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.

Blues saga (4) : Africa and the blues

If you're a regular, you probably know I'm both fond of blues and Africa.

But I've always felt a little uneasy about conecting them, especially after seeing Feels Like Going Home, the Martin Scorsese documentary that links the blues to West African contemporary musicians like Ali Farka Touré. I found it really oversimplifying.
So I was really happy to find this wonderful interview of Gerhard Kubik on Afropop Worldwide.

You have to listen to the audio interview as well (that was a pleasure to me, because the interviewer is French and the interwiewed Austrian, so I could understand their accents very easily !!) because you can hear the music.

Pr. Kubik, a music ethnologist from the University of Vienna wrote a book on the subject, which is one of the only scientific studies about African influences on American music.

First thing in this interview, he rejects the concept of "roots" :

As a scientific term, “roots” was tenuous. It is a concept not best suited for historically oriented studies. In African and African-American history as elsewhere in the world we have to operate from sources: written sources, oral sources, recorded sources, if possible, archaeological sources. Where there are no sources, there can be no safe conclusions. “Roots” is too vague to be used beyond casual statements that such and such tradition is based on something, somewhere. For example all the talk about roots of the blues in Mali is just enough to satisfy the public’s need for wild imagination. But we want to know which traditions, by whom in Mali or elsewhere, and in which time period—late 18th century?—were relevant as a background for the rise of blues in the US a century later. Popular formulations such as “From Mali to Mississippi” are anathema to historical studies.
The roots concept also has an ideological undertone. It implies that you can study at one culture without the light of history, while the other cultures is just “roots” to the former, a repository of stagnant, centuries old tradition. The concept insinuates that one continent is a provider of musical raw material to be processed somewhere else. Now to us in Africa, this is not acceptable. We are not roots to anyone.

You'll notice that he spent so much time in the field in Africa that he refers to the continent as "us".

Summing the whole interview is impossible (the audio file lasts one hour), but here are a few decisive points that I picked :

Using a "trait by trait" comparison between various forms of blues and field recordings he made in every part of Africa, Kubik eventually drew a map of blues sources in Africa. The darkest zone is the "core area for the provenance of the rural blues" and covers the best part of the Savanah belt (first legend) : Southeastern Mali, Burkina Faso, Northern Nigeria and Cameroon. Some musical styles there were influenced by Islamic and Mediterranean culture.

Then you have areas showing more blues traits (second legend, in grey), and areas where asymetric timeline patterns are prominent (Guinea Coast and Central Africa), a trait absent from the blues, but present in Brazil for instance (third legend, in light grey). The two remaining legends demarcate areas where specific instruments (slider techniques and mouth harps) are used.

On the other hand, "Delta blues has processed a stronger shot of traits from the West African savanna and sahel zone than other blues styles".

What are those traits ? Declamatory singing, wavy, ornemental intonation and pentatonic tonal systems (e. g., the famous "blue notes" that were absent from European traditions).

In the audio interview, Kubik plays successively a song by Big Joe Williams and a recording of a single-stringed fiddle player in northern Cameroon, and the result is quite amazing.
I don't own the latter (go hear the audio interview for that), but just check the Big Joe Williams tune : it really sounds African.

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

Well, what's the reason for that overlap ? Let me quote Gerhard Kubik :

One explanation would be that African Americans in the Mississippi Delta experienced greater social isolation and deprivation (than in other Americans areas). Segregation was more rigorous than elsewhere. In such a situation, people anywhere in the world tend to create and establish an alternative culture, as different as possible from that of their oppressors. The memory of Islamic values attached to an Arabic Islamized savanna style cluster, probably transmitted within just a few families, would have been eligible to fulfill such a function, and it took over in at least one genre, blues singing and blues guitar.

So, to come back to the Ali Farka Touré subject, the expression "from Mississippi to Mali" is not so wrong, but it is a 2-way link. Let us not forget that at the beginning of his career in France he became a John Lee Hooker fan and then integrated elements of American blues in his own style. All across Africa, in the late 20th century, young musicians took from American and European music : in Congo, from Cuban son and rumba; in West Africa, some singers were influenced by French chanson, in Nigeria and Ghana High Life took from Calypso, etc… So all that marketing thing about Farka Touré being the source, the roots, is nonsense. Of course there were connections between his original culture, his individual style and the blues. That's why his music is so beautiful

Ali Farka Touré – Sidi Gouro (buy) (1988)

Here's another bluesman who sounds very African : Louisiana ex-convict Robert Pete Williams.



Nest post in blues saga will be about another underrated influence of the blues : Native Americans

Sources for this post : thanks to Afropop Worldwide. The map was taken from Kubik's book Africa And The Blues, Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1999.