Who started the Delta blues myth?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:51 PM

Some Child ballads have AAB lyrics in Child. Jess Morris heard AAB from the black singer Charley Willis (born 1847) in "Old Paint" before 1900.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:47 PM

"Many songs, including 'John Henry,' can be called 'blues' in the broadest sense if they include 'blue notes.'" Black musicians about Frank Stokes' age did not use "blues" to refer to anything with a bent note in it, or even close, and there is no evidence that any black musician used the expression "blue note" about the earliest blues music. (White writers of the 1910s did.)

Blues with four-line stanzas appear in Howard Odum's pre-1909 material, four-line stanzas are common in the blues song families that can actually be traced to before about 1910, and blues with four-line stanzas were known to the likes of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Boy Fuller, Blind Blake, Blind Willie McTell, Rev. Gary Davis, Leadbelly, Mississippi John Hurt, Furry Lewis, Peg Leg Howell, Skip James, William Moore, Henry Thomas, Jesse Fuller, Charley Jordan, etc.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:33 PM

"Mike Yates wrote an article - Blues Jumped a Rabbit - a couple of years back, which deconstructs the Lomax idea that the Blues began in the Delta."

Or expresses healthy skepticism about it, anyway. Anyone who wants to deconstruct that idea shouldn't bring up the Tutwiler musician (_Father Of The Blues_ p. 74) while not bringing up the similar, years earlier, and more clearly mournful "Got No More Home Than A Dog" (_Father Of The Blues_ p. 142).

Patton's friend Booker Miller recalled Patton telling him that he began playing guitar when he was about 19, which would be in about 1910.

Yates' "We don't know what the [Tutwiler] singer was singing" is inaccurate.

Handy's _Father Of The Blues_ does not claim he heard the Tutwiler musician as early as "1903." Norm Cohen's research has suggested that the individual lyric "Going where the Southern cross the Dog," sung by anyone, logically should probably -- not necessarily in what we'd call a blues song -- predate 1903, because of when various railroad lines were built.

What Yates calls "Rag Ditties" were widely known to black musicians of the times as "reels."

Henry Thomas's "Lovin' Babe" is a variant of the "All Out And Down" that was known to Freeman Stowers, Mance Lipscomb, etc.

Spottswood's theory that blues began in the Piedmont is based on the existence of songs in the Piedmont that were also well known outside the Piedmont.

Black musicians of about 1911 apparently didn't share Spottswood's perception of the 12-bar blues (with e.g. AAB lyrics) as somehow especially "blues" relative to the 16-bar blues (with e.g. AAAB lyrics). Handy popularized the use of 12 bars in blues relative to 16 bars in blues a lot starting in about 1914.

Yates' mention of Max Haynes's article (which is very valuable) is misleading. If Jim Jackson knew both "I'm A Bad Bad Man" and blues songs, and Blind Blake knew both "Champagne Charlie" and blues songs, that does not somehow mean that "I'm A Bad Bad Man" or "Champagne Charlie" was a blues song.

When does Wardlow think Lem Nichols began playing Pearlee?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: meself
Date: 28 May 15 - 02:23 PM

'Blues' ain't nothin' but a good gal on your mind, according to at least one authority (forget who, though).

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 28 May 15 - 01:50 PM

Speaking of John Henry, it was long asserted as fact that he raced the stream drill at the Big Bend Tunnel in West Virginia in the 1870s.

Mudcatter John Garst has recently shown, on the basis of extensive new research and re-evaluation of the evidence, just how unlikely that claim really is.

Many songs, including "John Henry," can be called "blues" in the broadest sense if they include "blue notes."

But the "blues" proper also have the three-line stanza form that Joe describes.

Though rare elsewhere, the form is not unknown in Anglo-American folksong, particularly in the South. I'm thinking especially of Dillard Chandler's "The Sailor Being Tired":

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nrVr5TpkfWE

Maybe he got it from Afro- rather than Anglo-American tradition, but the question of just how the form originated remains open.

Chandler's song, however, has no blue notes and is unlikely to be considered a "blues."

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 01:36 PM

"... Leadbelly was Folk-Delta Blues..." What does the "Delta" mean there?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 01:33 PM

"I always thought of 'Delta Blues Music' as a style." Son House learned slide from Rube Lacy, who had learned slide outside the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta; Robert Johnson learned to play guitar well from Ike Zimmerman, who wasn't from that Delta, and emulated the records of Kokomo Arnold, who wasn't either; Hacksaw Harney in that Delta played the way he did; Crying Sam Collins outside that Delta played the way he did; "Mississippi" Fred McDowell learned to play guitar in Tennessee not knowing anyone would later care whether he ever lived in that Delta; Chicago welcomed Tampa Red and John Lee Williamson to the blues fraternity; etc. because the '20s-'30s blues musicians hadn't got the memo about what Alan Lomax would imagine in the '40s any more than the '20s-'30s blues writers had.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 01:16 PM

"down into Louisiana" The map you linked to shows the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta aka "Mississippi Delta" ("the distinctive northwest section of Mississippi between the Mississippi and Yazoo Rivers") as ending about 25 miles from Memphis (and not including e.g. Plum Point, Mississippi, where Memphis bluesman Jim Jackson was reportedly born, or Hernando, Mississippi, where Memphis bluesman Robert Wilkins was born) and being immediately on the other side of the Mississippi River from part of Arkansas and part of Louisiana (ending about 200 miles from New Orleans).

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 12:54 PM

Richard wrote: "should we not first ask 'What is Blues'?"

The black folk songs that had the word "blues" in them as of about 1909, the existence of which caused anyone to start talking about "blues songs," in about 1909, were apparently generally first-person sad songs with repetitive lyrics within the stanza, and chord progressions similar to I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I or I-I-I-I-IV-IV-I-I-V-V-I-I, rather than the quite different chord progressions found in countless black folk songs of the era. Songs with those characteristics that were reported to predate 1909 include "Got No More Home Than A Dog," the "Poor Boy Long Ways From Home" family, and the "K.C. Moan" family.

For anyone who wants to define "blues music" broadly, to include the likes of "John Henry"... we don't have evidence that that broadly defined "blues music" started in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta either.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 12:42 PM

"And the recently deceased Mr. B.B. King.... falls within what area of your Delta Blues scale?" I don't understand what relevance you think B.B. has to this thread.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 28 May 15 - 12:36 PM

Stanron wrote: "You set up a false premise..." No, I gave "Examples of people in general passing on the myth" in that post.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,leeneia
Date: 28 May 15 - 10:34 AM

From the OP "Who is to blame for the myth that we have evidence that blues music originated in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta?"

I have been interested in music all my life, and this is the first time I have heard this idea. Actually, the blues began in a lot of places as musicians picked up the musical concepts, shared and enlarged them.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 28 May 15 - 09:13 AM

Mike Yates wrote an article - Blues Jumped a Rabbit - a couple of years back, which deconstructs the Lomax idea that the Blues began in the Delta. You can read it online at www.mustrad.org.uk

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,gillymor
Date: 28 May 15 - 08:22 AM

Joe Offer, I seem to recall that the locals referred to the Yazoo River basin as the "Delta" back in Charley Patton's day. I probably read that in Steve Calt's and Gayle Dean Wardlow's biography of Patton.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Dave
Date: 28 May 15 - 06:04 AM

Phil, I would think its quite likely that slaves were brought across the Bering Strait as long as 25,000 years ago.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Phil
Date: 28 May 15 - 05:35 AM

"The first slaves were in America in the 17th Century." is just another myth as well.

The first slaves to make the Atlantic crossing to North America were most likely Irish. They began arriving in the late 10th century and remained in the general area of the Davis Strait and Labrador Sea for the next four hundred+ years or until just a century or so before Columbus.

They were called thralls by the their Norwegian and Icelandic masters. They (almost certainly) had the blues but no music remains, so... nevermind.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Mr Red
Date: 28 May 15 - 04:20 AM

Well!
& I always thought of "Delta Blues Music" as a style.

Methinks this comes under the same banner as "What is Folk Music?".

As the original editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, James Murray (1837-1915), said of language (apt here) it has a firm centre, with certainty stretching a distance therefrom but a periphery increasingly vague & ill defined. Or he might have opined "a circumference defined by the listener".

FWIW IMNSHO Leadbelly was Folk-Delta Blues, Muddy Waters played Blues, and not "Folk".

As for perpetrating a myth. History is made by the winners, and the Lomax's did a lot of winning. When few others were.

Labels are one way language communicates. It gives you something to argue about at least.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Joe Offer
Date: 28 May 15 - 01:59 AM

At the top of this Mississippi Delta map is the city of Memphis, 181 miles north of Yazoo City, Mississippi. Seems to me, that one could easily say that Memphis is the "Gateway to the Mississippi Delta." The map delineates a relatively small area of Northwestern Mississippi as "the Delta," but I think many people rightly think of "the Delta" as extending from Memphis down into Louisiana - I think that would be an apt definition of the Delta as a cultural area. I worked much of that area as a federal election observer in the 1980s. It's beautiful country and the people and the food are wonderful - but the whole area feels like it's The Delta, not just that one corner of Mississippi. Can't say I had time for music then, though. I was working 16-hour days.

But nonetheless, it's an interesting article, Joseph. I just think you define the Delta a bit too rigidly.

-Joe-

P.S. to Joseph: If you'd like to be a member of Mudcat, we'd love to have you. Just send me an email at [e-mail]

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 27 May 15 - 11:43 PM

At risk of causing widespread depression, should we not first ask "What is Blues"?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 27 May 15 - 09:59 PM

And the recently deceased Mr. B.B. King....

falls within what area of your Delta Blues scale?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Stanron
Date: 27 May 15 - 09:32 PM

Is this a straw man incident? You set up a false premise and demolished it with vigour. Why?

If, as I have always supposed, that blues was an amalgam of remembered African cultural heritage and taught western hymnal stuff on plantations, then blues will have originated wherever there were plantations.

Before the start of the 20th century the only records of this will be in written material. Letters from people who visited plantations and heard music being played, maybe travelling ministers keeping personal records or diaries kept by literate people who lived nearby.

The first slaves were in America in the 17th Century. I would expect that the music we now call Blues has been brewing ever since then.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 27 May 15 - 08:05 PM

"The way I heard it was not that the Delta was the only source of the blues, but that it was the first source that caught the attention of mainstream culture, when rural singers from the Delta started moving into New Orleans in large numbers to work on the docks."

The familiar myth that blues moved from the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta to New Orleans at some point was apparently based on the preexisting myth that we ought to think blues was in the Delta particularly early relative to e.g. Louisiana, for no reason anyone can actually give.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Richard Bridge
Date: 27 May 15 - 07:52 PM

This could be interesting.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 27 May 15 - 07:25 PM

The post is about trying to figure out who popularized a particular myth, the myth that we have evidence that blues music started in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. And, basically, it seems that Alan Lomax did, starting in the 1940s and 1950s, and still actively in the 1980s and 1990s, but he had plenty of help from others.

Writers since roughly Charters 1959, while discussing blues origins, have often remembered to throw the Yazoo/Mississippi Delta a bone, choosing to throw that bone illogically rather than not throw it at all (Charters, Oliver, Palmer, Oakley, Gioia), because none of them could do so logically, because they had no actual evidence that blues music started in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta. And, given when they were writing, it apparently only occurred to them to do throw that bone _at all_ (rather than throw that same bone to Alabama or wherever) because Alan Lomax had already popularized the idea that early blues music had a special relationship to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, an idea Alan couldn't support with evidence either, but liked the sound of as of about 1947, and as of about 1993.

In contrast, early writers interested in blues all bear the signs of not being influenced by or independently hitting on the same idea there as Alan did.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Lighter
Date: 27 May 15 - 06:44 PM

No worse organized than what I write.

And Joe's point is clear: there's no more evidence to attribute the "birth of the blues" to the Mississippi Delta than to places as far afield as Indiana and Tennessee.

In fact, whatever the truth may be, there seems to be little enough evidence (as distinct from assertion) to locate the birthplace of the blues in any region narrower than the American South and the Ohio Valley.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Jack Campin
Date: 27 May 15 - 06:10 PM

It would be rather easier to follow what you're saying if you stated your own ideas about how blues started and relegated the refutations of other theories to footnotes. As you're presenting it, it's not easy to see the point.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST
Date: 27 May 15 - 06:08 PM

The way I heard it was not that the Delta was the only source of the blues, but that it was the first source that caught the attention of mainstream culture, when rural singers from the Delta started moving into New Orleans in large numbers to work on the docks. Once it got their attention, people looked around and found there was a lot more of that kind of music and in a lot of locations.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 27 May 15 - 05:53 PM

I wrote that myself today.

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: Wesley S
Date: 27 May 15 - 05:45 PM

Where was this article cut and pasted from?

Or are you saying you wrote it yourself?

Subject: RE: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 27 May 15 - 05:45 PM

"as if House wasn't five years old at the most when Elbert Bowman heard blues in Tennessee"

This should read "three years old at the most."

Subject: Who started the Delta blues myth?
From: GUEST,Joseph Scott
Date: 27 May 15 - 05:40 PM

The title "Who started the Delta blues myth?" is shorthand for the real title of this post, which is "Who is to blame for the myth that we have evidence that blues music originated in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta?"

Short answer: Alan Lomax, it seems. (I found out today that that's a conclusion Vic Hobson and I have both come to independently. So maybe we're both right.) But it's interesting to look at who else has participated in popularizing the myth.

Hobson has written, "[T]he belief that the Mississippi Delta is the birthplace of the blues is so pervasive that we rarely if ever question why this is popularly believed. With the exception of Alan Lomax in the _The Land Where the Blues Began_ (1993) there are few authorities on the blues who have... openly stated this belief...." I don't know who Hobson believes are "authorities on the blues" rather than just writers on the blues whom Hobson personally does not consider "authorities." And Hobson apparently believes that Alan Lomax was an "authority" on blues music (whatever that quite is), a belief that I wouldn't say I share!

In any case, it's fair to say that it is the "blues writers," not their readers, who _are_ to blame for this myth. (Contrast, say, the myth current among many people -- if you read youtube comments, for instance -- that Robert Johnson was one of the earliest blues recording artists. That's an example of a myth for whom "the people" at large trying to share notes with each other _are_ squarely to blame, not "the blues writers," who know about Lemon Jefferson, etc.)


Robert Palmer, the rock writer who decided to write a book about blues -- and it sold and influenced other writers -- wrote that "Blues in the Delta... certainly is the first blues we know much about." That was a FALSE CLAIM when he wrote it. There had been a lot written even before 1935 about blues, some by keen-minded writers such as Newman White. Howard Odum had written about blues he'd heard before 1909, for example (in 1911, and again in the 1920s). Abbe Niles had written articles encouraging educated people to buy records by the likes of Rabbit Brown because they were terrific. George Washington Lee had published the successful book _Beale Street, Where The Blues Began_. Etc. Those writers all had NOT written that blues had a special relationship to the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, because Alan Lomax hadn't started popularizing that myth yet, because it wasn't the 1940s yet (Alan had never even heard of Robert Johnson yet in 1935).

When Palmer published his book
-- Willie Cornish's claim that Buddy Bolden played any blues in Louisiana by the time he stopped playing in 1907 had already been publicized
-- Roy Carew had already written about hearing a different blues in Louisiana in 1906
-- Tichener had recently republished "I Got The Blues" from 1908 by Maggio, of Louisiana (which Maggio had already said was based on a third Louisiana blues)
-- "Joe Turner" was already known to be an early relative of the folk songs about having the "blues" and known to be about events in Tennessee
-- Archie Green had already written in his well-received book that Elbert Bowman had heard blues in Tennessee by 1905
-- Handy had already written in a famous blues book about "blues" he'd heard in Indiana before 1900 and "all over the South" early on
etc.

So Palmer was just being sloppy and playing along with a myth he'd encountered somewhere -- ultimately thanks to Alan Lomax, best we know.


Sam Charters wrote in his 1959 book, "the delta has always been blues country...." Nope. And wrote "[I]f any one place could have given birth to the entire variety and richness of the blues, the delta could have done it." Compared to what a bunch of black Tennesseeans, or a bunch of black Louisianans, or a bunch of black non-Delta Mississippians (such as Crying Sam Collins, who was four years older than Charlie Patton and used a slide, or George Hendrix, who was also older than Patton, and taught Rube Lacy, who taught Son House slide), or a bunch of black Alabamans or Georgians, or... "could" have done? Is is this what we accept as passing for history, telling us what "could" have happened? Ross Russell's claim "Serious writing about the blues began in 1959 with the publication of Samuel Charter's _The Country Blues_" is ridiculous; read Newman White's footnotes before you read Charters. (Charlie Patton expert John Fahey was asked in 1979, "In your studies, did you find anything to dispel the theory that blues began in Mississippi and worked its way up to Memphis...?" "That's Sam Charters' idea, but it depends on your definition....")


Palmer was likely influenced by Giles Oakley's 1976 book, and Oakley was influenced by Charters (and likely by Oliver, see below). Oakley: "[M]any blues historians... are convinced that the blues actually originated [in Mississippi].... One of these writers is Samuel Charters who concludes that, despite the conflicting evidence, 'it was in the Mississippi delta counties that the first blues were sung.' ... By the 1890's there was a greater concentration of black people in Mississippi than in any other part of the country." So what? Is who invented jazz or rock and roll or hip hop going to magically have to do, for our convenience, with whichever state had the most black people in it?


Examples of people in general passing on the myth (or related myths):
"Indications point to MISSISSIPPI as the place where the blues began...." Foreword by Craig Morrison to _Blues_ by Dick Weissman (associate of Gary Davis, Sonny Terry, etc.), 2005.
_Deep Blues_ by Winborn quotes Son House's account of "how the blues began" as if House wasn't five years old at the most when Elbert Bowman heard blues in Tennessee, and makes the claim that "most evidence" points to blues starting in the Yazoo-Mississippi Delta, which is a false claim.
"The blues style was originated in the early 1900s by African Americans from the Mississippi Delta." -- _Hal Leonard Guitar Method_, 1980.
"He uses a bottleneck to slide over the guitar strings to give a distinctively blues sound. This 'bottleneck style' of guitar playing originated years ago in the backwaters of the Mississippi Delta." -- ad in _Living Blues_ for a film produced by Yale University Films, 1987.
John Giggie has written in a book with "Jim Crow" in the title: "Charles Peabody [in his 1903 article]... offered evidence of blues style of music performed by Delta blacks in Clarksdale, Mississippi." It would be interesting to know which tune(s) in Peabody's article Giggie thinks were "blues" songs and why.
"Howlin' Wolf... grew up in the Delta area where the blues originated." -- Howard DeWitt (author of numerous books), 1985.
Actor Morgan Freeman, usually a virtuously sober thinker, co-owns a blues club in Clarksdale called "Ground Zero" because, according to promotional material, "it all started here." This brings to mind a quote from W.C. Handy about his time living in Clarksdale: "Clarksdale was eighteen miles from the river, but that was no distance for roustabouts. They came in the evenings and on days they were not loading boats. With them they brought the legendary songs of the river." (Handy immediately follows that with an AAB lyric about steamboats.)
"This is the state where the musical style known as the blues began." _Mississippi_ by Rich Smith, 2010.
"Despite its proximity to the Mississippi Delta, where the blues began, New Orleans never..." _New Orleans_ by Downs and Edge, 2003.
"... Mississippi... is... the land where the blues began." Book by David Yaffe about Bob Dylan.
Etc.


Let's look at an attempt at a weaker claim (obviously motivated by the fact that the writer was working on a book with "Delta" in its title): Ted Gioia, who is primarily known for his books about jazz, wrote in his 2009 blues book, "the Delta's claim as [the blues'] birthplace is as strong as any other region's." Oh, is it, if Emmet Kennedy, Willie Cornish, and Antonio Maggio all said they had (independently) encountered three blues tunes in Louisiana before 1908?


Is Paul Oliver capable of doing pretty much the same sorts of things we just saw Gioia and Oakley do? Oliver: "Though its reputation is not unassailable, Mississippi has had the most advocates[*] as the source of the blues. Undoubtably the origins of the blues are far more complex but the 'Mississippi Blues' remains axiomatic as the essence of blues feeling...." There's no evidence at all that blues music originated in Mississippi -- but look at this shiny object over here, the "axiomatic" (as if any of our subjective tastes regarding Hacksaw Harney, Charlie Patton, Bill Gillum, Charley Jordan, Crying Sam Collins, John Hurt, John Estes, Peg Leg Howell, etc. really has anything to with the concept of the "axiom")?

*Argumentum ad populum fallacy. If Oliver knew of evidence that _he_ considered reliable (and plenty of other times he has shown interest in working from evidence he knew of himself), he could just present that evidence rather than handwave about what others had claimed.