Tag Archives: Blues

Who Did You Meet On That Road?

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This is part of a roundtable on The Best Band No One Has Ever Heard Of. The index to the roundtable is here.

Editor’s Note: Betsy Phillips had a comment on her post this week in which she speculated on Sleepy John Estes’ influences. I thought I’d reprint it here, along with examples.
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[Sleepy John Estes’] 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.

Going to Brownsville? Take that Right Hand Road.

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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.

Prove It On Me Blues

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Went out last night, had a great big fight
Everything seemed to go on wrong
I looked up, to my surprise
The gal I was with was gone.

Where she went, I don’t know
I mean to follow everywhere she goes;
Folks say I’m crooked. I didn’t know where she took it
I want the whole world to know.

They say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me;
Went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
They must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.

It’s true I wear a collar and a tie,
Makes the wind blow all the while
Don’t you say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
You sure got to prove it on me.

Say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.

I went out last night with a crowd of my friends,
It must’ve been women, ‘cause I don’t like no men.
Wear my clothes just like a fan
Talk to the gals just like any old man

Cause they say I do it, ain’t nobody caught me
Sure got to prove it on me.
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This is part of the Gay Utopia project, originally published in 2007. A map of the Gay Utopia is here.

You’re No Lightnin’ Hopkins

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This first ran on Splice Today.
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Years ago, when I was thoroughly obsessed with country, I was chatting with a similarly besmitten friend about the music’s roots. “Thank god for the blues,” he said. “If country had stayed just Irish music, I wouldn’t be able to stand the stuff.”

I think my friend probably spoke for a lot of roots music enthusiasts there. Not that Irish music is especially loathed. It’s more just ignored, or at most nodded to. Blues is earthy and driven and has, moreover, become so embedded in jazz and rock and R &B that is seems like it, all by itself, is the cornerstone of American music.

Irish music, on the other hand is just…not cool. You can see just how uncool in Come West Along the Road Volume 2, a DVD collection of traditional music performances taken from RTE, the Irish national broadcasting corporation. Taken mostly from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, most of the songs appear to have been videotaped directly from a wide variety of church basements…but that’s public television for you. Even public television can’t account for the McCaffrey Dancers exhibition dance from 1965, though. Put aside that they appear to be in a church basement. Put aside that the steady “plink/plink” of the piano is rivaled in dowdiness only by the dance itself, which consists of 12 well-scrubbed adolescents holding their bodies rigid while skipping here and there and here and there like neutered candy stripers. Put aside all that. And when you have done so, consider that the girls spend much time coyly holding hands with the girls and the boys coyly holding hands with the boys. Oh, yes, and the boys are wearing dresses. You just wouldn’t catch Howlin’ Wolf doing that, you know?

Irish music is, by most measures, and without too much argument, more fey than Howlin’ Wolf. Of course, most things are more fey than Howlin’ Wolf, but of those fey things that are feyer than Howlin’ Wolf, few are as thoroughly fey as Irish music. And when it’s not fey, it’s got a frightening glee club wholesomeness. Bobby and Peggy Clancy in a 1965 version of “Mrs. McGrath,” for example, seem like they’ve walked out of some remorseless folk-music parody, what with Bobby’s foot perched on a stoop, his aggressive collar sticking crisply from his modest sweater, and Peggy’s earnest toothiness. “A ring-dung-dah!” they sing with lilting, lobotomized cheer, “Oh Ted McGraw, were you drunk or blind/ when you left your two fine legs behind?”

There’s a tendency, or perhaps a temptation, to look at the feyness and the blank wholesomeness and chalk it all up (as it were) to whiteness. If the blues comes out of the black experience of suffering, then this music comes out of the white experience of never feeling much of anything; just chattering on obliviously through life worrying about whether the pants are pressed or whether those darn collars sticking out of the sweater right.

Except…well, in the first place, the Irish aren’t white. They became white when they came to the U.S., but back home they’re not conquering Europeans; they’re the people the Europeans conquered. Sweepstakes in suffering are always kind of pointless, and lord knows there are enough brutalized minorities in every part of the earth to go round, but as histories of bitter oppression go, the Irish’s is surely as impressive as anyone’s.

So when I watch this DVD, I’m essentially blinded by my own whiteness. What I see is people participating in the ridiculous denatured spectacle of soullessness; the bland feyness of not having any roots. That’s what ethnic Americans (such as my Jewish self) get in exchange for skin privilege; it’s the price of the ticket, as James Baldwin says. You give up your klezmer soul and you get to be a white American with all the benefits, such as they are.

But the musicians here haven’t done that. The authenticity markers are all wrong from my perspective, but that’s just because my perspective is screwed up. In most ways that matter, the music here is in fact quite close to blues. It’s a music that comes out of a community identity, forging joy out of hardship. “Oh Ted McGraw, were you drunk or blind/ when you left your two fine legs behind?” Ted’s Mom isn’t heartless. She’s just had bad luck before and is tough enough to take it with a smile.

Despite the relatively low profile of Irish music, white Americans have always fetishized oppressed white people, from Riverdance to Schindler’s List— that fetishization consisting precisely in pretending that said oppressed white people are, in fact, white like us. Maybe some similar self-delusion is why I’m so taken with this DVD…or maybe it’s just the music itself. Unlike my friend, I’ve never been super into blues, but Irish music really sends me. The wailing drone, repeated and repeated with slight variations — it’s just some of the most lovely music on earth.

On this disc, I think my favorite tune may be a short Irish song, Casadh Cam na Feadarnai, performed by Triona Ni Dhomhnaill on keyboards and vocal and Liam Rowsome on fiddle. There’s certainly a melody, but all the instruments — the fiddle, the electric piano, even the Gaelic syllables — seem more focused on percussion, the rhythms running around and over each other. The notation says it’s a song about a hag, and it does sound old and evil, a song to throw kids into pots by.

Or maybe the highlight is Martin Reidy’s unaccompanied version of “The Gal I Left Behind Me.” Reidy looks about 110. His ears are set so far back on his head they look ready to fall off, and he appears to have lost all his teeth. Every time he takes a breath his lips comes together with a wet pop. He sings sitting in what looks like (you guessed it) a church basement, on a bench, with two women beside him…one of whom, alternately perplexed and proud, may well be his granddaughter.

If so, she’s got every right to be proud; he gives a sterling ballad performance, his quaver adding poignancy to the high lonesome keening. That high lonesome is a sound I adore in American music too; it’s been passed on to singers like Almeda Riddle, Sara Carter, Kitty Wells, Emmylou Harris and (rather to my sorrow) Alison Krauss. Bob Dylan picked it up too, and Neil Young and that good British folkie Rober Plant and through him Axel Rose. It’s the music I grew up with, like blues, even if, like blues, it’s not my music really. But then maybe in another sense any music you love is yours.
 

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Crumbface

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We’ve had several posts on race this week, so I figured I’d finish up by reprinting this piece from Comixology. I think it’s one of Jeet Heer’s least favorite things I’ve written, if that’s any incentive.
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As cartoonists go, Robert Crumb is quite, quite famous. Still, there’s cartoonist famous and then there’s rock star famous. Which is to say that for all his notoriety and the cultural currency of “Keep on Truckin'”, the Crumb image that has been seen by most people is probably still his iconic 1968 Cheap Thrills album cover for Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring Janis Joplin.

It’s somewhat unfortunate that this is one of Crumb’s defining images. Not that it’s bad. On the contrary, the inventive layout, with images radiating out from a central circle is pleasingly energetic, and the drawing, as always with Crumb, is great. Plus, cute turtle! The only thing is….

Well, it’s kind of racist.

Crumb’s oeuvre not infrequently delves into reprehensible blackface iconography. Sometimes, (as in his Angel McSpade strips) he seems to be trying, at least to some extent, to critique or mock the imagery. In the upper right of the Cheap Thrills drawing, though, he seems to use blackface simply because (a) that’s how Crumb draws black people when he’s drawing cartoons, and (b) racist iconography = funny!

The racist image in question is an illustration of Joplin’s cover version of the famous Gershwin tune from “Porgy and Bess.” The song itself, written by a Jew to capture the sound of African-American spirituals using elements from Ukrainian folk tunes, is one of America’s great cultural mish-mashes. Though its lyrics evoke the happy darky stereotype (“Summertime, and the living is easy…”) its mournful, heartfelt tune suggests a barely suppressed sadness — a weight of hardship hidden for the sake of love beneath a lullaby. My favorite take on the song is probably Sarah Vaughn’s effortlessly heartbreaking rendition. In comparison, Joplin’s hoarse bombastic reading sounds strained and clueless. The rendition is bad enough that it even becomes borderline offensive: almost the very minstrelization of black experience that Gershwin, through a kind of miracle, managed to avoid.

In that sense, Crumb’s image for the song could almost be seen as parody; a vicious sneer at Joplin’s blackface pretensions, caricaturing her as both a wannabe black mammy and as the whining white entitled brat looking to the exploited other for entirely undeserved comfort. As I said, it could almost be seen as that — if Crumb hadn’t thrown in another entirely gratuitous blackface caricature in the bottom center panel, just to show that, you know, he really is exactly that much of a shithead.

Given the grossness of the Cheap Thrills cover, it’s interesting that Crumb has, in the intervening years, gained a reputation as a particularly thoughtful interpreter of the black musical experience. His passion for 1920s-30s blues and jazz records is well known, and he’s done some cover art for blues releases. He’s also written comics focusing on blues history, perhaps the most lauded of which is “Patton” from 1984, a 12-page illustrated biography of legendary delta bluesman Charlie Patton.

“Patton” absolutely eschews blackface caricature. Indeed, it more or less eschews cartooning, opting instead for a more realist style which seems to draw from photo-reference for its portraits of Patton, Son House, Robert Johnson, and others. Walk-on characters, though, are also portrayed as individuals. A black man and woman contemplating buying a phonograph, for example, are humorous not because they’re exaggerated, but because they aren’t; their faces are fixed in ambivalent desire and nervousness as they try to determine whether this, right here, is going to break the bank.

At the same time — it wouldn’t be quite right to say that Crumb dispenses with caricature. He just uses it more subtly. Some of his drawings of women in the strip are impossibly mobile, curving rubberlike to accentuate the more interesting bits:

Crumb’s fascination with the female form is no particular surprise given his oeuvre. Here, though, it’s subsumed within a grander project of fetishization aimed at Patton himself. Crumb’s recounting of the bluesman’s life is matter-of-fact, but there’s little doubt that not just Patton’s musical genius but his shiftless, earthy, sex-and-violence drenched life is a huge source of attraction for the cartoonist. You can see it in the enthusiasm with which Crumb’s pen limns the posterior in that picture above, as well as in the gratuitously R-rated fight scene below:

But I think Crumb’s fascination also comes out in subtler moments. There’s this passage for instance:

“The tin-pan alley blues barely touched the remote rural black people of the Delta region, where the real down-to-earth blues continued to evolve as an intense and eloquent expression of their lives.”

That statement may or may not be entirely true (the back and forth between rural and urban was arguably not quite as hard and fast as Crumb makes it out to be.) But the important point is that Crumb is making a distinction between Ma Rainey and Charlie Patton — and Patton is the one who is intense, who is eloquent, and who is “real”. In his appreciation of the form, then, Crumb has bypassed not only Janis Joplin but even Sarah Vaughn and her compatriots to arrive, at last, at the genuinely authentic expression of the blues.

In “Patton”, appreciation is not passive contemplation; it’s more like passion or desire. Crumb, for example, shows two consecutive panels of men appreciating the playing of seminal bluesman Henry Sloan. First Charley Patton looks at Sloan with an intense, almost needy fascination; then W. C. Handy looks at Sloan with a glance that holds more surprise, but no less yearning.

These meaningful stares are complemented a couple of pages later by this panel:

This doesn’t seem to quite be Crumb — his self-caricatures are generally instantly recognizable. But, at the same time, it clearly is Crumb; the white connoisseur who appreciates the “rich cultural heritage” of those African-Americans who (according to Crumb in the next panel) see the “old blues” as “too vivid a reminder…of an oppressive ‘Uncle Tom’ past they’d rather forget about.” Only the white listener can appreciate the lower-class, un-PC genius of the blues, undistracted by a history of oppression which regrettably (if understandably) blinds the music’s most direct heirs.

Of course, as we’ve seen, Crumb himself is responsible for at least one of the most widely disseminated modern examples of vicious Uncle Tom iconography in existence. Given that, it seems fair to wonder whether he isn’t protesting a bit too much here. Are black folks really disdainful of the blues because the music is not as uplifting as gangsta rap? Do they really see blues songs about violence, sex, and drinking as somehow Uncle Tomish? Or, you know, is the music just really old pop culture, and therefore not of particular interest to most people, as is generally the case with very old pop culture?

Perhaps the real question is not why black people don’t love the blues enough, but why Crumb loves it so much. After all, what is he getting from this story of authentic black people carousing and fighting and making great timeless art which only he and a select few like him understand?

It’s not really that difficult a question, obviously. White American culture (and not just American), from Gershwin to Joplin to Vanilla Ice and Madonna (to say nothing of Elvis) has long been obsessed with adopting, miming, parodying, and exploiting black culture. Because they have been oppressed and marginalized, blacks have taken on a kind of totemic value; they and their culture are the ultimate expression of resistance to the man, of purity and heart in the face of a monolithic culture of indifference. Being black is being cool — and through his love of old blues, Crumb can be blacker than Janis Joplin, blacker than Bessie Smith, blacker than non-blues-listening African-Americans — blacker, in other words, than black. On the last page of the story, we see a ghostly Charlie Patton floating above his girlfriend Bertha Lee — and you have to wonder if that’s how Crumb sees himself, an intangible, unseen observer, both watching and inhabiting the long-dead African-Americans he animates and desires. We haven’t, after all, come that far from Cheap Thrills; it’s just that, instead of drawing blackface, Crumb has — circuitously and with less painful racist connotations, but nonetheless — donned it himself.

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Karen Green had a thoughtful comment at Comixology.

In fairness, Noah, the two gratuitously naked and/or nubile women you show in the Patton comic would likely have been gratuitously naked and/or nubile even if they were white woman. As a woman, I’m well aware of how Crumb prefers to depict us!

There’s no excusing the Cheap Thrills cover, however.

I think you’ve touched on something quite insightful, though, in concentrating on WHY Crumb loves the blues–especially to the extent that he loves it. There is clearly the love of the arcane, the elevation of self into a particularly rarefied aficionado. (And I would wager there are just as many African-Americans pursuing that arcane love of the blues as there are whites.) But there’s also a possibility that a man who grew up seeing himself as marginalized and miserable–regardless of how easy his life was in comparison to former slaves–might find something kindred in that music.

That possible sense of kinship is what makes the Cheap Thrills cover all the more distasteful. Like Al Jolson in blackface gleefully reading the Yiddish paper The Forvert in the film “Wonder Bar,” it’s as if Crumb has embraced that black experience but still wants to prove that he exists apart from it–a particularly unpleasant wink at the audience.

And I responded:

I’d agree that it’s hard to tease Crumb’s misogyny out from his racism. My point here isn’t that he’s racist rather than misogynist, but that his fetishization of women bleeds over and inflects his fetishization of Patton. (Through his emphasis on Patton’s sexuality, through the use of significant glances sexualizing the blues, etc.) I think you could argue that it goes the other way as well, though (that is, the fetishization of blackness as earthiness inflects his misogyny.)

Art doesn’t belong to anyone; there’s absolutely nothing wrong with white people being into blues. There is, as you say, though, something unpleasant in the way Crumb seems to want to set himself up as more in tune with “authentic” blackness than some black people — especially given his really unfortunate history with racist caricature.

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This is a belated entry in our roundtable on R. Crumb and Race.

Blues Comics

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“You heard her, you ain’t blind.” – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the forward to Phillip R. Ratcliffe’s new biography of Mississippi John Hurt the granddaughter of the country blues guitarist describes what it was like to hear Hurt play for the neighbors in the front yard, sitting in his favorite straw back chair with a warm smile and a pan of roasted peanuts nearby. Again and again, she describes the experience in undeniably transcendent terms and insists that it was his “supernatural spirit that had a far greater effect on people than his music alone” (vii).

I wonder what Mary Frances Hurt Wright might think of her grandfather’s cameo appearance in the graphic novel, Stagger Lee — whether or not Shepherd Hendrix’s solemn illustration of the bluesman, or the narrative in which Derek McCulloch enfolds him, can convey the mythical power that she once felt as a listener. The lyrics to “Stackolee Blues” are printed above Hurt’s head in a word balloon edged with eighth notes; a crowd stands nearby. The scene, itself, is part of a larger, deeply fascinating blending of history and legend. But when it comes to conveying the quality of the sound that the crowd hears or the magnetic force Hurt’s granddaughter describes, even the most vivid representation can feel inadequate. It is hard to compare the silence of words and pictures on a page to the sound of that first plucked string.

Western artists have been enamored with the figure of the black folk musician in public and private moments going back to the nineteenth century. Modern American poets, most notably Langston Hughes, have aspired to an aesthetic in their verse that exemplifies the blues and the social and economic conditions that brought the music into existence. Nevertheless, blues historian Paul Oliver effectively sums up the challenge that awaits any artist or writer influenced by the sounds of Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters: “Blues is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down” (8).

But can a comic fare any better? Does the form’s interplay of verbal and visual elements provide a more dynamic set of tools for representing blues music and culture? My interest here extends to the distinctive ways in which comics approach auditory signification in particular: how do comics sound? Will Eisner, Scott McCloud and others in comics studies often emphasize comics reading as an active, multisensory encounter, guided not only by what’s on the page, but by what is demanded of the reader’s imagination. Which artistic strategies make for a more satisfying experience when it comes to hearing what we see?

A blues comic, like any blues narrative, is most compelling when it illuminates the suffering, heartache, and wry absurdity that gives the music its meaning, and exploits the dialogic relationship between the singer and the audience, rather than attempting to replicate chord progressions and flattened notes. To be sure, blues figures run the risk of being caricatured and over-romanticized; their lyrics are often used to invoke African American culture without any meaningful engagement. Noah problematizes this approach quite well in his analysis of Robert Crumb’s 1984 comic biography, “Patton” by pointing out how older blues musicians like Charley Patton are deployed in the story as signifiers of authentic blackness.

But blues narratives are just as well known for confronting stereotypes with counter-narratives that resist the easy consumption of the blues as spectacle. (Consider, for instance, how poet Tyehimba Jess imagines the simmering resentment between Lead Belly and folklorist John Lomax.) Comics have their own way of conveying this kind of nuance and dimension, especially when it comes to rendering the intricate rituals of music making. One useful example comes from the three-volume comic series, Bluesman, by writer Rob Vollmar and artist Pablo G. Callejo, published as a single edition in 2008.

Bluesman follows two itinerant African American blues musicians from one juke joint to another in the South during the 1920s. Early in the series — which, like the bars of a blues song, is divided into twelve parts — Lem Taylor and Ironwood Malcott persuade a local bartender to hire them by giving the room of drinkers and gamblers an impromptu performance. Callejo’s loose, heavy lines resemble woodcut illustrations that not only help to establish the mood and rural setting, but also to deepen the intensity of Lem’s expression as he sings, eyes closed, and plays the guitar. Musical notes amble through the gutters between panels until the bustling audience falls silent, begins to pay attention, and gradually moves to the dance floor.

In Bluesman, sound is generated through carefully accumulated layers of image and text that build from the flutter of Ironwood’s fingers on the piano and Lem’s head thrown back in song to the approving smiles and responsive bodies of the crowd. The lyrics are printed at intervals so that the audience (and the implied readers) can react to what is being heard, as indicated by jagged word balloons containing unattributed phrases like “C’mon now!” and “Oooh, baby!”. The juxtapositions of visual, verbal, and audible impressions easily recall the multi-vocal rhythms of Sterling Brown’s 1932 poem, “Ma Rainey.” But I think the sequential pictures allow us to reflect somewhat more satisfyingly on the elements of performance in such a way that our reading becomes a form of listening. Even if we cannot catch the actual pitch of the notes that Lem and Ironwood are playing, we are certainly more attuned to what James Baldwin describes as the “vanishing evocations” of musical sounds that resonate within.

Baldwin, in his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” also had this to say about musicians:

But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. (73)

I can think of no better way than this to describe what takes place in the first volume of Akira Hiramoto’s manga series, Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson (2008). Hiramoto combines the visual iconography commonly associated with Japanese comics together with a historical rendering of the Mississippi Delta and the supernatural tropes of demonic possession that surround Johnson’s legendary talent with a bottleneck slide guitar. When Johnson (or “RJ” as he is called) begins to play, the black and white panels tilt at long, unsteady angles. The guitar’s head and tuning keys are often positioned in the foreground, forcing our eyes to move up and down the long fingerboard as the strings reverberate. In scenes such as RJ’s stand off with Son House, frenetic background motion lines edge into the blurred contours of the musicians’ bodies and convey the searing intensity of the music.

I agree with many reviews of Me and the Devil Blues that the art surpasses the inconsistent narrative, which slips often into caricatures of black southern life. At the same time, the nightmarish premise of the series takes more aesthetic risks that Bluesman and de-emphasizes the collective participation of the listeners in order to transport us into the musician’s psyche. While the audience alternatively delights and recoils at the music being conjured forth, it is the internal workings of Johnson’s spirit that are on display as Hiramoto’s technique forcefully externalizes “the roar rising from the void” — the terrible and triumphant chords that only RJ can hear.

A critical interest in how comics register this supernatural sound need not draw our attention away from larger considerations of black cultural representation and re-appropriation, but more deeply into the social implications of artistic style and practice. Blues is as much a way of seeing in comics as it is for singing.

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Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues” [1957]. Vintage Baldwin. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Oliver, Paul. “Can’t Even Write: The Blues and Ethnic Literature” MELUS, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Spring, 1983): 7-14.
Ratcliffe, Phillip R. Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Qiana Whitted is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is co-editor of the essay collection, Comics and the U.S. South, with Brannon Costello, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in January 2012, and a forthcoming essay on the blues and black folk subjectivity in Stagger Lee.