Henry Thomas, Texas songster

Henry Thomas - Bull Doze Blues (buy) (1928)

Henry Thomas - Fishin' Blues (buy) (1928)

Henry Thomas, aka "Ragtime Texas" was one of the oldest Black folk musicians to ever record. Born in Big Sandy, Tx, in 1874, he recorded in 1928-89 when he was in his fifties. The 23 songs he left us (available on the Yazoo compilation Texas Worried Blues) are a great document on the music that was there before the blues. Henry was the archetypal songster, capable of playing any kind of popular music to entertain his audience and earn his life.
If you want to know more about the man please read this excellent article in The Handbook of Texas Online.

In fact Ragtime Texas only waxed a handfull of "bona fide" blues, and the rest was of various origins : rags, reels and other country dances, vaudeville and minstrel songs, with floating verses taken from many different popular songs.
His lively guitar playing, his use of the quills (see previous post), make him a very original figure of a great influence. His music was re-discovered thanks to the Harry Smith anthology in 1952, that featured a couple of his tunes, including "Fishin' Blues". In the 60's, great old-time music lovers like Dylan ("Honey Aloow Me One More Chance"), Canned Heat ("Bull Doze Blues" becoming "Goin' Up The Country"), Grateful Dead or Taj Mahal covered his songs.

And most of all, Ragtime Texas sang about the itinerant life of the hobo-musician like nobody else, especially in the following song :

Henry Thomas - Railroadin' Some (buy) (1928)

I leave you with this beautiful tribute made by Norman Blake 70 years after Henry Thomas recorded.

Norman Blake - Ragtime Texas (buy) (1998)

Favorite roots albums : Blind Gary Davis - Harlem Street Singer

Blind Gary Davis - Death Don't Have No Mercy (buy) (1960)

Blind Gary Davis - Lo, I Be With You Always (buy) (1960)

Sorry folks for the late post, I have few free time these days due to the Top 200 AMF album poll I'm running. This is another of my favorite albums.

This beautiful LP was part of my father's collection when I discovered it. It features a great vocalist and guitar picker in 12 gospel-blues songs as he sang them in the streets of New York City. The album was recorded in a 3 hour session on August 24, 1960.

This is pure top notch acoustic blues and one of the very first masterpieces of the folk/blues revival of the sixties.

I'll discuss the man Gary Davis later but you can check out his bio here.

A to Z : The Allen Brothers

The Allen Brothers - Bow Wow Blues (buy) (1927)


The Allen Brothers - Jake Walk Blues (buy) (1930)

Ever since the beginnings of the country industry, singers and musicians were fascinated by the blues. Although the most famous of them was Jimmie Rodgers and his blue yodels, others like Darbie & Tarlton, Dick Justice recorded numerous blues songs, but the Allen Brothers' music was so rooted in the blues that Columbia catalogued their recordings as "race" performances, which caused them to leave the label.

Austin and Lee Allen were from a poor family of Chatanooga sawyers, and spent a part of their youth as itinerant musicians especially on miners camps in the moutains. There they probably met a lot of other songsters, black and white, and learnt a lot from them. The songs they recorded between 1927 and 1937 were mostly personal compositions (a rare fact at that time) inspired by blues standards and jug band numbers. They often wrote about current events : "Jake Walk Blues" is a commentary on the Jamaican ginger ("jake") food-poisoning episode that made headlines that year.

Although they were good singers and valuable banjo/guitar players, Lee's kazzo playing is the duo's trademark. As Bill C Malone says , "he took this child's toy of presumed limited range and converted it to a lead instrument of exceptional flexibility. On Allen Bros recordings the kazoo is used like a trumpet; the result is a sound not unlike that heard on Charlie Poole's string band recordings, a syncopated but structured swing."

Like a lot of musicians who recorded in the twenties, their onstage repertoire was wider than just the blues.

As a bonus, here is a good example of their uptempo, swinging songs.

The Allen Brothers - Ain't That Skippin' An' Flyin' (buy) (1928)

Check out their AMG bio

Here a post on Lonesome Lefty's Scratchy Attic

Summer closing

Pink Anderson - I'm Going Away Baby (buy) (1961)


This is where I will spend the next 2 weeks, in Briançon, a little town in the Southern Alps, away from computers of all kinds. Then I'll go for another week in Normandie, so I won't be back before three weeks.

See you in september with a new River's Invitation : possibly one post a week instead of 2, and more bridges to late 20th century music.

Black ballads (5) : Crimes of passion

Mississippi John Hurt - Frankie (buy) (1928)


Leadbelly -Ella Speed (buy) (1944)

Man-to-woman murder, or the opposite, is very common in the blues, and it was the subject of ballads too : the two above, but also "Delia", sung by Willie McTell and brilliantly covered by Johnny Cash in 1994. What is more appealing and thrilling than passion and murder, treason and love gone mad ?

Of course the most famous of all is "Frankie and Albert", "Frankie and Johnny" or just "Frankie" in the Mississippi John Hurt version. You will find anything you need to know about it here in this Wikipedia article, and once again, at the Old Weird America, where you can download dozens of different versions of the song by blues, hillbilly, jazz and pop artists.

"Ella Speed" is based on the story of a New Orleans mulatto prostitute (an "octoroon") who was shot by Louis "Bull" Martin, a white man of Italian origin who was in love with her. She was married and had turned him down.

In Leadbelly's rendition, Bull Martin becomes Bill Martin. You can read more about the song story here in a post about the Mance Lipscomb version recorded by Chris Strachwitz in 1960. A good transition to my next post, as you will see in a few days.

A to Z : Ray Agee (1930-1990)

Ray Agee - Tin Pan Alley (buy) (Sahara, 1963)


Ray Agee - From Now On (buy) (Hi-Fi, 1958)


Ray Agee (see his All Music Guide Biography), born in Alabama, was stricken by polio at age 4. On one of the rare pictures of him I could find, he's leaning on two crutches. When his family emigrated to California, he and his brothers formed a gospel group. Then he switched to doo-wop and R&B and recorded his first 45, "Deep Troubled" for L.A label Aladdin.

I really love his 1963 cover of "Tin Pan Alley", his most acclaimed song, with a great guitar work by Johnny Heartsman. Agee was both a versatile and prolific composer. He tried doo-wop, soul, smooth Charles Brown-like West Coast blues, acoustic blues, socially conscious songs and pop-corn soul and recorded for myriads of small, local labels, never earning a nationwide fame.

Please don't forget to check out 2 posts about Agee in The MPM blog, with a 1972 song and most of all, a great radio interview of Frank Zappa, Ray Agee and Shuggie Otis from 1970 followed by an accoustic jam session with Agee singing. You'll learn that the first record Zappa ever stole was a Ray Agee 45 !

Black ballads (4) : Bad Men, from Stack'O Lee to John Hardy

Champion Jack Dupree - Stack O'Lee (buy) (1958)


The bad man is another recurrent hero of black ballads, and an object of fascination and fear (see the Railroad Bill discussion) . The bad man survived the blues era and can be found in rap and of course, reggae. Last week I saw "The Harder They Come" (with the famous and excellent soundtrack), a great "bad man" story.

The archetypal bad man is, of course, Stagger Lee (or Stack'O Lee), a St Louis (or, some say Memphis) pimp who shot Billy Lyons for a Stetson hat. A lot has been said and written about him, including a famous essay by Greil Marcus who linked him to Sly Stone.
Most scholars see a shooting in Saint Louis as the original murder that gave birth to the Stagger Lee legend.

Please check out this great post about Stack'O Lee at Gadaya's Old Weird America with the original story, many useful links and 40 versions by musicians of various genres and times.

In short, like Gadaya says, Stack is the dark side of John Henry, and his song, like the one about the steel diver, was recorded by hundreds of artists (400 according to the Staggerlee.com site). I love the Mississippi John Hurt rendition, one of the very first, but as we've already heard his John Henry, I'm posting the Champion Jack Dupree cover, one of a long line of New Orleans Stagger Lees (by Archibald, Lloyd Price, Fess Longhair, etc..).

Leadbelly - Duncan and Brady (buy) (1947)

Other bad men and murderers include Duncan, who shot sheriff Bill Brady in a barroom or a grocery store (some grocery stores sold whiskey and even other things). This song is very similar to Stagger Lee and seems to originate from St Louis too, as well as "Ella Speed" or "Frankie" of which we will talk later.
It was first recorded by hillbilly singer Wilmer Watts but the most famous version is by Leadbelly. Check out this discussion at Mudcat Cafe's forum and you'll learn a lot about the song's origins.
Let's not forget that Leadbelly himself carried the image of the bad man, sentenced 3 times for murder and assault.

Willie Walker - Dupree Blues (buy) (1930)

Frank Dupree grew up in Abbeville, South Carolina. He came on the scene in December 1921 in Atlanta, Georgia, where he had a gal Betty. In trying to appropriate a diamond for her in a jewelry store he shot a policeman down. Fleeing to Memphis and later to Chicago, where he was cornered, he killed a policeman and wounded several more. He was caught while getting his mail and sent to Atlanta for trial. He was executed for murder on September 1, 1922." (Roberts, Leonard Ward. In the Pine: Selected Kentucky Folksongs. Pikeville College Press, 1978.)

Another bad man story, where the hero kills for love (or, should we say, where the hero kills to satisfy his woman's greed) and the occasion to post a song by the great Willie Walker, a blind and forgotten musician from South Carolina (just like Dupree)who recorded 4 fantastic Piedmont blues in 1930 for Columbia with Sam Brooks, his regular accompanist.

Last but not least, John Hardy. In my earlier John Henry post, Lynchie from Aberdeen stressed the strong link between these two Johns. This is something I had never thought of, but this page confirms that for some people, J. Hardy and John Henry were one and the same. Both stories come from West Virginia.
Don't forget to check out the John Hardy post at Old Weird America, replete with information and recordings.
The historical John Hardy was probably a black coal miner who killed another worker over a crap game in West Viriginia. Before being hanged, he wrote a repentance song, which is believed to be the origin of the folk piece. Although John Hardy was black, the majority of singers who recorded the song were white, with the notable exception of Leadbelly (and more recently, Alvin Youngblood Hart). But the rendition which in my opinion towers over all the others, is by the Carter Family, with the great guitar work of Maybelle and Sara's voice.

The Carter Family - John Hardy Was A Desperate Little Man (buy) (1928)

Black ballads (3) : Railroad Bill and Kassie Jones, Heroes of the railway

Will Bennett - Railroad Bill (buy) (1929)

Furry Lewis - Kassie Jones (two parts) (buy) (1928)


On March 7, 1896, a man was shot at Tidmore and Ward’s general store in Atmore, Alabama (see photo above), and fell dead with 15 bullets in his body. The authorities and newspapers identified him as Railroad Bill, the famous outlaw who had been robbing trains in the Louisville to Nashville (L&N) railroad line and around, and murdered (at least) a lawman and 2 sheriffs that ware sent after him. You can find his whole story here at the Encyclopedia of Alabama, and an account of his death here at Lady Muleskinner Press.

Railroad Bill soon became a hero, especially to African Americans, who saw him as a symbol of rebellion against white power in these hard times of increasing segregation. He was said to be a sort of Robin Hood, selling stolen goods to the poor at a cheap price, and as a trickster and even a shapeshifter, able to turn into a dog or a fox when he was hunted. As Paul Oliver writes in his book Songsters and Saints :

Railroad Bill was the bad man/hero who was admired and feared by the black community; the outlaw on whom could be projected the challenge to the dominant whites, which, in a troubled time, they were too afraid to make themselves.

Ballads about Railroad Bill started circulating around 1900, and in 1929 Will Bennett, an unknown songster, recorded the most famous afro-american version in Tennessee. He puts himself in the place of the outlaw with a long description of his weapons, exactly like a gangsta rapper of the 1980's...

Kassie Jones (or Casey Jones, see photo above) was another great hero of the railway and subject of numerous ballads. He was the opposite of Railroad Bill : a white ingeneer who died in 1900 at the controls of his machine in a collision with another train while speeding to make up for lost time.

As he did for "John Henry" and the ballads on the Harry Smith anthology, Gadaya at The Old Weird America made a great post about Kassie Jones, including Lewis'bio, the whole story of the events depicted in the song and the history of the Casey Jones ballad. You can also find 50 different versions of the song !

Go to the Kassie Jones post on Old Weird America and find 40 different versions

While white singers emphasized the heroic behavior of the engineer and made him a symbol of self-sacrifice (he stayed at the control trying to stop his train and asked his fireman to jump to safety), the Furry Lewis version, which is the first recorded by an Afro-American, is quite different. Furry Lewis was an ex-hobo who had lost the use of a leg while trying to get on board of a train in his youth.

If you look at Furry Lewis' version (see here the lyrics of the traditional "white" ballad and the Furry Lewis version) it is not a chronological account of the facts but a sort of "stream of consciousness", jumping from the story to the narrator's point of view and to verses that seem to have no relation to Casey Jones and are borrowed from other ballads. The emphasis is not only on Kassie (who becomes almost a secondary character) but also on the figure of the "easeman" or "eastman", the narrator. Here's the final stanza :

I left Memphis to spread the news
Memphis women don't wear no shoes
Had it written in the back of my shirt
Natural born Eastmen don't have to work
Don't have to work
I'm a natural born Eastman, don't have to work

which makes Paul Oliver write :

The Eastman, or easeman, was a hustler, who lived by his wits, and, most often, as a pimp. Perhaps because the principal figure was white, perhaps because he died at the throttle straining to make up time, Casey Jones seems not to have been an enduring hero-figure in black ballads compared with the popularity of the engineer in white songs. If the moral of the story to some white singers was a reckless attention to duty, Furry Lewis's insouciant final stanza makes it clear where he stood.

In fact, just like Will Bennett's "Railroad Bill", it is very typical of what Paul Oliver calls the "blues ballad". The words are improvised, only the general structure is pre-established, with stanzas and, in the case of "Railroad Bill", a one-line refrain. In every recording Furry Lewis did of "Kassie Jones", the words were different : some new stanzas appeared and some others were put in a different place. These traits are found in the blues too.

Will Bennett ends his "Railroad Bill" with stanzas about his alcoholism, which have nothing to do with the Railroad BIll story. It is, in a sense, very symbolical of how the blues was born. Songsters, in addition to playing the old ballads, started to sing about their personal experience. The blues is very often sung in the first person.

I guess I've told you enough for today...

PS : Let me add, as a bonus track for those who'll have read the whole text, a great cover of Kassie Jones by Rory Block, 70 years after !

Rory Block - Kassie Jones (buy) (1998)

Black balllads (2) : Jack Johnson and the Titanic : when the blues brought the news

Leadbelly - the Titanic (buy) (1948)


First I'd like to wish all my American readers a happy 4th of July. Please check out Darius'blog, Oliver di Place, for great Independance Day posts here.

Let's go on with our exploration of Afro American balladry. Yesterday I found this great Leadbelly song in a French compilation called Black Heroes : From Stagger Lee to Joe louis.
Another subject of ballads was the news, the real events (and not only legends). The sinking of the Titanic gave birth to hundreds of songs. As always, Gadaya made a great job of compiling the best Titanic songs in his blog.

When that great ship went down : the Titanic variations at Old Weird America

But what's also interesting in Leadbelly's song is the mention of Jack Johnson, not the singer, but the boxer, a true Afro American hero. He became heavyweight world champion in 1908 after defeating Canadian Tommy Burns who until then had refused to fight a black man. The legend has it that he wanted to board the Titanic but was turned back because, as Lead sings, the captain "didn't haul no coal".
Apart from that song, Jack Johnson is absent from folk songs, but Miles Davis dedicated an album to him in 1970.

Musically, the Leadbelly song is very close to this one by Johnnie Head, who only recorded 2 sides in 1928. With his kazoo and tenor voice, he must have come from a vaudeville/medicine show or even jazz background.

Johnnie Head - Fare thee Well (buy) (1928)

Other athletes (like boxer Joe Louis or baseball players Jackie Robinson or Larry Doby) were the heroes of folk songs, but there's a song I really like, that I also discovered in the Black Heroes compilation. I guess it's the perfect post for a 4th of July. It tells the story of how a poor Mississippi farmer called the White House in 1934 to save his mortgaged farm. Pdt Roosevelt himself picked up the phone and helped him.
The news went nation-wide and Memphis Minnie made a song out of it the following year.
Find more here about the story.

Memphis Minnie - Sylvester and his Mule Blues (buy) (1935)

Black ballads (1) : John Henry

Ed Cabbell - John Henry (from the Digital Library of Appalachia) (2000)

The Two Poor Boys - John Henry Blues (buy) (1931)

Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry - John Henry (buy) (1958)

Today we'll start a series of posts about Afro-American ballads, a musical form that came just before the blues. Ballads were derived from European sources (see previous posts about folk songs), but very soon in the 19th century American ballads emerged, and among them, the ballads of black folk-heroes. The songsters and itinerant musicians carried these songs all over the country, and soon they would evolve into blues, the main difference being that in the blues, singers tell their personal story.

John Henry is by far the most popular of the black ballads, and the most covered in many genres, by musicians of all origins.

First of all, if you want to know and hear more about John Henry, go to Gadaya's John Henry post on The Old and Weird America. My fellow French blogger from Britanny has made a wonderful work of picking no less than 100 versions of the song compiled in 4 different playlists that you can download. The result is amazing. You will also find useful links (including this site dedicated to JH) and a great review of the song.

For this blues oriented post, I only chose African American versions. John Henry was a steel driving man and the famous Big Bend episode told in the song, when he competed against a steam-powered drill, might have taken place in West Virginia. This Appalachian origin explains why the song was covered by countless country and bluegrass musicians.

Painting : Palmer Hayden

In the first version I posted, Ed Cabbell mentions this last fact with humor in his spoken intro, before performing the song a capella, the traditional, work-song way. One of the reasons why the song is so popular, beside the symbolism of its lyrics, was the melody, with its short phrases and pauses, that made it an ideal hammer song, as Paul Oliver states. And please click on the guy's name, you'll learn many intersting things (in short he's a scholar, activist and historian of the Afro American community in the Appalachian).

(Almost) Nothing is known about The Two Poor Boys, apart that they came from East Tennessee and recorded one session in 1931. We don't even know for sure if they were black or white, although I ( along with the majority of historians) really think they were the former, contrary to what Wikipedia says. Their version is interesting because it has a strong hillbilly heritage : the mandolin, the singing and the floatin verse "Who's gonna shoe your pretty little feet", taken from old English ballads. The two guys were probably songsters and played material of various origins. Read more about them here at American String Conspiracy, a great blog that sadly has gone dead.

The third rendition by Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry is an old favorite of mine, because it was in my father's collection when I discovered blues 25 years ago. I guess this is the version I hear in my head when I think about John Henry. The duo was from the Piedmont region, just like our hero.

Mississippi John Hurt - Spike Driver Blues (buy) (1928)

Cephas & Wiggins - Nine Pound Hammer (buy) (1996)

Those are the main 2 variants of the song I also wanted to post. The first is by Mississippi John Hurt, one of the best songsters ever recorded (We will soon come back to his amazing life story). Here the melodyic line, at least in the very first verses is about the same, but the story is a bit different. It's a sort of "post-John Henry" song where the worker prefers to leave than to go on working like this, as if Henry's death had changed something. It's also a symbol of the musician and songster's life, who prefers his freedom and independance to hard labor. Leadbelly did another great version of that song with his "Take This Hammer". Note that Lead used to boast he could pick a bale of cotton a day (an impossible job for one man) in a very John Henry-like attitude.

"Nine-Pound Hammer", first published as a "negro folk-song" in the 20s became a country and bluegrass hit for the Monroe Brothers, Merle Travis or Tennessee Earnie Ford. Cephas & Wiggins, a sort of modern McGhee-Terry duet from Virginia recorded it in 1996 for their beautiful album Cool Down

And what about you ? What's your favorite version of John Henry ? Tell me, please !
Consider checking Gadaya's post on OWA before. Merci Gadaya for your help as the main source of this post.

Blues standards (A to Z) : After Hours

Erskine Hawkins Orchestra feat. Avery Parrish - After Hours (buy) (1940)


Clifton Chenier - Blues After Hours (buy) (1969)

This instrumental blues piece was first written and arranged by Avery Parrish who played piano in Erskine Hawkins Orchestra (photo below), for Bluebird records in 1940. The slow walking bass and right hand melody are easily recognizable and deliver a perfect wee-wee hours athmosphere, with smoky bar and sleepy pianist. The horn section only comes in at the very end of the song.

It was covered by numerous blues and jazz musicians. In jazz, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Herman, Jimmy Smith or Roy Haynes tried their hands at it.
Blues musicians include other pianists like Blind John Davis, Jay McShann or Pinetop Perkins, and guitar players like Pee Wee Crayton or Roy Buchanan.
And last but not least, the Clifton Chenier version for accordion and zydeco band, from his "Sings the Blues" album released by Arhoolie in 1987 but recorded by Roy C. Ames in Houston, Texas on April 1, 1969 and first released on Prophesy and Home Cooking labels.

As for Avery Parrish, according to All About Jazz, he "left the Hawkins orchestra in 1941, moved to California, and subsequently got into a bar fight. He suffered partial paralysis and never played again, at the age of 24. He died under mysterious circumstances at 42, in 1959".

The ragtime boom of 100 years ago

Scott Joplin - Maple Leaf Rag (buy) (pub. 1899)

According to Wikipedia, "Ragtime (alternately spelled Ragged-time) is an originally American musical genre which enjoyed its peak popularity between 1897 and 1918. It began as dance music in the red-light districts of American cities such as St. Louis and New Orleans years before being published as popular sheet music for piano. It was a modification of the march made popular by John Philip Sousa, with additional polyrhythms coming from African music. The ragtime composer Scott Joplin became famous through the publication in 1899 of the "Maple Leaf Rag" and a string of ragtime hits that followed, although he was later forgotten by all but a small, dedicated community of ragtime aficionados until the major ragtime revival in the early 1970s". Please check out the article, it's really well made.

I love the sound of piano rolls and player pianos. Ragtime piano, first a written music, and especially Maple Leaf Rag, sounds better this way than when it's played live. You really get the 1900's picture I guess.

Here's a great jazz cover of this theme, by the New Orleans Rhythm Kings, an excellent white band from the early twenties :

New Orleans Rhythm Kings - Maple Leaf Rag (buy) (1923)

Jelly Roll Morton - Tom Cat Blues (buy)

Cow Cow Davenport - Mama Don't Allow Easy Riders (buy)(1929)

One of the first stars in early jazz, Jelly Roll Morton (photo) wrote some rags too. The second track, by Alabama-born Cow Cow Davenport, is a good example of ragtime when played by blues-boogie pianists : musically simplified but as lively and syncopated. That was really ragtime's main appeal : mixing classical melodies with syncopated rhythms. Like jazz, like the blues. It took what was best from European and African cultures.

Another style to integrate the ragtime idiom was the beautiful Piedmont blues from the Southern Atlantic coast (from Virginia to North Florida).
Guitar players like Blind Gary Davis, Blind Boy Fuller or Blind Willie McTell had numerous rags in their repertoire. But the undisputed "king of ragtime guitar" was Blind Blake, one of my all-time favorite guitarists and musicians, who really made his instrument sound like a piano. We'll come back to him, but everything by Blind Blake is worth buying.

Blind Blake - Southern Rag (buy) (1926)


Learn more about ragtime :

Wikipedia
AMG review of The Greatest Ragtime Of the Century

Fife and drums (2) : The Young Brothers by Alan Lomax

Ed Young & Brothers - Chevrolet (buy) (1959)


I finally got the "Sounds Of The South" boxset with recordings by Alan Lomax and it's a goldmine.

The Young brothers recordings I told you about in a previous post
are in my collection now, and I have to say that I agree with the guy who wrote that it's the best f&d band Alan Lomax recorded. And they sing ! And it's way better recorded than Lomax's previous tracks from 1942.

So here is the passage refering to the Young brothers performance in Lomax's book The Land Where The Blues Began :

He always danced as he played, his feet sliding along flat to the ground to support his weaving pelvis, enticing someone in the crowd to cut it with him, turning this way and that, always with dragging feet and bent knees, and always leaning toward the earth.
His brothers Lonnie and G.D. Young played with him, Lonnie at the tail of the orchestra beating the bass drum, and G.D., a tiny sprite of a man –like a little dried-up ginger root and just as peppy- on the snare drum. Once you looked closely, you saw that the mainspring of the action was Lonnie and his bass drum. Lonnie was tall, lean as a country hound, with a flat, shiny roach of hair on top, always laughing quietly and, when his drumsticks were breaking out, always dancing. Movements flowed from Lonnie's midsection throughout his body. He played the lead in the band's polyrhythm, his padded sticks making a low, murmurous, but heated comment on the squeals of Ed Young's fife, as G.D. Young, the little brother of the bunch, riffled the snare drum. They went in for subtle stuff, quiet stuff. They capered without lifting their feet; their shoulders, belly, and buttocks separately twitched to the beat.

Ed Young & Brothers - Jim and John (buy) (1959)

The dance, as you might suppose, began at once, the Young brothers supplying the music, and as participants there were wives, flirting half-grown daughters, cousins, kids, neighbors drifting in -all experts at the Delta slow drag. The chocolate tape was sliding off the reels and across the silver recording heads, while the needles on two meters jumped to the beat in the face of the big Ampex. This was 1959 and I finally had German mikes and a Cadillac of a recorder and I was doing stereo - the first stereo field recordings made in the South. You should hear the recordings – for me, a life's dream realized.

I love Alan Lomax, especially when he gets lyrical...

As I told you, fifes and quills were progressively replaced by a more powerful, more expressive competitor : the harmonica. After recording the Young bros, Lomax went to Arkansas where he found Forrest City Joe, a bluesman who played the harp with a band in the Sonny Boy Williamson style. Check out this great solo performance :

Forrest City Joe - Levee Camp Remiscence (buy) (1959)

Then after that, Alan tried to go to the Black part of town in West Memphis to find more musicianq, but immediately got busted and thrown out of town by two threatening cops. That was Arkansas in 1959...

Anybody interested in more Sounds of the South tracks ? Please let me know. It's a hard to find record and it costs like 200 bucks on Amazon ...

You can DOWNLOAD HERE the full Disc 2 of Sounds Of The South (97MB)

North Mississippi fife and drums

Othar Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band - Granny, Will Your Dog Bite ? (buy) (1980)


In 1942, while traveling in North Mississippi, Alan Lomax discovered a community of musicians who played the most African-like (and I would add : with a little Indian influence too) music played in the USA (see my "Fifes and quills" post).
He recorded Sid Hemphill in 1942 with his band (snare drum, fiddle, guitar, quills), then in 1959 the Young brothers, the first real Mississippi fife and drums band ever recorded. Unfortunately I don't have these tracks, they are on a compilation called "Sounds of the South".

North Mississippi fife and drum bands generally feature a bass drum, a snare drum and a home made fife. They played at picnics, gatherings and celebrations. On Memorial day week end there was always a big fife and drum party just outside of Como, which underlines the military origins of this tradition. Fife and drums is a soldier's music, widespread in the British colonies and in the US Army.
Black recreational fife and drum music is very rare in the USA, but is common in the West Indies (check that Jamaician field recording released by Folkways in 1975), which were an important transit point for slaves shipped from Africa. In the USA drums were generally banned during slavery. So we can assume that this special, and very local tradition originated after the Civil War. But Mississippi fife and drum music is much more festive, as the descriptions made by Lomax in "Land Where The Blues Began" of picnics and dances suggests. There is a constant interaction between musicians and dancers, and very suggestive and sexual dance postures.

About Mississippi fife and drums, check out this great article by David Evans (1972), and watch this 10 minute-movie by Evans.

If this music may sound a little repetitive, you have to hear (and watch) it live. I saw a Brazilian batucada band in my hometown festival a few weeks ago, and this polyrythmic beat really puts you in a trance.

Napoleon Strickland - Black Water Rising (buy) (1969)

Fife and drums is a family and a community affair. Two of the most recorded performers, Othar Turner and Napoleon Strickland, said they learned how to play and make fifes from Sid Hemphill, who also taught his granddaughter, Jessie Mae, who was a great bass drum player. And Othar Turner taught his children and grandchildren.
Here are 2 videos of Sharde Thomas, Othar's granddaughter who keeps the tradition alive.
Check out this article about her.

First video with her grandfather (aged 94 at that time). You'll notice that she's learning to play in rhythm first, rather than melodically.



A few years later :



Looking for more ? Pay a visit to the folkstreams site, there are plenty of articles about fife and drum music and Othar Turner.

Fifes and quills

Flutes or pipes are not very common in blues recordings, because in the 1920s they were already part of the past, and had been replaced by the harmonica. In the blues, there are of two sorts :

The quills

Everybody with an interest in music should read Land Where The Blues Began by Alan Lomax.
When Alan Lomax came first to the hill country near Senatobian, in northern Misssissippi, in 1942, he met Sid Hemphill, a multi-instrumentist, born around 1876. Hemphill showed him the quills, "a set of hollow canes of varying lengths, bound together with the tops even". They are the same instrument as the Greek or Romanian panpipes, or the Inca's rondador. The quills were of various sizes, 4-tube to 10-tube for Sid.

In my first post about Indians and the blues, I'd put a recording of Sid Hemphill playing the quills in a fashion that called back to his African and Indian roots.

"Them's the quills...that's old folks' music. Music of olden time. Back yonder almost everybody used to play on quills. Now, ain't hardly common no more."

Henry Thomas : Old Country Stomp (buy) (Chicago, june 1928)

Another great quills player was Henry Thomas, who recorded 25 sides for Columbia in 1928. Being born in the 1870s, like Sid Hemphill, he was one of the oldest blues musicians ever recorded. The song above is an old square dance tune from the 19th century.

Read more about the quills here in this great Web page by a guy named Norm Sohl.
Ed at the great blog The Blue bus made also a great post about the quills.

The fife or fice



In Land Where The Blues Began there is this great description of Napoleon Strickland making his fife :

Majesterially, he draws the red-hot poker out of the coals and, holding up a section of cane, says, " Now this is something you go fishing with, but I'm gonna fix it so it will make music." He puts the cane down on the floor and, holding it steady with his foot, burns the first finger hole into the barrel, then puts the poker into the coals again. " Now I'm gonna show you how I make it sing."
He holds the flute uo to his lips and licks the place where he will blow it. Then he burns in that hole. Next he licks his other fingers and spreads them along the barrel, locating the other finger holes in accordance with his normal way of spreading his hand along the barrel when he plays. These tuning points are marked with spit. He nicks the chosen witted points with his big clasp knife - "See, I takes my knife and I swings each one of them out."
"How far apart do you put the holes ?"
"About half an inch, I think"
Here we witness black magic. No micrometer, not even a ruler or a pattern, has controlled the tuning of his fife. The finger holes are simply set a comfortable and familiar distance apart, where his fingers naturally fall when he's playing. He carefully burns out and enlarges these holes, one after another. He delicately touches the end of the cane. "When the sound come out this end, you got it made." Napoleon opines. "Now I'm gonna burn the jintes out of the cane." So saying, he pushes the red-hot poker up the barrel of the new fife, and as he burns through each joint of the cane, delicate notes of smoke rise in the kitchen air. Withdrawing the poker, he blows the barrel of the fife clear of smoke, shavings, and cinders. He rubs the cane to cool it off. "Now," he says proudly and with his widest grin, "here's the fice, and i'll do it like this."

Of course, fife is often accompanied with drums (and I soon will post about that style).
Ed Young was another fife player that Lomax met on his hill country trips. Here is a improvised version of "Joe Turner" he recorded with white banjo player Hobart Smith.

Ed Young & Hobarth Smith : Joe Turner (buy)



(this photo and the first one were taken by Alan Lomax).

From field hollers to the blues : Texas Alexander

Leadbelly : Linin' Track

Nobody knows for sure, but it's admitted that the blues was born around the 1890s. In his interview about Africa and the blues, this is what Gerhard Kubik says :

" We don’t know exactly what kind of music was first heard which later would be called blues. But African Americans began to try their hands on the guitar—before that it had been the banjo—soon after the Civil War, at first imitating the current, 19th-century popular music. They imitated ballads and other European country folklore. That is how the three common chords got into the blues. The stage was set by African-American soldiers participating in the Civil War. There is a precious photograph of a minstrel show they staged during that period or later, with one guitar and two banjos. Then some younger, second generation African American guitarists began to introduce the tonality of field hollers and other former slave folklore into their guitar accompanied music. They were highly successful. But they had to find ways of adapting these different total harmonic systems to each other."

Work songs and field hollers, being a capella, didn't have to stick to a particular structure or harmonic system, and thus were very spontaneous forms of expressions, bearing a lot of African traits, and especially the famous blue notes that were totally alien to Western harmony.

A great exemple of this transformation is the music of Texas Alexander (1900-1954). Born in Central Texas, he had been working on various camps, building railroads, levees or roads, including forced-labor camps. He was also a solo singer, who didn't play any instrument. Unfortunately there's hardly any picture of him.

Texas Alexander : Levee Camp Moan

Texas Alexander was first recorded in 1927 with New Orleans guitar player Lonnie Johnson (see photo below), one of the finest players of the era, and one of the first blues musicians to play guitar solos.



According to Lonnie Johnson, quoted by Paul Oliver (1) “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.”

"Levee Camp Moan" is one of Alexander's masterpieces. Lonnie Johnson doesn't try to play the three common chords, but just tries to respond to Alexander's vocals. Alexander sung with a lot of different musicians after him, but Lonnie Johnson was the one who best understood his music.
This is the blues being born. Note that the lyrics are sung in the first person, which is typical of the blues. The singer tells his own story.

Here's another song in which Lonnie plays the tree common chords. It's really funny to hear how the guitar plays cat and mouse with the vocals, trying to catch them.

Texas Alexander : Sittin' On A Log

For musicians only : You'll notice notice that the third (or dominant chord, e.g. G in the key of C) is barely played. The blues has a problem with dominant chords. Mr Kubik (kneeling on the left on photo below), please, again, explain that to us :

"It seems this integration was reached by African American musicians in the late 19th century when they were trying to align the tonality of field hollers, many of which are in savanna pentatonic system, with a guitar chord progressions they had learned. It then turned out to be possible to first back a field holler melody with the tonic chord (C) on the guitar, and then switch back to the sub dominant chord (F). (...) The dominant chord had to be modified or omitted or substituted. And so we get through blues and jazz history the problem of what to do with the dominant chord. They rejected it. You can listen to bebop. All the time it's being substituted by something else. Bebop has blues tonality."

Texas Alexander was also accompanied by pianist Eddie Heywood, who was a little less at ease with Alexander's singing, but finally got away with it quite brillantly, although he plays cat and mouse with the vocal line.

Texas Alexander : Sabine River

If you want to know more about Texas Al (like how he was sentenced to prison for murdering his wife in 1940) , check out these links :


AMG biography

2 great posts by DJ and blues scholar Jeff Haris on his Big Road Blues site

Texas Troublesome Blues : The Blues of Texas Alexander part 1

Texas Troublesome Blues : The Blues of Texas Alexander part 2

Star Maker Machine (and blues from South Africa)

Just a quick one, to tell you that I'm posting now on a collective blog called Star Maker Machine (after a Joni Mitchell song).

Go see this blog, it's great : every week there's a new theme, and people have to post songs about it.
This week, the topic is "rediscovery". I'm happy to be a part of SMM because I love this blog and it'll give me the opportunity to post about every genre, now that River's has gone old-timey oriented only.

Speaking of discoveries, here is a song picked from the "Africa and the blues Cd". It comes from South Africa and it's played on the pennywhistle, a cheap flute that replaced the too expensive saxophone in the townships during the 1950s and 1960s. That style, named kwela, is the father of mbaqanga (you know, the "Graceland" style). This is a great example, along with Ali Farka Touré, of a "full circle" cultural influence, because the blues, an American form partly influenced by African music, came back to Africa after the Second World War.

Lemmy Special Mabaso - 4th Avenue Blues

Africa and the blues (2) : face to face

Dear fellow river men and women,

I have received -and am halfway into- the book by Gerhard Kubik I told you about in a previous post. And Garaya just provided the companion disc on his blog.

That means I can post those fascinating samples given by Kubik when he did that "trait-by-trait" comparison between blues songs and field recordings he made in Central Cameroon in 1964.

Let's start with Big Joe Williams' "Stack-o Dollars", a very rough, one-chord Delta blues accompanied by a one-string fiddle. According to Kubik, an Africanist,"Delta blues has processed a stronger shot of traits from the West African savanna and sahel zone than other blues styles".

Big Joe Williams - Stack'o Dollars (buy) (Chicago, 31 oct 1935)

Now, let's hear Meigogué, a Hausa gogé (one-string fiddle) player recorded by Kubik in 1964. Gogué was a professional trader (like a lot of Hausa) and musical traveler from Cameroon.

Adamou Meigogué - Gogé song(Yoko, Cameroon, feb. 1964)

Meigogué's singing style with its melisma (singing of a single syllable of text while moving between several different notes in succession), alternating voice and fiddle, one-string melody and penthatonic mode is really close to the Big Joe recording. This style of music is influenced by Muslim-Arabic music, especially in the way of singing.


Another (even more) fascinating comparison can be made between :

A grinding song by a Tikar woman from Central Cameroon recorded by Kubik in 1964. Kubik said he had walked for half a day when he came to her village and heard her sing. So he gathered his equipment and recorded her at once. The song is about hard work, children supporting and the fear of death.

Tikar woman - Grinding Song(Monbra, Cameroon, feb. 1964)

... and Mississippi Matilda's "Hard Workin' Woman"

Mississippi Matilda - Hard Workin' Woman(buy)(New Orleans, 1936)



In addition to being simply amazing (and beautiful), those two examples show two distinct African styles that have influenced the blues (I'm quoting Kubik); They both come from the same area, the west central Sudanic belt, i.e. "the region from Mali across northern Ghana and Northern Nigeria into northern and central Cameroon"

(1) A strongly Arabo-Islamic song style, as found for example among the Hausa. It is characterized by melisma, wavy intonation, pitch instabilities within a pentatonic framework, and a declamatory voice production. All this behavior develops over a central reference tone, sometimes like a bourdon

(2) An ancient west central Sudanic stratum of pentatonic song composition, often associated with simple work rhythms in a regular meter, but with notable off-beat accents. This style reaches back perhaps thousands of years to the early West African sorghum agriculturalists, now scattered through the Sudanic belt in remote savanna, often mountainous areas. This style has remained unaffected by the Arabic / Islamic musical intrusion which reached West Africa along the trans-Saharian routes.

Of course, other African styles played a part (see the map on my first post), but those styles from west central Sudanic belt have a lot of common traits with the blues. They are devoid of percussion instruments, and drums were banned in most of the US plantations. they rely on string instruments, and are played by solo artists or small groups, on stringed instruments for the Arabic/muslim styles. That's probably why they survived more than the other styles in Northern America.

If you haven't, please check out the "Africa and the blues" program (interview, podcast) on the Afropop site.

I need your help

You must have realized that this blog has gone 100 % "roots" music now. If you look at older posts there used to be some rock here, even new stuff, but I realized that a lot of people were coming (and staying) when I posted about older styles like blues, country, folk or roots reggae or rhythm & blues.

Well I'm still a big rock fan (at the moment, I'm listening to David Bowie) but I LOVE old time country and blues. There are hundreds of blogs about "modern" genres, and I guess my knowledge of traditional music would be more useful for the music blog community.

So I'm building a sort of discography for this site, a list of important and favorite "roots" records, albums or compilations, from 1920 to 2009. Check it out by clicking on the link above.

My Favorite roots records

The list is in progress, so there are omissions. But YOU can help.
Tell me what are your favorite roots albums, e.g. anything blues, gospel, folk, country, old r&b, old reggae, even world music. Tell me what records you would include in that list, let us build it together.

I'll listen to them if I can (and if I don't already know them) and (probably) include them in the list and make posts, etc...

I'm waiting for your comments. Before going back to historical posts, let's hear something (relatively) recent : the great come-back album of Chicago guitar player Jody Williams.

Jody Williams - She Found a Fool and Bumped his Head (buy) (2002)

Mardi gras Indians

During the past weeks it was carnival time everywhere in the world, and even here in France where we have great "carnavals", especially in the north (with giants).

So, with a little delay, my last ( I promise) post about bluesy Indians will be for Mardi gras Indians. They've always been a object of fascination for me, and even more so now that I've read about their history here or here.

The Wild Tchoupitoulas - Hey Hey (Indians Coming) (buy) (1976)


Laissez les bons temps rouler !!