. The second chapter examines male blues singer Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter’s performance career during the 1930s and 1940s. Rather than adhering to conventional approaches surrounding Ledbetter, McGinley positions the theatrical elements of his performances on the forestage. The rise of folklore studies and the quest for the authentic and the real lead to an erasure, or in McGinley’s words, “abjection” of the theatrical elements of blues performance (83). Countering traditional accounts of Ledbetter as solely a blues musician, McGinley highlights how Ledbetter’s performance career was “deeply indebted to theatrical traditions” such as dance, comedy, and spoken monologues. It is quite clear after reading this section that one must view Ledbetter not just as a musician, but also as a consummate professional who was well versed in multiple modes of popular entertainment. The middle-section of the chapter explores Zora Neale Hurston’s and Alan Lomax’s approach to the role and place of the theater and theatricality in folklore studies. In spite of Lomax’s abjuration of...

Please allow me to introduce myself: essays on debut albums

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself: Essays on Debut Albums. Edited by George Plasketes. Burlington, VT. Ashgate Publishing Company, 2013. 250pp (hardcover). Illustrations, Appendices, Bibliography. ISBN: 9781409441762. $104.95 Here is an anthology of music writing that issues forth from an interesting premise: editor George Plasketes treats the debut album as a genre, and collects a body of writing that examines the debuts of various performers from Buddy Holly to now, mostly of the singer-songwriter variety. The inherent conceptual challenge is that a debut album is not a genre; it is an event or action within the career of an artist. But it is not a wholly irrelevant vantage point from which to view a wide variety of artists therefrom; when I was researching little-known blues singers for inclusion in the All Music Guide to the Blues I discovered that--almost without exception--in the 78-rpm era, the first record issued by a blues artist was that artist's best-seller. I did not have the luxury then to take the time to discover the reason why this was, and have not since; I've always wondered what the answer is. While Plasketes and his contributors do not aim at answering such higher mysteries, the potential is there for revelations of other kinds under such a blanket concept, and that alone justifies the value of assembling an anthology such as this. Though Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself cuts a swath through pop, folk, hip hop, avant-garde, and country categories, the overall thrust of the book has the effect of sameness to the type of artist covered, at least for the first two thirds of the book. Choices range from artists whose debuts were their one and only statements (such as the obscure Jackson C. Frank, of whom I had never heard, and was grateful for the introduction) to those whose first albums were merely the initial event in a long salvo of similar things, namely Jandek. As with most anthologies, some essays are better than others, and the very best essay included --Ian Inglis' piece on George Harrison's All Things Must Pass--violates the theme a little, as his debut album truly was Wonderwall Music which was also, significantly the first solo album by a Beatle. To have made that determination, however, would have cost the book its finest essay. Also we find some blurring of the thematic limits in the chapter on Joan Baez' debut, 1961s Joan Baez Vol. 1. To discuss that album properly one needs recourse to Joan Baez Vol. 2, which is almost identical to its predecessor in content and style. Likewise, contributor B. Lee Cooper deals with Wilson Pickett's unsuccessful debut It's Too Late and its successful successor In the Midnight Hour by addressing both albums. Nevertheless, there are some very fine things here; the opening chapter devoted to The Chirpin' Crickets by Buddy Holly Don Cusic's essay about Roger Miller, the article about Nick Drake, and the aforementioned entries on Frank and Jandek. …

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

If I Had Possession over Judgment Day: Augmenting Robert Johnson

The Color of the Blues: Considering Revisionist Blues Scholarship

Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 and the acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician also points to the possibility that, while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. Seasick Steve, Stockholm, 2009, courtesy of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license. Presenter: It's blues music that evokes a kind of hobo lifestyle, and people talk about your background in that way. Tell us a bit about where you were before you got to where you are. Seasick Steve: Well, you know, that's like another problem I have. People think they found me under a bridge a few years ago, but I raised five boys, you know, I had normal jobs, I had thirty-five years . . . But when I was a young fella, I had to leave home when I was thirteen, and I did some pretty rough living and wandering around. We used to ride trains or hitchhike and follow migrant work around the farm work. But, you know, that ended many years ago, and I just sort of had to be, tried to be, a regular fella. Seasick Steve's appearance on BBC breakfast television in 2009 to promote his aptly titled album, Man From Another Time, was an uncanny reminder of the post-war blues revival, when aging and forgotten African American blues singers, such as Mississippi John Hurt, Sleepy John Estes, and Son House, were rediscovered and presented to mainstream white audiences. The interview revealed how images and stereotypes conjured up during the blues revival of the mid-twentieth century—the bluesman as wandering hobo or anti-conformist rebel—are still with us in the twenty-first, a perception of blues musicians which, as the singer demonstrates in his response, needs to be repeatedly refuted. The acceptance within the public domain of a white man as a traditional blues musician, however, also points to the possibility that while some stereotypes remain, others, such as the fact that real bluesmen are black and from the Deep South, may have faded. In recent years, a number of writers have sought to deconstruct old stereotypes about the blues. Jeff Titon, Elijah Wald, Marybeth Hamilton, Patricia Schroeder, and Karl Hagstrom Miller have challenged depictions of the blues as an authentic folk music with roots firmly within working-class African American culture, most often presented at odds with modernity and consumer capitalism. This has taken the shape of dismantling the myth of the bluesman, revered as a rebel that renounced the worldly benefits of commercial success for his music. In essence, these revisionist writers have emphasized the irreconcilable variance between the blues as it really was and that which white middle-class enthusiasts and record collectors of the Sixties invented and wanted to see. This chosen view has resulted in obscure singers from the South, such as Son House, Skip James, and Robert Johnson, being idolized as archetypal blues heroes, at the expense of musicians like Leroy Carr and the Mississippi Sheiks, who were both more widely known among African American audiences and commercially successful during the Race Records era of the interwar years. However, while revisionists have highlighted the socio-cultural distances between commentators and the music, they have often limited their efforts by presenting the invention of the blues—that is, the rediscovery of the blues during the 1960s revival—as predominantly an American story. This has either neglected or downplayed the fact that the blues reached audiences far beyond the geographical borders of North America. The blues is American music with origins within African American culture of the South, but its story has not been limited by these national or cultural boundaries. Thus, to fully understand the nature of blues historiography and the way the blues has been invented since the revival, it is necessary to acknowledge that from the middle of the last century the blues was consumed, performed, and interpreted within a transatlantic context.

Pragmatic acts of love

This article is a pragmatic examination of the manner in which early American female blues artists talk to their audience about love. It is an extension of the preliminary work of Kuhn (1999), who examined the lyrics of male blues singers, and Watson (2006), who applied a revised version of Tyrmi’s (2004) model to investigate the expression of love and sexuality in the lyrics of pre-1950s’ American female blues singers. Kuhn’s (1999) study concentrated on the seductive strategies of male blues lyrics and applied speech act theory to her corpus. This article aims to extend upon Kuhn’s enquiry, by examining, in greater detail, the seductive strategies and other acts of love expressed in the lyrics sung by early female blues artists. It is, and has generally been, perceived that female artists are less risqué and less assertive in requesting their needs, and that they are more genteel in expressing their desires and feelings. Watson (2006) disproved this assumption. I found that these women were direct in stating their needs, either for love or sexual gratification and had no qualms about stating these needs. In this article, I further investigate how these women express their needs and wants by applying Searle’s (1969, 1976, 1979) speech act theory to the lyrics of early female blues singers. In doing so, I pay particular attention to the use of assertives, directives, and commissives. This methodology is applied to a representatively selected computerised corpus of 111 songs by 39 different American female blues artists, who pre-date the 1950s. Like Kuhn (1999), I am particularly interested in arriving at a fuller understanding of how it is that as we listen to the blues we feel that these lyrics ‘talk’ to us and I am especially interested in proposing a pragmatic taxonomy of these lyrics

Reviews:Something Urgent I Have to Say to You: The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams

SOMETHING URGENT I HAVE TO SAY TO YOU : THE LIFE AND WORKS OF WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS HERBERT LEIBOWITZ Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2011 HB, 494 pp, £23.99 William Carlos Williams, along with TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Wallace Stevens, was one of the great modernist poets of the century which America claimed for itself with the construction of the Panama Canal exactly a hundred years ago. Unlike the other three, as his latest biographer Herbert Leibowitz remarks, Williams was the only one who, although he had no party allegiance, stayed left-liberal in his opinions. At a time when the strength of the dollar made it easy for US writers to expatriate themselves, Williams spent nearly all his life in the town in which he was born in 1883 — Rutherford, New Jersey — in earshot of the ‘infinite variety’ of US voices that he wanted to bring into poetry. This he did, by trial and error, devising a punchy, humane, casual-sounding diction that went on to become influential, peopling his poems with the demotic of ‘ nurses and prostitutes, policemen and religious fanatics, farmers and fish peddlers, drunkards … blues singers and barbers ’. He broke down the poetic line, abandoning the rhythms of the ear for the cubist lines of the eye. ‘ No ideas but in things ’ he wrote; and it became a kind of mantra. It was a plea for candour after the vague abstractions of the previous century: the …

Boll weevil blues: cotton, myth, and power in the American South

Between the 1890s and the early 1920s, the boll weevil slowly ate its way across the Cotton South from Texas to the Atlantic Ocean. At the turn of the century, some Texas counties were reporting crop losses of over 70 percent, as were areas of Louisiana, Arkansas, and Mississippi. By the time the boll weevil reached the limits of the cotton belt, it had destroyed much of the region's chief cash crop - tens of billions of pounds of cotton, worth nearly a trillion dollars. As staggering as these numbers may seem, James C. Giesen demonstrates that it was the very idea of the boll weevil and the struggle over its meanings that most profoundly changed the South - as different groups, from policymakers to blues singers, projected onto this natural disaster the consequences they feared and the outcomes they sought. Giesen asks how the myth of the boll weevil's lasting impact helped obscure the real problems of the region - those caused not by insects, but by landowning patterns, antiquated credit systems, white supremacist ideology, and declining soil fertility. Boll Weevil Blues brings together these cultural, environmental, and agricultural narratives in a novel and important way that allows us to reconsider the making of the modern American South.

“Key to the highway”: blues records and the great migration

This paper looks at the way “race record” blues of the 1920s and 1930s reinforced the decision of poor farmers, sharecroppers, and working men and women to move to the cities of the North. The theme is the way black southerners used the blues as the soundtrack of the Great Migration. In a sense, the Delta blues was a musical travel narrative for tens of thousands of people who were leaving the rural South for an unknown, modern and industrial future. The paper will explore blues music as an expression of the fluidity of African American society and culture during the Great Depression.While avoiding direct protest, blues singers and musicians—first women, later men—crafted an art form and employed the technology of the phonograph to encourage freedom of movement and choice. At the moment the “race record” industry was being born, and black farmers and families were quietly picking up and leaving the South, the music they traveled with was the blues. The paper will look at examples of blues singers whose records dealt specifically with the Great Migration and consider their influence on listeners.

The Blues Formula: A Response to Taft

michael taft ends his response to my critique (2007) of his book, The Blues Lyric Formula (2006), on a heroic note, describing how, at the 1972 annual meeting of the American Folklore Society, he survived Albert Friedman’s criticism of his position on formulaic composition in the blues (2009:80). I personally witnessed several of Friedman’s harsh remarks to hapless graduate students at academic meetings and saw how they left permanent scars on some, reduced others to tears, and drove still others from the field of folklore studies altogether. Therefore, I congratulate Taft for his ability to hold his ground and go on to a distinguished career as a folklorist. The beginning of his response, however, is far less heroic, as he tries to make a virtue out of his faulty transcriptions of the lyrics of early blues recordings. Taft admits to a shocking error rate of “perhaps 10 percent of the words in any given song” but claims that his inaccuracies “tended to make my corpus seem less formulaic than it actually was” (2009:75). He states that “transcribing for the purpose of formulaic analysis” is likely to result in an inflated number of formulas, which is why he “tried not to prejudge the lyrics and erred on the side of some mishearings” (75). I feel almost embarrassed to point out that the goal of lyric transcription from recordings is accuracy. After this has been achieved can come formulaic analysis. But regardless of this weakness in his corpus, Taft and I are not in disagreement over whether “the blues is highly formulaic” (76). We have both long maintained this view. Instead, our dispute is over the nature and definition of the formula and how formulas are used by blues singers. I doubt that either Taft or I will change the other’s mind, but let me briefly summarize our differences and reply to some issues he raises in his response. Taft and I both claim that our work is inspired by the definition of the lyric formula first offered by Milman Parry ([1928] 1971:11). While I uphold a lexical and syntactic interpretation, focusing on the first part of Parry’s definition (“a group of words which is regularly employed under the same metrical conditions”), Taft upholds a semantic interpretation, focusing on Parry’s concluding phrase (“to express a given essential idea”). I believe, however, that Taft is quibbling over semantics. If Parry had used an alternative word such as “clear,” “simple,” “specific,” or “basic,” instead of the word “essential,” I think we would have no argument over the interpretation of his definition. Parry was not some sort of closeted proto-Chomskyan semanticist, nor was he being “crypto-psychological” (Rogers 1966; Taft 2009:76). Everything that Parry and his student Albert Lord (1960) wrote about formulas shows that these are

The Blackbird Flies: Remembering Carolyn M. Rodgers

The Blackbird FliesRemembering Carolyn M. Rodgers Angela Jackson Click for larger view View full resolution In Memoriam Carolyn M. Rodgers December 14, 1940—April 2, 2010 Photograph by Gloria V. Rodgers [End Page 919] It was the early 1970s, and Carolyn was sitting in her Hyde Park apartment talking about her next volume of poetry. Something outrageous about people would strike her funny as she entertained me with stories, and she'd throw her elegant neck back and laugh joyously. "I can't use it!" she exclaimed with her characteristic sentence. It was as if she were making something of life and throwing away with a good laugh anything she could not implement to make her Something. She was Carolyn Rodgers, slim and dark, head wrapped in a dark scarf, bound tightly; wouldn't you know, her groundbreaking second volume was named after her, Songs of a Blackbird. Of course, she knew about Paul Laurence Dunbar's "Sympathy"—"I know why the caged bird sings." Carolyn, this blackbird, was free, determined to stay free inside the city of her birth. She battled difficult climates. You wouldn't know it to look at her—she had resilience, if not physical strength. let uh revolution come. uhstate of peace is not known to meanywaysince grew uhround in chi townwherehowlin wolf in the tavern on 47th st.and muddy waters made us cry the salty nigger blues where pee wee cut lonnell fuh messin wid his sistuh and blood baptized the street at least twice ev'ry week and judy got kicked outa grammar school fuh bein pregnant and died tryin to ungrow the seed we was all up in there and just living was guerilla warfare, yeah. let uh revolution come,couldn't be no action like whati dun already seen. That day in the early 1970s Carolyn thought about calling her new volume Blues Gettin Up, for she, like Langston Hughes, was very much in touch with the sounds and souls of her people. She loved the Blues, all the music of Black people. Like the testimonies of the [End Page 920] Blues singers her song were distinct, singular, her own. Like the Blues singers she knew she could be knocked down, but she would not stay down. She was always gettin up, leaning on her writing hand. Her strength was in her pen. In her songs. She wound up calling that volume How I Got Ovuh, after a gospel song, and that volume was nominated for the National Book Award. She was a quiet queen, given to reflection and profound personal and collective probing, given to irony, humor, artistic innovation, and faith. I don't even know if she would want to be called "queen," though she carried herself with the presence of one. She moved with a kind of regal grace. Carolyn Marie Rodgers was born December 14, 1940, in Chicago, Illinois, to the union of Clarence and Bazella Rodgers. Her father was a welder; Carolyn called him "the fixit man." Her mother was a factory worker; Carolyn called her "a sturdy Black bridge." Carolyn started writing in grammar school as early as fifth or sixth grade. She was a natural poet. Carolyn had one brother, Robert, now deceased, and two sisters who survive her—Gloria V. Rodgers and Nina Rodgers Gordon. Carolyn earned a BA from Roosevelt University in 1965, and an MA from the University of Chicago in 1980. Between those years when Carolyn earned degrees she earned a distinct and important place in African American poetry. She earned a seat at the table of excellence. She earned a place at the banquet of posterity. Carolyn's first book of poems was Paper Soul (1967), published by Third World Press, now the oldest and most recognized of African American publishers. Carolyn was one of the founders of Third World Press. She shared that distinction with Jewel Lattimore (now Johari Hudson) and Don L. Lee (now Haki R. Madhubuti). This triumvirate was also founding members of the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC) Writers Workshop, chaired by the extraordinary Hoyt W. Fuller, editor of Negro Digest/Black World magazine. Other founding...

Ragged but right: black traveling shows, "coon songs," and the dark pathway to blues and jazz

The commercial explosion of ragtime in the early twentieth century created previously unimagined opportunities for black performers. However, every prospect was mitigated by systemic racism. The biggest hits of the ragtime era weren't Scott Joplin's stately piano rags. Coon songs, with their ugly name, defined ragtime for the masses, and played a transitional role in the commercial ascendancy of and jazz. In Ragged but Right, now in paperback, Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff investigate black musical comedy productions, sideshow bands, and itinerant tented minstrel shows. Ragtime history is crowned by the shows, the stunning musical comedy successes of Williams and Walker, Bob Cole, and Ernest Hogan. Under the big tent of Tolliver's Smart Set, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and others were converted from coon shouters to blues singers. Throughout the ragtime era and into the era of and jazz, circuses and Wild West shows exploited the popular demand for black music and culture, yet segregated and subordinated black performers to the sideshow tent. Not to be confused with their nineteenth-century white predecessors, black, tented minstrel shows such as the Rabbit's Foot and Silas Green from New Orleans provided and jazz-heavy vernacular entertainment that black southern audiences identified with and took pride in.

"The Low Hum in Syllables and Meters": Blues Poetics in Bob Dylan's Verbal Art

It may seem to be stating the obvious when pointing to the fact that Bob Dylan’s songs carry the voices of master blues singers. Vocal texture and color, singing behind the beat, and the use of twelve-bar rhythms might very well prove sufficient indicators for qualifying Dylan as a blues musician. Unfortunately, however, the elaborate and fascinating details of blues verbal artistry continue to remain a mystery to many scholars, as well as many musicians themselves. In this paper, we will take a closer look at the poetics of traditional blues lyrics within the particular context of their strong influence on Dylan’s songwriting. In doing so, we will focus on language use. Our goal is a deeper understanding of tradition, transmission, and personal creativity. By poetics, I mean that function of language that serves to enhance, embellish, and in any way focus the attention of listeners (or readers) on what could be called the “message for the sake of the message.” This definition is a direct borrowing from Roman Jakobson’s description (1987:62-94) of the interworkings of poetics in all speech genres, from everyday forms to the most complex and calculated of written poetries. Ethnopoetics, 1 which has been used most widely to treat Native American oral traditions, have contributed to the knowledge that poetic structures, motifs, and devices are culture-specific. Versification, narrative technique, sound patterns, metaphors, symbolic matrices, imagery, characterization, grammar use and all other such techniques derive from cultural uses of the

Gender Power

Structural changes in the United States during the 1920s enabled African American females to attain an historically prominent position as classic blues singers. Historical analysis of record availability is combined with analysis of song lyrics to assess the relevance of Connell’s ideas in explaining the success of these women; Connell’s theory of gender structures offers three loci within which to frame such structures: labor, power, and intimate relationships. Analysis of available popular music recordings during the period indicates that these singers were influential beyond their particular genre, whereas lyrical analysis mainly points to the importance of intimate relationships.

A Candle for Queen Ida

in jook joint on no map but the map of memory the private possession of few and one of them ... sometimes asks where was that? somewhere back in the woods ...--davenport (1991, 26) In Los Angeles, in 1982, I was invited to hear white women's jazz band. I was reticent about going mainly because of my musical background. That is, I grew up in northeast Georgia at time and in an environment where serious music and dancing were valued, daily activities. Before I was ten years old, I had heard (on vinyl) Eddie Harris, Dave Brubeck, Ketty Lester, Mahalia Jackson, Roy Hamilton, Jimmy Reed, and others. However, trusting my friends Jean and Bella, I went, reluctantly, and heard the band Alive! The group was excellent; the singer, Rhiannon, was incredibly powerful, and I had (to understate) most wonderful experience. Rhiannon's performance of Wild Women Don't Get the Blues was so compelling that I went to hear the group second time. The next night, I was totally thrilled when Rhiannon sang, pointing at me, Wild Women ... like doris--are the only ones / who will learn how to fly! As soon as possible, I got their album and learned that Ida Cox wrote Wild Women, but it was twenty years before I learned that my theme was written, performed, and recorded by Ida Cox in 1924, that Ida Prather Cox (1896-1967) was from Toccoa, Georgia, sixteen miles north of Cornelia, my hometown, that Cox and I are working-class Affrilachians, (1) and that Cox and I are both poets. Ida Cox was major songwriter, song stylist, and an important creator during the black women's blues era (the 1920-30s). (2) She recorded at least eighty-seven songs for Paramount between 1923 and 1929 and another eleven for Vocalion and Okeh in 1939 and 1940, and she was titled, in Paramount's publicity, the Uncrowned Queen of the Blues (Santelli 1993, 105). Each of the classic era blues singers has some justifiable claim to fame and blues royalty, but Ida Cox is unique in that she wrote almost 100 songs in her lifetime (Reitz 1981). (3) That, alone, is an impressive achievement. As contemporary of Sippie Wallace, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others, Cox is mentioned in several blues studies, (4) but I found no major book or articles solely dedicated to her life and work. (5) I do have collection of five compact discs of songs recorded by Ida Cox between 1923 and 1940 with liner notes and lyrics to most of the songs (Cowley 1999). Also, in my vinyl archives, I discovered reissued Ida Cox album,f' Lacking secondary sources, I immersed myself in these primary materials, the sound and textures of Ida Cox's voice, the inventiveness of her lyrics. Listening to the first disc, I was initially overwhelmed. The songs were redundant, predictable variations on heterosexual relationships, on loving well or poorly; being treated well or badly; leaving or staying; good luck, bad luck; two-timing men and back-stabbing women; death, retaliation (including death); moving on, staying, coming back--and all of it all over again and again. I was appalled--what could I say about any of this? Plus, since my ears (and sensitivities) are tuned to the smooth sound of contemporary recordings, I had trouble even paying attention. I was at first completely bored. Then, suddenly, I was totally attentive, and the same elements that I thought redundant became intriguing. Enlightenment, revelation, enjoyment, and engagement followed. Each time I replayed song, I heard something delightful and pleasing and found something else to say about Ida Cox's music. This article's purpose is to celebrate, acknowledge, honor, and I hope, illuminate the artistry of Ida P. Cox. The title, a candle, refers to my ritual of lighting votive candles to honor people and events (Jimi Hendrix, Nina Simone, full moon, winter solstice, payday). This article is candle of appreciation, analysis, and description of Cox as singer-lyricist-poet. …