The blues is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century. It's such simple music, it seems timeless. But the blues does have a history, and it keeps going.
keeps changing. For the 1920s New York record industry, the blues was a parade of powerful women on stage, singing about sex, sadness, and feeling blue. I woke up this morning with an awful aching head.
I woke up this morning with an awful aching head. This is the story of how folk art met up with new media and became the bedrock of American music. From the deep south came the blues that gave birth to rock and roll. In the 1960s, white kids got the blues. I am the little red rooster.
Two legs and a crow for day. The blues ended the 20th century as the ultimate brand of authenticity. Shoot the rat down.
Music that could be celebrated by prisoners and presidents. This is music with humble beginnings. Oh good morning, found my baby gone.
It's a bent note here. It's something that says I've been somewhere and you've been there too, but we don't necessarily want to talk about it. And blues is kind of like that. It's kind of a mystery and long may it stay a mystery, you know. The blues may have had its roots in Africa, but the music was born in the USA.
I'm going down in Louisiana. Why is it that there is no blues in Cuba, no blues in Puerto Rico? No blues in St. Kitts and Nevis.
Why is that not happening? I'm going down in your lawn. Get me in. In 1865, the American Civil War freed the slaves.
By around 1900, the blues had emerged in the Deep South. Their musical roots may have been ripped from the African soil, but to talk to each other, black Americans needed to forge a new language. In the United States, the music was broken up, the people were broken up. They were not parts of the same tribe, so there was nothing to express it except the blues. Well, you know, I just found out My trouble just picked up From the start, the blues spoke in the first person, talking about moving on and leaving your troubles behind.
I'm going down in your heart The blues comes actually as release from the kind of strict localism, you'd call it, you know, being confined. And it's, you know, you suddenly get songs about people traveling and people going to see this and people, what they met on the road. I've been through the territory of Kansas City And Kansas City, St. Louis, and St. Louis, Chicago I'm on my way to do well Appropriately, a railroad station was the setting for a crucial early encounter with the blues.
Here, a college-educated black man named W.C. Handy, the leader of a colored band, met a lean, loose-jointed Negro vagrant. We're in Tuttweiler, Mississippi, and this place is famous in blues lore because sometime around 1903, this is the spot where W.C. Handy recalled that he had first heard the blues.
He was sitting here and heard a musician playing a guitar. by pulling a knife across the strings, and Handy recalled it was the weirdest sound he had ever heard. The blues was being improvised all over the South for pleasure and profit. Later Handy heard in Cleveland, Mississippi, not too far away from here, an African-American string band playing the blues, and that was also a really pivotal moment, because that's when he realized he saw people throwing coins at their feet and realized that he could make money off of it. The sort of music Handy heard is played today by the Ebony Hillbillies.
Early blues music was dance music designed for adults to get them to come to some place and drink and have a good time and so it's it's mating music essentially it's about men and women The driving instrumental part of the blues certainly comes from early fiddle music, slave fiddle players, banjo players, but the blues was purposely formed as a dance music so other musicians would make money to come to dance halls. At the turn of the century, the blues was being played by the poorest people on whatever came to hand. You see the old slavery pictures, guys working on a railroad track.
They get to hitting the hammer the same way, you know. Then they make up a song. Huh.
Huh. I've heard guys say they put a piece of wire on the side of the house and play. Take tamarind, they play, they take a washing tub, they take a wash bowl, take spoons, you know.
Anything that you put together like that with a feeling, somebody will listen. Handy translated the weird sounds that he heard into a publishing empire. In W.C. Handy Park in Memphis, The statue commemorates the writer, composer, and publisher who gave himself the title Father of the Blues. Around 1914, in the era before records and radio, Handy's Memphis Blues and St. Louis Blues became sheet music hits. What's really significant about Handy hearing this music is that within a decade, he was writing these and making good money for his family.
off of this music. So we often talk about blues as a folk music, but almost from its inception, it was also commercialized. Soon this new musical form was crisscrossing the southern states of America. Today we think of minstrel shows as crude caricatures of black music.
But at the beginning of the 20th century, dozens of African-American minstrels were putting on tent shows across the South. Minstrel shows and their successors, the medicine shows, which toured the South right through the first half of the 20th century, were, in a sense, academies for musicians who wanted to become professional. The tent shows traveled through the countryside where audiences heard versions of the latest tunes from the big city. They were almost like kind of traveling salesmen for songs. They would pick up stuff from all over the place, whether from the vernacular from songs that were being sung in plantations or by professional troupes, by musical comedy troupes that was available on sheet music.
And they mixed it. all together. The men and women writing and performing the blues were ambitious.
They used the latest media to bring their music to the public. It was New York, the capital of the new recording industry, that made the blues a driving force in popular music. Initially, the record business ignored black musicians. You have to remember that in this period, in the teens and 20s, the money in songs was in publishing, it was not in recording.
And Perry Bradford, who was a black songwriter, he was a contemporary and a competitor of W.C. Handy's, was writing these songs and he wanted to get hits. I can't buy it.
In 1920, Perry Bradford scored a big hit with Crazy Blues, sung by Mamie Smith. It's said to have sold a million copies. No one knows for sure. But what is certain is that it launched the blues as pop music.
In the early 1920s, record companies began to release race records, music by black performers for black audiences. The first successful blues singers were women. The threat to whites was not black women.
it was black men. So the black men on the stage were forced to black up. Black women were not. They could perform with their own skin. But a black man had to be a clown.
He had to put on funny clothes and do funny dances. There was always interaction, although not always favorable, between American white males and... black women, they were allowed to do or be vocal or say certain things that the black males wouldn't be able to say or do.
Or showbiz in their own way, even though they were as gut blues as anybody else, but they had to dress it up. And there's nothing like a dressed up lady to turn the interest, I think. But he treats me like a doll Luckily, they were some of the most phenomenally great singers.
Even through those old records, you can tell the timbre of their voice and their delivery was amazing. Because this was out pre-microphone, you know, so these girls really had to be able to project. In segregated 1920s America, the Blues Queens performed on a black theater circuit.
And they lived their lives in a black underworld. When the artists used to perform and travel around, they would have to stay in people's houses, which turned out to be things that we called the buffet flats, in which you could get entertainment, food, you could get a bed, and you could get a bed with someone else in it if you wanted. Blues may have been a view from the bottom of society, but in 1923, the blues produced its first superstar, Bessie Smith. A dark brown woman from Chattanooga, Tennessee, she was a veteran of 10 years of touring with minstrel shows.
Bessie Smith. was talking about the woes of life with women, and that's probably why she was so popular. You know, she talked about domestic violence, which is what we call it now.
She talked about even fighting back. Come on out, you're going to move me. Don't you hit the woman?
Now, yeah. Now, wait a minute, kid. Grab the woman. Emerging from a dirt-poor background, Bessie Smith at her peak commanded $2,000 a week for her live performances. Oh, my baby, he's a love this time.
Oh, my baby, he's a love this time. Bessie Smith lives the blues, and especially those sexual songs, because she had a reputation, and she lived up to it. One of my favorites is Sugar in My Bowl, you know. I need a little sugar in my bowl. I need a little hot dog on my roll.
I could stand some love and fall so bad. I feel so funny. I feel so sad.
You know, it's just something to entice. You know, you're going to listen to things that entice you. You're going to eat food that entices you. You know, why not have a little spiciness in the music? Cavalry.
The blues was black music making a lot of money for its superstars, but the structure of the music came out of work songs and churches. If it wasn't for cabaret, where would I be? Yeah, yeah.
The call and response between the preacher and the congregation came ultimately from Africa. In tribal music, one singer sang a line and the other sang it back. On a hill called cabaret. In the blues, the second voice became an instrumental voice. Y'all praying with me?
Your prayer means... The call and response, when you sing the blues, you say a word, you say a lyric or whatever, then you play behind that. You know, for instance, I said, thank you, sir.
Then I, dun-dun-dun, you know, thank you, sir, dun-dun-dun, you know. At Calvary, we hear the words. The call and response, you can go back to early Africa, and it's usually based on a form of people returning from a hunt, saying, you know, I caught this, blah, blah, blah, blah, and people say, yeah, sure, you caught that.
You know, it's... It's acknowledgement and confirmation. You know, and did you hear that?
Yes, I heard that. What did I say? This is what you said. What does it mean? It means this.
Was on his shoulder on a hill called Cal. Religion spoke of the life to come, but the blues was rooted in the here and now. If you see the evening sun go down The music evolved into the 12-bar blues, turning sadness into stoicism and misfortune into humor. The blues is definitely more than just a sadness. Because basically a blues, especially if you deal with a 12-bar, it's set up like a joke.
You know, you repeat the line twice, and then you got the punchline at the end. I got a man that treats me like a rat. I got a man that treats me like a rat. He gets me so worried, I don't know where I'm at.
It's a happy music. It truly is. It's just that some of the subject matter of the blues sometimes had that sad feeling, but truly, it is not a sad music.
While the blues come a-texting Loving like a mule While the blues come a-texting Loving like a mule In 1926, Race records got into a new market and a new type of southern solo artist. Blind Lemon Jefferson, a street singer from Texas. His high, lonesome voice and solitary guitar sounded like another world from the vaudeville women who had dominated blues recordings.
It was a different kind of blues. It's one-on-one. A person is just kind of hollering at the moon. You know, there's no ulterior motive for a cat to do what he does because he's expressing his or her soul to the universe.
Blind Lemon Jefferson may have sounded like a voice howling at the moon, but he was backed by a business plan. Paramount Records employed black producer J. Mayo Williams to run their race records division. In his catalog, Williams appealed to his customers, asking if they could recommend any new blues talent. And by God, someone working in a record store in Dallas wrote to Paramount Records and said, there's this guy placed down by the tracks here who gets these huge crowds, and if we had a record of him, we could sell a bunch of them.
And that was Blind Lemon. Jefferson and the record company thought he sounded terrible but they gave it a try and by God it sold all over the country what is He became a recording star, and his success transported him far away from singing on street corners in Texas. He did alright for himself.
Say he owned his own car, he had his own chauffeur to drive him around. He was a doozy. That's it.
I don't know about Ragged. Some people say he was mighty sophisticated. Some people said he had some of the wildest suits you've ever seen. Have you ever heard of...
off in sound. Have you ever heard of... The success of Blind Lemon Jefferson gave birth to a new style of the blues. As if the vagrant with the guitar heard by W.C. Handy at the railroad station had come back to life.
But this time, he was selling a lot of records. All over the South, the songsters were auditioning. They were street musicians with a big repertory of songs. But the record companies wanted just one thing. The reason these fellas got pressed so hard into the blues is because...
because the recording companies found out that blues was big business. So all these musicians who'd run around singing pop songs and ballads of the day ended up writing a bunch of blueses. The record company would simply go to the songsters, and they would go to the South, go to Atlanta, they would just say, everybody come who wants to sing for us, they'd get a hotel, everyone would stay, four or five people to a room, they would go and hear the songs.
They would pick the blues, and nothing else. There was one region that supplied spectacular blues talent for the southern market, the Mississippi. Delta was a flat area formed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.
It was amazingly fertile soil for cotton, and it proved equally fertile for music. But this was no ancient landscape of big plantations filled with former slaves. There was virtually nobody in the Mississippi Delta until quite late because it was flooded.
You know, they had to build the levees on the Mississippi River. You needed the Army Corps of Engineers in order to get the modern deltas. And what that meant was that the population that was there at the beginning of the 20th century when blues was happening was very, very young. In the Delta, everybody was ready to get into the new style, which was blues.
And so it becomes this huge blues center, not because it's ancient, but for exactly the opposite reason. I'm on my way to Walla Now. I'm on my way to Walla Now. Will Dockery's farm was hacked out of the wilderness in the 1890s to become one of the biggest plantations in the Delta.
When Mr. Will first got here, there were bears and panthers, and the whole place was covered in woods. And so he set about to clear it, and he needed help. And so that's how he got so many people to come here, is he realized that these thousands of acres that he wanted to clear needed lots of helpers.
All I got's a fine dust to wear. By 1920, there were more than 2,000 workers living on Dockery. It was like a small town, a town which needed entertaining on a Saturday night. But once you have this commissary situation and people standing out here in front of it being paid on Saturday afternoon, it was the perfect place for these blues singers to come.
Saturday Night Live The greatest entertainer bass at Dockery was Charlie Patton, the father of the Delta Blues. Patton sang at the top of his voice. He liked to clown, throw the guitar behind his head.
talk to people in the audience, but he was a performer. He was an entertainer. My rider from the sea She's got to keep it here My rider He had a lot of the extremes, you know, he had a lot of hard lives and, you know, he had a lot of women. He played a, you know, every blues man gets a little, a little, but he had a lot.
He had him a rough wife and you know they lived a rough life and you know that's what killed him in his forties but you know it's and that's what almost got him killed a few times before that I'd wager. The blues singers traveled south and performed in isolated plantations. The talent scouts connected them to recording studios. The most important venue was a furniture store in Jackson, Mississippi, owned by a white man, H.C. Spear.
Well, really he's the godfather of Delta Blues. He is the Delta Blues and Mississippi Blues, which Sam Phillips was. was to rock and roll with his son label in the 1950s. Will you kill my Mandy? Yes, I will.
Dead by the eye. Gail Dean Wardlow tracked down H.C. Spear and interviewed him before his death.
This is H.C. Spear, Jackson, Mississippi. By 1926, I became a talent scout throughout all the southern states.
Well, he would walk up and over on the streets and listen to a musician play. He was looking for four original songs. The reason many bluesmen never got recorded is they didn't have enough original material.
Crying can't get enough. Crying so low. Oh, children, me. Spear told tales of drunken blues singers and bootleg liquor that fueled Saturday night parties. People came to drink, and they came to dance, and they were drinking moonshine.
And, you know, some of this moonshine was made through lead radiators, so, I mean, it had a high lead content. But there was always booze to be found at a party. Can he don't cry before me? H.C.
Spears said the bluesman, he said he don't fit. He said he's got to have a drink before he can make a record, and he smells a little bit. But he says...
They're great guitar players. He said the Delta blues was kind of like the meat barrel. It smells a little bit.
And someone like Bessie Smith, the city singers, they had dolled it up and put perfume on their blues. It has turned my party And left my black mind Spear got a letter from Charlie Patton in the Delta And... Basically, Patton said, I think I'm as good as anyone that's been recorded, and I would like to audition for you.
Spear got Patton a record contract. Patton was good. Patton was one of the best tuners I ever had.
And he was one of the best sellers, too, on record. His records made him famous, and he passed on his tips to the next generation. How'd I start to make a record? Was plying. Plying four mules on the plantation.
And a man come through there picking a guitar called Charlie Patton. And I liked his sounds. And so...
Every night that I'd get off of work, I'd go over to his house and he'd learn me how to pick the guitar. So I got good with it. For the musicians who started their lives on these plantations, Howlin'Wolf, Muddy Waters, B.B. King, and many more, the blues offered a way out. Excuse me.
These guys never picked cotton in their life. That's why they're playing the blues. To get out of the cotton fields they were playing.
The black families working in these cotton fields were sharecroppers. and for many, it was a modernized form of slavery. Hard times, young, everywhere you go Times get harder than ever been before Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union.
Segregation was total, and the white man's word was the rule of law. A white shopkeeper like H.C. Speer understood why this was fertile soil for the Blues.
You take the Negro for over a hundred years, he's been deprived of so many privileges. They could get into the field. and become more satisfied with themselves by singing, you understand. It was singing off something that's happened to them. A white man would take them and keep them for a week or two and not pay them anything.
They either maybe kill one or two now and then. It isn't what we hear, it's what we don't hear. What we don't hear in the blues is the real reason for the blues, the segregation and the discrimination. The control was total.
Well, to me, the blues is the expression where people couldn't express themselves. Those riffs and those songs came off of the expression of not being able to say to their slave master vocally that I don't like this. What is the cause of we being on the highway 61?
129 women and children here. Starving some of them are starving and suffering. But we who have the right are dividing with them.
She arrived from New York City. Thousands of black people began to vote with their feet, leaving poverty in the South for jobs in the North. The numbers were boosted by the Wall Street crash in 1929 and the depression that followed. It signaled hard times for the music industry.
Sales of records slumped, and the blues recording sessions dried up. Lordy some folks sat down, greyhound buses don't run. Delta bluesmen like Son House and Skip James made records that were commercial flops.
I'm so tired of weeping, so tired of longing, I'm so tired of groaning. Their music would lie buried like a time capsule. But in the 1960s, they would be rediscovered and acclaimed as masters of the Delta blues by a young white audience who adopted the blues as their own.
The path that led these young white people to the blues began with a new kind of record scout driving south, the folklorist. Be my woman, girl, I'm the only The only white people so far involved in the blues have been record manufacturers looking for hits. Be my woman, girl, I'm But the folklorists were looking for music they wanted to preserve.
John Lomax had grown up in Texas and had a long-standing love of folk music. In 1933, he and his son Alan received a grant from the Library of Congress to motor through the South, visiting big penitentiaries to make recordings. Nice.
My son and I conceived the idea this summer that the best way to get real Negro singing, Negro idiom, was to find the Negro who had the least contact with the whites. People have written that my grandfather, for example, was obsessed with the prisons and that he wanted to capture something isolated. But he wanted to find the oldest material, which is a very important thing to do. It's like archaeology. Prisons in the south were huge farms, which were run for profit.
I mean, I think you could almost call it an extension of slavery in the 20th century. And the men had to work from sunup to sundown, what they called from cane to cane, from when you can't see in the morning until you can't see at night, you know, the whole of the day, in unbearable heat as well. The music sung by black prisoners inspired an extraordinary passion in the young Alan Lomax.
He would spend the rest of his life recording music created by people at the bottom of society. I had heard all the symphonies there were and all the chamber music and the best jazz and I said this is the greatest music. There were 50 black men who were working under the whip and the gun and they had the best music. had the soul to make the most wonderful song I'd ever heard.
The most spectacular discovery the Lomaxes made in jail was a 45-year-old prisoner, Huddy Ledbetter, known as Leadbelly. I read goodnight. I read goodnight. He was a convicted murderer and had a fantastic repertory of blues and ballads.
He had a big penetrating voice. He was a dynamic presence, almost frightening to some people. He was, in one sense, a great performer, and you knew it for the second you saw him. on, but another way you thought, this guy is beyond performance. My girl, my girl, don't lie to me.
Tell me where did you sleep last night? When Lead Belly got out of jail and met the media, it became clear how much American journalists enjoyed writing about bad black men. Life magazine published a profile, Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel.
He was called a murderous minstrel, a sweet singer of the swamplands, here to do a few tunes between homicides. I'm going where the cold wind blows. This narrative had been shaped by reporters and the like who wanted to see, number one, a murderer who was out walking around, and a murderer who sang songs that people enjoyed, which was, you know, priceless. My girl, my girl, don't you lie. In February 1935, John Lomax took Lead Belly to a mansion in Connecticut, where a newsreel crew staged and filmed a reconstruction of Lead Belly's journey from singing convict to grateful performer.
Lead Belly, what are you doing here? Boss, I come here to be your man. I come here to work for you the rest of my life. It is scripted in kind of... ...funging detail to show Lead Belly as a servile, compliant, plantation negro who John Lomax kind of shepherds out of confinement.
Thank you, sir, boss. Thank you, sir, boss. I'll drive you all over the United States. I'll tie your shoestring for you. Later, John Lomax was embarrassed by this newsreel, while Leadbilly was angry because he didn't get paid.
Despite growing tension between them, Leadbilly performed with Lomax at Harvard University and literary conferences. He got a new audience that was unexpected, and that was educated, middle-class whites who were very liberal. He didn't really have an audience among blacks.
Lead Belly was never a success with black audiences, and white society saw him as wild and dangerous, an embodiment of his race. However, Lead Belly did find support in left-wing circles. We do not preach the sure hope of socialism in the life of these young comrades of ours.
We preach that, yes. As the blues entered white liberal society, the music could now be heard in the context of civil rights. The blues were getting political. I want all the colored people to listen to me.
Don't ever try to get no home in Washington, D.C. Cause if we go down, if we go down. I got a blue, blue, blue, blue, I took on a brotherly view. The only support for blacks in the South in the 30s was the Communist Party.
So there was a great symbiosis between the communists and this black. And in 1936, a meeting of the American Communist Party, they did officially recognize the blues as the voice of the proletarian black. but proletarian black record buyers were dancing to a different beat.
The blues records that dominated the Harlem hit parade of the 1930s were by the Count Basie Orchestra. Don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees? Don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees? Don't your heart look lonesome when your baby back up to leave? You see, to dance, you must have a beat.
And then here you go. Every beat, you put your foot down on a beat, and that's what Basie does for you. You can dance to his music, it don't matter what he plays.
Any sound. And that's why... That's so pronounced, you can't miss it. You can love me, baby, and treat me that way Count Basie's band combined the blues sound of Bessie Smith with the latest developments in swing, It was a very successful formula.
He took an eight-bar phrase, made it a 12-bar phrase. Now you got the blues. And he had 16 guys who can shout it.
Oh, God, they were great. In the evening, in the evening, mama when the sun goes down. The blues singers were getting more sophisticated.
The new style of blues crooners. like Leroy Carr, were no longer shouting the blues. We have electrical recording. Simple as that.
You didn't need to shout. So these singers could be more intimate, and there's another innovation comes at the same time, radio. So, an intimate voice singing softly in a radio late at night, irresistible.
Well, it's hard to tell, hard to tell Which one will treat you the best When the sun goes down This melody was not lost on a young man in Mississippi. Well, it's hard to tell, it's hard to tell When all your love's in vain All your love's in vain In 1936, a 25-year-old walked into H.G. Spears'store in Jackson, Mississippi. His name was Robert Johnson. He had a bunch of songs, and he wanted an audition to make some records.
Well, I felt lonesome, I was lonesome And I could not help but cry All my love's in vain Robert Johnson really used his ears, and he listened to everything that was going on around him, and he took in everything that was going on. All the popular musicians around him took their styles, and he took them all for other instruments and arranged them for his instruments. You know?
He's the first person we have from the blues world who had heard all the blues records. And as a result, he's the first person who doesn't just play a style from his place. He's like already this compendium of the greatest blues styles of the 20s and early 30s, and he's putting it all together. I woke up this morning, year round for my shoes. In his short lifetime, Robert Johnson recorded 29 songs.
He remained almost totally unknown. But beginning in the 1960s, Johnson's songs would see him acclaimed as king of the Delta Blue singers. I did a walkin'do It brought the idea of writing them yourself and playing them yourself to a new peak, where it became important that you were actually singing your own songs. This guitar playing is on the virtuoso scale.
This is your listening to... or an orchestra there. You're not listening to one guy. This is impossible.
In New York City, Robert Johnson had one very important fan. John Hammond was a record producer from a wealthy background who combined left-wing politics, man-about-town sophistication, with a very discerning ear. He discovered and encouraged Count Basie, Billie Holiday, and Bob Dylan.
Hammond described Johnson as the greatest Negro blue singer who has cropped up in recent years in a communist magazine. He asked the magazine to sponsor a concert he was planning, which would showcase the rich heritage of of black music. I'm sure John had never bothered to join anything, but he didn't mind contributing to the Communist Party if they would help make it possible to have this concert.
Hammond sent scouts down south to locate Robert Johnson, but they returned with the news that Johnson had died in mysterious circumstances. Nevertheless, the show went on. In December of 1938, John Hammond put on a concert here at Carnegie Hall, the most prestigious classical music venue in New York.
York. He called it From Spirituals to Swing. And the idea was that he was taking swing music, which everyone knew as a pop music, and trying to show its depth, put it in context of spirituals, of blues, of African music.
music and suggest that this was serious art, that this was something people should take with the same seriousness as European classical music. Hammond began the show by playing two Robert Johnson records. Then, as a substitute, he brought on another blues singer, Big Bill Brunzi.
Way down yonder in New Orleans Looking for a girl that I hadn't never seen They said she got good jealous Brunzi was based in Chicago. He had released over a hundred records under his own name. He wore sharp suits and played the latest musical styles. But because Hammond was in love with the idea that the blues came from a primitive countryside, he pursued it.
presented Brunzi as a simple farmhand. Hammond wrote, Big Bill Brunzi was prevailed upon to leave his Arkansas farm and mule and make his very first trek to the big city to appear before a predominantly white audience. He was completely a Chicago musician, but his job in that concert was to represent the rural blues, and so they turned him into that. And Big Bill Brunzi was no fool and realized that... That was a good part to play and kept playing it in New York, in London, in Paris.
I got the key to the highway And I'm built out and bound to go Hey, hey, hey, hey, Lord, Lord, hey The blues was being redefined. It was no longer just black pop music. It was now folk art from the era before records and radio.
Its new middle-class white audience heard the blues as music endangered by the modern world. Musicians and sociologists can now study American folk songs that have never been transcribed and would otherwise be lost if the library officials did not go into... the field to record unknown primitive singers.
In 1941, John Lomax's son, Alan, was at the Archive of Folk Song at the Library of Congress, and he was heading back into the field. What you do? Working with a team of black academics, Lomax set out to examine every aspect of music in the Mississippi Delta.
They visited juke joints to discover what the locals were listening to. It wasn't Robert Johnson's blues, but recordings by urban black hitmakers. In Lomax's notes, there's a wonderful account of late one night, he's wandering around, stumbles across a juke joint on the edge of a cotton field, and opens the door to find the whole place lit up, and everybody in there jitterbugging to Fats Waller.
I mean, this could have been any place. In his field trip through the Delta, Lomax recorded one man who was to become a blues legend, a 28-year-old tractor driver, McKinley Morganfield, also known as Muddy Waters. I get laid over in the evening, child, I feel like blowing my horn. I woke up this morning to find my little baby gone. Muddy Waters had a profitable sideline distilling illegal liquor, so he was suspicious of this white man and his recording equipment.
Muddy thinks that Alan Lomax is going to bust Muddy for bootlegging moonshine. And so Muddy doesn't trust this guy as far as he can throw him. The way Alan Lomax wins Muddy's trust is Alan White drinks out of the cup that Muddy has just had a sip out of.
And Muddy thinks, oh my God, even the revenuer agent wouldn't drink after a black man. This guy must be serious. I want to know the facts and how you felt and why you felt the way you did.
That's a very beautiful song. Well, I just felt blue, and the song fell into my mind, and it just come to me just like that song, and I just started singing. I feel mistreated girl you know now I don't mind yeah been mistreated baby now baby and I don't mind Alan Lomax would return to the blues all his life, but he had an uneasy relationship with its commercial popularity. He always felt, of course, that it was the music of the people who were singing it.
It wasn't an industrial music, it wasn't a big business music, it was actual music that had come from the hearts of people, you know, and from the lives they lived. Alan did not see the blues as a commercial form of music. He was more interested in documenting the country-style blues, the early proto-blues and field hollers and those sorts of things.
At the same time that Alan Lomax was recording Muddy Waters, new media were reaching the Delta. The first blues radio program began to broadcast from Helena, Arkansas, and they publicized themselves with a touring roadshow. People ain't got a cryin'shame Ain't got a pity I declare it's a cryin'shame It starts out Light as air, white as snow, that's world-famous King Biscuit flour, the perfect flour for all your baking needs.
King Biscuit Time was sponsored by a local flour manufacturer. Aimed at black listeners, it's broadcast for time to catch the workers at lunchtime on the plantations, including Muddy Waters. Muddy used to hear the show on the air every day at 12.15, and Muddy was out in the farmland listening to the show. show, and as so many others were.
That's how they knew about it. They said, they should hear our kind of blues. We're the blues artists. Muddy Waters was beginning to get gigs at the juke joints in the Delta.
The Blue Front Cafe started in the 1940s in Bentonia, Mississippi. Juke joint music, drinking, gambling. eating, I mean, you name it.
You'd have people come by, not expecting a salary, but they would have a harmonica in their pocket, a guitar strapped across their back, and they would play solo, sell a cap or a bucket down in front of them. They would play, and someone would contribute nickels, dimes, pennies, or whatever, and they'd play for that. I believe, I believe, my time ain't over.
I believe, I believe, my time ain't over. And make me leave my happy home Oh yeah Oh yeah But blacks were leaving the South in large numbers, pushed off the land by new machines on the plantations, and pulled towards the North, especially Chicago, by jobs in the factories. The motivation for Muddy Waters to put on his best suit, have his picture taken, and leave Mississippi, arrived in the shape of a record sent by Alan Lomax.
In an evening at the White House devoted to celebrating the blues, America's first black president focused on that moment. Lomax sent Muddy two pressings from their sessions together, along with a check for $20. Later in his life, Muddy recalled what happened next.
He said, I carried that record up to the corner and I put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and said, I can do it. I can do it. In many ways, that right there is the story of the blues.
Well, I feel in my heart like I feel the day. Heading for Chicago, Muddy caught the train out of the Delta in 1943. I'm out of trouble. I'm all right.
Well, babe, I just can't be satisfied And I just can't keep on The trains were segregated. Black Americans rode in carriages at the back. And the journey itself...
was an education. They had a colored car, a regular car. One thing I always remember, after the colored car, they left the windows open.
So you'd go through the tunnels, you'd get all that stuff in your face. In terms of learning about the real history of this country, you know, nothing is sharper than that teaching there, you know. Well, I know my little old babe She gonna jump and shout That old train be late, man In Chicago, Muddy plugged his guitar into electricity.
The music made by Muddy and other musicians from the South didn't just change Chicago. It changed the world. And I just can't keep on BF-WATCH TV 2021 I can't get no satisfaction, I can't get no satisfaction Cause I tried, and I tried, and I tried, and I tried I can't get no