Red Hot and Blue: Fifty Years of Writing About Music, Memphis, and Motherf**kers

By Stanley Booth

This collection of over fifty years of writing about the South and its music by Stanley Booth, one of the undisputedly great chroniclers of the subject, is a classic, essential read. Booth's close contacts with many of the musicians he writes about provide a gateway to truly understanding the music and culture of Memphis and other blues strongholds in the South. Subjects include Elvis Presley, Otis Redding, William Eggleston, Ma Rainey, Blind Willie McTell, Graceland, Beale Street and much more.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chicago Review Press
• Release date: May 7, 2019
• ISBN: 9781641601092

Stanley Booth

Stanley Booth is the author of Keith: Standing in the Shadows and has lived in Dedham since 1943.

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Index

BLUES DUES

Underpaid and overprivileged, is how one reporter described his livelihood. That’s how it’s been with me. While barely surviving, I’ve hung out with the most amazing characters. A few years ago, I received in the mail, with increasing urgency, a series of postings that consisted of at least two galley proofs and three letters from a New York literary agent whose client (a regular, probably salaried, contributor to one of the oldest American periodicals, one named after an ocean) had written a history of the blues. My collection of blues- and jazz-related pieces, Rythm Oil, had appeared about four years earlier and, according to the agent, her client liked it a bunch. He wanted my endorsement, desperately, it seemed.

So, finally, I picked up one of the proofs to look it over. I hadn’t read far before I came upon these words: The weekend I was in Memphis . . . Unlike many before him, who’d simply bought a lot of blues records, listened to them, and written a book, this writer had made the extra effort of going to the blues museum in Clarksdale, Mississippi, passing through Memphis on his way there, thus becoming an authority. I, who lived in Memphis twenty-five years, going in the course of my research to the city and county jails as a guest more times than I cared to remember, found it hard to restrain myself from hurling the galley all the way back to New York.

They have in Memphis an expression, blues pukes (BP). The blues book author (call him BP1) was just one of many who’ve crossed my path. They come from everywhere, though California, the American Northeast, Europe, and Japan seem to have more than their share. All BPs seem to suffer from the same delusion. They think they can vicariously absorb some essence that will permit them to interpret the mysteries of the blues. The shallowest BP thinks that he is somehow, by divine right, an arbiter of the authentic. Never happen. But still people persist in such delusions.

Of course, being jealous of the blues is like being jealous of heartburn. The truth is, knowing nothing about the blues is preferable to knowing anything about the blues. Here, however, we run into semantics. There’s the blues, an emotional state, and there’s the blues, an art form, or a group of art forms. Believe me, when you’re in the Memphis jail, city or county, you got the blues. When you’re in your cozy room, listening to Robert Johnson’s plaintive tunes, you’re hearing the blues. Two different worlds. But some people, people from Berkeley, or Boston, or wherever, are so highly imaginative that they make a leap of funk and become Spokesmen of the Blues. No, really, they make a living this way. People in Dublin, London, Kyoto, Amsterdam, and Lower Slobbovia read them and feel somehow enhanced, enlightened, end manned by the blues.

I never intended to have anything to do with the blues. They came into my life through my bedroom window when I was a child. It wasn’t a matter of choice. What I learned, I paid for in experience at the school where they arrest you first and tell you why later.

---

Here’s an attempt to communicate with the genus BP, species television producer (BP2, let’s say). It combines a modest amount of truth with an admixture of insincerity, self-promotional hyperbole (I never really knew Annie Mae McDowell all that well), and justifiable distrust.

September 6, 1996

Dear BP2,

Thanks for calling. I enjoyed our chat, and I appreciate your asking for my thoughts on a video series based on the blues. As you can imagine, this idea has come up a number of times in the past. The problem to a man in my position, which is nearly unique (others, among them men like Sam Charters and Paul Oliver and such esteemed friends of mine as Peter Guralnick and Greil Marcus, have written about the blues, but they, superb fellows and decent writers though they surely are, have all seen the blues in at best a secondhand fashion, at a certain remove), is to talk about my knowledge and experience without giving away all I have: my decades-long personal observation of the human reality, the tragic pain and transcendent joy, of the blues and all that word connotes in human life and passion.

Unlike any other writer about the blues, I grew up in a turpentine camp on the edge of the Okefinokee Swamp. A little later, I (and I alone among writers) kept Furry Lewis company as he swept the streets of Memphis. I (alone again) watched Otis Redding write and record Dock of the Bay and other soul classics. Dewey Phillips, the first man to play an Elvis Presley record on the radio, took me, no other writer, to Graceland and Elvis’s ranch. As a veteran of many Southern campaigns, I have seen fiery crosses and whole black neighborhoods burning. I stood behind Keith Richards and watched Meredith Hunter stabbed to death at Altamont. I am the only living person, writer, or what you will who has been friends with Brian Jones, Sam Phillips, Dewey Phillips, Bukka White, Gram Parsons, Alexis Korner, Ian Stewart, Huey Meaux, Sam the Sham, Alex Chilton, Anita Pallenberg, Keith Richards, Johnny and Eva Woods, Fred and Annie Mae McDowell, Shelby Foote the Civil War historian and his daughter Maggie the stripper, Jerry Wexler, Ahmet Ertegun, James Carr, Al Green, Rufus Thomas’s whole family, Steve Cropper, Jimi Hendrix, Mike Bloomfield, Phineas and Calvin and Mama Rose Newborn, Chris and Rich Robinson of the Black Crowes, Mississippi John Hurt, B. B. and Albert King. And Charlie Rich and Charlie Freeman and Waylon Jennings. And Little Richard and Duane Allman and Tinsley Ellis. And on and on. Jim Keltner and Charlie Watts. And Joe Venuti and Slim Gaillard and Lash LaRue. This might argue nothing more than an unseemly gregariousness, but you have read my book Rythm Oil, which gives rather more than an inkling of the stories I know and the way I tell them, that is, in effective dramatic scenes.

There are many great, thrilling, exciting stories arising from the blues. Any time someone can manage to pay me to tell one or a few, I am pleased. They all have something to do with slavery and freedom and betrayal and hatred and love and loss and death. Some people say the worried blues ain’t tough, Furry used to sing. I declare if they don’t kill you, they’ll handle you mighty rough. The stories are many, waiting to be told. But if I tell them in letters, not only will the letters be perhaps rather long, then everybody will know my stories, and I will have to go to work for a living, a fate I am determined to avoid, cost what it may.

Yours bluely,

The letter worked, in the sense that the people who read it decided to pay me for a treatment, an outline of a blues TV series, an enormous hype:

The Blues, featuring the incomparable bluesman B. B. King as host of eight one-hour programs, celebrates as television never has the present flourishing and the fascinating history of this essential musical form. Incorporating classic archival material as well as exclusive original performances and interviews, The Blues follows the music from its beginnings in slavery and oppression to its contemporary global prominence.

I gave them—two Europeans with a production company—pages and pages of such drivel, a description of a TV series that didn’t exist. Luckily, I got half the money up front. That was in the fall. By the end of the following Lent, having delivered all material owed them according to our contract, I was still waiting for the second half.

Fax Transmission April 11, 1997

BP2—

If you’d had a check sent to me by Federal Express as you said you were going to do, I’d have it now. Your failure to do what you say you will is deeply disturbing and extremely inconveniencing. I assure you that I have been treated with greater rudeness and insensitivity, but this amount of rudeness and insensitivity will suffice—’tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door, but ’tis enough, ’twill serve.

The last line comes, as you know, from Hamlet. Ham, as I call him, is describing the wound that will soon usher him off this mortal coil. I don’t think BP2 recognized the line’s provenance. He sent me a return fax accusing me of attacking him with bile and saying he couldn’t pay me without his partner’s approval. BP2 had come to my house, stayed as a guest by right of imposition, and now was telling me that he wasn’t in charge, at least when it came to disbursing funds.

My reply:

Well, of co’se, Massa, I’s mighty grateful you notice me at all, Cap’m—’scuse de hat. Please don’t whup po’ ole me, I don’t mean no ha’m—I been wo’kin’ out here in you Europeans’ fields so long, under dis broilin’ sun, dat my brains get a lil fried, you know, and I start to think I’s yo’ equal. Crazy ole man, please forgive me, Massa.

On the other hand, where she wore a glove, to hide that unsightly wart: Bile? Bill Shakespeare is bile? Deeply disturbing and greatly inconveniencing is bile? Well, let me put it this way. It’s going to be deeply disturbing and greatly inconveniencing to the Glynn County High Sheriff if he has to come out here and repossess the car for the bank. It’s going to be d.d. and g.i. to the people at Georgia Power when they have to send somebody out here to cut off my lights. Ditto the phone company. It’s going to be d.d. and g.i. to Father Germain when I can’t make it to serve as lector at mass because I no longer have a car. A number of other people will find it d.d. and g.i. also, and only because you haven’t done what you said you’d do weeks ago and pay me. You come to me and buy my small portion of the wisdom of the ages for pennies—you’d have bought it for a thousand bucks if you’d been a bit smoother—and are indignant when I simply ask that you do what you’ve said repeatedly that you would do? Who and what do you think you are?

One of the best things I ever overheard was a man seated at a table near mine in a Mexican restaurant in Mt Dora, Florida, saying, She never would’ve testified against me if she hadn’t been caressed into it.

Coerced, said the bottle-redhead eating with him.

Whatever.

So you have to caress [your partner], whom everyone to my delight keeps calling Boze, perfect name for a field boss, into paying me? Wow, you such a standup guy. Me mighty grateful. I really hadn’t the slightest concept how dignified and righteous you could be when asked to part with money in an expedient fashion. ’SCUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUSSSE lil ole me. But you know what? The first time it was the agent’s fault. This time it’s my fault. Next time it’ll be B. B.’s fault. You want me to introduce you to Sam Phillips? And Fred Ford? Are you sure? Search your heart, lil red rooster. You ain’t in a barnyard full of rockoids now.

I was discussing this sort of behavior with [another producer] a few days ago, and he said something I found interesting, about how dismissive it is, how it involves denial, the fundamental denial of the value of a unique vision in the first place.

I wash my teef wif di’mon’ dus’

I don’ care if de bank go bus’

Done got to de place

Where my money don’ never run out

I see now that to disport myself among such international gents as you & [Boze] I should have attained such status. The people who robbed Furry would have made little profit with your attitude. You can pay me quick and rob me and my friends much better. See, Furry never met anybody who was responsible for his economic status, either.

But Furry, God bless him, had the courtesy to die. If I were dead, you could talk to BP1, who spent in his life one weekend in Memphis, and be much more certain of your goal and so on.

Months later, they paid me. Naturally, the series didn’t get made. Why am I telling you all this? Because this is part of the blues. No bluesman was born rich and I’ve never known one who died rich. Insofar as I’ve learned about the blues, I’ve suffered from the basic blues conditions. I used to wonder why Furry sang so much about poverty, loneliness, and death. I don’t wonder anymore.

---

Nobody told me it would be like this, all those years ago when I started out with the blues. The first book about the blues I ever read, or heard of, was Sam Charters’s The Country Blues. Published in 1959, the year I came to Memphis, Charters’s book introduced me to Furry Lewis, Gus Cannon, Bukka White, and Sleepy John Estes, each of whom turned out to be a character in my life.

In those days, there were no blues records. A few existed, of course, but there were, as they say, none to speak of. The odd rhythm and blues hit—Good Golly, Miss Molly, Corrine, Corrina, Good Rockin’ Tonight—had been cast in twelve-bar blues form, but that was incidental. Today, there are a zillion blues recordings to choose from. Then, to give an example, Columbia had the four-LP Bessie Smith set. That was it until the appearance of a series of long-playing vinyl records marketed as Adventures in Sound. Included in the series were two Italian albums recorded in Sicily (by San Domenico Barbers of Taormina) and Naples, respectively; three French albums—one, called Delirium in Hi-Fi, Recorded Somewhere in France, by Elsa Popping and her Pixieland Band—two in Spanish, and one instrumental album of folk songs from the Russian steppes. Another single album, consisting of music approximately as esoteric as folk songs from the Russian steppes, was recorded in Denmark on acoustic guitar by the bluesman Bill Broonzy. Though the bulk of Broonzy’s work had featured his electric guitar and other amplified instruments, at this time European intellectuals hadn’t accepted instrumental electricity—in order to be authentic, Broonzy had to assume a primitivism he didn’t possess. He still cut a great album, with classic versions of Troubled in Mind, See See Rider, and Ananias.

I’d heard of an album on I think United Artists called Blues in the Night, featuring Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and the original Sonny Boy Williamson. Jim Dickinson and Johnny Cash had it, I later learned, but I never saw it until it came out on CD. Real blues was rare, precious. Then the first great rhythm and blues albums appeared: Fats Domino on Imperial; Jimmy Reed on VeeJay; Ray Charles, Joe Turner, and Champion Jack Dupree on Atlantic; Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, and Chuck Berry on Chess and Checker. I obtained Leadbelly’s Last Sessions on Folkways from the Readers’ Subscription Book Club and memorized every one of its four sides. We in the same boat, brother, we in the same boat, brother—and if you shake one end you gonna rock the other—in the same boat, brother. Well, it taken some time for the people to learn, what’s bad for the bow ain’t good for the stern—

Genius. The message rang loud and clear in those days of civil rights struggle. In 1959, I came to Memphis and, though it took me a few years to find what I was looking for, by the mid-sixties was sitting at the foot of Furry Lewis’s bed, happy as a dead pig in the sunshine.

Furry and other friends gave me more stories than I have breath to tell. After Furry’s death, I returned to my Georgia roots without leaving the blues. The blues is, for better or worse, where I stay. In recent years I’ve written about a number of different aspects of the blues, and many of those essays, along with some vintage pieces, censored by previous editors, are contained herein.

CHIMES BLUES,

BY JOE KING OLIVER

For a few years Bill Forman, one of the finest editors I’ve ever known—let’s see, that makes, what, three good ones?—worked at Grammy magazine. Through him I got cool assignments like the following, which is a minor definition of the blues, though it’s ostensibly about a jazz giant.

Fred Ford asked me, late in his life, Why didn’t Louis Armstrong send Joe Oliver some money? He was asking a larger question, one I couldn’t, and still can’t, answer. Dana Fradon said, If God hadn’t intended there to be poor people, he’d have made rich people more generous.

Joseph King Oliver, the New Orleans cornetist who led the Creole Jazz Band, which made what have been called the first genuine masterpieces in jazz recording, among them Chimes Blues, lies in an unmarked grave in New York City’s Woodlawn Cemetery. Born May 11, 1885, Oliver, while also working as a butler, was perhaps the leading Crescent City cornetist of the period between Buddy Bolden and Louis Armstrong. Armstrong’s idol, Oliver had played with the Henry Allen, Sr., Brass Band, the Magnolia, Olympia, Melrose, and Eagle Bands, and the Original Superior Orchestra.

He was a riot in those days, a contemporary of Oliver’s observed, his band from 1915 or ’16 to 1918 being the best in New Orleans.

The great King Joe Oliver, Armstrong called him, (my my whatta man) . . . How he used to blow that cornet of his down in Storyville for Pete Lala . . . I was just a youngster who loved that horn of King Oliver’s . . . I would delight delivering an order of stone coal to the prostitute who used to hustle in her crib right next to Pete Lala’s cabaret . . . Just so’s I could hear King Oliver play . . . Oh that music sounded so good . . .

In 1918, the year after New Orleans’s famous red-light district closed, Oliver joined the exodus of blacks from the South to Chicago, where he was featured simultaneously in Bill Johnson’s Original Creole Orchestra at the Royal Garden Cafe and Lawrence Dewey’s New Orleans Jazz Band at the Dreamland Cafe. After two years, the Dreamland offered Oliver the chance to form his own group to play there exclusively.

Oliver took his role as leader seriously: This is a matter of business, he once wrote, I mean I wants you to be a band man, and a band man only, and do all you can for the welfair of the band in the line of playing your best at all times. Oliver and his seven-piece Creole Jazz Band toured California in 1921, returning to Chicago the next year, when Oliver, perhaps thinking that two hot cornets would afford the band absolute supremacy, sent to New Orleans for Louis Armstrong, who had replaced him in Kid Ory’s Brownskin Band.

Oliver was a master of special cornet effects, apparently the first, using pop bottles, water glasses, cups, buckets, and other devices to make his horn bark like a dog, crow like a chicken, or cry like a baby. Armstrong was by 1922 simply a master. Oliver’s band recorded for the Paramount label in Chicago in March of 1923, but their first released records, the first real jazz recordings by an authentic black jazz group, were made on April 5 and 6 at the Gennett Studios in Richmond, Indiana. Legend has it that because Armstrong was so much louder than the other musicians, he had to stand far behind them as they played into the acoustic recorder’s horn.

Chimes Blues, the fifth tune recorded that first day, is honored principally because it contains Louis Armstrong’s first recorded solo, but even without Armstrong, it would be worth remembering, as are the other personnel: Oliver’s old boss, Bill Johnson, on inaudible string bass; Honoré Dutrey on tailgate trombone; one of the earliest great N.O. brother teams, Johnny and Baby Dodds, virtuosi on clarinet and percussion, respectively; and Miss Lillian Hardin, the Memphis belle, on Thelonious Monk–like piano. Lil’s chiming chords place the listener of 1923 or 2023 in a new world of strange intervals, a world of musical novelty where master musicians have serious fun, where Baby Dodds makes his woodblocks talk, where Johnny is eloquent, Lil magisterial. Louis’s solo, which closely follows as written the piece’s four twelve-bar strains, is rendered with strength, clarity, rhythmic sureness, and perfect control. And bringing it all together is the old master, the King, Joe Oliver. If he had never played a note, but simply had written such compositions as Chimes Blues, Snake Rag, Snag It, Sugar Foot Stomp, Doctor Jazz, and West End Blues, he would be a jazz immortal.

Keeping it together was another story. By February of the next year, Louis and Lil were married, and in June Louis left the Creole Jazz Band to play with the Chicago singer Ollie Powers. He’ll find out, he’ll have to come back, Oliver said, but it never happened. While Armstrong became an international superstar, Oliver had other bands, with such great musicians as Henry Allen Jr. and Lester Young, but bad luck dogged his steps: a nightclub where he would have had steady work burned down; he made a serious error in judgment by turning down a residency at New York’s Cotton Club (Duke Ellington took it, and never looked back); reduced to working in and around Huntington, West Virginia, he was stymied by having his band bus’s motor freeze and burst. He got it fixed only to have the bus wrecked in an accident a month later.

By this time, it was 1935. He started having trouble with his teeth, and before he could afford to visit a dentist, he contracted pyorrhea and lost them all, death to a brass player. By the end of 1937, he was in Savannah, Georgia, with no teeth, no bus, no band. I got teeth waiting for me at the dentist now, he wrote to his sister, who lived in New York City. I’ve started a little dime bank saving. Got $1.60 in it and won’t touch it. I am going to try and save myself a ticket to New York. The Lord is sure good to me here without an overcoat.

Unable to play, Oliver sold fruit on the street and worked as a janitor in a billiard parlor. I open the pool rooms at 9 A.M. and close at 12 midnite, he wrote in another letter to his sister. "If the money was only ¼ as much as the hours I’d be all set. But at that I can thank God for what I am getting. Which I do night after night. . . .

I’ve got high blood pressure and I am unable to take treatments because it cost $3.00 to take treatments and I don’t make enough money to continue my treatments. I can not asking you for any money or anything. Should anything happen to me will you want my body?

Oliver died two months later, on April 10, 1938. His sister used her rent money to bring his body north and gave up her plot in Woodlawn for him. But there is still no headstone on the grave of one of the true founding fathers of jazz.

MA RAINEY: THE MOTHER

OF THE BLUES

Not too long ago I started writing a series of essays on Georgia’s musical artists for the Georgia Music Hall of Fame. They appeared in the Allman Brothers’ Macon-based house organ, Hittin’ the Note. It paid some bills, and I’m grateful to my friend Lisa Love, director of programs and publicity at the hall of fame, for the gig. In a consideration of seminal Georgia artists, Ma Rainey’s name was bound to come up early. I fell in love with her when, one Sunday afternoon, I chanced to come upon a plaque commemorating her by the Chattahoochee River in Columbus. I knew her by reputation, but after that I came to know her powerful, epochal voice and the unique path of her life.

Toward the end of her career, Ma Rainey met two young Fisk University professors, John Wesley Work and Sterling Brown, when they attended one of her performances. They were interested in the history of the blues and what W. C. Handy called art, in the high-brown sense. Rainey was interested in what the young men had in their trousers, and I don’t mean in their pockets.

She was a poet and a great entertainer, but she was also, in a way few artists can ever be, an authentic expression of her origins. She was a black woman from the working class in Georgia. Her immense influence on the history of music came in a way that seems in retrospect natural and inevitable. In fact, it was neither. Rainey had tremendous courage as a person and as an artist. Her songs contain references to male and female homosexuality, domestic violence, moonshine, floods, jails, hoodoos, serial murder, prostitution, and her own black bottom. With her gold teeth, gaudy jewelry, and primitive stagecraft, she presented an image that could be appreciated by the most unlettered of her fans. But there was a validity about her that even intellectuals could not deny.

Brown, who was a bit put off by her directness when they met, nonetheless composed Ma Rainey, an ode that testifies to her lasting power as an artist:

O Ma Rainey,

Li’l and low,

Sing us ’bout de hard luck

Round our do’.

Sing us ’bout the lonesome road

We must go . . .

I talked to a fellow, and the fellow say,

She jes’ catch hold of us, some kinda way.

The woman known to history as the Mother of the Blues was born Gertrude Pridgett, poor and black, on April 26, 1886, in Columbus, Georgia. Her parents came from Alabama, and no one knows what her father, Thomas, did for a living. After his death in 1896, her mother, Ella Allan Pridgett, worked for the Central of Georgia railroad. Doing what, I wonder? What would a middle-aged black woman do for the C. of Ga. at the end of the nineteenth century? Maybe she cleaned railroad cars or waiting rooms, or both. She sure as hell wasn’t an officer of the company.

By 1886, Reconstruction was a faded, though still bitter, memory; segregation—white supremacy—was the rule on both sides of the Mason-Dixon Line. We alive today find it hard to envision what society was like so long ago. The only media were writing, drawing, painting, sculpting, photography (incipient), dance, musical instruments, and the voice, and the only places where these, with the exception of photography, could be approached were libraries, museums, and the stage, the last category including everything from churches to bordellos.

The first musical production in the New World, a one-act distillation of the English ballad opera Flora, or the Hob in the Well, was presented on February 8, 1735, at Charleston, South Carolina, in a courtroom—draw your own comparisons—without scenery or costumes. On December 30, 1790, an actor named Graupner appeared in blackface at the Old Federal Street theater in Boston, singing a Negro song in the play Oroonoko; or, the Royal Slave. In 1815 Pot-Pie Herbert sang, in blackface, The Siege of Pittsburgh at the Albany (New York) Theatre, receiving so many calls for encores that he became too exhausted to continue. In 1843 four white performers played the Chatham Theatre in New York City, billed as the Virginia Minstrels. Soon thereafter other minstrel companies emerged, among them the Kentucky Minstrels and the Original Christy Minstrels.

Minstrel shows celebrating a caricature of plantation life became a staple of American (and English) popular theater. Years before Harriet Beecher Stowe provided the world with the stereotypically noble black man Uncle Tom, the minstrel stage introduced many white audiences to that theatrical staple, the comic darky, lazy, superstitious, hyper-romantic, dishonest, ignorant, overindulgent, um, am I leaving anything out? Anglo-American theater has always depended on racial, ethnic, and social stereotypes: The stingy Jew or Scotsman, the drunken Irishman, the wise butler, the fat-headed politician, the unfaithful wife, the dim-witted cuckold/husband, and so on. Theater works in broad strokes, always has and probably always will, for practical reasons of stagecraft. But there are worlds within worlds, and the minstrel stage presented a broad array of characters. Still, none of them was more than a type.

Ma Rainey, who created a powerful and highly varied type—the hard-drinking, free-loving, trash-talking blues mama, to whom all subsequent blues mamas remain in debt—was the recipient of a popular music tradition whose roots went back to the broadsides, poems on topics of the day, sold for a penny on the streets of England’s colony. One was Yankee Doodle. Collections of sacred and secular songs were also popular; as a boy Abraham Lincoln sang from The Missouri Songster, first published in 1808. Hymnbooks such as William Walker’s Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (which, over a hundred and fifty years after its publication in 1835, would give the Black Crowes an album title), and the Carmina Sacra (pub. 1841) of Lowell Mason, composer of Nearer My God to Thee and Blest Be the Tie That Binds, sold hundreds of thousands of copies.

The darky songs that formed a substantial part of the minstrel shows were not written by black composers but derived largely from European sources. (A salient exception is Thomas Dartmouth Rice’s Jim Crow. Rice, a white man, is said to have lifted the piece’s central rhymed couplet from a black, crippled stable groom in Baltimore or Louisville.) Another white man, George Washington Dixon, claimed authorship of Zip Coon, published in 1834. Its tune, still familiar today as Turkey in the Straw, probably comes from an old Irish folk song. (The suggestion has been made that the same jig was earlier known as Natchez under the Hill, summoning up associations of the demimonde antecedents of the Killer, Jerry Lee Lewis, and his cousins Mickey Gilley and Jimmy Swaggart, who all grew up in Ferriday, Louisiana, across the river from that infamous Mississippi port.)

Ohioan Daniel Decatur Emmett’s compositions, including Old Dan Tucker, Blue Tail Fly, and Dixie, were the product of his own genius, as were the songs of Stephen Foster of Pennsylvania. Foster, the most popular American songwriter of all time (with the possible exception of Irving Berlin), died at thirty-seven with three pennies and thirty-five cents in scrip in his pockets. No more fortunate was the first significant black composer of popular songs, James Bland, born the son of free black parents in Flushing, New York, in 1854. Bland wrote such durable songs as Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, In the Evening by the Moonlight, Oh Dem Golden Slippers, Hand Me Down My Walkin’ Cane, and They Gotta Quit Kickin’ My Dog Around. When he died of tuberculosis in 1911 he, too, was alone and in poverty.

This period, from just before the (so-called) Civil War to the early years of the twentieth century, saw the establishment of genuine black music as a commercial entity. In 1865 in Macon, Georgia, Charles B. Hicks, a black man who was light enough to, but did not, pass for white, organized the Original Georgia Minstrels, the first all-black minstrel troupe, the first blacks in American show business. An 1872 review from New York City found the O. Ga. Minstrels eighteen saddle colored darkies . . . brim full of melody. One piece they performed was titled Happy Colored Children from the South:

Keep your eyes on the children from the south.

We’re as merry as the little birds a-singing in the trees.

Our hair’s so tight that we cannot shut our mouth,

We’re always just as happy as can be.

Repellent as it might seem today, singing such songs beat the hell out of hoeing corn. Soon there were many blacks in show business, in minstrel and other types of shows. In 1871 the Fisk Jubilee Singers, hoping to rescue the five-year-old Nashville university from its financial troubles, launched a concert series in the Northeast. By 1878, after touring the United States and Europe, they had endowed the school with $150,000, the equivalent of as many millions today. The term, or label, Spiritual would replace Jubilee in the record market, but the music had become a permanent part of the modern repertoire and would influence scores of composers, classical and otherwise.

Two other musical genres of lasting importance emerged during this era, ragtime and blues. Between the two, a technological revolution occurred as music consumers left sheet music for records.

Invented in 1877, when its creator, Thomas Alva Edison, was thirty, the phonograph began to adumbrate its commercial potential about 1890. The recording medium, a wax cylinder, each one, since no method of duplication existed, a unique objet, caught at most two minutes of a dim echo. If Edison (who, W. C. Handy tells us, did not approve of blues) needed a hundred copies of something by Johannes Brahms (whom he did record in 1889), Brahms had to play it a hundred times. In 1887, a German immigrant, Emile Berliner, applied to patent a reproduceable disc.

By the end of 1901, a process for mass-producing cylinders was developed, but cylinders were still limited to a two-minute playing time, while flat twelve-inch discs lasted up to twice as long. Later Edison developed the four-minute Amberol Record, a sturdier cylinder whose grooves were closer together. It went on sale in 1908, but in mid-1912, the Columbia Phonograph Company announced The Finish of the Cylinder Record; henceforward they would produce only discs. Edison continued to manufacture cylinders for a few more years before conceding that they were indeed finished.

Early recorded fare included the marches of John Philip Sousa, popular songs like Charles K. Harris’s After the Ball, and comic stage-ethnic recitations including Darky Specialties, German Comedy, Hebrew Comic, and Irish Songs and Specialties. These, along with American Indian music, bird calls, arias from operas—early catalogs reveal an amazing, albeit sometimes spurious, variety of sound recordings. Among the vocal offerings (baritone) in Victor’s initial catalog of 1902 were Italian arias by Signor Carlos Francisco, English songs by Herbert Goddard, and French arias by someone named M. Fernand. The catalog did not include the information that all three of these names were pseudonyms of a young man from Brooklyn named Emilio de Gogorza.

William Krell’s Mississippi Rag became the first copyrighted piano rag in January 1897. St. Louis brothel owner Tom Turpin’s Harlem Rag, the first published (as sheet music) piano rag, appeared that December. In the next year, Scott Joplin, composer of The Entertainer, Nonpareil, and Euphonic Sounds, began publishing his rag masterpieces. His Maple Leaf Rag (1899), the first big ragtime hit, sold over seventy-five thousand copies in sheet music its first year.

That was also the year of Ernest Hemingway’s birth. Maybe there’s no connection, but Hemingway’s was the first generation I know of to be given an appellation; they were the Lost Generation. For Americans as well as Europeans the First World War, 1914—1918, brought new attitudes and approaches to life. The machine age, threatened by Edison, had arrived.

For one thing, though enormously influential (affecting even Sousa’s marches), those ragtime pieces were hard, way beyond the abilities of the young ladies who’d rendered on the parlor pianoforte such simple tunes as Carrie Jacobs-Bond’s I Love You Truly and A Perfect Day. But anyone could play ragtime on the phonograph. Record players would even play jazz, after the Original Dixieland Jazz Band traveled from New Orleans to New York (via Chicago) for the first jazz recording sessions in 1917.

The popular success of the phonograph paralleled the reemergence of Manifest Destiny and American involvement in such areas as the Caribbean, Panama, the Philippines, and Hawaii. Spanish and Portuguese sailors had introduced the guitar to the Hawaiians, who laid it down flat and, retaining the Spanish manner of tuning the instrument to an open chord, played barre chords with a piece of bone, bottleneck, or metal tubing. Many American country musicians, black and white, played in similar ways. For the first two decades of the twentieth century, Hawaiian music was the US rage. Ragtime had started as a primarily guitar-based music; the stage was set for the blues.

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Among the few facts we possess about Ma Rainey’s early life are that she was a member of Columbus’s First African Baptist Church and gave her first stage performance at the (still-extant) Springer Opera House. She was fourteen, appearing in a revue featuring local talent called the Bunch of Blackberries. She soon found steady work in traveling tent shows. At one of these, in a small Missouri town, she heard a local girl sing about the ‘man’ who had left her, a song strange and poignant. According to what Fisk University professor John Wesley Work says she told him in the late thirties, Gertrude (she was not yet, at the time of which she was speaking, Ma Rainey) became so interested that she learned the song from the visitor, and used it soon afterwards in her ‘act’ as an encore. This happened, Rainey told Work, in 1902. She also told him that, often asked what kind of song it was, "one day she replied, in a moment of inspiration, ‘Why, it’s the Blues.’"

That ain’t likely—the term blues, short for blue devils (boredom and, later, depression), has been around since the late eighteenth century—but it’s credible that she heard some form of blues in 1902. W. C. Handy spoke of hearing protoblues in St. Louis in 1892 and in Mississippi in 1903, when in his words life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.

On February 2, 1904, when Gertrude was eighteen, she married a comedian, singer, and dancer named William Rainey, whose stage name was Pa. Together they worked with such minstrel units as the Rabbit Foot, Silas Green, C. W. Parks, and Al Gaines, as well as Tolliver’s Circus, sometimes billed as Rainey and Rainey—Assassinators of the Blues.

While other black women from Birmingham worked at washing, ironing, cooking, mopping, or doing field work, Gertrude Rainey, who was a bit taller but no wider than an oak barrel, sang, danced, and cracked jokes onstage. Like the woman in the Willie McTell song, she had a mouth chock full of good gold and was famous for wearing necklaces of twenty and fifty dollar gold pieces. She had large, expressive eyes and an endearing, if metallic, smile, but she was no beauty. Yes, she was ugly, Clyde Bernhardt, a trombonist and contemporary of Rainey’s, said. But I’ll tell you one thing about it: she had such a lovely disposition, you know, and personality, you forget all about it. She commence to lookin’ good to you.

Bernhardt saw Ma Rainey and Her Georgia Smart Set at the little ALCOA company town—five thousand employees—of Badin, North Carolina, in 1917. Her troupe then traveled by private train car (maybe one like her mother had cleaned—in any case, the car was made necessary because of segregation laws) and played under a large tent to audiences split down the middle, whites seated on the right. The female members of the chorus were darker than usual in such groups, it’s said because Rainey was dark herself and didn’t want lighter-colored females in the act. For two hours, accompanied by piano, violin, guitar, bass viol, and drums (or some similar instrumentation), the Smart Set performed dances, songs, and edifying comic bits involving such Ethiopian Delineations as chicken-stealing sketches, with live, possibly trained, chickens.

By the last century’s late teens, when the Raineys went their separate ways, Ma had developed a stage persona that would not change. Warm, direct, plainspoken but poetic, she was the mature mistress, fully in charge of her younger, handpicked lovers, whom she referred to as pig meat (young) and bird liver (younger).

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The first blues sheet music appeared in 1912: March saw Hart Wand’s Dallas Blues, August, Arthur Seals’s Baby Seals’ Blues, and September, W. C. Handy’s 1909 composition, Mr. Crump, now titled Memphis Blues. Songs with the word blues in the title, used as slang, had appeared before, but these 1912 numbers were serious efforts at capturing the folk idiom on paper. Songs like them have been called vaudeville blues to distinguish them from their origins. Those distinctions meant little to most people. In 1914 Handy published The St. Louis Blues, which became, eventually, the most popular blues composition of all time.

Records by such black groups as the Unique Quartette and single black men as Bert Williams had been around for years, and in 1914 the Victor Military Band made The Memphis Blues, the earliest known record containing an authentic blues strain. But not until 1920 did Mamie Smith become, in Handy’s words, the first colored girl to make a record. Her second release, Crazy Blues, the first vocal blues record, sold seventy-five thousand copies, mostly to black buyers, in its first month of release, ushering in the blues era.

Yet Mamie Smith, a native of Cincinnati, Ohio, has never been called the mother of the blues. In the early 1960s, Norman Mason, who played trumpet with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels, said of the blues singers who worked with the show, I guess Ma Rainey was the most famous. Because Ma Rainey was quite a character or legend in America here, in that she had such an outstanding voice for the blues, and she sang songs like the ‘Florida Blues’ and the ‘Kansas City Blues’ and the ‘Jelly Roll Blues.’ She sang songs then that would sound as up-to-date as if it were played right now. Billie Pierce, who played piano with her cornetist husband De De Pierce after working as a chorus girl with Ma Rainey, said, Only thing I can tell you about Ma Rainey was—she had a real good voice; a heavy gross voice for the blues and everybody liked her singing.

Sometime between 1912 and 1916, Rainey met her younger counterpart, Bessie Smith, and probably worked with her in traveling shows, among them Tolliver’s Circus and Moses Stokes’s company. Rainey, eleven days less than twelve years Smith’s senior, must have seemed a Ma. However, when they met, Ma Rainey had not been called the blues’ mother, and Bessie Smith was not yet its empress.

They both started recording in 1923; Ma Rainey would record over a hundred sides, but Bessie Smith,