[SPEAKER_00]: Hello and welcome to Folk Files, a podcast that takes a careful look at the stories that have been told about folk music and all its subgenres and tries to separate the fact from the fiction.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the background, you can hear Manish Boy by Muddy Waters, considered a very typical example of Chicago Blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Listening to it, you might think, is this really folk music?
[SPEAKER_00]: And that is a very good question.
[SPEAKER_00]: When I first started researching this episode, I didn't realize what a loaded question it was.
[SPEAKER_00]: I got the idea to start researching the blues at the 2026 folk alliance international conference in New Orleans, where I heard Chris Thomas King speak.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you're like me, you might know Chris Thomas King as Tommy from Obrother Where Art thou, or perhaps Lowell Foulson and Ray, the movie about Ray Charles.
[SPEAKER_00]: But King has had an international career as a blues musician and grew up playing in his father's Duke joint.
[SPEAKER_00]: The bulk of the research for this episode comes from his book, The Blues, the authentic narrative of my music and culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: Because the blues was such a big part of a folk conference, I thought, of course, the blues is a form of folk music.
[SPEAKER_00]: After all, it matches the definition from Big Bill Brunzy, a blues singer himself, who I quoted in my very first episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Is that a folk song?
[SPEAKER_00]: Must be, I never heard no horses sing it.
[SPEAKER_00]: More than that, the blues has a surrounding culture that transcends the commercialism of the music.
[SPEAKER_00]: It is music for the people, music that is often enjoyed, communally.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, I would learn that historically, when blues was defined as folk music, and folk music was defined far more narrowly than music that is for the people, it resulted in essentially disenfranchising many of the people who made the music, and that's why I felt the drive to record this episode, because the story of the blues has been hijacked, whether purposely or not, in a way that has real world consequences.
[SPEAKER_00]: People have lost their jobs, recording contracts have been compromised, and musicians have been financially and systemically driven away from their own musical culture because of the misrepresentation and misunderstanding of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: So let's start with the most basic origin story of the blues that has been told throughout the years.
[SPEAKER_00]: As the story goes, the building blocks of the blues were brought over to America on slave ships.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blues grew out of the field, haulers, work songs, and spirituals that black people would sing while enslaved, and the genre is rooted in the struggles and hardships of slavery.
[SPEAKER_00]: According to this version of history, the official birthplace of the blues is the Mississippi Delta where poor, illiterate black folks sang songs of sadness with a twang that echoed the songs formed in slavery that W.E.B.
[SPEAKER_00]: Du Bois termed Sorosongs.
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, here is a brief summary of Christ Thomas King's thesis.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blues was an enlightened music that grew out of the unique international urban environment of New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: It expressed the emotional energy and pride of Creole culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was raunchy and rebellious and spread to other regions around America thanks to traveling musicians, collaboration, and phonograph records.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, before we look at these two theories and understand what harm the traditional origin story caused, let's go over some definitions.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, what is the blues?
[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just kidding, that's going to take the whole episode to untangle.
[SPEAKER_00]: But we can at least talk about the technical musical definition of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: A 12 bar blues is a specific chord progression that sounds like this.
[SPEAKER_00]: For anyone who's familiar with musical terminology, the blues sits on the one chord for four bars, switches to the four chord for two bars, back to the one for two bars, and then five chord, four chord, and then back to one.
[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, the blues as a genre can stray far away from this format, but it's useful to know the primary building blocks.
[SPEAKER_00]: Let's also define the Mississippi Delta, because if you're not from the American South, it can be a little confusing.
[SPEAKER_00]: The Mississippi River Delta is the mouth of the Mississippi River, which can be found along the Gulf of Mexico in Louisiana and includes New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, the area known as the Mississippi Delta is in the northwest of Mississippi and is a large floodplain that's technically the Delta of the Yazoo River, which feeds into the Mississippi.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes people include Memphis, Tennessee in the Mississippi Delta, because it's right on the border of Mississippi and Tennessee.
[SPEAKER_00]: The next word we should talk about is Creole.
[SPEAKER_00]: Creole can refer to the Creole language, or it can be a type of cuisine, or a white person living in the West Indies, or a white person in the U.S. Gulf States descended from French or Spanish settlers, but in this episode, and throughout Chris Thomas King's book,
[SPEAKER_00]: The definition of Creole is a black person who was already living in Louisiana before it became a state.
[SPEAKER_00]: But let's return to the definition of the blues genre.
[SPEAKER_00]: For some reason, the genre has been linked to the definition of blue, meaning sad.
[SPEAKER_00]: But there are other definitions of blue, and looking at the earliest and most popular blues songs, the blues is clearly raunchy.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's blue entertainment.
[SPEAKER_00]: You may have heard the term blue stage for a venue where adult material is performed, or perhaps the term curse of blue streak.
[SPEAKER_00]: I played Manish Boy by Muddy Waters at the start of the episode, but consider one of his other well-known songs, Huchi Kuchiman, written by Willie Dixon in 1954.
[SPEAKER_03]: You've got a boy, a child's coming.
[SPEAKER_03]: Gonna be a son of a gun.
[SPEAKER_03]: Gonna make pretty women.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jump in, show.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then the weird one, I know.
[SPEAKER_03]: What is all about?
[SPEAKER_00]: That's not a song of sadness.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's a cheeky song about Muddy Waters' libido.
[SPEAKER_00]: and it was the same really early on as well.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jelly Roll Morton talked about hearing Buddy Bolden who appeared on the scene in 1877, sing his Buddy Bolden Blues, and he would sing funky butt, funky butt, take it away.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jelly Roll Morton opted to skip the funky butt part in this 1939 recording.
[SPEAKER_09]: Take it away.
[SPEAKER_09]: It's terrible.
[SPEAKER_09]: You're awful.
[SPEAKER_09]: Take it away.
[SPEAKER_09]: I thought I'd put him safe.
[SPEAKER_00]: So these songs were blue in the sense of being irreverent and risque.
[SPEAKER_00]: As Chris Thomas King explains, Creole's living in New Orleans, again, Black people whose families were living in Louisiana before the Louisiana purchase in 1803, didn't experience anything near the level of subjugation and oppression that Black people in the British colonies did under chattel slavery.
[SPEAKER_00]: A lot of crills were free long before the emancipation proclamation.
[SPEAKER_00]: Free Black settlers lived in the territory of La Floredata starting in 1513 when Ponce de León touched down.
[SPEAKER_00]: King points out that if the first enslaved Africans in America who arrived in Virginia in 1619 had just disembarked a little farther south, their freedom would have been protected by Black-led militias armed by the Spanish Crown.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unlike in the colonies where drums were banned in order to prevent African musical expression and to prevent drums from being used to send messages, drums were never banned in New Orleans, which had a rich musical culture going back centuries.
[SPEAKER_00]: As an example, there was a 100-person black symphony orchestra in New Orleans in 1830.
[SPEAKER_00]: Free black people in New Orleans had time to study music and become accomplished players.
[SPEAKER_00]: But after the Louisiana purchase, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants or Wasps started filtering into New Orleans and they were shocked by New Orleans culture.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, the Catholic influenced Creole culture encouraged music and recreation on Sunday's after church, whereas Protestants thought the parties that happened in Congo Square on Sundays were shockingly heathen.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wasps brought blue laws to New Orleans, which sought to limit alcohol consumption, gambling, dancing, etc.
[SPEAKER_00]: It's unclear what the origin of the term blue laws is, but it is thought that naming Creole music the blues was a playful way of pushing back against Anglo-Protestant encroachment.
[SPEAKER_00]: As King hypothesizes, the blues was created when Louisiana musicians, quote, went beyond the limitations of placid Victorian dance music.
[SPEAKER_00]: and created a new flexible scale system to better express the emotional energy of body Creole dance culture to accompany sensual down tempo dances like the slow drag.
[SPEAKER_00]: So, this music would not have come from spirituals and music of enslavement, because this was a completely different free group of people.
[SPEAKER_00]: And they were a people who were inspired by their Spanish roots.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blues was likely a product of cultures mixing in New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's New Orleans musician Jelly Roll Morton explaining how this Spanish tinge was essential to the blues.
[UNKNOWN]: This was one of the early tombs.
[SPEAKER_08]: That's the type of tombs.
[SPEAKER_08]: There was no doubt one of the earliest blues that was created as a composition, a playable composition and the city of New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_08]: This tombs was wrote about 192.
[SPEAKER_08]: All the bands in the city of New Orleans play these tombs at this tombs, I mean.
[SPEAKER_08]: Of course, you may notice the Spanish tense in it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jelly Roll Morton, who got his nickname from a slang term for female genitalia, started playing music and storyville brothels at a tender age.
[SPEAKER_00]: That's where he met Buddy Bolton, who's funky but blues I played earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Bolton also wrote, Make Me a Palette on Your Floor, here performed by Mississippi John Hurt.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because a lot of music happened in brothels, the female proprietors of those buildings
[SPEAKER_00]: In general, Black women were strongly involved in shaping the genre.
[SPEAKER_00]: Jelly Roll Morton explained that the first person he ever heard play the blues was Mamie Daydun, born 1879.
[SPEAKER_00]: She only had three fingers on her right hand, but she managed to play some mean piano.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here are Mamie's blues performed by Jelly Roll Morton.
[SPEAKER_10]: Also, the first black person to record a blues song, as far as we're aware, was another
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1919, she sang, you can't keep a good man down while backed by an all-white band.
[SPEAKER_02]: A year later, she sang Crazy Blues, backed by a black ensemble, The Jazz Hounds.
[SPEAKER_00]: I think the difference in energy and style between the two bands is striking.
[SPEAKER_00]: In my opinion, Mimi Smith is dragging the band behind her and you can't keep a good man down.
[SPEAKER_00]: Whereas in this recording, the singer and the band seem to be on the same page as to how the blues should feel.
[SPEAKER_02]: I can't sleep at night I can't need a mic For the man I love He don't dream me wrong
[SPEAKER_00]: I've talked a lot about New Orleans, but let's return to the theory that the blues actually started in the Mississippi Delta.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some folk historians specifically suggest that dockery plantation is the true birthplace of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Charlie Patton is considered the father of the Delta blues, and that's where he grew up.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, it's perfectly plausible that dockery plantation is the birthplace of the specific subgenre
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's easy to poke holes in the argument that it's the birthplace of the blues in general.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, Buddy Bolden and others in New Orleans had at least been playing the blues in 1895 if not earlier.
[SPEAKER_00]: Doggory plantation wasn't even turned into a plantation until 1895.
[SPEAKER_00]: Before that, the land was just forests and marshlands.
[SPEAKER_00]: As King explains, prior to it being drained and cleared, the Mississippi Delta was a safari populated by black bears, Florida Panthers and wild wolves.
[SPEAKER_00]: This isn't to say that people didn't live in the Delta, but they don't seem to have been decent-sized communities of Black people where the blues could have flourished at that time, like there was a New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Additionally, Charlie Patton, the father of the Delta Blues, didn't record his first songs until 1929.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's Pony Blues from that year.
[SPEAKER_06]: He didn't give up on it But I'm not blind man I'm a man already He didn't give up on it
[SPEAKER_00]: Meanwhile, Mimi Smith, mentioned above, had already recorded crazy blues, and King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, who both lived in New Orleans, recorded Dipper Mouth Blues six years earlier in 1923.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris Thomas King points out that essentially all delta blues musicians, including Charlie Patton, Mississippi, John Hurt, Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, admitted to listening to phonograph records.
[SPEAKER_00]: If that's the case, then they almost certainly heard Lonnie Johnson songs, which were recorded in 1925 and flew off the shelves.
[SPEAKER_00]: That timing suggests that it was Lonnie Johnson from New Orleans, not a Delta musician, who first transposed the blues, a genre originally played on horns or piano, two guitar.
[SPEAKER_04]: Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
[SPEAKER_00]: But that's Blue Ghost Blues from 1927.
[SPEAKER_00]: Many blues musicians admitted to being inspired by Lonnie, including Robert Johnson, one of the most famous Delta Blues players, who sometimes claimed his middle L initial stood for Lonnie instead of L-Roy.
[SPEAKER_00]: W.C. handy, who tried to style himself as the father of the blues, jumped on the blues originated in the Delta train, but told a story that seems to contradict his claim.
[SPEAKER_00]: He explained that when he and his band, which played conventionally white tunes at the time, stopped at the Tutwiler Mississippi train station in 1903, he heard a drifter playing, quote,
[SPEAKER_00]: It turned out that music was the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: But W.C. handy had spent the whole past year traveling around Mississippi and playing music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Would the blues have really sounded that weird if it was endemic to the Mississippi Delta?
[SPEAKER_00]: In his biography, W.C. handy talks about another night around that time when his band shared the stage in Cleveland, Mississippi with a group that was performing the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: But, an earlier manuscript was found where W.C. handy names the musician and the song.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was Prince McCoy, originally from Louisiana, playing wine and boy blues by Jelly Roll Morton.
[SPEAKER_00]: So again, this appearance of the blues in Mississippi can be traced back to Norlands.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's wine and boy blues by Jelly Roll.
[SPEAKER_10]: Don't deny my name Oh, don't worry, don't deny my name
[SPEAKER_00]: But it's about time we talk about definitions again, because I can imagine some of you are thinking, but these examples of New Orleans blues aren't they more jazz than blues?
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer is, at least at that time, jazz and blues were the same thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: There might be music historians who disagree, but in my opinion, the contemporary musicians expertise trumps that of music historians, and they were all calling the music blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can see it in the titles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Wine and boy blues, blue, ghost blues, dipper mouth blues, et cetera.
[SPEAKER_00]: But also in their correspondence.
[SPEAKER_00]: In 1914, Pops Foster wrote, The only thing Louie could play then was blues, so we played it all day long.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is referring to Louie Armstrong.
[SPEAKER_00]: Louie Armstrong played blues, not jazz.
[SPEAKER_00]: King Oliver also referred to his New Orleans brass band music as blues, asking in a private letter to Bunk Johnson.
[SPEAKER_00]: Remember how you used to drive the blues down in 1930?
[SPEAKER_00]: Sydney Bashet, a blues clarinetist born in 1897, claimed that jazz was what white people called the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: So where did the term jazz come from?
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people, including Gil Scott Heron, believe that the term is derogatory because it comes from the words, gism and ass.
[SPEAKER_00]: It does seem like the word had a negative connotation.
[SPEAKER_00]: As King explains, Miles Davis believed the term jazz was used to diminish the important contribution blues made to the world of music.
[SPEAKER_00]: The first instance of jazz or technically jazz with two S's was the original Dixie Land Jazz Band, who recorded Livery Stable Blues, which I've also heard called Livery Stable Blues in 1917.
[UNKNOWN]: Thank you very much.
[SPEAKER_00]: The leader of the original Dixiland Jaspand, which did not have any black people in it, was Niklaroka, a Sicilian trumpeter from New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Larroca learned the blues from his black neighbors.
[SPEAKER_00]: As New Orleans blues musician kid Ori explained, Larroca and those boys used to stand on the walkways out at Lake Ponsha train and pick up everything we were doing.
[SPEAKER_00]: I saw them.
[SPEAKER_00]: Interestingly, a copyright dispute broke out over-livery stable blues between La Roca and Al-Seed Nunes, another man who was not black.
[SPEAKER_00]: The judge threw out the case saying, it is an old Negro melody that has been known for a great many years.
[SPEAKER_00]: An Italian was also the first person to publish blues' sheet music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Antonio Maggio published the song, I Got the Blues in 1908.
[SPEAKER_00]: Maggio explained in 1955, I heard an elderly Negro with a guitar playing three notes.
[SPEAKER_00]: He kept repeating the notes for a long time.
[SPEAKER_00]: I didn't think anything with only three notes could have a title, so to satisfy my curiosity, I asked what was the name of the piece.
[SPEAKER_00]: He replied, I got the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is, I got the blues performed by Marco Fumo.
[SPEAKER_00]: But even though Italians weren't strictly considered white in the early 20th century, they were still a lot more palatable to white people than black musicians, which was why Italians got to record and publish blues before black people could.
[SPEAKER_00]: Arguably, the Dixie land in the original Dixie land Jaspend was there to remind white listeners that even though the music sounded black, they were still listening to white people.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be fair, the Italians did contribute to the evolution of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was arguably thanks to La Roca that Black blues bands dropped the fiddle.
[SPEAKER_00]: But Chris Thomas King argues, the Italians couldn't quite nail the syncopation of the Black music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Unfortunately, the term Dixieland plagued New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: Instead of being called blues or even New Orleans blues in the same way as Chicago blues or Delta blues, their music became known as Dixieland Jazz.
[SPEAKER_00]: The word Dixie has deep ties to the Confederate South and has come to symbolize pre-emmancipation romanticism.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's a reason why they changed their name to just the chicks.
[SPEAKER_00]: As King explains, the word Dixieland acted as a repellent to black musicians everywhere.
[SPEAKER_00]: None of them wanted to be associated with a genre named Dixie, even if that genre was one that they had created themselves.
[SPEAKER_00]: And the origin story that was being spun up around the blues also acted as a repellent.
[SPEAKER_00]: Imagine enjoying some body, lively music, and then learning that that music is basically just a new take on the haulers and work songs of your people when they were enslaved.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some people might embrace that historical thread, but I can imagine many people wanting to move past that music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Who wants to be reminded every time they hear a song about their people's painful oppressed past?
[SPEAKER_00]: But again, there doesn't seem to be any proof that the blues stemmed from work songs, just like there doesn't seem to be any proof that the blues originated in the Delta.
[SPEAKER_00]: So why did people start pushing forward that narrative?
[SPEAKER_00]: The answer seems to be a combination of racism and ambition.
[SPEAKER_00]: In the Folkfiles episode on Sea Shanties, I mentioned that a lot of English folk revivolists re-wrote music history in order to better fit a nationalist and pastoral folk music ideal.
[SPEAKER_00]: A similar thing happened in the United States where black musical contributions were collected, but they were painted with the brush of primitivism.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was strongly believed that black people were a simpler people who were not as civilized as white people.
[SPEAKER_00]: The famous folklorist John Lomax, Allen's dad, once lamented the fact that, quote, blacks are civilized, claiming that it meant that they had lost their old Negro trill.
[SPEAKER_00]: One of John's favorite words to use when describing the black population was savage.
[SPEAKER_00]: The story of how John Lomax marketed Ledbelly paints a picture of how early folklorists wanted to present black musicians.
[SPEAKER_00]: John Lomax didn't go to the thriving musical centers in the south to collect authentic black music.
[SPEAKER_00]: No, instead he went to the prisons.
[SPEAKER_00]: Apparently, for him, the most authentic black people were those behind bars.
[SPEAKER_00]: There, he found Ledbelly in 1933.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, Led Belly had already been a singer and guitarist for about 30 years at that point.
[SPEAKER_00]: He had learned from and played with a ton of musicians from New Orleans.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that wasn't the part of his story that was interesting to John Lomax.
[SPEAKER_00]: He made Led Belly perform in striped prison clothes.
[SPEAKER_00]: The New York Harald Tribune called him a sweet singer of the Swamplands here to do a few tunes between homicides.
[SPEAKER_00]: To be clear, Ledbelly was only locked up for one murder, which he claimed was self-defense.
[SPEAKER_00]: Ledbelly didn't particularly want to be paraded around as a criminal, so he eventually parted ways with John Lomax.
[SPEAKER_00]: But the Lomax is owned the rights to his most popular songs and received all the royalties they generated.
[SPEAKER_00]: Despite being a massively important musician who's work inspired countless other performers, he died penniless in New York in 1949.
[SPEAKER_00]: This is what I meant at the start of the episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: Sometimes there are real life consequences depending on whoever controls a story.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here is Ledbelly's Where Did You Sleep Last Night, which you might know from the Nirvana cover.
[SPEAKER_05]: My girl, my girl, don't lie to me.
[SPEAKER_05]: Tell me where did you sleep last night?
[SPEAKER_05]: Come on, tell me baby.
[SPEAKER_05]: And the pines, and the pines, Father's son, don't ever shine.
[SPEAKER_05]: I was here to rule night.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dorothy Scarborough, a contemporary of John Lomax, was also a hardcore primitivist.
[SPEAKER_00]: She was known as the song catcher, but she only seemed to want to catch songs that reminded her of a bygone south that she had heard about from her parents, whose father had both own slaves.
[SPEAKER_00]: She talked about a song her mother used to sing to her that she loved, a song about a runaway slave being mocked by the slave patrol filled with racial slurs.
[SPEAKER_00]: She once said, the colored mind is not essentially logical.
[SPEAKER_00]: She left New York where the blues was reaching its zenith in Harlem, and went on a pilgrimage to the south to find authentic black folk songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: She wrote, on the trail of Negro folk songs, which was published in 1925.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was based on an article that she had written called The Blues as folk songs.
[SPEAKER_00]: That title gives you a hint as to why I felt a little uneasy claiming the blues was so music.
[SPEAKER_00]: I said that it wasn't just racism, but also ambition that pushed the primitive blues origin story forward, and that's where WC handy comes in.
[SPEAKER_00]: Dorothy Scarborough interviewed him in on the trail of Negro folk songs, and it seems clear that he just said what she wanted to hear to a certain extent, since some of his quotes in her book contradict things that he had said in the past.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wanted to be known as the father of the blues, and if he got there by pandering to white folklorists, so be it.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was used to pandering to make a living.
[SPEAKER_00]: After all, he had joined a menstrual troop when he was younger, seeing it as the only way to make a living as a musician.
[SPEAKER_00]: And fair enough, how was he to know that his attempts to make a living would influence the history of blues music?
[SPEAKER_00]: After Dorothy Scarborough interviewed him, W.C.
[SPEAKER_00]: Handy became known as a blues informant.
[SPEAKER_00]: Edward Abbey Niles, a white lawyer, collaborated with Handy to create the first blues anthology in 1926.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was basically just a W.C. handy songbook, as well as a bit of a W.C. handy biography.
[SPEAKER_00]: He was the only contributor.
[SPEAKER_00]: But here's the thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: Handy published his actual biography, Father of the Blues, in 1941, where he confirmed that the Blues was born in the Mississippi Delta.
[SPEAKER_00]: After all, he had been working in the Delta since 1903, so it was beneficial to his career
[SPEAKER_00]: But, his 1926 blues anthology doesn't contain any songs from the Mississippi Delta.
[SPEAKER_00]: If you look at the anthology, you might think, wait, there's a song called Mississippi Delta Blues in here.
[SPEAKER_00]: But that song was written by New Orleans songwriter Spencer Williams.
[SPEAKER_00]: Here's what it sounds like, performed by Dessie Brown.
[SPEAKER_02]: That's what we say, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me, me
[SPEAKER_00]: So thanks to people like John Lomax, Dorothy Scarborough, and W.C. handy, the blues became wrapped up in primitivism.
[SPEAKER_00]: Authentic blues only came from illiterate, quote, savage sources.
[SPEAKER_00]: As King explains, New Orleans was a problem that had to be obfuscated from the blues origin narrative, except for the occasional voodoo curiosity, because New Orleans wasn't primitive enough.
[SPEAKER_00]: If John Lomax or Dorothy Scarborough had written about how there was a modern booming musical culture in New Orleans, where black residents were trained as professional musicians and crafted a complex new genre completely separate from any English tradition, that would have caused the doctrine of primitivism to crumble.
[SPEAKER_00]: Speaking of English tradition, that was another part of the problem.
[SPEAKER_00]: Folkloreists in the early 20th century were using English folk music criteria to measure the authenticity of black folk music.
[SPEAKER_00]: Some of Cecil Sharps' work, for example, was based on finding a literate, poor, apple-latchin musicians who were thought to have the most untouched versions of English, Irish, and Scottish ballads passed down orally through immigrant families.
[SPEAKER_00]: Setting aside whether or not that's even true for British folk music, it doesn't work for black folk music.
[SPEAKER_00]: From what I've read, African cultures don't have a ballad tradition like the British Isles.
[SPEAKER_00]: Music traditions are more often centered on communal playing or instrumental prowess.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, Chattel slavery was a completely unnatural condition that would not have allowed the same kind of folk process as British immigration.
[SPEAKER_00]: Slaves were illiterate because they were forced to be illiterate, not because they were part of an isolated oral tradition.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, as Chris Thomas King points out, no African scholars were consulted when folklorists created their criteria for African folk music authenticity.
[SPEAKER_00]: I've been mentioning Chris Thomas King's book a lot, but I should also say that I did read Alan Lomax's memoir, The Land where the Blues began.
[SPEAKER_00]: Essentially all of the clips that I've played of Jelly Roll Morton came from a series of recordings that Alan Lomax did.
[SPEAKER_00]: These recordings are incredibly insightful and clearly point to New Orleans as a huge player in the birth of the Blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: And yet, Alan Lomax never released those recordings.
[SPEAKER_00]: They were hidden away until his death in 2002 when the Library of Congress released them.
[SPEAKER_00]: I was hoping to find answers in Ellen Lomax's memoir.
[SPEAKER_00]: His contributions to folk music collection and awareness are unrivaled, but clearly he wasn't a perfect man.
[SPEAKER_00]: First of all, the memoir starts with Ellen Lomax being somewhat grumpy that black business owners in Memphis had responded to Jim Crow laws by banning white people in their establishments.
[SPEAKER_00]: Then, I saw what he had written about New Orleans musicians, and it just seemed kind of backwards to me.
[SPEAKER_00]: He wrote, like other much-recorded New Orleans musicians, Lonnie Johnson had Creole eyes for the blues, reorganized their lyrics so that each one told a story and set them to book learned harmonies.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hmm, in my experience, it's rare that a song starts as fragments and then gets turned into a story in later iterations.
[SPEAKER_00]: If the New Orleans versions of some of these songs tell a full story, wouldn't it be reasonable to believe that those are the original songs?
[SPEAKER_00]: Alan Lomax also says, the blues of the professional jazz men are never quite the real thing.
[SPEAKER_00]: To many New Orleans musicians, the blues were the music of the inferior longshoremen along the river.
[SPEAKER_00]: But in my opinion, Alan Lomax doesn't really explain why in a satisfying way.
[SPEAKER_00]: It seems like he is simply putting down New Orleans for being full of professionals who pursue commercial success and embrace international and modern influences.
[SPEAKER_00]: And that kind of thinking has hurt blues musicians up through the modern day.
[SPEAKER_00]: Chris Thomas King talks about how he was shunned by certain record labels for playing blues mixed with rap or hip hop because it was seen as inauthentic.
[SPEAKER_00]: He talks about how in the local blues festival in Baton Rouge, black musicians started to be paid less than white musicians who played time capsules of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: He mentions Isaac Tigret, co-founder of the House of Blues, who was forced to resign from the board after he was accused of modernizing the Blues when he was really just trying to foster an environment where modern blues singers could earn a living.
[SPEAKER_00]: And you could argue this is all essentially due to misguided blues snobbery based on a primitive, incorrect, origin story of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: And, as a recovering music snob myself, this is what it comes down to for me.
[SPEAKER_00]: You can have your own opinions about what makes good music, but as soon as someone starts pushing definitions and opinions on authenticity as fact, that's when the music itself starts to suffer and the musicians along with it.
[SPEAKER_00]: The blues is such a fascinating and wide-ranging genre of music, and I feel like I've barely scratched the surface in this episode.
[SPEAKER_00]: I wish I could have spent a full year researching this subject.
[SPEAKER_00]: I still feel like a newcomer to the history of the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: So that said, if you have any corrections, clarifications, or questions, please reach out to me at folkfilespodcast at gmail.com or on social media.
[SPEAKER_00]: There's so many ways to learn more about the blues.
[SPEAKER_00]: My recommendation is to take a pilgrimage to the places where blues has left its mark.
[SPEAKER_00]: For example, I went to Clarkstale, Mississippi this year, which is home to the Delta Blues Museum.
[SPEAKER_00]: Also, I'll put a link to Chris Thomas King's book in my episode notes.
[SPEAKER_00]: I'll end with one of the best known songs by Tommy Johnson, the real person who can play it in Obrother Where Art thou.
[SPEAKER_00]: This song is canned heat blues from 1928.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thank you so much for listening.
[SPEAKER_07]: Right, mama, mama, mama You know I can't keep you in me Right, mama, mama, mama, mama I can't keep you in me I can't keep you in me I can't bear that I can't bear that
[SPEAKER_07]: I will go, I'll do the monarchy I can't eat on my mind I'll go, I'll do the monarchy Can't eat on my mind I'll go, I'll do the monarchy
[SPEAKER_07]: No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no
[SPEAKER_07]: I will go, I'll win more than me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Try, can you?
[SPEAKER_07]: Don't mind me.