Blues Essays, Articles and Tales

A Clara Smith 78 Moan - No. 1
(Two-Way Influential Links Between Clara Smith & The Rural Blues)
            - by Max Haymes

The first of a series of short snippets from a forthcoming book on the life of Clara Smith.

I Ain't A Gamblin' Woman, I Got Such-A Rowdy Ways
(Raunchy Women's Blues 1923-1937)
           - by Max Haymes

This is the full essay published in short form as the liner notes for 'I Ain't A Gamblin' Woman I Got Such-A Rowdy Ways' on JSP Records 4 CD boxed set.

On reflection I think I should amend my sub-heading for this 4-CD set to “raunchy and dangerous black women’s blues”.  Many of the selections are fraught with danger - of the terminal kind - whereas ‘raunchy’ usually conveys highly sexual/sensual material of which examples are here a-plenty ...
 

Death Letter Blues (a survey of possible origins)
            - by Max Haymes

The first recordings of this title appeared in 1924 by vaudeville singers.  ...

Blues Specialist Record Shops in the UK - 1960s
            - by Max Haymes

A rough estimate of the number of record shops which specialised in blues in England during the 1960s, as far as I can recall, numbered about 10! This among many hundreds of record shops/stores in the UK.  There were no other outlets at that time.  Virtually all the rest did not include a ‘Blues’ section in their racks, although a very mixed ‘jazz' section was included which was heavily slanted towards ‘modern jazz’ in most of its various (often disputed) forms ...

I've Got The Blues, But I'm Too Damn Mean To Cry
(Protest in early blues & gospel)
       - by Max Haymes

The word 'protest' in the 21 ". century is often linked with, and refers to 'political protest'. But this is really a tautology or two words strung together meaning the same thing. Erroneously, people refer to being political as involvement by a group, or party, retaining power of government or aspiring to acquire this power for themselves.

But politics is a much broader concept. It covers virtually everything in our daily lives from birth to death. Public health and safety, education, transportation, energy, agriculture, social and environmental issues, are major aspects governing the degree of quality we experience in our time on the planet. Indeed, for African Americans in the first 3 centuries of enslavement, politics and protest meant life itself. While the former spent much time talking of what could be achieved, the latter attempted to have this talk transformed into action....
 

Travelogue: Researching the life of Clara Smith
      - by Max Haymes
 

"Hobo John" is an English blues enthusiast on a pilgrimage to present-day Mississippi. One night in Clarksdale he meets the mysterious Fat Man, who offers him the chance to see the real blues of the 1930s. Unable to refuse this offer, Hobo John embarks on a journey through the afterlife in the company of Travellin' Man, an old blues guitarist who shows him the sights, sounds and everyday life in the Mississippi Delta. Along the way, the Englishman discovers the harsh realities behind his romantic notion of the music he loves and the true price of the deal that he has made.

Check out the Recommended Books Section for more information.
 

One of the interesting facts to emerge from putting Papa Charlie Jackson and Bo Weavil Jackson together in a CD set, is the obvious different approaches they applied to the recently-arrived phenomenon - the country or rural blues.  Both artists were growing up in the South when the Blues were relatively young.  Still, there would seem to be little commonality between William Henry and James Jackson - presumed to be their respective given names. ...

In the despairing days after Dr. King’s death, the nation was overcome by the blues, so it was fitting that the pre-eminent blues band in the land would play for the activists in Resurrection City.
 

The final stanza is like a dream. Big Joe Williams looks down at Martin Luther King’s face, and vows to the slain civil rights leader that we’ll keep marching on - even unto Resurrection Day.

Dark was the night and cold was the ground on which Blind Willie Johnson was laid. Yet after his death, his music would streak to the stars on the Voyager and become part of the “music of the spheres.”

J. B. Lenoir was one of the bravest political voices of his era. He sang against poverty, lynching, the Vietnam War, racism and police violence in Alabama and Mississippi.

A powerful torrent of “justice blues,” as deep and wide as the Mississippi itself, flows in an unbroken stream from the Depression-era blues of Bessie Smith and Skip James all the way to the 21st century blues of Otis Taylor and Robert Cray.
 

In “Hard Times Killing Floor Blues,” Skip James sings for the multitudes forced out of their homes and jobs — locked out of heaven itself and trapped on the killing floor of poverty.

Gulfport Island Road Blues (Nonsense & Robert Johnson)
       - by Max Haymes

There has been, down through the years, a belief by many white people that blacks from the southern states often sang nonsense lyrics. From an otherwise very sympathetic Fanny Anne Kemble in the 1830s, on down to 1888 when another Englishwoman tracing the sea shanty, reports "The "chanty-men" have, to some extent, kept to the silly words of the negroes, and have altered the melodies to suit their purposes." ...

Tracing The Origins Of Dying Crapshooters' Blues Back To English And Irish Folksong In The Eighteenth Century
 - by Max Haymes

Blind Willie McTell's first known recording of Dying Crapshooters' Blues was in November 1940, and as part of his introduction to this version he states "I am gonna play this song that I made myself, originally this is from Atlanta". This statement also has strong significance when tracing the path of Crapshooter's origins ...
 

The ‘lowly’ mule is a ubiquitous icon in the early blues and reaches back into slavery times.  This animal appears in many blues such as those by Coley Jones, Kokomo Arnold, Memphis Minnie, Billiken Johnson, Sonny Boy Williamson, Jazz Gillum, Texas Alexander, Julius Daniels, and Edna Winston ...
 

This is the land of tornadoes, thunderstorms, scorching summers, packed churches, magnolias, kudzu, pecans, cicadas, squirrels and chipmunks that outnumber the dogs and cats, trees that want to grow forever and soul food ....
 

Black female singers in the first decades of the 20^th Century -during which time the Blues had 'arrived'- were generally part of their community at the lowest rung on the socio-economic ladder.    I am here, talking about the vast majority of black women and the female blues singers in particular, who sang and recorded the first blues on records; formerly ‘the classic blues’ and more correctly now the ‘vaudeville blues’.  
 

This is a story about how poverty, segregation and racial discrimination harm human beings. This is also a story about how beauty flowers from the fields of brutality. This is a story of the blues. “This is where the soul of man never dies,” as Sam Phillips said about Howlin’ Wolf. 

Click here for Spanish translation
(thanks to Rafael Reséndiz, professor at the National University of Mexico for the translation).
 

Although the sea-shanty is a form of work-song and the latter is a universal phenomenon in one form or another, the 'shanty is never ascribed any origins from the African continent. For whatever reasons, the various versions of the beginnings of the shanty point to many a geographical birthplace - except Africa. In fact it is not until African slaves were forcibly removed from their homelands that they got involved with work-songs of the sea ...
 

Although the blues on record started in 1920, it was not until 1924 when Willie Black was included on mandolin as part of Whistler and His Jug Band, from Cincinnati, in an ensemble role for a series of sides in September of that year.

..... I maintain that many superstitions, beliefs and customs were transported from the British Isles over to southern USA in the nineteenth century, and earlier.

The roots of the blues are many and varied. The two most prominent genres from which they sprang are Black folksongs, including both play-party songs and animal rhymes, and work songs. Many of these latter songs evolved from the singing of railroad track-lining gangs, sugarcane cutters, cotton pickers, road gangs, quarry and mine workers and the like, commonly within the prison systems of the American South and South West.

Sometime ago in the mid-1930s, (or a few years earlier) an African American group known variously as the Dixie Symphony Four or Dixie Symphony Singers recorded six performances for a record company on a radio station in San Francisco, California.
 

...  a very belated response to a query from Paul Garon, listed in ‘Words Words Words’, Blues & Rhythm magazine No. 188. April, 2004. After listening to Chicago Bound Blues by female singer Yack Taylor (1941), he said that the recording “begins with Yack singing that she wants to leave old Bingham town, or at least it sounds like that.  Heading for Chicago, of course.  But I can’t find a Bingham Town anywhere”.

..... there were indeed quite substantial number of songs and artists who influenced the Texas bottleneck guitar ace, forming an important factor in the roots of Blind Willie Johnson.

The term came to light - for Blues fans - via the recording by Blind Lemon Jefferson on the very first reissue on the old Austrian Roots label (Roots RL 301 L.P. Blind Lemon Jefferson Vol.1. c.1965.  This was Booger Rooger Blues .....

Although, geographically and culturally, Africa is the place that is usually associated with the roots of the Blues, by the layman, this is acknowledged for the most part to be on a musicological basis, by the Blues writers and aficionados. Even then traces of Africa are only glimpsed momentarily, like the sun on a cloudy day. Some African words have been retained in black American culture, including that of the Blues singer, but they are exceptions rather than the rule.

In 1930, funded by Mrs Mason, Langston Hughes went to Cuba and met many writers and artists there. His blues poems influenced one poet, Nicolás Guillén, to write ‘Motivos de Son’ (1930), hailed as the first ‘Negro’ poems in Cuba. Here are two poems from that period. 

This article is part of a far larger work ('Slave To The Blues') which seeks to focus on the secular roots of the Blues back in slavery times in the USA.

The North American Indian and the Afro-American, including the Blues singer, are two of the largest ethnic minorities in the United States. The aim of this study is to point up a far stronger link between the two of them than has been supposed, or even considered in the past.

On April the 10^th 1912 the Royal Mail Steamer Titanic sailed on her maiden voyage from Southampton. Shortly before midnight on the 14th of April she struck an iceberg and, a little over two and a half hours later, she sank with the loss of 1,517 passengers and crew. Considering the enormity of the disaster it is not surprising that a great number of songs were either written about the tragedy or referred to it in one form or another.
 

There are two words that are particularly difficult to define in the English language; 'poetry' and 'blues'. To attempt to classify these two together is even more difficult yet a large number of blues critics claim that blues lyrics are poetry. This paper proposes to examine the definitions of 'poetry' and 'blues' and to consider the extent to which it is justified to link the two.
 

There are so many blues artists that had nicknames or had adopted alternate names that I thought it would be interesting to list some of them and identify where their nicknames came from.

I’m travelling by train through Mississippi, accompanied by the ghosts of those who sang the blues here before I was born: those who migrated north to Chicago and elsewhere on these trains and those who stayed behind, in the little towns where the trains still stop. These railroads are entwined with music. It was at a station in Tutwiler, Mississippi, around 1903, that W.C. Handy first heard a blues holler  -  and the words were about the railroads: ‘I’m goin’ where the Southern cross the Dog…’ 
 

'Things They Said' (by early blues singers) - by Max Haymes 

Jumpin' The Blues - by Steve Pilkington

Jump blues – it’s a term you hear more and more of these days, but what exactly is it? Like many classic American musical forms, jump blues is a hybrid - an inspired mix of blues, swing and jazz. The end result is an intensely exciting, buoyant music which noted music writer, Billy Vera sums up like this, “Marked by a front line of horns (heavy on the saxophones), backed by a strong rhythm section and propelled by a strong ‘back beat’ on drums, the jump combos were long on danceability and short on subtlety.” 
 

Survey of Black Preachers in the South-before 1940 - by Max Haymes

This article is an initial ‘testing the water’ on a subject in earlier African American song which has rarely been considered in print up to this point in time.  – the preacher in the late 19^th. and early 20^th. centuries.  ...  Although intended as a larger work (possibly a book) I will here, be concentrating mainly on the origins of rap together with some early background to the importance of the preacher in early black communities; especially from the blues and gospel vantage point.  I will also be considering a particular theme which gets tangled up with the well-known ‘Dry Bones In The Valley’, much-recorded in the pre-war era by black preachers and quartets alike.
 

Got the Blues for Chattanooga - by Max Haymes

This article was inspired by a  poetic and far-sighted verse recorded by a blind blues singer in the late 1920s!  Twelve-string maestro, Blind Willie McTell recorded his beautiful “Drive Away Blues” for Victor Records in 1929.
 

Background of Recorded Blues: No. 1 - Pea Vine Blues - by Max Haymes

 

Background of Recorded Blues: No. 2 - Mobile and Western Line
- by Max Haymes

Background of Recorded Blues: No. 3 - Beaver Slide Rag
- by Max Haymes

This started as a list of acoustic or acoustic-based blues artists with an informed (mostly) guess at the make of the instruments they used during the “Acoustic Era”, i.e. prior to The Second World War. The list now has almost 200 artists!!

While I have always been aware of hoodoo in the blues, via references to ‘mojos’, ‘black cat bones’ etc., I didn’t realize just how many more obscure (or less obvious) allusions existed within the genre.
 

Information on the events of Robert Johnson's life is rather scarce.  From birth to his still-disputed burial place, his life has remained shrouded in mystery for more than half a century. Indeed, some early blues researchers encountered a difficult time finding any information about him, even in the years immediately after his death.
 

The reality of life for working-class blacks in the Southern states of the USA – putting the lyrics of the early blues into perspective.