Rural performers in the Mississippi Delta, for example, with its very large black population, contained aspects of older African melodies and instrumental styles. Texas produced a somewhat different sound, as was true in the Southeast. According to the blues scholar Samuel Charters, the blues developed out of “the singing of the West African griots, the holler, the work song, [and] the song traditions of the southern countryside.” The recording of blues performers accelerated after 1920, first featuring Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Sara Martin, and other female classic blues performers. The female classic blues singers performed in theaters with a jazz band, had elaborate costumes and settings, and often sang their own compositions. The male blues singers, however, were usually alone or in a small group, played acoustic instruments, particularly the guitar and piano, and appeared in juke joints and other local places. The blues queens were usually more popular than the male singers, such as Sylvester Weaver, Papa Charlie Jackson, Lonnie Johnson, and particularly Blind Lemon Jefferson from Texas, who were recorded starting in mid-decade. Charley Patton, Mississippi John Hurt, as well as the Memphis Jug Band and Cannon’s Jug Stompers, were turning out records by the end of the decade, but Bessie Smith remained “Empress of the Blues.”
Should these blues performers be considered doing folk or popular music? The answer is not clear. While the male singer–guitar players appeared to be performing traditional songs, they were certainly exposed to the commercial music of the time. Indeed, the Florida-Georgia guitar player Blind Blake performed numerous blues numbers, but he also recorded ragtime and minstrel tunes. Blind Willie McTell and Peg Leg Howell performed ragtime, hillbilly, minstrel, and gospel as well as the blues. Elijah Wald, in Escaping the Delta, has argued that these and other rural performers should be considered professional musicians who absorbed and performed a wide range of music. That is, “rural black Delta dwellers were not only aware of all sorts of nonblues, non-Mississippi music, but were doing their best to keep up with the latest developments.” This was true throughout the South, among blacks and whites alike. By the late 1920s piano players such as Leroy Carr, who lived in Indianapolis, and the Chicago-based duo of Tampa Red (Hudson Whitaker) and Georgia Tom (Thomas A. Dorsey), were definitely professionals. Some performers were incredibly popular, with Tampa Red recording 251 sides between 1928 and 1942, Big Bill Broonzy 224 sides, Lonnie Johnson 191 sides, and Bessie Smith farther down the list with 160 sides between 1923 and 1933. Wald continues, “These were the stars, the popular professionals who had the hits that the rural players learned, imitated, and reworked for local fans. They are not the whole story of the blues era, but they were by far the most visible and influential figures, and the ones who defined the style for the vast majority of its audience.” He goes on to comment, however, that “plenty of people did play blues at home to relax after a day’s work . . . and this kind of informal music making was far more common before phonographs, radio, and television made professional entertainment accessible in every living room.” This trend had started earlier in the century when the phonograph had begun to replace the piano as the main source of music in most homes throughout the country.
While record company executives and their agents were searching the South for “traditional” musicians to record, there was an increasing scholarly interest in AfricanAmerican music. In 1925, Dorothy Scarborough in On the Trail of Negro Folk-Songs divided her lengthy book into various topics: folk songs, ballads, dance songs, children’s game songs, lullabies, songs about animals, work songs, railroad songs, and a short last chapter on the blues. For her understanding of the latter she depended on W. C. Handy and was not interested in the current outpouring of blues recordings. “Each town has its local blues,” she notes, “no aspect of life being without its expression in song.” But she preferred work songs and ballads, seemingly more authentic. Howard Odum and Guy Johnson’s The Negro and His Songs, published in 1925, has a similar division (religious songs, social songs, and work songs), but with no designation for the blues. Odum began collecting in Georgia and Mississippi in 1905, leading to his pioneering 1909 Ph.D. dissertation in psychology at Clark University, which his biographer describes as “the first collection of American folk song to deal systematically and sympathetically with black secular music.” Parts soon appeared in two articles about “Folk-song and Folk-poetry: As Found in the Secular Songs of the Southern Negroes,” and later in his book with Johnson. Enlightened white southerners, Odum and Johnson professed not to make judgments, but their rather romantic views led them to conclude that “the processes of civilization are operating to make the Negro ashamed of his old spirituals and to relegate the more naïve of his social songs to a rapidly diminishing lower class. Slowly but surely the folk creative urge will be dulled and this great body of folk song, perhaps the last of its kind, will surely pass away.” In 1926 they published Negro Workday Songs, including a long section on blues songs, which they now believed are “probably the Negro’s most distinctive contribution to American art.”
African-American Influences
