Mamie Smith: The First Lady of the Blues

Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” the first recording of an African-American singing the blues, revolutionized pop music. Witnesses claimed that after its release in 1920, the song could be heard coming from the open windows of virtually any black neighborhood in America. “That record turned around the recording industry,” remembered New Orleans jazzman Danny Barker. “There was a great appeal amongst black people and whites who loved this blues business to buy records and buy phonographs. Every family had a phonograph in their house, specifically behind Mamie Smith’s first record.”

While blues music had been performed in the American South since the very beginning of the twentieth century, no one had made recordings of it before, largely due to racism and the assumption that African-Americans couldn’t – or wouldn’t – buy record players or 78s. “Crazy Blues” changed all that, sparking a mad scramble among record execs to record blues divas.

The stars they promoted in this short-lived era of “classic blues” were not the down-home country singers who’d record later in the Roaring Twenties, but the glittering, glamorous, and savvy veterans of tent shows, minstrel troupes, and the vaudeville stage. These mavericks defied stereotypes, and there wasn’t an Aunt Jemima among them (with the possible exception of Edith Wilson, who became the Aunt Jemima on the radio). Their lyrics were often erotic, frank, and cynical. Those who’d become most influential – Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox – had been performing blues for many years before their first recording sessions. Others emerged from black vaudeville and found quick fame and riches, only to be plunged back into obscurity and poverty. By the close of the 1920s, most of the classic blueswomen would see the popularity of their records eclipsed by male artists such as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Big Bill Broonzy, Lonnie Johnson, and Tampa Red.

Unlike country blues, the rural South’s party music, classic blues were conceived for the professional stage. Singers bedecked themselves in sumptuous gowns and paid careful attention to diction while belting out their woes to the accompaniment of a hot jazz ensemble or capable sideman. Whereas country singers could string together random verses as long as they wanted, most classic blueswomen relied on stately tunes by successful songwriters such as Clarence Williams, Porter Grainger, and the wily Perry Bradford, a key figure in the Mamie Smith story. A few of the best, though, wrote their own.

A veteran of vaudeville and the chorus line, the lovely Miss Smith was 37 years old when she made her historic recording of “Crazy Blues” in New York City. She had left Cincinnati’s tough Black Bottom neighborhood when she was ten years old to go on the road with The Four Dancing Mitchells. Five years later she joined the chorus of the Smart Set company, which landed her in Harlem. Mamie settled there and married her first husband, comedian Sam Gardner. Perry Bradford spotted her singing at a cabaret and gave her a spot in the musical Maid of Harlem at the Lincoln Theater. Her big number was his song “Harlem Blues.”

Bradford, who spent his afternoons working out new songs on the piano at Harlem’s Colored Vaudeville and Benevolent Association, had long dreamed of having African Americans record blues songs. According to his 1965 autobiography, Born with the Blues [Oak Publications], most New York musicians didn’t care for blues, which seemed to symbolize everything they tried to leave behind in the South. “Whenever I began drifting into the lowdown, melancholy strains of the levee-camp ‘jive,’ someone would yell to detract my attention,” Bradford remembered. “Anything to keep me from whipping out those distasteful blues.” A Southerner – Mississippi by way of Georgia – Bradford was certain blues could be alchemized into gold by creating a market in the South. For months he had been making the rounds of record companies, trying to sell them on his songs and his protégé, Mamie Smith. His persistence earned him the nickname “Mule.”

His first nibble came from Victor, one of the biggest labels in town. On January 10, 1920, Mamie Smith was ushered into a studio to cut a bare-bones trial recording of Bradford’s song “That Thing Called Love” set to her own piano accompaniment. Victor rejected it. The break Bradford had been searching for came soon afterward, when he caught the attention of Fred Hager, recording director for the fledgling OKeh label. “There are fourteen million Negroes in our great country,” Bradford told Hager, “and they will buy records if recorded by one of their own, because we are the only folks that can sing and interpret hot jazz songs just off the griddle correctly.” Asked what songs he had in mind, Bradford handed Hager sheet music for “That Thing Called Love” and “You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down.” Hager was impressed. He initially wanted Sophie Tucker, a white singer, to record the songs, but Bradford asked him to consider giving a black singer the chance. Mamie Smith, he promised, “will do more with those songs than a monkey can do with a peanut; she sings jazz songs with more soulful feeling than any other girls, for it’s natural for us.”

Hager’s decision was as brave as it was historic. In Born with the Blues, Bradford recounted: “Mr. Hager got a far-off look in his eyes and seemed somewhat worried, because of the many threatening letters he had received from some Northern and Southern pressure groups warning him not to have any truck with colored girls in the recording field. If he did, OKeh Products – phonograph machines and records – would be boycotted. May God bless Mr. Hager, for despite the many threats, it took a man with plenty of nerves and guts to buck those powerful groups and make the historical decision which would echo aroun’ the world. He pried open that old ‘prejudiced door’ for the first colored girl, Mamie Smith, so she could squeeze into the large horn – and shout with her strong contralto voice.”

The recording session was scheduled for Valentine’s Day, 1920. Hager had Mamie perform with his all-white studio band, credited on record as the Rega Orchestra. Mamie poured bluesy feeling into the pop tune “That Thing Called Love”:

“That thing called love has a sneaky feeling,
Being too sure of yourself sets your brain a-reeling,
You lay in bed but just can’t sleep,
Then you walk the streets and refuse to eat”

“Man,” Bradford enthused, “I was overjoyed when Mr. [Charles L.] Hibbard, the engineer, said, ‘It’s okay.’ . . . After Mamie finished recording ‘That Thing Called Love’ and ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down’ that snowy morning in February 1920, I was itching to jump up and yell, right there in the studio, ‘Hallelujah, it’s done!’”

The Chicago Defender, the most widely read black newspaper, covered the event in its March 13, 1920, issue: “Well, you’ve all heard the famous stars of the white race chirping their stuff on the different makes of phonograph records. Caruso has warbled his Jones to the delight of millions; Tettrazini has made ’em like it heavy and Nora Bayes has tickled their ears with a world of delight; but we have never – up to now – been able to hear one of our own ladies deliver the canned goods. Now we have the pleasure of being able to say that at last they have recognized the fact that we are here for their service; the OKeh Phonograph Company has initiated the idea by engaging the handsome, popular and capable vocalist, Mamie Gardner Smith of 40 W. 135 Street, New York City, and she has made her first record, ‘That Thing Called Love,’ a song by Perry Bradford, published by the Pace & Handy Music Co., and apparently destined to be one of that great company’s biggest hits. The OKeh records can be played on all phonographs and they do say that the one in question is a real dream.”

OKeh released “That Thing Called Love” in July. Bradford reported that they sold 10,000 copies “just as fast as the Button-Hole Factory at Scranton, Pennsylvania, could press and ship them all over the South.” In his autobiography Father of the Blues, W.C. Handy described, “In Chicago, large crowds of domestic servants and packinghouse workers waited outside Tate’s Music Store on South State Street to hear us demonstrate ‘That Thing Called Love’ and ‘You Can’t Keep a Good Man Down,’ as sung by Mamie. All over the country music stores sprung up like mushrooms and our folks were begging for OKeh agencies in vain. . . . We bought the records, shipped them and received a prompt check. This was followed by repeated orders of comparable size. Finally the Negro dealers got their agencies.”

Reports of strong sales down South – to whites and blacks – were no surprise to Bradford, who was certain Southerners would buy blues 78s: “They understand blues and jazz songs, for they’ve heard blind men on street corners in the South playing guitars and singing ’em for nickels and dimes ever since their childhood days.” In its July 31 issue, the Chicago Defender called on liberals to support the record’s release: “Lovers of music everywhere, and those who desire to help in any advance of the Race, should be sure to buy this record as encouragement to the manufacturers for their liberal policy and to encourage other manufacturers who may not believe that the Race will buy records sung by its own singers.”

A couple of weeks after the record’s release, Bradford stopped by Hager’s office. “I’ve got news for you,” Hager told him. “Mamie’s record is selling very big in Philly and Chicago; the South, as you said, has gone head over heels for it, and down in Texas, Birmingham, and over in St. Louis, they are falling for the record just like leaves fall in Autumn-time.” Bradford informed Hager that Mamie had just been booked to perform an East Coast vaudeville tour and suggested that OKeh record her singing another song, “Harlem Blues,” before she left town. Hager told him to have Mamie and her musicians in the studio at 9:30 the following Monday morning.

Bradford rushed off to assemble a band, which he named the Jazz Hounds, and to tell Mamie the good news. “At the time,” he wrote, “Mamie Smith had a five-room apartment on the top floor of Charlie Thorpe’s building at 888 West 135th Street, so I walked up to the top floor to her apartment and buzzed, ‘Mamie, we got a date set for you to record with our boys playing for you,’ and told her to come downtown to Bert Williams’ office tomorrow for a rehearsal. When Mom Smith heard the good news she jumped up and shouted, ‘The Lord Will Provide.’ Mamie’s husband Smitty started dancing all over the place.”

A few days later, on August 10, 1920, Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds convened at the OKeh studio near Times Square. Bradford decided to change the title of “Harlem Blues” to “Crazy Blues.” While Bradford took credit for writing the song, James P. Johnson insisted its melody was derived from an old sporting-house ballad called “Baby, Get That Towel Wet.” Mamie’s lineup consisted of seasoned black musicians – Dope Andrews on trombone, Ernest Elliott on clarinet, Leroy Parker on violin, and Johnny Dunn on cornet. In their autobiographies, both Willie “The Lion” Smith and Perry Bradford claimed to have played the piano. The musicians fortified themselves with their favorite prohibition drink, blackberry juice and gin – Mamie didn’t join them – and then got to work. Bradford remembered that there were no written charts: “They were what I called ‘hum and head arrangements.’ I mean we would listen to the melody and the harmony of the piano and each man picked out his own harmony notes.”

“As we hit the introduction and Mamie started singing,” Bradford continued, “it gave me a lifetime thrill to hear Johnny Dunn’s cornet moaning those dreaming blues and Dope Andrews making some down-home slides on his trombone, while Ernest Elliott was echoing some clarinet jive along with Leroy Parker sawing his fiddle in the groove. Man, it was too much for me.” Her voice drenched with emotion, Mamie began with a theme that would echo through countless blues songs to come:

“I can’t sleep at night,
I can’t eat a bite,
’Cause the man I love,
He don’t treat me right”

Her performance built to a heartbreak climax:

“I went to the railroad
To lay my head on the track”
The musicians gave it everything they had, and Mamie sang in grand vaudeville style. After about twelve test takes, they finally produced a final take. “Tears of gladness came into my eyes after the first play-back and the feeling that grabbed me just wouldn’t go all during our eight-hour session – from 9:30 until 5:30,” Bradford wrote. “It was like a pleasant dream that came from heaven, because mental telepathy must have directed the band. We were playing just as we felt, with these home-made ‘hum and head’ arrangements, for I forgotten about leading the band and kept on playing the piano, as I’ve never played before – or any time since.” After recording the 78’s flip side, “It’s Right Here for You (If You Don’t Get It – ’Taint No Fault of Mine),” everyone called it a day. The musicians headed over to Mamie’s apartment, where her mother cooked a celebratory meal of black-eyed peas and rice.

And thus Mamie Smith earned her place in history as the first African American to record a blues song.

But is “Crazy Blues” a true blues? My best answer is that parts of it are and parts of it aren’t. The song’s ingenious structure mixes three verses of 12-bar blues with three verses of 16-bar professional songwriting that uses a harmonic idiom similar to what might appear in a Scott Joplin rag or World War I pop song. The recording is in the key of E, and verses four and five are straight 12-bar blues. Verse two is a slightly modified 12-bar blues, going to the dominant in its second bar. Verses one, three, and six are 16-bar structures with trickier chord progressions and some chromaticisms, such as the descending bass line in the ninth through eleventh bars of verse one. Verses three and six feature secondary dominants that sound relatively “sophisticated” next to simpler blues verses two, four, and five. Listen to it here and judge for yourself: www.archive.org/details/MamieSmithHerJazzHounds.

Issued as OKeh 4169, “Crazy Blues” was credited to “Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds” and described as a “Popular Blue Song.” Sales of the 78 skyrocketed beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. In Harlem alone, 75,000 copies were reportedly sold in less than a month. “Pullman porters bought them by the dozens at a dollar per copy,” remembered Bradford, “and sold them in rural districts for two dollars.”

Mamie and her band were back in the studio on September 12, 1920, for a follow-up 78, “Fare Thee Honey Blues” backed with “The Road is Rocky (But I Am Gonna Find My Way).” In his autobiography, Bradford writes that this was his final recording date for the OKeh label: “On this last session Mr. Everhart, a big dealer from Norfolk, Virginia, was in the studio and booked Mamie Smith and the Jazz Hounds for a one-night performance at a salary of $2,000. Then he, Mamie and the Hounds, sold over ten thousand records, because he had ten helpers handing out the records (at one dollar per copy) so fast during that half-hour intermission under Billy Sunday’s big Gospel Tent that it looked like Barnum & Bailey giving away silver dollars.” Mamie and her band – sans Bradford – soon cut two more 78s, “Mem’ries of You Mammy” b/w “If You Don’t Want Me Blues” and “Don’t Care Blues” b/w “Lovin’ Sam from Alabam.”

With all this Mamie Smith mania, New York City suddenly became the blues recording capital of the world. Singers and orchestra leaders, publishers, talent scouts, record execs – all were ready to cash in. “Everybody tried to sing the blues,” explained Thomas A. Dorsey, “because the blues was paying off.” Variety noted that Mamie Smith’s records had “caught on with the Caucasians” and that “Perry Bradford and the Clarence Williams Music Co. are among the representative Negro music men cleaning up from mechanical royalties with the sheet music angle negligible and almost incidental. . . . Colored singing and playing artists are riding to fame and fortune with the current popular demand for ‘blues’ disk recordings and because of the recognized fact that only a Negro can do justice to the native indigo ditties such artists are in demand.” By December 1920, Mamie Smith music rolls were being advertised; for people with player pianos, these rolls were the equivalent of modern karaoke backing tracks.

The singer became an immediate concert draw. Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds initially earned $400 to $500 net per weeklong appearance, but her fees would soon rise. Bradford recalled that Porter Grainger always played piano at Mamie’s appearances.
On November 29, 1920, the Putnam Theatre in Brooklyn ran a newspaper ad for Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds, proclaiming her an “Attraction Extraordinary.” Smaller print declared that Mamie “just finished a record breaking engagement at the Lafayette Theatre, N.Y., and the Dunbar Theatre, Philadelphia, Pa. Do not fail to hear this sensational singer, who has been made famous by her new phonograph records.” Onstage, Mamie tried to duplicate her records, explaining to the Washington Post on December 19, 1920: “Thousand of people who come to hear me . . . expect much, and I do not intend that they shall be disappointed. They have heard my phonograph records and they want me to sing these songs that same as I do in my studio in New York. Another thing I believe my audiences want to see me becomingly gowned, and I have spared no expense or pains . . . for I feel that the best is none too good for the public that pays to hear a singer.”

Lucille Hegamin was the first Mamie Smith competitor ushered into a studio, cutting an unissued Victor test of “Dallas Blues” on October 11, 1920, with Fletcher Henderson on piano. In November, backed by Harris’ Blues and Jazz Seven, she cut her first hit, “The Jazz Me Blues,” which eventually came out on more than a dozen labels. By 1921, blues recording sessions were going full-swing. Mary Stafford, advertised as the “First Colored Girl to Sing for Columbia,” launched her recording career in early January 1921. In February, Lucille Hegamin had a hit with “Arkansas Blues.” In March, Cardinal Records recorded Ethel “Sweet Mama Stringbean” Waters’ first record, and Emerson Phonograph proclaimed Lillyn Brown “not only a favorite with her own people, but with white audiences as well.” In April, Gertrude Saunders became Mamie Smith’s labelmate at OKeh. Stage star Edith Wilson began recording for Columbia in September. Lavinia Turner cut for Perfect and Pathe Actuelle, Esther Bigeau made 78s for OKeh, and Lulu Whidby, Alberta Hunter, and Katie Crippen records came out on Black Swan.

Among the first wave of classic blueswomen who recorded in 1921, only Alberta Hunter, Ethel Waters, and Edith Wilson would have enduring success. Mary Stafford cut a half-dozen 78s by the year’s end and made a single side for Perfect in ’26 before vanishing from the scene. Lavinia Turner’s days in front of the horn were over by October ’22, with six 78s to her credit. Lillyn Brown cut only two; Lulu Whidby made variations of only one. Gertrude Saunders had a career total of three 78s. Katie Crippen’s four titles with Fletcher Henderson’s Novelty Orchestra helped her land a vaudeville tour, but she was soon working outside of music.

In truth, no one could touch Mamie Smith in 1921. The February 15, 1921, issue of the trade journal The Talking Machine World conveyed some of the national fervor for the singer in an article titled “Has Designs on the Preacher”: “The advertising department of the General Phonograph Corp., New York, received recently an interesting letter from a Mamie Smith enthusiast in North Carolina. Evidently this admirer of the Mamie Smith records has studied jazz music more carefully than the English language, but the letter itself is an indication of the popularity that Mamie Smith OKeh records have attained in all sections of the country. In fact, this letter is only one of many of similar tenor that the General Phonograph Corp. has received during the past few months. It reads:

“‘I rite you to please send me one of your latest catalog of latest popular songs and musical comedy hits popular dacing numbers I got the Crazy Blues all ready and if you have any other latest Blues sung by Mamie Smith and her jazz hounds send along 2 or 3 C.O.D. with the catalog. I want something that will almost make a preacher come down out of the pulpit and go to dancing and hang his head and cry I want all you send to be Blues.’

“The Mamie Smith OKeh library is being steadily augmented by new records made by this popular artist, and the phenomenal success of these records is reflected in the enthusiastic reports of OKeh jobbers and dealers throughout the country who state that the demand for Mamie Smith recordings has far exceeded all expectations.”

Mamie Smith cut twenty-two songs in 1921, including “Jazzbo Ball,” “‘U’ Need Some Loving Blues,” “Mamma Whip! Mamma Spank! (If Her Daddy Don’t Come Home),” and the jazzy “A Little Kind Treatment (Is Exactly What I Need)” (http://www.archive.org/details/JosephSamuelsJazzBandVmamieSmith-ALittleKindTreatment1921atment1921 ). Between sessions, she kept a grueling schedule of concert appearances. The March 15, 1921, issue of The Talking Machine World covered her appearances in Chicago: “Mamie Smith and her jazz hounds came, saw, and conquered in Chicago during the month of February. She played to large audiences on the South Side at the Avenue Theatre with immense success. The Chicago Defender, a newspaper circulating among the colored people of the city, carried large advertisement featuring the OKeh stock, ‘Hear this world-famous phonograph star,’ read the advertisement, ‘sing ‘Crazy Blues’ and all her latest hits, and then hear her popular OKeh records, the greatest blues records of the century. Mamie Smith records have enjoyed tremendous sale in all parts of the country.’”

A month later, in a full-page ad in The Talking Machine World, OKeh Records reported that “Mamie Smith, assisted by her All Star Revue, a large company of well trained artists, is giving concerts in all the large cities throughout the country. Due to her popularity, capacity-filled houses are guaranteed. And the enthusiasm created, in turn, has in every instance stimulated the sale of her records. She has recently filled engagements in Chicago, Indianapolis, Evansville, Lexington, Memphis, Little Rock, Tulsa, Oklahoma City, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston, Waco, Beaumont, New Orleans, St. Louis, Chattanooga, Atlanta, Savannah, Richmond, Norfolk, Wilmington, Philadelphia, and numerous other cities.”

Meanwhile back in New York City, Perry Bradford was beset with problems. Not long after the Pace-Handy Co. published “Crazy Blues,” he was sued for having previously sold the same song to Frederick V. Bowers, Inc., under the title “The Broken Hearted Blues,” and to the Q.R.S. company as “Wicked Blues.” Bradford settled out of court. He had legal problems with Mamie Smith as well. His book recounts that in May 1921 Mamie’s “new boyfriend,” Ocie Wilson, gave Bradford a “mouth-full of his large fists” when he showed up at their door with a process server. Bradford sued them for assault and battery, and lost in court. “From then on,” he wrote, “I didn’t bother Mamie anymore.” Covering another copyright case, The New York Clipper reported in January 1923 that Bradford had instigated others to perjure themselves on his behalf, and that the songwriter had served four months in the Essex County Penitentiary.

Mamie Smith continued to fare much better than her former partner. An ad for “Sax-o-Phony Blues” in the October 15, 1921, issue of The Talking Machine World stated that “September 24th marked the opening date of Mamie Smith’s concert tour for the coming season. Her personal appearances in all the large towns will be a tremendous boom to her records. Her first engagement will be in the New England territory. She will tour as far South as Florida. Sax-O-Phoney Blues looks like the feature hit in her song review. This means big business for every OKeh jobber who has sufficient stock on hand to meet ready requests. Mamie Smith is working Sax-O-Phoney Blues hard.”

In Mamie Smith’s prime, her stage appearances netted her up to $1,500 a week. Bedecked in diamonds, plumes, and a shimmering gown, she could get a standing ovation just by strutting across the stage. Bubber Miley, Coleman Hawkins, and many other promising young players passed through her band. She released nine more vaudeville-style blues and pop 78s in 1922, including “Wabash Blues,” “Mamie Smith Blues,” and “Mean Daddy Blues,” featuring Coleman Hawkins on tenor sax. By 1923, though, her record sales were being eclipsed by those of other singers, notably Bessie Smith, Alberta Hunter, Clara Smith, Ida Cox, and, by year’s end, the South’s favorite blues singer, the great Ma Rainey. After recording four 78s in July and August 1923, Mamie Smith was dropped from the OKeh label. She made three 78s for the small Ajax label in 1924, and two more for Victor in 1926. Mamie Smith’s glory days were over. All totaled, she earned an estimated career royalty of $100,000.

For a while, Mamie continued to be a draw in theaters. Thomas C. Fleming, a writer for the Sun-Reporter, San Francisco’s African-American weekly, described seeing her onstage for http://www.sfmuseum.org/ : “In 1924, a musical revue that starred Mamie Smith, the great blues singer, had a long run in San Francisco. After closing, it toured some cities in the Sacramento Valley, including Chico, where it appeared at the Majestic for two nights. I attended both nights, fascinated with a show of that size playing in the hick towns. Chico had a tiny black population, so most of the audience was white. The cast, which was all black, included Smith, an orchestra of about eight pieces – saxophone, clarinet, piano, drums, trumpet, trombone, banjo -- a chorus line of maybe six girls, all good-looking, and a number of comedians. One I recall with pleasure was Frisco Nick, who staged a hilarious dance while he sang ‘Three O’Clock in the Morning,’ a great waltz hit, with a broom as his partner. Except for Smith, the entire cast was from the San Francisco Bay Area. Mamie Smith was about on a level with Bessie Smith. She played the black circuit theaters in the Middle West and the East Coast. The black circuit didn’t exist on the West Coast, because they didn’t have separate theaters for blacks and whites, although in some places, such as Portland, Oregon, blacks could sit only in the balcony.”

Mamie was still drawing crowds four years later, when in January 1928 the Lincoln Theatre in Harlem ran an ad for “Harlem’s Own Record Star, Mamie Smith and Her Gang,” with the subtitle “You’ve Seen the Rest, Now See the Best. ’Nuf Sed.” That September, Mamie opened at the Lafayette Theatre in the musical comedy Sugar Cane.

In March 1929 OKeh Records recalled Miss Smith to the studio. She was in grand form belting out pistol-hot, risqué blues, but OKeh shelved all five recordings. In its March 23, 1929, issue, the Chicago Defender carried a two-line note reporting “Mamie Smith will soon make her debut in talking pictures in The Blues Singer.” No film of this title was released, but later that year Columbia released Jail House Blues, a silent film short with accompanying musical discs. Oddly dressed in a huge Tam-o-shanter, plaid skirt, and tight sweater with a feather boa collar, Mamie can be seen singing “Jail House Blues” on www.youtube.com/watch?v=jb4tyPjxHdE .

Mamie Smith’s recording career ended a decade after it began with four OKeh tracks in February 1931. All of these were songs were released, with “Jenny’s Ball” becoming the most popular. Miss Smith reportedly retired from music after their release. I’ve been unable to find any account of her goings-on during the 1930s.

Eight years later, Mamie Smith attempted a comeback – in films. She sang an expressive, slowed-down version of “Harlem Blues” with Lucky Millinder and His Orchestra in the 1939 black gangster musical Paradise in Harlem (www.youtube.com/watch?v=8AN3pxrRzMM&feature=related). Her co-stars included Edna Mae Harris and the Juanita Hall Singers. The film’s press book called it “The ‘Gone with the Wind’ of Colored Pictures,’” with “The Greatest Colored Cast Ever Assembled in One Picture.” In addition to singing, Mamie had a featured role playing – who else? – Miss Mamie.

The following year Miss Smith played a small part in the Aetna Film’s all-black Mystery in Swing. She appeared in two films in 1941, both produced for International Roadshows Release by Jack Goldberg, who’d staged road shows for Mamie in the 1920s and was reportedly her husband when these films were made. Sunday Sinners was described in its press book as “A Dramatic Thunderbolt – A Conflict of Riff Raff and Righteousness,” and Mamie received top billing over Edna Mae Harris, Alec Lovejoy, Norman Astwood, and “A Brown Skin Chorus of Beauties.” Her other film, Murder on Lenox Avenue, was touted as “A Modern Story of Harlem Life” with “Donald Heywood’s Most Singable and Danceable Score.” Astwood, Lovejoy, and Harris rejoined Miss Smith in the cast. (Murder on Lenox Avenue can be legally downloaded at www.archive.org/details/murder_on_lenox_ave1941 .) Her final celluloid role was in the 1942 soundie “Because I Love You” with Lucky Millinder. From here, Mamie Smith’s trail disappears.

She reportedly died penniless on August 16, 1946, and was buried in an unmarked community grave. Seventeen years later, musicians in Iserlohn, West Germany, organized a hot jazz benefit to buy her a tombstone inscribed “Mamie Smith 1983-1946 First Lady of the Blues.” They shipped the stone to New York, where Victoria Spivey, herself a classic blueswoman, and Len Kunstadt, publisher of Record Research magazine, arranged to have Mamie Smith re-interred in the Frederick Douglass Memorial Park in Richmond, New York. They celebrated the event with January 27, 1964, gala honoring Mamie at New York’s Celebrity Club. Among the attendees were several of Mamie’s peers from the early 1920s, including Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter, Gertrude Saunders, Lillyn Brown, Rosa Henderson, and organizer Victoria Spivey. In 1994, “Crazy Blues” by Mamie Smith and Her Jazz Hounds was honored with the Grammy Hall of Fame Award.

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Thanks to Bill Ferris and the University of Mississippi’s Blues Archive and to Tim Gracyk for their assistance with research and graphics. Tim’s website, www.gracyk.com, is an excellent source for learning the basics of buying and selling 78s.

Ry Cooder – Talking Country Blues and Gospel

Sometimes the most memorable interviews happen unexpectedly. Researching Blind Willie Johnson, the sublime prewar gospel-blues slide guitarist from Texas, I was struck by how magnificently Ry Cooder had used Johnson’s “Dark Was the Night – Cold Was the Ground” in his Paris, Texas soundtrack. I sent Cooder a note asking if he’d give me a quote. A few days later, on February 25, 1990, the phone rang and it was the man himself. After talking about Blind Willie Johnson, Ry suddenly moved on to another Johnson – Robert – and unraveled one of the great myths surrounding the legendary Mississippi Delta bluesman. Read on.


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You come closer to sounding like Blind Willie Johnson than anyone I’ve ever heard.
God almighty!

How do you think he physically played the instrument?
Well, I’m playing his music the way I know how to play bottleneck, which is to hold the guitar upright, wear a bottleneck on your finger, and fingerpick the thing, and play in the tuning that I’m certain that he used. But I have no idea how he played what he played. I mean, who knows? It’s so far back into the distant past that anything is possible. I’ve seen this guy, Rev. Leon Pinson – he’s a blind preacher from Mississippi – play holding a bar in his finger and thumb on his left hand, reaching around underneath like you would, and fingering the thing that way. And getting a very similar vibrato to Blind Willie Johnson. He has the quality of never quite coming up to the note and hitting it. In other words, that’s a very inexact technique that I just described, but it does give you the quarter tones and all of the strange nuances. When I’m playing, I’m so used to playing the very note. Look, it’s sad that no one ever thought to take a picture of the guy while he was playing, because he played in two styles. He played normal guitar, just strumming and rhythm, which you can hear him doing with his thumb. I don’t have any idea how he played, and I don’t know what he looked like when he played. You know, two seconds of observation would answer every question you could ever have.

People who saw him playing on the streets of Beaumont in the 1940s said that he played with the guitar on his lap and used a pocketknife.
Played flat?

Like a Hawaiian guitarist.
I can’t imagine how he could have played what he played doing that. There is one thing about when you play that way – the same with this guy Pinson, who’s playing not flat, but holding the thing, rather than wearing it – there’s something that happens when you wear it, and there’s something else that happens when you hold it. Now, Blind Willie Johnson had great dexterity. He could play all of these sparking little melody lines. There’s fabulous syncopation. He’d keep his thumb going real strong. But when I saw this guy Pinson down South last summer – even though he’s nowhere near the guitar player Johnson was – I had an ear to what he was doing that sounded like Johnson. I don’t know, it’s just a different sound, and I can’t quite say why. But I have a feeling when you play bottleneck and you’re wearing the thing, your hand is there on the strings, either damping them or not damping them. It’s more of a controlling sound when you hold the guitar and nothing but the bar or the knife blade, maybe, touches the string. The guitar tends to ring more. It tends to keep the strings released and open, see. And more sound is happening. Because Johnson’s sound is very active.

I never could figure out how in the world he got such a busy sound playing so little. I used to think, why are all the strings going all the time? Because the recording is so horrible – the quality of the recording is the worst in the world, on one of those horrendous little machines which is eliminating all but the most spikey sound that the guy is producing. You’re not hearing any of the real aural ambient effect at all. I’m sure that in person, this guy sounds a thousand percent different. All the recording is showing us is the lowest-common-denominator type of sound, the most direct thing. The struck notes are all that you’re hearing. But even through that, you can hear that the strings are moving all the time. And I used to think that he’s making a lot of work to move all these strings around. And I know that old, primitive players, street guys and blues players, do nothing to work too hard. It seems like, to me, when I met these guys, the few that I’ve met, they’re very efficient in the style. If it takes too much effort and physical work, then you’re doing something wrong. So when I was young, I didn’t know. I used to go to tremendous efforts to try to do this stuff, only to realize later that I was probably barking up the wrong tree.

Are you suggesting that he didn’t damp behind the slide?

Oh, I know he didn’t. Now, he could have used his picking hand. Because if you’re playing flat, you can, with the side of your hand in the manner of steel players, stop resonance just by approaching the strings, barely touching them. But you can do a lot that way. But I personally cannot see how . . . Of course, I don’t play flat.

Another account says he held his guitar normally and used a jackknife for his slide.
I don’t know, because I haven’t researched or read – I’m sure you’ve looked into this way further than I have – but I have a feeling that all of the primitive players who were not in Mississippi and who played slide played flat. Lead Belly played flat. Guys from Texas did play flat. Because when the Hawaiians came through in an early World’s Fair [1893’s Columbia Exposition], everybody saw these guys and everybody was influenced. There was tremendous impact. And they all played flat. So most people would have said, “Right, I play flat.” Now we know Blind Willie played regular, because there’s that one picture of him. And you know that that’s the way that the guitar was used. But then when you go to play the sliding style, why, then you’re playing flat. It’s just natural that everybody would have done what the Hawaiians did. It’s just human nature – except in Mississippi, where for some crazy reason they didn’t. In Mississippi they seemed to play regular, but with bottlenecks and bones and things. Some people held a jackknife between the fingers, as though it were another finger. But outside of Mississippi – and I don’t know about any scholarship or historical investigation that bears this out – but you can hear the difference. And you can hear when people are playing flat. It’s probably true that Blind Willie Johnson played all that stuff flat, and it is quite amazing, but it would account for how he gets around on the strings.

Of course, I’ve tried all my life -- worked very hard and every day of my life, practically – to play in that style. Not consciously saying, “Today is Tuesday, I will again try to play like Blind Willie Johnson,” but that sound is in my head. And really when you come right down to it, you can sit down and play some of his tunes, and the single-string melody thing that he did, which is so great. He’s so good – I mean, he’s just so good! Beyond a guitar player. I think the guy is one of these interplanetary world musicians, the kind of person they talk about in that Nada Brahma book, where the world is sound and everything is resonating. He’s one of those guys. There’s only a few. Being blind and all, maybe he asked what’s going on, maybe somebody described it to him.

I wish we had some notion what people thought of these Hawaiians – they must have looked like Martians coming through with their grass skirts and things. And God knows they’re good players. Because they were so good at what they were doing, why, Mexicans picked it up, and the South Americans picked it up. We know that they sold steel guitar from then on, and the stuff was made to be done that way. And along comes a guy like, say, Robert Johnson, whom I hope didn’t play flat!

Johnny Shines told me recently that he did not.
It’s just unthinkable, because there’s too much going on. When you play flat, you can’t do so much. Well, that accounts for some of the simplicity and purity of Blind Willie’s thing, and I cannot do it. I cannot play flat to save my life. I can’t coordinate my body that way. It’s fine with me that he did. When I saw this guy Leon Pinson down in Mississippi, I went home and I found me a metal bar like he had and started trying to do it. It was awkward for me, but after a couple of days I started to see where you could play all this Blind Willie stuff that way. It didn’t occur to me to think, “Therefore he must have played flat.” It’s just what Pinson has gone and done. But if you did, you’d even be closer to that sound. I can see that it’s probably the case.

Was Pinson’s hand coming around the neck of the guitar the way you normally would?

Yes, because he plays regular too, like they all do. They all make a clear distinction between slide playing and regular playing. They don’t mix them together. Very few people did in those days, or do now. So he says, “I’m now gonna play slide,” and he takes out his bar, tunes the guitar down to a chord – same one as Johnson, same D tuning – and goes on doing this thing, not fretting at all. If you wear the slide, you can fret, but he’s not. He’s just playing the note and very few chords. Now, Blind Willie played hardly any chords. It was years before I realized that my brain was imagining the chords – he wasn’t playing them. He was just playing two or three notes and getting a suggestion of a chord once in a while. He was playing in that modal feel, not wanting to disturb that tonic drone. He didn’t need to. He was doing a different thing. And when you hear this old guy Pinson, you hear him strictly playing quarter notes and not playing the notes straight up and not wanting to create these stacked-up triads and regular harmonic intervals. It’s dissonant all the time. Now, that’s what these old recordings of Blind Willie Johnson don’t show us because you can’t hear anything. You don’t know to what extent this was dissonant or polytonal in that way.

Didn’t Johnson have a remarkable left-hand vibrato?

Oh, the best! The absolute best. Very light touch – real light and really fast. It’s just a thing that you can’t talk about, almost, because it’s just so perfect. But that vibrato, you can go and do it by wiggling that bar just right. I’m trying to do it these days. I hate doing it – it feels terrible – but I can see that you get a different sound, and that’s the only explanation that I can think of. I’d also like to know what kind of damn guitar he had. He probably used a little guitar. They didn’t have big guitars in those days. Hillbillies did, later in the ’30s when Gibson started making those big jumbos, but back in those days, all those players had smaller instruments.

What’s your attraction to “Dark Was the Ground – Cold Was the Night”?
That’s the most transcendent piece in all American music, the way he used his voice and the guitar. This other tune that I love so much is “God Moves on the Water.” Oh, that thing is like a roller coaster, man. He’s got an energy wave in there that he’s surfing across the face of that tune so mighty! He hits the chorus, and to me it’s like ice skating or downhill racing – it’s an awesome physical thing that happens. But “Dark Was the Night” is the cut – everybody knows that lick. You can throw that lick at anybody nowadays. I threw it up inside Paris, Texas, you know, and everybody relates. And now you play that lick, and everybody knows what it is. It’s like an unspoken word. It’s really amazing. [Legally download these tracks at http://www.archive.org/.]

I’ll really tell you, Blind Willie Johnson is in the ether somewhere. He’s up there in the zone somewhere. But if he played flat . . . And at this point, after talking with you, I’m starting to feel that really would account for it. Because I know that if it was regular, I could be doing it. I can do what he did – I can play those notes now. I mean, I have learned. My co-ordination and understanding have developed to the point where I am capable of executing those passages, but it sounds really different when you play flat.

Which of the first-generation bluesmen did you observe first hand?

Skip James I barely got to see, because he was sick all of a sudden. But I saw him, and I didn’t know what to make of him because his records really impressed me. When I saw him, he was having such physical trouble and he was so strange as a person that I recoiled from him. I didn’t know what to do. I was pretty young, and the vibe really killed me. But his records I listened to quite a lot. We used to see John Hurt, of course. And then, for me, the big deal was to see Sleepy John [Estes] because I liked his records so much. When I got mobile, I got a little older, I went down South to see him, and we used to sit with him. I’d go see him in his house up in Brownsville, Tennessee. Take him money and things. By that time I was kind of doing things. But as a teenager, I used to see him come through here.

Well, the whole thing about guys like that was you weren’t ready for them as citizens of the world. You know, for middle-class white kids in Santa Monica, sad to say, you don’t really know any people like that. Or Rev. Gary Davis – you just don’t know what’s going on. I had these records, although they weren’t easy to get in those days, but people had given me tapes or some 78s. I used to listen to these things and think, “Well, what could this all be about? Who are these people? What are they saying?” It’s a mysterious journey here, like Alice in Wonderland. And then, not understanding anything about the historical, social, economic conditions that produces music – there again, being pretty young and all – all of a sudden, in the folk boom, on the scene in Hollywood, in this folk music club, appears these guys. And they walk to the stage, walk through the audience. I was thunderstruck! I couldn’t breathe, you know. They got up onstage, sat down, and commenced to do whatever it was they were able to do. And of course that really killed me, because I thought, “This is beyond my understanding.”

After a while I began to gather up courage and go up and talk once in a while. You could sit down and say, “Can I understand this?” or “Can you show me this or that?” It was hard for me, but I did. And then I found out it was good, because they didn’t mind. They liked talking; it was not unpleasant for them. I didn’t bother anybody or badger them, like people do these days. But I was always curious and always trying to understand. Then it became obvious that it wasn’t so much the music as it was the people. If you could figure out where the people were and how they were as beings, why when the music was very clarified. Because what’s totally mysterious on record and inexplicable, why, in five minutes of watching a guy play, you got it. You understand body rhythm and how the instrument is approached, which is entirely different than how I’d seen it done. It was not linear, it was not patterns – they’d play out of patterns. They don’t play the horrible boom-chicka-boom thumb-finger, thumb-finger thing, you know. Everybody I knew did. That mad adherence to a mechanical thing that you set yourself up like a robot and play and think that’s what it is. I don’t know how that ever got started – banjo, maybe. But these guys didn’t play patterns, they didn’t play tuned. They were probably mostly out of tune. The whole thing was a revelation in what the instrument really could do in terms of personal expression. It’s a great gift to be able to have seen those people. Poor people today can’t see anybody.

Back in the earlier days, there wasn’t the attention to Western musical traditions of timing and tuning.
Not at all.

This is evident on the Bristol Sessions and other early country recordings – no studio sync-up here.
Oh, forget it. They’re coming from an entirely different way of life, an entirely different background. It’s just so radically different. If you go to Mississippi today, even, it’s a different place. You feel it’s a Third World country, a whole other scene. And back then, think of what it must have been like.

What impressed you about Sleepy John Estes on record?

Well, he had a great group – that piano player and the jug and the harmonica and him, all playing in different rhythmic emphasis. Everybody has a different take on what the rhythm is. Some of it’s half-time, some of it’s double-time. But the jug band idea, I think, is the greatest idea in terms of ensemble, applied in whatever way you want to apply it. In other words, primitive guys playing what they think is right and what they probably heard on somebody’s uptown record and trying to do it themselves. Or just what they hear music as sounding like, see, because they all listen to records too. Robert Johnson trying to sound like Lonnie Johnson makes perfect sense. And then saying, “Well, this is my version of Lonnie Johnson. This is what I think’s going on.”

Sleepy John Estes, of course, was a natural. He just put his hands on the instrument and opened his mouth. And then somebody would play piano and make it up out of nothing. I mean, out of nothing at all. Having no education, musically. It’s not like New Orleans, where everybody was schooled and there was a standard of reference. God almighty, down in the country, there is not standard of reference. You just did whatever your body would do. That’s the beauty of it. And Yank Rachel on mandolin – the whole thing is just fabulously interesting to me. From the sound point of view, I just used to bathe in those records. It’s like sit down and let it wash all through you. Pretty fascinating. Jesse Fuller – same thing with him. He used to come in, set that stuff up, and then sit down and play it and just wind it up. It would just unspool at you. It would take you away from your environment, that’s for sure.

Did Rev. Gary Davis ever give you playing tips?
Oh, I used to sit with him. He was a guy who gave lessons, actually. Now, how he got started and what made him turn to doing that in his age, I don’t know. But it was known that if you wanted to pick up from him, why, all you had to do was give him five or six dollars and go sit with him. So I used to go to where they put him up in some little house down here in L.A., someplace near Hollywood, when he’d come into town. And I’d sit there and say “I like this song” and name one of his tunes – because he had songs. He wasn’t just playing 12-bar blues, he was playing songs, and they had structure and all. Of course, he had this bizarre chordal sense and crazy right hand, and that was interesting. So we’d sit there for an hour or however long he wanted to stay – because when you’re in the company of a master, time is not a thing of the clock. The clock is not ticking, necessarily. If you want to stay all day, that’s okay. If you get tired, you leave. It’s kind of that sort of a thing. So we used to sit there. I never could play it back to him. A month later, it would come to me, what he had shown me or what he had done. He would just play, and then you would try to remember. I’d stare at his hands and try to figure it out. But I couldn’t make anything sound like that, and I never could play his way. I found that it was beyond my ability to do the thing that he was doing.

From a physical standpoint, what made it so difficult?

I don’t know. I mean, he had a bizarre technique. And you had to commit to it. It’s not a technique that flows into another person’s technique. In other words, Gary Davis is all by himself, in my experience, and if you committed to learning and being a student of his and a follower of his guitar mannerisms, you had to do that regardless, and everything else was secondary. I didn’t want to do that. I was really interested in something else at the time, and I felt that this was out of my range. I used to love to play his tunes, but I didn’t play them with any deep satisfaction because I realized it wasn’t working. This is not doing what he is doing. This is turning out like something else, and I’m not really crazy about it. Although he had some nice chord changes that used to thrill me, and I used to like to play the tunes just to hear those chord changes go down. But it was impossible.

In the prewar blues genre, do any other people stand out as being transcendental?

Gosh, sure. I mean, so many people. Blind Blake is a great player, a great musical figure. He’s another mysterious figure. In the years where he was on top of his thing, I think he was fabulous.

I think Lonnie Johnson has never been recognized as one of the transcendental people who influenced everybody. You can recognize Lonnie Johnson in just about anybody, with his voice and his elegant style. The stuff he did with Louis Armstrong was just incredible. So there he was. And he recorded with guys like Eddie Lang and all that. What he must have sounded like to country black people – they must have thought, “Well, this is somebody else!” You know, he’s up in town, getting this fabulous tone, and he’s real elegant and real top-hatted. It’s a whole other thing. It’s pop music, really. You can see people copying him right and left. Oh, it’s amazing. When I was very young, I heard some of that stuff, and it came through and really killed me. I used to sit and try to do that all the time. Still do. If I want to warm up, get my hands working and discipline my body, I will try to play some of his instrumentals. I can’t imagine what the hell he was doing, but I’m trying for it all the time. It’s just a way of using the instrument, right?

Did you hear many influences in the music of John Hurt?

That he had heard? Well, who knows? There’s a guy from Mississippi who’s playing in an un-Mississippi style. Very linear, melodic style. What did he hear? He must have heard Geechie music, maybe. Maybe he heard stuff from the Piedmont area. Maybe he thought it up all by himself.

Explain what you mean by Geechie music.
You know, the way the Sea Island people sound. That island thing all in the Piedmont area where Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, and a lot of those people sort of are from. It’s a very melodic style, syncopated in a different way. They play major chords and things, unlike a guy like Skip James, who plays crazy polymodal things and it’s a more open sound. Then Furry Lewis and John Hurt are far apart – maybe that’s Memphis. I don’t know what that is.

Now, Furry Lewis was in medicine shows. Medicine shows were interesting because they took music all around. They would leave regional areas, which were so distinct in those days. The musicians in the minstrel shows would travel to other areas and influence and be influenced. They were like a rock and roll tour is today, you might say. I mean, the fact that Joseph Spence travelled through the South in ’20s in medicine shows is mind boggling! I mean, that’s just absolutely amazing to me. And God knows what people thought of him, and yet if he went in the Piedmont area, there must have been places where he recognized music like his own. That’s a real interesting thing to think about, because guys like Furry Lewis were on medicine shows most of their early life. Jesse Fuller was travelling in medicine shows. That’s one of the things you could do to make money.

Were these shows designed to sell snake oil liniment?

Oh, yeah. You know, they would come into town on a truck, depending on how prosperous and how big they were. We’re talking about a countrified version of a minstrel show when minstrelsy had already either died out or was unknown in the countryside where there wasn’t a theater. Out in the countryside, in these little bitty towns – which was most of the Deep South – these damn guys, these quack doctors, would come in with a show and go ahead and do it. They would have a musical interlude, like Blind Peg Leg so-and-so would do his thing. Can you imagine what some of those shows must have been like?

Have you ever seen this film called Louis Bluie? There’s a little piece of footage about the jug band that’s in there, from like about 1910. That’s your medicine show. That’s hotter than fire. That one guy with the hat plays so much jug, he looks like he’s about ready to blow up! It’s awesome looking. That kind of thing just kills me, because I know they were out there and they were doing this, and it was hot. We think of the old men who could barely do it, but this was not so back in the ’20s and before. This stuff must have been cosmic! All we know is what we’ve got on records and a few still photographs. It’s really a shame. But I think to myself, “Well, that guy [director Terry Zwigoff] found that piece of film footage. I wonder what else is out there?” We’ll never know what it’s like. Or in the alleys off Beale Street. And just everywhere. I mean, music was all over the place. Country suppers and parties and picnics, and then there’s all that piano music, and then these guys get together. Blind Blake played all over the place with all kinds of people, including Johnny Dodds. It’s just really something. Or the zither player who played with Lead Belly.

But as far as old Blind Willie Johnson is concerned, he just missed the media, even when he died. If somebody would have been paying attention, but nobody thought about it much in those days, I guess.

It’s just like nobody thought about Robert Johnson. What happened was the engineer who made those records died, and no one ever asked him what kind of guitar did he play. And I’ll tell you something else about this. You know how they talk about how he was nervous and wouldn’t face the room [during his recording sessions]? I don’t believe that. You think that man is nervous? I’ll tell you what he was doing. They say he sat in the corner.

Well, find yourself a plaster corner sometime – all those hotel rooms [where early blues sessions were recorded] were plaster. And I don’t mean wallpaper or curtains. But you go and sit in a corner, with your guitar tight up against a corner. Face the corner and play, and see what it sounds like. Now, what you get there is a thing they call “corner loading.” This is an acoustic principal. What that does is it eliminates most of the top end and most of the bottom end and amplifies the middle. The same thing that a metal guitar does or an electric guitar – it mostly amplifies the midrange, which is where that metallic, kind of piercing sound is what’s left. Now, you take and record that way, and you’ll sound different. Because Robert Johnson sounds funny – let’s face it. It doesn’t sound like anybody playing an acoustic wooden guitar. But it’s not a metal guitar. But if you sit in a corner and stick your face up into the corner and listen, you’ll hear that sound. It ties the notes together. It compresses the sound too, and his sound is very compressed. See?

Look at Robert Johnson’s picture and listen to his singing and his forceful personality. This is a guy who was afraid of the audience?! Hell, no! This is chew-them-up-and-spit-them-out kind of a guy. I think he was sitting in the corner to achieve a certain sound that he liked. In other words, if you’d have said, “Robert, I’m gonna boost the midrange, take off . . .” – because it’s a dry sound, the acoustic guitar, finally. It’s a boring sound for Robert. He wants to hear wang! He wants to hear the electric. He wants to hear that boosted midrange. And I’ll bet you that if you could have done that for him with equalizing and headphones in the modern era, he’d have been very glad. I’ll bet you if you’d have given him a Marshall amp to play it through, he’d have been extremely glad! But sitting in the corner, he could achieve something like that.

And with the sound on those records, the voice and guitar is being mooshed together. It sounds like it’s being compressed – and early field recording did compress a lot. If you look at some of that primitive equipment, being tube and having a lot of headroom, it does tend to compress. I’ve never fiddled with that. I wanted to try it for the movie. We found the machine that they were gonna use to shoot the scene with – they got it out of a museum. I said, “Alright, let me take the machine into the room and load up the corner and see if we get that sound.” As interested as Walter Hill, the director, was in that idea historically, he didn’t have time to mess around. Someday I’m gonna try it, because I just know in my heart it will work. Because I have done it – I have sat in the corner, with earphones, and listened to the sound, and it sounds like that. And it’s a great thing, because all of a sudden the whole projection of the instrument is changed radically by a simple thing like that. [See the Epilogue at the end of this blog.]

I mean, these are the things that Don Law or whoever made those damn records could have answered in two seconds, for Christ’s sake. But nobody asked him. And if you weren’t there, you don’t know. How big was Robert Johnson’s guitar? Somebody said it was big, a Kalamazoo or Gibson – I’ve heard that said. Those are large-bodied guitars. They push some air around. And his hands look funny, bending at the top joint like that. I’m starting to believe that’s him in the photo.

Were you a fan of Tampa Red?
Oh, yeah! Love Tampa Red, of course. Now, if you were to say, “Do you think you sound like any of these people?” I would say it’s easier for me to sound like Tampa Red. I think I’ve got that wired. I don’t think I’m so good at these earlier guys, because they’re so idiosyncratic, but Tampa Red ironed out all the kinks and made it a little more accessible. He played it with a little more of a modern, big-band feeling, like a soloist, almost. Very linear and really, really good. He put it all together, as far as I’m concerned. He got the songs, he had the vocal styling, he had the beat. I really think that it’s a straight line from Tampa Red to Louis Jordan to Check Berry, without a shadow of a doubt – a straight line through those three guys. You really can feel it. And he wrote some songs – or assembled them in the manner of traditional music, where you don’t write so much as you assemble or reassemble – like “It’s Tight Like That” and “Sittin’ on Top of the World.” That’s a mind who sees how to refine and flesh-out, drawing from all sources. He’s drawing from sources like the Chatmon brothers and the Mississippi Sheiks, Papa Charley Jackson.

Tampa Red put it all together, he really did. He changed it from rural music to commercial music, and he was very popular as a result. Look how successful the guy was – he made hundreds of records, and they’re all good. Some of them are incredibly good, with Washboard Sam and whoever was on piano – that stuff is fabulous! You gotta say, “Okay, that’s where it starts to become almost pop.” It’s a very straight line – him, Louis Jordan, Chuck Berry. The development is clear in my mind when I listen to that stuff. It’s good. And he had a great guitar technique too, for sure. Ooh! Non-threatening. I mean, everything about him was fun-sounding. He wasn’t scaring anybody. He didn’t sound like he was gonna eat you alive. He just sounded like we’re all having fun here, like Jim Jackson’s Jamboree and all that stuff. I really love all that.

What did you think of Robert Wilkins?

Well, he’s a great player, a songwriter. That “Prodigal Son” song is a hell of a song. [In 1929, Wilkins recorded his first version as “That’s No Way to Get Along” and later renamed the song “Prodigal Son.” It's at http://www.archive.org/ under its original title.] When you get these guys who write from a spiritual reference or point of view, it’s really interesting – like Washington Phillips and all that. Washington Phillips played Doceola [a small keyboard instrument] – different bag, but he had some pretty scary tunes too. Oh, there’s so much. The list goes on and on – it’s amazing, isn’t it? It’s a one- or two-generational thing, coming from almost nowhere. There’s no background for the blues to even exist.

There’s no reference to real blues before 1900.

Yeah. And where would it have come from, unless it’s that cane-fife stuff, wherever that came from. You know, fife-and-drum bands down in Mississippi, like that guy Napoleon Strickland. That stuff seems pre-blues to me. And that seems to be the only thing that I can think of that is.

In parts of antebellum Mississippi, Black Codes forbade the playing of drums after they had been used to spread messages among slaves during a revolt. Maybe this helps account for the differences between the development of black music in New Orleans and Mississippi.

Sure. They had a whole schooled musical tradition in New Orleans. Up until a certain point, the kids all learned regular serious music. They learned how to read music. They also had country bands, like in the South Carolina area, those jump bands playing on broken Confederate horns they found in the field, playing hymns and things. That’s a whole other bag. Do you know The Music from the South series that Frederick Ramsey put together on Folkways? One of the volumes was called Country Brass Bands. He went down there and he recorded two country brass bands, which were kind of loose organizations of guys who knew each other and would play on the weekends or for dances.

Apparently, this started after the Civil War. The Confederate armies all had brass bands and marching bands as part of the morale building. And when they lost, these guys just laid their instruments down in the field and left them. Then after the war goes by and the black people return to the field or their homes, and they actually found these horns in the dirt or left in sheds or I don’t where. In time, they became handed down in families, broken, full of holes, tied together with tape. And they didn’t learn to play like the guys in New Orleans, with proper fingering. They knew only the bugle mouth and a little fingering, all wrong, but they liked these things and so they started playing in bands. You gotta get that record. He found two of these bands – there are about ten guys in each group, and they play some kind of hymns that they know in this style, on broken instruments. They have no chops, they’ve got no mouth embouchure at all. But they play this so it’s strictly from the guts. It’s the life vibration that they live in, a pure expression through a horn rather than, say, a guitar.

Also, in those days when Ramsey was doing this work, in the ’50s, he did an early news magazine show on CBS called Omnibus. You must see this – it’s strictly important. Ramsey did one called something like, “They Took a Blue Note.” It was an hour show of jazz. They came to Ramsey, being the expert at the time, and he put it together for them. It shows him going down into Alabama. You see a little of New Orleans – that’s a really nice funeral there. Then you’re out there and there’s Horace Sprott, who was one of his discoveries, playing the harmonica and plowing the field – that’s kind of stagey and dumb. But all of a sudden, around the corner come five guys behind a barn, and they have these beat-up horns. They stand up and play this stuff, and you just fall on your knees. I’m telling you, you will have a transcendent experience, because it’s right in front of your face. It’s a thing that you can barely believe, but it’s one of the great documents of pure soul. These guys are field hands in the 1950s, they’re all middle-aged men, hard-working guys, and they play these horns in some crazy way. The sound that comes out is utterly mind-boggling. It’s just too good.

I had given up all hope of ever seeing this – I figured, well, that’s gone – but there are still some of these jump bands, as they’re now called, down in the South. I heard one at the Atlanta Blues Festival, called the Old Morrisville Brass Band, from South Carolina, and they play this way. They can’t finger these horns and they can’t change keys, but they’ll blow you right out of your seat. It is good.

Try to make the effort to get a hold of the CBS footage – you won’t be sorry. It belongs in everybody’s collection. It is something else to see. You’re talking deep country here, where some of these scenes were filmed – now it’s probably a mall. Man, that thing with the brass players is hot! It’s riveting. You need to see that, because that’s a pre-blues instrumental expression from the countryside, and that’s Civil War-vintage type of understanding on your instruments. [If any readers find or post this footage, please send a link.]

Besides the fife-and-drum tradition, do other pre-blues forms still survive in the country?

I think that the marching band music is one, because it’s all based on 19th-century music. I think the cane-fife thing is a voice there. And then, of course, we have Joseph Spence, who was a voice from the 19th century – he’s dead now. He was in medicine shows, and he was playing hymns. And have you heard this [1920s] group called the Norfolk Jubilee Quartette with Jimmy Bryant on bass? [Sample track: www.archive.org/details/RideOnKingJesus.] Well, I believe they are Geechie, Piedmont-area guys. If they don’t sound like Joseph Spence, then I’ll eat my hat. He does the same thing with his voice. And I know in my heart he heard that group, because that group was hugely popular. And Jimmy Bryant on lead bass was a unique expression [Cooder sings one of Bryant’s deep bass parts] – that’s what Spence is doing all the time. He’s singing that part.

Apparently Jimmy Bryant used to make women fall out and they’d throw their handbags at him and the rest. And he got out in the audience and did the number. So I have a feeling that that minstrel-type gospel shout thing, which we now refer to as quartet style, is a 19th-century style as well. And it sort of survives in pockets down there. There are a few people who still relate to that, but it’s hard to hear anymore. It’s really died out since the era of the soloist kind of wiped it out. But that was a thing that you found in minstrel and church styles way early – I mean, some of those gospel quartet records are way, way early records. So I figure that sort of survives, because church things tend to change slower. People keep their church traditions. And if you went down in the Sea Islands today, where a lot of that music came from, and down around the Norfolk area, you’d hear some of that stuff. I just know you would. It isn’t blues, but there’s blues in it.

And the blues singers listened to church music too, because almost every black was raised up in church. I don’t care if they end up the meanest, nastiest blues singer, they were raised in church. So they were hearing this stuff as a youth, and it’s got to mean something, especially to country people. What else do they have to do but go to church? There’s a strong musical voice in all black music that comes from their experience in church, whatever that may have been. In the case of country people it’s the singing – they didn’t have anything else. That’s why a lot of early records were of preachers.

Around 1902, the Dinwiddie Colored Quartette made some of the first recordings of African-American spiritual music. Have you heard these?
Yes, I have. They sound like a quartet – it’s quartet style. It’s typical church music. [Sample track: www.archive.org/details/DinwiddieColoredQuartet-StealAway1902.] Look, it was the simplest thing for the recording scouts to say, “Well, we know there’s music in the church. We’ll go down the road to find the church, and we’ll ask who’s good and have them come in and sing.” They did that all the time.

Why do you think it took so long for record companies to seriously focus on black musicians?

Nobody thought of them as a market, because they didn’t have any money. They’re poor. You don’t count them. This is a technological thing, and technology is linked to affluence. And then somebody was smart. Ralph Peer was one smart guy who went into the hillbilly hills and figured that these people will but their own music. That’s really a leap of genius. First, you had to sell them the record player. What’s the point of having the records unless you’ve got the record player? So it became a product that furniture stores sold – that’s a known fact. And they actually used to make the records in the back of furniture stores. It was a very concentrated idea. Later on, you had centers of recording, and that’s a whole other story. But I don’t think it was until they began to realize if you can sell something to somebody, go and make it, go and do it. But naturally, technology on any level is linked to where they think they can make money off of it.

Do you think liquor was commonly supplied at country blues sessions?

Yeah, because first of all, you do take people into strange, problem-ridden situations, which is to say, “Mr. Charley says sing, I guess I better sing.” And there’s plenty of that that went on. I can only imagine that these records, on up into modern blues, were made under the most nervous, uncomfortable circumstances imaginable. Because these damn guys weren’t psychologists, they were businessmen. They said, “Boy, you sing.” “Oh, well, alright, sir.” And unless the guy was drunk, maybe he couldn’t. Maybe he was too god-damned scared of white people. Who wouldn’t be? “If I don’t sing, they’ll cut my hands off.” I could believe that, so I figure booze was a way of dealing with a primitive person – get him drunk. Not so much in the case of the church people, who have their religion to kind of shield them, but with blues singers it apparently was true. It’s a thing that’s puzzled me – you know, why liquor was such a deal. Is it because their life is oppressing and hard and they’re unhappy and they drink? I just don’t know why people drink like they do, because I don’t like it myself. So I have a hard time understanding that. But on the other hand, they sing about it and talk about it so much of the time that it must have been about the only fun thing that you could do. That’s why in the modern scene, when you go down to the ghetto, what do you got? You got liquor stores. So that’s obvious. So yeah, they probably used it freely, said “Here, drink this and play.”

I heard that they frequently put pillows under blues guitarists’ feet . . .
To have them stop stomping their foot, because that pushed so much air around. I’m sure they did. They went to lengths to kind of balance it out – that must have been hard too. But the genius of some of those records is beautiful. Some of them are terrible. It’s a question of the engineering capability – where they were, what kind of room.

Plus what kind of 78s survive.
Yeah, man. The 78 is a high-fidelity medium, in a way. It’s going around so fast that it does sound good, except that when they get scratched, they don’t sound not so good!

This interview has been a great help, Ry.
Well, good. Do what you want with it.

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Epilogue: We ran the Blind Willie Johnson and Robert Johnson parts of this interview in the July 1990 issue of Guitar Player magazine. Then, in its April 1991 issue, Progressive Architecture magazine responded to Cooder’s theory about why Robert Johnson recorded facing a corner. After four full pages of charts, diagrams, and technological analysis, Technics Editor Kenneth Labs concluded: “Cooder is probably right.” The article’s lead graphic featured the cover of Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers, Vol. 2, with its artist’s rendering of Johnson in the hotel room. I’ve also tried recording acoustic guitarists and spoken word artists this way, and it works.
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