A Brief History of the Blues #3: September '07

The image of a lean African American man walking slowly along a dusty back road under the brutal Mississippi noonday sun with a guitar slung over his shoulder, has become synonymous with very words ‘The Blues’ and yet in the early days, this was not really the case. During the blues formative years, most of the more famous of the blues players fell into one of two camps. The first was the ‘barrelhouse’ piano player and the other was the female ‘blues shouter’. In and around the Mississippi delta and Arkansas river towns, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Slim, Champion Jack Dupree and Sunnyland Slim pounded the black and white keys as hard as they could and shouted their blues over the voices of rowdy drunks in a host of brothels and barrelhouses. They were, more often than not, itinerant musicians who would travel from town to town looking for the nearest party house with beer on tap and a beat up piano in the corner. Usually these pine top players would work the same circuit over and over, wandering from club to club, brothel to brothel, for weeks and months at a time, building up a fan base that would eventually follow them to each venue. One of the reasons that the piano player was the more often times sought after musician in these clubs had as much to do with how loud they could play as it was what they were playing.

Add to the fact that much of the popular music of the day was composed for and played on the piano as opposed to the guitar. At the time, the guitar, outside of flamenco/Spanish music and the occasional classical parlor piece, was considered to be the ugly cousin in popular music, relegated to providing a steady rhythm in bands or cowboy songs and not much else. And like audiences of today, most folks don’t exist solely on one type of music, especially if you were looking to dance as well as having something playing in the background for atmosphere. So a piano player might knock out a rag or two, a few sentimental ballads and some country and western with their blues as this is what their audiences demanded. The guitar players were just as capable of playing such a mix but a cheap acoustic guitar never stood a chance of being heard over the din of a packed house.

But the blues guitarists were still there, playing in the lumbar and levee camps, rocking in the juke joints and on street corners, and honing their crafts. They were still being hired out for picnics, dances and mixers as it was easier to get a guitar to these places, as opposed to a piano. In order to compete for the more lucrative money in the cities, the guitarists began to play the same sort of ‘swing’ and ‘boogie’ that had been the province of the keyboardists. It didn’t take long for the guitarists to incorporate the now almost required walking bass line of the blues – a sound ‘borrowed’ directly from the pianists. In the Delta acoustic blues, the steady thrum – thrum of a separate bass line sinks into the ear and gives the song an immediate earthy, muddy tone.

While the guitar slingers and pine top pounders competed for the spots in the clubs that were springing up in the Delta cities from Memphis to New Orleans, back east, the blues first superstars were blowing the minds of the east coast intellectuals in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. Ma Rainey and Bessie Smith had become darlings of café society and the musical voices of the burgeoning Harlem Renaissance and both sang their versions of the blues. Physically the two covered both ends of the spectrum; although both were tall and solid women, Smith was a delicately attractive woman while Rainey has been described by many as ‘plug-ugly’ and yet both had huge voices and enormous stage presence, the sort that stunned audiences. On-stage Ma Rainey often emerged from a huge plywood Victrola in feathers, a sequined gown and a huge necklace made up of silver dollars strung together. In what has become a blues paradox, Ma Rainey ended up leaving the secular performances when the Great Depression ended her career and she lived out the remainder of her life doing the Lords work. When one considers the rumors that surrounded her during her life, the thought of her returning the church later in her life seems out of place.

Bessie Smith, although eight years younger, was discovered by Rainey in her hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. The story is that Rainey took Bessie under her wing as an entertainer although the truth is more likely that Rainey saw Smith as competition and opted to keep her close. Smith cemented her reputation not by singing her own compositions or ones created for her but rather by her re-working of songs from other artists. Smiths first hit record, selling an impressive 750,000 copies, was a reworking of 'Down Hearted Blues’, which had been a modest success for it’s originator, Alberta Hunter, a few months before. It has been said that record buyers would hear a song that they liked by another artist would wait a few months for Bessie’s version.

There were several other female blues singers and shouters during the Twenties and Thirties who sold numerous recordings. The afore-mentioned Alberta Hunter, Mamie Smith, Sippie Wallace and Victoria Spivey to name a few. Guitar wielding Memphis Minnie recorded ‘Bumble Bee’ in 1929 and this was a direct source for Muddy Waters hit ‘Honey Bee’ some twenty years later. (To give you an idea of the sort of booming voice these ladies of the blues carried, there is a story in which she bested Big Bill Broonzy in a blues contest, and Broonzy had a HUGE voice).

But the acoustic blues guitar was coming into it’s golden age when the Sears – Roebuck catalogue began selling cheap Washburns, Schmidts and Stella guitars for prices ranging from $2.50 to $9.00. Guitars were now in reach of the poor and sales took off. They were cheap, flimsy guitars with ungodly high actions and lousy tone but ask anyone who plays, any guitar can make music if you play it right.