Published in Worthies Magazine, March 2006
“So I started playing for these rent parties, and then I run into Blue Smitty and Jimmy Rogers and we got something ‘goin’ on. We started playing little neighborhood bars on the West Side, five nights a week, five dollars a night. It wasn’t no big money, but we’s doin’ it.” McKinley Morganfield (Muddy Waters) on his beginnings in Chicago in mid 1940’s
Imagine a race, slapped down to nothing. Their culture, heritage, values wiped out. All past experiences erased becoming meaningless, having you and your family becoming worthless, becoming a piece of furniture.
That has happened all to often in human history, but sometimes something wonderful may come out of the ashes – a small flower in a vast wasteland. If the people survive, endure this field may become a garden. If the conditions are right a maturing culture my arise. A sign of hope that people can grow form its torment.
Out of American Slavery, something small, one little piece of the growing puzzle. An emotional out pouring, in one of the most creative, “simple” signs of resistance to overwhelming forces – music. Music that became an art never before heard; music of man’s struggle. An art that connects people & crosses racial lines. Music that continues to grow, never stagnant, never dying. Music to make one’s man’s dominance over another a little more palatable, if possible. Music – The Blues.
The origins of a new art form can be complex. Many factors can be easily attributed; others form a quiet underlying subtext. The structure of the blues became more defined before World War I. Some major roots included the field hollers, Spirituals and the ballads. The ballads contributed structure while the hollers of field hands replaced the group work songs. The brutal work of cotton picking, muleskinners, were given rhythm and tempo to ease the burden and offer precision where needed – the laying of rails & the section gangs. African roots of course being a major factor, especially later when the slave traders believed those Africans the Senegambians some being Islam converts were considered more suitable for housework, were given the time to learn some music and construct instruments. Those Africans from further south were given the most brutal of labor with no time to make traditional instruments. The voice and body motion became the basis for singing.
The “Delta”, the place were it all began, wasn’t the Mississippi delta, but a leaf-shaped plain, flat & fertile, from just south of Memphis down to Vicksburg – about two hundred miles. With the river on the west and at its widest, eighty-five miles to the east lay the state’s central hills. When the Choctaw Indians “moved” out, well-to-do pioneers with their slaves moved in. Putting the slaves to clearing and draining, the soil, dark, rich and deep was perfect for cotton. After the civil war, the social upheaval, slaves that remained became tenant farmers with generation after generation becoming deeper in debt. Abuses were common. Plantations made their own currency paying the tenants with this script which was not usable outside the county & sometimes even outside the plantation itself. The only choice was for the former slaves to pack up and go on the road in the dead of night in search for something better. The area wasn’t fully developed until the twentieth century, but there was little room for sharecropping or individual farms. The jobs were the poorest, the dirtiest around. The railroad pointed north to those who dared to venture. North to Chicago.
North went Muddy Waters, and in the early forties some 50,000. Between the 1940s –50s about 70,000 came from the Delta alone. Some stayed like Charles Patton; stayed but never still. They rambled from county to county, from gig to gig, Robert Palmer considers him along with Presley and Armstrong, one of the most influential musicians America produced in the twentieth century. He personally inspired almost every Delta bluesman. Dockery Farms is where it all began. The first blues of the Delta.
Others influence by or influencing the music were Walter Boyd aka Leadbelly, the man who taught him – Blind Lemon Jefferson, W.C. Handy, Henry Sloan, Willie Brown, Robert Johnson, Son House, and the blueswoman – Sippie Wallace, Edith Wilson, Ma Rainey and the towns like Cleveland, Drew, Clarksdale and Rulesville.
The music stands on its own. Created and sung by the poorest of the poor, the marginalized, mostly illiterate living in virtual serfdom. An American music, essentially American and popular worldwide. Its part of the history books, from the civil war to migration to early Chicago. Out of tragedy, poverty something that enriches us all.
I fold my arms Lord and I walk away (2)
Just like God tell you, somebody got to pray
Pork chops ‘’forty-five cents a pound, cotton only ten (2)
I can’t keep no women, no no now or then.
So dry, ole boll-weevil, turn up his toes and die (2)
Now now notin’ to do – bootleg moonshine and rye.
Son House 1930’s
What’s Going On!
The Village Vanguard will have the Roy Haynes Quartet from March 14-19, The Kenny Barron Trio from March 21-26 and in late March to early April the Tom Harrell Quintet.
Tavern on the Bay in New Rochelle on Pelham Road has Latin Jazz on Sundays from 6-9 with no admission and free appetizers.
Glenn Slaby Blog