There was a vibrant blues marketplace in the Southeast beginning in the 1920s, for example, well documented by Bruce Bastin in Red River Blues, with the likes of Blind Willie McTell, Buddy Moss, Blind Boy Fuller, and Blind Gary Davis, as well as Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry. Texas also had its share of blues musicians, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, who died in 1930, Texas Alexander, and the versatile Huddie Ledbetter(aka Lead Belly). In Memphis bandleader W. C. Handy, the self-proclaimed “father of the blues,” held forth, along with the Beale Street Sheiks, Memphis Minnie and Joe McCoy, the Memphis Jug Band, and Gus Cannon’s Jug Stompers. The blues could take many forms—solo guitar and piano players, jug bands, duos, blues shouters, the classic bluessingerssuch as Bessie Smith. Many performers, such as Mississippi-born Big Bill Broonzy, were brought North to record in Chicago, Richmond, Indiana, or New York by the 1930s.
Blues was usually considered to reflect personal struggles and experiences, with little (or perhaps very subtle) larger political implications. There was, however, a large body of blues and gospel songs of an overt political nature, although the Lomaxes and most other collectors seemed not to notice. For example, President Franklin Roosevelt had won the support of most African Americans by 1934, although those who lived in the South were unable to vote, which generated a large body of songs, but not all were uncritical. Van Rijn (1997) has carefully documented the story in Roosevelt’s Blues: African-American Blues and Gospel Songs On FDR. Big Bill Broonzy, for example, praised the WPA in his “WPA Rag,” as did Casey Bill Weldon in “W.P.A. Blues,” while Peetie Wheatstraw countered with “304 Blues (Lost My Job on the Project).” In 1938 Lead Belly recorded the critical “Bourgeois Blues” about segregation in Washington, D.C., although he also wrote “The Roosevelt Song” which was positive about the president. Lawrence Gellert, who had moved to North Carolina from New York in 1924, had earlier managed to collect a number of political, even militant, blues, which were first published in the Communist sponsored New Masses magazine, and collected in Negro Songs of Protest (1936). “These songs are still in the making,” he noted in the Preface. “Never sung twice quite in the same way, new verses are constantly improvised, the text doggerel, nonsense, bawdy or protest, depending upon the mood of the singers or whether whites are within earshot.”
Just as black performers were exposed to a wide range of white musical styles, the opposite was also true, that white musicians were often influenced by the blues. The Allen Brothers, for example, recorded “Chattanooga Blues” in 1927, but when it was listed in the Columbia Records race catalog they threatened to sue the company for damaging their reputations (listeners would think they were black). They were not alone in adopting a blues style, including Frank Hutchinson, Tom Darby and Jimmie Tarlton, and particularly Jimmie Rodgers, whose “blue yodels” were highly influential, particularly on the young Gene Autry. “As the 1930s drew to a close, the blues was assimilated into more and more forms of commercial country music,” Charles Wolfe has written. “The notion of white blues was no longer novel, and producers no longer thought of it as an automatic ticket to big sales, but it was on its way to becoming a part of the deep fabric of country music.”
The Folk Festival Councils
