"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

"He understood that the same strong emotions he had felt in Tutwiler were not some aberration, not the haphazard response to the mood of a specific time and place, but stood as genuine testimony to the power of this strange, roughshod style of performance. In an instant, he saw that people would pay for these songs, audiences would flock to them."

This is Ted Gioia writing in Delta Blues in regards to W.C. Handy's reaction to local black musicians. The group was playing at a dance in Cleveland, Mississippi, and consisted of a guitarist, a mandolin player, and a bassist. The songs were akin to what Handy heard during his much-ballyhooed encounter with a musician at the Tutwiler train station in 1903 -- the apocryphal moment when the blues was "born."

The music at the dance had no clear beginning or end, few harmonic and melodic variations, and was driven by a relentless, rhythmic thump-thump-thump of the musicians' feet. Today, this music would be classified as proto-blues or pre-blues; back then, it was often referred to as native music or primitive music or simply dance music.

At any rate, as the musicians played "a rain of silver dollars began to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet" (more Gioia) and now Handy began to understand fully "the beauty of primitive music."

This is when the blues became commercialized. We've been wringing every last penny out of them ever since.

We recently papered the immediate area with colorful flyers depicting two cartoons. In the first, W.C. Handy is seen chasing after music notes (blue notes, in fact) with a butterfly net; in the second, he is selling them at a makeshift stand. At the bottom it simply read: "Fairo Records." It's modestly clever.

FR-1 Record release party

The record release party for FR-1 was held. At a jukehouse on the highway south of Tutwiler, down near the catfish ponds among the fields, where the herons fidget and wait for a meal. The Tutwiler Community Education Center would not put us up. Possibly they will reconsider for FR-2.

From the Tallahatchie County Pantagraph, which sent a scribe to cover the event:

It was a Saturday afternoon and everybody went into town, and fellows were playing on the streets, standing by the railroad tracks, people pitching nickels and dimes, while and black people both. The train came through town maybe once that afternoon and when it was time, everybody gathered around there, before and after the train came, and announced where they'd be that night. And that's where the crowd went.

Then:

The jukehouse was a scene of noise, excitement, and bright lights. A plank was nailed across the door to the kitchen and fish and chitlins were sold. There was dancing in the front room, gambling in the side room, and maybe two or three gas or coil-oil lamps on the mantel piece in front of the mirror. Powerful lights.

"That country ball was rough!' one party-goer exclaimed. "It was critical, man! It started off good, you know. Everybody happy, dancing, and then it started getting louder and louder. The women were dipping that snuff and swallowing that snuff spit along with that corn whiskey, and they started mixing fast, and oh, brother! They started something then!"

FR-1 Songs

Side A
"I'm Going Back Home"
Memphis Minnie and Joe Johnson
2:45

Side B
"She Wouldn't Give Me None"
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy
3:01

FR-1 Liner notes

"I'm Going Back Home"
Memphis Minnie and Joe Johnson vcl. duet acc. by Memphis Minnie, gtr.
Memphis, 26 May 1930
Victor 23352

"She Wouldn't Give Me None"
Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy vcl. duet acc. by own gtrs.
Memphis, 20 February 1930
Vocalion 1576

I could pull the book off a shelf―This Remarkable Continent: An Atlas of United States and Canadian Society and Cultures; a bit of a mouthful, no?—thumb through the pages, and show you the map myself. However, the tome's pages are not gilded and thus, put us at risk for paper cuts. Such wounds would produce tiny droplets of blood and blemish the map, rendering it unreadable. So I shall describe it for you … Four states are shown, clockwise from the top: Tennessee, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. The map features a multitude of tiny dots, each one the hometown of recorded blues performers born between 1890 and 1920. The dots are concentrated on a north-south line along the Mississippi River with the majority on its eastern bank. This line has two termini: Memphis and New Orleans.

This is crucial in understanding Memphis Minnie's importance. She is represented by one of the tiny dots on this map; she was born Lizzie Douglas Lawlers in Algiers, Louisiana, a town that sits at the mouth of the Mississippi across from New Orleans' former slave docks. In her teens, Minnie ran away north to Memphis, where she was eventually discovered by Columbia Records in 1929. Thus, she resided on the north and south poles of the axis on which the prewar blues world rotated. She played a significant role in how fast that world rotated, in how the blues advanced and transitioned; similarly, she was magnetic in attraction. As much as her contemporaries, Minnie dramatized inner dreams and despair in such a way that personal expression became universal; later, she was present when prewar blues plugged in and went electric.

Minnie recorded over 200 sides for labels like Columbia, Vocalion, Decca, Okeh, and Bluebird—labels that issued "race records," releases made by black artists and sold to black consumers. Her glory here on earth makes talk of ascension standard. Consider a well-appreciated photo of her from either 1929 or 1930. She is standing next to a seated Kansas Joe McCoy, her first of three husbands and duet partners. She is wearing a florid, drop-waisted day dress with straightened, flapper hair. The photo's poor quality plays a trick on the eye: Minnie looks like she is not touching the floor, like she is beginning to ascend into heaven. Like her left hand will slide off the right shoulder of McCoy and fall gently to her side, and as she slowly rises, her expressionless countenance will turn to one of pure rapture, at which point McCoy will exit the building where the photograph was taken to look heavenward, squint at the sun, and then despair when he's delivered no final glimpse of her.

FR-1 Memphis Minnie, Joe Johnson, & Kansas Joe McCoy: "I'm Going Back Home" / "She Wouldn't Give Me None"