He emailed me yesterday and he sounded down and homesick. I think he felt trapped in the touristy areas and not able to get out and see as much of St. Maartin’s as he’d like. I guess it would suck to take your first trip to a foreign country only to find you were surrounded by people just like you. He should go on a trip with the Professor. I hear about her stories and it’s all “yes, we did this cheesy tourist thing, but then we ended up at this cool place and that lead to this other adventure.” That sounds more like the Butcher’s style.
Still, I have missed him. And the lawn needs cutting.
Sarcastro sent me this article from Reason about how the rise of the Delta Blues was heavily influenced by the rise of the ubiquity of affordable guitars. In his email, he says only, “Seeds of a good article…”
That is probably all that needs to be said. But since Sarcastro doesn’t have a blog anymore and I like to blather, let me make two points, one minor and one major.
The minor point:
Chris Kjorness ends his piece by saying
Even as the blues was attaining nationwide prominence through the first Delta artists being recorded in the late 1920s, the Delta itself was in turmoil. Scholars looking back have found a depressed region decimated by cotton crop failures, boll weevil infestations, and the great flood of 1927. Racial tensions boiled over as more whites moved into the area. The revived KKK gained popularity in the region, terrorizing blacks. Once-numerous black-owned businesses were squeezed out of existence by institutionalized racism. Many descendants of Delta pioneers pulled up their stakes and moved north, to places like Chicago and Detroit, once again determined to find a better life.
It was during this time that the Delta bluesmen began to be seen as naive folk artists: trapped in the worst of situations, resentful of the modern world, using music as a coping mechanism and almost stumbling onto brilliance. But a closer study of musical biography and commercial history reveal a very different picture. Bluesmen were clever, ambitious, and quick to adapt to changing conditions. And their conditions were changed forever by a mail-order catalog.
And I want to say in response, “Yes, but no.” If you’re writing an article that is supposed to be debunking legends, not just rewriting them, you need to account for the fact that we know folklorists who went to the Delta and tried to capture evidence of a fading way of life in 1941-42. And while they recorded some blues songs, we can read in John Work, Lewis Jones, and Samuel Adams’ own words their impressions of McKinley Morganfield aka Muddy Waters. Morganfield could not fit more cleanly into Kjorness’s story. He was a plantation musician. He played both black and white music adeptly. And he played country blues on a shitty guitar in his sharecropper’s shack.
And each of the men who talks about him remarks about how extraordinary what he’s doing is and how they all love it, but that they aren’t sure it fits their survey because it doesn’t sound old-fashioned at all.
I think that the “naive folk artist” construct is best understood not as a misunderstanding of white folks (though it was also that), because, let’s be honest, it was in part a misunderstanding of very young white folks who, when they were in their skiffle bands before becoming the Beatles or the Rolling Stones or the Yardbirds and then Led Zeppelin, didn’t realize what a short time twenty or thirty years ago actually is. But instead, probably should be understood as a marketing construct by many of those very same artists once they got to Chicago and got electric guitars. “Don’t listen to that old-fashioned stuff (that I will neglect to mention I used to make and love) made by those hicks (of which I was one). Listen to this new stuff, made by me here now.”
My major point:
Bessie Smith died along Highway 61 between Memphis and Clarksdale in 1937. She obviously would not have been in the Delta to perform if she didn’t have an audience there. That’s just self-apparent. Bessie Smith died in the Delta because she had reason to be in the Delta.
It’s too late for Kjorness and for Reason now, obviously, since the article is written. But this will carry a date on it of May 2012. That’s almost seventy-five years since Smith, a blues singer, died in the Delta, and we still cannot get even one woman into the short version of the myth of the Delta blues.
How hard would it be to just say, in the section where Kjorness is talking about the monetary opportunities for black musicians, specifically for black blues musicians, that the Delta bluesmen would have been very aware of the kinds of money and opportunities that blues singers like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey were able to realize?
Women don’t actually have cooties. You can tell a story about the blues that includes us, that shows that men would have been aware of us and wanted the kinds of success we had, and no one’s dick will be cut off.
It’s not a history that’s segregated by gender. Why must the legend always be?
When can the Empress sit on her throne and be recognized in all her territory? Seventy-five years later, her blood on that ground, and she still doesn’t get to be a part of the story of the Delta blues.
Here’s Geeshie Wiley, from Natchez. I guess we have to pretend she doesn’t exist, either, but let’s listen to her sing once before we do so. Try to ignore Elvie Thomas with her spooky guitar accompaniment, since that’s also not worthy of being included in the great story of the Delta bluesmen.
Oops, apparently no one told the folks over at Third Man Records that the blueswomen aren’t really a part of the story. Hopefully, someone will send them this article from Reason so they’ll know.
I read this over at Hurray for the Goddamned Idiot and I must say, though it would probably ruin me as a political blogger, if I wouldn’t be happier as a political blogger if I adopted this attitude–we’re all pieces of shit. On rare occasions, we will do good.
Right now, I rage about a lack of a baseline of goodness, but that’s obviously foolish. Maybe there is no baseline they’re failing to aspire to.
If that is the case, then I should be less offended when they fail to be decent human beings.
Tiny Cat Pants 