That Joe Turner Blues Cry, That Blues Cry for Freedom
That “Joe Turner” Blues Cry, That Blues Cry for Freedom!
A look at racial resistance and protest in the blues.
By Jim Hauser
Samuel Charters, in his essay ”The Blues’ Angry Voice” (published in his 2004 book Walking a Blues Road), stepped back from his often-quoted statement that “There is little social protest in the blues” to look at the possibility that he may have been wrong.[1] Charters was a major force in bringing about the 1960s blues revival, and his claim went counter to the belief held by many blues fans, scholars, and writers that the blues was largely a body of protest music. Due to his great influence, Charters caused quite a stir when his claim first appeared in 1963 in his book The Poetry of the Blues.[2] It aligned him with blues historian Paul Oliver who made a similar claim in 1960 in his book Blues Fell This Morning, although Oliver was apparently more open to the possibility that there may have been a substantial number of protest blues that went undocumented due to self-censorship.[3] Together, Charters’s and Oliver’s claims became gospel among many, and Peter Guralnick apparently followed their lead when, in 1971’s Feel Like Going Home, he stated that it had been a vast misconception that the blues was a form of protest music.[4]
One of Charters’s conclusions from his 2004 reassessment was that the blues records of the past may have been coded and possibly contained “veiled inferences of protest and rage within the lyrics of the songs.”[5] One of my main purposes in writing this article is to document that, despite some lingering doubts in the mind of Charters, coded social (i.e., racial) protest clearly existed in the blues. Also, I will make the case that protest—both coded and uncoded—not only existed in the blues, but occupied a key role in it, and was possibly even one of the cornerstones of the blues.
Before moving forward, I want to point out that Charters did not use the term “racial protest,” but this is clearly what he is talking about when he writes of his search for social protest in the blues. Racial protest is the more specific and accurate term, and racial protest in the blues is the subject of this article. Therefore, from this point on, I will use that term.
For the purposes of this article, I will define racial protest simply. If a blues song contains lyrics which a black man living in the Jim Crow south would have feared singing in the presence of a white man, I categorize those lyrics as open or uncoded racial protest. And if the lyrics contain a hidden, below the surface meaning, and a black man living in the Jim Crow south would have feared singing an uncoded version of the lyrics in the presence of a white man, I categorize those lyrics as covert or coded racial protest.
Through this article, I am not attempting to make the argument that every blues song is primarily a protest song. James Cone, in his book The Spirituals and the Blues, writes that “the blues are about love and sex and the pain of human relationships.” And about “that po’ boy long way from home,” and “de freight train…sixteen coaches long,” and much, much more.[6] But I think that he would agree with me that there is also often an element of resistance and protest in many of those songs. And that is because the blues was used as a survival tool. Here is the very first sentence in his book: “The power of song in the struggle for black survival—that is what the spirituals and blues are about.”[7] He also writes, “In order to understand the black reaction to the social restrictions on the black community as reflected in the blues, it is necessary to view the blues from the perspective of black people’s attempt to survive in a very hostile white society.”[8] Cone is saying that we must put the blues in its proper historical and social context. If we fail to do this, we are depriving ourselves of gaining a deeper understanding of and appreciation for this life-enriching music.
In Charters’s reassessment, he noted that “for many years there has been a continuing controversy as to whether, within the blues lyrics themselves, there was a coded protest against the social conditions that produced the songs.” He then pointed out that blues scholar Paul Garon (in his 1975 book Blues and the Poetic Spirit) cited a conversation recorded by Alan Lomax in 1947 with blues musicians Memphis Slim, Big Bill Broonzy, and Sonny Boy Williamson as evidence that coded protest existed in the blues. During the conversation, the three men spoke with candor about the blues and the difficulties of African American life under Jim Crow.[9]
A transcript of the conversation appears in Lomax’s book The Land Where the Blues Began. In it, Lomax prompts the three bluesmen by asking, “Tell me what the blues are all about.” Memphis Slim’s initial response was “Blues started from slavery.” Later, he elaborated, “[B]lues is kind of a revenge, you know. You wanta say something, you wanta signifyin’ like – that’s the blues. We all have had a hard time in life, and things we couldn’t say or do, so we sing it.”[10] Through Memphis Slim’s use of the word “signifying,” he was saying that blues lyrics were coded in some way. Signifying is an African American linguistic practice involving innuendo and indirection through which the speaker can say one thing but actually mean the opposite or something quite different. Among other things, signifying was used to covertly insult, ridicule, or mock another person.
Broonzy contributed to the conversation by pointing out something which is key to understanding a certain type of coded protest in the blues. It involved a form of signifying through substitution. Broonzy explained that a man could curse his boss by doing it indirectly through use of a substitute. Specifically, he could “sing words” in which he insults a mule which were actually words intended for his boss.[11] In addition to Broonzy, blues musicians and songwriters Brownie McGhee, Willie Foster, and Willie King have all identified the use of substitution in the blues as a method of striking back against bosses or other white people who mistreated them.
I’ll be providing more details about the testimonies of McGhee, Foster, and King, but I first want to show that the use of substitution in the blues as a form of resistance has its roots in the black spirituals. W.C. Handy pointed this out in a little-known article published in the August 30, 1919 issue of the The Chicago Defender newspaper under the title “Blues.” In it, Handy explained that slaves sang the black spiritual “Go Down, Moses” as a substitute for singing about their desire for freedom.
Most “Blues” are ambiguous. They are modeled after the spiritual of slave days. The slave would sing, “Go down, Moses, tell old Pharoah let my people go.” He had no interest in Pharaoh or Moses, but was thinking about his own freedom. But he dared not sing about himself so he sang of Pharaoh.[12]
Handy’s statement clearly implies that there was coded protest in the blues and that those who sang the blues feared singing songs of open protest. When considering the extent to which the blues were coded, we should keep in mind that Handy said “most” blues are coded (ambiguous), not “some” or “about half” but “most.” “Most” implies 60 percent at the very least.
Brownie McGhee spoke about coded protest through substitution in the blues in an interview that appeared in black researcher Lawrence Redd’s 1974 book Rock is Rhythm and Blues. His statements are below. He had an extremely roundabout and idiosyncratic way of expressing himself, and this is why so many brackets appear below. The bracketed dots indicate the omission of words and sentences, and the bracketed words indicate changes in wording that I have made in order to provide clarity.
You don't forget things that happen to you [...] there's always something happening that I think people should know about. And that's what I write about. Of course, whiskey, women, and money has been the basic formula of blues, but in my blues, I use them as crutches. [...] Most of my blues deep down inside, is resentment, persecution. I want to know why certain things happen to me because my skin is black. I want to know why if I got a dollar I'm not accepted. [...] Whiskey can be the title, but it's not what I'm talking about. That's to relieve my mind. Women don't treat me as bad as [portrayed in] some of the songs. [...] People don't understand double entendre----that's what we write a lot of times. Whiskey, women, and money----they're just crutches for me.[13]
Later in the interview, McGhee states, "The white man began to accept these blues [not knowing] we were talking about him through our woman---to him. And it [was] one way to get back at a man, at that time. And this is what was called blues."[14]
Willie King’s testimony about substitution appears near the beginning of the Martin Scorsese PBS documentary Feel Like Going Home. King once worked as a sharecropper, and his statement identified the danger in openly complaining about the boss.
And they would use a lot of these songs which they would talk about their woman, but they was telling you about the bossman […] Oh, my baby, she’s so mean, she just won’t treat me right, she take all my money. Well you talkin’ about the bossman. But this is a way that they have to get the message undercover. So they couldn’t just come out and say, “Well, my bossman ain’t treatin’ me right.” You gonna find you hangin’ from one of them trees in the mornin’, ya know. Yeah, before day in the mornin’.[15]
Willie Foster was a Mississippi musician who has provided us with a key description and illustration of substitution in black music. He uses the term “indirect songs” in his testimony. According to him, sharecroppers who were not free to leave their work situations would sing indirect (coded) songs about leaving in which the lyrics seemingly were directed at a mistreating woman but in actuality were intended for the “boss” -- the man who was preventing them from leaving. Foster does not explain why sharecroppers were not free to leave, but it has been well-documented that many sharecroppers were victims of peonage and were required to pay off their debts to the owner of the land that they farmed before they could freely move away or go to work on another plantation. Foster’s testimony appears in a film directed by Scott Taradash titled Honeyboy and the History of the Blues, which is a documentary about the life and music of bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards. A transcript of Foster’s testimony is below.
Back in the thirties, I was old enough to sharecrop with and without my parents. And we couldn’t move when we wanted to move. And so we would sing some indirect songs. With the indirect—when you singin’ the song, you be singin’ to the man that you can’t tell you gonna leave. ‘Cause if you tell him you gonna leave, he’d say, Well go down there and burn him up in his house or kill him. Kill that man. He’s gonna leave ya. He’s talkin’ about runnin’ off. I ain’t gonna give him nuthin’. So that’s where, that’s where that indirect song comin’ at—“Oh baby I’m gonna leave you. Baby you won’t treat me right”— callin’ the bossman baby. That’s indirect, that’s through your wife to the bossman.[16]
Foster’s filmed testimony included a somber and quite moving performance of one of the songs which he classified as indirect songs. The film does not identify the name of the song, but I will refer to it from this point forward as “61 Highway (Sharecropper Blues).” Its lyrics are below.
Well I woke up this mornin’, Honey, all I had was gone
Minutes seemed like hours and hours just like days
Seemed like my baby would stop her low down evil ways
Minutes seemed like hours; hours, hours just like days
Well I’m leavin’ in the mornin’, and I won’t be back no more
Says, I’m leavin’ in the mornin’, and I won’t be back no more
I’m gonna leave here runnin’, cause walkin’ is most too slow
I’m Gonna hit that 61 Highway, up the road I’m gonna go
When I leave this time, further up the road I’m gonna go
I’m gonna walk 61 Highway, ‘til I give out in my knees
Whoa, gonna walk 61 Highway, ‘til I give out in my knees
I’m goin’ fur north baby, as you can ever say you please
You know when I leave this time baby
Don’t look for me back this way no more [17]
To sum up, five African American blues musicians – Broonzy, Handy, McGhee, King, and Foster – are all saying the same thing: the blues contains coded protest through substitution. Oftentimes the substitute is a woman, but not always. For example, from Broonzy’s testimony we can see it may also be an animal such as a mule. (Another example of a mule being used as a substitute will appear later in this article.) And usually the substitute takes the place of a white man.
Two verses in a key protest version of the blues ballad “John Henry” also use substitutes: John Henry's shaker (the man who held a steel hand drill in position as John Henry hammered it) in one verse and his woman in another. Let me explain.
The duo known as The Two Poor Boys made several recordings of the ballad under the title “John Henry Blues,” and in at least one of those versions John Henry issues a thinly veiled death threat against his captain through his shaker. And it’s almost as if the musicians were intentionally drawing a picture for us to illustrate that coded protest was expressed through substitution; they do that by including both parties to the substitution—the captain and the shaker—in the verse. The key part of the verse is the seemingly meaningless interjection “Oh, Captain.” To recognize the protest, one simply needs to realize that the words “Oh, Captain” are not an interjection but instead are actually being said by John Henry.
John Henry spoke to his shaker; said “shaker did you ever pray?”
"‘Cause if I miss this piece of steel
Tomorrow will be your buryin’ day
Tomorrow will be your buryin’ day
Tomorrow will be your buryin’ day, Oh, Captain
Tomorrow will be your buryin’ day"[18]
Substitution also takes place in the very next verse as John Henry makes a veiled threat to quit his job and leave his captain by substituting his woman for the captain. Of course, John Henry’s quitting his job would leave his captain short on manpower.
Who’s gonna shoe your pretty little feet?
Who’s gonna glove your hand?
Who’s gonna kiss your rosy cheeks?
When I’m in a distant land
I’m in a distant land
I’m in a distant land, Oh, Captain
I’m in a distant land.
This Two Poor Boys version of the ballad is part of a tradition in which a death threat is made against the captain through variations to the standard shaker verse. In a variation different from the one used by The Two Poor Boys, the singer simply replaces the word “shaker” with the word “captain,” which results in an open (uncoded) protest. For example, the verse below was sung by Grover Wells while incarcerated at Mississippi’s notorious Parchman Farm prison.
John Henry told his captain
“Bossman, do you ever pray?”
Well, if I miss this steel and this hammer get away,
Tomorrow be your buryin’ day, Lord, Lord,
Tomorrow be your buryin’ day”[19]
Now, I’d like to return to Willie Foster’s testimony for a closer look. It has led me to wonder about what other songs may have been members of the group which he referred to as indirect songs. His “61 Highway (Sharecropper Blues)” appears to be his own original composition, although, as in many blues, it’s clear that he has borrowed lines from other songs, including lines from Son House’s version of “Walkin’ Blues” in his first verse and “Key to the Highway” in his second verse. Probably other sharecroppers who used this indirect song technique also came up with their own compositions and borrowed from other songs to one degree or another. But some sharecroppers may have simply used an existing song to sing to their bosses; the blues standard “Key to the Highway” seems to be almost tailor-made for that purpose. Just as in Foster’s song, it contains lyrics in which a man tells his mistreating woman that he plans to leave her, hit the road, and never return. All of this is expressed in the first three verses of Charles Segar’s 1940 recording of “Key to the Highway,” the very first recording of this song.
I got the key to the highway, I’m rarin’ to go (twice)
‘Cause I’m gonna leave here runnin, walkin’s most too slow
I’m goin’ back to the border, where I’m better known (twice)
‘Cause you ain’t doin’ nothin’, but drivin’ a good man ‘way from home
Give me one more kiss mama, one more kiss before I go
Give me one more kiss babe, just before I go
I’m gon’ leave here, ain’t comin’ home no more[20]
In the fourth verse of Segar’s recording, he sings of taking to the highway at night and walking it “until the break of day.” This verse could easily have been interpreted by any sharecropper who had been planning on leaving his boss, and by his fellow “in the know” black neighbors, as the song’s protagonist’s need to leave under the cover of night and to stay off the road during the daylight hours. In other words, the sharecropper and his neighbors could have imagined the song’s protagonist as being on the run not from his woman but from his boss or maybe even the law, who might have been on his trail for running out on his debts.
In Segar’s fifth (final) verse, he sings, “I’m gonna roam the highway, until the day ya die.” In recordings by other musicians, this line is sung as “until the day I die.” If the protagonist actually is on the run from his woman, why would he need to roam the highway until either she or he died? One could interpret this line as being nothing more than an exaggerated sentiment used to convey how emotionally devastated the protagonist feels. But this line may also have been interpreted by any of those who sang or heard the song as a comment on the hopelessness of ever escaping the white bosses, the racist Jim Crow laws, and life under Jim Crow oppression in general. This hopelessness may partly explain what is behind the frequently appearing blues theme of “moving on” or “rambling” from place to place.
Anybody who sang “Key to the Highway” or heard it being sung, whether he was a sharecropper or a victim of some other form of debt peonage, a railroad worker, a factory worker, an inmate on a prison farm, or a professional musician, could have imagined the song as having two facets: one in which the protagonist was on the run from a woman and another in which he was on the run from some sinister force of Jim Crow.
The word “key” in the song’s title may have been highly symbolic, and for black performers and their audiences the true theme of the song could have been the theme of escape. Not simply escape from a mistreating lover but escape from the bondage of forced labor: escape from a plantation owner or boss who held a sharecropper or worker as a virtual prisoner; escape from peonage in a levee camp, lumber mill, turpentine farm, Alabama coal mine or Florida phosphate mine; or escape from a chain gang, prison farm, or convict lease camp. Forced labor of African Americans was a widespread practice in the Jim Crow south; therefore, using songs such as “Key to the Highway” to covertly express a desire to escape or covertly communicate about a plan to escape may very well have been a quite common practice.
Another reason “Key to the Highway” may have been sung was to express not just the desire to escape from forced labor but the desire to escape from the Jim Crow south entirely. Many African Americans dreamed of leaving the south, and over several decades millions of them escaped by traveling interstate highways leading to the north with the goal in mind of finding work and a new home in cities like Chicago and Detroit. One of those highways was route 61 which Foster’s “61 Highway (Sharecropper Blues)” identifies as his escape route. Of course, many never did leave the south, but escape to the north remained for them a dream and “Key to the Highway”—a song which became a widely known standard—would have been a fitting song, a perfect vehicle, for giving voice to that dream.
Before leaving the subject of “Key to the Highway,” let’s consider the possibility that it was influenced by the older, much more obscure “Key to the Bushes,” a protest song that is clearly about escape from forced labor. It was recorded by Bessie Tucker in 1929. The first verse of Segar’s version of “Key to the Highway” is almost identical to the first verse of Tucker’s recording; the only significant different between the two is that the word “highway” appears in Segar’s song while the word “bushes” appears in Tucker’s. Tucker’s first verse is below.
I’ve got the key to the bushes, and I’m rarin’ to go
I’ve got the key to the bushes, and I’m rarin’ to go
I ought to leave her running, but that’s most too slow [21]
The second and third verses of Tucker’s song make it clear that the protagonist is a victim of forced labor. Possibly he has been put to work on a prison farm or chain gang. A convict leave camp is another possibility. Verses similar to the third (final verse) appear in early black work songs.
Captain, captain, ha-ha what’s ta matter with Sal? (twice)
You have worked my partner, you have killed my pal
Captain’s got a big horse pistol, ha-ha, and he think he’s bad (twice)
I’m gonna take it this mornin’, if he make me mad [22]
It’s not clear what the protagonist means when he says, “I’ve got the key to the bushes,” but when considered in context with the other verses, it’s clear that escaping into the “bush” (bushes) was on his mind. Possibly, the captain’s pistol, which the protagonist threatens to take possession of, is the “key” to his escape.
Was “Key to the Bushes” a source of inspiration for “Key to the Highway?” It’s not unusual for two blues songs to have a verse in common without there appearing to be any real connection between them, but the fact that both songs not only share the same opening verse but also contain lyrics with a theme of escape—escape from forced labor in “Key to the Bushes” and escape from a mistreating lover in “Key to the Highway”—lends some credibility to the idea that the earlier song inspired the later one. If a connection between the two actually exists, then the openly expressed theme of escape from forced labor in “Key to the Bushes” could have been encoded into “Key to the Highway” in the form of escape from a relationship gone sour with a woman. Therefore, “Key to the Highway” may have held a special significance to forced laborers on chain gangs, prison farms, and in convict lease work camps.
The importance of the theme of escape in the blues is highlighted by blues scholar and folklorist William Ferris in his book Blues from the Delta.[23] In it, he writes an analysis of what transpired in a “blues session” or “blues house party” that he recorded at the home of Floyd Thomas in Clarksdale, Mississippi in 1968, including a discussion of the dominant theme of the party: escape from Mississippi. Participants in the party included musicians Jasper Love and Wallace “Pine Top” Johnson who sharply criticize life in Mississippi for African Americans. For example, Love states, “They ain’t acting right by us,” and jokes that even black snakes are trying to get out of Mississippi.[24]
Ferris points out that a house party performance is a more authentic setting for the blues than a commercial recording session; it reveals much more about the music than can be understood through simply listening to blues records or reading texts of blues lyrics.[25] He notes that during a house party “the role of ‘performer’ shifts repeatedly from the singer to his audience and back to the singer” as there is a constant interplay between the performer and his audience[26] and the music is interrupted with conversation, stories, and jokes which serve as commentary about the song being sung and the various meanings invested in it. For example, in the second edition of his book, Ferris points out that Love links Mississippi with sickness and death during a performance of the classic “Going Down Slow” (a song in which a dying man laments having lived the fast life).[27] Love also makes a comment about drifting out of Mississippi—in other words, escaping from Mississippi—during a performance of the blues standard “Driftin’ Blues.”[28] Commenting on the party in the first edition of his book, Ferris points out that “throughout both the jive [conversation, jokes, and stories] and songs the theme of escape from Clarksdale appears repeatedly.” He then goes on to provide several examples of this, and sums up by writing, “These examples indicate how the theme of escape is woven through both song and jive and the living conditions discussed suggest why both singer and audience are so concerned with the theme.”[29]
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the theme of escape in the blues; Jim Crow was such a cruel and brutal system that it made life for African Americans punishingly difficult. Later in this article, we will see musicians B.B. King, Ray Charles, and jazz great Sidney Bechet attributing the source of their blues to how they suffered under Jim Crow. African Americans in the south had to endure not only disenfranchisement, segregation, and poverty, but also the threats of false arrest and imprisonment, lynchings, race riots (i.e., race massacres), other forms of racially motivated violence, and the cross-burning, white-robed, and hooded Ku Klux Klan. A white man’s misinterpretation of a statement made by a black man, a black man’s unintentional failure to abide by a Jim Crow social custom such as stepping off a sidewalk as a white man approaches from the opposite direction, a black man’s accidental brushing up against a white woman—any of these could lead to disaster. Rosa Parks likened life under Jim Crow to walking on a tightrope and stated that survival under it required “a major mental acrobatic feat.”[30] Protest against Jim Crow white racial violence is loud and clear in Charley Patton’s “Down the Dirt Road Blues” as he sings of going north to Illinois because “Every day seem like murder here.”[31] Is it any wonder that African Americans letting their hair down at a private house party associated two songs that seem so innocently free of protest--“Goin’ Down Slow” and “Driftin’ Blues” -- with life under and escape from Jim Crow?
You can hear the lyrics of “I Left My Baby” being sung by blues vocalist Jimmy Rushing as Ray Charles comments on the double-meaning in and coded nature of the blues in a 1968 TV special titled CBS Special Report: Of Black America, Body and Soul.[32]
Most blues that we hear, they’re talkin’ about love affairs. You sing about the woman, but you’re really also talkin’ about all the kickin’ around that you’ve had, about the humiliation that you’ve known and all the put-downs that you’ve had, the throwing outdoors that you’ve had, the hunger that you’ve had. Things like that. You think about all these other things, but you still singin’ about that woman. Somehow, that woman she’s almost like a god. She’s your savior. If you got her, you can make it through anything. But when that’s gone, then you got the sho’ nuff blues.[33]
Charles prefaced the above comments by pointing out the source of the blues, noting:
The blues belong to the black man. From the time he set foot on American soil, there’s been all kinds of things that has happened to him, but mainly he’s been limited. So many, many things he could not do as a citizen. He’s had to put up with all kinds of shortages. You name it. Whatever it may be, I assure you that the Negro in America has had a shortage of it. If it’s anything good, there’s been a shortage for him. There’s been a shortage in work. There’s a shortage in food. Shortage in money. There’s a shortage in education. About the only thing that has been good, and I think this is because it has been instilled in him, he’s born with it, and that’s his music. That’s the only thing that he’s had ample supply of. And that music, the ample supply of that music has been the blues. But you can’t teach a man how to have the blues. You can’t teach a man to know what it means to be somebody’s dog, or somebody’s fool, or somebody’s flunky, to be just almost a nothin’. This is why it seems to me the black man can sing the blues with far more effect. Because he knows what he’s singin’ about. I don’t think, I don’t know of any white person that can really sing the blues and know what he’s talkin’ about.[34]
B.B. King has provided testimony on the source of his music, and it corroborates much of Charles’s testimony. However, there is one big difference: Charles, appearing before a national television audience at the tail end of the civil rights movement, chooses his words carefully, while King, on the other hand, tells the whole unvarnished and uncomfortable truth. He specifically identifies white racial violence as the primary source of his blues, with woman troubles running a distant second.
Where I lived, a little place between Itta Bena and Indianola in Mississippi, the people are practically the same way today, they live practically that same way, and that is under the fear of the boss in a manner of speaking. Because so many Negroes down there have been killed many, many different types of ways if you said the wrong thing at the wrong time. Very few were able to get away with speaking up with what they thought was right or what was wrong. So when they use the word frustration, I don’t think that really tells the whole story because a guy get to feeling a lot of times he's afraid, he’s actually afraid. They use the word brainwash, because if you live under that system for so long, then it don’t bother you openly, but mentally, way back in your mind it bugs you […] Later on you sometime will think about all of this and you wonder why, so that’s where your blues comes in, you really bluesy then, y’see, because you are hurt deep down, believe me, I’ve lived through it, I know. I’m still trying to say what the blues is to me. So I sing about it. The next thing, which is relatively minor compared to living like I have, is your woman. Y’see your woman is the next thing that can make a man pretty blue too y’know.[35]
Blues scholar and musician Adam Gussow, in his book Whose Blues?, comments on the above testimony in this way: “Fear of the boss. Fear of the violence perpetrated by ‘that system.’ This according to King, is where his blues come from. Woman troubles are strictly secondary.”[36]
Gussow goes on to state, “This is an astonishing claim. Most blues lovers I know would insist that woman troubles (and women’s troubles with men) are the central theme of the blues. But no, King says. It’s the death of fellow black people, and the possibility that something similar might happen to you, that produces the deep-down hurt that you sing to get off your chest.”[37]
If we step away from looking at protest and look instead at the source of the blues and how it was expressed through song, we can see that while substitution and its associated double meanings were devices used to express protest, substitution and double meaning were also at the very heart of how the blues was expressed. For Ray Charles, his blues held a double meaning: the surface meaning of his lyrics reflected his experiences with women, and the below the surface meaning reflected his experiences with racial oppression. And his testimony seems to indicate that both were reflected on an equal basis. But for B.B. King, the woman’s role was minor; she served as a conduit for expressing his bluesy feelings and emotions over not just racial oppression in general but white racial violence in particular.[38]
It may be significant that B.B. King’s extremely open and honest testimony about the source of his blues was made to an Englishman (Michael Haralambos) in the mid-1970s. Would he have been so forthright if he had been speaking to an American writer at that time? Probably not.
King and Charles, with the surface meaning of their blues centered on troubles with women, created music which followed in the footsteps of W.C. Handy and other musicians. Handy and the others transformed folk blues into a new form of blues revolving largely around romantic loss—loss most often due to a soured relationship, but also other forms of loss such as the absence of a lover. In a 1952 Phylon journal article titled “The Blues,” poet and folklorist Sterling Brown wrote about W.C. Handy’s reworking the folk blues “Joe Turner” into his “Joe Turner Blues” which he published in 1915.
This song [“Joe Turner Blues”] derived from blues that folk Negroes sang much earlier about a bad Tennessee sheriff, Joe Turney, but Handy altered the dreaded “long chain man” into a wandering lover. All of that points up the history of the blues: the persistence of their lines, their basis in folk-life, and the alteration of folk blues which had many concerns – including hard times, peonage and jail – into the more marketable blues that concentrate on love.[39]
In addition to coded songs of protest, I believe there were a fairly large number of songs of open protest. And despite a tendency toward self-censorship on the part of the musicians, there are a good number of these songs documented on sound recordings. For example, there is a long string of songs which openly protest police harassment, false arrest, vagrancy laws, and the forced labor associated with them through verses containing the line “I was standin’ on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm” or variations to it.
These songs include Julia Moody’s “Police Blues,” Blind Boy Fuller’s “Bull Dog Blues,” The Downhome Boys’ “Original Stack O’Lee Blues,” Nolan Welsh’s “Bridwell Blues,” Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee’s “Woman’s Lover Blues” (and McGhee’s solo variation to it titled “My Occupation”), the Mississippi Shieks’ “Jailbird Love Song,” Washboard Sam’s “I’m On My Way,” Cannon’s Jug Stompers’ “Feather Bed,” Jimmie Gordon’s “Number Runner Blues,” and a particularly revelatory song collected by Lawrence Gellert in his Negro Songs of Protest titled “Standin’ On De Corner.” Additional "standin' on the corner" protest songs can be found in various books and research articles discussing the blues or black folk music.
The "I was standin' on the corner" line, as it appears in Henry Thomas’s “Don’t Ease Me In,” is typical:
I was standing in the corner, talking to my brown [woman]
I turned sweet mama, I was workhouse bound.[40]
The line also appears in The Downhome Boys’ (Papa Harvey Hull and Long Cleve Reed’s) “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues,” a 1927 recording which protests the most extreme form of police brutality: murder. It was released on Black Patti Records, one of the first black-owned record labels. I discuss this recording in some detail in an African American Folklorist article titled “Stagolee and John Henry: Two Black Freedom Songs?”[41] The “standin’ on the corner” line is in the verse below.
Standin’ on the corner, well, I didn’t mean no harm
Well that policeman caught me, well, he grabbed me by my arm[42]
Despite the verse above, the protest against police brutality in the lyrics is so understated that it apparently went unnoticed by blues writers, including Paul Oliver who wrote about this recording in his book Songsters and Saints.[43] Still, the protest was likely heard loud and clear by the The Downhome Boys’ black listeners.
Typically, the element of protest in recordings of “I was standing on the corner” songs is quite understated, mild enough that record company executives felt safe in releasing them. The protagonist simply tells his story of the consequences of standing on the corner without any accompanying commentary. However, the line was part of a floating verse; floating verses appear in a good number of blues songs and may function as a form of “a picture is worth a thousand words” shorthand. According to Paul Oliver's Broadcasting the Blues, many floating verses imply "a wealth of unstated associated meaning, permitting a maximum of content with a strict economy of means." In the case of the “standing on the corner” verse, this resulted in a protest that was much more pronounced than the muted literal meaning of the lyrics.
Some of what was implied but left unsaid by the lyrics’ literal meaning is revealed in the song “Standin’ On De Corner” which was collected by Lawrence Gellert in his Negro Songs of Protest. In this song, the judge winks at the policeman who arrested the song’s protagonist and the policeman winks back. Then the judge declares, “N-----, you get some work to do.” The song ends with the protagonist working on a chain gang singing, “Miserin’ fo’ my honey, she miserin’ fo’ me / But, Lawd, white folks won’t let go holdin’ me.”[44]
In a stunningly powerful filmed performance of his “Blues #1,” Mississippi musician Belton Sutherland sang a variation to the “I was standin’ on the corner, I didn’t mean no harm” line which completed a protest verse with a stinging bit of sarcasm.
Kill that old grey mule, burn down the white man’s barn
Kill that old grey mule, burn down that white man’s barn
I didn’t mean no trouble; I didn’t mean no harm.[45]
T. DeWayne Moore, in an April 2018 article in Living Blues magazine, discusses Sutherland’s song in terms of the exploitation which was part of the sharecropping system. He notes that planters (landowners) profited from the harvested crops stored in their barns and shortchanged the sharecroppers who grew the crops, and then writes that “Sutherland hollers the suggestion that they might as well have burned down the barn of the cheating planter.” He concludes that Sutherland’s song “offered a bold denunciation of tenant farming contracts and sharecropping arrangements between black tenant farmers and white landowners.”[46]
The threat to “burn down that white man’s barn” might have also been accompanied by a threat to kill the landowner. Considering Broonzy’s explanation that a mule could be used as a substitute for a boss, it’s possible that the “old grey mule” which is the object of a threat in the above verse was used as a substitute for the landowner. It’s also possible that the third line of the song’s very next verse—a verse which is a variation to the opening verse of Percy Mayfield’s “Strange Things Happening”—included a veiled threat of violence against the landowner.
I want you to love me or leave me, girl, anything you wanna do
I want you to love me or leave me, anything you wanna do
What a strange thing happenin’, someday might a-happen to you[47]
Sutherland’s song is an example of what Charters referred to as the blues’ angry voice—it was the voice of protest he had been looking for but never found. In his “The Blues’ Angry Voice” essay he explained, “I was one of many people who sought in the blues some explicit protest against the rigid system of apartheid that controlled the lives of African Americans,” and he went on to state, “I could never say that I had found something that made the open statement of protest I hoped to find.”[48] He closed the essay by acknowledging the possibility that Jim Crow-era commercial blues recordings contained coded protest, but then went on to conclude that the existence of undocumented songs containing open protest was a stronger possibility: “What seems more likely is that there could have been another layer of black song that constituted the angry cry we have been searching for. We were just never given the chance to hear it.”[49] We can only wonder if Sutherland’s particularly angry and defiant use of the “…I didn’t mean no harm” line was unique or whether it was widely used by musicians but went undocumented as a result of self-censorship.
Charters came to this conclusion about the unheard and therefore undocumented angry voice of the blues after examining a book of songs collected by Lawrence Gellert titled Negro Songs of Protest, published in 1936.[50] While the authenticity of some of Gellert’s songs have been questioned, some have been proven to be authentic through the work of cultural historian Steven Garabedian who, in his book on Gellert’s work titled A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest and White Denial, matched lines and verses from songs in Gellert’s collection to lines and verses collected by others who had performed field work in the South.[51] Along this same line, I have personally come across a verse from a song in Gellert’s collection titled “I Went to Atlanta!”—a song which was key to triggering Charters’ reassessment—in Ralph Ellison’s classic “blues novel” Invisible Man.[52]
In 1963, Charters said he heard “complaint” in the blues but not protest, but if he had concentrated on taking a closer look at complaint instead of focusing on what he defined as protest, he might have come to a different conclusion about the political nature of the blues and the element of protest in it. When a blues musician in the Jim Crow south sang a song of complaint about a lack of money, hard times, or trouble, didn’t that song oftentimes carry with it the implication that the biggest reason by far for the singer’s blues and unhappiness was racial oppression? For example, when William Harris sang, “Have you ever dreamed lucky and woke up cold in hand” in his “Bullfrog Blues,” wouldn’t he and members of his black audience have had in the backs of their minds the same kinds of things that Ray Charles disclosed were on the back of his mind when he sang the blues?—“the kickin’ around that you’ve had, the humiliation that you’ve known and all the put-downs that you’ve had, the throwing outdoors that you’ve had, the hunger that you’ve had.” In other words, weren’t they thinking that the main reason the song’s protagonist was destitute was the economic consequences of having black skin? Blues songs about lack of money, hard times, or trouble—and even “bad luck”—must have often carried with them the implication that the root of it all was racial oppression. And if these songs did carry that implication, weren’t they, in a sense, songs of racial protest? Yes! But the protest was understated. It was an extreme form of understatement, but it was understatement—and protest—nevertheless.
The blues was a form of racial resistance. Just singing the blues—singing of sadness, loss, and hardship—was, in itself, an act of resistance and protest, a way of saying, No, I reject the mask of the happy-go-lucky, carefree, contented, submissive Negro that you insist I wear. I’m not happy, I’m full of discontent and pain and suffering. The phrase “I can’t be satisfied” and variations to it were used as an expression of discontent, worry, and bluesy sadness in a good number of blues including William Harris’s “Bullfrog Blues,” Blind Willie McTell’s “Mama ‘Tain’t Long Fo’ Day,” Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues,” Mississippi John Hurt’s “Got the Blues, Can’t Be Satisfied,” Belton Sutherland’s “I Have Trouble,” and the Muddy Waters hit “I Can’t Be Satisfied” which propelled him on to stardom. And If we consider the coded nature of the blues, we may come to wonder whether the violence expressed in Johnson’s, Hurt’s, and Waters’s “I can’t be satisfied”-themed songs was aimed not at a woman or romantic rival but an oppressor.
Muddy Waters, while recalling his early days when he lived in Mississippi, pointed out that the phrase “I can’t be satisfied” contains a protest against racial oppression in the quote below which appears in Paul Oliver’s book Conversation with the Blues.
I can't remember much of what I was singin' now 'ceptin' I do remember I was always singin', "I can't be satisfied, I be all troubled in mind." Seems to me like I was always singin' that, because I was always singin' just the way I felt, and maybe I didn't exactly know it, but I just didn't like the way things were down there -- in Mississippi.[53]
It's not clear what Waters meant when he said "I didn't exactly know it" but the quote does show that at some point in his life he began to consciously associate the phrase "I can't be satisfied" with the racism he experienced in Mississippi. And from that point on, when he performed "I Can't Be Satisfied" he must have often had the same kind of thoughts going on in his mind as the thoughts that were going on in the minds of B.B. King and Ray Charles when they performed the blues.
In his 1960 autobiography Treat It Gentle, Sidney Bechet characterizes the blues as a form of protest music. Specifically, he describes the blues as a prayer for release from racial oppression. He comes close to characterizing the blues as freedom songs or as a cry for freedom.
And both of them, the spirituals and the blues, they was a prayer. One was praying to God and the other was praying to what’s human. It’s like one was saying “Oh, God, let me go,” and the other was saying “Oh, Mister, let me be.” And they were both the same thing in a way; they were both my people’s way of praying to be themselves, praying to be let alone so they could be human […] And the blues, they’ve got that sob inside, that awful lonesome feeling. It’s got so much remembering inside it, so many bad things to remember, so many losses.[54]
Earlier in his book, Bechet recalls a blues song he had heard in jail about a man who was to be hung for a crime he did not commit. He makes it clear that this song was a song of racial protest, as he points out:
He was more than just a man. He was like every man that’s been done a wrong. Inside him he’d got the memory of all the wrong that’s been done to all my people. That’s what the memory is … when I remember that man, I’m remembering myself, a feeling I’ve always had.[55]
“Joe Turner,” one of the oldest documented blues songs, may not have contained the angry voice that Charters searched for, but it is a key example of open racial protest. It contains two key elements that I believe are essential parts of the very core of the blues: (1) protest against oppression and (2) romantic troubles, loss, or longing (through mistreatment, betrayal, absence, imprisonment, death, or some other tragedy). W.C. Handy spoke of the importance of this song as an introduction to his performance of it in his 1953 album Blues Revisited: A Unique Series of Authentic Performances by the Legendary W.C. Handy.
When they speak of the blues that carry three-line stanzas, and we want to tell the story of the blues, we can’t tell it without the story of Joe Turner. Joe Turney was the brother of Pete Turney, the governor of the state of Tennessee, who pressed Negroes into peonage and took them down the Mississippi River to the farms. To do this, they had decoys that lured Negroes in Memphis to crap games where they were arrested and put in prison. Women looking for their husbands who were late coming home would ask, I wonder where my husband is? Then they’d be told, Haven’t you heard about Joe Turner? He’s been here and gone. He had a long chain with 50 links to it, where he could press Negroes in handcuffs and take them away. So the Negroes around Memphis made up a song.[56]
Handy’s claim that “You can’t tell the story of the blues without telling the story of Joe Turner” indicates that he saw “Joe Turner” as one of the cornerstones of the blues. After making the comments above, Handy – at almost 80 and blind – goes on to sing two verses of “Joe Turner.”
They tell me Joe Turner’s come and gone, oh Lord (twice)
They got my man and gone
He come with 40 links of chain, oh Lord (twice)
He got my man and gone
“Joe Turner” is clearly a song of open racial protest. But the protest is understated, as it is in much of the blues. There is no call to action. The woman expresses no anger. She simply and matter-of-factly tells the tale of what happened to her man. Nevertheless, “Joe Turner" was a cry out against exploitation and injustice, a cry for freedom. And when you hear Handy’s brief but moving performance, you realize that that “Joe Turner” cry, that cry for release and freedom is the same cry you hear in "Go Down Moses" and in other black spirituals. And you realize that that cry could not be expressed more beautifully or more eloquently than through those spirituals . . . . . . And, of course, through the blues!
Notes:
[1] Samuel Charters, Walking a Blues Road: A Selection of Blues Writing, 1956-2004, (New York: Marion Boyars, 2004), 131-142
[2] Samuel Charters, The Poetry of the Blues, (New York: Oak Publications, 1963, First Avon Printing, July 1970), 152
[3] Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, 2nd ed., (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), 270. [First edition published by Cassell & Co., London, 1960]
[4] Peter Guralnick, Feel Like Going Home: Portraits in Blues ‘n’ Roll, (New York: First Vintage Books Edition, 1981), 39. [Originally published by Random House in 1971].
[5] Charters, Walking, 141-142
[6] James Cone, The Spirituals and the Blues, (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1992), 113. [Originally published in 1972 by Seabury Press]
[7] Ibid, 1
[8] Ibid, 119
[9] Ibid, 131
[10] Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, (New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1993), 460-461
[11] Ibid
[12] Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff, “They Cert’ly Sound Good to Me: Sheet Music, Southern Vaudeville, and the Commercial Ascendancy of the Blues,” American Music 14, no. 4 (Winter 1996), 423. (This article reprinted in full W.C. Handy’s article titled “Blues” from the August 30, 1919 edition of The Chicago Defender.)
[13] Lawrence Redd, Rock Is Rhythm and Blues, (Michigan State Univ. Press, 1974), 107
[14] Ibid, 111
[15] Feel Like Going Home, directed by Martin Scorsese, (New York: Sony Music Entertainment, 2003) DVD
[16] Honeyboy: The history of the Blues, directed by Scott Taradash, (Toronto: Sky Merchants, 2008) DVD. Foster’s full testimony, including his striking performance, can be found on YouTube by Googling “Honeyboy and the history of the blues trailer." His testimony starts at about the two minute and 20 second mark. You can also get to the video by clicking on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGvs8pAHTH8
[17] Ibid
[18] Two Poor Boys, “John Henry Blues.” This recording can be heard on YouTube at either of the following links: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XY38e3F9xXg&t=11s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbAT23py5Dw
[19] Grover Wells, “John Henry.”
[20] Charles Segar, “Key to the Highway.” https://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=4187.0
[21] Bessie Tucker, “Key to the Bushes.” https://weeniecampbell.com/yabbse/index.php?topic=11751.0
[22] Ibid
[23] William Ferris, Blues from the Delta, 1st ed., (London: Studio Vista, 1970); Blues from the Delta, with a new introduction by Billy Taylor, 2nd ed., (New York: Da Capo, 1984) [Reprint of Blues from the Delta, 2nd ed., (New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1978]
[24] Ferris, 1970, 86; 1984, 110
[25] Ferris, 1970, 62-62, 84; 1984, 103
[26] Ferris, 1970, 84
[27] Ferris, 1984, 110
[28] Ferris, 1970, 84; 1984, 132-133
[29] Ferris, 1970, 86
[30] Jeanne Theoharis, “Get Reintroduced to Rosa Parks as a New Archive Reveals the Woman Behind the Boycott,” Smithsonian Magazine (online article dated December 2015), accessed January 8, 2024, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/reintroduced-rosa-parks-new-archive-reveals-woman-behind-boycott-180957200/
[31] Charlie Patton, “Down the Dirt Road Blues.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzcCQJ3F_eQ
[32] You can find the Of Black America, Body and Soul TV special on YouTube by searching with the phrase “black America body and soul” or by clicking on this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMms6ObGhQY The quoted statements made by Charles appear at the 30-minute mark of the program. You might need to use headphones to hear the audio. (Without headphones, the audio is garbled on some computers and electronic devices.)
[33] Ibid
[34] Ibid
[35] Michael Haralambos, Soul Music: The Birth of a Sound in Black America, (New York: Da Capo, 1985), 72. [Reprint of Right On! From Blues to Soul in Black America, (London: Eddison Press, 1974)]
[36] Adam Gussow, Whose Blues: Facing Up to Race and the Future of the Music, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020), 37
[37] Ibid, 38
[38] It may be that this blues doubleness is what gives the music of B.B. King and Ray Charles and other black musicians much of its power. It may create a “sum is greater than its parts” effect.
[39] Sterling Brown, “The Blues,” Phylon, vol. 13, no. 4, 286
[40] Henry Thomas, “Don’t Ease Me In” https://weeniecampbell.com/wiki/index.php?title=Don%27t_You_Ease_Me_In
[41] Jim Hauser, “Stagolee and John Henry: Two Black Freedom Songs?”, African American Folklorist, https://theafricanamericanfolklorist.com/articles/a-hrefhttptheafricanamericanfolkloristcom20201129twoblackfreedomsongsstagolee-and-john-henry-two-black-freedom-songsa
[42] Downhome Boys, “Original Stack O’Lee Blues” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZzQpHPvGLs
[43] Paul Oliver, Songsters and Saints, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984) softcover edition, 238-239
[44] Lawrence Gellert (editor), Negro Songs of Protest, (New York: American Music League, 1936), 21
[45] Belton Sutherland, “Blues #1” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ccn6_60NhJI
[46] T. DeWayne Moore, “Burn Down the White Man’s Barn: The Unmarked Biography of Belton Sutherland,” Living Blues, vol. 49, no. 2 (April 2018), 39-40
[47] Page 39 of Moore’s article notes the connection between the verse and Mayfield’s song.
[48] Charters, Walking, 132
[49] Ibid, 142
[50] Ibid, 135
[51] Steven Garabedian, A Sound History: Lawrence Gellert, Black Musical Protest and White Denial, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2020), 142-148, 167-171
[52] Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, second Vintage International edition, (New York: Vintage International, 1995), 312 (Originally published in 1947.)
[53] Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, second edition, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26. [first edition published in 1965]
[54] Sidney Bechet, Treat It Gentle, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), 212-213
[55] Ibid, 108
[56] W.C. Handy, Blues Revisited: A Unique Series of Authentic Performances by the Legendary W.C. Handy, 33 1/3 rpm LP recording, (New York: Heritage, 1953). A slightly edited version of Handy’s statement also appears in the 2003 PBS documentary Warming by the Devil’s Fire, directed by Charles Burnett.
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