This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.
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There’s not much to Durhamville, Tennessee, where Sleepy John Estes (born John Adam Estes, January 25, 1899 according to his grave/born John Adams Estes, January 28, 1900 according to his World War I draft card– June 5, 1977) was born and buried, with a life in nearby Brownsville sandwiched between. To get there, you drive narrow, mostly straight, country roads. The speed limit is 50, but that’s only to encourage the locals who could certainly drive faster to watch out for the rare stranger who has to take the roads much slower. For Tennessee, the land is flat, though, being Tennessee, that means it has some gentle rolls to it. It’s mostly farmland, interrupted by wavy lines of trees in the low spots where the creeks lay. I’ve always come into Durhamville from the south, so it’s one farm after another, then a cemetery on the right, more farms, and then the cemeteries surrounding the Elam Baptist Church on the left. Maybe a quarter mile up the road is “downtown” Durhamville, which is four empty wooden buildings at a crossroad—three brick store-ish looking buildings on one side of the street and one wooden building on the other that gives off a kind of post-office-ish vibe. They are obviously no longer safe to enter.
Once tractors were cheaper than sharecroppers, there wasn’t any need for even as little of Durhamville as there was.
But the Elam Baptist Church is still something of a tourist destination, kind of, if I, going out there every year or so to Sleepy John Estes’s grave, count as a tourist. The church you can see from the road sits on a slight rise, surrounded by graves and a fence. This is the old white Baptist church. Down the lane that runs next to the church is another church, the old black Baptist church. According to the people I found at the church, it has a white congregation now. It has a smattering of graves near it. And then, the next lot south, is an enormous cemetery, one that seems to be made up of one-third Esteses, none of whom are Sleepy John. If you’re looking for him, he’s buried next to his sister in a kind of no-man’s land where the three cemeteries come together.
Sleepy John’s grave, taken by itself, isn’t actually that interesting. You can see it on Find-a-Grave and spare yourself the soggy shoes and the bug bites. But standing in the cemetery full of Esteses is totally worth it. For one thing, it’s hard to think of Sleepy John Estes as some isolated lone bluesman when you’re standing among fifty of his family members. Most of the Esteses have Masonic symbols on their graves—even Sleepy John’s sister—so it’s easy enough to imagine that he probably also was a Mason, which, in rural Tennessee in his lifetime would have been part social club, part survival strategy. Mostly, you get the feeling of Sleepy John being a part of a large family in a close-knit community that sat in a place fundamentally rigged against them. Just looking at the dead Baptists, Durhamville must have had three black people for every white person, and yet who got the nice church and the churchyard burial? Not the Esteses.
The most important thing you can see by going to Durhamville, if, for some reason, you actually would want to go there is that, if you are going from Durhamville to Brownsville, perhaps to see the girl you love, with her great, long, curly hair, you do, indeed, take the right-hand road.
Now we’re getting at the interesting thing about Sleepy John Estes. Mr. Hugh Clarke, of “Lawyer Clark Blues,” was a real person in Brownsville. “Vasser Williams” who gets what amounts to the world’s best auto-shop commercial in “Brownsville Blues” was likely Vassar Williamson, who was living in rural Lauderdale County in 1930 with his wife, Morene, and their son, Verlon. (I base this both on the fact that this is the only Vassar living in Lauderdale County and that Sleepy John drops the last syllable in a lot of words in this song—Durhamville gets shortened to Durham, Brownsville to Browns. No reason “Williamson’s shop” couldn’t get truncated to Williams’ shop.) I couldn’t nail down a Martha Hardin, but there are a couple of possible women (A Martha Ewell, whose father was Jim Hardin died in Dyer, just northeast of Brownsville, in 1956 at the age of forty. Right name, right general area, right general age. And there are a couple of older Martha Hardins buried south of Brownsville, possibilities if we imagine John taking up with 50 year old women when he was a young man. And that’s assuming her last name isn’t Harding or, considering John’s mumble, possibly Hardeman—both last names you would have found in Brownsville or the surrounding county before the song was recorded.). The streets Sleepy John refers to are real streets you can drive down in Brownsville—Wilson and Bradford.
Now, I’m trying to walk a tricky line here because I, personally, find the backstories of songs in most cases rather tedious. I don’t care how many songs Pattie Boyd inspired, for instance. But I don’t think that what Sleepy John was up to was quite that simple. Steve Leggett over at All Music calls Brownsville Sleepy John’s Spoon River, as in Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, and I think this gets as close to Sleepy John’s artistic project as I’ve seen anyone bother to come.
Sleepy John wasn’t attempting to literally or figuratively seduce anyone by writing a song about them (at least, not in the way George Harrison or Eric Clampton were Boyd). He was, I think, transforming the ordinary people and places that surrounded him into something aestheticly meaningful. He wasn’t writing a song for, say, Hugh Clarke that would curry favor with him (or at least not that alone). He was trying to do something to Clarke through that song, to make Clarke valuable to Estes’ audience not because he was a good lawyer, but because the song about him was good.
Sleepy John was what we might these days call “adding value” to the place he lived with and the people he lived among by making them subjects of song. Think about how powerful it is, even though we all know it’s corny, when we go to a concert and the performer says, “Hello, [whatever place the performer is in tonight]!” That feeling of “Where we live matters to this artist we like!” Now imagine what that must have been like to have Sleepy John singing songs about the people in these little unknown towns, being able to go to record shops, or at that time, probably furniture stores, and finding records with people you knew mentioned on them.
I just finished Steve Johnson’s chapbook, Obscure Early Bluesmen (Who Never Existed), which, in a brief nineteen pages manages to mercilessly skewer every single thing about white people and our long, problematic love of old, obscure blues. One of the jokes of the book is that almost all of these fake bluesmen, of course, recorded a version of Stagger Lee. It’s just expected—of course every blues singer, even those that don’t exist, would have a version of Stagger Lee.
But “Stag” Lee Shelton was a real person. Billy Lyons was a real person. And we still sing about them. We don’t know who first wrote that song, but that song made those men immortal, after a fashion.
You listen to enough Sleepy John Estes and you start to suspect that he is deliberately up to something similar. He is, by god, going to write songs so catchy about these people and this place that they live on and become mythological. They are real and more than real.
I debated a long time about whether Sleepy John Estes was obscure enough to write about. Take three seconds to type “Sleepy John Estes” into Google and you’ll be able to read about what an enormous influence he was on Bob Dylan, how Ralph Peer recognized his talent, how Led Zeppelin “borrowed” heavily from him.
Sleepy John hasn’t been lost or forgotten—even if the people in the church near where he rests have no idea who he is—and he’s likely someone you’ve heard of. His music, even the old stuff, isn’t that hard to get into because he had such impact on the gods of 20th century popular music. You’ll recognize songs and phrases and vocal approaches, even if you think you don’t know him. And a lot of his songs are just flat-out fun. Try “Milk Cow Blues” which somehow sounds like a person wound three music boxes all playing the same song and set them off to playing that song at slightly different times. There’s no reason the song shouldn’t shake apart into nonsense, but somehow it doesn’t. It’s genius, awesome, and makes clear his jug band roots.
But I think what’s been obscured about him is that he wasn’t just the musical progenitor of songs we love. He had an artistic drive, an aesthetic sensibility. He was up to something in that place with those people. He wasn’t just writing about them—his songs aren’t three-minute documentaries. He was trying to do something to and for them.
But, I’ll admit, I’m struggling to even find the words to talk about what that something is. And I want to get at it. To put it into words that would make you appreciate what it’s like to stand next to someone’s grave, to see his people in the dirt there with him, and to listen to those songs and hear him singing about them like they mattered, not just to him, but to the larger world.
So, this is the thing about Sleepy John Estes: he had a goal and it wasn’t just to write the best songs he could or to be the best guitarist he could, though those are fine goals. He knew music could do something and he wanted it to do that something for and to the people he knew.
And when you stand in those places, among those familiar names, looking at how the real world maps onto Sleepy John’s artistic world, it feels like he may have done it, may have brought those two realms close enough together that some of his ordinary world was able to escape and live on.
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Editor’s Note: One of Betsy’s comments on this thread has been turned into a follow up post with youtube examples here.
This is great. It comments on the theme nicely it seems like; Estes seems to have been deliberately creating the no one who would hear him, in writing about and in some sense directing his music to a local audience. (Though you could say he’s also trying to make no one someone, in writing about where he’s from for an audience that at least potentially includes people like Led Zeppelin.)
I wish someone would write a biography of Estes, because there’s a lot of stuff to know about him and I feel like I barely know enough about him to speak articulately.
But what strikes me about him is that he seems to have had a really democratic, but pragmatic attitude toward his art. He traveled some, he recorded some, he lived long enough to hear how he’d influenced popular music. And, like most bluesmen, he didn’t die rich.
But he seems to not have thought life in Memphis was more important or more real than life in Brownsville. You don’t get a sense that he thought Ralph Peer was more important in his life than Clarke, though he surely appreciated both men.
That, I think, is what I respond to in his music, this sense that the people he sings about are as important as the people other people sing about, the places he sings about as worthy of the honor as the places you sing about.
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“Sleepy John was what we might these days call “adding value” to the place he lived with and the people he lived among by making them subjects of song. Think about how powerful it is, even though we all know it’s corny, when we go to a concert and the performer says, “Hello, [whatever place the performer is in tonight]!” That feeling of “Where we live matters to this artist we like!” Now imagine what that must have been like to have Sleepy John singing songs about the people in these little unknown towns, being able to go to record shops, or at that time, probably furniture stores, and finding records with people you knew mentioned on them.” I really appreciate this. In my own work, I’m really interested in the tension between the local and the dispersed. In the midst of the Great Migration, blues singers played such a critical role in both mapping a black public (home and away, here and gone) as well as forging those affective links between those who migrated and those who were left behind. Thanks for your piece!
That’s an interesting point about migration, Paige. I think that’s the case with a lot of country as well; it’s insistent on the importance/authenticity of local community, but the insistence is caused in part by the recognition/reality of diaspora/migration. You don’t need to make a place if you’re sure the place will still be there tomorrow.
To speak of another genre, wasn’t jazz much shaped by the Great Migration of African-Americans to the north fleeing Jim Crow?
Yes. Exactly. But I also want to say that it’s also always more complicated than that.
We have a cultural myth that the blues originated with one man and a guitar in rural Mississippi, men who were isolated from the rest of popular culture. But early commercial success in that genre was mostly female–Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, etc.–none of whom were from the Delta. And even in the Delta, Muddy Waters, for instance, had a band and they could play everything on the jukeboxes in Clarksville–songs popular among white and black audiences. Waters was in a minstrel show for a while and had been to Memphis. Robert Johnson played as far from Mississippi as New York.
To speak to Paige’s point, I think one of the reasons blues artists (or, frankly, everyone making “race records”) can do the kind of forging and mapping she’s talking about is that so many of them have already been navigating that landscape. They do go away and come back and may hope to be able to leave and stay gone.
This is wonderful, Betsy – a genuinely moving meditation on how music can recreate our sense of place by beings its own place.
Question: do you have any sense of what early recordings Estes himself might have been listening to – either as discs or on the radio – as he set about “adding value” to the immediate and local? I ask because your essay has got me thinking about the paradoxical way in which the act of recording, by itself, can both capture and transcend the local. Was Estes hearing something out there in the magical place of recorded music that he then decided to bring on home, as it were … ?
And in the context, do you know Elijah Wald’s great book, Escaping the Delta? A strong challenge to that myth of creation you mention …
Ben, his first record comes out in 1929. There’s not much recorded music before he gets his start. Certainly, there wasn’t recorded music on the radio at the time. So, his influences would all have been live musicians.
I wish someone would do a good biography of him while people who remember him are still alive. But, it’s interesting, just in the little bit we do know of him, how linked in he was with other West Tennessee black musicians. He played with Yank Rachell (who wrote “She Caught the Katy” among other things) from Brownsville and Hammie Nixon, also from Brownsville, who came straight out of jug bands and who recorded with a lot of folks in Memphis, as well as Son Bonds, who was hooked in with Sonny Boy Williamson out of Jackson.
So, I have a guess at an answer to who’s influencing him, just based on how far apart towns are. But let me be clear that I am purely guessing. Rural West Tennessee has a large African American population. Like the Mississippi Delta, it’s cotton-growing country. Before the Great Migration, the population in the country would have been predominately African-American. My guess is that there was a small chitlin circuit that ran out of Memphis, over to Jackson and back–again, my guess, is that performers went up 51, first night in Millington, second in Covington, third in Ripley, fourth in Dyersburg, etc. with a stop in Brownsville at some point. My guess is that West Tennessee musicians would take to the circuit when they could and that’s how they were all meeting each other. Because Brownsville is near Memphis now–with a car–but it certainly wasn’t then. There had to be some mechanism that was bringing these guys into contact with each other.
I also suspect in a song like “Milk Cow Blues” that we’re hearing the heavy influence of black minstrel show music (obviously, music from the larger chitlin circuit). Two things make me think that. We know that performers at the minstrel shows were, obviously, not amplified but needed to be heard above a crowd and we know that every minstrel show featured a marching band. If you listen to the song with those two things in mind, a few things jump out–you could march to that song, the guitar rolls in the song could be nods to the drum rolls you would have heard in a marching band, and you can bellow the lyrics (in fact, Robert Plant regularly did). Estes isn’t bellowing on the record, but, thanks to Plant, it’s not hard to imagine how you could project “Hey, sweet mama, let me be your kid” over the noise of a crowd.
So, that’s my guess–that his influences were the live performers he saw there in Brownsville, but that he probably had the ability to see a lot more good musicians coming through Brownsville then than we realize.
Thanks – that is fascinating – it takes some real imaginative work to reconstruct a world where influence is so local.
But I’m not sure if I’d agree there’s not much recorded music before 1929 … The great god Wiki tells me that the first recording to sell over a million copies was by Caruso and released in 1902. And I know Mamie Smith’s Crazy Blues was released in 1920 and also sold a million copies – and is usually credited for inaugurating a “race music” boom in the 1920s. So there had been quite a number of recordings in a number of genres that had sold in the millions by 1929. Of course, “not much” is a very relative thing, and what any of that means to Sleepy John, of course, I don’t know. Quite possibly nothing, as you suggest.
My sense (which could be entirely wrong) is that guitar blues took off in 1929 or thereabouts. Estes could well have been listening to Ma Rainey and such on record though.
And I’m pretty sure Papa Charlie Jackson was recording earlier…
I turned one of Betsy’s comments into a post with youtube examples here.
Noah, your comments are exactly why I wish someone would do a good biography of him. My feeling is that, when his family was out in Durhamville, they absolutely would not have had a record player or access to records. And that, even when the family moved to Brownsville, they probably weren’t doing well enough to afford a record player.
But I don’t really know. Obviously, if Estes thought it seemed like a cool idea to make a record, he was familiar with records and what having a hit record might mean for a musician.
Knowing the kinds of things Gordon and Nemerov were able to find in Clarksville when they were working on the John Work book (full disclosure, I was the acquiring editor on LOST DELTA FOUND), it doesn’t seem to me out of the realm of possibility that a person might be able to track down what records were actually stocked in stores in Brownsville during the time before Estes started recording himself.
But here’s a curious thing. Just something to keep in mind when we’re talking about Estes’s recorded influences.
This is a typical version of “Milk Cow Blues,” Kokomo Arnold’s the artist. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B944jMtu6Qc
If you know any of the other versions of “Milk Cow Blues” done over the years, you can recognize them in this song. Except for Estes’. His “Milk Cow Blues” is not even remotely the same song.
I can’t help but wonder if Estes, when he was playing around Brownsville, knew there was a popular song called “Milk Cow Blues” and knew his audience knew there was a popular song called “Milk Cow Blues,” and also was aware that none of them knew what it sounded like, because it wasn’t available in town. So, as long as his “Milk Cow Blues” was good, as long as it sounded like a hit song, no one would ever think to question whether it was the right song. Then, when it came time to record, he had this song he’d worked up which was good enough to pass as a hit. Of course he’d record it. Hence the same name, but not the same song.
I don’t know, obviously, but it’s important to remember that an artist having a record doesn’t mean that record was available to buy in Brownsville or, even if it was, that Estes could have afforded it.
But, again, I truly believe these are the kinds of things someone could find out, even now. It’s not too late.
Have you thought of writing a biography yourself?