Edited by Azizi Powell
This post provides an excerpt of Mike Yates's 2011 online article "Blues Jumped A Rabbit". That article provides information and comments about when & where the Blues music genre actually originated.
The portion of that article that is excerpted in this post focuses on a shared pre-Blues music repertoire between Black musicians/singers and and White musicians/singers in the 19th century, particularly in the rural South. Henry Thomas (Ragtime Texas) is one of the singers/musicians who is mentioned in this passage.
The content of this post is presented for historical, folkloric, and cultural purposes.
All copyrights remain with their owners.
Thanks to Mike Yates and all others who are quoted in this post.
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FEATURED ARTICLE EXCERPT: BLUES JUMPED A RABBIT by Mike Yates
From http://www.mustrad.org.uk/articles/blues.htm
[Citations are indicated by numbers within this passage. However, this excerpt is given without citation notes.]
..."W C Handy liked to call himself "the Father of the Blues", but perhaps this was not strictly accurate, because the blues had been born some time before Handy encountered the term. So how do we find out just what it was that the people were singing before Handy began to compose? Well, one way is to examine the recordings that exist of singers who probably picked up some of their repertoire before 1900, and one such singer was Henry Thomas, better known as "Ragtime Tex".
Henry Thomas is believed to have been born in a place called Big Sandy in Texas in 1874. He was a singer who accompanied himself on the guitar and the "quills" - a set of pan-pipes that were carried just under the mouth. During the period 1927 - 29 he recorded a total of twenty-three sides.16. All of Henry Thomas's sides are available on a Yazoo CD Henry Thomas. Complete Recorded Works, 1927 - 1929 (Yazoo 1080/1). I am indebted to Stephen Calt, who wrote the CD's booklet notes, for what is said about Henry Thomas above. 16
Three songs, Arkansas, Honey, Won't You Allow Me One More Chance? and Woodhouse Blues, can probably be traced back to the Minstrel or Vaudeville traditions, while a further eight songs seem to come from an early tradition where verses were shared between both black and white singers. These are John Henry, The Fox and the Hounds, The Little Red Caboose, Run, Mollie Run, Fishing Blues, Old Country Stomp, Charmin' Betsy and Railroadin' Some.
Take, for example, the song Run, Mollie Run which contains verses from a number of songs, including Poor Liza Jane (Roud 825).
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Liza was a gambler, learned me how to steal
Learned me how to deal those cards, to hold that jack a trey
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Music in the kitchen, music in the hall
If you can't come Saturday night, you need not come at all
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Whoa Liza, poor girl
Whoa Liza Jane
Whoa Liza, poor girl
Died on the train
Miss Liza was a gambler, she learned me how to steal
She learned me how to deal those cards, to hold that jack a trey
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
I went down to Huntsville, I did not go to stay
Just got there in the good old time to wear them ball and chain
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Cherry, cherry, cherry like a rose
How I love that pretty yellow gal
God almighty knows
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Poor Liza
Poor Liza Jane
Poor Liza, poor girl
Died on the train
I went down to Huntsville, did not go to stay
Just got there to do old time, to wear them ball and chain
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
Miss Liza was a gambler, she learned me how to steal
She learned me how to deal those cards, a-hold that jack a trey
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
She went down to the bottom (field), did not go to stay
She just got there in the good old time to wear that rollin' ball
Run Mollie run (x3)
Let us have some fun
(According to folklorist Mack McCormick, a dealer who holds out a jack and three seriously reduces his opponent's chances of laying down a sequence in Coon Can or similar card games.)
Henry Thomas also recorded a number of what we might call "Rag Ditties", songs which seem to be the forerunners of blues. These are Red River Blues, Bob McKinney, Don't Ease Me In, Lovin' Babe and Don't Leave Me Here. Lovin' Babe includes the following lines and verses:
Lovin' babe i'm all out and down (x3)
I'm laying close to the ground
Look where the evening sun has gone (x3)
Gone, God knows where
The longest day that ever I seen (x3)
The day Roberta died
Just make me one pallet on your floor
I'll make it so your husband never knows
That eastbound train come and gone (x3)
Gone to come no more.
There are also four songs that could properly be called blues, Cottonfield Blues, Bull Doze Blues, Texas Easy Street Blues and Texas Worried Blues. Looking at Bull Doze Blues we can see that most of the stanzas comprise a single line that is repeated three times, as in the song Poor Boy, a Long, Long Way from Home mentioned above.
I'm going away, babe, and it won't be long
I'm going away and it won't be long
I'm going away and it won't be long
Just as sure as that train leaves out of that Mobile yard
Just as sure as that train leaves out of that Mobile yard
Just as sure as that train leaves out of that Mobile yard
Come shake your hand, tell your papa goodbye
Come shake your hand, tell your papa goodbye
Come shake your hand, tell your papa goodbye
I'm going back to Tennessee
I'm going back to Memphis, Tennessee
I'm going back to Memphis, Tennessee
I'm going where I never get bull-doosed
I'm going where I never get the bull-doosed
I'm going where I never get bull-doosed
If you don't believe I'm sinking
Look what a hole I'm in
If you don't believe I'm sinking
Look what a hole I'm in
If you don't believe I'm sinking
Look what a fool I've been
Oh, my babe, take me back
How in the world …
Lord, take me back.
(This song should be titled Bull Dose Blues, the term being a "Southern colloquialism meaning to bullwhip a black person, or to intimidate through threats of violence".17. Stephen Calt, Barrelhouse Words: A Blues Dialect Dictionary University of Illinois Press, Urban & Chicago, 2009, p.40.17”.
Readers who have got this far may have noticed a slight reticence on my part to go along with the "blues began at the Dockery Plantation, on the lips of Charlie Patton" theory. Here is part of a recorded conversation between two American folklorists, Dick Spottswood and Kip Lornell:
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DS: Lonesome Road Blues I guess is the revisionist title. And I think in the 19th century a lot of those songs were in three quarter time a la Down In The Valley or Birmingham Jail and that they began being in four quarter time, and once you drop the third line of the stanza, instead of singing "Going down the road feeling bad" three times, you only sing it twice. Or Takes a worried man to sing a worried song which you always have to sing that line three times too, right? As soon as you drop that third line you've got something approaching the classic blues stanza.
KL: I also think of those songs as having roots in white culture too.
DS: Sure.
KL: I think there was a very strong shared repertoire in the nineteenth century between blacks and whites, especially in the rural South, and a lot of songs we think of as blues songs now, and certainly that's true of black fiddle and banjo playing, they have common ancestry in both black and white rural traditions.18. For recordings of black musicians playing tunes from a common black/white repertoire, see Black Fiddlers (Document DOCD-5631), Black Banjo Songsters of North Carolina and Virginia (Smithsonian-Folkways SFW 40079, Altamon - Black Stringband Music (Rounder 0238) and Deep River of Song - Black Appalachia. String Bands, Songsters and Hoedowns (Rounder 1823). 18
DS: Yeah, it almost seems as though those two worlds sort of split apart and became the musics that we know them around the twentieth century. Ma Rainey telling John Work that she encountered the blues in southwest Missouri in 1902. She maybe had heard something like that before but clearly she encountered something at that point that she experienced as something entirely new musically.19. As previously mentioned, 1902 was the year when W C Handy started travelling around Mississippi. 19
KL: And I think a lot of that has to do with the Jim Crow laws of the 1890's kind of reinforcing what was once freedom or a semblance of freedom for blacks, all of a sudden the Jim Crow laws come in in the mid 1890s and zap, it's like being back towards slavery again. I think that really signals a sea change in American culture.
DS: Well the desired effect was to push the races apart physically and it certainly had that effect. Maybe that gave black culture the chance to put some flesh on those skeletal blues bones.
KL: It certainly happened right around the turn of the century and that seems to be the main legal and social impetus for that happening at that time.
DS: But even after that blues was always sort of crossing the street of the racial divide. Hart A Wand's Dallas Blues and all the Handy's Memphis Blues and Beale Street Blues of the teens kept pushing those songs back towards white culture again still even with the earliest recordings that we know, which is actually all that we can still hear. Mamie Smith is still singing something that has a distinctively racial component and it's not really until you get to Jimmie Rodgers in 1927, and this time exclusively via phonograph records, that you have somebody deliberately dragging blues back across the racial street again.20. Jimmy Rodger's recordings are available on several reissue CD sets. 20
KL: Yeah, there are a few earlier examples but Jimmie Rodgers was the one who put blues in the American mainstream.
DS: I think you'd have to say Handy and Rodgers both.
KL: And Handy especially through the publishing ... the sheet music starting about 1912, 1913, really helped, for people who could afford sheet music, who were interested in sheet music and I'm willing to guess that was many, many more white people than black people.
In truth, it seems almost impossible to tie the blues down to any one place or person. In 2010 Peter C Muir showed that while the term "blues" became especially popular in the period 1912 - 1920, the term had existed long before these dates.21. Peter C. Muir Long Lost Blues. Popular Blues in America, 1850 - 1920 University of Illinois Press, Urbana & Chicago. 2010.21 And one writer, Max Haynes from Lancaster University, managed to show that many blues singers actually used phrases, lines and even whole songs which had originally come from, of all places, the 19th century British Music Hall.22. Max Haymes's The English Music Hall Connection can be found, in several parts, on: www.earlyblues.com 22”...
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RELATED LINK:
Click http://pancocojams.blogspot.com/2016/09/fishin-blues-and-four-other-pre.html for a pancocojams post that provides information about Henry Thomas ("Ragtime Texas") and showcases "Fishin' Blues" and four other YouTube sound file examples of his music.
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