See That My Grave is Kept Clean: The World and Music of Blind Lemon Jefferson

By Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell

A new biography of the beloved but mysterious Blind Lemon Jefferson, famous blues musician. Born in 1897, Jefferson was a blind street musician who played his guitar at the corner of Elm Street and Central Avenue in the Deep Ellum area of Dallas, Texas, until a Paramount Records scout discovered him. Between 1926 and his untimely death in 1929, Jefferson made more than 80 records and became the biggest-selling blues singer in America. Although his recordings are extensive, details about his life are relatively few. Through Govenar and Lornell's extensive interviews and research, See That My Grave is Kept Clean gathers the scattered facts behind Blind Lemon Jefferson's mythic representations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: La Reunion Publishing
• Release date: Oct 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781646053278

Alan Govenar

Alan Govenar is an award-winning writer, poet, playwright, photographer, and filmmaker. He is director of Documentary Arts, a non-profit organization he founded to advance essential perspectives on historical issues and diverse cultures. Govenar is a Guggenheim Fellow and the author of more than thirty books, including Paradise in the Smallest Thing, Stoney Knows How: Life as a Tattoo Artist, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Untold Glory, Texas Blues, Stompin’ at the Savoy, Everyday Music, Texas in Paris, Osceola: Memories of a Sharecropper’s Daughter, and A Pillow on the Ocean of Time.

Book preview

Cover: See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, The World and Music of Blind Lemon Jefferson by Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell

See That My Grave

Is Kept Clean

The World and Music of

Blind Lemon Jefferson

Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell

with a photographic essay by Alan Govenar

Logo: Deep Vellum

La Reunion Publishing, an imprint of Deep Vellum

3000 Commerce St., Dallas, Texas 75226

Deep Vellum is a 501c3 nonprofit literary arts organization founded in 2013 with the mission to bring the world into conversation through literature.

Copyright © 2023 by Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell

Photographic Essay Copyright © 2023 by Alan Govenar

First edition 2023

All rights reserved

Support for this publication has been provided in part by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, the City of Dallas Office of Arts and Culture, the George and Fay Young Foundation, the Summerfield G. Roberts Foundation, and the Communities Foundation of Texas.

ISBNS: 978-1-64605-312-4 (paperback) | 978-1-64605-327-8 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Govenar, Alan B., 1952- author. | Lornell, Kip, 1953- author.

Title: See that my grave is kept clean : the world and music of Blind Lemon Jefferson / Alan Govenar and Kip Lornell ; with a photographic essay by Alan Govenar.

Description: First edition. | Dallas : La Reunion, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023027212 (print) | LCCN 2023027213 (ebook) | ISBN 9781646053124 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781646053278 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Jefferson, Blind Lemon, 1897-1929. | Blues musicians--United States--Biography. | Guitarists--United States--Biography.

Classification: LCC ML420.J324 G68 2023 (print) | LCC ML420.J324 (ebook) | DDC 781.643/092 [B]--dc23/eng/20230706

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027212

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027213

Cover design by Lexi Earle

Interior layout and typesetting by KGT

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

CONTENTS

Preface

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Seeing a World Blind Lemon Never Saw

Notes

Selected Discography

Bibliography

Index

Preface

Blind Lemon Jefferson is an icon: a giant figure in the history of the blues, a major guitar stylist, and a singer with a booming voice and two-octave vocal range. While his name may sound familiar, at the same time, he largely remains an enigma. Jefferson has become a metaphor for all that we don’t know about this unique style of African American music. How a blind street singer embedded himself in the consciousness of the world is remarkable, if not bewildering. His recordings often seem inscrutable; the fidelity, even at its best, was worse than much of what was recorded on labels other than Paramount in the 1920s.

Pulitzer prize-winning playwright August Wilson remarked to Alan Govenar and Akin Babatunde in 1998 that he listened to Blind Lemon Jefferson every day for five years. Blind Lemon Jefferson was the voice of Black America at that moment, he noted. Indeed he was. Even though his 78 rpm Paramount records cost seventy-five cents when they were released, almost as much as a cotton picker or sharecropper might earn in a day, Blind Lemon quickly became a household name among Black Americans eager to hear music with strong historical, cultural, and rural southern roots. Blind Lemon’s recordings sold well, and he returned to the studio over a dozen times—typically traveling to Chicago from his Texas home—resulting in nearly one hundred sides, principally for Paramount Records. But some four years after he first set foot in a record studio, he was found dead, at age thirty-six, of natural causes on a bitterly cold, wintery Chicago streetcorner. His name and music quickly became, and remain, the stuff of legend.

Several tribute records to Jefferson by secular and sacred Black artists quickly hit the market following his sudden death, although none of them sold well because the Depression was beginning its stranglehold on the economy. Jefferson’s music influenced a younger generation of musicians as diverse as Robert Johnson, who clearly was familiar with his recorded repertoire, and T-Bone Walker, who met Jefferson as a young man growing up in Dallas. Inevitably, his popularity waned for lack of new records and due to his death at the beginning of the Great Depression, but he was a musician’s musician, a singer and guitarist anyone who dared to play the blues had to acknowledge. For decades, record collectors and blues enthusiasts have certainly known of him, and his seventy-eights fetch prices that even in today’s marketplace are solid investments.

Jefferson’s name invariably comes up in histories of the blues, starting with Sam Charters’s pioneering 1959 The Country Blues,¹ in which Jefferson is discussed with great appreciation and enthusiasm, but the book contains few facts and considerable amounts of misinformation, especially in terms of dates for Jefferson’s birth and death, his move to Dallas, and his marriage. Charters embroiders the myth of Blind Lemon by stitching together a biography, which is built on his own personal experiences, his random conversations with Jefferson’s family members and people in the African American community, and his own romantic and, at times, literary meanderings. That said, some of what Charters sets forth is illuminating. For example, in the book, Alec Jefferson shared his memories of when his cousin, Blind Lemon, went to Waxahachie to sing at country suppers when Alec was in his teens:

Of course, my mother didn’t let me go to them country suppers often. They were rough. Men was hustling women and selling bootleg and Lemon was singing for them all night. They didn’t even do any proper kind of dancing, just stompin’.

They’d go down to the station and get him in the afternoon. He’d start singing about eight and go on until four in the morning. Sometimes he’d have a mandolin or a guitar and singing along, but mostly it would be just him, sitting there and playing and singing all night.²

From this evocative memory, instead of elaborating further on Blind Lemon’s commanding presence at country suppers, Charters lapses into supposition: When Lemon was in Dallas, he spent most of his nights in the red-light district … He’d finish the night drunkenly fumbling with one of the girls, his guitar shoved under the chair so nobody would step on it. It was a raw, dirty life, but Lemon was successful at it.

Perhaps without knowing it, Charters was perpetuating a popular (and, sadly, ethnocentric and, to varying degrees, racist) misconception of not only Blind Lemon but of bluesmen in general. Yet Charters was nonetheless instrumental in spawning intrigue among blues aficionados and performers alike who were hungry to know more about the early history of the music they loved.

Just about everyone writing about the blues mentions Blind Lemon but provides (and often repeats) only scant concrete information. Even August Wilson, who wanted to write a play about Blind Lemon, commented that he couldn’t find out enough to build a credible drama; he instead focused on one of Jefferson’s contemporaries in his play Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. If Ma Rainey was the Mother of the Blues and Bessie Smith its Empress, Blind Lemon was its first prince. He was destined to become king, although he was never billed as such during his lifetime.

The direct impetus for this book came about when we collaborated on shaping a long-anticipated book about the unpublished manuscript on Texas blues coauthored by Mack McCormick and Paul Oliver for publication. Both of us first heard about this tome in 1975, right as the massive project had stalled to a complete halt, though it continued to loom apocryphally in the world of blues research. Some forty years later, Alan reached an agreement with Paul Oliver to help him to finish the book. But it soon became clear that the book could not be completed per se, and it had to see publication largely as it existed in 1975. It was at this juncture that Alan invited Kip to join him on this adventure. Both McCormick (1930–2015) and Oliver (1927–2017) died during the period when we worked on the book’s necessary footnotes and the two essays that framed its overall importance. In 2019, Texas A&M University Press published The Blues Come to Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book.³

When we first dug into the Oliver and McCormick project, we were impressed by the sheer volume of previously unpublished material contained in the manuscript, much of it from McCormick’s voluminous fieldwork that he largely conducted in southeast Texas over the course of a decade, starting in 1959. Among his many interviews were talks with Blind Lemon Jefferson’s sister Carrie and others who knew the famous singer back in the 1910s and 1920s. We casually discussed the possibility of writing a proper Blind Lemon Jefferson biography while we were working on the book, but we did not get serious about this project until the spring of 2020.

Vague talk of a Blind Lemon Jefferson biography has marinated for several decades. Anyone attempting such a biography has been confronted by the reality that no one ever interviewed Jefferson and only one photograph of him exists. His legacy was largely formed by the records that he made during the latter half of the 1920s, which attracted many admirers and enthusiasts. But anyone who thought carefully about moving in this direction was ultimately stymied by the fact that precious little concrete information exists about his life.

Starting in the 1960s, almost all the articles that discuss Blind Lemon’s life and music, as well as the liner notes of long-play records and compact discs containing reissues of Jefferson’s recordings, largely reiterated the same well-known fundamental biographical information without offering much, if anything, new. Many aspects and details about his life remain largely obscure or unknown, despite the interest in his music and some new information that has been gleaned by a variety of researchers.

When we embarked on writing this book in the spring of 2020, locating anyone who knew Jefferson personally was not possible because he had been dead for about ninety years. Alan began researching and writing about Blind Lemon Jefferson in the mid-1980s and has continued his research on and off since then, when he was not working on other, unrelated projects. This book owes a great deal to his previous work on both Blind Lemon Jefferson and Black history, culture, and music in Dallas in particular and in Texas more generally.

In 1992, Alan published an article on Blind Lemon Jefferson in Jefferson Blues Magazine.⁴ Over the years, he has expanded in multiple directions and has undertaken additional research and writing. In 1998, his book Deep Ellum and Central Track: Where the Black and White Worlds of Dallas Converged (coauthored with Jay F. Brakefield) was subsequently revised and updated in a second edition published in 2012 called Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas.⁵ In addition, he has created three related musicals with Akin Babatunde: Blind Lemon: Prince of Country Blues, Blind Lemon Blues, and Lonesome Blues.⁶

The Majestic Theatre, 1925 Elm Street, ca. 1920s. From the collections of Dallas History & Archives Division, Dallas Public Library.

In fact, much of the primary and background information comes from Alan’s nearly forty years of interactions with the world of Blind Lemon Jefferson. Alan also provided new photographs of the physical world related to Jefferson’s life, photographs that he took in the summer of 2020 and 2022 in Dallas and East Texas.

When we began working on this book, we spoke about simply updating the 2000 special issue of the Black Music Research Journal about Blind Lemon Jefferson, edited by David Evans, into a book, expanding on the information by including some new essays and photographs.⁷ Alan had contributed a biographical essay to this issue, and Kip had written about the relationship between Blind Lemon and Lead Belly. We are indebted to David Evans for his incisive writing about Blind Lemon Jefferson’s music and to Luigi Monge for his thoughtful observations about blindness and the lyrics heard on Jefferson’s Paramount recordings. Both of their articles in that issue informed and helped to shape this book.

While that issue of the Black Music Research Journal contained plenty of new information and fresh perspectives about Jefferson, very few readers outside of academic circles were even aware that it existed, and it has become difficult to obtain a copy of the journal itself. After several months of discussions, however, we decided to undertake a book-length monograph that situated Jefferson within his specific cultural, familial, musical, and historical milieu but that also established a visual context for his life and career, including ephemera, record labels, race record ads, and historical and contemporary photographs.

In writing this book, we benefited further from the work of other scholars. When we started seriously researching and writing, we revisited Bob Uzzel’s book Blind Lemon Jefferson: His Life, His Death, and His Legacy,⁸ which he wrote because no one had attempted this feat and because he grew up in the same part of Texas as Jefferson and appreciated his music. We spoke with Uzzel, who was quite encouraging; he hoped that we could expand upon his initial attempt at a biography. Although Uzzel’s study of Jefferson’s life added some new information, his book seemed more like a compilation of existing facts. In other words, it was a good start for further research that could result in a more fully developed, book-length biography.

In 2003, Monge and Evans’s article for the Journal of Texas Music History, New Songs of Blind Lemon Jefferson, included new information about Jefferson’s unissued recordings and catalyzed further the possibilities of writing a more substantial biography.⁹ Additionally, several other researchers deserve special recognition here. Paul Swinton seriously considered writing a book about Jefferson but ultimately shared his research into the life, music, and times of Jefferson with us. Peter Paeth graciously and cheerfully spoke with us about his research on the race record ads created by his father in the 1920s, including the Paramount ads for Jefferson’s records. We are indebted to Guido van Rijn for helping us initially contact Paeth and interact with Alex van dur Tuuk about specific details related to his exhaustive and authoritative published research into Paramount Records. Moreover, several books published by van Rijn’s Agram Blues Book series—most notably, the third edition of van dur Tuuk’s Paramount’s Rise and Fall (2019)—helped with background and discographical information.¹⁰ T. Dewayne Moore contributed essential information about Blind Lemon’s life and provided scans of primary source documents. Moreover, Moore’s research and writing about Itta Bena, Mississippi-based Ralph Lembo, and Paramount talent scouting during the mid to late 1920s helped us to better understand this process.¹¹ Chris Strachwitz, Lars Edegran, Jay Brakefield, and Paula Bosse shared their research on Blind Lemon and the early years of Deep Ellum and Old North Dallas.

We also need to express our appreciation to the two anonymous outside readers solicited by Texas A&M Press, which ended up being substantially backlogged in their production schedule before they could add this book to their catalog. Their reports resulted in a tighter, more focused final manuscript. Likewise, the book’s indexer, Dr. Stephen Lorenz, also read the manuscript with an eye for the small but important details. Our copyeditor, Mike Jauchen, also offered many useful recommendations, while Jay Bruder provided the scans of labels from Kip Lornell’s collection of 78 rpm records. Jason Johnson-Spinos assisted with the preparation of photographs and images for publication. Moreover, Alan’s wife, Kaleta Doolin, and Kip’s wife, Kim Gandy, offered their insights and support as work on this book advanced.

We know that our biography of Blind Lemon Jefferson cannot be comprehensive. Ultimately, this book is as much a cultural, social, and racial history as it is a conventional biography. Because Jefferson was never interviewed, we were forced to stitch together the details of his life through an assessment of what others said about him. In so doing, we realized that the persona he projected in his songs was not necessarily autobiographical but instead was an expression of his times, often giving voice to the values, beliefs, and foibles of people in his community and those he encountered on his journey from East Texas to Dallas to Chicago and to the other places he probably traveled.

In the process of writing this book, we have come to know Blind Lemon in ways we hadn’t previously understood or anticipated. Through our research, it became clear that Blind Lemon recognized what he needed to do to succeed in the burgeoning race record market by embracing the bravado and persona of the bluesman, though he never lost touch with his deep Christian roots in the Baptist Church.

Blind Lemon was very supportive of his family and did his utmost to provide for them. In 1928, he bought a house at 2517 Beall Street in Dallas, where his parents (and perhaps Blind Lemon himself) lived when they were not in Freestone County. That Blind Lemon could afford such a purchase underscores his wealth relative to his initial status as street busker, but more importantly, it’s an illustration of his success as a race record star whose career flourished for about four years before it suddenly and unexpectedly ended.

After Blind Lemon passed in late December 1929, the 1930 census listed Alex (Cassie) Jefferson [sic] as a resident in the Dallas City Directory. The directory further notes his age as sixty and that he married at age twenty-two. 2517 Beall Street was valued at $1,500 and, despite the appearance of Classie’s name, Alec is listed as the only person in the household. His occupation is listed as a yard man for a private family. Alec Jefferson died on January 28, 1933. His death certificate has critical mistakes: his name is spelled Alex, his date of birth is listed as Dont no [sic], and his age is given as forty, which is impossible, especially given the fact that Lemon was born in 1893 and died at age thirty-six. Classie Jefferson (born February 6, 1865) passed away on August 12, 1947, in Plainview, where she had moved to live with her daughters.

Chapter One

When you hear Blind Lemon Jefferson sing, Well, the blues come to Texas loping like a mule on his 1926 Paramount recording Got the Blues, questions abound. Where was the blues coming from? How did it get there? Why was it coming to Texas? Deer and rabbits lope, but don’t mules balk? Furthermore, was Blind Lemon singing about a musical style, or was he alluding to the experiences of those, like his maternal grandmother, who were born into slavery? And what about the blues as a musical genre? In the nineteenth century, blues was a word commonly used to express feelings of despair, but the term was not clearly associated with a Black American musical genre until early in the twentieth century. However, it is likely that by the time Blind Lemon recorded Got the Blues, the term expressed a particular musical form, a state of mind, and the personal experience of Black men and women coming of age early in the twentieth century.

Slave Refugees

Carrie Jefferson, Blind Lemon’s younger sister (born in 1899), recalled that their mother, Classie Jeff, had told them many times that she was born a slave in 1865, just two months before she and her family were emancipated on June 19, which is known today as Juneteenth. In a 1961 interview with Mack McCormick, Carrie remarked that Classie’s mother was a refugee from Alabama to Texas. They brought her down here in the Bottom [between Streetman and Wortham]. You see her mother was carrying her then and they didn’t know they were free, and when they got down here in this Riley Bottom where we lived so long, she said Big Mama told her she was standing up on a block. And she said the man told them ‘You all are free.’ And Big Mama said she hollered and said, ‘Thank God Almighty.’ And she said the man knocked her out cold for days. Well, Mama was born in a week or two weeks after then.¹²

Although the precise number of refugeed slaves in Freestone County remains unknown, the practice of Southern planters trying to refugee their slaves in Texas for safekeeping, away from the incursion of Union armies, is well known. An alternative but less likely explanation for the term refugee is that Texas bordered Mexico, which had outlawed slavery in 1829. Mexico served as an international Underground Railroad destination, secondary in importance to Canada and a much closer destination for slaves living in the Deep South. It’s not clear how many slaves escaped to Mexico via Texas, but the number is probably at least ten thousand.¹³

Estimates of how many slaves were relocated to Texas for safekeeping vary. Using Texas county tax records from 1862 and 1864, Randolph B. Campbell concluded that at least thirty-two thousand more slaves were taxed in 1864 than expected.¹⁴ Dale Baum, mining the same Texas county tax records, has suggested there were probably closer to fifty-one thousand.¹⁵ Even that number might be conservative. This speculation is fueled by a letter from Confederate General John Bankhead Magruder, in which he commented, I am told that over 150,000 negroes have gone from Missouri and Arkansas into Texas.¹⁶

The precise number of African slaves brought to Texas from the Caribbean and not from other parts of the United States is unknown, although historians have theorized that six hundred to one thousand were imported from Cuba in the early nineteenth century. Around 1913, James P. Underwood of Brazoria County interviewed and photographed one of them, ninety-year-old Ned Thompson, who said that he had been captured in battle at age twenty. Thompson was sold to slave traders, who transported him to Cuba and then to Brazoria County, Texas, where he spent the rest of his life.¹⁷

In 1867, a Freedmen’s Bureau official, while registering newly freed slaves to vote, reported that five hundred men identified their place of birth as Africa. In 1870, the federal census listed 123 African-born men and women in Brazoria County, but by this time, almost all of the Africans were between the ages of fifty and seventy. Uncle Cinto Lewis, a 111-year-old ex-slave living in a brick cabin with his wife on the Huntington Plantation in Brazoria County, recalled in his 1937 WPA interview that during the years when he was enslaved, some niggers jus’ come from Africa and old Marse has to watch a’ ’em close, ’cause they is de one what mostly runs away to de woods.¹⁸ Cinto’s brief narrative, while lacking in detail, is nonetheless evocative.

According to Philip Dale Browne, in 1850 there were 618 slaves in Freestone County and no free Blacks: Of the planters and farmers scarcely one in four owned a slave. Eighty-two out of one hundred and ten slave owners owned five or less slaves. Of the eighty-two, thirty-five owned only one each. Fifteen of the one hundred and ten owners possessed ten or more slaves each, while four of the of the fifteen owned more than twenty-eight per cent of all the slaves. Those four men all carried the name of Stroud, two of whom were from Georgia and the other two from Alabama.¹⁹

Browne reviewed the Slave Schedule for Freestone County and observed that forty-five percent of these slaves were under thirteen years of age. Moreover, he speculates that slave owners emigrating to Texas wanted to keep, buy, and bring young slaves … than old ones, primarily because they were much less expensive … and could be raised with little cost in a country where coarse necessities were easily and cheaply produced. In addition, considering that taxation on slaves in the county was based on age, sex, and condition, Browne suggests, it is not without reason to suppose there may have been instances where owners reported their slaves younger than they really were.²⁰

Before and during the Civil War, most of the White citizens of Freestone County were staunch supporters of the Confederacy and worked hard to preserve the evil institution of slavery at great moral and economic cost. In the History of Freestone County, Michael Edd Bonner notes, all areas of the county were deprived of certain luxuries, but managed to get by, but he never mentions the hardships to which enslaved people were subjected. During this period, as Bonner points out, cotton was the principal cash crop, although the big problem was an inability to eat cotton.²¹ Second to cotton was corn, which was also plentiful and helped to meet the nutritional needs of White families in the county, but once again, Bonner ignores the plight of the enslaved population. However, because it was so abundant, corn served as a staple for slaves too.

After the Civil War and the emancipation of slaves in Texas, Browne writes:

Survival was but a grim determination and faint hope against threatened despair … family members dead, fled or maimed; money, credit and labor force gone; white leadership suspicioned or disenfranchised; illiterate black people on the loose without home or property and being manipulated by and between Northern resentment and Southern resentment.

With the freeing of the slaves, a new approach to the employment relationship between Blacks and whites was inescapable. Work arrangements were contractual, and the terms of the contract were almost always onerous for the newly freed