 |
| National resonator guitar. |
I somehow got it in my head that both artists featured in this post plied their trade in Chicago. They did not, so I’ll cover the Chicago blues as a pivot to the second artist and continue on the Delta blues with…
Son House, Between God and the Blues
Edward James “Son” House, Jr. was born in 1902, on a plantation between Clarksdale and Lyon, Mississippi. His parents split when he was young, which, then as now, meant bouncing between households - the Clarksdale area with his father, Eddie House Sr., and various stops in Louisiana with his (for some reason, nameless) mother, including New Orleans. House’s father was a musician - a tuba player - who came in and out of the church as House grew up. When drinking drove at least one of those separations, Eddie Sr. tossed the bottle, straightened out, and became a deacon in the church. Both parents passed down their religiosity to Son House, and his faith weighed heavily and challenged him throughout his life - and it got hold early too; according to Wikipedia, he preached sermons on visits at his mother’s in Algiers, New Orleans, by age 15. To the extent music came into House’s life at all, he didn’t see it as a positive - and that tied to the culture and his upbringing. As a little bio on Musician Guide noted:
“Blues was so disreputable that even its staunchest devotees frequently found it prudent to disown it. If you asked a black preacher, schoolteacher, small landowner, or faithful churchgoer what kind of people played and listened to the blues, they would tell you, 'cornfield n*****s.'"
The heart of the Mississippi Delta didn’t provide many career options, so House, like most Black Americans grew up working on the old plantations, picking cotton, gathering tree moss(?), or whatever came his way. He married quite young, and against his parents’ wishes, to an older New Orleans woman named Carrie Martin. The moved to Centerville, Louisiana to help work her father’s farm, but House soured on both the marriage and farm-work after a couple years and ended both. Preaching became his next calling - he even found paid work for a time, but, like his father, he wrestled between drinking and bringing in the sheaths.
The challenge grew deeper when he got his first real, intoxicating sniff of the blues. It happened in 1927, though the specific accounts differ: the Musician Guide piece frames the moment as a chance encounter, while Wikipedia presents it as hanging out with “drinking companions.” Both sources agree on the two men in question - Willie Wilson and James McCoy - and the broad outlines: Son House saw one of them play bottleneck guitar and decided he’d found his calling. He’d gone from “Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was sin" to “Jesus, I like that! I believe I want to play one of them things” in an afternoon. He ran out and bought a $1.50 guitar, Wilson taught him how to tune with his ear and McCoy gave him a couple before they sent him on his way, and this is where his career starts. Sort of...
A year or so after converting to the blues, House killed a man - either a “mass shooter” at a juke-joint or a random party-goer at “drunken” Clarksdale-area house party; again, sources differ - and was sentenced to 15 years at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. He would serve only two years, but was steered away from the general vicinity of Clarksdale as a condition of his release - an order that steered him not too far from home, but also toward the best patch of his career.
House landed in Lula, Mississippi, near the Arkansas border and eight miles from a “blues hub” called Helena, Arkansas. There, famous Delta blues guitarist “in exile,” Charley Patton, spotted him busking near a cafe and, after an audition House didn’t even know he was having, Patton invited him to play with him and another musician named Willie Brown. The café was run by a bootlegger named Sara Knight and, between performing and helping with the bootlegging, they all made a good living for a while. The same period (early 1930s) and locale saw House record for the first time: the original invitation came through Patton, who had a bigger reputation, and he brought along House, Brown and a pianist named Louise Johnson. They all recorded several side, but, the Depression being the Depression, none sold well and House wouldn’t record again until 35 years later. That full partnership didn’t last long due to Patton’s passing in 1933. (For the record, Wikipedia notes that Patton’s biographers dispute it ever happened.)
House continued playing with Brown after Patton’s death, and all over the region. He found time to teach contemporary and future luminaries like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, “My Black Mama,” one of his signature songs. As noted on a site called Mississippi Blues Trail, his playing circuit looked something like this:
“Like other Robinsonville-area blues artists, including Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Brown, House performed mostly at weekend suppers and dances held at sharecroppers’ houses. Tunica County locals have recalled House living and working on the Harbert, Tate, and Cox plantations, though he preferred to sing or preach.”
Yes, Son House continued to preach; as noted above, he would vacillate between the Bible and the bottle his entire life. His career in music, on the other hand, first stalled, then died its first death. He left the Delta for good by 1943 and never looked back. He made Rochester, New York his escape from Jim Crow and found work with the railroad company. When word reached him that Willie Brown had passed in 1952, Son House quit the blues hard. From Musician Guide:
“’I said, 'Well, sir, all my boys are gone.' That was when I stopped playing. I don't even know what I did with the guitar."
With the 60s folk/blues revival in full swing, a trio of fans rediscovered him in Rochester in 1964. It’d been so long since he played that they drafted Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson to teach “Son House how to play like Son House,” but he picked it up and got going again. He re-recorded a lot of his old material and hit the touring circuit for the first time in 20 years, playing famous gigs like the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, New York’s Folk Festival in 1965, and the 1967 American Folk Festival tour of Europe. He drank then as he’d done throughout his career and for the same reason - to steady his nerves. That, along with everything else, caught up with him to the point where he retired a second and final time in 1974. He lingered sometime before dying of laryngeal cancer in 1988.
About the Sampler
I didn’t say much about Son House’s style up above, because it’s so damned…for lack of a better word, primal, i.e, beating-heart visceral, or the closest you can get to raw expression on the tuneful side of the heaviest hard-core punk. The music’s sparer, obviously, nearly all of it just him and a guitar - or, per a quote of blues scholar Robert Palmer:
"[House's] instrument became a congregation, responding to his gravelly exhortation with clipped, percussive bass rhythms and the ecstatic whine of the slider in the treble.... It was stark, gripping, kinetic music that demanded to be danced to and would have left few listeners unmoved.”
I tried to capture that with a combination of Son House’s most famous numbers - e.g., “Preachin’ Blues,” “Levee Camp Moan,” “Delta Blues,” and “The Jinx Blues” - and I rounded those out with a bunch of songs that caught my ear - e.g., “Walking Blues,” “Am I Right or Wrong,” “Death Letter Blues,” “John the Revelator,” “Grinnin’ in Your Face,” “Levee Camp Blues,” and, because it was an oddball, “American Defense,” something it sounds like he recorded for the war effort. And also different from everything else.
And now…
Chicago Blues, a Segue
Before getting to the next artist - also a son of the South, by the way - I wanted to define a term, the Chicago blues, specifically. I expected Wikipedia would give me a little more to work with, but here are the basics. It followed the Great Migration, aka, the Great Northern Drive - e.g., the masses of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow and looking for better than the dead-end opportunities they found in the South - to the northern cities, St. Louis, MO and Chicago, IL among others. Over time, the Delta blues changed to match the milieu. To borrow a quote Wikipedia posted by blues singer/guitarist, Kevin Moore:
“You have to put some new life into it, new blood, new perspectives. You can't keep talking about mules, workin' on the levee.”
The instruments and uses of them changed as well. The change wasn’t immediate, but, over time, the guitars became electric, the harmonicas amplified, and the bands expanded to include a full rhythm section - e.g., bass and drums - and the piano joined in with some artists. Perilously close to what you expect to see with your average rock band, basically, and the chain of influence runs straight through Chess Records and from Muddy Waters to Chuck Berry. It was a broader sound, as well, something designed to appeal to a mass audience - and an urban one too, hence the nickname, “urban blues.”
An entire career path evolved for blues artists in Chicago. They’d start playing house parties, on street corners and near open-air markets like the one on (in? near?) Maxwell Street. From there, they graduated to blues clubs, e.g., Ruby Lee Gatewood’s Tavern and, full disclosure, I’m not pretending to know those names, never mind their meaning. The basic idea is that Delta blues musicians came up from the South, reinvented the blues and turned it into a whole new cultural touchstone. Now, one of the guys who made it happen…
Tampa Red, Man with the Golden Guitar
“He formed a vital link between the country blues of the 1920s and the electric Chicago blues of the postwar era.”
- Musician Guide, Tampa Red bio
Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia in 1903. His parents died during his childhood, leaving an aunt and a grandmother to raise him in Tampa, Florida, and giving him the names he used for the rest of his life - e.g., Hudson Whittaker and, of course, Tampa Red, a shout-out to his adopted hometown and…either his red hair or his “light complexion.” Unlike Son House, Tampa Red did not wrestle with religion or angst over the blues: he learned to play first from his brother, then from a street musician named Piccolo Pete. He also wasted less time getting north: Tampa Red was in Chicago by 1920, somewhere around his 17th birthday. The first playing, paying job he landed on getting to the Windy City? Accompanying another “urban blues” legend, Ma Rainey (already covered in this series). He tapped another legend when his rendition of “Through Train Blues” split his first 78 rpm recording with Blind Lemon Jefferson (also covered).
His own career took off in the late 1920s, when he met and collaborated with a pianist/arranger named Thomas A. Dorsey, aka, Georgia Tom. Together, they wrote and recorded a number titled “It’s Tight Like That,” in 1928. The song went on to sell a million copies and the story behind it should sound very familiar:
“The song came about when Mayo Williams heard them playing with a tune, borrowed from a Papa Charley Jordan song, built around the then-popular catch phrase, ‘Tight Like That.’ Williams loved it and insisted they record it right away.”
Because they played it in a second/third generation musical/genre off-shoot called “hokum,” Tampa Red and Georgia Tom played as the Hokum Boys. When they added female impersonator Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon to the mix - which just goes to show how far back so many things go (i.e., think of a first date for just about anything, then forget about it because it probably happened well before) - they played as Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. Both Tampa Red and Dorsey played on multiple recordings and for multiple artists; they were session musicians, possibly before the terms was coined. In terms of giving credit where it’s due, Dorsey may deserve more of it: Dorsey’s chops as an arranger had already connected him to Mayo Williams the “front man for Paramount Records” in Chicago; it was Dorsey who arranged Tampa Red's first opportunities to record.
Tampa Red’s first-choice instrument also made him stand-out: in 1928, he picked up a National steel-bodied resonator guitar, the loudest guitar available before they went electric. For an extra touch of flair, he played a gold-plated tricone model - which led to one of his nicknames, the “man with the golden guitar.” Related, that same guitar was found somewhere around nowhere Illinois in 1990, and later donated to the Seattle Music Experience. That’s for anyone who wants to see it. He also expanded on a specific, influential style on that guitar, what Wikipedia calls “a distinctive single-string slide style” - something you hear on numbers like “King Fish Blues” and “How Long, How Long Blues” - along with the singing style he passed on to later genres and generations.
The 1930s put a hiccup in Tampa Red’s career, just like it did everyone else’s - only he had the unique experience of losing his key collaborator, Georgia Tom, to God and gospel music (that’s to say, Georgia Tom embraced both to the exclusion of all other things). The Great Depression tanked his record sales, of course, but he didn’t stay down nearly as long as most: 1934 saw him re-signed to Victor Records and, holy shit, did Tampa Red record: 251 sides from 1928-1942, and a total of 335 sides in all over the course of his long career. A set of specific catalysts carried him out of his short hiatus, most of them contained in this quote:
“Three events contributed to his resurrection: the repeal of Prohibition, the rise of the jukebox, and Lester Melrose taking over RCA Victor's new Bluebird label. Jukeboxes provided cheap entertainment in the newly legal bars. Lester Melrose recognized their importance for record companies and made sure his artists were well represented in Chicago jukeboxes.”
The Bluebird label bears noting for a couple reasons. First of all, it was the flagship of Victor Records’ budget line, with 78s selling for 35 cents instead of the 75-cent regular price, a marketing strategy that put all that vinyl in the hands of Black consumers (and the curious and open-minded among everyone else). Second, when he founded of the Chicago Five, he introduced the not just the backbone of the Bluebird sound, but also the basic template for most modern musical acts, aka (as Wikipedia puts it), “the small-group style of later jump blues and rock-and-roll bands” - i.e., the instruments noted in the Chicago blues intro above.
Tampa Red made his next jump by going electric in the 1940s and switching over to R&B. He actually landed his greatest successes somewhere during his…think this makes his third act. He recorded a pair of hits some time apart, starting with 1942’s “Let Me Play with Your Poodle,” a hot No. 4 on the “Harlem Hit Parade” (precursor to the R&B charts…and how was that for you?) an his 1949 hit, “When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too).” In other words, Tampa Red thrived over 25 years (1928-1953) and even reinvented himself at least twice. Perhaps even more important, both he and his wife became an anchor or the Chicago blues community, both a way-post and a gateway for Delta blues musicians coming up from the South. As Wikipedia elaborates:
“He achieved commercial success and some prosperity. His home became a centre for the blues community, providing rehearsal space, bookings, and lodgings for musicians who arrived in Chicago from the Mississippi Delta as the commercial potential of blues music grew and agricultural employment in the South diminished.”
The year 1953 turned out to be an annus horribilis for Tampa Red. His wife, his anchor as an anchor to the blues community, passed away. Tampa Red took to drinking after that and I have yet to see any sign that he stopped before his death, in poverty, in 1981. It was better than one hell of a run. He was one of the rare early blues artists no one had to rediscover, because he never really went away. As Ry Cooder later put it:
“I really think that it's a straight line from Tampa Red to Louis Jordan to Chuck Berry, without a doubt.... Tampa Red changed it from rural music to commercial music.”
We all die, but some go out better than most.
About the Sampler
Just by way of playing in/creating the Chicago blues sound, Tampa Red boasts a considerably wider repertoire than Son House’s - multiple instruments, cleaner (poppier) vocals, etc. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do anything else - e.g., “Black Angel Blues” is damned close to “regular” blues. Most of it, however, comes from what I’m interpreting as the “Bluebird sound.”
I linked to a handful of the hits above, but I also included the following (thoroughly modern) numbers: “Don’t Lie to Me,” “Love Her with a Feeling,” “Don’t Forget It,” “The Jitter Jump,” "The Duck Yas Yas,” “She’s Love Crazy,” and, one of Tampa Red’s biggest hits, “Anna Lou Blues.”
The composition of this post accidentally touched on both sides of the great migration, something that really comes through when you listen to the sampler; they’re totally different sounds and approaches to the same genre. The contrast probably hurt Son House in terms of listening - Tampa Red’s material is just so damned accessible - but Son House’s stuff keeps growing on me. And bringing chills.
To close with an editorial note, I don’t have many more of these multi-artist posts lined up - just two more up to the 25th or 26th chapter, and mostly because they’re hard to turn around quickly - but I’ll be loitering in this era for a while. I’ve got a pair of blues legends in the near-term…even if I’m not sure they’re any more legendary, at the end of the day, than any of the blues artists I’ve covered so far. This was a busy period, basically, and I’m skipping plenty.
At any rate, till the next one.
Son House, Between God and the Blues
Edward James “Son” House, Jr. was born in 1902, on a plantation between Clarksdale and Lyon, Mississippi. His parents split when he was young, which, then as now, meant bouncing between households - the Clarksdale area with his father, Eddie House Sr., and various stops in Louisiana with his (for some reason, nameless) mother, including New Orleans. House’s father was a musician - a tuba player - who came in and out of the church as House grew up. When drinking drove at least one of those separations, Eddie Sr. tossed the bottle, straightened out, and became a deacon in the church. Both parents passed down their religiosity to Son House, and his faith weighed heavily and challenged him throughout his life - and it got hold early too; according to Wikipedia, he preached sermons on visits at his mother’s in Algiers, New Orleans, by age 15. To the extent music came into House’s life at all, he didn’t see it as a positive - and that tied to the culture and his upbringing. As a little bio on Musician Guide noted:
“Blues was so disreputable that even its staunchest devotees frequently found it prudent to disown it. If you asked a black preacher, schoolteacher, small landowner, or faithful churchgoer what kind of people played and listened to the blues, they would tell you, 'cornfield n*****s.'"
The heart of the Mississippi Delta didn’t provide many career options, so House, like most Black Americans grew up working on the old plantations, picking cotton, gathering tree moss(?), or whatever came his way. He married quite young, and against his parents’ wishes, to an older New Orleans woman named Carrie Martin. The moved to Centerville, Louisiana to help work her father’s farm, but House soured on both the marriage and farm-work after a couple years and ended both. Preaching became his next calling - he even found paid work for a time, but, like his father, he wrestled between drinking and bringing in the sheaths.
The challenge grew deeper when he got his first real, intoxicating sniff of the blues. It happened in 1927, though the specific accounts differ: the Musician Guide piece frames the moment as a chance encounter, while Wikipedia presents it as hanging out with “drinking companions.” Both sources agree on the two men in question - Willie Wilson and James McCoy - and the broad outlines: Son House saw one of them play bottleneck guitar and decided he’d found his calling. He’d gone from “Just putting your hands on an old guitar, why, looked like that was sin" to “Jesus, I like that! I believe I want to play one of them things” in an afternoon. He ran out and bought a $1.50 guitar, Wilson taught him how to tune with his ear and McCoy gave him a couple before they sent him on his way, and this is where his career starts. Sort of...
A year or so after converting to the blues, House killed a man - either a “mass shooter” at a juke-joint or a random party-goer at “drunken” Clarksdale-area house party; again, sources differ - and was sentenced to 15 years at Mississippi’s Parchman Farm State Penitentiary. He would serve only two years, but was steered away from the general vicinity of Clarksdale as a condition of his release - an order that steered him not too far from home, but also toward the best patch of his career.
House landed in Lula, Mississippi, near the Arkansas border and eight miles from a “blues hub” called Helena, Arkansas. There, famous Delta blues guitarist “in exile,” Charley Patton, spotted him busking near a cafe and, after an audition House didn’t even know he was having, Patton invited him to play with him and another musician named Willie Brown. The café was run by a bootlegger named Sara Knight and, between performing and helping with the bootlegging, they all made a good living for a while. The same period (early 1930s) and locale saw House record for the first time: the original invitation came through Patton, who had a bigger reputation, and he brought along House, Brown and a pianist named Louise Johnson. They all recorded several side, but, the Depression being the Depression, none sold well and House wouldn’t record again until 35 years later. That full partnership didn’t last long due to Patton’s passing in 1933. (For the record, Wikipedia notes that Patton’s biographers dispute it ever happened.)
House continued playing with Brown after Patton’s death, and all over the region. He found time to teach contemporary and future luminaries like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, “My Black Mama,” one of his signature songs. As noted on a site called Mississippi Blues Trail, his playing circuit looked something like this:
“Like other Robinsonville-area blues artists, including Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, and Willie Brown, House performed mostly at weekend suppers and dances held at sharecroppers’ houses. Tunica County locals have recalled House living and working on the Harbert, Tate, and Cox plantations, though he preferred to sing or preach.”
Yes, Son House continued to preach; as noted above, he would vacillate between the Bible and the bottle his entire life. His career in music, on the other hand, first stalled, then died its first death. He left the Delta for good by 1943 and never looked back. He made Rochester, New York his escape from Jim Crow and found work with the railroad company. When word reached him that Willie Brown had passed in 1952, Son House quit the blues hard. From Musician Guide:
“’I said, 'Well, sir, all my boys are gone.' That was when I stopped playing. I don't even know what I did with the guitar."
With the 60s folk/blues revival in full swing, a trio of fans rediscovered him in Rochester in 1964. It’d been so long since he played that they drafted Canned Heat’s Alan Wilson to teach “Son House how to play like Son House,” but he picked it up and got going again. He re-recorded a lot of his old material and hit the touring circuit for the first time in 20 years, playing famous gigs like the 1964 Newport Folk Festival, New York’s Folk Festival in 1965, and the 1967 American Folk Festival tour of Europe. He drank then as he’d done throughout his career and for the same reason - to steady his nerves. That, along with everything else, caught up with him to the point where he retired a second and final time in 1974. He lingered sometime before dying of laryngeal cancer in 1988.
About the Sampler
I didn’t say much about Son House’s style up above, because it’s so damned…for lack of a better word, primal, i.e, beating-heart visceral, or the closest you can get to raw expression on the tuneful side of the heaviest hard-core punk. The music’s sparer, obviously, nearly all of it just him and a guitar - or, per a quote of blues scholar Robert Palmer:
"[House's] instrument became a congregation, responding to his gravelly exhortation with clipped, percussive bass rhythms and the ecstatic whine of the slider in the treble.... It was stark, gripping, kinetic music that demanded to be danced to and would have left few listeners unmoved.”
I tried to capture that with a combination of Son House’s most famous numbers - e.g., “Preachin’ Blues,” “Levee Camp Moan,” “Delta Blues,” and “The Jinx Blues” - and I rounded those out with a bunch of songs that caught my ear - e.g., “Walking Blues,” “Am I Right or Wrong,” “Death Letter Blues,” “John the Revelator,” “Grinnin’ in Your Face,” “Levee Camp Blues,” and, because it was an oddball, “American Defense,” something it sounds like he recorded for the war effort. And also different from everything else.
And now…
Chicago Blues, a Segue
Before getting to the next artist - also a son of the South, by the way - I wanted to define a term, the Chicago blues, specifically. I expected Wikipedia would give me a little more to work with, but here are the basics. It followed the Great Migration, aka, the Great Northern Drive - e.g., the masses of Black Americans escaping Jim Crow and looking for better than the dead-end opportunities they found in the South - to the northern cities, St. Louis, MO and Chicago, IL among others. Over time, the Delta blues changed to match the milieu. To borrow a quote Wikipedia posted by blues singer/guitarist, Kevin Moore:
“You have to put some new life into it, new blood, new perspectives. You can't keep talking about mules, workin' on the levee.”
The instruments and uses of them changed as well. The change wasn’t immediate, but, over time, the guitars became electric, the harmonicas amplified, and the bands expanded to include a full rhythm section - e.g., bass and drums - and the piano joined in with some artists. Perilously close to what you expect to see with your average rock band, basically, and the chain of influence runs straight through Chess Records and from Muddy Waters to Chuck Berry. It was a broader sound, as well, something designed to appeal to a mass audience - and an urban one too, hence the nickname, “urban blues.”
An entire career path evolved for blues artists in Chicago. They’d start playing house parties, on street corners and near open-air markets like the one on (in? near?) Maxwell Street. From there, they graduated to blues clubs, e.g., Ruby Lee Gatewood’s Tavern and, full disclosure, I’m not pretending to know those names, never mind their meaning. The basic idea is that Delta blues musicians came up from the South, reinvented the blues and turned it into a whole new cultural touchstone. Now, one of the guys who made it happen…
Tampa Red, Man with the Golden Guitar
“He formed a vital link between the country blues of the 1920s and the electric Chicago blues of the postwar era.”
- Musician Guide, Tampa Red bio
Tampa Red was born Hudson Woodbridge in Smithville, Georgia in 1903. His parents died during his childhood, leaving an aunt and a grandmother to raise him in Tampa, Florida, and giving him the names he used for the rest of his life - e.g., Hudson Whittaker and, of course, Tampa Red, a shout-out to his adopted hometown and…either his red hair or his “light complexion.” Unlike Son House, Tampa Red did not wrestle with religion or angst over the blues: he learned to play first from his brother, then from a street musician named Piccolo Pete. He also wasted less time getting north: Tampa Red was in Chicago by 1920, somewhere around his 17th birthday. The first playing, paying job he landed on getting to the Windy City? Accompanying another “urban blues” legend, Ma Rainey (already covered in this series). He tapped another legend when his rendition of “Through Train Blues” split his first 78 rpm recording with Blind Lemon Jefferson (also covered).
His own career took off in the late 1920s, when he met and collaborated with a pianist/arranger named Thomas A. Dorsey, aka, Georgia Tom. Together, they wrote and recorded a number titled “It’s Tight Like That,” in 1928. The song went on to sell a million copies and the story behind it should sound very familiar:
“The song came about when Mayo Williams heard them playing with a tune, borrowed from a Papa Charley Jordan song, built around the then-popular catch phrase, ‘Tight Like That.’ Williams loved it and insisted they record it right away.”
Because they played it in a second/third generation musical/genre off-shoot called “hokum,” Tampa Red and Georgia Tom played as the Hokum Boys. When they added female impersonator Frankie “Half Pint” Jaxon to the mix - which just goes to show how far back so many things go (i.e., think of a first date for just about anything, then forget about it because it probably happened well before) - they played as Tampa Red’s Hokum Jug Band. Both Tampa Red and Dorsey played on multiple recordings and for multiple artists; they were session musicians, possibly before the terms was coined. In terms of giving credit where it’s due, Dorsey may deserve more of it: Dorsey’s chops as an arranger had already connected him to Mayo Williams the “front man for Paramount Records” in Chicago; it was Dorsey who arranged Tampa Red's first opportunities to record.
Tampa Red’s first-choice instrument also made him stand-out: in 1928, he picked up a National steel-bodied resonator guitar, the loudest guitar available before they went electric. For an extra touch of flair, he played a gold-plated tricone model - which led to one of his nicknames, the “man with the golden guitar.” Related, that same guitar was found somewhere around nowhere Illinois in 1990, and later donated to the Seattle Music Experience. That’s for anyone who wants to see it. He also expanded on a specific, influential style on that guitar, what Wikipedia calls “a distinctive single-string slide style” - something you hear on numbers like “King Fish Blues” and “How Long, How Long Blues” - along with the singing style he passed on to later genres and generations.
The 1930s put a hiccup in Tampa Red’s career, just like it did everyone else’s - only he had the unique experience of losing his key collaborator, Georgia Tom, to God and gospel music (that’s to say, Georgia Tom embraced both to the exclusion of all other things). The Great Depression tanked his record sales, of course, but he didn’t stay down nearly as long as most: 1934 saw him re-signed to Victor Records and, holy shit, did Tampa Red record: 251 sides from 1928-1942, and a total of 335 sides in all over the course of his long career. A set of specific catalysts carried him out of his short hiatus, most of them contained in this quote:
“Three events contributed to his resurrection: the repeal of Prohibition, the rise of the jukebox, and Lester Melrose taking over RCA Victor's new Bluebird label. Jukeboxes provided cheap entertainment in the newly legal bars. Lester Melrose recognized their importance for record companies and made sure his artists were well represented in Chicago jukeboxes.”
The Bluebird label bears noting for a couple reasons. First of all, it was the flagship of Victor Records’ budget line, with 78s selling for 35 cents instead of the 75-cent regular price, a marketing strategy that put all that vinyl in the hands of Black consumers (and the curious and open-minded among everyone else). Second, when he founded of the Chicago Five, he introduced the not just the backbone of the Bluebird sound, but also the basic template for most modern musical acts, aka (as Wikipedia puts it), “the small-group style of later jump blues and rock-and-roll bands” - i.e., the instruments noted in the Chicago blues intro above.
Tampa Red made his next jump by going electric in the 1940s and switching over to R&B. He actually landed his greatest successes somewhere during his…think this makes his third act. He recorded a pair of hits some time apart, starting with 1942’s “Let Me Play with Your Poodle,” a hot No. 4 on the “Harlem Hit Parade” (precursor to the R&B charts…and how was that for you?) an his 1949 hit, “When Things Go Wrong with You (It Hurts Me Too).” In other words, Tampa Red thrived over 25 years (1928-1953) and even reinvented himself at least twice. Perhaps even more important, both he and his wife became an anchor or the Chicago blues community, both a way-post and a gateway for Delta blues musicians coming up from the South. As Wikipedia elaborates:
“He achieved commercial success and some prosperity. His home became a centre for the blues community, providing rehearsal space, bookings, and lodgings for musicians who arrived in Chicago from the Mississippi Delta as the commercial potential of blues music grew and agricultural employment in the South diminished.”
The year 1953 turned out to be an annus horribilis for Tampa Red. His wife, his anchor as an anchor to the blues community, passed away. Tampa Red took to drinking after that and I have yet to see any sign that he stopped before his death, in poverty, in 1981. It was better than one hell of a run. He was one of the rare early blues artists no one had to rediscover, because he never really went away. As Ry Cooder later put it:
“I really think that it's a straight line from Tampa Red to Louis Jordan to Chuck Berry, without a doubt.... Tampa Red changed it from rural music to commercial music.”
We all die, but some go out better than most.
About the Sampler
Just by way of playing in/creating the Chicago blues sound, Tampa Red boasts a considerably wider repertoire than Son House’s - multiple instruments, cleaner (poppier) vocals, etc. That doesn’t mean he didn’t do anything else - e.g., “Black Angel Blues” is damned close to “regular” blues. Most of it, however, comes from what I’m interpreting as the “Bluebird sound.”
I linked to a handful of the hits above, but I also included the following (thoroughly modern) numbers: “Don’t Lie to Me,” “Love Her with a Feeling,” “Don’t Forget It,” “The Jitter Jump,” "The Duck Yas Yas,” “She’s Love Crazy,” and, one of Tampa Red’s biggest hits, “Anna Lou Blues.”
The composition of this post accidentally touched on both sides of the great migration, something that really comes through when you listen to the sampler; they’re totally different sounds and approaches to the same genre. The contrast probably hurt Son House in terms of listening - Tampa Red’s material is just so damned accessible - but Son House’s stuff keeps growing on me. And bringing chills.
To close with an editorial note, I don’t have many more of these multi-artist posts lined up - just two more up to the 25th or 26th chapter, and mostly because they’re hard to turn around quickly - but I’ll be loitering in this era for a while. I’ve got a pair of blues legends in the near-term…even if I’m not sure they’re any more legendary, at the end of the day, than any of the blues artists I’ve covered so far. This was a busy period, basically, and I’m skipping plenty.
At any rate, till the next one.
No comments:
Post a Comment