"Genuine Race artists make genuine blues for Okeh"

Today, the distinction is sharp and clear: Music is both an expressive art form and a marketable commodity. For those of us with an investment in music, whether it's of the monetary or emotional variety, we embrace this art/commodity distinction or bang our heads against it. However, at the very least, we recognize its existence.

For me, part of the country blues' allure is rooted in how the development of this distinction occurred during the genre's heyday in the 1920s and 1930s. Music's long-established power to stir imaginations and evoke powerful feelings was validated when the Charley Pattons and the Geeshie Wileys of the country blues era committed their songs to wax, and performed live at juke joints and weekend picnics. Said musician Johnny Shines in Giles Oakley's The Devil's Music: A History of the Blues: "One time in St. Louis, we were playing one of the songs that Robert [Johnson] would like to play with someone once in a great while, 'Come on in My Kitchen.' He was playing very slow and passionately, and when we had quit, I noticed no one was saying anything. Then I realized they were crying ... Both women and men."

So the lesson learned wasn't firmly rooted in music's cultural significance; instead, it was music's commercial viability. "Race" records—78s recorded by African-Americans for African-Americans—made labels such as Victor, Okeh, and Vocalion prevail in a market war against the fledgling music industry's money-making behemoths: the sheet music publishers. Paramount sold wind-up phonographs at $11 a pop; records went for 75 cents and could be ordered through the mail. In 1921, record labels moved 100 million units for the first time; six years later, over 500 different "race" records were released. This was the start of what would be the record industry's seven-decade tenure of prosperity and influence.

But perhaps anecdotes are more telling than any sales statistic. From Pete Daniel, author of Deep'n as It Come: The 1927 Mississippi River Flood: "When the flood came, people didn't have time to save very much and they sometimes got out with only the clothes on their back. But if they had a chance to save something, one of the first things they saved was the Victrola. Even some of the poorest people would save their money to buy a Victrola and then they would save money to buy records. It was a very important part of poor people's lives."

Technological progress has led to changes in how music is consumed. The phonograph brought music into the privacy of one's home; the Walkmen took that privacy to the outside world. Today, as technology speeds toward an end point where music accessibility will become infinite, I wonder if the sharp, clear distinction referenced above is hurrying toward its own end point: one of irrelevancy. After all, why make a fuss about how music is both an art form and a commodity when its powers as both are no longer potent or even pertinent?

It's fun to stay at the ...

"There is a historic landmark in the borough of Brooklyn, New York, that has been forgotten. In the early twentieth century, the neighborhood known as Williamsburg was home to a polyglot population: Italian and Polish immigrant families pushed out of overcrowded Manhattan; Irish families who'd been there a bit longer; and single men of various ethnicities attached to the nearby Navy Yard. To cater to the latter, in 1904 the Young Men's Christian Association opened a lodging house at 179 Marcy Avenue, near a stop on the BMT subway line and a few blocks in from the Williamsburg Bridge. And it was there at the Williamsburg YMCA, in a single room sometime in the mid-1940s, that the Delta blues was born."

In Search of the Blues
Marybeth Hamilton, 2008

No man's land

"There was always a border beyond which the Negro could not go, whether musically or socially. There was always a possible limitation to any dilution or excession of cultural or spiritual references. The Negro could not ever become white and that was his strength; at some point, always, he could not participate in the dominant tenor of the white man's culture. It was at this juncture that he had to make use of other resources, whether African, subcultural, or hermetic. And it was this boundary, this no man's land, that provided the logic and beauty of his music."

Blues People: Negro Music in White America
LeRoi Jones, 1963

FR-2 Songs

Side A
"I Wish My Mother Was On That Train"
Blind Joe Taggart and Emma Taggart
2:43

Side B
"She Wouldn't Give Me None"
Blind Joe Taggart and Joshua White
2:50

FR-2 Liner notes

"I Wish My Mother Was On That Train"
Blind Joe Taggart and Emma Taggart vcl. duet acc. by Blind Joe Taggart, gtr.
New York City, 6 November 1926
Vocalion 1063

"I've Crossed the Separation Line"
Blind Joe Taggart and Joshua White vcl. duet acc. by own gtrs.
Chicago, October 1928
Paramount 12717

Before proceeding, it must be established that this is not about prophets, as in "derives from profitis, a Greek word meaning 'foreteller.'" Likewise, it's not about prophets and prophecy, as in Isaiah, and Messianic divinations specifying that God's servant will be buried in a rich man's tomb; it's also not about foretelling.

Rather, this is about forthtelling, a concept that is primarily concerned with insight into the will of God. This is about prophets, as in—to quote passages from Taylor Branch's Pillar of Fire—men who make "biting symbols out of daily pains and predicaments," men who "while facing, even welcoming, the destruction of themselves and their own people [remain] suffused with redemptive powers." More importantly, this is about guitar evangelists from the 1920s and 1930s: those strange, chinked fragments broken off and separated from the rest of society; those men who led hardscrabble artistic existences. Such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, who sang: "I stood on the corner and almost bust my head / I stood on the corner, almost bust my head / I couldn't earn enough money to buy me a loaf of bread."

South Carolina's Blind Joe Taggart was a guitar evangelist and a prophet. His redemptive powers were rooted in his music; many of his songs were salvation narratives that helped give folks the power to begin draining the poison from their souls. And yet there was that penchant for personal destruction, shooting through him with every breath. He made it into a biting symbol: the separation line, as in, "I've Crossed the Separation Line," which could represent the demarcation between sacred and secular. Taggart, like many others, moved between two incompatible callings: the flesh-and-blood realism of the blues and the divine teachings of the church. The line was repeatedly crossed, sometimes smudged, like a thumb dragged across pen ink on paper. Bluesman-turned-minister Rube Lacy once said, "The blues are true and the Truth shall set you free." Taggart sang with a clarity and resolve that suggested he believed the same, even at the risk of damning his soul. He did this for a variety of labels (Paramount, Vocalion, Decca, Broadway, Herwin) under a variety of aliases (Joe Donnell, Blind Tim Russell, Blind Jeremiah Taylor, Blind Joe Amos) throughout the 1920s and 1930s.

Before departing, we must discuss the spouse, the balancing force (the prophetess?), the slink who will sneak the husband into Heaven. On "I Wish My Mother Was On That Train," wife Emma (identified as such by blues historian Paul Oliver) dispels with call-and-response to sing in harmony with her husband. Taggart sounds a tad uneasy; Emma compensates by sounding so indifferent. I like to think that when Taggart's hands shook with a tremor of anxiety, Emma clasped them and steadied them.

FR-2 Blind Joe Taggart, Emma Taggart, & Joshua White: “I Wish My Mother Was On That Train” / “I’ve Crossed the Separation Line”

Where this crosses that or that crosses this ...

"[The state of Mississippi] sold 774,000 acres of the Delta to a railroad that had not laid a single mile of track and owned not a single locomotive. But this road did have a franchise and a state tax exemptions worth millions of dollars, and it ultimately became the Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad, the Y&MV, later called "the yellow dog" in blues songs after the color of its trains. The Y&MV was wholly owned by the Illinois Central and shared the same directors.

A few weeks after the first sale, the state sold 706,000 acres of Delta land for $2,500 in cash plus nearly worthless old levee board bonds that had a face value of only $45,954.22. Title to this land went through several hands before ending up with the Southern Railroad, controlled by J.P. Morgan."

Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 and How It Changed America 
John Barry, 1998