[1]

Testimonials

“I encountered the blues when I was quite a child. I was born in Mumford, Texas,

and grew up in Bryan, Texas, in the 1950s. I performed as a musician at many of

the juke joints on the Moore Brothers farm and Allenfarm, local house parties

and suppers. I heard many stories about the life on these and other plantations, but not in the details this book provides. At this late date, Texas and America are

still trying to live down their morbid past. The cotton industry has long passed

and left these towns, villages and plantations to a bare minimal existence. Many are resorting to rebranding themselves by getting the state government to

designate them the Antique Capital of Texas or The Blues Capital. This book is

calling to the altar for all who contributed to Blood on The Cotton and is a must-read for all who are curious about Blues Music as it developed in Central Texas

along the Brazos and other rivers.”

– Nat Dove, film composer, musician and music historian

“The authors’ dedicated research, coupled with their skilled storytelling, has

produced an important work about the blues in the Brazos Valley. Whether you

are a music lover or a historian, this book is sure to please – this is one great

read!”

– Bill Page, Texas A&M University Library Coordinator and historian

“This book underlines an ongoing problem in the U.S. – white violence. Violence

kept the system going in Texas for a long time, and to some extent it continues,

but it is never dealt with publicly. This is strange here in the Brazos Valley,

which is quite prosperous, since this violence certainly contributed to prosperity.”

– Michael Kraft, PhD

[2]

Copyright © 2018 Glenn D. Davis

All Rights Reserved

Except where permitted by law, no part of this book may be reproduced or

transmitted in any form, electronic or otherwise, to include photocopying,

scanning, recording, or any storage and/or retrieval system, without

written permission from Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP).

First Edition.

[3]

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my long-suffering wife, Dorothy Traska-Davis,

who had to put up with my addiction to getting this book into print. Her

insights and proofing were also fundamental to the completion of this

work.

Photos are from Google Images or from the private photo collections of

Russell Cushman and Glenn D. Davis

[4]

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments 5

Preface 7

Introduction 11

Chapter 1: Reconstruction and Black Suffering 14

Chapter 2: Violence: Settling the Brazos Valley 24

Chapter 3: Brazos Valley Plantations 33

Chapter 4: Plantation Mentality 43

Chapter 5: The Tom Moore Farm 55

Chapter 6: Mance Lipscomb, Songster 69

Chapter 7: Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman 75

Chapter 8: The Chitlin’ Circuit 89

Chapter 9: The Austin Nexus 102

Chapter 10: Public Interest in Blues Rises 111

Chapter 11: Blue-eyed Blues? 123

Chapter 12: Internationalization of the Blues 131

Chapter 13: The Future of the Blues 141

Chapter 14: Conclusions 149

Epilogue: Blues in the Brazos Valley 153

Bibliography 155

About the Author 161

[5]

Acknowledgments

It would take a lot of space to name all the people who assisted in the

writing of this book, but I will just start by thanking Jay Brakefield for his

massive help with research and writing. It was largely because of Jay’s

encyclopedic knowledge of both the Texas blues and the blues in general

that this book came to fruition. It was a real pleasure working with him in

interviewing and researching the subject material herein. Jay contributed

materials from his own collection, including interviews with Mance

Lipscomb, Sunny Nash and Nat Dove. Jay also wrote the chapters on

Lipscomb and Hopkins.

I would also like to extend a hearty thank you to Russell Cushman, the

Brazos Valley artist and businessman who helped the small central Texas

city of Navasota become designated as the Blues Capital of Texas.

Russell, who at one time was the administrator of Navasota’s now-defunct

Blues Alley (museum), graciously allowed some of the photos on his Web

Site Blues Valley to be used in this book. He also sat for several interviews

which provided the author with facts and history concerning the history of

the Brazos Valley.

Another key interview was with Matt Moore, the grandson of Harry

Moore, one of the Moore brothers who owned and operated his part of the

Tom Moore farm (each brother owned a part), a central focus of this work.

Thanks Matt for making time for that interview.

This shout-out goes to College Station resident Lorenzo Grays for

providing information about the history of black juke joints in the Brazos

Valley, especially the stories he recalled about the now-defunct Green

Lantern, which stood near the south entrance to Texas A&M University.

How could I possibly forget the interview with Mama Nitt, an African-

American owner of the still-operating Big Wheel juke in Grimes County?

If you are still with us Mama Nitt, I just want to say thanks for that

interview and that you are one special lady.

[6]

A very special thank you goes to Bill Page, Texas A&M University’s

chief researcher on the history of the Brazos Valley. Thanks Bill, your

knowledge is breathtaking and you have offered so much help that I can

only give a great big thanks, although that seems inadequate.

And to all the others, especially to my good friend and compatriot Anne

Boykin, who offered help and moral support, I say thank you all very

much indeed!

[7]

Preface

The blues and I go back a long way. When I was growing up, my mother

would regale me with stories of John and Alan Lomax, the Texas father-

and-son folklore team that recorded and documented just about anyone

who was anyone, including Muddy Waters, Woody Guthrie and Lead

Belly. She’d met the Lomaxes while attending grad school at the

University of Texas in the early 1930s and recalled their tales, including

one about Lead Belly pulling a tooth with a pair of pliers he found while

waiting in their car, spattering the interior with blood. Tough guy, that

Huddie Ledbetter.

The first time I heard Lead Belly was when I ordered an LP about an inch

thick from Folkways Records in New York. It was kind of like tasting

really hot food for the first time; it took me a few listenings to decide that I

liked it. (Remember, this was the era of Perry Como, Snooky Lanson and

“How Much Is That Doggy in the Window?”) But once I got a taste of that

strong, soulful music, I was hooked. The real breakthrough moment

happened, though, in the summer of 1962, when I was working in

downtown Houston and often spent my lunch break haunting the Sam

Houston Bookstore, which sold records in the basement. One day the

pleasant middle-aged saleswoman said, “Hey, let’s hear the new Lightnin’

Hopkins album.” The sounds of “Happy Blues for John Glenn” gave me

one of those life-changing “this is my music!” moments. I proceeded, over

the next several decades, to listen to and research jazz, blues and other

“ethnic” sounds.

While I was copy editing at The Dallas Morning News, I was always on

the lookout for a music-related story to peddle to the editors as a freelance

project. In 1986, when the movie Crossroads premiered in Dallas, I wrote

an article quoting Houston researcher Mack McCormick as saying he was

almost certain that Robert Johnson, whose legend was the basis of the

film, had made his Dallas recordings in a building on Park Avenue, near

[8]

the main public library. (Years later, another researcher established the

truth of this by finding a vital piece of correspondence.)

In 1989, while covering the funeral of local blues pianist and National

Heritage Fellowship winner Alex Moore, I met Alan Govenar, a folklorist,

writer and filmmaker. This led to a personal and professional relationship

that continues to this day. We started talking about the need for a book

about Dallas’ famous and infamous Deep Ellum section, which, back in

the day, as they say, had been a key spot in the development of blues and

jazz. Blind Lemon Jefferson, the first commercially successful solo male

blues recording artist, was discovered playing under a large oak tree at the

intersection of Elm Street and Central Track in the heart of Deep Ellum.

The book was published in 1998 by University of North Texas Press and

republished in 2013, expanded, updated and retitled, by Texas A&M

Press.

In researching the book, we interviewed a number of fascinating people,

including Jews who had catered to African Americans at Deep Ellum

pawnshops and stores. We talked to musicians and cabdrivers and found a

few people who had known Blind Lemon, including a 101-year-old black

man living in a nursing home in Mexia. “Blind Lemon! Blind Lemon!,” he

exclaimed happily, a huge smile lighting his face. “He was a gui-tar man!”

Alan got to know a couple of very hardy nonagenarians down in Lemon’s

home country, Limestone and Freestone counties, who had known him

and remembered his funeral.

When I moved to Brazos County (home of Texas A&M) in 2004 to work

for the local paper, one of my motives was to continue blues research in an

area that, I had postulated, was the Lone Star State’s near-equivalent of the

Mississippi Delta. The area had produced Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance

Lipscomb, Blind Willie Johnson, Albert Collins, Texas Alexander, and

many others. For one reason and another, the project dragged on, and my

research was sporadic and not well-organized.

[9]

But a picture began to form, and once I began to dig into the region’s

racial and political history, I realized that my previous research had

revealed only half the story. What was missing for the most part was the

context in which that great music had been produced. We’d touched on

this, of course, but the more I learned, the more I wished that I could go

back and re-interview some of the black folks I had talked to decades

before, people who were alive when some of these horrors happened.

One of the worst incidents ended up destroying the little town of Kirvin,

Texas, right down the road from where Lemon grew up. He had often

walked there to play and hang out, and he must have known about the

terrible events of 1922, when he was 29 years old and making a living as a

street musician, going back and forth between Dallas and his home

country, about 80 miles south.

The relationship between the music and the racism the musicians faced is

a tough one to suss out. B.B. King certainly alluded to slavery and post-

slavery in “Why I Sing the Blues.” Lightnin’ recorded a song called

“Slavery” and several versions of “Tom Moore’s Farm” or “Tom Moore

Blues,” about the notorious plantation owner who, with his brothers,

farmed thousands of acres in the Brazos bottom in Brazos and Washington

counties. (“Meanest men I ever seen.”) Mance Lipscomb told me that

sharecropping, which occupied much of his life, was just another form of

slavery. Mance would have been five years old when the White Man’s

Union Association, enraged by a racially progressive Populist-Republican

coalition, staged an armed takeover of Grimes County in 1900 that

presaged decades of power.

Lynching was a regular occurrence in Texas, as it was in other Southern

states. (And yes, Texas was a Southern state; the “Southwestern” image

came later, and not by accident.) Movies to the contrary, a lynching didn’t

consist merely of the “stringing up” of a suspected evildoer. Many of these

affairs were “spectacle lynchings,” in which hundreds or thousands

watched as African Americans, usually accused of harming or merely

talking back to a white person (often a woman), were subjected to fiendish

[10]

tortures before finally being allowed to die. People carried off body parts

as souvenirs and made postcards. In one particularly egregious example,

in Anderson County in East Texas, whites slaughtered an unknown

number of blacks simply because of rumors that they were going to cause

trouble.

For obvious reasons, blues lyrics don’t deal directly with this violent

legacy. Coded language is used. Even so, many younger African

Americans shy away from this music, which has largely been performed

and heard by whites since the blues and folk boom of the 1960s. And

suggesting that the blues reflects victimization can be touchy, too,

particularly when coming from a white researcher. Not that the blues is

always sad; quite the contrary. The African-American novelist Richard

Wright called it an exuberant melancholy, which provided the title of a

radio show I hosted for several years on a community station in Bryan.

But the fact remains that the music, especially the “deep blues” that came

out of the cotton fields and prisons before the advent of commercial

recordings in the 1920s reflected wounds so painful that perhaps only art

could express them. People were hurt into poetry, as Auden once said of

Yeats.

Jay Brakefield

Co-author of Deep Ellum: The Other Side of Dallas

[11]

Introduction

Blues music seems to have emanated from river bottoms where cotton was

the main crop, particularly from the Mississippi Delta and from the Brazos

Valley of Texas. It was born around the end of the 19th century or the

beginning of the 20th

in a broad swath of the South, in those very areas

where slaves had harvested cotton and other crops and where freed

African-Americans continued to do so after Emancipation. The blues

incorporated elements of the field hollers and work songs heard in the

fields, but it also represented something new, an individual expression of

the complex feelings of a newly freed people. The blues went on to

become the bedrock upon which much popular music, including rock and

roll, jazz and rap, was built. But in its earliest incarnation, the music was

something quite different, a cry of pain mixed with wry humor in the face

of overwhelming repression.

This analysis focuses on the blues that was born in Texas, while drawing

on comparisons between Brazos Valley blues and the music that derived

from the Mississippi Valley. It also highlights blues performers from

Southeast Texas such as Mance Lipscomb and Sam “Lightnin’” Hopkins.

Lipscomb had an important part to play in the development of the Texas

blues as his life span roughly paralleled the birth of the blues, its

rediscovery by whites in the 1960s and its revival as a popular form of

entertainment. Mance’s style also influenced many blues rock singers,

such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. The younger Hopkins, on the other

hand, is important because of his electrification of the Texas blues sound

in the post-WWII period. Another Texas musician, Aaron “T-Bone”

Walker, is credited with taking electrification a step further by

synthesizing hard down-home blues with the more sophisticated jump

blues, played by combos and big bands.

The small town of Navasota is a central focus as the nearby Tom Moore

farm and its repression of black workers became the catalyst for the

[12]

creative reaction that sprang up in opposition, in turn producing a unique

blues sound. Today, Navasota, the largest town in Grimes County, though

not its county seat, boasts an official state designation as the “Blues

Capital of Texas.” However, it might be more accurate to state that the

Brazos Valley and portions of East Texas (the old Cotton Belt), not just

Navasota, could be called the true blues capital of Texas.

Getting a state designation as the blues capital was a smart marketing

move on the part of the small Texas town, which has benefited from two

annual blues events held in honor of Lipscomb, a Navasota resident, black

sharecropper and community musician. Although Lipscomb did not move

out of Navasota, Hopkins, from Leon County, in the upper reaches of the

Brazos Valley, was one of the Texas blues singers who did move, but only

about 100 miles south to the big city of Houston. Sadly, the Navasota

Blues Fest in now defunct.

Another theme of this work is to analyze the relationship between violence

and the blues. As we shall see, blues lyrics often touched on violence,

though this has generally been obscured. The blues brought the African

musical traditions of bent or slurred notes, overlapping call and response

and complex polyrhythms to ramshackle Southern juke joints. It then

spread to nightclubs across the country, where it was played in

sophisticated arrangements. The blues of the Southwest – Texas,

Oklahoma and parts of Louisiana and Arkansas – often went west with

such migrants as Walker and Pee-Wee Crayton. In Southern California,

Walker, like Waters, plugged into an amplifier and thus changed his

sound. However, this created something very different, such as the playing

of jazzy single-string runs and jazz chords in tight call-and-response

interaction with the brass and the reeds of a big band. The pain and humor

of the blues was no less present, but in a swinging big-band format. As the

big bands faded away, blues musicians, like their jazz counterparts, often

worked in smaller combos.

The boom that fueled the late-life careers of many blues musicians

eventually diminished, though the blues still has many devotees at home

[13]

and overseas. Today, many of the fans and players are white, and “blues

tourists” from all over the world flock to spots such as Clarksdale,

Mississippi, which produced Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Sam

Cooke and others. The small town still has a vital music scene. But what

happens to the blues in the future is an open question, one that is dealt

with in this work.

However, this work is not about only the blues. It’s as much about Texas’

bloody, racist history as it is about the blues music itself. The state’s

agricultural traditions are inextricably intertwined with the powerful and

enduring music produced by people who for many years were considered

less than fully human. That powerful mix has produced a musical message

that the whole world has come to recognize and appreciate. That blood on

the cotton was not shed in vain.

[14]

Chapter One

“There was never any moment in our history when slavery was not a

sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations

of the Constitutional Convention.”

John Jay Chapman, American writer and “Gilded Age” critic

Reconstruction and Black Suffering

othing scared white residents of the post-Civil War South,

including those former plantation owners in Brazos, Burleson,

Robertson, Washington and Grimes counties of Texas, more than

the idea that their newly liberated slaves might use their

newfound rights to organize into a voting bloc that would take over local

politics. Many black citizens had settled in Brazos County as a result of

slavery; they were brought in to work the plantation cotton crops in the

river bottoms. In antebellum Brazos County, there were almost as many

slaves as white people – 1,713 whites and 1,063 slaves in the 1860 census.

By the mid-1890s, blacks did outnumber whites 8,845 to 8,800. Cotton

was grown in the Brazos River bottoms (cotton needs a lot of water) and

was then processed in multiple gins in the Brazos Valley. Bales were

loaded onto trains in the railhead town of Millican in Brazos County and

N

[15]

shipped off to Houston and Galveston and on to various destinations,

including those overseas.

One such country was England, a staunch supporter of the South during

the Civil War, as the British needed the high-quality cotton for their

thriving textile industry. Called “white gold,” cotton was the currency

which kept the South afloat during the long Civil War. As black historian

James O. Horton, speaking in a PBS documentary about the Underground

Railroad called “Whispers of Angels,” said: “By 1840, cotton was

America’s most valuable export and by 1860 the total dollar value of

slaves was greater than the value of all American banks, railroads and all

manufacturing facilities in the United States put together. The ‘Peculiar

Institution’ (slavery) was no sideshow, it was the main event.”

When the Civil War finally ended in 1865, steel could once more be used

for the railroads and Millican’s significance as a railhead town of Texas

began to fade as railroad construction started moving northward again.

Where the railroad went, civilization followed. Stores that had started in

Millican, such as Sanger Brothers, moved northward with the railroad.

Sanger Brothers ended up in Dallas. Life was still good in Millican in

1865; the bustling town of about 6,000 had been the center of commerce

in Southeast Texas before and during the war since it not only shipped

cotton, but also was the training center for Confederate troops. Camp

Speight was the largest, but there were several other camps surrounding

the town. There were many stores catering to every need and there were

many saloons, several hotels and even a couple of houses of ill repute.

Plantation owners and other wealthy business people built lovely houses in

nearby Navasota, just across the Navasota River. Other nearby towns,

especially Anderson, had supplied ordnance and pistols for the

Confederate army. The famous Dance Brothers pistol had been

manufactured there.

But the South had lost the war. Federal troops began arriving in Millican

in June 1865 and Brazos County began almost eight years of

Reconstruction turmoil. U.S. Major General Gordon Granger had landed

[16]

in Galveston on June 19, 1865 to enforce President Abraham Lincoln’s

Emancipation Proclamation. This was more than two months after General

Robert E. Lee had surrendered to the North. The auspicious day became

known as “Juneteenth” by blacks and has been celebrated every year

since.

It did not take long for trouble to start, however. Black workers and white

landowners struggled to work out their new economic and social

differences, and a series of Freedmen’s Bureau agents, occasionally

backed by small numbers of federal soldiers, attempted to mediate

between the groups. Some progress was being made on the educational

front as black children attended school for the first time at Millican and at

Wilson’s Plantation. However, whites and blacks quarreled constantly

over labor contracts, and interracial violence became increasingly

common. All hell broke loose when whites and blacks engaged in armed

combat in what became known as the Millican Riot (or Massacre), which

received nationwide attention at the time.

White Men in White Sheets

“By the late 1860s, the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) became one of the principal

forms of opposition to Reconstruction, and members were pledged to

support the supremacy of the white race, to oppose the amalgamation of

the races, to resist the social and political encroachment of carpetbaggers,

and to restore white control of the government,” stated the online version

of the Texas State Historical Association. The Klan made its first

appearance in Grimes County in June 1865 and racial strife started in

earnest there three years later. Seeing groups of armed black civilians

marching as if they were going to war sent a chill down the collective

spines of whites in the area.

The KKK was also active in the cotton-dependent towns of Bryan,

Anderson, Navasota and Wellborn in the late 1800s and early 1900s, not

to mention the much larger cities of Houston to the south and Waco to the

north. Residents, especially the black ones, were sometimes astonished to

[17]

see riders wearing bed sheets with eyeholes. Most knew the riders by their

horses, even though their faces were covered. But the idea was not to be

anonymous, but rather to strike fear into the hearts of the black population

to “keep them in their places,” especially around election time.

The KKK also did not hesitate to lynch blacks they saw as being guilty of

some crime or other transgression, such as making a pass at a white

woman, or worst of all, wanting to

vote. The “spectacle” lynchings of the

1890s featured a carnival-like

atmosphere in which the unfortunate

black man (nearly always a man) was

lynched, then burned and the

remaining parts and bones of his body

sold to the white crowd as “souvenirs.” The most highly prized was the

black man’s penis. It was said that these public lynchings were so popular

that gawkers from several states away would come by train just to see the

grisly carnival.

A book written by Cynthia Skove Nevels, entitled Lynching to Belong,

from the Texas A&M Press in 2007, claims that poor white immigrants

from Europe (Italians, Irish and others) tried to ingratiate themselves to the

local white establishment in Brazos County by volunteering to do the

actual lynching. In fact, there were so many lynchings of blacks around

Bryan in the late 1890s (at least 16) that the area became known as a

“White Man’s Town.” However, Brazos County was not atypical of that

time, Nevels writes. “On the face of it, Brazos County seemed typical of

rural communities in the Jim Crow South at the end of the nineteenth

century. Heavily dependent on cotton production, the county was also

burdened with memories of slavery and plantation agriculture, and the loss

and upheaval of war.”

To many antebellum white Southerners the black field hands not only

represented a conquered people, but also symbolized the pain of the

South’s loss in the Civil War. Nevels’ book added: “Historian Grace

[18]

Elizabeth Hale has argued that violence – particularly against black men –

was ‘a determining characteristic of whiteness in the South’.” A total of

3,513 blacks were lynched in the United States between 1882 and 1927;

between 1885 and 1942 Texas lynched 339 blacks.

Sometimes lynching just wasn’t horrific enough to fit the seriousness of

the crime, in Southern eyes. In that case burning at the stake was required.

In her 1895 book called The Red Record, the famous black muckraker Ida B. Wells quotes the New York Sun of February 2, 1893:

“PARIS, Tex., Feb. 1, 1893. — Henry Smith, the negro ravisher of four-

year-old Myrtle Vance, has expiated in part his awful crime by death at the

stake. Ever since the perpetration of his awful crime this city and the entire

surrounding country has been in a wild frenzy of excitement. When the

news came last night that he had been captured at Hope, Ark., that he had

been identified by B.B. Sturgeon, James T. Hicks, and many other of the

Paris searching party, the city was wild with joy over the apprehension of

the brute. Hundreds of people poured into the city from the adjoining

country and the word passed from lip to lip that the punishment of the

fiend should fit the crime that death by fire was the penalty Smith should

pay for the most atrocious murder and terrible outrage in Texas history.

Curious and sympathizing alike, they came on train and wagons, on horse,

and on foot to see if the frail mind of a man could think of a way to

sufficiently punish the perpetrator of so terrible a crime. Whisky shops

were closed, unruly mobs were dispersed, schools were dismissed by a

proclamation from the mayor, and everything was done in a business-like manner.”

In the late 1960s, the editor of the Paris News still proudly displayed the

lynching photos he kept in his desk and bragged that the local blacks were too scared to fight back.

Strange Fruit

White Southerners complained of Yankee occupation and carpetbagger

excesses, but the white man’s pain paled in comparison to that suffered by

the blacks. The latter often sought relief and solace in music – their own

[19]

unique version called the blues. Although the blues, as a musical genre,

was no doubt born in the cotton fields and partly came from the work

songs of cotton pickers, there is never any mention of the word “lynching”

in blues lyrics – the word was just too scary to even say out loud. Perhaps

the closest mention was in Billie Holiday’s 1939 recording of the song

“Strange Fruit.” But even then the ominous word was conspicuously

absent.

“Southern trees bear a strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop.”

Professor Adam Gussow (himself a blues player) of Ole Miss university

and author of Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence in the Blues

Tradition, argues in his book that Holiday’s song should not be considered

a true blues song, but rather as a protest conjoined with the blues spirit.

After all, he points out, the song was written by a white man named Abel

Meeropol (a.k.a. Lewis Allen) and was only sung by Billie Holiday, a

well-known jazz singer and songwriter. Holiday said that every time she

sang the song, she had to throw up.

[20]

Slavery Under Another Name?

Reconstruction was a difficult period in the Deep South, and in the Brazos

Valley. Former cotton plantation owners were faced with a dilemma in the

post-Civil War decades – they still had cotton to produce, but the outcome

of the war had freed their former slaves. What to do? Recreating slavery

under another name was the obvious solution. Ratified on December 18,

1865, the 13th

Amendment to the Constitution stated: “Neither slavery nor

involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party

shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any

place subject to their jurisdiction.” So there was the South’s escape clause

written in black and white: “except as a punishment for crime.” All

Southerners then had to do was arrest and imprison blacks on trumped-up

charges and then assign the “criminals” to the work force of a plantation

owner or other private business. It was not very difficult for former

Southern aristocrats to come up with ways to imprison defenseless blacks

or trick them into endless servitude.

Vagrancy Laws. Coming up with this subterfuge was just too easy. First

you charge an unemployed black with being a vagrant, since he or she had

no job, then throw the unlucky person in jail, then his future “owner” bails

him or her out. Then he or she becomes ensnared since the debt can never

be repaid.

The Peonage Laws (debt enslavement), which were officially outlawed

by Congress in 1867, were another way Southerners would entrap hapless

negroes into endless servitude. The PBS documentary “Slavery by

Another Name” explains:

“The most corrupt and abusive peonage occurred in concert with southern

state and county government. In the South, many black men were picked

up for minor crimes or on trumped-up charges, and, when faced with

staggering fines and court fees, forced to work for a local employer would

who pay their fines for them.”

[21]

These “convicts” literally owed their souls to the company store and

would never be able to repay their debts to their “massas” (masters). After

all, white men kept the books and they were not about to let their black

workers pay off their debts and go free.

Convict Labor. Careful not to run afoul of the 13th

Amendment, Southern

states also started leasing their convicts en mass to local industrialists. The

paperwork and debt record of individual prisoners was often lost, and

these men found themselves trapped in inescapable situations. This type of

labor “arrangement” was especially important for the rebuilding and

extensions of Southern railways that had been decimated by the Northern

Army during the Civil War.

Chain Gangs: Starting around the turn of the 20th century, the mass

production of automobiles brought a troubling problem to the surface.

Southern roads, severely damaged in the Civil War, may have been still

usable after the war by horses, wagons and buggies, but they could not

accommodate the faster-moving automobiles of Henry Ford. The U.S.

government tended to look the other way when some Southern states

began to use prison chain gangs for the repair of roads and railroads.

Washington wanted to bring the South into the democratic coalition, not

isolate it. The rising industrialization of the South was also a boon to the

whole U.S. economy, which was moving away from agrarianism.

Sharecropping (Tenant) Farming. “During the decade following the

Civil War, Negroes in Texas demonstrated little tendency to migrate from

the agricultural sections of the state. To be sure some blacks relocated in

counties in West Texas and others moved to towns and cities in the eastern

portion of Texas,” wrote William Brophy in his 1974 dissertation entitled

The Black Texan 1900-1950: A Quantitative History.

During slavery it had been illegal for slaves to learn how to read and write,

so after emancipation where were they to go and find jobs? Most hung

around the same plantations and worked the same jobs they had under

[22]

their former masters. Only this time (after 1865) it was called “tenant

farming.”

In post-1865 Brazos County, there were three types of tenant farmers:

cash, share and cropper. Cash types rented land from a landowner for a

specified sum of money. Share tenants, who provided everything

necessary for farming, except the land, normally paid the landowner one-

fourth of the cotton and one-third of the grain produced on the soil.

Croppers had only their labor to offer a landowner, and they received one-

half the harvest. In the peak tenant year of 1930, 75.9% of all Afro-Texan

farmers were tenants.

Oral contracts were common because the Landlord and Tenant Act of

1874 protected both parties. However, the Law of 1915 enabled the

landlord to secure a warrant from a justice of the peace to seize the

possessions of a tenant who did not fulfill his contract. Tenants were also

prohibited from subletting without the permission of the landowner.

Although many poor whites were also tenant farmers, the mostly illiterate

former slaves were “free” in name only.

“The Negro farmer probably viewed the crash of 1929 and the subsequent

depression as a curse. Cotton prices fell to shattering lows and the

Department of Agriculture under Henry A. Wallace instituted an

agricultural subsidy program that encouraged landlords to remove tenants

from the land. Hard times and the hope of relief work beckoned Negro

farmers to the towns and cities. Unskilled, uneducated, and with little to

offer the industrial segment of the economy, blacks from the soil cast

themselves upon an uncertain future,” concluded Brophy.

A Doomed Idea?

Reconstruction, or the idea of reuniting the South and North, was a lofty

idea that had little chance of succeeding, as both local and national politics

got in the way. The Southern interpretation of the eugenics theory stated

that blacks were unequivocally inferior to whites and that black genes

guaranteed that no intelligence could be passed on to their children.

[23]

Incredibly, the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision seemed to

confirm this eugenics theory version by stating that the ideals set forth in

the U.S. Constitution did not apply to blacks because they were not legally

citizens of the United States. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Law stated that all

captured runaway slaves must be immediately returned to their owners,

who also were allowed to go into free states and capture their runaways,

since they were their “lost property.” Northern Abolitionists dubbed it the

“Bloodhound Law” after the dogs used in the hunts. Even some free

blacks living in the North fled to Canada in fear of being kidnapped. Uncle

Tom’s Cabin was published in 1852 and 12 Years a Slave followed in

1853, both books reflecting prevailing fears of the Fugitive Slave Law.

At the end of the four-year-long, bloody Civil War fought mainly over the

issue of slavery, four million blacks were left to fend for themselves in an

unsympathetic and openly hostile South. They suffered unspeakable

misery and many died from sickness, beatings and other forms of torture.

In some places as many as 30-40% of the black workers died in a month’s

time; 9,000 or more died from the extreme rigors of forced slavery, even

though it was officially illegal.

[24]

Chapter Two

“The violence that pervades blues culture is over-determined, a subset of

southern violence, working-class violence, frontier violence, the violence

endemic among young single men – American gun culture as a whole.”

Adam Gussow, Seems Like Murder Here: Southern Violence and the

Blues Tradition

Violence: Settling the Brazos Valley

eeds of discord were sown at a small town near Navasota named

Anderson once white settlers arrived. These whites believed in

slavery and in many cases brought their own slaves with them. The

practice was so wide-spread it prompted historian Randolph B. Campbell

to call early Anglo Texas an “empire for slavery.”

The first white settlers in present-day Brazos County were Robert Millican

and his family, who emigrated from Missouri in December 1821. They

were members of the group known as Stephen F. Austin’s “Old 300” and

were a fractious clan, to say the least. According to some accounts, they

immediately got into a “shooting scrape” with the Holland family that was

resolved only when Austin assigned them to opposite sides of the Brazos

River: Millicans on the west, Hollands on the east. The Millicans received

a land grant in 1824 and settled in the southern part of present-day Brazos

S

[25]

County, where that settlement still bears their name. The family ruled just

about everything in the area; even militia elections were held in their

family home.

The family patriarch Robert Millican was born in South Carolina in 1750

and came to Texas in 1821. He died at the ripe old age of 46 in 1836, the

year Texas won its independence from Mexico and became a Republic.

Perhaps his medical condition was aggravated by the family’s having had

to flee south-central Texas as the Mexican army approached. This

evacuation of women and children during the latter part of the Texas

Revolution is known as the “Runaway Scrape.” Millican’s passing left his

wife, Nancy, and sons James, John, William, Daniel, Andrew, Elliot and

Diadem and a daughter, Letty.

But the family’s troubles were far from over. In late 1839, James Millican

was slain. Another relative, Willis Millican, was indicted on charges of

assault with intent to kill Cary White and William B. Dean. Although

White was acquitted in James’ death, the Millicans warred among

themselves. After the patriarch’s death, the sons successfully sued their

mother in a land dispute.

Like many other Texans jumping on the cotton-growing gravy train, the

Millicans owned a number of slaves, although not enough to entitle them

as “planters.” This official designation was usually reserved for owners of

at least 20 bondsmen. In the early 1840s, according to county tax rolls,

William, Elliot and Diadem each had one slave; John, eight; and Nancy,

seven.

Other family members went into law enforcement. Elliot served as sheriff

of Navasota County, which was split off from Washington County in

1841. He continued in that office when the county’s name was changed to

“Brazos” in the following year. By October 1844, William, Andrew and

Diadem Millican were dead, apparently of natural causes. Elliot, a doctor,

served as a state representative after annexation. His house, which was

described as “Millican, per se,” served as a restaurant, hotel and

stagecoach stop. Some remains of the old stagecoach stop can still be seen

[26]

in Millican. Press accounts of Elliot’s death in October 1860 are

contradictory; he was either murdered by one of his brothers or jumped

from the third story of Lott’s Hotel in nearby Washington-on-the-Brazos,

which had once been the capital of the Republic of Texas.

In 1858, the Houston Tri-Weekly Telegraph ran an ad for 300 men to work

on the Houston & Central Texas rail line progressing north from Houston.

Planters were invited to hire out slaves as laborers. The railroad bought up

the land on which the town of Millican stood. The line reached Millican in

April 1861, just in time for the outbreak of the Civil War. The town

remained as the railhead throughout the war, serving as a major

transportation hub for the Confederacy, and its population swelled to as

many as 6,000. In 1862, it boasted a rail depot, two hotels, three livery

stables, two or three stores, two brothels and as many bars. Among the

merchants were the Sanger brothers, who followed the line north and

eventually established a very successful department store in Dallas.

After the South surrendered, federal troops and a Freedmen’s Bureau

agent were posted in Millican. In July 1865, a soldier, John C. Gill,

writing to his mother in Ohio, called the town “a miserable cut-throat

hole” where “everyone carries a large bowie knife and revolver strapped

to him.” He referred to Texas as “an outlawed state” and said, “I wish our

army had gone through the entire state, and laid it waste. Yet there are

many honorable citizens to be found.”

Maybe Gill had a point that the Union army should have laid waste to

Millican, maybe not. However, Mother Nature did what the Northern

army had not. In 1866, Millican was ravaged by cholera followed by an

outbreak of yellow fever the following year. It was a one-two punch that

devastated the small town. The latter plight hit so fast that officials found

some residents dead in their front-porch rocking chairs. Some survivors

were in such a panic that they tore down their houses, loaded the lumber

on train cars and went as far north as they could. The railroad reached

Bryan (about 19 miles northwest) and the town of Millican began to dry

[27]

up. The local newspaper moved to Bryan and the post office was closed,

though some say it later reopened.

And then something even worse happened. A Freedmen’s Bureau agent,

Sam C. Sloan, reported that a Captain Richards, “an ex officer of our

service,” had been “murdered most foully about eight miles from this

place, in Washington County…Civil law is a farce here.” A detachment of

federal troops was ordered to Millican. On January 1, 1867, Sloan reported

that one freedman had been robbed by whites and another slain “without

any cause or provocation.”

The Millican Riot

Amid this volatility, a black man named Cary Holt was lynched near

Millican a year later, bringing the KKK into the picture. According to

Freedmen’s Bureau agent N.H. Randlett, “On the 7th of June a party of

about fifteen persons dressed and known as Ku Klux marched through

Freedmen’s village in Millican. The freedmen who were congregated at

their church rallied and commenced firing muskets and pistols at the said

Ku Klux who quickly dispersed leaving the ground covered with masks,

winding sheets and other wearing apparel, and two revolvers. Freedmen

immediately armed themselves and commenced drilling. This caused great

uneasiness among all classes of people. Several citizens (white) requested

me to disarm the freedmen. I informed them that I would stop the

freedmen from any warlike preparations when the Ku Klux would stop

their incursions. After some delay this was done, and I issued an order

informing all parties that organized armed gangs, societies, &c. not

authorized by law was prohibited by Genl. Orders Hd. Qrs. Dist. of Texas

no further trouble occurred.”

But further trouble soon erupted. The following month, according to the

San Antonio Express, an African-American blacksmith named Miles

Brown went to the Holliday plantation near Millican to talk about his pay.

(The family apparently was prone to withholding money. In December

1866, Sloan had ordered Leon Holliday’s cotton held until freedmen were

[28]

paid.) When Brown visited the farm, the male Hollidays were absent. The

blacksmith, who may have been intoxicated, spoke to the women he found

at home. The next day, he was told that he had insulted the women and

that the Hollidays had threatened to kill him. Brown took off for

neighboring Washington County without telling anyone, and a rumor

spread that he had been lynched in the Brazos River bottom. A group of

blacks went to the spot where the lynching was supposed to have occurred

but did not find Brown’s body, though by at least one account they found

another corpse. They broke into smaller groups and headed for home but

were confronted by a group of whites. Millican Mayor Wheat attempted to

calm the situation, but when someone discharged a gun, fighting broke out

and several blacks were killed.

Whites blamed the trouble on a minister, George E. Brooks, and a white

colleague, a schoolteacher, whom the Galveston Daily News called

Brooks’ “yellow adjutant.” The Texas Countryman referred to him as “a

white renegade named Hadley.” Brooks was a leader of the black

community and the local Loyal League, served as a federal voting registrar

and was associated with an Austin black newspaper, the Free Man Press.

A white backlash quickly followed. A train from Bryan brought 150 to

200 white men, and the Freedmen’s Bureau summoned additional federal

troops from Brenham. Sporadic fighting continued for several days, and

Brooks’ mutilated body was found in the river bottom. The violence

merited coverage in papers as far away as Boston and New York.

Coverage in most Texas papers was biased and racist, though the Express

sarcastically noted that “it is barely possible that even the Negro race may

object to being killed by the time they get fairly used to it.” A letter to the

Daily Austin Republican, signed by “A Colored Man,” proclaimed:

“During last summer, when the yellow fever was raging, these colored

men stood around the bedside of the sick and dying of these white men,

who have been murdering them in return. Mr. Brooks, a faithful servant,

was one of the main nurses, who proved worthy of his occupation. What

few of these poor, abused, and wronged people remain in that little city

[29]

will not forget this wickedness and inhumanity, which has been returned

for their faithfulness.”

The casualty toll has never been authenticated. Press accounts initially

said that as many as 50 blacks had been killed. According to Randlett, the

Freedmen’s Bureau man, five were killed, one was wounded and one was

missing. Racial confrontations occurred around the same time in a number

of other places in Texas, including Hempstead, Cedar Creek in Bastrop

County, in Houston and in Washington and Freestone counties. According

to historian Alwyn Barr in Black Texans, 468 freed blacks were slain

between 1865 and 1868 in Texas, 90 percent of them killed by whites.

That’s why some call the incident a “massacre.”

The Millicans’ violence continued even after the riots had ended. In 1871,

John Millican assaulted a black man in a saloon owned by a justice of the

peace, Col. R.C. Myers. Millican was arrested on Myers’ orders and

ordered to appear in court. Millican killed Myers and was subsequently

assassinated. Before he died, he identified his attackers as Myers’

children, Allen Myers and Nannie Baldridge. In 1875, according to the

Galveston Daily News, a jury brought in a not guilty verdict, “which

seemed to meet with general approbation.”

The 1869 Constitution

Even as the violence took place in Millican, a black man from the area,

Stephen Curtis, was serving as a delegate to the state constitutional

convention in Austin. The contentious gathering, which involved two

sessions lasting a total of five months, produced an incomplete document

approved by only 49 of the 90 delegates. But it was published under

federal government order and subsequently ratified by public vote. The

1869 Constitution enfranchised blacks, raised taxes to pay for schools,

roads and bridges and excluded many former Confederates from

involvement in politics.

Enactment of the constitution was followed by the election of Radical

Republican Edmund J. Davis as governor. He proved exceedingly

[30]

unpopular, and Texans soon moved to reverse the changes being made

under Reconstruction. In 1872, Democrats regained control of the

Legislature, which proceeded to repeal most of the programs enacted by

previous Republican rule. The new incumbents also moved to reduce the

governor’s powers. In December 1873, Davis was defeated by a

Democrat, Richard Coke, and in 1876, Texas adopted the current

constitution, which completed the work of undoing Reconstruction in the

state just as equivalent events took place on the national level.

A fiery black state senator, Matthew Gaines, was expelled from his office

on the grounds of questionable bigamy conviction. The former slave had

voted for a bill that led to the establishment of Texas A&M University in

Brazos County, one of two land grant colleges established under the

Morrill Acts of 1862 (the other was the University of Texas at Austin). An

effort in the 1990s to establish a campus memorial (statue) to Gaines

stalled despite the involvement of history professor Dale Baum, who has

written extensively about the Civil War and the postwar era in Texas.

Some saw lingering racism in the failed effort.

Settlers in Grimes County

The area that became Grimes County, neighboring Brazos County on the

east, had a somewhat similar history. Early white settlers included Jared E.

Groce, who brought 90 slaves from Alabama and established Bernardo

Plantation, near present-day Hempstead, in 1822. Three years later he built

one of the earliest cotton gins in Texas on the Brazos River in what is now

southwestern Grimes County. Other settlers included Anthony Kennard;

the family became prominent in the county, and the slain black Populist

leader Jim Kennard may have been connected through blood, slavery or

both. The county was created in 1846 and named for Jesse Grimes, a

North Carolina native who had arrived in the area in 1827, signed the

Texas Declaration of Independence, served in the Texas army and

represented the area as a legislator for both the Republic of Texas and the

state after annexation by the United States. The county’s final boundaries

were set in 1873, when Madison and Waller counties were created.

[31]

The population of Grimes County was heavily

black from the beginning. The 1850 census

showed that there were 1,680 slaves, two free

blacks and 2,326 whites. In 1855, there were 3,124

slaves. In 1858, the county tax rolls showed 42

slaveholders who had at least 20 slaves and thus

qualified as planters. Two years later, the number

of planters had swelled to 77. The county had

4,852 white residents, 505 of whom owned a total

of 5,486 slaves. In 1864, with residents of the

Deep South “refugeeing” their slaves to Texas, the

slave population of Grimes County had increased to 7,005. In a strange

twist of fate, the Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest, founder of

the Ku Klux Klan, sent his mother to Grimes County to save her from the

ravages of the war in Tennessee. She stepped on a rusty nail, contracted

blood poisoning, and died.

Grimes County residents voted 907 to 9 for secession in February 1861.

During the war, the county was home to a Confederate training camp and

a pistol factory, operated by the Dance brothers, that turned out .36- and

.44-caliber revolvers modeled on the Colt Dragoon. In 1865, returning

Confederate soldiers, whose pay had been withheld, looted a cotton and

munitions warehouse in Navasota and sparked a fire that destroyed much

of the commercial district. The troops billeted at Millican had jurisdiction

over Brazos, Grimes and other counties; a company was also stationed at

Anderson, and at times the Freedmen’s Bureau had a presence in

Anderson and Navasota. This hardly prevented white attacks on blacks;

29, including 12 homicides, were recorded in the county in 1867 alone.

Grimes County, too, was ravaged by the yellow fever and cholera

outbreaks that had devastated Millican.

In 1870, African-Americans comprised 60 percent of Grimes County’s

population of 13,218. Despite white resistance, the county remained in

Republican hands, and Governor Edmund J. Davis garnered majority

Jesse Grimes

[32]

support in the county in 1873, when he was defeated by Coke. Particularly

galling to “unreconstructed” Democrats was the alliance of progressive

whites such as Garrett Scott with black Republicans. After the Greenback

Party faded in the 1880s, Scott and like-minded liberal whites found a

home in the People’s Party, which emerged from the Southern Farmers’

Alliance in 1892. This led to the campaign of terror that accompanied the

formation of the White Man’s Union Association and the resulting black

exodus from Grimes County. By 1910, the black population was down 30

percent, to 9,858. Today, a Confederate Memorial Plaza in Anderson, near

the site of the 1900 shootout, honors the Southern dead, and Rebel flags

still fly in the surrounding countryside. Although monuments to

Confederate generals and others are currently being taken down, there is

little danger that the Anderson memorial will suffer the same fate.

Books like James Ronald Kennedy’s The South was Right! (1991) suggest

that many southerners still feel that the Civil War (which they refer to as

“The War between the States”) was more about states’ rights than it was

about slavery. They still believe their cause was noble because the South

was just defending itself from strong Northern aggression. The past, as

William Faulkner once wrote, isn’t really past at all. Or perhaps we could

paraphrase Faulkner’s statement thusly: The past hasn’t really passed.

Farming and growing was certainly a way of life worth defending for the

settlers of the Brazos Valley. Some built great plantations with their newly

found, cotton-based riches. The great plantation homes, evidence of that

wealth, can still be observed in Bryan, Navasota and Galveston. The great

plantations of Texas gave way to huge farms in the post-Civil War period.

Slavery may have been prohibited by law, but the sharecropping that

replaced it bore a strong resemblance.

[33]

Chapter Three

“The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder’s moral perceptions

are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an

aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.”

Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Brazos Valley Plantations

otton was not a very important crop for Southern planters before

1793, when Eli Whitney invented his hand-cranked cotton gin, a

simple machine that greatly speeded up the process of separating

cotton fibers from the seeds. This had been such a slow process

before the gin that it took one slave a whole day to produce a pound of

seedless cotton. That output increased 50x using the gin, so cotton became

a profitable business. In the first ten years of cotton gin use, output soared

by 800%. When the gin later became motorized, output skyrocketed and

Southern planters started to become very wealthy as a result.

By 1830, America produced half the world’s cotton and by 1850, when the

repressive Fugitive Slave Law was passed, that percentage had risen to

75%. No planter in the South wanted to miss the gravy train of growing

cotton. By 1850, there were more millionaires per capita in Nachez,

Mississippi than anywhere else in the world. The slave trade was also

C

[34]

propelling Galveston Texas to giddy economic heights during the same

period, giving the small Gulf Coast port the nickname “New York of the

Gulf.” And cotton was not the only thing escalating in value. Plantation

slave prices also skyrocketed from a pre-gin, per-capita $300 to nearly

$2,000 by 1860.

James Meigs, Editor-in-Chief of Popular Mechanics

magazine, spoke to the subject in a documentary called

“America: The Story of Us,” saying: “Slavery was on the

decline before the invention of the cotton gin, but after

the gin had demonstrated its value every farmer in the

South wanted to plant cotton.” Could the first part of

Meigs’ statement explain why America’s founding

fathers were so ambivalent about the moral turpitude of owning slaves?

After all, slavery had been abolished in Britain by 1776 and had also been

outlawed across most of Europe. Never mind that the first American ship

fitted for bringing captured Africans to the colonies, the Desire, sailed

from Salem, Massachusetts.

A glaringly huge contradiction was that George Washington, James

Madison and Thomas Jefferson all owned slaves. When Jefferson penned

the preamble to the U.S. Declaration of Independence stating that “all men

are created equal” and that “we hold these truths to be self-evident,” was

he thinking at all about his own 135 slaves? Jefferson’s view that blacks

were inferior didn’t stop him from having a long-term sexual relationship

with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, after his wife’s death. Making this

inconvenient truth even more complicated was the fact that the beautiful

light-skinned Hemings was Jefferson’s wife’s half-sister. The children he

fathered with Hemings were the only slaves Jefferson ever freed. Many

whites resisted this knowledge, claiming that DNA testing proved only

that a Jefferson fathered the children. But Harvard history professor

Annette Gordon-Reed, an African American who hails from Livingston,

[35]

Texas, used Jefferson’s travel records to establish that Hemings became

pregnant only when Thomas Jefferson was at Monticello.

Some authors suggest that these founding fathers were not too concerned

about slavery in the new United States of America since it was perceived

to be “on its way out,” a convenient way, nevertheless, to explain away

their seeming “hypocrisy” on the issue. This “hypocrisy” raised its ugly

head again once the South started rolling in the big bucks on the cotton

trade. The industrialized North quickly adopted a “look the other way”

approach to the slavery issue once the power loom came into widespread

use there. Raw cotton comes in (from the South) finished product goes

out, all under one roof, thus producing the modern mass-manufacturing

factory. Put another way, the North and the South had found a way to

mutually profit off the cotton trade, never mind the smoldering political

issue of what to do about the slaves.

By 1850, the manufacturing of cheap cotton clothing had become the

biggest industry in New York City. Cheap cotton, ready-made clothes

began to replace the made-at-home garments and buckskins of the past.

The U.S. Congress had just passed the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850 that

declared Negroes non-citizens, and thus not subject to the terms of the

United States Constitution. Its effect was to give the green light to

continued slave use, even making it legal for slave owners to apprehend

their escaped “property” in other states.

Short-lived Optimism for Post-Civil War Blacks

Slavery came to Texas in the early 1800s. Texas had about 5,000 slaves at

the time of its revolution in 1836, but by 1845, when the state was

annexed to the United States, this grew to 30,000. But by 1860, on the eve

of the Civil War, the slave population had exploded to over 180,000 or

30% of the entire population of Texas. Many of these slaves had been

brought to Texas from other states, but some had been born there. Texas

had been admitted to the Union in 1845 as a slave state, and the

[36]

production of cotton supported the antebellum economy. The plantations

along the Brazos River were the engines of that economy. When the war

ended, these institutions were broke and gone with the wind.

A new optimism arose following the June 19, 1865 unveiling of the

emancipation document that freed Texas slaves. These enslaved workers

had never been allowed to leave their plantations (without special passes)

so being able to travel freely for the first time produced not only the

original euphoria of being free but also a desire to seek out better lives

elsewhere for themselves and their children. Many left their plantations in

search of jobs and long-lost family members.

“In the decade between 1867-77, during the period known as Radical

Reconstruction, the freedmen and women had the support of congressional

Republicans and Union troops stationed in the South in crafting an era of

unprecedented interracial democracy, during which blacks were granted

first citizenship and then the right to vote. The progress blacks made in

public life during Radical Reconstruction was nothing short of

remarkable; among the many profound changes in the South, black

schools and churches were established and around 2,000 African

Americans held public office,” opined an online article called “Race in

Blues Music History: Looking at the Past through the Lens of Race.”

(Schmoop.com)

More often labeled “Radical Republicanism,” the movement was

originated by House Republicans and was designed to be a punishment of

the South for seceding from the Union. Many of its aims failed due to the

resistance of the Southern-born President Andrew Johnson, an old-

fashioned Southern Democrat with strong states’ rights views. Radical

Republicanism, in its misguided enthusiasm and impatience, ran into other

blockades as well, mostly on the economic side.

“The first big disappointment of Radical Reconstruction had been the

failure of land reform in the South. The much hoped for ‘Forty Acres and

[37]

a Mule,’ suggested by General W.T. Sherman’s famed Special Field Order

15, never materialized. Former Confederate lands remained in the hands of

former Confederates, and freedmen found their diminishing hopes for

economic independence tied to southern boosters’ misbegotten dreams of

a new industrial South. Long before the New South dream sputtered,

before even Reconstruction could be considered a failure, most freedmen

and women had long since had to reconcile themselves to the ugly

economic reality that came to characterize southern agrarian life in the

absence of meaningful land reform. That reality was the system called

sharecropping,” concluded the online article.

Brazos Valley Plantations vs. “Farms”

Up until 1850 or so Brazos Valley farmers, were not really that interested

in growing cotton; their main cash crops were corn and sugar cane that

grew easily in the Texas heat and did not have to be processed like the

more difficult cotton. Corn and sugar cane did not need gins, and unlike

cotton, corn was a food that sustained life. No Texas meal at that time was

complete without cornbread, grits and molasses. Another cash crop was

indigo, a plant used to make a dark blue dye.

In fact, Brazos County produced only 142 bales of cotton in 1850, a mere

pittance compared to the cotton productivity in neighboring Grimes and

Washington counties. But the times had changed dramatically by 1860,

writes Professor Nevels in her book. “Ten years later, on the eve of the

Civil War, the county’s [Brazos] population had more than quadrupled,

largely spurred by the arrival of the Houston & Texas Central Railroad

and the certain prospect that the railroad would continue to build

northward through the county and beyond.”

However, the plantations of Grimes and Washington counties continued to

dwarf those of Brazos County, whose cotton plantation output had risen to

2,000 bales by 1860. Meanwhile, hundreds of white immigrants were

coming into the Brazos Valley from the Deep South, thanks to railroad

advertising for jobs, bringing their slave-driven plantation mentality and

[38]

cotton-growing expertise with them. “The change had vast implications

for the future,” explains Nevels. “This culture – which included the

ideology of white supremacy and the total domination of blacks – would

remain firmly in place through the end of the Civil War and far beyond.”

In other words, the Brazos Valley became tied to the slaveholding

mentality of the Deep South. It was on these plantations and post-WWII

“farms” that many black blues singers from Texas such as Mance

Lipscomb and Lightnin’ Hopkins got their starts, singing for both black

and white folks.

An old plantation home, the Lamar Calder House in Richmond Texas, is now rented by the Duck Dynasty TV franchise

Wherever the railroads went, civilization followed. This was especially

true in Grimes County during the 1850s. “The railroad first reached

Grimes County in 1859, when the Houston and Texas Central extended its

line to Navasota, thus bypassing Anderson, whose residents had rejected

the railroad, supposedly remarking that such an innovation ‘would scare

our mules and our Negroes.’ Though founded only in the early 1850s,

Navasota, with the aid of the railroad, rapidly grew into an important

commercial center,” states the Texas State Historical Association. “By

1856 six communities had acquired post offices: Anderson, Bedias,

[39]

Grimesville, Retreat, Prairie Plains, and Navasota. Two spas were

established in the county around 1850: Kellum Springs, ten miles north of

Anderson, and Piedmont Springs, seven miles west of Anderson.

Piedmont Springs, in particular, attracted guests from great distances, and

in 1860 a four-story, 100-room hotel was constructed there,” explains the

same article.

Differences between Plantations and Farms

Sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between plantations and farms,

although most scholars agree that these differences include not only size

but also the type of labor employed therein.

“In the economic history and agricultural history literatures, the dividing

line separating farms from plantations is not sharply defined. On one side

of the spectrum, operations employing only free labor, which include all

northern units and about one-half of southern units—are clearly farms;

their operators are farmers. And those operations with only a few slaves

are rarely called plantations; the owners are hardly ever styled planters”

explained Alan L. Olmstead of the University of California and Paul W.

Rhode of Davis University of Michigan in their joint PhD dissertation

entitled Were Antebellum Cotton Plantations Factories in the Field?, later

published as a chapter in the 2015 book Enterprising America: Businesses,

Banks, and Credit Markets in Historical Perspective. “On the other side of

the spectrum, units with units with .50 or more slaves are clearly

plantations; the owners of these operations are undisputedly ‘planters.’ But

authors differ about where to set the dividing line between the largest

slave farm and the smallest slave plantation.”

Golliwoggs and Jim Crow

In her 1895 book Raising Racists: The Socialization of White Children in

the Jim Crow South, author Kristina DuRocher quotes an African

American housekeeper as saying, “I have seen very small white children

hang [lynch] their black dolls. It’s not the child’s fault; he is simply an apt

student.” These dolls featured raggedy clothes, black faces and large lips.

[40]

They were sometimes the target of rock-throwing white kids, who let their

racist sentiments fly, so to speak. What may be disturbing to some readers

is that many of these caricatures still exist in stores around the United

States and in other countries as well.

White racial hostility toward blacks abounded in the Jim Crow South.

Take the Golliwogg caricatures, for another example. In 1895, her book,

entitled The Adventures of Two Dutch Dolls and a Golliwogg, Florence

Kate Upton drew the illustrations, and her mother, Bertha Upton, wrote

the accompanying verse. The book’s main characters were two Dutch

dolls, Peg and Sarah Jane, and the Golliwogg. The story begins with Peg

and Sara Jane, on the loose in a toy shop, encountering ‘a horrid sight, the

blackest gnome.’ The little black ‘gnome’ wore bright red trousers, a red

bow tie on a high collared white shirt, and a blue swallow-tailed coat. He

was a caricature of American black faced minstrels – in effect, the

caricature of a caricature. She named him “Golliwogg.”

And, of course, there are also the “cute” statuettes, called

“lucky darkies,” still guarding the entrance gates to many

private homes in the South, as if to celebrate the plantation

years when black servants dressed likewise. These images

can now be found around the world: darky statues in

Europe and Thailand, “Darkie” toothpaste in Asia

(especially Japan) and in Australia. Robertson’s, the

manufacturer of such icons in the United States, finally

“retired” the Golly in 2002. Similarly, the children’s book

Little Black Sambo was deemed by some to be a slur to

Africans and African-Americans and was banned from

publication in the 1970s. Similarly, the Sambo’s restaurant chain failed

after attacks on its name and décor as racist.

Perhaps most offensive is the Tom caricature, encouraged by the Uncle

Tom character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s great antebellum novel Uncle

Tom’s Cabin. The icon is best described on the Ferris University “Jim

Crow Museum” Web page: “The Tom caricature portrays black men as

[41]

faithful, happily submissive servants. The Tom caricature, like the

Mammy caricature, was born in antebellum America in the defense of

slavery. How could slavery be wrong, argued its proponents, if black

servants, males (Toms) and females (Mammies), were contented and

loyal? The Tom is presented as a smiling, wide-eyed, dark skinned server:

fieldworker, cook, butler, porter, or waiter…Tom is portrayed as a

dependable worker, eager to serve. Unlike the Brute, the Tom is docile

and non-threatening to whites. The Tom is often old, physically weak,

psychologically dependent on whites for approval.”

The debate continues over whether Golliwoggs are hated racial symbols or

just cute and lovable icons. However, campaigns have been conducted to

ban Golliwoggs in advertising, such as images of Aunt Jemima pancake

mix (Happifyin’ Aunt Jemima Pancakes Sho’ Sets Folks Singin’!”),

Uncle Remus tales, Uncle Ben’s rice, Rastus’ Cream of Wheat and the

dim-witted Buckwheat of the “Our Gang” film comedies (a.k.a. “The

Little Rascals”) television show. The Buckwheat character became

pejorative but, ironically, “Our Gang” was the only show on early

American television that showed whites and blacks as equals. Rastus was

portrayed as the perpetually happy black in minstrel shows whose name

went on to become a pejorative term for uneducated or under-educated

blacks. Some people find it hard to believe that many of these Golliwogg

images can still be found on the shelves of American supermarkets and

other stores.

In her excellent essay in the Journal of Negro History, Jessie W. Parkhurst

explains how the “Black Mammy” of antebellum plantations held an

honored position in the Southern aristocracy. She writes that most

aristocratic men in those days took pride in pointing out that they had been

raised by such slaves, who had real power within the plantation owners’

families. Mammies practically ran the everyday business of plantation

owners’ “big houses” and were even buried in special coffins instead of

the usual wooden boxes allotted to field hand slaves.

[42]

Black actress Hattie McDaniel

probably provided the best portrayal

of a “Black Mammy” in the 1939 film

Gone with the Wind. She became the

first African American to win an

Academy Award (best supporting

actress) and, ironically, had to walk

all the way to the stage from the back

of the segregated room. Some observers marveled that she had even been

invited to the 1940 ceremony held at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel.

Demonstrators outside the building protested, holding up signs stating “no,

no mammy.” McDaniel’s long and slow walk to that stage paved the way

for black actors to receive academy awards, as did Sidney Poitier, Halle

Berry, Whoopi Goldberg, Angela Basset, Danny Glover, Will Smith, Cuba

Gooding Jr., and others.

As Parkhurst observed, whites and blacks in the South differed on what

came out of slavery. The former often romanticized the Old South in

literature and films but the latter saw nothing good resulting from the

slavery experience. The Black Mammy became a hated symbol of

oppression to many African Americans, who tend to point out the uncanny

resemblance between the actress in Gone with the Wind and the

Goliwoggish Aunt Jemima character on Quaker Oats pancake mix boxes.

Any indicator of a “happy” or “contented” slave icon tends to irritate black

sensitivities. The last living person to play the iconic Aunt Jemima role

was Texan Rosie Hall, who was born in Robertson County, between

Hearne and Wheelock. From 1950 to 1967, Hall carried on the tradition of

traveling the country and serving pancakes wherever she went. She passed

in 1967 and a grave marker in her memory was finally erected in 1988.

[43]

Chapter Four

“The plantation mentality still prevails and policy tends too strongly

toward rehabilitation of the bankrupt planter.”

Journal of the Royal African Society, 1936

Plantation Mentality

orking-class blacks often define “freedom” as the battle against

plantation mentality, a pervasive Southern ethos promoting

white domination and demanding black subservience. This

mentality found fertile soil in the Brazos Valley in the 1800s, with its

cotton plantations and imported black slaves. In his 1969 PhD dissertation

entitled Black Texans 1900-1930, Bruce Alden Glasrud wrote: “Jim Crow

statutes grew more numerous [in the 1890s], Negroes were barred from

restaurants, hotels, bars, theaters, and other places where racial contact

might be possible.”

What, exactly, were Jim Crow laws? The term “Jim Crow” originated in

1830 when a white minstrel show performer, Thomas “Daddy” Rice,

blackened his face with burnt cork and danced a jig while singing the

lyrics to the song, “Jump Jim Crow,” which was about a black stableman

of the same name:

W

[44]

“Weel about and turn about and do jis so,

Eb’ry time I weel about I jump Jim Crow.”

Beginning about the 1820s, white entertainers

began performing songs, skits, and dances in

blackface, often as the two stereotypical

characters of minstrelsy, Zip Coon and Jim Crow.

Schmoop.com explains further: “On the one hand, these routines, which

were tremendously popular throughout the United States—North and

South—for much of the 1800s and centered on blatantly racist, crude

caricatures of African-American language and life, played for white

laughs. But on the other, minstrelsy served as a vehicle for popularizing

Black secular music. The minstrel shows were, to borrow the phrase of the

historian Eric Lott, sites of ‘love and theft,’ and the racial dynamic of

showcase, appropriation, and ridicule became even more complicated as

Black performers—some of whom, such as W.C. Handy and Ma Rainey,

would become crucial blues figures—increasingly filled the ranks of the

white-owned touring minstrel companies after the Civil War.” Minstrel

shows were still being performed in Navasota as late as March 1963,

according to the Navasota Examiner.

The Draconian Jim Crow statutes followed closely on the heels of the

black codes passed in 1865-66. Although vagrancy was the central

concept of the black codes, Jim Crow statutes had the intent and the effect

of restricting African-Americans’ freedom, and of compelling them to

work in a labor economy based on low wages or perpetual debt, or both.

Both sets of laws formed the core of plantation mentality, which was

essentially a desire by Southerners to continue suppressing “inferior”

blacks as they had in the antebellum South.

Some would even argue that the roots of plantation mentality still have not

been completely eradicated. Lane Thibodeaux in an article entitled “Potent

Symbols of How Far We’ve Come” in the March 20, 2005 issue of the

Bryan-College Station Eagle, said the water fountains at the Brazos

[45]

County Courthouse spoke volumes about the lingering plantation

mentality. Until 2005, a sign above the fountains read “Out of Order,” but

they were not broken for whites. Before that the same sign used to read

something entirely different: “Whites Only.” White residents of the Brazos

Valley may have been poor, but they were determined not to be the lowest

rung on the sociological totem pole.

In the 1700s and 1800s, slaves working in the plantations knew mostly

picking cotton and other hard labor. There were few avenues for emotional

release – except in the mainly Baptist churches, which became the centers

of black communities. Not only for worship, these organizations provided

their congregations with social interaction, feasts, entertainment and above

all, singing. These black churches excelled at singing, and still do. Choirs

were not just providing the minister with a warm-up for the following

sermon, they were providing a form of high entertainment. Great singers

like Mahalia Jackson and Whitney Houston got their starts in church

choirs. One black singer famously stated: “We sang gospel hymns in

church on Sunday mornings and went to the jukes that night and sang the

blues. The words were different, but it was basically the same thing.” In an

online essay called “Rich Soil, Poor People: A Week in the Mississippi

Delta,” writer Daniel Warner says, “Before the blues, spirituals were sung

by the people as they picked cotton. B.B. King, a product of cotton

picking in the Delta himself, would say ‘Black folks were singing

spirituals so they wouldn’t drift into nothingness’.”

Times were hard in the Great Depression and hardly anybody had any

money, except the wealthy plantation owners along the Brazos River, in

the bottoms where cotton was grown. It had only been a couple of

generations since the “separate but equal” Supreme Court ruling in the

1890s. The attitude of most whites then was that African-Americans

should know their place in society, which in their opinion meant doing the

hard and dirty work and then discreetly staying a proper distance from

whites, while at the same time paying them respect. Jim Crow laws and

[46]

the Black Codes were still intact and blacks were expected to comply. The

KKK was very active then, always ready to make sure they did.

Suppression Gives Rise to Creativity

The river bottoms of the Brazos and Navasota produced hated symbols,

but they also produced artistic expression. Thibodeaux explains: “On the

northwest corner of West 55th and 9th Avenue in Midtown Manhattan is a

legacy of that expression. Opened in fall 2004, the building stands on

some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The building was

funded by some of the wealthiest individuals in this country. Ironically, its

existence can be directly attributed to the hardscrabble existence and

segregation experienced in the river bottoms of the Navasota and Brazos.”

The building is the home of the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater. The

theater’s namesake, Alvin Ailey Jr., lived and worked in the Brazos Valley

before becoming America’s leading black expressionist dancer. He was

born in the town of Rogers, near Temple, but spent his formative years in

Navasota. Ailey’s mother worked as a domestic helper, while Alvin spent

time working in the cotton fields in the bottoms. Alvin Ailey left Navasota

in 1942 at age 12. He battled personal demons later in life and died of

AIDS in 1989 at age 58. In an attempt to avoid the stigmas associated with

AIDS at the time, Ailey asked his doctor to announce that he had a rare,

terminal blood disease called dyscrasia.

Like many others, Ailey’s experiences of observing and

living in the strict segregation and class distinctions that

existed in the Brazos Valley in the 1930s never left him.

His most celebrated work, Revelations, is an ode to the

passions and rhythms of his Deep South experiences,

especially the black churches of Navasota. There must be

something universal about the messages of Alvin Ailey

and his American Dance Theater, which has performed

for an estimated 21 million people in 48 states, as well as Alvin Ailey

[47]

71 countries on six continents. The company has often been an

ambassador for American culture, starting with President John F.

Kennedy’s Southeast Asia tour program in the early 1960s.

And, of course, there was the blues, the focus of this book. Many Brazos

Valley blues players went on to become legends of the blues genre: Mance

Lipscomb, Lightnin’ Hopkins, “Texas” Alexander, Tom Cat Courtney,

Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson, to name just a few.

Navasota, Mance’s hometown, has been designated by Texas as the state’s

official Blues Capital. However, that is only one reason this work will

spotlight the many achievements of Mance Lipscomb, who liked to be

called a “songster” and not a bluesman because his repertoire included

songs from many different musical genres. Violence was often a mainstay

of blues songs, such as “Texas Blues.” This is definitely a blues song as it

adheres to the typical AAB repetition and I-IV-V chord progression.

“Walked all night long with my pistol in my hand. x2

When I found my woman she was with some other man.

Shot that woman, man I thought she’d die. x2

Yeah I hit her across the head, know’d I blacked her eye.

It’s a low down, low down dirty shame. x2

Have a half bad woman and you scared to call her name.

My babe done quit me put all my clothes outdoors.

My Woman done quite throw’d all my clothes out the do’ (door).

That’s all right mama you gonna reap just what you sow.

Late last winter when it was chillin’ cold. x2

My woman put me out didn’t have nowhere to go.

I didn’t have no money, my shoes had done worn thin. x2

I didn’t have a decent pair of pants to go to Sunday school in.

That’s alright things about to come my way. x2

Got change in my pocket, change of clothes every day.”

Most of the jukes in Brazos, Washington and Grimes Counties have long

since closed, but there was where much of the Texas blues was created.

What was it about the Brazos Valley that contributed to such artistic

[48]

creativity? Perhaps the downward pressure on the black population during

Reconstruction and afterwards created something special in the form of

the blues in this part of country, much as the Mississippi Delta gave the

world a string of master bluesmen such as B.B. King, Robert Johnson,

Muddy Waters, “Son” House, and many others. Although they probably

never had more than a casual encounter while sharing a bill, maybe Mance

Lipscomb and Muddy Waters were kindred spirits who shared a similar

kind of mojo. The way Ma Rainy, often called the mother of the blues, put

it: “White folks hear the blues come out, but they don’t know how it got

there.”

The Miss Kitty Problem

Black writer Sunny Nash, like Ailey, sensed that something was amiss in

society at an early age. In her book Bigmama Didn’t Shop at Woolworth’s,

the young writer finds her angst on a flickering TV screen. The 12-year

old growing up in north Bryan’s Candy Hill district (so-called because of

the “sweet” smell of its many wooden outhouses) was lucky enough to

have a TV at that age. She loved to watch westerns in the early 1960s.

“The washed-out television portrayal of the Old West didn’t intrigue me

as much as bother me, making me uneasy with myself and my world…I

sensed there was something wrong about the way it was spread out so

neatly before me.” Miss Kitty, the busty saloon proprietress, smiling from

one side of her mouth, was the character Sunny found the most irritating.

“Miss Kitty’s long black eyelashes stood apart like a frog’s toes. No

longer hearing what she said, I stared at the contrast between the

prominent round mole beside her mouth and the porcelain quality of her

very pale face.” Where were the black cowboys?

Perhaps this bewilderment with the way the world

operated and the lack of any real opportunities is what

drove black intellectuals like Sunny Nash out of Brazos

County. Sunny went to California, where she still lives

and works. Her cousin, singer Johnny Nash (“I Can See

Clearly Now”), still lives near Bryan. Sunny was quoted

Sunny Nash

[49]

as growing much more despondent of the black situation in an article

entitled “Shall We Overcome Our Racial Divide: Can We Bridge the Gap

between Blacks and Whites in Bryan/College Station?” in Insite Magazine

in February 1997, when the little girl from Candy Hill was much older,

writer Cynthia Nevels quoted her as much more despondent about the

racial situation. Sunny continues:

“But when the light is out, and the hope is gone, then people just

don’t try anymore. They actually give up. They throw up both their

hands, they’ll do anything. They don’t care about other people’s

property, because they don’t have any; they don’t feel like they

will ever have any. They don’t care about their physical bodies,

because they take drugs, they drink – why try to take care of the

body, why try to do anything right if none of that is going to make

your life better?”

What, then, would make life better? Education is the only force that can

break the vicious cycle, if applied in sufficient quantities.

“I was about your age when the Supreme Court used the railroad to

legalize what they called ‘separate but equal’ in 1896,” Bigmama

explained to young Sunny Nash. “Plessy vs. Ferguson made things

separate, but it sure didn’t make them equal.”

Part Cherokee Bigmama also told Sunny that a young black girl named

Linda Brown, who had sued her school district in Topeka Kansas for

forcing her to attend inferior schools, set fire to the school integration

movement. Her case went all the way to the Supreme Court in 1954; the

ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education laid the legal framework for the

dismantling of Jim Crow education by declaring that “separate but equal”

was inherently unequal.

However, anti-Jim Crow reformers found it tough sledding in Brazos

County. Schools, for example, fought integration for some 10 years until

finally opening their doors to blacks in 1971, making Brazos County

school districts some of the last in the nation to fully integrate.

[50]

“Was Jim Crow before or after the South lost the war?” The young Sunny

Nash was perplexed as she asked this question of Bigmama.

“The North may have won the Civil War in the history books, but the

South didn’t lose,” answered the old lady. “The North gave the South

everything the South was fighting to keep; because the North, the South,

the West, and the East all wanted the same thing – us in a low place.”

The Significance of the Gay Nineties

The “Gay Nineties” refers to a special era in American history in which

Northeastern industrialists were amassing great fortunes. Railroad

construction was sweeping the country and the Carnegies, Mellons and

Rockefellers were cleaning up. The rest of the country was not doing so

well economically, but “decadent” art, witty stage plays and women’s

suffrage movements were in full bloom. Businessmen and women of all

stripes look back nostalgically on a decade good for business because it

pre-dated the income tax. America’s dominance of markets in South

America and in the Caribbean meant that a new set of wealthy individuals

and families was coming to the fore in the Northeast. The “high life” of

these families was well documented in the novels of Booth Tarkington and

Edith Wharton. Mark Twain called the decade “The Gilded Age,”

referring to a period of great wealth that was also riddled with a lot of

crime. However, a serious economic crash called “The Panic of 1893,”

cooled off markets, setting off a deep recession that lasted until 1897.

Conversely, the agrarian economy of the South was depressed during the

entire decade. Cotton was still king, but the lofty reforms of

Reconstruction had run upon some serious difficulties, especially after the

Northern troops ended their occupation in 1877. The rapacious

carpetbaggers had mostly left, but the Supreme Court ruling in the Plessy-

Ferguson case of 1896 pretty much reversed the push for integration by

ruling that accommodations for blacks could be “separate but equal.”

Southern whites rejoiced by instituting the Black Codes and writing up

[51]

Jim Crow laws to control the blacks. The number of black men lynched

during the decade skyrocketed. Many Southern planters and plantation

owners in the antebellum period had lost much of their wealth because it

had been measured mostly by the number of slaves they owned. Of course,

the value of a slave had dropped to zero in mid-1865.

But why did the number of lynchings skyrocket during this giddy decade?

Why did white people lynch blacks at all? A Wikipedia article (from the

University of North Texas) on lynching seems to give a few hints:

“Historians point to the legacy of slavery, the cotton culture that relied on

exploited black labor, the frustrated aggressions of whites especially

where economic competition with blacks existed, the weak constraints

against white mob violence, and racist ideology. One of the most

important reasons why lynching increased in the 1890s was the economy.

In 1893 the nation suffered the worst depression in its history up to that

time; it lasted until 1897 and brought 20 percent unemployment. Cotton

prices plummeted to 5.8 cents a pound in some areas. Factories laid off

workers, displacing them from mill villages and creating real hardships.

There was a correlation between the price of cotton and lynchings. More

lynching occurred when cotton prices plummeted and when the economy

drove people from their jobs. Other causes for the increased number of

lynchings include the rise of the Populist party and agrarian threats to the

political status quo, the rise of radical theories and assumptions on the

savagery of the black race, and with cotton reaching its lowest point in

1895.”

“Honor was the ancient code, prevalent in the antebellum South, which

held the region together. It was also the cement that bound white

Southerners to the concept that they were “superior” and that black slaves

were akin to soulless animals, only good for working the fields and for

producing offspring who would continue the same oppressive cycle,”

explains the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. White slave owners felt

[52]

that way because slaves were their possessions, bought and paid for, fair

and square. Indeed, an owner’s net worth equaled the number of slaves he

possessed.

One ploy, used to justify many lynchings of Southern black men, was the

“black beast rapist” theory. Author Lisa Cardyn explains in an article

entitled “Sexualized Racism” in the Michigan Law Review: “If the iconic

white woman personified purity, sanctity, and virtue, all that was good

about the South, the imagined black man was her natural antithesis: base,

predatory and lascivious, a blight upon the region and its prospects. The

rape of the esteemed white woman by a black man of this description was

regarded with singular horror, for such an attack defiled not only its

proximate victim, but also the entire southland as well.” Joel Williamson

in Crucible of Race puts the matter this way: “In their frustration, white

men projected their own worst thoughts upon black men, imagined them

acted out in some specific incident, and symbolically killed those thoughts

by lynching a hapless black man. Almost any vulnerable black man would

do.”

Lynching, however, also required community support for its survival.

“Community support protected the lynchers from interference or

prosecution. The public statements of prominent citizens supported

lynching and thus boosted the morale of the lynchers. Primarily, public

support for lynching reflected the white man’s fear of the Negro. People

viewed lynching as a means of keeping the Negro ‘in his place’ — inferior

to the white man,” wrote David L. Chapman in his thesis called Lynching

in Texas at Texas Tech University in August 1973. Chapman later became

a historian and archivist at Texas A&M’s Cushing Memorial Library.

[53]

Boll Weevils and Electric Chairs

The cotton fields of Texas were decimated by a boll weevil plague in

1890, explains author Rick Koste in Texas Music (1998), causing destitute

black workers to leave for big cities to find work, ironically spreading the

blues to Dallas and Houston. “These urban substructures each evolved

their own blues communities [Deep Ellum-Central Track district and Fifth

Ward, respectively] and it thus became possible for someone like Blind

Lemon Jefferson to become the first authentic Texas blues star.” One of

Blind Lemon’s hits, reflecting the fear of dying a violent death, was

’Lectric Chair Blues:

“I want to shake hands with my partner and ask him how come he’s here

I want to shake hands with my partner, ask him how come he’s here

I had a wreck with my family, they’re gonna send me to the electric chair.

I wonder why they electrocute a man at the one o’clock hour of night

And I wonder why they electrocute a man at the one o’clock hour of night

Because the current is much stronger, when the folks has turned out all the

lights.

I sat in the electrocutin’ room, my arms folded up and cryin’

I sat in the electrocutin’ room, my arms folded up and cryin’

And my baby asked the question, was they gonna electrocute that man of

mine?

Lemon, get me a taxi to take me away from here

Lemon, get me a taxi to take me all away from here

I haven't had a good friend in this world, since they lead Lemon to the

electric chair.

I feel like jumpin’ in the ocean, I feel like jumpin’ in the deep blue sea

I feel like jumpin’ in the ocean, and like jumpin’ into the deep blue sea

[54]

But nothin’ like that wrecked in my heart when they brought my

electrocuted daddy to me.

The White Man’s Union Association

By 1890, the times had changed dramatically from the lofty goals set

down by Reconstruction planners. “The goal of Reconstruction was to

readmit the South on terms that were acceptable to the North: full political

civility and equality for blacks, and a denial of political rights of the

whites who had been leaders of the secession movement. The main

condition for re-admittance was that at least 10 percent of the voting

population in 1860 take an oath of allegiance to the Union,” pointed out a

PBS documentary entitled “US Slave: The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.” Of

course, these Southern whites resented the gains being made by blacks

during the military occupation and thereafter. In addition to the terrorist

KKK, the “White Man’s Union Association” began springing up in

several Brazos Valley counties in the late 1800s as the number of voting

blacks began to seriously threaten the strength of the white vote.

By the year 1890, Brazos County’s African-American population reached

8,845 making blacks the majority. Despite the majority (or most likely

because of the majority) local Anglo Democrats instituted a “White Man’s

Campaign” in 1890 in several counties bordering the Brazos River to

prevent African-Americans from nominating and voting for political

candidates, thereby preventing the possibility of victory by a black

candidate or even an Anglo “scalawag,” i.e. a white person who would

fight for the advancement of blacks. Scalawags were dealt with severely as

can be seen in a gun battle that broke out around the Anderson court house

on November 7, 1900. It is a cautionary tale of a white sheriff who stood

up for the 13th

14th

and 15th

Amendments (the last specifically gave black

Americans the right to vote) and nearly lost his life in the process in a

gunfight in broad daylight in downtown Anderson, the seat of Grimes

County.

[55]

Chapter Five

“Now you go out there and raise all the hell you want, kill who you want,

just so you don’t get killed. All you got to do is make it back here, back to

my place.”

Tom Moore, as quoted by a black Texas farmer

The Tom Moore Farm

tarting in the late 1920s, five Moore brothers (Tom, Harry, Clarence,

Steve, Walker) established a very large cotton farm of 15,000 acres

near Navasota that was operated more like a plantation than a

modern farm. Walker had bought land there as early as 1911. Texas

Monthly magazine described Tom, the most powerful of the brothers,

thusly: “Tom Moore was a notorious twentieth-century plantation owner

along the Brazos River, near Navasota, who ran his land and the mostly

African-American sharecroppers on it as if it were the nineteenth century

instead.”

Tom (1901-97) and his brother Harry (1903-88) were the one-two punch

of plantation mentality power in Grimes, Brazos and Washington Counties

in Texas for decades, a sort of white man’s law unto themselves. Tom

ruled the farm with an iron hand while Harry was the farm’s chief

politician, with his reach extending all the way to the Oval Office,

S

[56]

occupied during the late sixties by his good friend Lyndon Johnson. But it

was mainly Tom who received the brunt of black hatred aimed at the farm

and its chief administrator. A line from one blues song referred to Tom

Moore as the devil incarnate. The reference was in a song called “Three

Moore Brothers” by a black prisoner named Joseph “Chinaman” Johnson,

on a recording released in 1965. Here is how the song began:

“Well, who is that I see come ridin’, boy,

down on the low turn row?

Nobody but Tom Devil,

That’s the man they call Tom Moore.”

A fair criticism or not, Tom Moore became the chief antagonist for several

blues songs. “Tom Moore’s Farm” was recorded by at least six different

performers, with the words being slightly different, but the refrain

remaining the same.

The Tom and Harry Team

The brothers Tom and Harry were close to such powerful Texas

politicians of the day as (later president) Lyndon B. Johnson and

subsequent governor of Texas John Connally. Johnson was sometimes

seen on the Moore farm playing poker with “the boys.” Harry boasted that

he could walk into the White House and get a meeting with the president

anytime he wanted while Johnson occupied

the Oval Office.

Tom Moore also used paroled convicts as

workers on the farm. According to Bruce

Jackson’s 1999 book Wake Up Dead Man:

Hard Labor and Southern Blues, “Moore

once intercepted a letter and tracked down a

farm escapee who had run off to Mexico, and brought the man back to the

farm. Another story in the book focuses on how Moore gave men on the

[57]

farm the option to select any car they wanted. The problem was: Since

anyone driving a car on the farm was trapped, the car could never be

driven off the land.”

An article in The Houston Press entitled “Lightnin’ Hopkins, Mance

Lipscomb and the Legend of Tom Moore’s Farm” suggests that Harry,

like his brother Tom, was not someone to be messed with: “Anna Mae

Hunt’s 1984 book I Am Annie Mae gives an account of hellish life on the

farm, which she claimed harkened back to slavery times. Mance

Lipscomb’s 1993 book I Say Me for a Parable, as told to Glen Alyn, also

gives a perspective on the Moore farm from Lipscomb’s home in

Navasota. By one account, Harry Moore was supposedly just as ruthless

and feared as Tom Moore, but since there isn’t much info about him

floating around and he isn’t a character in blues songs like his brother, that

part of the story is still more of a mystery.”

One of the few incidents of Moore brutality to break into public view was

the July 1948 beating of a black parolee named John Roe. According to

Roe’s account from his Austin hospital bed, he had asked Tom Moore to

use a farm truck to take his sick child to the doctor. Moore denied the

request and told him to get back to work. When Roe persisted, Moore

struck him with a shovel, then pistol-whipped him and chased him,

bumping him with a truck fender, as Roe ran for his life with a broken arm

and other injuries.

The farmworker managed to get to Austin, more than 100 miles away,

where he reported the incident to the state parole board. He was admitted

to Brackenridge Hospital and told his story to a Texas Ranger, the chief of

the parole division, a Salvation Army captain and a stenographer.

According to newspaper accounts, investigations were launched by a

Brazos County grand jury, the Rangers and the FBI, as well as the Austin

branch of the NAACP and the local Communist Party, to determine if

peonage was being practiced on Tom Moore’s farm. What if anything ever

came of these investigations is unclear, and Moore descendants say that

[58]

Tom Moore was cleared of any wrongdoing. An article on the Roe

incident in the Pittsburgh Courier, an African-American newspaper, noted

that a similar incident had involved Harry Moore, a few months before.

The victim in that case was identified only as “Mr. Walker.”

Exploding Safes, Black Lovers

In their book From Can See to Can’t: Texas Cotton Farmers on the

Southern Prairies, authors Thad Sitton and Dan K. Utley quote a black

farmer named Bubba Bowser of Washington County, a friend of Mance

Lipscomb’s, about the Moore brothers:

“They wasn’t just white folks, they was the law. An American white man,

he is the law. An American white man is Uncle Sam. I say something

about the law to Mr. Tom [Moore], he say, ‘Hell Bubba, we the law, me

and the white people is the law. We Uncle Sam. We make the laws and

break ’em, we the government.’ This here’s American white man country,

and he rules it, just what he say go. Mr. Tom used to tell them old n*ggers,

‘Now you go out there and raise all the hell you want, kill who you want,

just so you don’t get killed. All you got to do is make it back here, back to

my place’.”

Sunny Nash, the black writer/singer from Bryan who migrated to

California, recalled that a lot of the blues songs were really work songs

from the farms. She also remembered hearing songs about Tom Moore

and his farm. “Everybody was afraid of those people, the Moore brothers.”

She played piano for a church on the Moore farm near Cawthon until her

dad told her he’d rather she wouldn’t go back. “I never heard anyone call

the Moores mean, just that it was dangerous after dark if you didn’t belong

there. People disappeared, and law had no power there.”

In an interview with Matt Moore at the old headquarters of the Moore

Farm, I was taken on a tour of the old Moore cotton gin there. Matt

showed me an old safe on the second floor which used to hold payroll

money as well as weapons of black workers. Just to make sure that nobody

[59]

broke into the safe, it was rigged with an explosive device and cyanide

gas, Matt explained. Ruthless, yes, but very effective.

It was an open secret that Harry Moore (Matt’s grandfather) had a black

lover named Mama Nitt, who lived near the Moore Farm. She told this

author that Harry was very good to her and that if she needed something

from Harry, all that she had to do was ask. Mama Nitt owned a juke joint

near Navasota called the Big Wheel, where many blues bluesmen gave

live performances during the Chitlin’ Circuit days, and thereafter.

White Violence at Work

John Shelton Reed, an authority on Southern violence, argues in The

Encyclopedia of Southern Culture that “the concept of justifiable homicide

is at the heart of the southern tendency to violence. One carries a gun or

knife because one might have to use it, and one uses it because the

occasion merits it. Much of the literature and popular culture of the South

revolves around violence, which is often viewed in a neutral or even

laudatory way. For Southerners, murder in defense of honor, after

sufficient provocation, is often tragic rather than simply wrong.”

If what Reed wrote is true, then would it be a stretch to argue that the

white man’s racism could be mimicked by his black workers? Especially

if their boss is telling them to go out and kill whoever you want, but come

back to the farm and I will protect you from the law?

Other writers carry this argument one step further. “One of the most

pernicious and dehumanizing effects of white racism has been the

gradations of skin color within the black population to take on

characteristics of a caste system,” wrote Giles Oakley in his 1997 book

entitled The Devil’s Music: A History of the Blues. “The closer the color

was to white, the more attractive they were felt to be even among black

people.” Or as Georgia bluesman Blind Willie McTell sang, “A black man

give you a dollar, you won’t think it nothin’ strange, Yellow man give you

a dollar he’ll want back 95 cents change.”

[60]

Finally, one oppressed black worker decided to do something about all the

injustices. He wrote a song which became a classic Texas blues ballad. A

Texas Monthly article entitled “The Secret History of Texas Music, Tom

Moore’s Farm” stated: “In the mid-thirties, a young sharecropper named

Yank Thornton, fed up with Moore’s brutal methods—making the laborers

toil for long hours in the sun, keeping them in line with threats and

violence—began writing verses about him and singing them at local

dances: ‘Standing on the levee with his spurs in his horse’s flank, whip in

his hand watching his boys from bank to bank’.”

In the long run, it was the Thornton-Lipscomb song “Tom Moore’s Farm”

that survived the test of time, being re-recorded in at least six different

versions by other blues musicians. Its message goes to the core of the

white-on-black problem that has so pervaded the history of the Brazos

Valley. Here are the lyrics to the original.

Tom Moore’s Farm

Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing, you know

This black man done was wrong

Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing, you know

This black man done was wrong

Yes, you know I moved my wife and family down

On Mr. Tom Moore’s farm

Yeah, you know Mr. Tom Moore’s a man

He don’t never stand and grin

He just said, “Keep out of the graveyard, I’ll save you from the pen”

You know, soon in the morning, he’ll give you scrambled eggs

Yes, but he’s liable to call you so soon

You’ll catch a mule by his hind legs

Yes, you know I got a telegram this morning, boy

It read, it say, “Your wife is dead”

I show it to Mr. Moore, he said, “Go ahead, n*gger

You know you got to plow old Red”

[61]

The Texas Monthly piece continues: “Thornton sang unaccompanied,

though a guitarist named Mance Lipscomb—who was a sharecropper on a

farm next to Moore’s plantation—helped him shape the verses into an

actual song. Lipscomb began playing ‘Tom Moore’s Farm’ too, and his

version soon became popular at black gatherings.”

Publicly stating in a song that

Tom Moore would not give a

black worker time off even to

attend his wife’s funeral was a

dangerous road to travel. Both

Thornton and Lipscomb knew

the hazards of criticizing the

Moore family at that time.

Either of both could have

become targets for revenge. “If

he knew I put out a song like that,” Lipscomb once told musicologist and

blues historian Robert “Mack” McCormick, “I couldn’t live here [in

Navasota] no more. I wouldn’t live six months if he knowed that. He got

people out there come out here set this house on fire.” Mance did not think

he was exaggerating either as he had heard many stories of black bodies

found floating face down in the nearby Brazos River.

Of course, the existence of a 1933 recording brings into question the

origin story of the song. Since many blues songs were reworkings of songs

sung on farms or performed in prison, it’s entirely possible that Thornton

and Lipscomb refashioned an older a Capella song into a blues version

with guitar accompaniment, with the instrumental breaks filling the space

earlier occupied by the sounds of work and breathing.

It was McCormick who discovered Lipscomb and Hopkins, introducing

them to much larger audiences starting from the late 1950s. So Mack,

The Moore Brothers' Store

[62]

deeply aware of the Tom Moore song’s true meaning, wrote in the liner to

his Treasury of Field Recordings: “This is a true song of protest, but it is

important to appreciate exactly what it is protesting. It is not protesting the

evils of the sharecropping system on any broad economic level. It is not

protesting Tom Moore’s wealth gained from the sweat of others. It is

simply a brutally truthful characterization of one particular hardened

opportunist who had taken advantage and mistreated his laborers.”

It’s not just the contents of the song that irritated McCormick, he had

strong words about Tom Moore, the man. “Tom Moore is castigated not

because he is cruel and unjust, but because he is too cruel and too unjust,

more so than the status quo permits. His actions have been extreme, else

he would not have achieved this kind of recognition from the people of the

tenant farm culture.” Mack had many more blues stories to tell but his

master work The Blues Come to Texas is still unfinished and unpublished.

Mack passed away in Houston at the age of 85 in 2015. McCormick’s

collaboration with Paul Oliver ended acrimoniously. Texas A&M

University Press will publish the book in early 2019 as The Blues Come to

Texas: Paul Oliver and Mack McCormick’s Unfinished Book, Compiled

by Alan Govenar with Documentation and Essays by Alan Govenar and

Kip Lornell.

The Farm Itself

Black activist and author Annie

Mae Hunt explained that

Washington County was free but

Grimes County preserved slavery,

probably referring to the Tom

Moore farm as it was the biggest in

the area. It was also where she was

raised, claiming that living there The railroad depot at Allenfarm

[63]

was a “nightmare.” While blacks like Hunt tended to vilify the farm,

whites often held more ambiguous views.

Take Russell Cushman, a local businessman and author who once

operated the Blues Alley Store and Museum in downtown Navasota. Until

recently, he was an organizer of the annual blues festival called “Blues

Fest” there every August in honor of Mance Lipscomb. Cushman not only

knew Tom Moore, but thought highly of the man. That affinity shines

through in some of his writing, but generally speaking, Cushman provides

a balanced and penetrating look at the Texas blues and at the notorious

farm and its owners who inadvertently helped create this music.

Cushman was a longtime Navasota resident, relocated to Bellville, who

maintains an Internet blog called Blues Valley, which extols the vast

beauty that was found on the Tom Moore farm. Also, a well-known local

artist, Cushman was commissioned to do a painting of the farm and was

given a “dime tour” of the property by Tom Moore himself. “The farm

coursed along 25 miles of the Brazos River and spanned over 15,000

acres,” explained Cushman. “I saw settlers’ ruins, purebred Brangus cattle,

oil wells, the Tom J. Moore gin, the Moore headquarters at Allenfarm, the

infamous Big Wheel juke joint, and Graball, an ideal ranching community

because everybody was trying to grab all they could of it. And Tom got

the most of it. He considered it to be the most beautiful, desirable land in

America.”

Of course, that viewpoint is debatable.

Anyone who has been to or lived in the

Shenandoah Valley of Northern Virginia

or the wine-producing fields of the

Northern California area would

probably beg to disagree. Moore was more likely expressing his pride in

having developed a rough Texas landscape into a beautifully manicured

The Moore cotton gin

[64]

farm. But perhaps it was more than pride that pushed Tom Moore to

succeed, where others had failed.

Cushman explains: “Like many old-time fathers of his generation, Tom

Moore seemed determined to prove that his sons would never be smarter

or tougher, and he never reached the day when he was ready to hand it [the

farm] over. No wonder some black people were afraid of him, even his

own sons deferred to him. Nobody had the guts to tell Tom to quit driving.

One day, while in his mid-nineties, after driving away unconsciously from

a little fender-bender, the Navasota cops finally respectfully followed him

home and just took his car keys from him.”

The power of the Moores went a lot further than intimidating their workers

or getting velvet-glove treatment from the local cops. Tom and Harry had

real political clout at very high levels. Local folklore contains many stories

of black workers dying while “trying to swim across the Brazos River” to

escape their bondage. These stories have it that the bodies of many of

those escapees were either riddled with bullet holes or wrapped in heavy

chains. The problem was that proof was hard to come up with as these

bodies were never found. “Harry Moore was an honorary badge carrier of

the Texas Rangers. Since many of the Moore bosses were armed prison

guards, problems rarely developed or lasted very long,” concluded

Cushman.

“The Moores ran their own Justice of the Peace

court, and to some degree, were the ‘Law East of the

Brazos,’ and enjoyed considerable influence on local

lawmen and notable Texas politicians like Senator

Lyndon Baines Johnson,” says Cushman. “Johnson’s

first job after marrying ‘Ladybird’ was to go to work

for his father-in-law at a creosote plant on the

northern outskirts of Navasota. He became a lifelong

associate of the Moores then.” Naturally, the Moores’

Russell Cushman

[65]

influence rose along with Johnson’s surging power first in Texas and then

nationally after being elected a Democratic Senator, t. hen Vice President

and finally President of the United States.

Johnson became President by default in 1963 after John F. Kennedy was

assassinated in Dallas. LBJ was elected president in 1964 and after signing

the Voting Rights Act in the following year, Johnson reportedly told two

senators on Air Force One that “I’ll have those n*ggers voting Democratic

for the next 200 years.” In any event, Texas flipped from being a blue

state, turning solidly red shortly thereafter. Many believe it was due to

Johnson’s civil rights actions during the mid to late 1960s. Whether or not

that statement is accurate, it is true that the “flip” coincided with LBJ’s

days in the Oval Office. Throughout the 1970s up until the present day,

the Republican Party has ruled supreme for Texans, meaning mostly white

Texans. According to some sources, including newsman Bill Moyers, who

served as an aide to Johnson, LBJ realized that when he signed the 1964

Civil Rights Act, he delivered the South to the GOP. Others question

whether the power-hungry Texan really uttered those words. If he did, he

proved prophetic.

A Lawless Hurricane

Geographically, Texas gets its fair share of hurricanes coming off the Gulf

Coast. But those high gusts of wind are due to atmospheric changes of

pressure. What can we say about psychological hurricanes caused by

lawlessness, social injustice, prejudice and ignorance? Perhaps we can say

that certain geographical areas, such as Texas’ Brazos Valley, have indeed

stirred up such hurricanes. Maybe we can even narrow our analysis down

to two main causes: violence and hardship.

“This intense violence and hardship made Navasota the eye of a lawless

hurricane that slung people in every direction. A heartless place of

heartbreak and injustice and psychological trauma, few who drank from its

poisonous backwater could stay long. Nobody clings to bad memories or

the ground that hosts them. Only the toughest of the tough could call it

[66]

home. Only those with a mountain of Faith could still find the hope or

strength required to stay. And those that stayed, generation after

generation, prayed a lot, and some sang a lot, and many of them sang the

blues,” writes Cushman.

The Tom Moore Farm Today

As soon as the Moore family moved into the Brazos Valley, they started

buying up the best properties in order to create their new farm. One of

their first purchases was Allenfarm, a large cotton farm utilizing prison

labor. It was then owned by John D. Rodgers, whose family was among

the early settlers in the valley. On this land, the Moores built their

company store and cotton gins, the core of the entire operation. At its

peak, Allenfarm had its own post office, railroad station, two churches and

three gins. Many of these landmarks can still be seen today, including the

old bell that called workers to work, told them it was time to eat and

signaled the end of the working day. I was told that Tom’s daughter has

the bell at her home, so it’s not really on public view.

In March 1887, the Dallas Morning News reported: “This farm

[Allenfarm] is worked on shares by the State, with second-class convicts,

consisting of old men, young boys and cripples – those whose physical

defects prevent their being first-class laborers, and the number is kept up

to an average of 100.” Old man Rodgers reportedly did not favor the idea

of hiring black workers, so that probably explains why they were not

mentioned in the above newspaper report about the farm. The Moores did

not have such compunctions, as they relied heavily on black labor. They

were not opposed to using prison labor though, even putting captured

Nazis to work during WWII (from a nearby concentration camp). Tom and

his brother Harry ruled their farm with an iron hand, but nobody lives

forever.

[67]

After the passing of Tom and

Harry, business as usual began

to change. Part of the vast

Moore farm was sold off to the

King Ranch, the largest of the

South Texas ranches. Cotton

and alfalfa growing gradually

morphed into the seed business

known as “Thomas Moore

Feed,” especially under the

tutelage of Texas A&M educated Matt Moore.

The next generation of Moores had an even more exotic plan; they

developed another part of the old farm into a facility dedicated to getting

people married. As the Moores’ own website states: “Harry’s great

grandfather, Harry H. Moore started the farm and ranch in 1928 and Harry

B. and Tara [wife] started hosting weddings and events on the property in

2010. Harry continues to work on the farm and ranch today with his

father, Jerry Moore.” These days, business as usual on the Tom Moore

farm has an entirely different ring to it. Perhaps the evils of the past have

finally been buried beneath the rich alluvial soil of the Brazos Valley

farm.

There can be little doubt that the original

Tom Moore farm, where many blacks saw

much evil lurking, became the main

antagonist for blues song creation in the

Brazos Valley. But some writers, like

Russell Cushman, see a great irony there as

well. “In some strange twist, it is many of

Navasota’s white population who are the

ones that have preserved the blues, loved

them and celebrated them, as if they know

just how important they are as documents of The old dinner bell at Terrell Farm

[68]

a time and a history locked up in the iron box. Every year I see a handful

of the great-grandchildren of these white plantation families, coming back

to Navasota to enjoy the Navasota Blues Fest. Ironically these are many of

the folks I must give the credit for reviving Trans-Brazos Blues and the

story behind them.”

[69]

Chapter Six

“Most of his repertoire seemed to be on like a computer disc in his head.”

Chris Strachwitz, Arhoolie Records

Mance Lipscomb, Songster

n the afternoon of June 30, 1960, Mance Lipscomb was at work

supervising a crew cutting grass along the highway in Grimes

County, when two white men came to his house. They talked to

his wife, Elnora, and learned that her husband would be home soon, so

they waited. When he drove up, they introduced themselves as Mack

McCormick and Chris Strachwitz, folklore researchers looking for blues

players. They had driven up from Houston, where McCormick lived.

Lipscomb was wary. As he told a friend and fellow musician, Michael

Birnbaum, the two had first gone to the Navasota office of Tom Moore.

Moore, Lipscomb said, “was sorta jumpy

about all the bad things he done, thought

Chris and Mack was some Secret Service

men hunting him. He didn’t talk so good. He

said, ‘Oh, I don’t want to see nobody because

all my hands happy out yonder.’ If they were

Secret Service men, he thought they might let

O

Mance Lipscomb at home

[70]

him off that way. So, Mack insisted, wanted to take his picture, and he

wouldn’t do it.” Moore said he knew of a good guitarist but wouldn’t

name him and refused to go with them. “He kept saying his hands were

happy,” Lipscomb said.

Moore advised McCormick and Strachwitz to “go down on the colored

run and talk to old Peg Leg.” They found the one-legged man at a beer

joint, and he directed them to Lipscomb’s house on Piedmont Road.

When he returned from work, they asked him to play, and he sat on the

tailgate of his pickup truck and played “St. Louis Blues.” They dismissed

that as “white folks’ music” and said they wanted to hear the music he

played for Saturday night suppers in the river bottom. Lipscomb was

surprised to hear this request from the two white visitors, but agreed that

they could return after he had cleaned up and had eaten dinner.

His wife was angry, but he prevailed, and when they returned, they asked

him to get his guitar and play for them in the kitchen, where they set up a

microphone and a tape recorder—the first one Lipscomb had seen. “I

wondered what the devil them people was fixin’ to do,” he said. “Might

want to hurt me or something. I say, ‘Well, they here, all I can do is watch

‘em; if they make any crooked moves, it’ll be me and them. I might not

could whip them, but I be tryin’.” He figured he could head-butt

Strachwitz, a tall man, in the belly and get away from the shorter, stockier

McCormick. Elnora Lipscomb was pacified when her husband showed her

the money the men had given him.

As it turned out, of course, the two white men had “discovered”

Lipscomb, who commenced, at an age when many were ready to retire, a

musical career that involved getting paid more than the “fifty cents and a

fish sandwich” he had received for playing those Saturday night suppers

for decades. But Lipscomb was wise to be wary, and so was Tom Moore,

for Grimes County, 80 miles northwest of Houston and 20 miles south of

Texas A&M University, was a vestige of the Old South with a long and

bloody racist history that had gotten the Moores in trouble a few years

before.

[71]

Mance, having lived all his life with racial oppression, which he called

“the pressure,” knew how to get along with white people without being an

Uncle Tom and performed for the Moores and other local whites. He was

widely respected in the black community where he lived and was known

as “Daddy Mance.” He and Elnora raised numerous children, including

more than 20 sired by their son, a farmer known as Little Mance.

Mance Sr. had made the best of a tough life. His

father, a fiddler who played for local dances,

vanished when Mance was young, and he was

working by the time he was 12. When the town

fathers hired Frank Hamer in 1908 to tame the

wild and woolly place, the legendary lawman

recruited the teenage Mance to drive him around.

Lipscomb said “Mr. Hayman,” as he called him,

was a “bad man” – not evil but tough as a boot.

Hamer is remembered now largely for leading the

posse that tracked and killed outlaws Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow

near Gibsland, Louisiana, in May 1934. After a fusillade of gunfire stilled

the pair, Hamer stepped toward the bullet-riddled Ford V8 sedan. “Be

careful, Cap, they may not be dead,” another lawman cautioned. “If

they’re not, they soon will be,” Hamer shot back.

This, then, was the violent, racist atmosphere in which Mance Lipscomb

became a man at an early age. He also took to music as a child, and liked

to recount his acquisition of his first guitar, about the time Hamer came to

town. Around Navasota at that time, banjos and fiddles were the primary

instruments, but Mance’s brothers had guitars, and he wanted one. When a

gambler came walking through the field one day and offered to sell an old

beat-up instrument for $1.50, Mance’s mother, Jane, agreed as long as she

could pay the man when she got the money. Mance said he sat under a tree

and “whammed away,” without any idea what he was doing, and at night

could hardly sleep for dreaming of guitars. Mance learned songs from

Legendary lawman Hamer

[72]

itinerant musicians and, on a cotton-picking trip to North Texas around

1917, saw Blind Lemon Jefferson singing along Central Track in Dallas.

He admired Jefferson’s playing and singing but decided that, rather than

imitating anyone, he would “estimate my own style.”

A Wild Streak

Like many young men, Mance had a wild streak. As he told Allan Turner

and Jay Brakefield in an interview in his home in 1972, he once lost his

money in a game of “coon can” (or conquian, a card game of the rummy

family) on Christmas Eve. Sure that he had been cheated, he went home to

get his gun. His wife persuaded him to forget the money and stay home

and warned him that the gamblers were probably lying in wait for him,

guns at the ready. She was right, and the incident helped him settle down

and become the dignified figure who inspired both those in his community

and the young whites who later flocked to him.

While working at a lumber yard during his Houston sojourn in the 1950s,

Lipscomb was injured. He retained a lawyer. As he told Turner and

Brakefield, the lawyer invited him to have a seat and said, “Now, Mance, I

want you to tell me the truth.” Lipscomb added wryly, “Them lawyers

want you to tell them the truth so they can lie for you. Let them do the

lyin’.” Sometime later, the lawyer called to say that he had the money

from a settlement, and Mance drove his old truck to Houston. He returned

with $1,500 cash in a paper sack and didn’t stop till he got home, where he

poured the money on the bed. His wife exclaimed, “We can live like

people now.”

Navasota was rigidly segregated. Paul Oliver told Brakefield on a visit to

Dallas that once, after he had given a talk about his musical research, he

was approached by a woman from Navasota who allowed that she was

glad to have heard his stories because she had always wondered what

happened on “that side of town.” After a bad experience with local

[73]

workmen, Lipscomb finished the house itself. Everything wasn’t plumb,

but the atmosphere was warm and welcoming, and after the interview,

assured that the two journalists wouldn’t sell the tape for profit, he pulled

out his guitar and played and sang several tunes.

The recording that Lipscomb made at his

home that day in 1960 was released the

following year as Texas Songster, on the

Reprise label. One of the label’s owners was

Frank Sinatra, and lore has it that Lipscomb

entertained Sinatra on his yacht. The cover

featured a photo of Mance and his family on

the porch of their home. The photographer

was Ed Badeaux, McCormick’s brother-in-

law. Lipscomb went on to record and

perform extensively. He desegregated Threadgill’s, the Austin beer joint

where Janis Joplin and other folkies from the University of Texas hung

out. The owner, Ken Threadgill, who loved to sing Jimmie Rodgers songs,

complete with yodeling, told his patrons one night that the entertainment

would be provided by a black man who was a gentleman and that no one

was to cause any trouble. Nobody did. Members of the folkie set

journeyed to Navasota for guitar lessons, and Glen Alyn literally camped

out in a tent in Mance’s yard while starting to record the interviews that

became Mance’s oral biography: I Say Me for a Parable.

The first time Lipscomb traveled to California to perform, Michael

Birnbaum said, the club owner had to send him money for clothing and a

plane ticket. The Texan became a popular performer who would tackle

anything from a slide-guitar piece, played with a pocket knife, to pop

tunes such as “Shine on, Harvest Moon.” “Mance was very strong,” said

Birnbaum, who hung out and played with Mance when he visited

[74]

California. Birnbaum, who became a college professor, for years was a

regular performer at the Navasota Blues Fest, held in his friend’s honor.

Lipscomb told Texas Monthly magazine in 1973, “When I was young I

always prayed that He would let my last days be my best days – and here

they are.” When he died at 81, in 1976, his image, along with those of

musicians such as Jerry Garcia and Freddie King, adorned the walls of the

Austin hippie landmark called Armadillo World Headquarters. Another

gigantic replica of Mance decorates nearly a whole wall of the Blues Alley

building (now a coffee shop) in Navasota while a statue of the songster in

a nearby park reminds visitors of Lipscomb’s legacy. Mance’s tombstone

can be viewed at Navasota’s Oakland / Resthaven cemetery, not far from

that of R&B artist Joe Tex.

[75]

Chapter Seven

“I had the one thing you need to be a blues singer, I was born with the

blues.”

Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins

Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, Bluesman

ightnin’ Hopkins (1912-82) embodied the blues, its country roots,

its move to the city, and the uneasy relationship between its black

practitioners and its white acolytes. With his gold teeth, fine

clothes and dark shades, he looked the part to a T. Hopkins who was born

John Samuel Hopkins in rural Leon County, in the upper reaches of the

Brazos Valley. He gave his birthdate as March 15, 1912, but, like much of

his biography, that is uncertain. He was the last of four children born to

Abe and Frances Hopkins. His father was a sharecropper; his mother

stayed home with the children. Abe Hopkins was a rough character with a

deep, powerful voice, who loved to drink and gamble. Lightnin’ said his

father would fight “right smart”; others said he was more bark than bite.

At any rate, he was killed over a dice or card game when Sam was three

years old. How much the child remembered of his father is uncertain,

though he later used his parents and their marital difficulties in his music,

L

[76]

even making up a comic song about “Mama got mad at Papa ‘cause he

didn’t bring no coffee home.”

Sam Hopkins was a storyteller, and to say that he embellished the facts of

his life would be an understatement. What is certain is that he took to

music at an early age, playing the piano and organ at church and making

the guitar his primary instrument. He

told interviewers that he fashioned his

own guitar out of a cigar box and

screen wire. Both his brothers, Joel

and John Henry, were musicians, and

their little brother said he defied their

injunctions to leave their instruments

alone. He told an interviewer that his

brother Joel caught him playing his

“guitar,” then relented when he

realized that the child had talent.

These stories parallel those of other

bluesmen, including those who grew up in the Mississippi Delta, another

cradle of the blues. They often made guitars from found materials,

sometimes nailing a wire to a wall and playing the one-string instrument,

called a didley bow, with a slide made from the neck of a glass bottle. And

the story of playing an older sibling’s instrument in contravention of

orders to leave it alone is also a familiar one. Whatever the facts of his

birth and upbringing, Sam Hopkins showed musical talent early. Frances

Hopkins lamented that her baby was never good for anything but playing

music, and the facts of his life reveal nothing so much as a prodigious

mama’s boy who, in many ways, never really grew up.

A Brush with Fate

A seminal event in Sam Hopkins’ life occurred when he was eight years

old, after Frances Hopkins had moved her family to a patch of ground near

Leona, another small Leon County town. As Sam often told the story, the

family attended a Baptist gathering in or near Buffalo, another small Leon

[77]

County town. Also, in attendance, playing and singing under a tree, was

Blind Lemon Jefferson, who later became a very popular recording artist.

When he met the young Sam Hopkins, though, Lemon Jefferson was a

community musician, walking the roads near his home near Wortham, in

Freestone County, playing on street corners in nearby towns and

sometimes taking the train 77 miles north to Dallas.

As Hopkins told it, he began playing along, impressing the blind musician

by following along. “I was so little and low, couldn’t nobody see me,”

Hopkins told one interviewer. When he learned that his accompanist was a

child, Jefferson had someone hoist him onto the bed of a truck, and the

two continued to play together. “You’re going to be good guitar player,”

Blind Lemon said, in Sam’s telling.

Encouraged, Hopkins continued to hone his musical chops growing up

near Leona. The oldest boy, John Henry, had struck out on his own, saying

that if he stayed, he might kill the man who had slain his father. Sam

didn’t see his brother for decades, and when he did, the reunion was

stormy.

Another of Hopkins’ oft-told tales

involved getting into fights and ending up

on a chain gang in Houston County. After

he moved to the city of Houston, in Harris

County, and attracted white fans, he

would even pull up his pant leg to show

scars from the manacles used to hold him

down. Researchers have found no

documentation of his time in prison, but

Hopkins, like many other healthy young

black men in the South, certainly did hard,

low-paid work on farms, and this provided

much of the material he performed and

recorded later. “I ain’t gonna pick no

[78]

cotton, ain’t gonna pull no corn,” he sang in “Going Back to Florida,”

“and if a mule run away with the world, I’ll tell that mule to go ‘head on’.”

The handsome young man with a guitar became a ladies’ man early on and

in the 1920s married Elamer Lacey. For a time, he lived near Crockett, in

Houston County, where he often performed on Camp Street, the main

stem of the town’s black community. Today, a statue of the Texas

bluesman, complete with hat, shades, cigar and guitar, stands across the

street from the Camp Street Café.

Hopkins said his outdoor musical career was interrupted by the police,

who let him finish a song, then jailed him, presumably for disturbing the

peace. He told of one day when he and a musician called “Jabo” toured

the countryside, stopping at little

crossroads communities and putting

down their hats for contributions. Music

was an escape route for many rural

musicians, white and black, as well as a

good way to pick up some spare change.

White fiddler Johnny Gimble said he

discovered at an early age that playing

the fiddle was easier than picking cotton,

and Western swing bandleader Cliff

Bruner recalled a musician who

auditioned for a job, saying, “Man, get me out of this cotton patch!”

Hopkins may have embellished his biography for awestruck white fans

later, but like other black workers, he certainly endured the brutal labor of

farm work for starvation wages. “I was getting’ 50 cents a hundred

[pounds of cotton], working for me and my wife, too; man, you don’t

know what I had to do.” Hopkins also vented about the rigors of cotton

picking in his song “Cotton.” Determined to make a living from his music,

he abandoned his wife and two daughters. However, it is unclear whether

Hopkins left his wife or she abandoned him. One of Hopkins’ songs gives

us a hint: “I Hate I Got Married.”

[79]

A Center of Texas

Centerville, as the name implies, is about halfway between Dallas to the

north and Houston to the south. It was here that Lightnin’ got his start by

playing and singing in the small town’s (pop. 388) church. When the

young and budding musician met Blind Lemon Jefferson in nearby

Buffalo, he realized that the blues was “in him.” It was reported that Blind

Lemon, after that initial meeting, would not let anyone except Lightnin’

accompany him at church performances. As the young musician

progressed, he did so with the help of his cousins, including the much

older Alger “Texas” Alexander. But then came the urge to ramble, which

took Hopkins as far west as Arizona and to Clarksdale, Mississippi, to the

northeast. But he always seemed most drawn back to Houston, then a very

Southern city of about 290,000 with a large black population concentrated

in the former Third, Fourth and Fifth Wards. He said he had been

imprisoned there for an unspecified offense in the 1930s.

Hopkins didn’t serve in the military during World War II. In one of his

colorful stories, he said he was stabbed by a fellow gambler the night

before he was to report for the draft and sang to pretty nurses while others

went off to fight. After the war, Lightnin’ realized the financial limitations

of being a rural musician and was encouraged by an uncle, Lucien

Hopkins, who helped him buy a guitar. Hopkins made the move to

Houston, staying in a series of rooming houses in the Third Ward and

playing on the street and in neighborhood bars. He even played on city

buses, where he drank whiskey and created a party atmosphere.

Hopkins’ recording career began in 1946 when a music producer, Lola

Ann Cullum, took him and a piano player, Wilson “Thunder” Smith, to

Los Angeles to record for the Aladdin label, owned by the Mesner

brothers. Hopkins had wanted to bring “Texas” Alexander, whom he

always referred to as his cousin. However, Cullum, who was described as

a stylish, sophisticated African-American woman married to a prominent

dentist, rejected this idea because the rough-hewn Alexander had served

time in prison. Hopkins insisted on bringing Smith, however, and

[80]

apparently that’s how he got his nickname. An Aladdin producer

exclaimed, “If you’re ‘Thunder,’ you must be ‘Lightnin’!” Hopkins, of

course, told other versions of the story.

The late drummer, singer and songwriter Doyle

Bramhall said he was backstage with Hopkins

between sets when the bluesman cum

storyteller asked, “Doyle, do you know how I

got my nickname, ‘Lightnin’? I was sittin’ on

my porch and lightnin’ struck me.” The

awestruck young white musicians who

followed Hopkins and sometimes incurred his

wrath weren’t going to question his tall tales, at

least not to his face. At any rate, back in

Houston, nickname firmly in place, Hopkins continued to perform and to

record at Gold Star Studio, a modest affair just off Telephone Road a few

miles from his home ground. Gold Star was owned and operated by Bill

Quinn, a radio repairman who had expanded into recording. At Gold Star,

Hopkins established his singular method of recording: “Pay me $100 cash,

and I’ll sing you a song. Give me another $100, I’ll sing another.”

Enter a Man Named Mack

Hopkins’ life began to change when he met a transplanted Yankee named

Robert Burton “Mack” McCormick, who had begun writing for jazz

magazines as a teenager in Pittsburgh. Hopkins was stuck in Houston, for

family reasons. He didn’t much like the city, but set out to explore, trying

to find what made it interesting and vital. Working at various times as a

census taker and cabdriver, he soaked up information about the parts of

town where most white people didn’t go. He walked neighborhoods,

asking about local musicians, people who weren’t set on fame and fortune,

but made a living where they lived. As McCormick wrote in the liner

notes for a 1959 Hopkins album The Roots of Lightnin’ Hopkins:

[81]

“Houston’s Third Ward is a tiny kingdom. Sam Lightnin’ Hopkins, is its

prophet and jester. Most of his 47 years he’s wandered a few blocks of

Dowling Street, a cocky, loping figure with a guitar slung across his back

pausing now and then to gather a crowd and coax their coins into his hat.

He is — in the finest sense of the word — a minstrel: a street singing,

improvising song maker born to the vast tradition of the blues. His only

understanding of music is that it be as personal as a hushed conversation.

“His lanky frame bent to the guitar, he virtually dances his songs, posing

with self-delight, at times contorting as if a man in the grip of a strong

purgative. For long introverted moments pain shades his puckered face,

then suddenly he bursts into a blazing gold-toothed grin. A rich moan

settles on the haze of exhaust fumes. A phrase hangs suspensefully [sic] as

he twirls the guitar, bringing it back to position precisely with the beat.

Over the dark sunglasses slipping down his nose, he winks at a friend and

makes up a line for him. He drifts from a prison work song to a mistreated

blues and then slips into a boogie-paced line of patter in which he gaily

mocks the bystanders. Lifting a limp hand in a sardonic command he picks

out a girl in the crowd and tells her, ‘Okay — now twist it.!’ And she

does.”

“Hopkins’ songs speak about railroads and

jails, fickle love and hard times, gaining

immediacy as the lines are newly melded at

each performance. Unpredictably wandering

through a song, Lightnin’ bends the

traditional blues to his purpose, adds his

own spontaneous rhyme, involves his

listeners with impromptu narrative and

asides tossed out with a knowing grimace.

Jeweled guitar phrases heighten the mood as

he formulates the verse to follow.

“The language of these blues is deceptively simple, casual in its honesty,

yet firmly in touch with the realities and primary emotions. In the hands of

the singer, the guitar is not accompaniment but corollary: the joy or pain

[82]

of the song's origin, the passion re-experienced. Caught in the flow the

metrical pattern strains or telescopes to fit the singer’s need.

Autobiographical fact and legendary wisdom merge in one complete

expression. For Lightnin’ it is a total expression. His personality is the

half-spoken blues line ending in a moan or an impish chuckle.”

Mack Productions

McCormick produced several Hopkins albums, including what is probably

his best, Walkin’ This Road by Myself, one of the few that actually have

the feeling of an album, rather than simply a collection of singles. It

included an electrified tune called “Devil Jumped the Black Man,” which

may have opened a window into his soul, and several acoustic numbers,

including a slyly devilish version of the blues standard “Good Mornin’

Little Schoolgirl.”

But the relationship soured, partly because McCormick was trying to

manage Hopkins, a virtually impossible task. In a sense, the men were

distorted mirror images, each driven to do things his own way, and damn

the torpedoes. Through McCormick and others, Hopkins was introduced

to white audiences, which propelled him into a different world, one in

which people sat politely while he played, then applauded at the end of

each song. Initially thrown (“Preacher don’t get no amens in this church”),

the bluesman developed a different act, in which he played the role of

Lightnin’ Hopkins. Gone was the close interaction with the crowds, and

with it much of his inspiration. By his later years, when decades of heavy

daily drinking had dulled his musicianship, Hopkins seemed to have

become a parody of himself.

For many whites, including McCormick, the blues artists

they “discovered” were folk artists who had been

corrupted by modern society, symbolized by the electric

guitar and flashy clothes. This obsession with “pure” folk

music would lead ultimately to Bob Dylan’s legendary

1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival, in which

Big Bill Broonzy

[83]

he appeared with the Paul Butterfield Blues Band and “went electric.” In

one of the many McCormick stories treasured by his friends and admirers,

Mack unplugged the band during a sound check when they wouldn’t stop

playing and vacate the stage to make way for a group of singing convicts

he had brought from Texas.

Another bluesman with rural roots who had gone to the big city, Big Bill

Broonzy, who had played electric guitar as a session man in Chicago for

decades, gladly donned overalls and played an acoustic guitar for adoring

white fans. Others, such as Muddy Waters, refused to play that role. But

Lightnin’ was in survival mode. He’d happily sign an exclusive recording

contract, then cavalierly disregard it. As he once explained when

confronted with this duplicity, “Well, this guy wanted to record me, and I

needed the money.”

McCormick said that when Lightnin’ played the juke joints in Houston,

he’d take a break sitting with the amplifier clamped between his knees,

lest some young hotshot upstage him, as Gatemouth Brown had done to T-

Bone Walker at the Bronze Peacock in 1947.

Hopkins and other blues players, country and city, had come face to face

with what Greenwich Village mainstay Dave Van Ronk called “the great

folk scare,” which produced such “pure folk” musicians as the Kingston

Trio performing songs by Lerner and Loewe. What the black musicians

really thought about all this is anybody’s guess and surely varied with the

individual, though Muddy Waters did once remark that you didn’t have to

be wearing overalls with a whiskey bottle hanging out of the back pocket

to be a blues performer and that you didn’t have to have a white face to be

a gentleman.

At any rate, in 1959 another folklorist, Sam Charters, went to Houston

looking for Hopkins, who wasn’t easy to find. He didn’t have a phone,

much less a manager, despite McCormick’s efforts. After a few days of

hanging around and letting it be known that he wasn’t a bill collector or a

cop, Charters succeeded. Hopkins pulled up beside him at an intersection,

rolled down the window of his car and asked, “Are you lookin’ for me?”

[84]

Hopkins owned two guitars, an electric and an acoustic, both of which he

regularly hocked in a Third Ward pawnshop. The amplified instrument

was his choice in the noisy jukes, where it allowed him to be heard above

the din. Charters insisted on recording him on the acoustic, and did so in a

long afternoon at the rooming house on Hadley Street in the Third Ward

where Hopkins lived. Taking regular pulls from his ever-present liquor

bottle, Hopkins produced powerful, searing blues about laboring in the

Texas sun and jokey songs about women (“She little and she low, she right

down on the ground…you know the way she acts make a rabbit hug a

hound”). The result, a Folkways album titled simply Lightnin’ Hopkins,

came with inserted liner notes describing Hopkins’ career and Charters’

search.

Performing for Whites

Performing for whites, Hopkins could be delightfully risqué. While

performing one of his standards, “Keep on Rubbin’ at That Same Old

Thing,” for a well-dressed crowd, he drew laughter with a perfectly timed

drawl, “That’s just a little song come out of the country.” At other times

he would drunkenly ramble and repeat himself. Perhaps the drinking was a

defense mechanism; he seemed lost and loaded playing a gig at Houston’s

Love Street Light Circus amid flashing strobe lights and stoned hippies

during the wild 1960s. He became a hit on the club and festival circuit,

even taking planes when he had to, though it took him several days and

quite a bit of alcohol to recover from the experience sufficiently to

perform. He developed a network of friends and relatives on both coasts

with whom he could stay and often took his favorite beer (Pearl) and foods

(sardines and crackers) with him. On those jaunts, when he had a night off,

he’d play for black audiences in joints similar to the ones back home,

making up songs, engaging in the ritual insult game called signifying or

playing the dozens, and generally letting his conked hair down.

Burning Bridges

Hopkins eventually broke contact with McCormick and Charters;

apparently the only white man he ever really trusted was Chris Strachwitz,

[85]

a German immigrant with a love for American music. He founded

Arhoolie Records in California, initially to record Hopkins, though he

went on to document a huge variety of American vernacular music.

(McCormick suggested the name as the onomatopoetic rendition of an

African American field holler, one of the building blocks of the blues.)

Strachwitz tracked down Hopkins, who invited him to a juke joint.

When the tall, lanky Strachwitz walked in, Hopkins paused in mid-song to

tell the crowd, “Man come all the way from California just to see po’

Lightnin’.” Strachwitz wasn’t judgmental or pushy, and he didn’t try to

control Hopkins. He loved hanging out, experiencing Hopkins’ warmth

and wit around his own people. If Sam wanted to play an electric guitar,

that was fine. And thus it was that when Hopkins recorded the definitive

version of the song about Tom Moore; he did so on portable equipment

Strachwitz brought to Lightnin’s Fourth Ward apartment. He’d recorded

the song before, calling it Tim Moore’s Farm. The version recorded for

Strachwitz, called “Tom Moore Blues” goes like this:

Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing

You know this black man he did was wrong

Yeah, you know it ain’t but the one thing

You know this black man he did was wrong

(Spoken: Say what was that?)

You know that’s when I moved my wife and family,

I moved ‘em down on Mister Tom Moore’s farm

Yeah, you know there were four Moore brothers: Tom, Clarence, Harry

and Steve

Do you know them four Moore brothers, boy

They’ll give you anything in the world you need.

You may ask Mr. Tom for a favor, he’ll tell you to go see Mr. Steve

[86]

Clarence say: “We ain’t puttin’ down nothing, Lightnin’ until Christmas

eve.”

Yeah, you know they done bought Washington County.

Now them fools done fenced it in.

Yeah, yeah, you know I got a telegram this mornin’

Saying my wife was dead.

Showed it to Mister Moore

He said, “Go ahead, Lightnin’

You know, boy, you got to plow a ridge.”

That white man said, “It’s been rainin’, yes, and I’m way behind

I might let you bury that woman, Sam

One of these ole dinner times.”

I told him, “No, Mr. Moore, whoa,

Somebody’s got to go!”

Yes, and he said, “If you ain’t able to plow, Sam,

Step down there and grab you a hoe.”

(Spoken): And I had to cry. I stepped off to myself and I cried like this

(instrumental passage, punctuated by spoken “Lawd, have mercy!”)

(Spoken): Man, listen to me good.

You know he had a little brown Jersey

(Spoken): I’m talkin’ about a cow, now.

She walk to the fence and low. Low cow!

Whoa, she walk up to the fence and low.

You know, she was lettin’ me know it’s gonna be hell to tell the captain,

Any way you meet that man, Tom Moore.

[87]

Tweaking the title to “Tim Moore” in an earlier version didn’t help. Tom

Moore or one of his hirelings once appeared at a Hopkins gig in Conroe,

north of Houston, to warn him about singing that song, as some surviving

Moores and other white farmers were (and still are) touchy about the

lyrics. But though he apparently had never actually worked for Tom or his

brothers, Hopkins had done his homework, naming them in the intense

version called “Tom Moore Blues.” On that Arhoolie album, called Texas

Bluesman, Hopkins also included a song called “Slavery,” his most direct

statement on racial history, and “Bud Russell Blues,” invoking a legendary

and feared “transfer man” who moved numbers of chained convicts from

place to place, stifling any rebellion with his powerful presence and the

big .45 revolver on his hip.

In his last years, Hopkins often complained of not feeling well and having

trouble eating, probably already suffering from the esophageal cancer that

killed him in early 1982. He had a steady companion in Antoinette

Charles, whom he referred to as his wife but who in fact was married to

another man and had a family home in the Fifth Ward. Hopkins lived his

way, drinking, smoking, gambling, hanging out with acolytes (McCormick

said Hopkins was the first performer he knew who had what would later

be called a posse), driving slowly through the neighborhoods, shouting to

people sitting on their porches. He didn’t, as promised, leave a substantial

sum to his daughter Anna Mae Box, whom he often visited in Crockett.

Some say Charles got him to change his will days before he died. Box and

others contested the will, without success.

Hopkins was a limited but powerful musician. As Austin guitarist Denny

Freeman said, he used the same simple licks in virtually every song, but

there was something magic about his playing. He may have been a more

sophisticated musician than he let on, surprising people in odd moments

with his knowledge of jazz chords, making up lyrics for neighborhood

children, drawing on old country dance tunes such as “Take Me Back,”

which may have been part of a larger repertoire of such tunes he forgot or

abandoned when he became exclusively a blues artist.

[88]

Mack’s Final Years

Mack McCormick spent his last years largely hiding in his house in the

Spring Branch area of north Houston, working on his vast collection,

which he called the Monster, trying to digitize half-century-old field notes

written on a cheap typewriter paper called railroad bond and trying to

write “serious” plays, such as one about an imagined conversation

between Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. He never published his

long-rumored biography of Robert Johnson, the man who, blues lore

would have it, sold his soul to the devil at a lonely Mississippi Delta

crossroads in exchange for an ability to play his unearthly guitar style.

Johnson died at 27, barking like a dog, by some accounts. It was said that

Johnson was poisoned by a jealous husband, but others claim it was the

devil collecting his due. Much of this research, however, appeared in an

article and a book by respected author Peter Guranick.

After McCormick died in November 2015, age 85, friends and family

gathered for a memorial service. It closed with a recording of Lightnin’

Hopkins singing about sitting in a shack on a rainy day, unable to scratch

out of few dollars from the rich East Texas soil. The song closed with one

of Hopkins’ wry spoken asides, “That’s how it seem to me!” Everyone

laughed in one of those perfectly shared moments.

[89]

Chapter Eight

“The circuit was basically the African-American segment of the

entertainment industry during the days of segregation.”

Preston Lauterbach, The Chitlin’ Circuit and the Road to Rock ‘n’

Roll

The Chitlin’ Circuit

efining the Chitlin’ Circuit can be a daunting task, but the online

site Reverb did as good a job as any: “In an era when African

Americans sat at the back of the bus and were banned from

‘Whites Only’ establishments, the so-called Chitlin’ Circuit flourished.

Driven by the entrenched racial segregation of the Jim Crow era, the

circuit gave comics like Redd Foxx and Richard Pryor their first shots at

infamy and it provided playwrights like August Wilson with an engaged

audience. It also gave birth to rock ‘n’ roll music.”

Named after an African-American dish prepared from fried pig intestines,

the Chitlin’ Circuit started off in the 1920s in Indianapolis, but quickly

spread nationwide. To describe all the various jukes that formed the circuit

is a task beyond the scope of this chapter, which will dwell on the jukes of

the Brazos Valley and circuit pubs in Houston, Dallas and Austin, the last-

named being known as the live music capital of Texas. The early circuit

D

[90]

featured mostly local blues singers, but shortly after the end of WWII, a

different kind of sound started to emanate from these small shacks calling

themselves juke joints (they usually had a juke box for music when live

musicians weren’t playing). This new brand of music was later named

“rock ‘n’ roll” by a Pittsburgh-based disk jockey named Alan Freed, or at

least he was the first to widely circulate the term.

“The circuit gave the architects of blues-fueled rock ‘n’ roll their start –

icons like Bo Diddley, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Tina Turner, Jimi

Hendrix and the Isley Brothers – in predominantly southern, black-only

nightclubs. Even Gladys Knight performed in a house band on the circuit

early in her career, playing at what she called ‘roadside joints and honky

tonks’ across the South. No menus. No kitchens. Just a grizzly old guy

selling catfish nuggets, corn fritters or pig ear sandwiches in a corner,”

continued the Reverb article.

Preston Lauterbach, author of the excellent The Chitlin’ Circuit and the

Road to Rock ‘n’ Roll explains that there were no idols or divas on the

circuit. “It was a real place to be a professional musician, to learn, to grow

as a performer, to evolve, to get better, to exchange ideas,” Lauterbach

says. “There was no such thing as a media-made Chitlin’ Circuit star –

there was no Chitlin’ Circuit idol, there was no corporation getting behind

an individual. They had to get out there and kick ass every single night or

they were screwed. It was a real survival-of-the-fittest type situation that

forced the artist to be good, to be competitive, in order to be able to make

a living.”

The Bronze Peacock

While Lauterbach was describing the national circuit scene, the Texas

circuit was also smoking hot during the ‘40s, ‘50s, ‘60s and early ‘70s.

One of the hottest stops of all was the Bronze Peacock in Houston’s Fifth

Ward. “The Bronze Peacock was the culmination of several years of

entertainment development by Don Robey, a Fifth Ward native. Robey

was a ruthless and wily businessman and gambler, who started opening

[91]

night clubs in his neighborhood in the 1930s. In February 1946, he opened

the Bronze Peacock, designed to be the finest upscale club in the Fifth

Ward,” wrote Andrew Dansby in the Houston Chronicle.

Robey was a fascinating character. He was mixed-race, white (possibly

Jewish) and black, and was given to utterances such as, “I’m a white man

and a black man. I’ll outsmart you, then I’ll kick your ass.” He was

ruthless too. He encouraged songwriters to a small flat fee rather than

waiting for royalty payments and often took a writing credit under the

alias “Deadric Malone” in order to get publishing royalties for himself.

This pistol-toting bad-ass grew up in the Fifth Ward, probably the toughest

of Houston’s historic black neighborhoods. It was known as the “Bloody

Fifth” and included an area known as “Pearl Harbor” and a neighborhood

called “Frenchtown,” settled by black emigres from Louisiana and

possibly the birthplace of zydeco, the lively, danceable fusion of white

Cajun music and rhythm and blues. Other than a California sojourn of a

few years, Robey spent his whole life there.

Not only were the Peacock’s premises posh,

but the black entertainers it attracted were at

the top of their games: Louis Jordan, B.B.

King, T-Bone Walker, Clarence Brown, Little

Richard, Joe Turner, Wynonie Harris, Cecil

Grant, Amos Milburn and an endless list of

blues greats. If someone was looking for the

blues played on stage or just a great night out

on the town, the Bronze Peacock was the

place to go. It did not take long for owner Robey to realize that he was not

only sitting on a pot of gold, but that he needed to expand. Robey decided

to go into the music business with his own Peacock label. He eventually

became the owner of Duke Records, which helped develop the careers of

Bobby Bland and many other R&B artists in the ‘50s and ‘60s. A turning

[92]

point in the Bronze Peacock’s history occurred, by accident, at a 1947

dinner event there.

Dansby explains: “The venue became the launching point for blues great

Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, who stepped up on stage in 1947 and

dazzled on a night when T-Bone Walker was too ill to perform. Robey

signed Brown to a record deal, and had him record for the Aladdin label in

Los Angeles, but the recordings went nowhere. Frustrated, Robey decided

to enter the music industry himself. His interests quickly became grander

than being a club owner. Robey started to build a music empire in

Houston, as he realized the financial possibilities in music publishing and

recordings. Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top called him ‘a mover and shaker on

the Houston blues, gospel and R&B scene’.” Robey did not own Aladdin.

As noted above, it was owned by the Mesner Brothers and was based in

Los Angeles. When the brothers were slow in releasing Brown’s records,

Robey launched Peacock.

One law of physics states that whatever goes up must come down. And

that’s what happened to Houston’s hottest blues pub as the new rock ‘n’

roll music began to push the blues into the background. Desegregation in

the ‘60s also meant that blues performers were no longer confined to the

Chitlin’ Circuit and that the more affluent black population was moving to

the suburbs. Meanwhile, the population of Houston began to rise and

competing pubs sprang up like mushrooms after a spring rain. “By the

1970s the industry had changed such that Robey’s corner of the business

had been reduced significantly. He sold what was left of his music

business holdings in 1973. Two years later, he died of a heart attack,”

reported Reverb. The Bronze Peacock later morphed into the Charity

Baptist Church and the pub’s only memorial remains in a room of the

Houston House of Blues named in its honor. The original Bronze Peacock

has been razed, but it is not forgotten.

[93]

The Victory Grill

One of the greatest landmarks along the circuit was the Victory Grill in

Austin Texas, established by Johnny Holmes on Victory over Japan (VJ)

Day in 1945 to honor returning black servicemen who would not be served

at white establishments. A declining fan base and a drop-off in new

customers forced Holmes to close the performance part of the grill in the

mid-1970s, but thankfully it was reopened (with a stage) in 1996. Located

at 1104 E 11th street in Austin, it is still open for great down-home

cooking and even greater music.

Wikipedia explains: “The Victory Grill is one of the last remaining

original Chitlin’ Circuit juke joints. It is

listed on the National Register of

Historic Places, archived by the Texas

Historical Commission, and dubbed a

‘Texas Treasure’ by the statewide

organization Preservation Texas. During

its heyday in the 1950s, most of the

popular national blues, rhythm and blues,

and jazz acts that played Austin

performed at the Victory Grill. Ike & Tina Turner, James Brown, Etta

James, Billie Holiday, Chuck Berry and Janis Joplin were some of the

artists who graced the stage. A resident of the area later quoted, ‘The [11th

]

street was so crowded you could barely walk. It was like New Orleans’.”

African-Americans living in or returning to Austin just after the end of

WWII were largely confined to the area east of I-35, which bisects the city

from north to south. Then came Brown vs the Board of Education

Supreme Court ruling in 1954 that declared segregation unconstitutional.

Many blacks then moved out of the E. 11th Street area, where the Victory

Grill was operating, along with many other blues-featuring establishments,

as they started finding opportunities elsewhere. Conversely, many white

music lovers (especially those attending the University of Texas, began to

[94]

frequent the grill in search hearing authentic blues music and tasting real

soul food.

Once rock started outpacing the blues in popularity in the ‘60s, white

establishments like the Continental Club on Congress Avenue and a host

of other pubs on 6th

Street began stealing the musical spotlight. The

Fabulous Thunderbirds, composed of blues guitarist Jimmie Vaughan,

Kim Wilson, Keith Ferguson, and Mike Buck were big draws there.

Jimmie’s younger brother Stevie Ray, played in a succession of bands,

including the Cobras, before forming his own trio, Double Trouble. Sill

later, Stevie gained national and international fame as a top-notch blues

guitarist before his untimely death in a 1990 helicopter crash. Amidst all

this musical merrymaking in Austin, thankfully, the Victory Grill has

survived and remains one of the nation’s landmark Chitlin’ Circuit sites.

The Dallas Circuit

“Dallas’ black history became realized in the post-Civil War era. After

the war many blacks moved west to the DFW area looking for work in

the train yards of Dallas, Fort Worth, and Denton. Many others built

small rural agricultural communities outside these cities. As the area

began to grow with industry more and more blacks came looking for

opportunities,” says an article in www.blacksindallas.com. “By the

1950s blacks had been ‘redlined’ into certain sections of the city,

mainly South Dallas and Parts of Oak Cliff. But after forced

desegregation during the civil rights era most whites abandoned Oak

Cliff and it became home to a large portion of Black Dallas.”

It’s hard to realize now, even for those of us who lived through it, how

segregated America once was. Out of necessity, African-Americans

created their own society, parallel to, nested within, the larger one. Most

towns had a black business district where African-Americans owned

businesses ranging from stores, cafes and bars to insurance agencies,

churches, funeral homes and lodges. In larger towns, the diversity of

businesses was greater. Two Dallas black business directories published in

the early 20th

century are a trove of information; at one point, Dallas even

[95]

had a black detective agency. For decades, the center of black community

life in Dallas was the Elm Street state headquarters of the Colored Knights

of Pythias, a building designed by black architect William Sidney Pittman,

son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. Chicago had Bronzeville, while

Indianapolis, the birthplace of the Chitlin’ Circuit, had Indiana Avenue.

Dallas has had its fair share of chitlin’ circuit joints, especially in the

area nicknamed Deep Ellum (in the black vernacular) and what was

then called North Dallas. Blind Lemon and Lead Belly met in Dallas

around 1912 and played on the streets of Deep ellum and in juke joints.

T-Bone Walker, who grew up in Dallas and Fort Worth, said he once

served as a “lead boy” for Jefferson. Mississippian Robert Johnson

Made all his records in Texas, in San Antonio and in Dallas.

Later, the action moved to South Dallas, where “Big Bo” Thomas

owned several prosperous clubs. Thomas featured the top entertainers

of the say, including Ike and Tina Turner and Al Greene. Circuit clubs

often featured package that included comedians, singers and dancers, as

well as the main attraction. These shows were tailor-made for black

audiences, especially black women. “These Chitlin Circuit shows are

candy,” says the South Dallas Cultural Center’s Vicki Meek. “People

go to them because they’re sweet and easily digestible. The audience

expends no effort to ‘get’ the show, and there’s always a happy

ending.” She explained that the plays were probably somewhere

between Aesop’s Fables and a blaxploitation television show.

“It’s a question of how we want to feel when we leave

the theater,” she continues. “A lot of what our story is

in this country is painful. And people don’t want to be

reminded of that. So, if they can go and see something

that will make them laugh and forget, they are going

to opt to do it.” Some critics point out that Meek may

have been confusing the Chitlin’ Circuit with black

vaudeville as she uses the word “theater,” which was

not a feature of the circuit. Redd Foxx

[96]

It’s venues like Meek was describing, however, that launched the careers

of such black comedy stars as John Elrod Sanford, better known by his

stage name of Redd Foxx. He started out playing black nightclubs, then

teamed up with Slappy White on the chitlin’ circuit between 1951 and

1955, finally landing his own TV show called “The Redd Foxx Comedy

Hour.” Foxx was also featured in the 1970s’ “Sanford and Son” sitcom,

which was NBC’s answer to CBS’ immensely popular Archie Bunker of

“All in the Family.” Foxx was one of the black comedians practicing “blue

humor,” a style so bawdy it was considered unfit for white audiences. One

lighter example of this type of humor: “The definition of indecent – when

it’s in long, and it’s in hard, and it’s in deep – it’s in decent.” It wasn’t

until the social upheavals of the 1960s that Foxx’s recordings were finally

placed in white sales outlets. The more unleashed Foxx laid the

groundwork for the success of later potty-mouthed black comedians like

Richard Prior and Dave Chapelle, the latter of whom did not have to come

up through the chitlin’ circuit.

Brazos Valley Jukes

The Big Wheel. The juke featured in the movie The Color Purple is

somewhat of a template for the run-down, shack-like ambiance of most

country jukes, which usually featured a jukebox and a dance floor, but

little else. Some, particularly in rural areas, were in homes. One such juke,

located in Washington County near the original capital of Texas called

Washington on the Brazos, lies the Big Wheel. On a back road between

cotton fields, the Big Wheel’s unmistakable landmark is a large pair of

metal wagon wheels in front of the shabby entrance. It is owned and

operated by a salty, foul-mouthed black matron called Mama Nitt.

Inviting me into her living quarters just behind the dance floor, Mama Nitt

filled my ears with nitty-gritty recollections of brighter days spent in Las

Vegas as a singer and, er, entertainer. Her gruff manner and rather scary

appearance veil an inner heart of gold, however. She is quick to help the

needy and take in strangers that would no doubt be turned away by others.

[97]

Despite being well over 80, Mama Nitt also makes it clear that she puts up

with no nonsense. “I’m one mean SOB and I don’t take no shit off

nobody,” she says convincingly. “If you white boys want to see what a

real juke is like, come back here on a Saturday night about 8pm. That’s

about the time the music, dancin’ and cuttin’ starts.”

Lots of local talent played at the Big Wheel. One such black entertainer

was Nat Dove. “In his teens, before he could drive, Dove was playing in

places around the area: Smitty’s, the Black Cat, the Big Wheel, the Green

Lantern. He played with Houston bluesmen Lightnin’ Hopkins and Juke

Boy Bonner. He played at nameless juke joints in houses on the Moore

plantation, Allenfarm, the inspiration for the blues song ‘Tom Moore’s

Farm,’ recorded by both Hopkins and Navasota songster Mance

Lipscomb,” wrote Jay Brakefield in the Bryan-College Station Eagle.

The Green Lantern. When Texas A&M University in College Station

Texas was first built (1876), it featured four gates on its rectangular

layout: north, south, east and west. African-American employees

congregated near the south gate (which no longer exists), so black

entertainment was also located there, particularly the juke-like Green

Lantern along Wellborn Road. The Lantern was not like lower-ranking

country jukes in several ways: it was much cleaner and better-appointed, it

had a dress code, it had better food and drinks, it attracted better

performing talent and it also featured rooms for rent out back (so

customers could stay the night to sober up or just take a short “rest” with

females they had just met in the main entertainment area). Former

customers say that the Green Lantern was a “very classy” joint several

notches above the country jukes, which were nearly always more like

shacks. One such customer remembers top-notch, nationally known acts

like Bobby “Blue” Bland performing at the Green Lantern.

The Green Lantern’s former site is now occupied by a large Methodist

church on Wellborn Road in College Station, one county over from the

Wheel. Nat Dove, who grew up in the Brazos Valley, has lived and played

all over the world, in such disparate places as Paris and Japan. He now

[98]

lives in Bakersfield, California, but occasionally returns home to perform.

He notes, however, that with the demise of the Navasota Blues Festival

and the downsizing of the Bryan Blues Festival that Dove initiated in

2012, the number of venues are shrinking. Like the racial segregation that

fostered it, the Chitlin’ Circuit is fading into history.

It’s also a shame that the Green Lantern is no longer a landmark of

College Station, as the pub added class entertainment to a rather stale

environment, musically speaking. Ironically, the Lantern was located on

the school bus route from Wellborn and Peach Creek to the A&M

Consolidated public elementary school for whites (during segregation).

This author was one small kid riding that bus during the 1950s and I was

warned by my parents to “stay away from that ‘evil’ place.” White adults

(read parents) in those days were horrified by rock ‘n’ roll musicians like

Little Richard and James Brown, but black jukes featuring the blues were

pure evil to them. “No respectable white person should go anywhere near

them” was the prevailing attitude in that day.

Circuit Personalities from Texas

The Texas chitlin’ circuit featured many black performers who got their

starts at Houston’s Bronze Peacock. One such personality was Clarence

“Gatemouth” Brown (1924-2005), who was born in Louisiana, but moved

across the border to Orange, Texas at an early age. His nickname came

from his ear-to-ear smile that became a trademark. As noted earlier,

Gatemouth got his start from owner Robey. By 1961, however, the two

had fallen out over money. An article on Brown in the US edition of The

Guardian explains: “Reportedly, he [Gatemouth] asked for a royalty

statement and Robey pulled a gun on him. In Brown’s version, he

disarmed Robey and beat him up. A more prosaic account of the breakup

would acknowledge that Brown did not have the drawing power of two of

Robey’s other acts, Junior Parker and Bobby ‘Blue’ Bland.”

[99]

During his relationship with Robey,

Gatemouth had recorded such hits as

“My Time is Expensive” and “Okie

Dokie Stomp” on the Peacock label, but

Brown’s career went on the skids after

the confrontation with the Peacock

owner. Brown later claimed he was

“blackballed” by Robey and his career

did indeed nosedive for a decade.

Ironically, Gatemouth’s future fame was secured in Europe in the early

1970s, while performing there with well-known guitarists like Roy Clark.

The veteran circuit player later made a US comeback, culminating in his

Grammy Award-winning “Alright Again!” (1982). Gatemouth was more

versatile than many other blues players of his generation: he could play the

fiddle, piano, harmonica, guitar or mandolin, all while mixing a potent

musical cocktail of the blues, jazz and Cajun styles. “I refuse to be

labelled as a blues player, jazz player, country player,” Brown once said.

“I’m an American musician.” Maybe so, but Gatemouth had that Texas

chitlin’ circuit style written all over him.

Back when Nash Ramblers were still considered “cute,” a Houston-born

blues singer named Amos Milburn (1927-80) was tearing up the chitlin’

circuit, playing jukes anywhere in the U.S., from Myrtle Beach to

Houston. In 1950-51 Billboard named him best artist. Beach Music Hall of

Fame elaborates: “Born one of 13 children in

Houston Texas, he learned music as a 4-year-

old on a rented piano and danced at

Depression-era talent contests for groceries

and beer. Milburn somehow dug out of his

poverty to create a magical blend of cocktail

blues, jump blues and boogie woogie. That

magical blend would later be called R&B.”

After signing on with West Coast-based

Aladdin Records, Milburn produced a series

Gatemouth Brown

Amos Milburn

[100]

of dance hits with raucous lyrics that included “Down the Road a Piece”

and “Chicken Shack Boogie.” Perhaps his biggest hit was recorded in

1953. The song, penned by Rudy Toombs, was “One Scotch, One

Bourbon, One Beer.” It was surprising to no one who knew Amos that the

song was such a great match for his style, because he was a big drinker

when he was not belting out the blues. Milburn also caught the eye of

other black singers, like black crooner Sam Cooke.

“In later years he formed a close performing friendship with Charles

Brown, touring together. They even co-wrote a song, entitled ‘I Want to

Go Home’ which heavily influenced Sam Cooke. Charles Brown, known

to be a fast and loose gambler was the house player at the gangster-owned

Copa Club in Kentucky. Sam Cooke, a fan of Brown would hit the Copa

whenever he was in town. He became a big fan of Brown and Milburn’s

song. He rewrote the lyrics, changed the title to ‘Bring It on Home to

Me’ and asked Brown to accompany him on the piano and backup. Brown

turned him down and Lou Rawls took his place. The song became a

legendary hit,” Beach Music Hall of Fame explained.

Another great blues band from Texas that performed at the Bronze

Peacock a lot was Big Walter [Price] and the Thunderbirds. Walter’s

obituary on the News 92 FM Houston website entitled “Legendary

Houston Blues Singer ‘Big’ Walter Price Dies” says: “Price, who is being

remembered for signature style and vocal delivery was once quoted as

saying: ‘I don’t want to be rich. I want to go to heaven when I die. You

understand where I’m coming from, man? I just want to make a decent

living, have a decent family and treat people like they ought to be treated,

and make sure that they get the same decent life that I would like to live

for myself. That’s the bottom line’.”

Price (1917-2012), who was born in Gonzales (near San Antonio), had a

tough life in his youth picking cotton and later working for the railroad in

Fort Worth. Price was raised by his tyrannical aunt who beat him when he

did not pick enough cotton. Big Walter recorded his first song “Calling

Margie” for the TNT label of San Antonio in 1955, but gained little or no

money from the effort. He later ran away to Houston where he joined his

friend “Gatemouth” Brown, singing at the Bronze Peacock and recording

[101]

on the Peacock label. Price had little education, but learned to write and

record his own songs, such as “Shirley Jean,” which sounded like an early

swamp pop song and “Pack Fair and Square,” that was clearly inspired by

“Flip Flop and Fly.”

It was a short step from the music performed on the

chitlin’ circuit to rock ‘n’ roll. “Rocking,” after all,

was African-American slang for sex: “Rock me,

baby, like my back ain’t got no bone.” As a

Washington Post review of Lauterbach’s book puts

it: “What happened to the music that was nurtured

on the chitlin’ circuit was, of course, what has

happened to black music throughout American

history: Whites discovered it, fell in love with it

and adapted it — ‘covered’ it, to use the music-

business term — to suit their own gifts and tastes.

The great musical wave that brought rock and roll into being in the mid-

’50s certainly profited many black musicians, among them Little Richard,

James Brown, B.B. King and Ray Charles, but the greatest attention and

financial rewards mostly went to whites. After the rise of rock and roll,

black music moved into the mainstream as it never had before, but the

music business then, as now, was owned and operated by whites for

whites.”

That’s the business side of music, but what about the ageless and perhaps

unanswerable question: Can white singers actually sing the blues like

black people? Can they express the emotions that accompanied the black

experience of suffering discrimination at nearly all levels of American

society? Obviously, the chitlin’ circuit was not needed by white

performers because they could take their acts anywhere.

So, is Janis Joplin performing “Ball and Chain” or Eric Burdon singing

“House of the Rising Sun” really approximating the feeling that

accompanies black blues songs? Can white performers truly understand

the humiliation and pain that blacks had to endure? Then again, how can

any writer adequately explain the debut and success of Elvis Presley?

[102]

Chapter Nine

“We all sat around a big oak table reserved for musicians and there was a

microphone and a little amp and someone would sing a song and then pass

the mike to the next person.”

Tary Owens, recalling the beginnings of the Austin Nexus at

Threadgill’s

The Austin Nexus

ho would have ever thought that a nationally and

internationally known white singer of the blues would have

gotten her start in a gas station/beer joint that became a

restaurant/bar? “Threadgill’s was a converted gas station on the

northernmost edge of Austin…the bar’s owner, Kenneth Threadgill, had

been a bootlegger during Prohibition and is said to have acquired the first

beer license in Travis County after its repeal. He was also a Jimmie

Rodgers enthusiast whose jukebox was stocked with old 78s – every last

one a Jimmie Rodgers record,” states the official Janis Joplin website.

“Threadgill had purchased the gas station in the mid-thirties, and by the

mid-forties he was selling soda pop and beer out of some old coolers while

his friends played guitar and fiddle and sang hillbilly blues. By the mid-

W

[103]

fifties a group of local amateur musicians were showing up every week to

play, and Threadgill would pay them with two rounds of free beer. There

was no stage at Threadgill’s. Instead, the performers played right in the

middle of the customers.”

Nearby University of Texas at Austin was a hotbed of liberal thought and

anti-war sentiment during the ’60s and ‘70s opposition movement to the

Vietnam War. Singers such as Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Judy Collins

were adding their voices to the rising

multitude of opponents to “LBJ’s

War.” Many of the clientele coming

to Threadgill’s were “folkies” (lovers

of folk music) opposed to the war. It

was an atmosphere heavily laden with

anti-government and revolutionary

feeling. The answers really were

blowing in the wind during that

period of sweeping social change in

Texas and in the rest of the nation.

Every Wednesday was open mic night and would-be singers would bring

their egos and ambitions to Threadgill’s to try and impress the audiences,

composed mostly of University of Texas students and others seeking new

sounds. It was in the early 1960s that one UT student and artist named

Jack Jackson heard a new performer at the mic, who impressed him

deeply. However, Jackson thought she was one of the weirdest students he

had ever seen. “She was sad, dirty, and unwashed, with a bad complexion

and matted hair. She looked as if she’d been wearing the same clothes for

weeks, even sleeping in them. And she had these coonskin caps, ratty old

things – God knows where she got them.” The gravelly-voiced young lady

said her name was Janis Joplin.

Janis (1943-70) was born and raised in Port Arthur, Texas, then a scruffy

oil refinery town about 90 miles east of Houston. She attended school

[104]

there and was bullied by other students. They “laughed me out of class,

out of town and out of the state,” Janis said later on the Dick Cavett Show.

Other kids at high school would routinely taunt her and call her names like

“pig,” “freak,” “n*gger lover,” or “creep,” reports Wikipedia. Joplin

stated, “I was a misfit. I read, I painted, I thought. I didn’t hate n*ggers.”

While a student at Thomas Jefferson High School, Janis turned to running

around with other students who were considered “weird.” A self-described

misfit, Janis was rumored to have once taken on the entire high school

football team on the 50-yard line of the school football field. One of her

“weird” friends provided her with blues recordings, including the songs of

bluesman Lead Belly. Listening to these blues recordings deeply

influenced the budding young singer.

Myra Friedman’s Buried Alive: Janis Joplin’s

Biography states: “Musically, Janis Joplin and her

friends gravitated toward blues and jazz, admiring

such artists as Lead Belly. Joplin was also inspired

by legendary blues vocalists Bessie Smith, Ma

Rainey and Odetta, an early leading figure in the

folk music movement. The group frequented local

working-class bars in the nearby town of Vinton,

Louisiana. By her senior year of high school,

Joplin had developed a reputation as a ballsy,

tough-talking girl who liked to drink and be

outrageous.”

Janis made no secret of the fact that Texas did not like her and that she felt

the same way about the conservative Lone Star State. “Texas is okay if

you want to settle down and do your own thing quietly, but it’s not for

outrageous people, and I was always outrageous, she was quoted in

Rolling Stone as saying. “In Texas, I was a beatnik, a weirdo. I got treated

very badly in Texas. They don’t treat beatniks too good there.”

[105]

By “Texas” she was really referring to conservative cities in the state, such

as Port Arthur. That’s why she got out of the oil-drenched port city and

made a beeline to Austin, which was much more liberal. While a student

at the University of Texas, however, Joplin was voted “the ugliest boy on

campus,” which hurt the young singer-to-be deeply, scarring her for the

rest of her life. Much of the pain that seeps from the lyrics of her

emotional music can be traced to those bullying incidents. Probably

because of her lingering pain, she turned to drinking heavily and using

hard drugs (heroin), which eventually became her undoing. Joplin partied

as hard as she sang, and it was also rumored that she could match any man

drink per drink until she drank him under the table.

The Austin Nexus Forms

Once Janis became a regular at the Wednesday night open mics at

Threadgill’s, the place started to pack in new music lovers who had heard

about a “star” singing there with a band called the Waller Creek Boys.

Janis met many new friends at the Threadgill’s nexus, including Mance

Lipscomb, from Navasota. Mance later opened for Joplin at several

performances in California, when Janis was the lead singer for Big Brother

and the Holding Company. But Janis had no bigger fan than the owner of

the pub: Kenneth Threadgill, who was also a musician. Heavily influenced

by the yodeling of country singer Jimmie Rodgers and the singing actor Al

Jolson, Threadgill was such a good country singer that Texas

Congressman J.J. Pickle dubbed him “the Father of Austin Country

Music.” Threadgill even sang with Willie Nelson in the movie

“Honeysuckle Rose.”

When Janis first sang at his pub, Kenneth was blown away. The two

singers became instant best friends, a relationship that continued until

Janis overdosed on heroin and died in a California hotel in 1970.

Following her coming-out performance at the Monterey Pop Festival in

1967, Janis Joplin had become a blues-inspired rock legend known

internationally. She was called “the first real female rock superstar,” who

[106]

went on to record four albums, the last of which (Pearl) was released

posthumously in 1970.

Wikipedia sums up her career: “Joplin, highly respected for her

charismatic performing ability, was posthumously inducted into the Rock

and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995. Audiences and critics alike referred to her

stage presence as ‘electric.’ Rolling Stone ranked Joplin number 46 on its

2004 list of the 100 Greatest Artists of All Time and number 28 on its

2008 list of 100 Greatest Singers of All Time. She remains one of the top-

selling musicians in the United States, with Recording Industry

Association of America (RIAA) certifications of 15.5 million albums

sold.”

Janis was also the subject of many film documentaries. One of the best is

the PBS American Masters series film entitled Janis: Little Girl Blue in

2015. “I’m thrilled that Janis Joplin is taking her rightful place in the

series alongside other music icons of the era like Jimi Hendrix and The

Doors,” said Michael Kantor, executive producer of American Masters.

The Whitest Bluesman

Some 26 miles northwest of Port Arthur lies Beaumont, another

conservative Texas city better known for its small-town flavor than for

good music. But Beaumont was the home town of the Winter brothers:

Johnny and Edgar, who both distinguished themselves as top-drawer blues

musicians, especially the former (and older) brother. Johnny Winter

(1944-2014) became known as one of the world’s greatest rock/blues

guitarists, with a world-wide following. A 1968 article in Rolling Stone

put all this into context: “The hottest item outside of Janis Joplin, though,

still remains in Texas. If you can imagine a hundred and thirty-pound

cross-eyed albino with long fleecy hair playing some of the gutsiest fluid

blues guitar you have ever heard, then enter Johnny Winter. At 16,

[Michael] Bloomfield called him the best white blues guitarist he had ever

heard. Now 23, Winter has been out and around for some time. At one

[107]

time he and his identical twin brother, Edgar, had a group called the Black

Plague, Edgar on tenor and at the keyboard.”

Both brothers were born albino and legally blind.

Much like Janis Joplin, they were bullied by their

classmates in school because they were different. In

the autobiographical documentary about Johnny’s

life called Down and Dirty, he refers to this

treatment as “stupid.” Winter later said, “They

didn’t like African-Americans because they were

too black and they didn’t like me because I was too white.” The kids

would hurl insults at Johnny and he would respond by hitting them. “It

was nothing but stupid,” Johnny said. There can be little doubt that the

taunting the brothers had to endure in those days colored the lyrics of their

music in later years.

Brother Edgar echoed his brother’s sentiments in another Rolling Stone

article published in 2014: “Growin’ up in school, I really got the bad end

of the deal. People teased me and I got in a lot of fights. I was a pretty

bluesy kid.” That alienation, he believed, gave him a kinship with the

black blues musicians he idolized. “We both,” he explained, “had a

problem with our skin being the wrong color.”

Somewhat like “wild child” Joplin to the southeast, Johnny and Edgar

were attracted to black music. They would listen to the blues on the local

radio station and would also show up in a local black-only juke called the

“Raven.” It was there, says the documentary, that Johnny ran into B.B.

King, who was surprised that the young white kid asked him (through a

messenger) if he could perform a song there. “Ordinarily, I would have

said no, since I did not know the kid. And then I got to thinking,” King

says in the video. “If I walked into a white pub and asked the same thing

they might reject me just because I was black.” So King accepted, Johnny

played “fantastic” and got a standing ovation. “I never got one,” said

King. “And then I asked him to play more.”

[108]

Before Johnny signed with Columbia Records and became a big star

nationally and internationally, he was known as Johnny “Cool Daddy”

Winter along the Texas Gulf Coast. According to ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons,

Cool Daddy had a string of records that sold well in those early days.

Winter started recording at age 15 with a song by his first band called

Johnny and the Jammers. “School Day Blues” was released on a Houston

label. In 1968, Winter released his first album, The Progressive Blues

Experiment, on Austin’s Sonobeat Records, and the Texas-born bluesman

never looked back after that.

Johnny’s biggest break came in December 1968 when he was invited to

play at a big concert at Fillmore East in New York City, which was

attended by representatives from Columbia Records. They heard Winter

perform B.B. King’s “It’s My Own Fault.” Impressed with Johnny’s

performance, Columbia Records offered Winter $600,000 to sign, the

largest advance ever paid by a record label to that date. The whitest

bluesman accepted on the spot. And Columbia records execs were not the

only ones impressed with Johnny. Janis Joplin met him while they were

both in New York City. They ended up living together for two months

before they both moved on.

Wikipedia sums up the rest of Winter’s career: “Best known for his high-

energy blues-rock albums and live performances in the late 1960s and

1970s, Winter also produced three Grammy Award-winning albums for

blues singer and guitarist Muddy Waters. After his time with Waters,

Winter recorded several Grammy-nominated blues albums. In 1988, he

was inducted into the Blues Foundation Hall of Fame and in 2003, he was

ranked 63rd in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 100 Greatest Guitarists

of All Time.”

And Then There Was Stevie

Perhaps most representative of Austin and its sound was Stevie Ray

Vaughan (1954-90), who helped revitalize the blues rock genre in the

1980s, often playing at Austin’s Continental Club. Blues rock had peaked

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during the ‘60s and ‘70s protests against the Vietnam War, but started

making a comeback in the more hedonistic 1980s. Janis Joplin and Johnny

Winter were known for their high-volume, high-intensity blues music.

Many, if not most, Vaughan fans came to his concerts to hear his guitar

riffs, which are still some of the most notable in the genre’s history.

Vaughan was also a showman on the guitar, often holding his Epiphone

Riviera or Fender Strat behind his head and continuing to play. Guitar

World once commented: “Stevie Ray Vaughan’s guitar tone was as dry as

a San Antonio summer and as sparkling clean as a Dallas debutante.”

As a matter of fact, Stevie was born in Dallas but dropped out of high

school there in order to move to the center of the Texas musical universe:

Austin. There he found a lively blues scene with musicians such as Denny

Freeman and Derek O’Brien and singer Lou Ann Barton. In 1975, another

Port Arthur native, Clifford Antone, opened Antone’s club on Sixth Street,

which was still quite funky in the years before yuppiedom. Antone

regularly brought in classic performers such as Muddy Waters and James

Cotton. Antone died in 2006, but the club still survives.

Accompanying Stevie there was his older

brother Jimmie, also an accomplished blues

guitarist. Interestingly, Stevie’s father had

dropped out of high school to join the US

Navy during WWII. “A shy and insecure

boy, Vaughan was deeply affected by his

childhood experiences. His father struggled

with alcohol abuse, and often terrorized his

family and friends with his bad temper. In

later years, Vaughan recalled that he had been a victim of his father’s

violence. His father died on August 27, 1986, exactly four years before

Vaughan’s own death,” states Wikipedia.

Stevie’s paternal grandfather had been a sharecropper. The Great

Depression years of the 1930s were tough times in which a means to

survival trumped a choice of the vocation one wanted. However, it is

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interesting to note that sharecropping was not a job that fell to blacks only.

Equally interesting is the role of domestic violence in forming the attitudes

that come to the fore after a child escapes the “prison” of his own home.

That concept seems to apply to both black and white families. As one

expert once said, “You can’t really understand what violence is like until

you have been on the receiving end of it.” That also applies to racial

prejudice. “The new racism,” states white comedian Bill Maher, “is

denying that racism still exists.”

After years of struggle, Vaughan finally caught the spotlight at the

Montreux Jazz Festival in 1982 and he was off and running. His first

album called Texas Flood hit the market in the following year, selling half

a million copies. After final conquering his alcohol and drug demons in

1986, Stevie performed with Jeff Beck and Joe Cocker in 1989 and 1990,

respectively. SRV also shared the stage with other blues legends like Eric

Clapton, Buddy Guy, Muddy Waters, and many others. It was Waters who

observed Vaughan’s substance abuse: “Stevie could perhaps be the

greatest guitar player that ever lived, but he won’t live to get 40 years old

if he doesn’t leave that white powder alone.” Muddy missed on the short

side by only four years.

By the mid-1980s, Stevie’s career was climbing into the musical

stratosphere, so to speak. In October 1984, his performance at Carnegie

Hall seemed to signal that he had reached the pinnacle of his career. After

that performance, he was quoted as saying: “We won’t be limited to just

the trio, although that doesn’t mean we’ll stop doing the trio. I’m planning

on doing that too. I ain’t gonna stay in one place. If I do, I’m stupid.” His

brother Jimmie, who joined the band on the second set that night added: “I

was worried the crowd might be a little stiff. Turned out they’re just like

any other beer joint.” After Carnegie Hall, Stevie became an international

sensation. He took his show on the road all over the world: England,

Japan, Australia, the Caribbean, you name it. Texas storms have a

tendency to suddenly rise up furiously out of the flat terrain, but then fade

away just as quickly. And so it was with Stevie’s life and career. They

[111]

both were extinguished on August 27, 1990 when SRV perished in a

helicopter crash just outside East Troy, Wisconsin. Extinguished, but

certainly not forgotten. Legends do not disappear, they are turned into

statues.

Stevie’s influence as a guitarist is hard to calculate since it is so

widespread, nationally and internationally. One current bluesman,

Grammy Award-winning Gary Clark Jr., told Texas Monthly: “He’s a

major influence on myself and so many others. You can still walk up and

down Sixth Street here in Austin and hear a bunch of young guitarists

playing Stevie Ray Vaughan licks. And then the other day, I met a 22-

year-old in Melbourne, Australia, that was hugely influenced by Stevie.

It’s a global thing. He’s one of the most powerful guitarists ever. He

changed the way people play [Fender] Stratocasters. I don’t know of any

young guitar player interested in blues who hasn’t studied his licks and

wanted to play as powerfully and dynamically as him.”

Wikipedia summarizes Stevie’s career as follows: “Vaughan received

several music awards during his lifetime and posthumously. In 1983,

readers of Guitar Player voted him Best New Talent and Best Electric

Blues Guitar Player. In 1984, the Blues Foundation named him Entertainer

of the Year and Blues Instrumentalist of the Year, and in

1987, Performance Magazine honored him with Rhythm and Blues Act of

the Year. He earned six Grammy Awards and ten Austin Music Awards,

and was inducted posthumously into the Blues Hall of Fame in 2000, and

the Musicians Hall of Fame in 2014. Rolling Stone ranked Vaughan as the

twelfth greatest guitarist of all time. In 2015, he was inducted into

the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

[112]

Chapter Ten

“The blues is instilled in every musical cell that floats around your body.”

Nick Cave, Australian singer/songwriter and actor

Public Interest in Blues Rises

he folklore about the Mississippi Delta, about Muddy Waters,

Howlin’ Wolf and Robert Johnson, is etched in the memory of

every blues lover worldwide. Especially compelling is the folk tale

of Robert Johnson selling his soul to the devil at a lonely crossroads in

exchange for an unearthly skill on the guitar. Meanwhile, the immense

popularity of the electrified Chicago blues has tended to obscure Texas

and its blues. There were stylistic differences, to be sure: it’s been said

that Mississippi blues pounds while Texas blues swings. But the story,

really, is much the same. Slaves, many of whom were brought to Texas

from elsewhere in the South before and during the Civil War, sang as they

worked and played, often to the amusement and astonishment of whites.

Some early researchers felt the need to improve on what they heard.

According to Alan Govenar’s monumental Texas Blues, the esteemed

Texas historian Walter Prescott Webb met “a young singer named Floyd

Canada in a Beeville, Texas, pool hall in 1915. Webb wrote that Canada,

T

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with guitar, banjo and harmonica accompaniment, sang a song to the tune

of ‘Dallas Blues’ that ran to a length of eighty stanzas of four lines each,

rhyming in couplets. From what we know about blues today, however, the

song collected by Webb seems absurd. It is likely that Webb, believing the

songs to be incomplete, simply reconstructed the true texts by combining

two AB stanzas to make the quatrains, and pulled together several blues

with the same or similar tunes to generate a text that, if correct, is the

longest blues song ever recorded. In any event, it is clear that Webb

recognized the importance of what he collected. He called the song ‘The

African Iliad’ because he believed that it told the ‘whole story of the

modern Negro….”

“Dallas Blues,” by the way, was the first

published blues, though it had only a tentative

relation to Dallas. It was an instrumental

piece by an Oklahoma City musician named

Hart Wand, who, while practicing his violin,

heard a black porter say, “That gives me the

blues to go back to Dallas.” Wand published

the song himself in 1912 and sold it for 10

cents a copy. That year also saw publication

of “Memphis Blues” by W.C. Handy. It also

marked the first known instance of people,

mostly white (Handy was an unusual

exception) making money from the blues. Handy, a trained musician,

initially was somewhat scornful of the music of his unschooled brethren,

but after seeing a local group pelted with money as they sang a seemingly

endless version of “East St. Louis Blues” in a Mississippi juke joint,

discovered the beauty of the music of his people, as he noted drolly in his

autobiography, Father of the Blues.

Blues Chroniclers

The best-known researchers to document and record the blues were John

and Alan Lomax, the father-and-son team from Texas who wore out cars

[114]

crisscrossing the country starting in the 1930s, recording folk music for

the Library of Congress – everything from cowboy songs to the blues.

John Lomax, in particular, born in 1867, just two years after the end of the

Civil War, was hardly immune to the racism of his time.

In 1933, he and Alan recorded the great African-American musician

Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly, at Angola State Penitentiary in

Louisiana, where he was serving a five- to 10-year term for assault with

intent to kill. After he was released the following year, he and John Lomax

reached an agreement for Lead Belly to serve as his driver and assistant on

his recording trips. Ledbetter tired of this treatment and, no doubt, created

sensational headlines such as “Bad N*gger Makes Good Minstrel” in a

1937 Life magazine spread.

Lead Belly sued Lomax over money and, while living in New York City,

fell in with the lefty folk crowd that included Pete Seeger and Woody

Guthrie. In this company, Lead Belly wrote and recorded one of the few

blues songs to tackle racism head-on, “The Bourgeois Blues” (“The white

folks in Washington, they know how/To call a colored man a n*gger just

to watch him bow”). He wasn’t always above playing the white man-black

man game, even appearing in convict stripes in a short film in which he

pledged his loyalty to John Lomax before their falling out. Lead Belly was

a songster rather than a bluesman, though he sang blues, having learned

much about that form while singing on the streets of Dallas with Blind

Lemon Jefferson, whom he met about 1912, which in retrospect was a

significant year in blues history.

Attitudes Begin Changing

Whites’ attitude about African-Americans’ musical talent was often

fraught due to lingering racism and money. A common attitude among

whites was that blacks’ musical talent was innate and had little or nothing

to do with study or intelligence. Blacks were often portrayed as having

“natural rhythm” and their singing while at work was miscast as evidence

of an inherently sunny nature. As late as 1940, the WPA Guide to Texas

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could proclaim of the fertile Brazos Valley near Hearne, in a sense Texas’

equivalent of the Delta, “Today the Negroes of this region are a carefree

lot, singing in the fields—songs of their pleasures and sorrows, of the

simple life they know.”

When the blues boom began with Mamie

Smith’s recording of “Crazy Blues” in

1920, plenty of whites saw dollar signs. The

Wisconsin Chair Company had begun

manufacturing Victrolas, then making

records. Its biggest star for a few years in

the 1920s was Blind Lemon Jefferson, who

hailed from the small farming community

of Couchman, Texas, in Freestone County,

about 80 miles south of Dallas. He was

born in 1893 and took to music at an early age. He was very independent

and often wandered the roads around his home, walking seven miles to the

booming little town of Kirvin to sing on the street or in front of a

barbershop.

Jefferson was surely aware of a riot that broke out in Kirvin in 1922. After

the murder of a young white woman, though no evidence pointed to a

black killer, local whites burned three young black men alive. A reign of

terror followed in which between 11 and 23 blacks were killed. African-

Americans began an exodus, and the town dried up. How much this and

other, similar racial horrors influenced the music of Jefferson and others is

difficult to ascertain. No one interviewed them to explore their feelings.

In any event, Jefferson also played in other small towns in the area,

including Marlin, where it’s said that on many Saturdays, he sang the

blues on one corner while Blind Willie Johnson growled his religious

songs across the street. Jefferson frequently took the train to Dallas, where

he played on the street, often under a big oak tree at the intersection of

Elm Street and Central Track, outside a record store and shoe-shine stand

owned by a black entrepreneur, R.T. Ashford. Musician Sammy Price

[116]

worked for Ashford and said he alerted the businessman to Jefferson’s

talent. Others question that account as self-promotion on Price’s part.

However, it happened. Ashford, who scouted for Paramount, negotiated a

contract and rode the train to Chicago with Jefferson in 1925 for his first

recording session.

Until his mysterious death in Chicago in late 1929, Jefferson made regular

trips to the Windy City to record at a studio used by Paramount.

Apparently, Jefferson actually received royalties, kept a small apartment

in Chicago and even owned a car and hired a driver. Most other black

performers recorded by Paramount and other labels fared less well. They

recorded in Grafton, Wisconsin, for a flat fee, received no royalties and

returned home to hard work and playing on the front porch and at local

parties and juke joints until they were “rediscovered” during the folk and

blues boom of the 1950s and 1960s.

Johnson’s Texas Recordings

Robert Johnson, the most storied Mississippi bluesman, made all his

records in Texas in 1936 and 1937 before returning home and being

murdered in 1938. Johnson was recorded in a hotel in San Antonio and a

building owned by a movie studio in Dallas, a common arrangement for

black and white musicians at the time. Record companies sent engineers

and producers down South, usually in the cooler months, and put out the

word that they were recording—not just blues, but anything that might

sell, from cowboy songs to Mexican-American music.

The Dallas studio where Johnson recorded had been built for Western

swing pioneer Bob Wills. On one of the days when Johnson made his

Dallas sides, logs show that a wide range of music was recorded, including

that of the Light Crust Doughboys. Founders Wills and Milton Brown had

left the band, but it included Marvin “Smoky” Montgomery, who played

four-string banjo with the Doughboys off and on from 1935 until shortly

before his death in 2000.

[117]

After the resurgence of interest in Johnson, Montgomery often wryly

remarked that if he’d known that black guy with a guitar would become

famous, he’d have paid more attention. Montgomery (real name Marvin

Wetter), had come to Dallas from Iowa and was introduced to the blues by

fellow white musician Dick Reinhart, who often ventured down to Deep

Ellum to sit in with black musicians. The building at 508 Park Avenue

where recordings were made has found its place in history in the last few

years thanks to a renovation by an organization called Encore Park.

The fragile 78-rpm discs

featuring black musicians were

aimed at black audiences in the

South and in the Northern

ghettos where they had fled in

what later was dubbed the Great

Migration. They were called

race records, and “race music”

endured as a commonly

accepted term until the late

1940s, when it was rechristened

rhythm and blues. African-

American newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News

and Dallas Express carried ads for these records drawn and written by

whites, pandering to stereotypical images of blacks as lazy drinkers and

gamblers.

But white musicians such as Reinhart and Montgomery were listening,

too, and the blues was an essential component of Western swing, born in

Fort Worth after Wills migrated down from the Texas Panhandle in 1929.

In Cowtown, he performed in blackface in minstrel shows and formed the

Wills Fiddle Band, which included vocalist Brown and guitarist Herman

Arnspiger. The band played on the radio and was hired by W. Lee

“Pappy” O’Daniel, a flour salesman who later went on to become Texas’

Black newspaper Dallas Express building

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governor and a U.S. senator. O’Daniel was the only man to defeat Lyndon

Johnson in a political race.

The band, renamed the Light Crust Doughboys, became so popular that

virtually every radio in Texas was tuned to its popular daily radio show

(“The Light Crust Doughboys are on the air!”). Wills went on to found the

Texas Playboys, which had its heyday in Tulsa, Oklahoma, before World

War II. Brown led the Musical Brownies until his death in a car crash on

Fort Worth’s infamous Jacksboro Highway in 1936. These and other

country, Western swing and “hot fiddle” bands played everything from

pop standards of the day to the blues. For that matter, away from the

recording studio, where white producers wanted blues because that’s what

was selling, many black musicians played a similarly broad repertoire.

Johnson astonished friends by playing note-perfect versions of songs he

had just heard on the radio.

After his “discovery,” Mance Lipscomb sometimes shocked his white

listeners by performing such standards as “Shine On, Harvest Moon.” It

was all just music to him. Even Gene Autry, early his career, recorded

blues songs as well as “The Ballad of Mother Jones,” a tribute to the fiery

labor organizer. These white performers, unlike those who came along a

generation or two later, made no attempt to “sound black” by roughing up

their voices because the blues fit well into a country format. “Deep Ellum

Blues” was created (stolen, actually) by the Shelton Brothers, white East

Texans who became radio stars in Dallas. They changed the lyrics to an

earlier song, “Georgia Black Bottom,” recorded in 1927 by the Georgia

Crackers. The message was the same: Watch out when you go looking for

some dangerous fun.

Great Depression and Collective Insomnia

The Great Depression crushed the black entertainment industry. Recording

of blues diminished from a flood to a trickle. Theaters and other black

venues closed or were bought out by whites. Tastes in music changed. Old

records gathered dust. Music historian Gayle Dean Wardlow recalled that

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when he knocked on doors in black neighborhoods starting in the 1950s,

looking for old blues records, he once found several being used to edge a

garden.

It was in that decade, often stereotyped as an era of “collective

Eisenhower insomnia,” that young white Americans tired of the insipid

music on the hit parade began to rediscover their country’s trove of raw,

powerful music. One catalyst was the appearance in 1952 of an album

anthology of American folk music assembled by a Greenwich Village

character named Harry Smith. The Folkways Records set included

everything from “Georgia Stomp” by Andrew and Jim Baxter and “Dry

Bones” by Bascom Lamar Lunsford to long-forgotten African-American

gems such as “Old Country Stomp” by the East Texas songster Henry

“Ragtime Texas” Thomas to “John the Revelator” by Blind Willie

Johnson, who accompanied his powerful religious songs with slashing

blues slide guitar.

This music reappeared at the height of the McCarthy witch hunt that

targeted left-wing musicians such as Pete Seeger. Things were changing,

though. In 1954, when Wisconsin Sen. Joe McCarthy’s reign of terror

came to an end, the Supreme Court officially ended school segregation in

Brown vs. Board of Education. Elvis Presley then burst upon the scene

with a revved-up version of “That’s All Right, Mama,” originally written

and recorded by Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup. When Dewey Phillips (no

relation to Sam Phillips, who recorded Presley at Sun Studios in Memphis)

played Presley’s record on his popular “Red, Hot & Blue” radio show, he

was careful to point out that the singer had graduated from Humes High

School—in other words, he was white.

In the 1950s and early 1960s, white kids in America were listening to

black music that scandalized their parents, who called it “the devil’s tool.”

They were tuning in to powerful stations across the Mexican border and

hence free from American governmental regulations. Those hot sounds

could also be found on Nashville’s WLAC; on WVON, “the Voice of the

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Negro,” owned by Chicago blues record moguls Leonard and Phil Chess;

and on Memphis WDIA, “the black spot on your dial.”

White Search for Black Music

Once they were able and old enough to do so, many of these young whites

of the ‘50s and ‘60s went in search of black music. Austin folkies learned

to play the guitar from Lipscomb in Navasota and they brought him to the

state capital to desegregate Threadgill’s, the beer joint where Janis Joplin

and her friends gathered to sing and play. Blues fans listening to old John

Hurt records heard him singing about “Avalon, my hometown” and drove

to the tiny Mississippi community, where they found Hurt, launching a

performing and recording career that lasted until his death in 1966.

English researcher Paul Oliver made regular trips to America, ignoring

warnings about going to “that part of town” and finding performers such

as Dallas’ piano-playing blues master Alex Moore, who recalled the great

days of Deep Ellum in the 1920s.

Mack McCormick, walking black neighborhoods in Houston, looking for

local musicians, found Lightnin’ Hopkins and promoted and recorded the

idiosyncratic musician. Chris Strachwitz, a German immigrant, founded

Arhoolie Records in California to record Hopkins, then branched out into

the entire panoply of American vernacular music. As noted above, when

Sam Charters recorded Hopkins in Houston in 1959, the white researcher

induced the bluesman to accompany himself on acoustic guitar.

Charters’ insistence on the unamplified guitar

illustrates another thread in the tangled skein of

blacks, whites and blues. Acoustic instruments

were viewed as part of a pure folk tradition,

while amplification signaled corruption, selling

out, going commercial, although many musicians

had used amplification for years. Folk music was

identified with Seeger and Guthrie, with fighting

for workers’ rights and riding the rails. This

[121]

controversy came to a head at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, when Bob

Dylan appeared with the electric (and loud) Paul Butterfield Blues Band

and already appalled those who wanted him to stay true to his folk/protest

origins—never mind the fact that he had recorded with electric bands and

had even led a rock band in high school. This controversy may seem silly

now, decades later, but at the time it was quite emotional. Alan Lomax

actually got into a fistfight with Dylan’s abrasive manager, Albert

Grossman.

The music business, of course, has long been rife with exploitation, and

black musicians were especially vulnerable to fast-talking whites. Many,

including the Chess brothers, when asked about royalties, often responded

by offering instead a new car or some fine clothes. Hopkins dispensed

with royalties for the most part and regularly signed and violated exclusive

contracts. Don Robey, the mixed-race record mogul in Houston, proved

that exploitation has no color, offering up-front cash in lieu of royalties

and garnering a share of the publishing royalties by adding one “Deadric

Malone” (pen name) as a co-writer.

Brazos Valley native Nat Dove

remarked in an interview: “The music

business in the United States is the

closest thing to sharecropping I can

think of.” He’s not the first to make

that analogy. Others have compared

Chess Records to a plantation where

musicians who had picked cotton

down south labored for white bosses

for relative chump change, picking

guitars instead of cotton. And yet, in

the complicated world of race and

music, many musicians such as Muddy Waters were quite loyal to the

Chesses, and pursued back royalties only after Leonard Chess was dead

and the company had been sold to GRT.

[122]

And yet genuine friendships formed in this volatile environment. Muddy

Waters called Eric Clapton his “son” and used Johnny Winter to produce

his “comeback” albums in the 1970s. The image of the albino Winter with

Muddy and his dark-skinned musical compatriots is a powerful image, rife

with symbolism. All of which leads us, as T.S. Eliot said, to an

overwhelming question: However much whites love and cherish the blues,

can – and should – they play it?

[123]

Chapter Eleven

“White people can play the blues, but they can’t sing it.”

Muddy Waters, a truly great blues pioneer

Blue-eyed Blues?

n age-old question in the music industry is: Can whites play and

sing the blues with the same intensity and feelings as blacks?

Some say yes and some say no, but it is not an easy question to

answer. Chapter eight focused on three white players and singers from

Texas who at least came very close to matching the original blues sound.

Some would argue that they not only matched the sound, but even

surpassed it. Could a black blues singer really match the intensity of, say,

Janis Joplin’s “Cry, Cry, Baby?” Could Lightnin’ Hopkins out pick Stevie

Ray Vaughan on the guitar? Could anyone, black or white, equal the

finger speed of Johnny Winter on a Gibson Firebird?

Elvis Presley, as some observers have said, became the first “black” singer

to cross the racial divide. Elvis was brought up poor and white, so he knew

the misery of having nothing. But the key to understanding his youth was

that he was not averse to mixing with blacks. He often attended their

churches to listen and study the way the black choirs sang. He applied that

A

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style to his own. “In fact, Elvis didn’t really sound quite like anything that

had come before him, black or white. He sounded, above all, like the

future of American popular music, a future that would see white America

enthusiastically adopt black styles, whether——as Ma Rainey would

surely have pointed out——they got it or not,” stated an essay in

schmoop.com called “Race in Blues Music History.”

That’s really the question isn’t it? White performers don’t necessarily need

to be great players or singers to “get it.” Sometimes timing is far more

important. “If it is merely coincidence that Elvis Presley debuted the same

year [1954] that the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v. Board of Education,

then it is one of the great coincidences of history. The advent of Elvis was

one of the early shots in the musical revolution of rock and roll,

and Brown marked the dawning of the social revolution of the Civil Rights

era. Both landmark events heralded a new era in the interaction between

black and white in America, and both hinted at the tumult that would

arrive with the next decade,” continued the “Race” article quoted above.

And the 1960s was certainly tumultuous enough to produce a tsunami of

“new” musical genres – blues/rock being one of them.

There can be no doubt that white artists

“borrowed” a lot of black blues music and

made it their own. Elvis lifted “Hound Dog”

from black blues singer Big Mama Thornton

and Eric Burdon and the Animals produced a

huge hit, “House of the Rising Sun,” from an

old New Orleans folk song originally recorded

by black bluesman “Texas” Alexander in 1928

(lyrics are different, however). Where the “borrowing” ends and the

original creativity starts is often hard to determine. Obviously, some

blacks get defensive when the issue is raised. “The blues is black man’s

music, and whites diminish it at best or steal it at worst. In any case, they

have no moral right to use it,” argued the late jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason,

who was also a founder of Rolling Stone magazine. On the other hand,

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whites can get just as defensive. They ask, for example, if black R&B

singer Ray Charles had the “moral right” to take a white church hymn and

convert it into the 1954 hit song “I Got a Woman.” And why did Ray

Charles, they might ask, turn to country and Western music at one point in

his career anyway?

Refrigerator Nabbers

One might answer that last question by pointing out that the blues and

country & western were two of the pillars on which rock ‘n’ roll was

built. Blues bassist Willie Dixon once said, “the blues is the roots,

everything else is the fruits.” And one could easily ask why a country

singer like Jimmie Rodgers, a yodeler no less, would sing blues songs too.

The Platters’ bass player, Henry Weinger, didn’t find either question

surprising. He maintained that “Because of our music, white kids ventured

into black areas. They had a sense of fair play long before the civil rights

movement. We were invited into a lot of homes by kids whose fathers

looked at us like we were going to steal the goddamned refrigerator.”

A better question might have been who was stealing what from whom.

Were the Rolling Stones stealing when they named their band after a

Muddy Waters song? Maybe the “stealing” worked both ways. It was

Muddy himself who pointed out that that the Rolling Stones stole his

music but gave him his name. After all, some critics point out, flattery and

high praise often share the same stage. Minstrels never convinced anyone

they were black, but that wasn’t the point anyway. Jefferson Airplane

named their band after Blind Lemon Jefferson, and that was paying high

tribute to a black Texas blues singer who never got the praise, or the

riches, the white band got. One has to ask: was this because Jefferson

Airplane (later Starship) was white or was it because improved technology

had given the white band a better sound? Maybe it was just because their

timing was better?

A June 1999 article in the Independent entitled: “Music: White Men Sing

the Blues” asked the question of whether white bands like the Rolling

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Stones could actually sing the blues like black singers. “Yet, although

black people were not seduced by the Stones’ artificial persona, many

white teenagers were. The group had embraced the rebellious stance of

black blues musicians, prompting Stanley Booth to describe Keith

Richards as ‘the world’s only blue gum white man, as poisonous as a

rattlesnake’. Brian Jones also initially called himself ‘Elmo Lewis’, an

allusion to the blues guitarist Elmore James.”

The same article points out that Mick Jagger studied the dance moves of

the incredibly athletic James Brown in order to perfect his own version of

the funky chicken. He also copied the moves of Ike and Tina Turner, in an

attempt to become a white singer with black moves. By doing so Jagger

succeeded in becoming an international sex symbol, but some observers

remained unimpressed. Ike Turner said that Jagger “could not sing” and

Truman Capote deduced that Jagger’s performances were “about as sexy

as a pissing toad.” Nevertheless, the Rolling Stones are still rocking and

making millions onstage despite being grandfathers and senior citizens.

One has to admire the tenacity of a band that can rock on for more than 50

years! But some music critics have little respect at all for rock ‘n’ roll

music. In the book by David Hatch and Stephen Millward called From

Blues to Rock: An Analytical History of Pop Music, Albert Goldman

asserted: “Rock ‘n’ roll is basically institutionalized adolescence. And the

bottom line of rock ‘n’ roll is that it’s a baby food industry.”

Croaking Bob Dylan

Whether Mick Jagger is a silver-haired adolescent or not, he does not have

a monopoly on yelling and shouting and then calling it “music.” Take folk

rock hero Bob Dylan (real name Robert Zimmerman), for instance. He

admits that he doesn’t sing but “croaks.” Fair enough, but Bob Dylan

never intended to be a singer. He wanted to be a poet, and that’s why he

took the name “Dylan” from the great Welsh poet and writer Dylan

Thomas. American folk rock folklore has it that Bob visited a poetry

publisher when he first traveled in Greenwich Village (then a Bohemian

hangout for beatniks and hippies) in New York City in the early 1960s.

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That publisher was impressed with his poetry, but suggested he sing it

instead because he could only pay $25 for the poem whereas a song could

get more publicity and sell more copies. The poem (song) was “Blowing

in the Wind,” which became an anthem for the civil rights movement and

for protests against the ongoing war in Vietnam. Others dispute the

veracity of this story by arguing that Dylan had been a musician since

childhood and had always intended to sing. His singing was far less

croaky on his early recordings, they point out, though one critic said Dylan

sounded like “a prairie dog caught in a barbed wire fence.”

Bob Dylan had also heard stories of a songster in

Texas named Mance Lipscomb and decided to visit

Navasota to meet Mance in mid-1962, just as Dylan’s

popularity was reaching the take-off stage. In Dylan:

A Biography, author Bob Spitz quotes Dylan as

stating that he had “picked up” songs from Lipscomb.

Spitz suggests this statement may have been false

since Dylan made it before he went to Texas. No

matter, there can be no doubt that Dylan was

influenced by the music of the Texas songster. On the other hand, Mance

claimed he had taught Dylan the song “Baby Let Me Lay It on You,”

although musicologists and others have suggested otherwise. Tim Dunn,

author of The Bob Dylan Copyright Files 1962-2007, states that

Lipscomb’s influence was “either downplayed or not mentioned.” In the

early 1960s (and before), original black singers were rarely given credit

for having influenced a white singer and Mance was not an exception.

A Question of Authenticity

When you get right down to it, the real question concerns cultural

appropriation, some critics say, which means using material from another

culture without giving credit or compensation. Freelance journalist and

editor of BBCNewsbeat Irahman Jones writes (2016) about Elvis Presley’s

cover of “Hound Dog,” previously recorded by black artist Big Mama

Thornton, though it was written by the white team of Leiber and Stoller.

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“With a song like this, it’s easy to see why Elvis often gets levelled with

accusations of appropriating black music. Why is he seen as the father of

rock ’n’ roll music when he didn’t invent it? Why did it take a good old

white boy to popularize a genre which black Americans had been playing

for years, and in the process become one of the richest people on Earth?

It’s clear to see cultural appropriation going on here; Elvis clearly stole

music from the black culture of the time, passed it off as his own, and

hugely profited from it himself.” The song stayed at No. 1 for 11 weeks in

1956, ultimately selling 10 million copies worldwide, making the young

Elvis (then 21) a very wealthy man. Thornton’s original version, recorded

four years earlier, had sold two million copies, though Thornton collected

only $500.

Perhaps many white singers are simply performing the blues and not really

putting black feelings into the music, some critics suggest. But at the very

least, a white performer trying to sing the blues should give recognition to

the original artist and make it plain what the content of the blues song was

originally referring to, as he or she is morally (but perhaps not legally)

supposed to do. However, when a musical genre like the blues suddenly

becomes “hot” legalities often get overlooked, all in the interest of making

as much money as possible before the market cools.

“Remember that, up until relatively recently, white people wouldn’t buy

music performed by Black people, and that Black culture was considered

‘inferior’, ‘strange’, or ‘exotic’. Then white performers repackaged the

Blues for a white audience, and suddenly they were respectable, and the

origins of the Blues as a culture of resistance and the expression of

a particular experience were often erased and denied. And remember that

this happened during or not long after segregation … I would say that was

cultural appropriation,” writes Yvonne Abburow in the online journal

Patheos. By “relatively recently,” Abburow probably meant anytime up

until the 1950s.

Like Abburow, a PhD candidate at the University of Florida, Howell

Evans, argued that there is something smelly about white discourses on

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blues history. In his work The Literature of the Blues and Black Cultural

Studies (2004), Evans wrote: “The literature of the blues is mostly a white

man writing about a black man’s art, and there is more than a taste of

paternalism …what this paternalism masks, this worship of the old

authentic bluesman, is the guilt that white musicians have in ripping it

off.”

Uncle Mac’s Influence

Eric Clapton is arguably the greatest blued-eyed bluesman living today.

As a kid growing up in England, he was mesmerized by a BBC radio

program called “Uncle Mac,” which was aimed at small children. Eric’s

ears really perked up, however, when Uncle Mac occasionally sneaked in

a blues song or two. It was just enough to encourage the young musician-

to-be to pick up a guitar and try to emulate the beautiful, yet strange,

guitar riffs flowing from the radio. To Clapton, it was all the more enticing

since the new rock ‘n’ roll music from America had been banned by the

BBC. From these humble beginnings, Clapton went on to become lead

guitarist for the Yardbirds, Cream and finally as a solo singer/songwriter.

He is the only musician ever inducted into Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame

three times (once for each role).

In his autobiography Clapton, Eric writes that the

bluesman who impressed him the most was Robert

Johnson, the black man who had, according to legend,

sold his soul to the devil to acquire his incredible

abilities on the guitar. “At first the music almost

repelled me, it was so intense, and this man made no

attempt to sugarcoat what he was trying to say, or

play. It was hard-core, more than anything I had ever

heard. After a few listenings I realized that, on some

level, I had found the master, and that following this

man’s example would be my life work,” Clapton wrote. “I tried to copy

Johnson, but his style of simultaneously playing a disjointed bass line on

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the low strings, rhythm on the middle strings, and lead on the treble strings

while singing at the same time was impossible to even imagine.”

Clapton was not the only English guitar player (or singer) to emulate the

black bluesmen of the American South. That “copying” or “borrowing”

became a major element of the British Invasion of the 1960s. If one did

not know better, and closed his or her eyes when hearing Eric Burdon’s

version of the “House of the Rising Sun,” one might think Burdon was

black. On the other hand, maybe Muddy Waters was right after all: white

performers can play the blues but they can’t sing it. Perhaps Muddy had

Eric Clapton in mind when he said that.

However, all that brings us full-circle back to the question of cultural

appropriation. Are we hearing “real blues” from white singers or simply a

blues performance? Is it morally all right for singers or players to

“borrow” an original song without getting permission? Some sources go

even further, arguing that blues music and its performance by white

players and singers is a subtle form of social stratification.

“Once music is not understood in its historical and emotional context, it is

no longer a work of art, but a commodity. I would go one step further and

argue that the historical commoditization of blues perpetuated racial

stratification,” theorizes an article in FYImusic news.com in July 2017.

Extending that argument, could one accurately state that the reason the

blues became so international so quickly is that it really did become a

commodity being sold on the world market? Do young white performers

today sing “Hound Dog” thinking they are paying tribute to Elvis and

know nothing about Big Mama Thornton? What about blues singers in

Australia, Germany or Japan, for example?

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Chapter Twelve

“I can’t sing about picking cotton in Mississippi, but I can sing about my

experiences traveling to Brazil and my deep connections to Palestine.”

Big Harp George (George Bisharat), Palestinian-American blues

singer

Internationalization of the Blues

raditional blues, like Lazarus, was brought back from the dead in

the case of music by the British Invasion of the 1960s and the

rising popularity of protest-style folk music during the same

period. Blues-infused rock groups from England, which were greatly

influenced by the historic blues style, like the Rolling Stones or the

Animals, also brought new energy to an outdated, but still powerful, style.

However, the blues as we once knew it may be dying a second death.

Perhaps the only new trend that can save it (again) is internationalization.

Although they don’t always know the history of the songs they are

singing, blues artists from all over the world are tapping into the blues

style. Blues pubs are popping up from Tokyo to Berlin, from Toronto to

Sao Paulo and beyond.

T

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“One of the things that is really exciting in the blues world right now, here

in the [San Francisco] Bay Area maybe more than anywhere, is the

internationalization of the style,” Big Harp George observes. “One of my

songs is ‘Hey Jaleh,’ which happens to be the name of my Iranian-born

wife. I have had blues musicians tell me I should change that name, that

no one has ever sung a blues song to an Iranian woman.”

Is it really that strange that people from

other cultures and other nations can “get”

the American blues? No matter your

nationality or cultural upbringing, feelings

are feelings and they can be expressed in

song. George was educated in Beirut, but

did not need to work in a cotton field in the

American South to understand where the

blues is coming from.

“I have not picked cotton,” George points out. “I have not worked in a

steel mill. By comparison to many blues musicians, I’ve had a very

privileged life. But that does not mean I can’t tap emotions and contexts

that are consistent with the blues tradition, and that are genuine to my own

experience.”

Today, many American blues performers, black and white, find much of

their work overseas. Dallas’ once-hot blues scene has cooled, and

musicians such as Brian “Hash Brown” Calway, who moved to Dallas

because of the music, play a lot of solo gigs. Calway also supplements his

gig income by conducting music camps at the Shack Up Inn, in which

guests stay in refurbished sharecropper houses on the old Hopson

Plantation in Clarksdale, Mississippi.

Blues in Japan

Japan has been a mecca of musical sorts for blues and jazz players ever

since the US Occupation of Japan (1945-52). American GIs brought their

musical recordings with them, which they introduced to a new Japan

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hungry for anything American. Visiting singers and performers of all

musical stripes found eager audiences in Tokyo, Osaka and other cities in

the country. Some famous singers, such as Julie London, even recorded

some of her albums in Tokyo during the late 1950s and ‘60s. She did live

TV there, as well. For instance, London traveled to Tokyo in May 1964 to

record an hour-long TV special for TBS television.

Rolling Stone magazine reported that B.B. King’s “third 1971

recording, Live in Japan, went unreleased in the U.S. until 1999, and here

you can hear King spread out a little more than on those contemporary live

recordings. Extended, largely instrumental workouts like ‘Niji Baby,’

‘Hikari #88’ and the nine-minute ‘Japanese Boogie,’ showcase a looser

and jammier side of King that’s less frequently documented.”

Live performances by such American

performers were augmented by music in the

plethora of blues or jazz coffee shops, where

thousands of albums lined the walls and strict

silence was requested so that patrons could

hear the music played through huge speakers.

It seems strange, at first glance, for the

Japanese to take to American music like

ducks to water. But some foreign journalists

visiting Japan have come up with

explanations.

“It seems possible to argue that American blues offers a new solution to

the Japanese, an idea they maybe hadn’t encountered before, hadn’t

realized could work as a balm. It’s not merely a reflection of ennui or

despair or confusion, it’s a deep validation of it. It externalizes the internal

in a way that allows for catharsis,” writes Amanda Petrusich in “Feeling

the Tokyo Blues” in The Week magazine.

Japanese cities are composed of bustling clusters of humanity that can

only be believed if one actually has the experience. But for the open-

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minded and adventure-some individual, exploration of these mazes can be

an exciting and fulfilling exercise. Petrusich describes one such thrill

while tramping through the Golden Gai portion of Shinjuku, sometimes

jokingly referred to as Sin-juku, Tokyo’s main entertainment area. It is

usually populated at night by tired Japanese “salarymen” looking to let off

some steam by getting drunk or visiting the many “soaplands” (a cleaned-

up term for a place to buy some sex). She walked into one of the blues

joints in Shinjuku just to see what it was like.

“I wandered into a place called ‘Slow Hand,’ [Eric Clapton’s nickname] in

part because its sign read EVERY DAY I HAVE THE BLUES. Inside, I

surveyed the ephemera: posters for The Blues Brothers, Eric Clapton, the

Butterfield Blues Band, Frank Zappa. A giant, curling portrait of Robert

Johnson. I was the only patron. I ordered a Japanese whiskey, which

arrived in a heavy, cut-crystal glass. The bartender — and lone employee

— set out an ashtray decorated with peace signs and the words HAIGHT-

ASHBURY, and began fixing me an octopus and miso salad, although I

hadn’t asked for anything to eat. We tried to chat, but mostly we mimed,

laughed. He said his favorite piano player was Sunnyland Slim, who was

born in the Delta but moved to Chicago in 1942, part of the Great

Migration of black Southern workers to the industrialized North.”

Local Blues Performers

A small but energetic group of resident blues players, foreign and

Japanese, serve the domestic market for live performances of the blues.

Let’s take the Tokyo circuit, for example. There is the Blue Heat in

Yotsuya, Blues Alley in Meguro, the Jazz Blues Soul Bar in Dogenzaka,

the Club Quattro in Shibuya, the Cotton Club in Yurakucho and, of

course, the very upscale Blue Note (which sometimes has blues bands, but

is mostly for jazz fans) in the Akasaka area. For example, I saw Natalie

Cole perform “Unforgettable” there, along with her father’s video of the

same song that was showing on a large screen behind her.

[135]

This author dealt with many resident players while I was entertainment

committee chairman at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan (FCCJ)

since one of my many jobs there was to hire bands for the weekly

Saturday Night Live event at the club. My best blues players there were

American blues guitarist/singer Steve Gardner, who lives and sings the

blues, and Kaz Minamizawa, who is considered to be one of Japan’s

greatest blues guitarists.

Steve is from Pocahontas, Mississippi where he learned to

sing and play the blues from black performers. After going to

Japan, he lived the blues lifestyle while performing at blues

clubs and at the FCCJ. His style is an authentic version of the

traditional blues (he even plays the rub board at some

performances), as sung and played by the masters of the Delta.

Steve is still singing and playing on the Tokyo circuit at some

of the above-mentioned clubs.

Conversely, Kaz traveled to the United States when he was only 18, to

learn to play and sing the blues. He visited black churches around the

nation for years, perfecting the sound he had heard from black church

choirs. He now performs and plays the blues to Tokyo

audiences in both English and Japanese. Nearly perfect,

accent-less English makes his singing a delight to hear. His

guitar playing is well beyond ordinary, as well. His talents

are so good that he once accompanied American bluesman

and rock pioneer Bo Didley on a blues tour of Australia.

The Blues Down Under

Much as in the case of England, early post-WWII musical trends in

Australia were greatly influenced and nuanced by American traditional

blues artists like Muddy Waters and Lightnin’ Hopkins. Later, rock ‘n’

roll artists became more mainstream, but a handful of bands carried on the

blues tradition down under, with a decidedly local bent. “Oz Blues” was

the result and loyal followers of those groups still turn out for live

Steve Gardner

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performances and for blues festivals. Perhaps the most important of these

groups was (and still is) Chain, a band like the Rolling Stones in that it has

lasted throughout several decades.

“Phil Manning is one of the stalwarts of Australian blues, and a founding

member of one of its most influential bands, Chain. Formed in 1968, the

band brought blues music to Australia’s working class, fostering a

dedicated underground following before breaking into the charts in the

early seventies. Their success was unprecedented at the time, and

established them as an indelible name in Australian Blues, with the

Australian Blues Music Festival giving out ‘Chain’ awards each year in

the band’s honour,” writes Brandon John in an article entitled “How the

Blues Emerged from the Underground to Shape Australian Music” in the

online journal Tone Deaf. The year 2018 marks the 22nd

straight year of

the festival.

“In the mid-to-late sixties, some bands began to call themselves ‘Blues

Bands’,” Phil recalls, “and, while copying American blues acts, made their

attempts to earn a living with what was a very underground movement at

the time. The ‘purist’ acts were few and far between but Foreday Riders

and shortly after Chain are two of the notable ones. With Chain, we

realised that copying American blues was a dead-end street, so we began

writing our own material using the blues form as inspiration, with lyrics

that conveyed our experience. Eventually ‘Oz Blues’ became a term that

stated, well, it’s blues – but in a uniquely Australian way.”

A different kind of Aussie bluesman is C.W.

Stoneking, who specializes in a sub-genre of traditional

American blues called “hokum.” This style of blues

music uses extended analogies or euphemisms to make

sexual innuendoes. For instance, let’s look at a stanza

from a 1937 Lil Johnson recording in hokum style:

“Got out late last night in the rain and sleet,

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Tryin’ to find a butcher to grind my meat,

Yes, I’m lookin’ for a butcher,

He must be long and tall,

If he want to grind my meat,

Cause I’m wild about my meatballs.”

In an article for PRI World entitled “How an Australian Musician Evokes

the Southern Roots of the Blues,” writer Paulus van Horne explains that

the genre is pure entertainment, composed for the vaudeville shows and

rundown theaters home to minstrel shows in the 1920s and 1930s. “Both

black and white musicians sang hokum. It wasn’t only white people

making fun of black people, nor was it black people playing up

stereotypes for a white audience.”

Stoneking, for his part, sings his hokum songs with a strong American

southern accent, an accent specifically associated with African American

residents of turn-of-the-century Mississippi. It is doubtless that Stoneking

is sincere in his appreciation of this music. Yet, there are still obvious

markers of the minstrel roots of his music. References to ‘the jungle’ and

fictionalized voodoo practices abound in his lyrics,” concludes van Horne.

In the United States, the practitioners of political correctness would be

quick to jump all over Stoneking for reviving references to the black-faced

minstrels of days gone by. But C.W. himself is just as quick to respond

saying: “I don’t even think about that when I’m making the song. It’s not

part of my creative process to sift through the multitudes of politics and

just people being bad.” Stoneking’s record label is called “King Hokum.”

[138]

American Blues in Germany and Europe

Germany is also a mecca for American blues, for many of the same

reasons as Japan. It was also occupied by US forces for years after the end

of WWII, and young Germans in the immediate postwar period were also

starved for new forms of music. They were influenced by their American

occupiers, as well. And it’s not only Germany, but many European nations

seem enthralled with American blues, the music and its violent history.

In fact, Germany’s connection with the American blues stretches far back

into history. “Not long after the American Civil War ended, a number of

Black musicians, fleeing the racist climate in the States, where the Ku

Klux Klan had just formed, came to ply their trade in Europe. Here, they

were exoticized but not terrorized,” says Amien Essif in a 2015 article in

Scalawag magazine called “Berlin, the Blues Ambassador, and the

Imagined South.”

Essif is not the only German writer to take note of the influx of black

American bluesmen in the post-Civil War period. “Given the extent of

violence and discrimination experienced by African Americans, it is not

surprising that an astounding and ever-increasing number pursued their

livelihood overseas,” writes historian Rainer E. Lotz, pointing out that in

1896 the German music publication Der Artist counted more than one

hundred Black performers touring the country that year.

“Whatever it is about blues that appeals to Europeans, it’s something deep

and persistent. The fact is, the music is now part of the European

mainstream. Historian Neil A. Wynn in his introduction to the book Cross

the Water Blues: African-American Music in Europe claims that Europe

buys 70 percent of blues records produced worldwide, and a big chunk of

that figure accounts for blues music produced by European artists,” claims

Essif.

It may or may not be ironic, but a lot of European modern-day blues

enthusiasts know the history of the blues, but tend to see the music in

another light. Europe, being that it is multi-cultural and that Europeans

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tend to learn several languages in school, appreciate the blues in a more

positive and open-minded way than many Americans. In fact, Europe sort

of looks at the blues through the idyllic eyes of detachment.

“But then there’s this other vision of the South as a mythic melting pot.

Frankie Jürgensen, lead guitarist for the German band Mhowl, told me he

associated blues music not with segregation but with the multi-cultural

aspect of Southern cities like New Orleans where all the world’s traditions

fused into new forms,” writes Essif.

The American Folk Blues Festival

Something magical happened to the blues scene in Germany in 1962,

when German music producers Lippman and Rau contacted Willie Dixon,

a mainstay of the Chicago blues scene, about setting up a blues festival in

Europe that would bring the great American bluesmen to the Continent.

Many had never been out of the United States, so they leaped at the

opportunity. The event turned out to be a rousing success and gave the

blues a lot of publicity there. It continued annually from 1962 to 1972,

took an eight-year hiatus, returning in 1980. It finally ended in 1985, but

had prompted the establishment of other blues festivals like it in other

European countries. Since its inception coincided with the peak of the

Cold War, the festival had political overtones as well.

“The organizers of the American Folk Blues Festival

made no references to civil rights struggles in the U.S.

until 1965, and then only did so from the safe distance

of an ostentatiously liberated, anti-racist West

Germany. However, conceptualizations of blues as

simple, raw and uninhibited but ultimately non-

threatening were occasionally challenged on and off

stage by the participating musicians. It is important to

acknowledge the local specificity of the blues in both Germanys and the

way in the music has been used in efforts to overcome the Nazi past and,

to a lesser degree, to resist East German authorities while simultaneously

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adhering to colonialist and primitivist traditions,” opined Ulrich Adelt in a

2008 article in the American Quarterly.

Fast forward to 2011, when something truly wondrous happened to the

blues in Europe. “In 2011, various blues organizations from around the

continent founded the European Blues Union and simultaneously created

the annual European Blues Challenge. Regional or national blues

associations, like the Baltic Blues Society and France Blues, hold annual

competitions modeled on the International Blues Challenge held in

Memphis, Tennessee, and send their local winners to the European event.

Sixteen countries competed in the first challenge, a live-music competition

held in Berlin. The fifth competition was held this March [2015] in

Brussels and featured representatives from at least 20 countries,”

explained Essif in the above-quoted article.

Indeed, Germany seems to be the main engine

for blues activity and recording sales in Europe.

It is home to Bear Family Records and its huge

collection of blues recordings and other

paraphernalia concerning the American blues and

other musical genres. Formed in 1975, it is the

gold standard for the reissuing of classic blues

recordings and is a large contributor to the sale of

blues recordings worldwide. The label issues lavishly designed box sets of

blues and other American roots music, with book-length liner notes.

Scalawag quotes black American blues promoter in Germany Ed Davis: “Here’s a German guy singing about ‘down home’ in America, but in

reality ‘down home’ for him would be in Bavaria or someplace, you

know? But that shows the influence the music has on people. Because you

can go anywhere you want in Europe—anywhere—and you’re going to

find a hundred blues bands.”

All this blues activity in Europe, Japan, Australia and many other

countries is encouraging, but is it really enough to save the American

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blues a second time? Since we are more concerned here with the Texas

blues, we must ask if Texas bluesmen like Mance Lipscomb, Lightnin’

Hopkins, “Texas” Alexander, Blind Lemon Jefferson and many others will

be remembered as such. How about the late Janis Joplin, Johnny Winter

and Stevie Ray Vaughan? Will they be remembered as blues performers or

simply as rock ‘n’ rollers who were only influenced by the blues? Also,

will they even be remembered as Texans?

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Chapter Thirteen

“I worry about the future of blues music.”

“Buddy Guy, in an interview with NPR (8/2015)

The Future of the Blues

uddy Guy is perhaps one of the greatest blues guitarists alive

today. He is also a showman on stage who can even play the

guitar with his teeth. But he is worried. “I worry about the future

of blues music whether you are black or white. If they don’t hear it like I

did and listen to it and don’t know about it — you ever been to Louisiana

where they cook all this gumbo?” asked Buddy Guy of his NPR

interviewer. “So if you never tasted it, you wouldn’t love it. That’s what’s

happening with the blues. Now, the young people don’t know nothing

about it unless … Let the young people know where it all started.”

Buddy likes to talk about Louisiana cuisine because he was born and

raised in that state. When he was a child, he was so enamored with blues

music that he tore some wires off the screen door of his home to try and

make his own guitar. His dad got mad because mosquitoes are huge in

Louisiana, Buddy explained.

B

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His love of the blues needs no explaining, but he does it anyway: “Like I

said, the blues comes in all denominations, man. It comes with your

family, with your lover, with your friend. And I had some good friends

until I loaned them a lot of money; then I lost them. I’ve got a piece of

paper in my club, ‘You loan your friend your money, you finna lose your

money and your friend.’ And that’s the blues, sir.”

Buddy was a close friend of Muddy Waters

and visited the master bluesman shortly

before he died in 1983. “We heard he was

sick and he was hiding. He didn’t let us

know he had cancer. We rang him and he

said, ‘Aw, man, I’m fine.” He was profane,

I can’t say what he said. He said, ‘Y’all just

keep playing that em-effing blues and don’t

let that blues die. I’m fine.’ The next couple

days, that’s when I got the call from the media and asked me how did I

feel — he had passed.”

Many black youths today would argue that bluesmen like Muddy Waters

represented the past; they say the traditional blues of the Mississippi Delta

and Texas’ Brazos Valley are “old man’s music.” What is newer and more

exciting, for them, is the musical side of hip hop culture called rap – the

sound from the “hood.” Is it currently popular with such youths? Oh, yes.

In 2017, rap artists raked in the big bucks: Diddy pulled in sales of $130

million followed by Drake with $94 million, according to Forbes

magazine.

Rap Takes Over the Blues?

Let’s not forget, however, that the blues and rap started in very different

places. Instead of emerging from the cotton fields of the South, rap was

[144]

born in the concrete jungles of America, particularly in New York City.

Black youths with pre-Walkman boom boxes on their shoulders and a

microphone in hand created a noisy street version of putting a black

message to music. In that way, but few others, rap and the blues are distant

cousins.

“Hip hop as both a musical genre and a culture was formed during the

1970s when block parties became increasingly popular in New York City,

particularly among African-American youth residing in the Bronx.

However, hip-hop [rap] music did not get officially recorded for the radio

or television to play until 1979, largely due to poverty during hip-hop’s

birth and lack of acceptance outside ghetto neighborhoods,” explains

Wikipedia.

Besides being loud and crude, critics say rap is violent, vile and

misogynistic. For one, they point to gangsta rap groups like Body Count

and their 1992 song “Cop Killer.” Those lyrics are too vile to repeat here.

Ironically, then lead singer Ice-T now plays a cop on television’s “Law

and Order: Special Victim’s Unit.” For another example, these critics look

to best-selling rapper JZ’s (Beyonce’s husband) “99 Problems.” As the

2013 song extended the lyrics from “I got 99 problems and bitch ain’t

one” to “I got 99 problems and bitch ain’t one / She’s all 99 of ‘em; I need

a machine gun.” Eminem, a white rapper who starred in the movie “8

Mile,” has achieved multiplatinum success (220 million records sold

worldwide) with dark tales about murdering the women in his life — from

his ex-wife to his own mother. He is called the “King of Hip Hop.”

Supporters of rap, on the other hand, would argue that the lyrics for some

of the traditional blues songs were just as bad. In “Terraplane Blues,” for

example, the great bluesman Robert Johnson has stripped a woman of her

humanity and likened her to a machine for his sexual use. Consider the

following lines from Louisiana Red’s “Sweet Blood Call”:

[145]

“I have a hard time missing you baby, with my pistol in your mouth

You may be thinkin’ ‘bout goin’ north, but your brains are staying south.”

Rap and the Blues: Cousins?

Traditional bluesmen and today’s rappers would probably agree on at least

one point: both genres attempt to deliver a black message of feeling pain,

sorrow or elation, just in different formats. In both cases, it’s more about

the conveyance of feelings.

“Because, looked at in a lot of ways, this [rap] is the living blues. There is

a direct, obvious line that runs from Robert Johnson or Tampa Red

through Louis Jordan, Muddy Waters, Bo Diddley, on to James Brown,

Kurtis Blow and Ice Cube. And though there are certainly ways in which

Bo or Muddy are more like Mr. Red than like Mr. Cube, in a lot of ways

they would sound more at home in N.W.A. (Niggas with Attitudes) than in

the Hokum Boys. Both had a tough, electric, urban style that pointed the

way towards what has come since,” says folk blues guitarist and music

historian Elijah Wald.

Perhaps the problem with rap is that it’s not the message of the lyrics so

much as the musical beat that delivers it, Wald suggests. “To readers

under thirty, the brilliance of hip-hop production is probably old news, but

for most of us older blues fans, the beats were always a stumbling block.

We could hear that rappers were descended from bluesmen (and, far more

rarely, blueswomen), but the sampled disco tracks and mechanical rhythm

machines had a sterility that seemed like the antithesis of everything we

loved about blues.”

[146]

Masters of Fusion

Maybe the road to the future of the blues was prepared by musicians such

as B.B. King, who had a talent for fusing the blues with other musical

genres, such as jazz, R&B and rock ‘n’ roll. “Riley B. King (1925-2015),

known professionally and otherwise as B.B. King, was an

American blues singer, electric guitarist, songwriter, and record producer.

King introduced a sophisticated style of soloing based on fluid string

bending and shimmering vibrato that influenced many later electric blues

guitarists,” states Wikipedia. Born into a sharecropping family in Itta

Bena, Mississippi, B.B. King became one of the best-known blues

performers of his time, an important consolidator of blues styles, and a

primary model for rock guitarists. His nickname was apt: “King of the

Blues.”

Biography online goes into more detail: “After serving in World War II,

Riley B. King, better known as B.B. King, became a disc jockey in

Memphis, Tennessee, where he was dubbed ‘the Beale Street Blues Boy.’

That nickname was shortened to ‘B.B.’ and the guitarist cut his first record

in 1949. He spent the next several decades recording and touring, playing

more than 300 shows a year. An artist of international renown, King

worked with other musicians from rock, pop and country backgrounds. He

won his 15th Grammy Award in 2009.”

King was the first bluesman to enter the pop mainstream, paving the way

for others to follow. In 1969, B.B. released his biggest hit “The Thrill is

Gone,” featuring a string section. He became the first blues performer to

sing and play in the Soviet Union, in 1979. It did not seem ironic at all that

the King of the Blues passed away in Las Vegas, a mecca for musicians of

all stripes and from around the world.

[147]

Straight from Austin’s 6th

Street

Music lovers from around the world congregate once a year in mid-March

in Austin, Texas for a huge festival (not just music any more, but much

more now) called South by Southwest (SxSW). Started in 1987, SxSW not

only features music but film and lectures as well these days. Over its 10-

day run in 2017, the festival attracted over a million music lovers, and

others. No doubt many came for the premieres of new movies and to catch

a glimpse of a movie star or attend a talk given by some of the many stars

who attended.

Austin is also home to the famous Sixth Street collection of bars and

restaurants where barhoppers may run into Willie Nelson jamming with

friends or k.d. lang just hanging out. Why? Because both artists still record

their music there. Austin is also famous for the television program called

“Austin City Limits,” which premiered in 1975 and can still be seen on

PBS. Austin has indeed earned its monicker: “Live Music Capital of the

World.” Strolling down 6th

street one might also run into Gary Clark, Jr.,

who grew up in Austin, and is now leading the movement to revive the

blues in the Lone Star State and elsewhere.

“I’ve always wanted to play from an earthy,

organic, toes-planted-in-the-soil place, says

guitarist Gary Clark Jr., who is singlehandedly

taking the blues into the future. Influenced by

rock, soul, and hip-hop as much as by the

Mississippi Delta blues, Clark, 28 [now 34],

started performing at age 14 in clubs in his native

Austin, Texas. Alicia Keys has compared him to

Jimi Hendrix and Marvin Gaye. Eric Clapton

invited him to play at his 2010 Crossroads concert. Last February [2011],

Clark performed at the White House with B. B. King, Mick Jagger, Jeff

[148]

Beck, and Buddy Guy for President Obama,” wrote journalist Lisa

Robinson in the December 2012 issue of Vanity Fair magazine.

Past as Prologue

There is no doubt that the blues has become more flexible, making it

easier for performers from around the globe to put their bluesy style into a

recognizable blues form. “For the blues to have a future in which daring

artists bring in new listeners, the establishment needs to share the blues

with people who have a different idea of what it is. The future can be built

on new modes of expression if musicians and fans remember the blues

isn’t merely a form. It’s a feeling. Capture it, as so many artists did in

decades past in so many ways, and you’re playing the blues, whether it’s

with a bottleneck, a big band or a studio full of digital effects,” wrote Jim

Fusilli in an article entitled “Lamenting the Future of the Blues” in the

Wall Street Journal.

Blues purists and non-traditionalists alike agree that the blues as we have

historically known it may be in trouble. “We’re all worrisome about

getting a young audience,” XM Satellite Radio’s Bill Wax said over sweet

tea in Memphis. At the same time, though, he said: “I don’t believe the

blues world looks for the next big thing. We love people who play around

with the form, but we don’t want people to mess with the tradition.”

Children of the Future

Performers from England once before resurrected the traditional American

blues from musical obscurity and a sensational British blues guitarist

named Toby Lee may be leading the way again. In 2018, he’s only 13

years old, but has shown a complete mastery of a Gibson Firebird guitar

and a deep understanding of blues music, despite knowing little about its

history. Lee is considered one of the hottest young guitarists on the

[149]

international scene and the next generation of great guitar heroes. Toby

says he was greatly influenced and inspired by B.B. King. In October

2014, when Toby was only 10 years old, he got the chance to perform with

his hero on stage.

In a March 2018 interview with Gibson.com,

Lee was asked why he sent a get-well video

to B.B. King, that went viral on the Internet.

“I think it was because it was really sad,

because he’s such a great musician, and we

didn’t want anything to happen to him. He

was keeping blues going, so I guess I wanted

to do it to give him a little bit of a boost,

because I love the blues so much and want to

be able to represent it when I’m older. So, sending a message to him was

quite a big deal to me, because he’s one of my heroes,” Toby said. “He’s

one of the greatest blues musicians in the world. He brought blues and jazz

together, and to be honest, he brought people together. He’s just a really

great musician, and he incorporates loads and loads of styles into blues.

He’s a really inspirational guy.” Toby was speaking retroactively as King,

unfortunately, had passed away three years before.

Perhaps the innocent act of a young boy applauding his blues hero is more

symbolic than he ever realized; like another young boy from Hope,

Arkansas who had the joy of shaking hands with his political hero decades

ago, then went on to become President. Perhaps the video was a passing of

the blues torch to the next generation of blues performers, no matter what

their race or nationality happens to be. Maybe Toby himself is an

embodiment of the blues future. There must be a whole lot of kids out

there with skills like Toby Lee, the U.K. Young Blues Artist of the Year

for 2018. Let’s greet them with open arms because blues music is too great

to die another death.

[150]

Chapter Fourteen

“The blues was bleeding the same blood as me.”

B.B. King, blues guitarist, singer and producer

Conclusions

he blues is becoming more and more institutionalized as a musical

genre: 2003 was declared the year of the blues and International

Blues Day falls on August 4th of each year. In other words,

traditional blues may be on the decline, but the musical style will never be

forgotten. “Blues can still be heard in forms close to the earliest folk blues,

showing that it is still in touch with its roots, and within modern jazz and

rock and roll, showing the enormous impact it has had over the last

century,” states the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture. That may be an

understatement, as it was referring to an American reader. But what about

the millions of blues fans around the world who appreciate and try to

replicate the blues pioneers? They might not have ever picked cotton, but

that does not mean they cannot interpret the blues to fit into their own

cultural values. They can also understand what it means to be oppressed,

then find a way to resist by speaking (or singing) the truth to the powers

that be. A greater international appreciation of the American blues

therefore means an extended life for the musical genre.

T

[151]

Ole Miss Professor Adam Gussow, and many other analysts, agree on one

point: Violence was a large part of blues development. “African

Americans’ identity was shaped in an environment whose language,

society and political structure were created by the same people that had

denied them any right or dignity. Although the aesthetic and moral

standards were dictated by dominant white culture, blacks were able to

create their own, which diverged from the existing social order. Blues

music represented the opposing voice that refused to be silenced by

oppression and segregation. But what made the Blues such a powerful and

inspiring event was that it was not meant to be political. It was a raw,

authentic expression of intimate feelings of pain, love, pleasure and anger.

Blues music carried the very essence of humanity. This is where the social

significance of the Blues lies: In the recognition that some basic aspects of

human experience are universal. The Blues expressed this with

unprecedented clarity, honesty and simplicity,” states Susanna Steinfeld in

her 2015-16 thesis The Social Significance of Blues Music.

The oppression that existed on the old Tom Moore farm in the Brazos

Valley of Texas is only one example of widespread mistreatment of black

workers, and black people in general in the days of Jim Crow laws and

thereafter. Vestiges of white on black violence remain, even in the 21st

century: beatings and killings by police of unarmed black men and not

allowing blacks to stay in coffee shops to wait for their friends. Do such

examples recall the dark old days of Jim Crow? Like the blues of old, are

the black rap artists of today voicing the same sort of frustrations? Perhaps

that is why an anti-police attitude is so prevalent in rap songs like “Cop

Killer.” A bigger question to ask: might rap be a young black artist’s

version of the blues? But then how does one explain white rap artists like

Eminem?

And then there is the argument of whether the blues was born in the

Mississippi Delta or in Texas. Most observers believe it was the former,

[152]

but some disagree. “But almost 10 years before Johnson apocryphally sold

his soul at the crossroads — or even recorded a single song — the real

blueprint for modern popular music had been drawn in the state of Texas.

At least, that’s the theory. You can trace 90 per cent of the music that

came after back to three artists,” writes Rick Howe for the online

magazine Earshot, quoting Michael Corcoran, a Texas music historian.

“With Blind Willie Johnson you have the guitar hero, Arizona Dranes was

the crazy piano thumper, and with Washington Phillips you have the

introspective song writer.”

You can almost hear many blues purists, convinced that it was the Delta

that spawned the music, snickering. Maybe Mississippi was the first,

maybe not, but there can be no doubt that Texan Blind Willie Johnson left

a huge imprint on the blues. “The unknown Pentecostal preacher laid

down six tracks for Columbia Records which went on to sell millions of

copies in cover versions by Bob Dylan, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton and

The Grateful Dead, to name a few. To this day, many guitar greats still

consider ‘Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground’ to be the greatest

slide guitar performance ever recorded,” concludes the Earshot article.

In closing, the argument can be made that Texas blues is not being given

its due in the history of blues music, and it should be. It is true that John

Hurt and Muddy Waters get much credit, but Blind Willie Johnson, Blind

Lemon Jefferson and other blues performers from Texas were just as

great, if not greater. How many people realize that Jefferson Airplane

named their band in tribute to a black Texas blues singer? Or that B.B.

King considered Jefferson a major influence? Are Texas-born guitarists

like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Johnny Winter receiving their well-deserved

places as modern equivalents of Johnson? Is there a greater white blues

singer than Texan Janis Joplin? Let’s give credit where credit is due.

[153]

Epilogue: Blues in the Brazos Valley

This book is not a work of musicology on the origin of the Blues in the

Brazos Valley of Texas, but a good look at the history of the valley around

the town of Navasota. I know this history well, since my family arrived in

the area from North Carolina in 1833. They occupied a Mexican land

grant of 6,000 acres to the east of Navasota and in just a few years had

established a prosperous plantation. They had seven slaves. We quickly

became rich on cotton and by 1852 my great-great grandfather had a

fortune of 25,000 gold dollars. All this came to an end in 1865 with

emancipation, though several slaves remained on what was left of the

plantation as workers. They were paid in kind, molasses, cornmeal and

greens once a week.

Stories of slavery times came to me from my mother, who grew up on the

property with my great-grandmother. She alleged that we were not cruel

and that we did not whip the slaves at night. She recounted that the Scots

Irish families nearby did whip at night and that great-grandmother

frequently heard wailing from pain. Of course, emancipation was short-

lived and it was replaced by a system of extreme violence aimed at

keeping the former slaves and their immediate descendants terrified and

docile.

This was a system which my relatives accepted, and indeed they help to

create it. They helped to form the White Man’s Union in the area, which

began by simply murdering opposition figures in the fields as they were

working. They fixed elections in Navasota, and my great-uncle was mayor

for 30 years. During this time, anyone who got out of line was lynched or

simply thrown in to the Navasota River, which feeds the Brazos. Other

family joined the Klan and terrorized White as well as Black residents of

the area.

Growing up, we lived in a split world. We listened to Mantovani and

Lawrence Welk, never to local music. My mother detested Texas country

music. She certainly had heard the Blues, but we never listened to them,

though sometimes there was Black gospel music on the radio. Indeed, my

own exposure to the Blues came in college in California, where they were

[154]

part of the revival of American folk music, and of the invention of singer-

song writers.

Even in the 60’s, conditions in the Brazos Valley were oppressive. Field

workers were paid 25cents an hour for picking cotton and had no income

in the off season. Exchange existed on some plantations where the workers

were paid in scrip, which they could only spend in the company store.

They were held on the land until the 60’s, when the Federal Government

broke up the system.

Of course, everything has changed now and the Blues have gone

mainstream. They are on the NPR stations in the area and the PBS station

in the show Austin City Limits. The city of Navasota claims the to be the

Blues Capital of Texas because of the fame of resident Mance Lipscomb.

Until recently, a festival was held every year in honor of his memory.

This book does quite a good job of pointing out that the widespread

acceptance of the Blues is ironic. Even the families of those who had

plantations and perpetrated violence against the workers who created the

Blues, gather at festivals and enjoy the music.

Michael Kraft

(Dr. Michael Kraft grew up in Bryan and horrified many in the community

by not studying at A&M, instead attending college in California and

ultimately earning a Ph.D in philosophy. Now he spends his time reading

that subject.)

[155]

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About the Author

Glenn D. Davis graduated from Sophia University in Tokyo with an undergraduate

degree in English and a master’s degree in political science. After writing a 300-page

graduation thesis at Sophia called The Right Wing of Japan, he entered the Foreign

Correspondents Club of Japan (in Tokyo) in 1980 and was active on various committees

there for more than 20 years. Returning home to Texas in 2007, after a 40-year career in

Japan, Glenn taught at the prestigious Rice University in Houston (Japanese journalism),

at Texas A&M University in College Station (international relations) and at Blinn

College in Bryan (journalism).

Glenn has penned seven non-fiction (mostly history) books on various subjects and

published more than 500 articles in newspapers and magazines around the globe. His

widely acclaimed first book An Occupation without Troops (Tuttle Publishing Co.,

1996) was republished in Japanese by two different Japanese publishers (Kodansha and

Shinchosha), selling more than 30,000 copies in total. He also wrote How We Lived in

Wellborn before Television (CreateSpace.com, 2010), College Station (Arcadia

Publishing, 2011), Essays from the End of the World: Four Decades in Japan

(CreateSpace.com, 2013), and Oswald: Japanese Threads in the JFK Assassination

Fabric (Kadokawa Shoten, 2016). This book, Blood on the Cotton, is his eighth work.