Fri 30 May 2008
Texas Troublesome Blues: The Blues Of Texas Alexander Part 2
Posted by Jeff under 1920's Blues, 1930's Blues, Texas Blues
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In part one I discussed Alexander’s sides with Lonnie Johnson, hands down his finest accompanist. That by no means is meant to take anything away from the rest of Alexander’s output or his musical partners, it’s just to point out the sheer genius of the Johnson sessions. After two sessions with Johnson, Alexander was paired with pianist Eddie Heywood on four numbers cut at back to back dates on August 16th and 17th of 1927. The pairing of the sophisticated Heywood with Alexander’s musical unpredictability worked better than one would think particularly on “Sabine River Blues”, a true masterpiece, a beautiful number with a gorgeous melody, sung with great feeling. Heywood’s playing is sensational throughout. “Mama, I Heard You Brought It Right Back Home” has an equally attractive melody with almost a bit of a pop feel. There’s a loose, light feel to the Heywood sides that are quite attractive and all four numbers are quite strong including “Farm Hand Blues” and “Evil Women Blues.” Lyrically “Mama, I Heard You Brought It Right Back Home” is perhaps the most interesting as Alexander freely mixes traditional lyrics with strikingly original imagery:
If I leave here runnin’, mama, don’t you follow me (2x)
If I leave here walking, you can go with me
Sally went to cookin’, man, but she didn’t know how (2x)
Says, she put cayenne pepper, mama, in my hot bow-wow
Says, I’m goin’ up the country, mama, don’t you want to go? (2x)
Said I need another dozen, right on my right side, sho’
If I’m get lucky, mama, should happen to work (2x)
I’m gonna carry my money right on back home again
I’d rather see my coffin easin’ through the world (2x)
Than to see my woman do me like she does
I’m scared to go down that big road by myself (2x)
‘Fore I go, baby, I’ll carry me someone else
These recordings makes one wish he had recorded more often with a pianist. It should be noted that Alexander seems to have given little thought to his accompanists. As Paul Oliver points out he “seems to have made little effort to vary his approach to blues singing, or to adjust to his accompanists; they had to fall in with him, and accept, both his timing and erratic verse structure.”
In part one we discussed “Work Ox Blues” and “The Risin’ Sun” which featured both Lonnie Johnson and Eddie Lang. Lang went on to back Alexander on “St. Louis Fair Blues” and “I Am Calling Blues” and plays in a trio with pianist Clarence Williams and New Orleans jazz legend King Oliver on “Tell Me Woman Blues” and “‘Frisco Train Blues.” Lang’s playing is very fine but lacks the imagination and improvisatory feel of Lonnie Johnson although he seems to have no shortage of interesting ideas. King Oliver plays some beautiful, sympathetic cornet fills on both numbers with Lang taking a particularly lovely solo on “Tell Me Woman Blues.”
On June 15th 1929 Alexander cut eight sides with Texas guitarist Little Hat Jones. Jones played in a classic Texas blues style and opens each number in up-tempo fashion before slowing down to accommodate Alexander. The two made a good team with Jones playing consistently interesting, varied runs behind Alexander’s vocals. The best performance was “Ninety-Eight Degree Blues” sung with plenty of gusto and mixing traditional imagery with frank sexuality:
I’m gonna get up in the mornin’, do like Buddy Brown (2x)
I’m gonna eat my breakfast, God, and lay back down
I say I’m gonna eat my breakfast, man, and lay back down
When a man get hairy, y’know he needs a shave (2x)
When a woman get musty, you know she needs to bathe (2x)
I’ve got somethin’ to tell you, make the hair rise on your head (2x)
Got a new way of lovin’ a woman, make the springs screech on her bed
I’ve got a new way of lovin’ a woman, make the springs screech on her bed
“Someday, Baby, Your Troubles is Gonna Be Like Mine” is a lovely number featuring some exceptional playing from Jones while “Johnny Behren’s Blues” is another stand out track. According to Oliver “Behren (or Behrens) was a local singer who had one extended blues on which he told of his skill as a sailor, jockey or other occupation, and how he ‘learned’ the women he knew”. Alexander delivers it thusly:
When I was a sailor, sailin’ on the deep blue sea (2x)
Say, I learned all the women, man, them ocean ways
Says, I learned a way that every woman crave (2x)
Say, it must be a new way that really won’t behave
When I was a jockey, I learned my baby how to ride (2x)
Say, I learned her how to ride, man, from side to side
It’s a reoccurring oddity in Alexander’s songs that often the title not only doesn’t appear in the song but bears no relation to the song itself.
On November 29 1929 Alexander was paired with another Texan guitarist, Carl Davis who fronted the Dallas Jamboree Jug Band which cut five sides in 1935. Davis also appears on eight sides (two others went unissued) with guitarist Willie Reed on a September 1934 session which ran over two days. Reed had cut solo sides in Dallas in 1928 and 1935. Regarding Davis’ style, Oliver noted that he “had an arpeggio style which linked him with Lonnie Johnson and Gene Campbell, which he was flexible enough to fit around Alexander’s notably erratic song structures.” The highlight from this session is “Texas Special” sporting some terrific flat-picked guitar from Davis and wonderful singing including a gorgeous humming coda. The song is a fascinating grab bag of traditional, original and cryptic lyrics:
When the Blues come to Texas, they come ’round through the woods (2x)
Then they stopped by my house, done all the harm they could
When I leave this time, paint your windows green (2x)
Said, if I don’t never die, woman, I’ll be-e-e seldom seen
I’d rather see my coffin rollin’ up to my back door (2x)
Than to hear my woman say she can’t use me no more
I’d rather see my brother come in staggerin’ drunk (2x)
Than to see my woman, Lord, packin’ up her trunk
The “blues come to Texas” image is one drawn from Blind Lemon Jefferson as is the “matchbox” theme at the end of “Johnny Behren’s Blues.” He references Lemon again with the “piney wood” image in “Peaceful Blues”, yet another lyrically interesting number:
Said, mama told me, told me, papa sat and cried (2x)
Say, “You’re too young a man to have that many women your side.” (2x)
Says, I woke up laughin’, went down the road a-flyin’ (2x)
Says, I always had Miss Margie on my mind
I’m gonna climb my woman’s belly like a yoyo do a string (2x)
If I don’t fix her up, I’ll be in a dirty name
I love my woman better than a cow loves to chew her cud (2x)
Lord, that fool, she got mad, moved to the piney wood
Mmmmm, heeeumm,
Hee-ehhh, ummmuhh
Lord, that fool, she got mad and moved to the piney woods
“Perhaps both singers drew on a common source” Oliver conjectures. “We’ll never know, but the evidence of his recordings reveal Texas Alexander to have been among the most individual of singers, and the least subject to the influence of others.”
*Thanks with lyric transcriptions to John M and the members of Weenie Campbell
Sabine River Blues (MP3) ![]()
Ninety-Eight Degree Blues (MP3) ![]()
Johnny Behren’s Blues (MP3) ![]()
Texas Special (MP3) ![]()

Alexander made his greatest records in the company of Lonnie Johnson at six sessions cut for Okeh between August 1927 and November 1928 at recording dates in San Antonio and New York City. Alexander’s erratic sense of timing made him a challenge to work with as Lonnie Johnson related to Paul Oliver: “He was a very difficult singer to accompany; he was liable to jump a bar, or five bars, or anything. You just had to be a fast thinker to play for Texas Alexander. When you been out there with him you done nine days work in one! Believe me, brother, he was hard to play for. He would jump–jump keys, anything. You just have to watch him, that’s all.” Johnson’s approach is a thing of beauty; he plays almost no chords, just melodic, single string lines achieving a gorgeous tone, answering and underscoring Alexander’s magnificent vocals, his moans and hums with a subtle delicacy and empathy. In the notes to the Matchbox series, which collect Alexander’s entire output, Oliver writes: “Johnson alone is completely at ease, anticipating and elaborating with astonishing fluency; this was the period of his most remarkable guitar solos and he seems to be at the peak of his abilities.” The very first song they recorded, “Range In My Kitchen Blues”, sets the template, a beautiful number with Johnson’s opening and closing the number in elegant fashion. Songs from these sessions find Alexander at his most primal; “Levee Camp Moan Blues”, ‘Section Gang Blues” and “Penitentiary Blues” show, as many have written, that Alexander likely had intimate knowledge of the Texas penal system. In “Levee Camp Moan Blues” he sings:
Possum issued plus bonus material) I’ve been featuring the music often on the program and today we finally get around to devoting an entire show to these remarkable recordings. I was also fortunate to interview a very gracious George Mitchell who took some time to recall his field recording days. This show will kick off what will eventually be a series of shows devoted to field recording spotlighting the contributions of John and Alan Lomax, David Evans, Art Rosenbaum and others. I’ve written quite about Mitchell’s recordings so what follows is some brief background plus some links to more in depth articles I’ve written.
tracks by
also play a track by the excellent singer Roosevelt Charles who was recorded extensively by folklorist Henry Oster in 1959-1960 in Angola Penitentiary. This cut is from the marvelous Angola Prisoners’ Blues which also features fine cuts from Robert Pete Williams. Charles has sides on various anthologies plus one out-of-print LP on Vanguard, Blues, Prayer, Work & Trouble Songs.
birthday. Less well remembered is the once popular Papa Charlie Jackson. Jackson was one of the first male blues artists to record, beginning in 1924 with the Paramount label, playing a hybrid banjo-guitar and ukulele. Jackson spent his teen years as a singer/performer in minstrel and medicine shows. He is known to have busked around Chicago in the early ’20s, playing for tips on Maxwell Street, as well as the city’s Westside clubs beginning in 1924. Little is known about his life. Between 1924-1934 he cut around 70 sides. Alice Moore was another once popular artists little remembered today. She was a very fine St. Louis singer who collaborated with the likes of Kokomo Arnold, Peetie Wheatstraw and Lonnie Johnson. She had two main periods of recording activity: the first in the late ’20s, followed by resurgence in 1934 that lasted through 1937. “Doggin’ Man Blues” is a fine vehicle for her clear, nasal tinged vocals featuring steady rolling piano from Wheatstraw.
I suspect most have never heard of Ziegler who’s legacy rests on just a handful of recordings made by George Mitchell in the late 1970′s and some sides made in the 1990′s for the Music Maker organization. The recordings, those by Mitchell in particular, present a musician of singular and immense talent, a musician who fashioned the simple rural blues into something totally unique and utterly moving. Zielgler developed a gorgeous, fluid slide technique balanced by his delicate high falsetto, a style that is completely captivating. Ziegler’s recordings appear on the following collections: Georgia Blues Today (issued by Flyright in 1981 and reissued by Fat Possum), John Lee Ziegler: The George Mitchell Collection Vol. 6 (the same tracks appear on The George Mitchell Collection 7-CD box set) plus Expressin’ The Blues, Blues Sweet Blues, Georgia Blues Today and Cames So Far all on the Music Maker label.
Hooker songs, Sam Cooke’s pop hits, and traditional Chattahoochee songs like “If I Lose Let Me Lose” all in his distinctive style. Ziegler could sing some gospel, but while a lot of the musicians Mitchell recorded had given up blues for the church, Ziegler was content in his choice to stick with secular music.
legal system. Unfortunately even today the prison system has a disproportionate number of African-Americans and tales of being unfairly targeted by the criminal system all too common.
outside of recorded music. In The Land Where The Blues Began, Lomax had this to say regarding prison songs: “They tell us the story of the slave gang, the sharecropper system, the lawless work camp, the chain gang, the pen.” Bruce Jackson, who recorded in southern prisons in the 1960′s and 70′s, explained: “Southern agricultural penitentiaries were in many respects replicas of nineteenth-century plantations, where groups of slaves did arduous work by hand, supervised by white men with guns and constant threat of awful physical punishment . . .. It is hardly surprising that the music of plantation culture — the work songs — went to the prisons as well.” A New York Post reporter wrote as late as 1957: “The state penitentiary system at Parchman is simply a cotton plantation using convicts as labor. The warden is not a penologist, but an experienced plantation manager.”
Daniel, and folklorist Bruce Jackson visited a Texas prison in Huntsville in March of 1966 which resulted in the film and book,
Discovered in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Robert Pete Williams became one of the great blues discoveries during the folk boom of the early ’60s. In 1956, he shot and killed a man in a local club. Williams claimed the act was in self-defense, but he was convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison. He was sent to Angola prison, where he served for two years before being discovered by folklorist 

I came to Rochester in the late 1980′s for college and have been up here ever since. Over the years I met numerous people who fondly recalled Son House and when I started doing my yearly radio birthday tributes to Son, it brought more people out of the woodwork who gladly shared their memories with me. So it’s puzzling that the City has never honored Son in anyway. At least Cab Calloway (born in Rochester in 1907) has a plaque honoring him, albeit tucked away on a nondescript side street in an equally nondescript park. For years myself and others thought someone should rectify this sorry state of affairs; a plaque, a statue or something to honor one of the pivotal figures in blues history, a major influence on both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters and who’s recordings are among the most powerful in blues history. It would be a shame to let Son’s memory slip back to the years before he was rediscovered in Rochester, but the sad fact is there is nothing tangible in this city that shows he ever made this city his home for a good part of his life.
collection. Today’s program spotlights several amazing prison songs recorded by the tireless Alan Lomax. “Levee Camp Holler” by Bama is a stunning acapella blues from the collection Prison Songs, Vol. 1: Murderous Home (originally issued as Negro Prison Songs in 1957). This is an incredible collection recorded at Parchman Farm in 1947-1948. As Lomax wrote, these songs “…tell us the story of the slave gang, the sharecropper system, the lawless work camp, the chain gang, the pen.” We also play a couple of remarkable selections Lomax recorded at the women’s wing of of Parchman Farm back in 1939 which come from Document’s Field Recordings, Vol. 8: Louisiana, Alabama, Mississippi (1934-1947). Beatrice Perry’s “I Got a Man on the Wheeler (Levee Camp Blues)” is a haunting number about the men in her life sung acapella while Lucille Walker sings an acapella version of “Shake ‘em On Down.” A week prior to these recordings Lomax recorded two numbers by Bukka White at Parchman and from that session we play Bukka’s tour-de-force version of “Po’ Boy.” We jump ahead to hear some field recordings made in 1980 by music researcher Axel Kuestner and recording engineer Siegfried A. Christmann. With their station wagon and portable recording equipment they hit the road spending 2-1/2 months documenting blues, gospel, field hollers and work songs throughout the South. Hundreds of hours of tape was used and the resulting project came out as 14 LP’s on the German L&R label. The tracks by Son Thomas, Guitar Frank and Archie Edwards come from the 3-CD Living Country Blues on Evidence, culled from the original LP’s. The
atypical of their sound which has something of a vaudeville sound.

I first encountered the Callicott’s music on Mississippi Delta Blues – “Blow My Blues Away” Vol. 2 and found myself going back to those recordings often. He was a good, if unspectacular guitarist, picking out simple, gently surging melodies in a manner that brings to mind Mississippi John Hurt, but as a singer he was magnificent. There’s a timbre and warmth to his vocals that immediately draw the listener into his world and even in his old age he was still capable of delivering a beautiful falsetto in the manner popularized by Tommy Johnson. Callicott’s music is often compared to medicine show artists from the area as Paul oliver noted in the liners to the original Blue Horizon LP: “Nesbit is only a score of miles south of Memphis in the red earth country of De Soto county. From here and the adjacent Tate and Marshall counties a number of the old-style songsters lived …Among them were the medicine show and jug band musicians like Jim Jackson from Hernando four miles from Nesbit, Frank Stokes, a blacksmith who lived some fifteen miles further south in Senatobia, and Gus Cannon from Red Banks, about the same distance to the east.” David Evans noted that Callicott: “…shows a close musical affinity to his old friend Frank Stokes. Both have a kind of quavering vocal delivery, which combined with clear diction and a good feeling for lyrics can be very effective in putting across the meaning of a song.” Callicott’s recordings for Mitchell are superior to those on Blue Horizon, captured in beautiful form on mostly traditional material like “Laughing To Keep From Crying”, the title drawn from a line drawn from Virginia Liston’s “You Don’ Know my Mind” from 1923, an unusually detailed version of “Frankie And Albert”, “Roll And Tumble” and others. Callicott seems distracted and less focused on the Blue Horizon session possibly due to the presence of Bill Barth (second guitar) and Bukka White (whistling). He does turn in some fine performances including “Hoist Your Window And Let Your Curtain Down”, “Joe’s Troubled Blues”, the ancient “War Time Blues” which probably dates back to World War I (Yack Taylor’s “Those Draftin’ Blues” is lyrically and melodically similar) and a fine version of Akers’ “Dough Roller Blues” which sports the arresting lyric: “I’ll cut your throat woman/Drink your blood like wine.”
Of those early recordings, “Cottonfield Blues Parts 1 & 2″ is a classic Mississippi blues hollered over a the throbbing groove of the amazingly tight twin guitars of Akers and Callicott. Callicott explained the set up: “I kept him chorded up good, trackin’ him…You hear them bases? Well, that’s me. Hear them little strings? Well, that’s him…And when that guy would get to playin’, I’m tellin’ you the truth-we’d sit face to face. And we changed up [i.e., swapped guitar lead]…and you wouldn’t know it.” The duo were swept up by one of those mobile recording unit as Gayle Wardlow explained in his groundbreaking article, Garfield Akers and Mississippi Joe Callicott: From the Hernando Cotton Fields: “In the fall of 1929 Brunswick/Vocalion Records made its initial field trip to Memphis to record talent for its Vocalion 1000 and Brunswick 7000 Race series. The session at the Peabody Hotel was highlighted by the first recorded appearances of Garfield Akers, Mattie Delaney, and Kid Bailey, concomitantly with veterans Memphis Minnie and Tampa Red. Callicott recorded his lone 78, “Fare Thee Well Blues/Traveling Mama Blues”, for Brunswick in 1930 at a second session in Memphis where Akers also recorded again (“Dough Roller Blues/Jumpin’ and Shoutin’”).

