Killin' Floor Blues: A Music & Murder Mystery

By Paul Martin

As America staggers through the Great Depression, 

death stalks the pioneer blues musicians. 

 

In the depths of the Great Depression, father and son musicologists John and Alan Lomax

• Language: English
• Publisher: Historia
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781947915992

Paul Martin

Paul Martin was educated at Cambridge University and at Stanford University, California, where he was Harkness Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences. He lectured and researched in Behavioural Biology at Cambridge University, and was a Fellow of Wolfson College, before leaving academia to pursue other interests, including science writing. His previous books include The Sickening Mind and Counting Sheep.

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Paul Martin

KILLIN’ FLOOR BLUES

A Music & Murder Mystery

First published by Level Best Books 2020

Copyright © 2020 by Paul Martin

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise without written permission from the publisher. It is illegal to copy this book, post it to a website, or distribute it by any other means without permission.

Paul Martin asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

This novel is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living and dead, events, or localities is entirely coincidental.

Author Photo Credit: Mark Thiessen/NGS

First edition

ISBN: 978-1-947915-99-2

Cover art by Level Best Designs

This book was professionally typeset on Reedsy

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For my parents and my grandparents,

who endured the worst of the Great Depression

Praise for Books by Paul Martin

A revelation. Brings the early blues greats to life.—Jeffrey Meyerriecks, renowned classical and jazz guitarist

Author Paul Martin doesn’t know the meaning of the word boring.—San Francisco Book Review

Paul Martin knows his stuff. This is a fascinating tale of music and race during the Great Depression. There’s a lot of great history of Blues packed into this murder mystery.— Kelly Oliver, bestselling author of the Fiona Figg Mysteries

While the famous musicologists and folklorists John and Alan Lomax did travel to many of the locations mentioned in this story, the incidents related here are entirely fictional. —PM

Hard times here and everywhere you go,

Times are harder than ever been before.

And the people they are driftin’ from door to door,

But they can’t find no heaven, I don’t care where they go.

—Skip James, Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues, 1931

Prologue

John Lomax made two fateful trips to Chicago in 1929. In March of that year, he rode the train north from Mississippi, a journey that gave him a firsthand look at the Great Migration. The trains back then were filled with black people fleeing the decades of oppression they’d faced under the South’s Jim Crow laws. Coming from rural and urban areas alike, they were headed for large northern cities—Chicago, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, New York—where they hoped to find a better life.

John was on his way northward to meet with Charles Chic Rice, an executive at Paramount Records, one of the many companies that were producing race records—old-fashioned 78 rpm recordings featuring black performers and aimed at the growing black audience. John wanted to ask Chic Rice for advice about preserving the songs and voices of America’s country blues artists, scores of whom were living in obscurity throughout the South.

At the time, John worked for the Republic National Bank of Dallas, although his real passion was collecting American folk songs. After earning degrees from the University of Texas and Harvard, he published Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads, followed by Songs of the Cattle Trail and Cow Camp. Thanks to those books, Americans became familiar with western classics such as Home on the Range and Git Along Little Dogies.

John visited Chic Rice again in December. John’s son Alan would have loved to accompany his father to Chicago, but he was only fourteen back then and still in school. Over the next decade, though—during breaks and after he’d finished college—Alan would accompany his father on many of his trips. Together, they traveled the country in search of authentic folk musicians, recording them for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Song. In the course of their work, they introduced several remarkable unknown or forgotten folksingers to the public.

Their most amazing experiences, however, began with John’s trips to Chicago. While he did get some useful advice from Chic Rice, John also got two of the biggest shocks of his life. In 1929, the first two in a string of senseless murders of the great early blues musicians took place in Chicago—murders that would draw John and Alan into a whirlpool of violence that spanned more than a dozen years and nearly as many states.

I

~1929~

Chapter One

Clarksdale, Mississippi—March

The late winter sun climbed higher in the sky, throwing tenuous shadows on the early morning streets of Clarksdale. Seat of Coahoma County, Clarksdale prided itself as the Golden Buckle in the Cotton Belt—the storied Mississippi Delta. Bordered by the meandering Mississippi and Yazoo rivers, that seven-thousand-square-mile expanse of farmland stretched some two hundred miles between Memphis and Vicksburg, its deep alluvial soil, laid down by centuries of floodwaters, among the most fertile on Earth. For some Mississippians, the Delta was a veritable Garden of Eden, only with more snakes.

Prosperity had come to Clarksdale in the last century with the construction of the railroads, which turned the once sleepy village into a shipping and transportation center. These days, tidy white houses drowsed on neatly mown lawns in the shady residential areas. Downtown, boxy cars and dust-covered farm trucks sputtered past whitewashed, brick-fronted stores, which sold just about everything required by the townsfolk and the families on the surrounding plantations—groceries and clothing, furniture and hardware, guns and ammunition.

Over at the Clarksdale train depot, the Northern Express chugged away from the ponderous old terminal building on its daily run to Chicago. The train’s white passengers lounged in comfortable parlor cars, while its black passengers made do with the butt-numbing wooden benches of the segregated carriages. During the cotton boom of the late 1800s, the Illinois Central Railroad, the main north-south rail line in this part of the country, brought thousands of black workers to the Delta, a steel magic carpet supposedly whisking them to the land of prosperity. Now the rail line was carrying their disillusioned descendants far away from their old lives of poorly paid stoop labor on someone else’s land.

Two deputies taking their ease on the porch in front of the sheriff’s office scowled in the direction of the train station. They couldn’t do much to stop the ticket-holding black families from boarding those segregated coaches, other than to try to discourage them by roughing them up or arresting them for vagrancy or some other trumped-up charge. But even then, those stubborn outbound travelers would soon be back at the station with their meager collections of bags and bundles. The deputies also knew that for every black person leaving the Delta in broad daylight there were probably a dozen sharecroppers who’d be hopping freight cars after dark, leaving their mysteriously persistent farming debts behind them.

On its way out of town, the Northern Express skirted the Roundyard, the colored section of Clarksdale, a jumble of weather-beaten, tin-roofed shanties beside the Sunflower River east of the train tracks. Laundry drooped over sagging clotheslines, and knots of youngsters in hand-me-down overalls and flour sack dresses played in the dusty yards. Along Fourth and Issaqueena streets, dilapidated cafés and stores plastered with tin advertising signs vied for attention with the ramshackle juke joints where young black folks gathered on Saturday nights to gamble, drink, and dance until the roosters crowed. The engineer of the Northern Express issued a blast on his whistle as the train passed a barbershop where old men whiled away the time. Outside, three elders in overalls and rumpled fedoras sat staring into space. One of them raised a hand calloused by a lifetime of planting, hoeing, and picking cotton.

The train gathered speed as it left the Roundyard behind, venting a burst of steam like a pent-up sigh. Inside one of the parlor cars, a sixtyish gentleman with thinning hair and a thickening waist lit a fat five-cent cigar. Dressed in a conservative three-piece suit, he had the confident air of a scholar and successful businessmen. He extinguished his wooden match with a puff of smoke and contemplated the flat Delta countryside rolling by outside the window. Leafless trees and skinny telephone poles lined the tracks. Blackbirds and sparrows clung to the gnarled limbs and overhead wires, dark daubs on the pale-blue canvas of sky. Empty fields stretched away into the distance, forming a razor-straight line along the horizon.

Looks pretty barren, don’t it?

A sallow man across the aisle gazed at his fellow passenger. The round lenses of his horn-rimmed glasses gave him an inquisitive, owlish look. He seemed to have shriveled inside his shiny gabardine suit, as if he’d recently been ill. He smelled of cologne and had unnaturally white false teeth.

It does now, replied the cigar smoker. The cotton fields always look this way before the spring planting season. That won’t begin until the ground warms up to at least sixty-five degrees. Below that the seedlings could be injured. Planting around these parts normally takes place in April or May, along about the time the magnolia trees bloom.

You seem to know a lot about it. You a planter?

A banker. But I grew up around cotton.

The sallow man held out his hand. Name’s Lieb. Josh Lieb. I represent the Avon Company. My territory runs from Memphis down to Vicksburg.

John Lomax. My bank’s in Dallas—Republic National—but I was born just down the road from here, near Goodman, Mississippi. Rough times there for farmers after the Civil War. My family moved to Bosque County, Texas, when I was a baby. I’m told they traveled in covered wagons, if you can believe it. Real pioneer stuff.

What brings you back to Mississippi?

Sort of a hobby—or a compulsion, as my wife calls it. I like to collect American folk songs in my spare time. Got started as a boy. After my family settled on a farm just off the Chisholm Trail, I began scribbling down cowboy ballads I learned from passing cattlemen. I also wrote down Negro spirituals I learned from a local black man I’d taught to read and write. I’ve traveled all over the South collecting Negro work songs and field hollers. They’re part of the legacy of these cotton-growing regions.

Mighty unusual for a white man, if you don’t mind my sayin’ so.

You aren’t the first person to make that observation. When I was a student at the University of Texas, I showed my collection of cowboy songs to my English professor. He told me they were worthless, that I should burn them. Of course, I didn’t listen to him. Folk songs are really fascinating when you study them. For instance, did you know that the old call-and-response work songs of the slaves were related to traditional communal songs of Africa? Same with the solitary field hollers. Like his African ancestors, a lonely slave out in a field might have sung an impromptu song about his hardships and disappointments while he worked. Frederick Douglass wrote that ‘the songs of the slave represent the sorrows of his heart.’ Since Emancipation, black sharecroppers, itinerant workers, and convict laborers have continued to sing those same kinds of songs to relieve the drudgery of their lives.

Lieb shrugged. Why’s that important?

Oh, I don’t know…maybe because it was those folks who turned this former swampy wilderness into a cotton kingdom, making the plantation owners rich.

Lomax thought about the legions of anonymous black workers who’d cleared the Delta’s tangled woods and wild undergrowth so the land was fit for planting. With nothing but mules, shovels, and wheelbarrows, they’d built the earthen levees that protected vast tracts of bottomland from devastating spring floods. They’d laid the railroad tracks that opened up the region with reliable transportation. And of course, they’d always worked the cotton fields—kids, old folks, every able body. They worked six days a week, from can to can’t, meaning from when it was light enough to see until dark.

By the end of the nineteenth century, he continued, those Negro folk songs, primarily the field hollers, led to the development of the music we call the blues. That’s my current interest. He glanced out the window. And it began right out there.

Well, Lieb said, I’ve never cared too much for darky music myself.

Lomax smiled as Lieb busied himself with his paperwork. The portly banker lightly hummed an old spiritual to the steady clattering of the train’s wheels on the rails. The soothing sound, together with the car’s steady rocking motion, conjured up memories of his boyhood home by the Brazos River. He pictured his father, James, relaxing in his favorite chair after dinner, the old wooden rocker creaking as the weary farmer slowly seesawed back and forth.

Taking a notebook from his briefcase, Lomax started a letter to his wife.

My Dearest Bess,

Another few days and I’ll be home again. Unfortunately, my song-hunting trip has been a mixed success. I’ve always found it easy to dig up new spirituals—just attend any country church where colored folks gather—but tracking down authentic blues songs is proving to be considerably harder. Sometimes I hear about a singer who’s working on a plantation, but when I show up, the owner might not allow me on the premises. And even when I do run one of these musicians to earth, he might be afraid to speak with me simply because I’m white. It’s frustrating, to be sure.

I did have some success down in Greenwood. I met an old black fellow there who was singing for coins on a street corner. He was leery about being seen talking to me, but after I dropped a dollar in his cup, he agreed to meet me at the end of the day out at the edge of town. I was able to take down some of the lyrics he was singing, and he explained the origins of the songs. One was called Pony Blues, a song by Charley Patton, a musician I’ve heard about.

It turns out that Patton has just recorded several songs for Paramount Records. Maybe the folks I’ll be meeting at Paramount will be able to put me in touch with Patton and some of the other Delta musicians. From what the old gent in Greenwood said, most of these country singers tend to move around, and it’s not unheard of for them to wind up in jail now and then.

When I get to Chicago, I’m hoping to have lunch with Carl Sandburg and some of our other friends from our days in the city. I’ll drop you another line when I get settled at the hotel. Right now, I need to give this letter to the porter so he can mail it as we pass through Memphis. Give Little Bess a hug for me, and make sure Alan is keeping up with his homework so he makes the grades he’ll need to get into college. See you soon. I love you.

John

Lomax folded the letter and tucked it inside an envelope. He sat tapping the envelope against his palm. He envisioned his wife rustling around in the kitchen as she fixed dinner for their two youngest children, Alan and Bess Jr., or Little Bess. What a lucky man he was, he told himself. A good job at the bank, which, thanks to his position as a vice president, afforded him the luxury of sufficient time off. A loving helpmate who’d tolerated his passion for chasing after old-time music for twenty-five years, even though the pay was often scanty. And four fine children—the oldest, Shirley and John Jr., now grown up and on their own. His children filled his life with laughter and constant surprises, such as his discovery that Alan was developing an interest in folk music. Alan had demonstrated his appreciation of the blues through his frequent trips to local black-owned record shops. One day soon, Lomax thought, he could bring Alan along on ballad hunting excursions like this one.

~

After dark, Lomax slowly made his way to the dining car. He’d spent several hours during their daylong journey going over his field notes. In the afternoon, they’d passed into Illinois, rattling across the forty-year-old Ohio River rail bridge at Cairo. Since they still had a few more hours to go before they reached Chicago, Lomax decided he’d better get something to eat. He found an empty table at the far end of the car. An immaculate white cloth covered the table, with a vase of fresh flowers by the window. Outside, a canopy of stars arched above the dark countryside.

A colored waiter in a crisp white porter’s coat came by with the menu. Care for a drink, suh?

Hmm. A whiskey sour would taste good.

Yes suh. Right away, suh.

Lomax leaned back and relaxed, puffing on his fourth cigar of the day and enjoying the quiet time by himself. Above the clackety-clack of the rails, he heard the faint sound of someone singing to the accompaniment of a guitar. He got up and peered through the window in the door at the end of the dining car.

In a segregated carriage beyond, he could see black families eating the dinners they’d brought with them, since they weren’t allowed in the dining car—and couldn’t have afforded the prices even if they were. There were no overhead storage racks in the segregated cars, and the aisles were strewn with suitcases and other belongings. In the middle of the car, a young black man sat playing a battered guitar. His hat was tilted on the back of his head, and he had an unlit cigarette tucked behind one ear.

Lomax stepped onto the platform between the two cars so he could hear better. The guitarist was using the glass neck cut from a bottle as an improvised slide, its sharp edges softened and smoothed with heat. His instrument whined in counterpoint to his voice, emphasizing the flatted blue notes of the scale. He was singing a rendition of Jim Crow Blues, a recent Paramount recording by the Alabama-born piano man Charles Cow Cow Davenport. The young guitarist sang about his frustration with his old life in the South and his determination to liberate his soul by escaping to Chicago.

Lomax looked at the faces of the other passengers, all of them smiling and nodding to the words of the song. Who knew how long they’d scrimped and saved to afford their tickets to freedom. They were bound for the Promised Land. It sounded good to Lomax. He hoped each of these eager wayfarers would find what they were looking for up north. He tried to imagine the strength it took to keep their fragile dreams alive under the daily assaults they’d endured in the South. They’d certainly earned the right to sing the blues.

Overhead, a full moon ghosted between patchy clouds. The chilly air carried the acrid tang of smoke from the engine up ahead. Lomax flipped the stub of his cigar out into the night, where it glowed for an instant then vanished like a firefly winking out.

Chapter Two

Chicago—March

Hemmed in by immigrant and middle-class white neighborhoods on Chicago’s South Side, the city’s teeming colored district percolated like a sloe gin fizz—a little sweet and a little tart. On city maps, the long, narrow rectangle of the Black Belt vaguely resembled the outline of a coffin—or, if you were in an optimistic frame of mind, maybe one of the cinder runways over at the new Chicago Municipal Airport on Cicero Avenue.

This city-within-a-city extended roughly from 31st Street to 63rd, bordered on the east by Cottage Grove Avenue, Washington Park, and Lake Michigan, and on the west by the railroad tracks just west of State Street. The district’s cultural and economic heart centered around 47th and South Parkway. Here were the best stores, hotels, and apartment buildings, along with the offices of black doctors, dentists, and lawyers. Several fine churches attracted large Sunday crowds, but the rest of the week, most residents of the Black Belt paid more attention to the brightly lit marquees of theaters and nightclubs.

The entertainment district known as The Stroll ran along State Street from 26th to 39th. It was said that The Stroll crackled with so much musical energy that if you held a trumpet in the air it would play itself. Blues, jazz, and popular music rang out at all hours of the night at hot spots such as the Dreamland, De Luxe, and Sunset cafés. Sweet-singing Alberta Hunter held forth at the Monogram Theater, which was so close to the tracks that she had to stop singing whenever a train rumbled past.

At the Palladium Dance Hall, Bertha Chippie Hill belted out her songs with the backing of King Oliver’s band. Headliners the likes of Count Basie, Louis Armstrong, Cab Calloway, and Jelly Roll Morton entertained black and white patrons alike, including the mobsters who’d infested Chicago like cockroaches since Prohibition. Just the month before, Al Capone’s triggermen had gunned down six members of a rival gang on St. Valentine’s Day, giving Scarface control of the city’s gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging rackets—all of which flourished on the South Side.

~

In a nondescript apartment building on the corner of 31st and State, a gaunt black man sat alone in his room, methodically picking out a tune on an old Washburn pawnshop guitar. It was difficult to tell what he was trying to play, since his skills appeared to be rudimentary, although a careful observer might have noticed that the fingers on his left hand didn’t move in a normal way. He seemed to be having trouble fingering the notes.

The man wore a white shirt and tie beneath a dark suit. A phonograph sat on a bureau beside the door, with a stack of 78s beside it. The man laid his guitar on the single bed and went to the window. Standing, he resembled a gangling, well-dressed scarecrow. In the streets below, people were going about their business. The man studied the entrance to Dickerson’s Record Shop across the street. When he saw bluesman Big Bill Broonzy walk out the door, he turned away, muttering an angry oath. The scarecrow was one of society’s most dangerous creatures—a man driven by his delusions.

Out on the street, the scarecrow strolled a few blocks to the south. He’d donned a pair of dark glasses and a black bowler hat, which he wore canted forward in a cocky manner, like a drunk spoiling for a fight. On the corner of 34th and State, he glanced at Mecca Flats, a tenement building that looked like a gutted war relic. Rickety wooden stairs clung precariously to the exterior of the grimy brick structure. Built in 1891 to house fewer than two hundred families, the building now sheltered some two thousand people.

During the Great War in Europe, jobs and affordable housing for black migrants had been plentiful. Now, newly arriving families were finding both harder to come by. In Mecca Flats and similar South Side tenement houses, colored residents shared hot bed apartments, so crowded that they had to sleep in the same beds in shifts.

The gaunt man raised his collar against the cutting wind blowing in off Lake Michigan. Walking on, he felt the comforting presence of his .38 Special against his side. Time to go to work.

~

At precisely 8:10 p.m., the Northern Express chuffed into downtown Chicago’s Central Station, the fortress-like intercity passenger terminal just off Michigan Avenue at the south end of Grant Park. When the train groaned to a halt, John Lomax grabbed his luggage from the overhead rack and followed his fellow passengers toward the end of the car. Emerging into the bedlam on the platform, he handed his bags to a porter and stretched his legs, taking a moment to soak in the gaudy magnificence of the Victorian Gothic station. Opened in 1893 to handle the crowds streaming in for the Chicago World’s Fair, the massive terminal housed the Illinois Central Railroad’s headquarters. For passengers, their first glimpse of the echoing main pavilion and thirteen-story clock tower affirmed that they’d landed in a big city.

Lomax paused to watch the impoverished black families nervously climbing down from their segregated carriages. It was a familiar scene to him, having worked as a bond salesman in Chicago from 1917 to 1919. Dressed in their outdated Sunday best and clutching their few belongings, the new arrivals gaped at the packed station with the dazed look of shell shock victims. Over the past dozen years, some seventy-five thousand black migrants had poured into Chicago. A fortunate few among the new arrivals had relatives to meet them and take them home. The unlucky ones had no idea of where to go. They seemed to be waiting for a sign from Providence. Eventually, they’d be swooped up by the local slicksters loitering around the station, black men hired to guide the bewildered to some hot bed apartment in a slum tenement house—for a fee, of course. In the Windy City, the unprepared were plucked like chickens.

Despite his familiarity with Chicago, Lomax didn’t really care for the place. During his family’s two-year residence, he’d grown to hate the city’s impersonal streets and canyons of tall buildings, the din of trains overhead and the constant blaring of horns. On dark winter afternoons, the shrill, piercing whistles of traffic cops sounded like the shrieks of tormented spirits. He’d jumped at the chance to return home when he was offered a job with the University of Texas alumni association, where he worked for six years before accepting his current job in the Republic National Bank’s bond department.

On the way to the station exit, Lomax stopped at a news kiosk and purchased a copy of the Chicago Tribune to see what was going on in town. The Tribune had been Lomax’s regular paper when he’d lived here, since its conservative slant matched his own political views. He also bought a copy of the Chicago Defender, one of the leading black newspapers in the country and a force behind black migration and the struggle for equal rights. Southern plantation owners tried to keep the Defender out of their tenants’ hands, but colored railroad porters and other sympathizers made sure that copies reached them. Unschooled farm families sometimes gathered in secret to listen to one of their literate neighbors read to them about well-paying factory jobs up north, along with the success stories of black sports stars, entertainers, and businessmen. The destitute country folk hung on the articles as if they were listening to parables from the Bible.

Lomax, however, wanted to search the Defender’s advertisements for new records by blues musicians. Ads carried by the Defender and other black newspapers had ignited the growth of the race record industry. Selling their 78s in shops and by mail order, record companies were able to reach the black audience both in northern cities and in the rural South. Enterprising railroad porters also helped spur the industry by buying stacks of race records up north and selling them for a profit in southern states.

Lomax tucked the two papers under his arm and got into the Checker taxi his porter had hailed. Palmer House, please, he told the driver.

Okeydokey, Mac. The driver turned onto Michigan Avenue and headed north through the Loop, paralleling the green expanse of Grant Park.

Lomax unfolded the Tribune and scanned the front page. What’s the best show in town right now?

The driver, a burly Irishman in a newsboy cap, looked over his shoulder, grinning. I know a coupla speakeasies where they got some fine-looking women who are very, very friendly, if you know what I mean.

I was thinking of something less adventuresome. I meant the best floorshow.

A floorshow, huh? Well, the Palmer House always has somethin’ goin’ on. And they say the show at that big new Stevens Hotel is jim-dandy. Of course, I never been to either one. Too rich for my blood. There’s always the Green Mill on North Broadway. They got singers, comedians, that sorta stuff.

I know about the Green Mill. That place has been around forever.

The Friar’s Inn is pretty hot, if jazz is your thing.

~

Lomax felt slightly guilty as he strode into the immaculate two-story lobby of the Palmer House hotel. The abundance of marble and the elaborate ceiling murals with scenes from Greek mythology made him feel like he was walking into the world’s fanciest brothel. As a man who’d roughed it in bunkhouses and shacks many a night, he wouldn’t normally have splurged on this sinful luxury, but since he only planned to be in town for two or three days, he figured that being in the center of the action was worth the extra expense—and nothing came cheap at this

Reviews for Killin' Floor Blues

[Gary Carter · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you love blues music and a enthralling historical mysteries, this book features father and son, John and Alan Lomax, blues legends Robert Johnson, Charlie Patton. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Son House, Leadbelly, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, Billie Holiday and a multitude of others. This book features alternative history mixed with reality of the times. Great read!!!