Big Road Blues

J.D. Short

I suppose it sounds rather romantic spending your time roaming around the south with a tape recorder recording blues but for all the rewards and exciting discoveries it’s a stressful enterprise, not to mention a precarious way to make a living. These days hardly anyone one does it anymore and the sad fact is that blues has largely disappeared as integral part of African-American rural communities; most of the old timers have passed on and few of the younger generation are interested in blues, particularly traditional blues. Much has been written about John and Alan Lomax who scoured the south and beyond making landmark recordings for the Library of Congress from the 1930’s through the 1960’s. Less well known are those that followed in the Lomax’s footsteps; there was folklorists and researchers such as David Evans, Sam Charters, Gayle Dean Wardlow, Art Rosenbaum, Pete Welding, Chris Strachwitz ,Bruce Bastin, Bengt Olsson, Dick Spottswood, Kip Lornell, Glenn Hinson, Tim Duffy, Siegfried A. Christmann and Axel Küstner. Some were hunting for the famous names who made records in the 1920’s and 1930’s, others were seeking to fill in biographical blanks regarding some of the older musicians coveted by collectors and then there were those who were seeking to document the blues tradition as it still existed in rural communities, men like George Mitchell and Peter B. Lowry. This was a very different undertaking than 1960’s blues revival which sought out and put back on the circuit such legendary artists of the past as Son House, Skip James, Bukka White and Mississippi John Hurt. The field recordings made during this era were a sort of a parallel undercurrent to the more famous artists. What they recorded in the rural communities of Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and Mississippi in the 1960’s was a still thriving, if largely undocumented, blues culture.

Today’s abbreviated show is part two of our look at field recordings made in the 1960′s and 70′s. Today’s program spotlights recordings made by Paul Oliver, David Evans, Sam Charters, William Ferris, Fredric Ramsey Jr. and Bruce Jackson. In the second hour we present Truckin’ My Blues an hour-long special which introduces listeners to the stories and sounds of four older Southern bluesmen—and to the efforts of Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, to help lift these musicians from poverty and obscurity.

In the opening set we spin a couple of tracks recorded by Sam Charters.  Charters’ fieldwork, extensive liner notes, production efforts, and books served as an introduction to many who had never heard of artists like Lightnin’ Hopkins and Robert Johnson. Charters also began his work as a field recorder during the ’50s, and this research would result in his first book in 1959, The Country Blues. “…The Country Blues was the first full-length treatment of the topic,” wrote Benjamin Filene in Romancing the Folk, “and its evocative style inspired thousands of whites to explore the music.” A companion album, also titled The Country Blues, would simultaneously be released on Folkways. Charters compiled vintage blues reissues, produced numerous albums and did extensive field recording, much of it released on the Folkways label.

Baby Tate’s “When I First Started Hoboing” comes from the film The Blues (read loner notes) which  was begun as, Charters wrote, ” an effort to document aspects of the blues that couldn’t be put on to a phonograph record. In 1961 and 1962 I was doing a great deal of recording in the South, and in Memphis I became interested in not only the sound of Furry Lewis’s guitar style, but in the patterns of movement in his hands and fingers as he played. Out of this came the long trip through St. Louis, Memphis, Louisiana, and South Carolina in the summer of 1962 that led to the film. It was shot under very severe limitations of equipment and film knowledge with a hand held Bolex 16 mm camera, and the sound track was recorded with a portable Ampex machine and a small battery operated Uher. The Blues was finished early in 1963, and was premiered at the University of Chicago Folk Festival in January, 1963″

J.D. Short recorded two sessions in the early ’30s for Paramount and Vocalion, then quickly faded into obscurity. Charters recorded Short at his transplanted home base of St. Louis in 1961 while Charters was passing through the area making similar field recordings of Henry Townsend, Barrelhouse Buck Edith North Johnson, Henry Brown, and Daddy Hotcakes. Short’s recordings have recently been reissued on CD as part of the Sonet Blues Story. As Charters writes in the notes: “The recording that we did in his house that summer – mostly in the kitchen to get away from the noises in the street – was his last, but we didn’t have any idea of it. I was filming him for a sequence in ‘The Blues’ and trying to get his ideas about the backgrounds and the aesthetics of the blues for ‘The Poetry Of The Blues’ so we recorded a lot of music – new versions of songs he’d done before – new songs – and his own comments about the styles and the music.” Short unexpectedly passed away shortly after this session at the age of 60. Short also did a 1958 session with pal Big Joe Williams which was released on Delmark as Stavin’ Chain Blues.

Also in the first set we play a recording by another early field recorder, Frederic Ramsey. Ramsey traveled all over the South photographing black life.Much of his fieldwork is to be found in Music From the South, a 10-volume set of recordings that was released on Folkway. His book “Been Here and Gone,” about black culture was published in 1960.In 1958, folklorist Frederic Ramsey, Jr. recorded someone named Cat-Iron in Buckner’s Alley in Natchez, Mississippi. Ramsey wrote a detailed poetic description of his discovery of Cat-Iron for The Saturday Review which, alas, offered no background on the artist. A biographic cipher, Cat-Iron’s sole testament is Cat-Iron Sings Blues and Hymns, described in the 1958 Folkways catalogue as “old-time Negro songs and guitar style.”

We also play a pair of tracks from the CD accompanying William Ferris’ new book, Give My Poor Heart Ease: Voices of the Mississippi Blues. Ferris has written and edited 10 books, including the influential Blues from the Delta, and created 15 documentary films, most of which deal with African-American music and other folklore representing the Mississippi Delta. Ferris has produced several albums and made numerous field recordings.

On part one of this feature we played several recordings made by David Evans. It was Evans’ investigation into Tommy Johnson in the late 1960’s that we owe a good deal of what we know about Johnson and it was through Evans’ field recordings that Johnson’s influence comes into sharper focus. Evans began making field recordings in 1965 when he spent about five weeks taping blues artists in Mississippi and Louisiana. The collection Goin’ Up The Country released on Decca in 1968 collects some of the best performances he recorded. The album was reissued in 1976 on Rounder and Rounder also released South Mississippi Blues in 1973, another collection of field recordings from the same period. The Legacy of Tommy Johnson (1972) was issued as  the companion LP to Evans’ Tommy Johnson biography. Today’s selection, Ranie Burnette’s “Shake ‘Em On Down”, comes from the album Afro-American Folk Music From Tate And Panola Counties, Mississippi . The collection is a survey of the hill country, just east of the more famous Mississippi Delta, which has been compiled from recordings made by David Evans in 1969 -71, together with three takes from Alan Lomax’s famous 1942 visit there.

The earliest tracks come from 1960 and were made by Paul Oliver and Chris Strachwitz and come from the albums Conversations With The Blues, a companion to Oliver’s landmark book, and recordings the men made of Alex Moore and the Black Ace which were subsequently issued on Arhoolie Records. Conversation With The Blues is a series of interviews in the artists own words, compiled from interviews with over sixty blues singers. In the Summer of 1960 blues scholar Paul Oliver and his wife made a trip through Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas to interview and record older blues artists for a series of programs sponsored by the BBC. Among those recorded were Sam Chatmon, K.C. Douglas, Big Joe Williams, Butch Cage & Willie Thomas, Robert Curtis Smith among several others.Oliver was also in Chicago were he organized a recording session resulting the album Blues From Maxwell Street which features tracks by Arvella Gray, James Brewer, Daddy Stovepipe and King Davis.

Born in Hughes Springs, Texas, Babe Kyro Lemon AKA Black Ace was raised on the family farm, and taught himself to play guitar, performing in east Texas from the late 1920s on. During the early 1930s he began playing with Smokey Hogg and Oscar “Buddy” Woods, a Hawaiian-style guitarist who played with the instrument flat on his lap. In 1937 Turner recorded six songs Decca Records in Dallas, including the blues song “Black Ace”. In the same year, he started a radio show in Fort Worth, using the cut as a theme song, and soon assumed the name. In 1941 he appeared in The Blood of Jesus, an African-American movie produced by Spencer Williams Jr. In 1943 he was drafted into the United States Army, and gave up playing music for some years. However, in 1960, Arhoolie Records owner Chris Strachwitz and paul Oliver persuaded him to record an album for Arhoolie (reissued on CD as I Am The Boss Card In Your Hand). His last public performance was in a 1962 documentary, The Blues, and he died of cancer in Fort Worth, in 1972.

In 1929, Alex Moore made his debut recordings for Columbia Records and recorded again in 1937 for Decca Records. It was 1951 before Moore recorded again with RPM/Kent. However, throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Moore performed in clubs in Dallas and occasionally other parts of Texas. He was recorded by Paul Oliver and Chris Stratwichz in 1960 (reissued as From North Dallas To The East Side), and those subsequent recordings saw him obtain nationwide recognition.

Our final selection, the nearly ten minute “I Got Too Much Time For The Crime I Done”, comes from the remarkable album Ever Since I Have Been a Man Full Grown issued on  Takoma in 1965. The recording was made by Bruce Jackson in 1965 at Texas’s Ramsey Prison Farm of a fellow named Johnnie B., or J. B., Smith. As far as I know this is the only LP devoted to a single unaccompanied singer of prison work-song. From the liner notes: “Smitty – J.B. Smith – is eleven years into a forty-five year sentence that begun in 1954; he is 48 years old. This is his fourth time in prison in Texas and he does not expect to be paroled for some time. For him, a song like “No More Good Time in the World for Me”, though it draws heavily on the general inmate song vocabulary, is completely personal; the situation applies to him almost without qualification.” J.B. Smith: “The oldtimers still sing. That is, if whoever is carrying (in charge of) the squad will let them. In some cases the boss won’t let them sing. …The young men don’t get a chance to work with the older men and they haven’t experienced working with older men. A lot of them have never been in the system before. And the crews they work with don’t even know the songs, the worksongs that they work by. But once they get to working with the older men, they learn the songs and they try to carry them on when they can. But like I said, in most cases they can’t because they’re not permitted.”

In the second half of the program we air Truckin’ My Blues Away. From the notes: “This music-rich hour-long special introduces listeners to the stories and sounds of four older Southern bluesmen—and to the efforts of Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, to help lift these musicians from poverty and obscurity. The musicians cover a wide swath of the South: Boo Hanks from Virgina, Va.; Captain Luke from Winston-Salem, N.C.; Eddie Tigner from Atlanta; and Little Freddie King from New Orleans. In their own words and performances, these men bring us the story of a music, an era and a culture that are uniquely American.The program is co-produced and co-written by Richard Ziglar and Barry Yeoman, who traveled around the South collecting interviews and field recordings of the musicians. Yeoman, who co-produced our Gracie Award-winning program ‘Picking Up the Pieces,’ narrates.”

Next week, in the second half of the program, we air Truckin’ My Blues Away. From the notes: “This music-rich hour-long special introduces listeners to the stories and sounds of four older Southern bluesmen—and to the efforts of Tim Duffy, founder of the Music Maker Relief Foundation, to help lift these musicians from poverty and obscurity. The musicians cover a wide swath of the South: Boo Hanks from Virgina, Va.; Captain Luke from Winston-Salem, N.C.; Eddie Tigner from Atlanta; and Little Freddie King from New Orleans. In their own words and performances, these men bring us the story of a music, an era and a culture that are uniquely American.The program is co-produced and co-written by Richard Ziglar and Barry Yeoman, who traveled around the South collecting interviews and field recordings of the musicians. Yeoman, who co-produced our Gracie Award-winning program ‘Picking Up the Pieces,’ narrates.”

In our abbreviated program we take the first hour to look at field recordings made in the 1960′s and 70′s. The program will spotlight recordings made by Paul Oliver, David Evans, Sam Charters, William Ferris, Fredric Ramsey Jr. and Bruce Jackson.

Show Notes:

In his memoir, Big Bill Blues, Broonzy called Sleepy John Estes’ way of singing the blues “crying the blues.” As Tony Russell noted: “The 25-year old man who sat down to record “The Girl I Love, She Got Long Curly Hair” for a traveling Victor unit in Memphis would prove to be one of the company’s most striking finds in a city full of distinctive blues artists. High, blurred, plaintive, his voice sounded like that of a man on the verge of tears; sometimes it would even break, momentarily as if overwhelmed by emotion.” While Estes would become for his finely wrought personal songs, these initial numbers were local standards or common themes like “Divin’ Duck Blues” (“If the river was whiskey and I was a divin’ duck”). His storytelling is evident on early numbers like “Street Car Blues” but it wasn’t until signing with Decca in 1937 that he cut his most enduring compositions. Today’s program spotlights  Estes recordings before his comeback, spotlighting the remarkable recordings he made between 1929 and 1941. In addition we feature some of the fine musicians from the Brownsville area who worked and recorded with Estes including Son Bonds, Yank Rachell, Hammie Nixon, Charlie Pickett, Noah Lewis and Lee Brown.

John Adam “Sleepy John” Estes, was born in Ripley, Tennessee, around 1900. Estes first learned to play guitar from his sharecropper father at age twelve. Soon thereafter, while working in the cotton fields with his family, he crafted his own cigar-box guitar and began to hone his skills at local house parties and fish fries. His nickname “Sleepy” stemmed from a chronic blood pressure disorder that gave him fits of narcolepsy. Around 1915, the Estes family moved to Brownsville, Tennessee, which served as Sleepy John’s base residence periodically for the rest of his life. Brownsville was also home to “Hambone” Willie Newbern, an important early influence, as well as Yank Rachell and Hammie Nixon–musicians with whom Estes partnered at local venues and on professional recordings. Other Brownsville musicians who Estes worked with were pianist Lee Brown and guitarists Son Bonds and Charlie Pickett, all who recorded in the 30’s and all who backed Estes on record. Estes teamed with Rachell to play house parties, picnics, and the streets in the Brownsville area from 1919 to 1927. He also partnered with local harmonica player Hammie Nixon, hoboing Arkansas and southern Missouri with him from 1924 to 1927. At this time jug band music was wildly popular, so Estes started the Three J’s Jug Band with Rachell and jug player Jab Jones. The Three J’s played Memphis, where they competed for exposure in a competitive scene dominated by the Memphis Jug Band.

When the Victor recording company sent a field recording unit to Memphis in September 1929, Estes recorded several sides backed by the Three J’s, with Jones playing piano instead of the jug. Other acts to record for Victor on this trip included the Memphis Jug Band, Frank Stokes, and Cannon’s Jug Stompers. He was invited to record again for Victor in May 1930. This session yielded the uptempo “Milk Cow Blues,” a tune Robert Johnson would later record as “Milkcow Calf Blues.” In all the group cut fifteen sides, three were unissued, over the course of eight session in 1929 and 1930. Estes gave the following account of his recording debut: “Well, it was the guy who recorded the ‘Kansas City Blues’, Jim Jackson. We were coming down the street , me and Yank Rachell. He said ‘Boys, that was a mighty good peice you sang on the street the other day.. You can really sings. I can tell you how to make some money.’ Yank said, ‘John we can go ’round ourselves. We don’t need him to carry us.’ I went around to the Ellis Auditorium and we talked to Mr. R.S. Peer of New York City. he told us., ‘Boy’, he was recording two or three other boys there, they’d hit two pieces in an hour. ‘We got some more boys here but I want to see you before you go. I want you to come back late in the afternoon so I can hear what you can do.’ We went back then and we recorded.”

Estes and Nixon moved to Chicago in 1931 where they played parties and the streets. The Depression hit the recording industry hard, and the Estes/Nixon team did not record until a July 1935 date with the Champion label where the duo cut six sides at two sessions. Among the sides recorded were “Drop Down Mama” and “Some Day Baby Blues,” tunes that became staples for a later generation of bluesmen. As Tony Russell remarks: “Nixon is the nightingale of blues harmonica and his parallel melodies echoing Estes singing on “Someday Baby Blues” and “Drop Down Mama”, to mention just the most famous of their duets, are beautiful in their understated melancholy.” They left Chicago in the late 1930′s to travel the country playing lumber camps, parties, and street corners for four years. The Decca label brought Estes to New York City to record in 1937 and again in 1938 where he cut eighteen songs, laying down some of his most enduring songs. He was backed by Charlie Pickett on guitar and Hammie Nixon on harmonica. Among the songs were vivid depictions of the Depression in songs like “Down South Blues”, riding the blinds in “Special Agent Blues (Railroad Police Blues)”  and “Hobo Jungle Blues.” On the latter he sings:

Now, when I left Chicago, I left on that G & M (2X)
Then if I reach my home, I have to change over on that L& N
Now, came in on in that Mae West, and I put it down at Chicago Heights
Now, when I came in on that Mae West, I put it down at Chicago Heights
Now, you know, over in hobo jungle, and that’s where I stayed the night
Now, if you hobo through Brownsville, you better not be peepin’ out (2X)

Now, Mr. Whitten will git you, and Mr. Guy Hare will wear you out
Now, out East of Brownsville, about four miles from town (2X)
Now, if you ain’t got your fare, that’s where they will let you down

He sang many celebrated songs about hometown life in Brownsville including “Lawyer Clark” (“He said if I just stay out of the grave, he’d see that I wouldn’t go to the pen”), he sings about Martha Hardin’s house burning down in “Fire Department Blues”, he describes race relations in the south in “Clean Up At Home” (“I played for the colored, I played for the white/All you got to do, act kinda nice, you got to”) and the personal narrative “Floating Bridge” where describes a near brush with death after falling off a car ferry crossing a river:

Now I never will forget that floating bridge (3X)
Tell me five minutes time under water I was hidW
hen I was going down I throwed up my hands
Now, when I was going down, I throwed up my hands (2X)
Please, take me on dry land
Now they carried me in the house and they laid me ‘cross the blank’t (3X)

“Bout a gallon-and-half muddy water I had drankThey dried me off and they laid me in the bed
Now, they dried me off and they laid me in the bed (2X)
Couldn’t hear nothin’ but muddy water runnnin’ through my head

Estes was paired with younger guitarist Robert Nighthawk, perhaps to modernize his sound, for his last six song Decca session in 1940 which lack the spark of his collaborations with Nixon. A year later he recorded for the Bluebird label backed by kazoos and a tub bass in a swinging session with the Delta Boys (Son Bonds and Raymond Thomas), who echoed Estes’s jug band sensibilities. All three men variously take the lead on exuberant numbers like “Don’t You Want To Know” , “You Shouldn’t Do That” both sporting a vigorous kazoo solo from Bonds who takes the lead on “Black Gal Swing.” On September 24, 1941 the trio made their final sides together, a three song session for Bluebird including the aforementioned “Lawyer Clark” and “Little Laura.” Little Laura, according to Don Kent’s notes to the Yazoo Sleepy John Estes CD, was a neighbor of Sleepy John’s and the Jimmy referred to in the lyrics is Sleepy John’s name for Yank Rachell. This song is essentially the one Sonny Boy Williamson I  recorded for Bluebird a couple of months earlier as “She Was A Dreamer.”

Estes returned to sharecropping in Brownsville in 1941. In 1948, he and Nixon recorded again for the Ora Nelle label (“Harlem Bound” and “Stone Blind Blues”) but the records went unreleased. Estes went completely blind in 1950 and elected to try his hand at recording again. In 1952 he cut four sides for the Sun label. Estes was rediscovered in 1962 during the blues revival. He cut several albums for Delmark and returned to touring with Hammie Nixon before health problems confined him to Brownsville. Sleepy John Estes died June 5, 1977.

After recording with Sleepy John Estes in  1929 and 1930 Yank Rachell decided to try his hand at farming and also worked for the L&N Railroad. During a stopover in New York Rachell teamed up with guitarist Dan Smith and laid down 25 titles for ARC in just three days, though only six of them were issued. Shortly before the ARC date, Rachell had discovered a kid harmonica player that he believed had real talent, John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson. They worked together at the Blue Flame Club in Jackson, Tennessee starting in 1933. In 1934 Williamson went north to Chicago. With the success of Williamson’s first Bluebird dates of 1937, Rachell decided to join Sonny Boy in Chicago for sessions in March and June of 1938. Yank Rachell also contributed four sides of his own to each session, and then 16 more in 1941 with Sonny Boy backing him up. After Sonny Boy Williamson’s murder in 1948, Rachell drifted away from music and relied solely on straight jobs to make his living, settling permanently in Indianapolis in 1958. His wife passed away in 1961, and afterward he began to resume performing. In 1962, Rachell was re-united with Nixon and Estes, and the three of them began playing college and coffeehouse circuit, recording for Delmark as Yank Rachell’s Tennessee Jug Busters. Estes died in 1977, and from that time Rachell worked mainly as a solo act. He recorded only sporadically in his last years and passed in 1997 at the age of 87.

Sleepy John Estes, American Folk Blues Festival, 1964

Noah Lewis was born in Henning, Tennessee, and raised in the vicinity of Ripley. He played in local string bands and brass bands, and began playing in the Ripley and Memphis areas with Gus Cannon. When jug bands became popular in the mid-1920s, he joined Cannon’s Jug Stompers. He cut seven sides under his own name at sessions in 1929 and 1930. Recording as Noah Lewis’ Jug Band, he was backed on two numbers by Sleepy John and Yank Rachell with just Estes backing him on two other numbers cut a couple of days apart. Lewis died in poverty of gangrene brought on by frostbite in Ripley, Tennessee, in 1961.

Harmonica player Hammie Nixon was born on January 22, 1908, in Brownsville, TN. He began his career as a professional harmonica player in the 1920s, but also played the kazoo, guitar, and jug. “I used to hear a lot about him, John Adam”, Nixon recalled, “and I was just a kid, living out on my parent’s home near Ripley.  …And he heard me playing and he asks me would I like to go and play my harp for him?So I told him yes, but I had o ask my mama first because I was just young, see. So he comes back to my mama’s house with me, but she didn’t want me to go you know. Anyhow he says like he would look after me and provide for me and so forth so she let me go. And we been together ever since.” He performed with Sleepy John Estes for more than 50 years. He also recorded with Lee Green, Charlie Pickett, and Son Bonds. He played with many jug bands. After Estes died, Nixon played with the Beale Street Jug Band (also called the Memphis Beale Street Jug Band) from 1979 onward. Shortly before his death he cut his lone album, the marvelous  Tappin’ That Thing for the High Water label. He died August 17, 1984.

Another associate of Sleepy John Estes and Hammie Nixon, Son Bonds played very much in the same rural Brownsville style that the Estes-Nixon team popularized in the ’20s and ’30s. The music to one of Bonds’s songs, “Back and Side Blues” cut in 1934, became a standard blues melody when John Lee “Sonny Boy” Williamson from nearby Jackson, TN, used it in his classic “Good Morning, (Little) School Girl” he cut in 1937.Bonds cut a total of fifteen sides over five sessions in 1934, 1938 and 1941. Hammie Nixon backs Bonds on the two 1934 sessions while Estes backs Bonds on his last two sessions in 1938 and 1941.On his Decca and Champion sides Bonds was called Brownsville Son Bonds and Brother Son Bonds at his second Decca session which was religious. Nixon gave the following account of Bonds’ death: “He got killed around the same time that Sonny Boy got killed. Sonny Boy got killed in Chicago, Son got killed in Dyersburg. A fellow shot him, he though he was shooting somebody else. Son was sitting on his porch. This guy wore them great thick glasses and he got into it with the guy who lived next door to Son. It was way about 12:00 at night and he though it was the boy who lived next door.” Estes had a different version involving a woman and a plot to get Bonds’ insurance money.

Little is known about Charlie Pickett, who was from Brownsville, TN. Sheldon Harris reported that he was Estes cousin. Hammie Nixon had him performing in a group with Estes, Nixon, and others on the streets of Chicago in the 1930′s and 1940′s. Nixon told Kip Lornell in 1975, “He started preaching in St. Louis, been living in St. Louis for a couple of years. I think he’s preaching in Los Angeles now.” Of the song “Let Me Squeeze Your Lemon”,Nixon said, “I will never forget the first time he started playing that song, how he sung a something like, ‘When I got home, another nigger kicking in my stall.’ The bossman told him ‘don’t say that no more!’” He cut four sides for Decca in 1937 backed by Hammie Nixon and Lee Brown.  Pickett also played guitar behind Estes on 19 numbers at sessions in 1937 and 1938. He or Estes may have played guitar behind pianist Lee Green at a 1937 session.

Pianist Lee Brown was another member of the Tennessee musicians who who worked in Estes orbit. As Tony Russell sums up: “…Brown was subsequently more prolific than his modest talent merited.” His lone hit was “Little Girl, Little Girl” from his second 1937 session, sessions at which he backed Estes and Charlie Pickett. Estes backs Brown on two songs from his first session. In all Brown was involved in six sessions that yielded twenty-nine sides with one unissued. He was backed by some top flight backing musicians including Charlie Shavers, Sammy Price, Buster Bailey, Henry Allen, Robert Lee McCoy and Lil Armstrong among others. Brown cut some post-war material including two songs in 1945 for the Chicago label and a session for King in 1946

Show Notes:

We cover a wide swath of blues spanning from 1927 through 1976. Along the way we spotlight some fine piano blues, several superb blues ladies, lots of pre-war blues including twin spins of Charlie Patton and two by Memphis Slim. Among the featured piano players are a couple from St. Louis; Aaron “Pinteop” Sparks and Charlie McFadden. According to Henry Townsend McFadden could play a little piano but on his records deferred to others including Roosevelt Sykes, Eddie Miller and Aaron “Pinteop” Sparks. McFadden was a marvelous vocalist who possessed a plaintive, laid back delivery and was a good lyricist to boot. McFadden used the name “Speck” Pertum when he recorded for Brunswick, nicknamed for the glasses he always wore. Based in St. Louis, he toured extensively with Roosevelt Sykes, traveling as far south as Texas. McFadden cut two-dozen sides between 1929 and 1937 for a variety of different labels. According to Townsend he passed sometime in the early 1940′s.

The Sparks brothers were based in St. Louis and cut four sessions, the first for Victor and the other three for Bluebird, between 1932 and 1935. Milton cut two songs for Decca in 1934 under the name Flyin’ Lindberg. Aaron backed a number of St. Louis artists at their second session: Elisabeth Washington, Tecumseh McDowell, Dorotha Trowbridge, James “Stump” Johnson and Charlie McFadden.Townsend remembered the brothers well:   “He [Marion] just kept getting better and better and got to playing for illegal joints y’know. …Pinetop was doing a lot of house-party playing and uh ’cause this was a trend then. We would go from house-party to house-party and make some money to pay the rent. We’d go from place to place like that I mean it’d be announced at this party before it was over that there would be such and such a place to get their rent paid and Pinetop would play for those kind of parties where they had a piano–and I kinda went around him quite a bit.” Now at that time Milton wasn’t singing, Pinetop was the star when it come to singing. And so just out of nowhere Milton decided he was going to sing and he’d start. …Aaron got the name Pinetop because “He was very good at the number that Smith made [Pinetop Smith's "Pine Top's Boogie Woogie"]. Today’s selection, “Down On The Levee”, is a typically sensitive mid-tempo number featuring Milton’s fine, mellow delivery and some wonderful right hand flourishes from Aaron.

Mack Rhinehart and Brownie Stubblefield were a piano/guitar team that cut a dozen sides in 1936 and 1937. Rhinehart also recorded solo as Blind Mack in 1935 but only two of his ten  sides were ever released.  According to Blues & Gospel Records some twenty-two sides by the duo remain unissued. Nothing is known about the duo although noted researcher David Evans called Rhinehart “a major artist” with “an outstanding recorded legacy.”

Better known is Montana Taylor who was born Arthur Taylor in Butte, Montana, where his father owned a club. The family moved to Chicago and then Indianapolis, where Taylor learned piano around 1919. Later he moved to Cleveland, Ohio. By 1929 he was back in Chicago, where he recorded a few tracks for Vocalion Records, including “Indiana Avenue Stomp” and “Detroit Rocks”. He then disappeared for some years but was rediscovered by jazz fan Rudi Blesh, and was recorded both solo and as the accompanist to Bertha “Chippie” Hill who sings on today’s track, “Mistreatin’ Mr. Dupree.” His final recordings were from a 1948 radio broadcast. Taylor died in 1954. Taylor’s final recordings are collected on the CD Circle Recordings on the Southland label.

Bertha “Chippie” Hill

We showcase several fine blues ladies including stars Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith plus lesser known singers like Mary Johnson, Hattie Burleson and Hattie Hudson. From 1928 we hear Bessie in top form in “Slow And Easy Man.” The Columbia Records 1927 catalog gave prominence to Bessie as “The Empress of the Blues” and listed a full three pages of her recordings. The advertising read: “Wherever the blues are sung, there you will hear the name of Bessie Smith, best loved of all the Race’s blues singers. Bessie has the knack for picking the songs you like and the gift of singing them the way you want them sung. Every year this famous ‘Empress of the Blues’ tours the country appearing before packed houses.”  Like Bessie Ma Rainey made her debut in 1923. Born in 1886, she said that she added blues in her act in 1902 and by the 1920′s it certainly dominated her repertoire. Our selection, “Leaving This Morning”, is one of eight numbers she cut in 1928 backed by the team of Tampa Red and Georgia Tom Dorsey.

Of the lesser known ladies, Mary Johnson of St. Louis (sometimes billed as “Signifying Mary”) made her debut in 1929. She cut just shy of two-dozen songs, achieved modest success and never recorded again after 1936 despite living until 1970. Johnson was blessed with superb backing musicians throughout her brief career that elevated her recordings above many of her contemporaries. She was accompanied by either Henry Brown, Judson Brown, Roosevelt Sykes, or Peetie Wheetstraw on piano, many selections featuring trombonist Ike Rodgers, guitarists Tampa Red and Kokomo Arnold and violinist Artie Mosby. Hattie Burleson and Hattie Hudson both hail from Dallas. Hudson cut one 78 in Dallas in 1927.Texas blues singer Hattie Burleson recorded four tracks in Dallas, TX, for Brunswick Records in October 1928. Two years later she recorded three sides in Grafton, WI, for Paramount Records. Little else is known about her life, save that she lived in the famed Deep Ellum area of downtown Dallas, where she operated a dancehall for a time. Her “Sadie’s Servant Room Blues” is a rare protest song dealing with domestic service:

Missus Jarvis don’t pay me much
They give me just what they think I’m worth
I’m gonna change my mind, yes change my mind
Cause I keep the servant room blues all the time

I receive my company in the rear
Still these folks don’t want to see them here
Gonna change my mind, yes change my mind
Cause I keep the servant room blues all the time

We spin a pair of tracks apiece by Memphis Slim and Charlie Patton. From Slim we play tracks form two excellent 1960′s records: Sonet Blues Story cut for Verve in 1967 and  Bad Luck & Trouble cut for Candid in 1961 a session he shared with Jazz Gillum and Arbee Stidham. The former session is a nice date featuring excellent contributions from guitarist Billy Butler and tenor man Eddie Chamblee. Slim is in majestic form on today’s number, “I Am The Blues.” The latter date finds Slim running through some favorites and offering up some spoken commentary about the songs’ originators like Leroy Carr, Big Maceo and Curtis Jones.

We return again to Charlie Patton who we spotlighted at the end of November. I never get tired of listening to Patton and this time we spin a couple of tracks I didn’t get to last time: “Elder Greene” and “Hammer Blues.” “Elder Greene” was likely a song Patton picked up from his mentor Henry Sloan.  As David Evans noted the song is “related melodically to versions of “Alabama Bound,” a song that Patton’s niece identified in Sloan’s repertoire. Of the latter number Evans writes  “‘Hammer Blues’ there are brief mentions of serving a sentence on a road gang and being shackled in preparation for a train ride to Parchman Penitentiary in northern Sunflower County. It is not known whether these verses refer to an experience of Patton or of one or more of his friends.”

We play some more modern blues, relatively speaking, from the 1960′s. Among those are cuts by L.C. Robinson (House Cleanin’ Blues) and Homesick James (Ain’t Sick No More) cut for the Bluesway label. ABC-Paramount formed the BluesWay subsidiary in 1966 to record blues music. The label lasted into 1974, with the last new releases coming in February, 1974. The label issued over 70 albums, numerous 45′s plus several titles that remain unreleased. The label has been ill served reissue wise with only a handful of releases issued on CD, usually by labels other than the parent company MCA, and in many cases these CD’s themselves are out of print. MCA has largely left the catalogue languish. The BluesWay label has a decidedly mixed reputation, cutting many very good records and many downright bad ones. At some point I’ll be doing a feature on the Bluesway label.

Show Notes:

When a woman get the blues, she goes to her room and hides (2x)
When a man gets the blues, he catches a freight train and rides
(Trixie Smith, Freight Train Blues)

For southern Blacks the appeal of the railroads has always been both a real and a symbolic one. For them the train was a symbol of power, of freedom and escape.  As blues historian Paul Oliver wrote: “In the slavery periods when they were unable to travel between districts without written ‘bonds’ from their owners, the snorting engines, with brilliant furnaces traces their progress and clouds of black smoke that hung in the still air above the tracks long after the screaming whistles had died away, inspired them in awe which their descendants still retain.” This image carried on, in the hard times of the 1920′s and 1930s’, when the southern Blacks struggled to make a living and saw the northern cities as their saviors, where work was plentiful and a better life was to be had. As the blues developed, the railroad featured prominently in the songs. Numerous songs were sung about individual trains such as the Flying Crow, the Sunshine Special and the Panama Limited, many simply abbreviated like the C&O (Chesapeake and Ohio), T&P (Texas Pacific) or the L&N (Louisville and Nashville), many songs dealt with the hobos who rode the rails, others dealt with working for the railroad while other songs retold the famous railroad ballads of John Henry, Railroad Bill and Casey Jones. Today’s show will spotlight all of these types of railroad blues.

The title of today’s program comes from the song by Henry Thomas. Thomas, nicknamed “Ragtime Texas”, was born in 1874 in Big Sandy, Texas. The 1874 date marks him as one of the eldest-born blues performers on record. Thomas was the archetypal rambling musician who went wherever the railroads would take him. According to Mack McCormick, as told to him from a former railroad conductor, “Ragtime Texas was a big fellow that used to come aboard at Gladewater or Mineola or somewhere in there. I’d always carry him, except when he was too dirty. He was a regular hobo, but I’d carry him most of the time. That guitar was his ticket.” Speaking of his famous “Railroadin’ Some”, William Barlow calls it the most “vivid and intense recollection of railroading” in all the early blues recorded in the 1920’s.

Among the famous railroad songs featured today are two associated with Leadbelly, “Rock Island Line” and ‘Midnight Special”, and the folk ballads Casey Jones, John Henry and Railroad Bill. John Lomax recorded “Rock Island Line” at the Cummins State Prison farm, Gould, Arkansas, in 1934 from its convict composer, Kelly Pace. Leadbelly, who was with Lomax at the time, rearranged it in his own style, and made commercial recordings of it in the forties. The song refers to the Chicago, Rock Island and Pacific Railroad. Lyrics appearing in the “Midnight Special” were first recorded in print by Howard Odum in 1905. The song was first commercially recorded on the OKeh label in 1926 as “Pistol Pete’s Midnight Special” by Dave “Pistol Pete” Cutrell and the following year by bluesman Sam Collins. In 1934 Lead Belly recorded a version of the song at Angola Prison for John and Alan Lomax, who mistakenly attributed it to him as the author. Leadbelly recorded at least three versions of the song, including the one we feature with the Golden Gate Quartet.

John Luther “Casey” Jones was an American railroad engineer from Jackson, Tennessee who worked for the Illinois Central Railroad. On April 30, 1900, he alone was killed when his passenger train collided with a stalled freight train at Vaughan, Mississippi on a foggy and rainy night. His dramatic death trying to stop his train and save lives made him a folk hero who became immortalized in a popular song. We spin two versions on today’s program: “Kassie Jones Pt. 1″ by Furry Lewis and “Southern Casey Jones” by Jesse James.

John Henry is an American folk hero, notable for having raced against a steam powered hammer and won, only to die in victory with his hammer in his hand. He has been the subject of numerous songs, stories, plays, and novels. The truth about John Henry is obscured by time and myth, but one legend has it that he was a slave born in Missouri in the 1840s and fought his notable battle with the steam hammer along the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway in Talcott, West Virginia. On today’s show we play a version by the duo The Two Poor Boys.

The legend of Railroad Bill arose in the winter of 1895, along the Louisville and Nashville (L&N) Railroad line in southern Alabama. Based loosely on the exploits of an African American outlaw known as “Railroad Bill,” tales of his brief but action-filled career on the wrong side of the law have been preserved in song, fiction, and theater. He has been variously portrayed as a “Robin Hood” character, a murderous criminal and a nameless victim of the Jim Crow South. He was never conclusively identified, but L&N detectives claimed he was a man named Morris Slater. Today we spin  “Railroad Bill” by Will Bennett.

Featured today are several songs about specific trains or railroad lines. Our opening track “Sunshine Special” by Blind Lemon Jefferson refers the train of the same name which was inaugurated by the Missouri Pacific Railroad on December 5, 1915, providing service between St. Louis, Little Rock, and destinations in Texas. The Sunshine Special served as the flagship of Missouri Pacific Railroad’s passenger train service. Several songs make reference to the Flying Crow, a train line connecting Port Arthur, Texas to Kansas City with major stops in Shreveport and Texarkana. Black Ivory King, Carl Davis & the Dallas Jamboree Jug Band, Dusky Dailey, Washboard Sam and Oscar Woods all recorded songs about the train. Other songs dealing with specific trains featured today include Jack Ranger’s “T.P. Window Blues” ( Texas Pacific Railroad), Lucille Bogan’s “T& NO Blues” (Texas and New Orleans Railroad), Sparks Brothers‘ “I.C. Train Blues” (Illinois Central Railroad), Little Brother Montgomery’s “A. & V. Railroad Blues” (Alabama & Vicksburg Railroad), Willie Brown’s “M&O Blues” (Mobile and Ohio Railroad), Billiken Johnson’s “Sun Beam Blues” (Sunbeam was a named passenger train operated from 1925 to 1955 between Houston and Dallas by the Texas and New Orleans Railroad), Andrew and Jim Baxter’s “K C Railroad Blues” (Kansas City Southern Railway), George Noble’s “The Seminole Blues” (Seminole Gulf Railway), and Pink Anderson & Simmnie Dooley’s “C.C. and O. Blues” (Chesapeake and Ohio). Sam Collins’ “Yellow Dog Blues” seems to refer to two trains. In 1903 W.C. Handy related how he heard a lean, raggedy, black guitarist in Tutwiler’s railroad depot, singing of going to where the “Southern cross the Yellow Dog.” The “Southern” was the Southern Railway which began operations in 1894.“The Dog” was the Yellow Dog, a name for the Yazoo Delta Railroad which opened in 1897.

Several songs like Bukka White’s ” Special Streamline” and Cripple Clarence Lofton’s “Streamline Train” refer to streamliners. A streamliner is any vehicle that incorporates streamlining to produce a shape that provides less resistance to air. The term is most often applied to certain high-speed railway trainsets of the 1930′s to 1950′s. For a short time in the late 1930s, the ten fastest trains in the world were all American streamliners.

Other trains immortalized in blues songs will be featured in the sequel to today’s show; trains such as the Cannon Ball (an Illinois Central passenger train routing between Chicago and New Orleans, now known as the City of New Orleans), the Santa Fe (Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway), the Seaboard (The Seaboard Coast Line Railroad), the Katy (the Missouri, Texas, Kansas, Texas line), the Big four (Cleveland, Cincinnati, Chicago & St. Louis Railroad ) and the New York Central among others.