“Rock’s First Act – A History of Early Rock and Roll; 1929 – 1959”
By James P. Manouse
Preface
Rock and roll has been with us now for over 50 years. Described as having an “unruly history”, Rock and Roll was born out of the influences of various forms of music in existence at that time during the first part of the 20th century, but primarily it sprang up from a southern musical form known as the blues. The blues itself can be traced back to the rhythms of West Africa, carried to these shores via the slave trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Other contributing influences were traditional European folk tunes and even marches, brought over with early American settlers from Europe travelling to the New World in the 17th, 18th and 19th centries. These melodies having been used in native, traditional folk songs developed over, perhaps, a period as long as a thousand years, or for as long as folk songs have been sung.
The primary focus of this series will be on Rock and Roll’s evolution from the Blues, and how it can be traced from the earliest recorded Blues form, known as “Country Blues.” There is no denying the role that Hillbilly music would play in the earliest recordings of such greats as Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Buddy Holly, but Rock’s major debt, as this series will show, is clearly owed to this simple form of southern regional music. Like Country music, which was also developing as Hillbilly music in the Appalachian's, the Country Blues form focused on just a man and his guitar - as simple as it gets and at the same time as powerful as it gets.
Time for a word on what this series is not: We will not be analyzing or focusing on chord progressions, notes, keys, or any of the esoteric lexicon or vernacular of the music, but rather on the people and the road that their regional music would take that would ultimately lead down a path to Rock and Roll. ALthough at timnes we will talk about form, where it is important.
We begin with the first artists to be recorded performing the Blues (in the 1920’s), and follow it all the way to the “Day the Music Died” in 1958 with the plane crash that killed three early Rock pioneers. It’s a long first act, to be sure, but it all leads to a place that created the likes of The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, The Who, The Animals, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, Cream, Deep Purple, Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, AC/DC, and then on to everyone from Lynyrd Skynrd to Aerosmith, The Doobie Brothers to The Allman Brothers, Bruce Springsteen to Tom Petty, Nirvana to Pearl Jam, and Guns ‘n’ Roses to Metallica.
It’s an incredible period, filled with larger-than-life characters, mysterious deaths, countless brushes with the law, legendary stories of moonlight deals with The Devil, all culminating with a white boy from Tupelo named Elvis, who, during a short period of time in 1956, turned the world on to Black music, and in so doing, changed the world.
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Part I
Chapter 1: Country Blues and the Mississippi Delta
The “Country Blues” came about in the early years of the twentieth century. This rhythms behind the Blues actually began centuries before and can be demonstrably traced all the way back to West Africa. Eventually, these West African rhythms made their way across the Atlantic, carried by those being carried into bondage in the New World, and manifesting themselves in field hollers and spirituals sung in church, the only place where black slaves were allowed to congregate in groups. A man who claimed to have lived next door to the great Texas Bluesman, Lightnin’ Hopkins, reinforced this to me by one day saying; “Remember, (the blues) came from one place: church.”
Aside from these West African rhythms, and as the noted and celebrated musicologist, the late Robert Palmer, points out in his book and television documentary based on the subject, “Deep Blues”, many of these early rhythms also came from a rather unlikely, but readily available source; the rhythms and beats of fife and drum corps that were so prevalent in 18th century Europe and Colonial America. Created to provide a beat that soldiers could march to out on the battle field, they would evolve to the point that not only could you march to them; you could even dance to it.
And so, it is from these two sources, the beats derived from the drum patterns of fife and drum corps and the ancient rhythms of West Africa that would serve as the two elements critical to the foundations in the creation of the percussive style of guitar that would become a signature part of the Country Blues, and later, Rhythm and Blues, and Rock and Roll. Traditional european folk songs would provide the melodies and the lyrics at the start.
The Birth of the Blues
Wikipedia notes that: “Blues is a vocal and instrumental form of music based on the use of the blue notes and a repetitive pattern that most often follows a twelve-bar structure. It emerged in African-American communities of the United States from spirituals, work songs, field hollers, shouts and chants, and rhymed English and Scots-Irish narrative ballads. The use of blue notes and the prominence of call-and-response patterns in the music and lyrics are indicative of African influence.”
It was these types of songs that were first sung in the churches, built for the sharecroppers by the Plantation owners, and the only places where they were allowed to congregate together, in the beginning. Needless to say, these services lasted as long as they could and often incorporated fish fry’s with music, the lyrical content of which was generally spiritual in nature, but always included themes of one day being freed or released from the burdens that they were forced to endure while upon this earth.
Slowly, the rhythms of West Africa, incorporated into these church spirituals, would make their way into the fields and came to be known as “Hollers”, where inside of the churches, members of the congregation would shout, or holler-out, their songs of praise in an attempt to free or exorcise themselves, even if only for a moment, of their considerable burdens; cleansing their souls of their troubles by raising up their voices and getting it all out of their system. It was this combination of ancient West African rhythms combined with these lyrics, spelling out their troubles all the while professing their faith, that lead to the Blues form. It was these rhythms and the lyrical content, by now focusing on their troubles and leaving the spiritual praise for the churches, that found their way to the juke joints, barrel houses, and secular fish fries that brought us what we think of as the modern Blues form.
The Delta
Most of what was occurring and evolving into the Blues was happening in one particular part of the South and in one particular region of Mississippi known as The Delta. The Mississippi Delta is located in Northwest Mississippi, along the Mississippi river and eastward, and not far south of Memphis, Tennessee.
The development of the Blues can be traced to specific places as well, such as the 10,000 acre Will Dockery cotton plantation and saw mill, founded in 1895 (and a place so large that it had its own micro-economy, complete with a railroad depot with full time ticket clerk, its own doctor, two churches, its own currency, and a commissary large enough to take care of the needs of some 2000 workers, many of whom were not Black, but European and Chinese), and long considered to be the actual birthplace of the Delta Blues due to the fact that at one time legendary bluesmen such as Charlie Patton, Son House, Robert Johson, Muddy Waters, Willie Brown, Tommy Johnson,and Howlin' Wolf (a veritible who's who of the founding fathers of the Delta Blues) all lived at Dockery. While Will Dockery reportedly took little interest in the music being developed on his plantation, he did not hinder it in any way, in fact, furture generations of his family have funded research into the history of the Delta Blues.
As Allen Lomax points out in his masterpiece of the genre, “The Land Where The Blues Began”, this is a story of the Black South, but not one born out of slavery, and that has everything to do with the geography of the Delta region. Until the years following the Civil War, the Mississippi Delta was a flooded, mostly uninhabitable area of the state, constantly under the great flood waters of the Mississippi river. While there may have been some thought to the creation of levees to at least make an attempt at holding back the Mississippi’s waters, the advent of the Civil War put those ideas on hold. Because of the unliveable nature of the land, there were no plantations, no slaves, no overseers, no one at all in the area until after the war, and in fact, until well after Reconstruction, when the levees could finally be constructed.
The Mississippi Delta, then, was a creation of the post-Antebellum, post-Civil War, post Reconstruction South. It was nearly the twentieth century before convicts were gathered from near-by Parchman Farm ( a prison farm to be more precise), and forced to work at hard labor with mules and wheel barrels, bringing load after load of dirt and earth to create the giant levees necessary to hold back the waters of the mighty Mississippi as best as they could.
Such was the lack of respect for the lives of the convicts forced to build these levees that it was not unusual to hear tales of a man with a mule or a wheel barrel falling down, off of the levee, and, in kind, with no way out, simply being buried under load after load of dirt. Such was the reality of the times that the life of the laborers was cheap and the men expendable; so cheap in fact, that rather than making an attempt at saving the man, and in so doing, stopping the work, that the man was left to die so that the work could continue unabated.
Even with the addition of the levees, and as we all know from the recent and tragic events in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane of Katrina, flood waters still rise, and they can still breach the levee walls, and at the start of the twentieth century, that’s exactly what would happen. As the waters would resede, this newly re-claimed land proved to be very fertile, when not swarming with snakes and alligators.
The land proved to be perfect for the planting of cotton. And so it was here that these new, post-slavery plantations, like Dockery, sprang-up close to towns such as Clarksdale, Mississippi. Clarksdale, located in the Mississippi Delta county of Coahoma on the Sunflower river, east of the Mississippi, sprang into new prominence to provide a commercial center for the region. The town, while founded in the early part of the 19th century would not incorporate until the late 1880’s, paralleling the growth of the Delta cotton business and the new plantations springing up. In fact, the web site Clarksdaletourism.com points out that post 1900, free from floods that plagued the area in the late 1880’s, the area was able to sustain positive growth going forward for many years. Located at the intersection of state highways 61 and 49, it is these crossroads in Clarksdale that became the crossroads mentioned so prominently in the folklore of the blues.
In the beginning, and before a type of mass subjugation took place, Black sharecroppers prospered and made good money, but as is the case where money can be made quickly, and where the law is slow to respond, and where the laws themselves are written to benefit those that have the money necessary to buy power, that corruption was rampant. Soon the Black sharecroppers that had found an abundant life in this new land found themselves coming under the thumb of wealthy plantation owners.
Such was the injustice, that on one especially horrific occasion, when the river had flooded, that plantation owners actually imprisoned free sharecroppers in make-shift concentration camps (resembling the P.O.W. camps of World War II, but without the barracks) to keep them from moving on to other plantations away from the Delta, to look for other land to work.
Some went so far as to force their sharecropper victims to actually buy back emergency supplies, sent free-of-charge in a humanity relief effort by the Red Cross. By forcing them to pay for their own supplies, the plantation owners were able to force them into becoming increasingly indebted to them, in effect, binding them to the land in a feudal arrangement. Since the sharecroppers had no money with which to buy the supplies, the method proved effective. Held at gun point, and without shelter, the conditions were inhumane.
By the 1940’s technology had advanced to the point where most of the cotton farming had become mechanized and the life of the Delta sharecropper came to an end, as the field laborers were replaced by machines.
But, looking back, it is no wonder then, that the first “Bluesmen” were looking for a way to escape this unforgiving environment and for a way off of the plantation. This still wasn’t a world where any of the people that worked on the plantation received anything close to an education and so their options were extremely limited; work as a sharecropper or work at the plantation in another capacity, working for instance, as a truck driver.
It was from this difficult life that sharecroppers went to church to try find the promise of a better life in the here-after, where the Good Lord would finally relieve them of their burdens, and to the juke joints and barrelhouses to get a little relief while they were still here. It was in these types of places that Country Blues sprang forth as a unique form of musical entertainment. It was worked-on, developed and evolved into a particular, authentic type of regional music.
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Chapter 2 – The Delta Blues
In the beginning, the Delta Blues were performed by a single man, with a guitar, and maybe one other man seconding (accompanying) him on guitar. Guitars were first introduced to the area by Mexican immigrants when they migrated north in the late 19th century. Sometimes, by singing and/or playing the higher strings for melody or lead, strumming the lower strings for the bass or rhythm line, and then banging on the body of the guitar, or stomping their foot on the floor to produce a percussive beat, a single performer was able to emulate the parts found in a modern day rock band. In the Delta, a technique using a bottleneck on one finger created the slide-guitar technique, which elongated the sound of the notes, and as they trailed off, it was reminiscent of the part that modern day keyboards might play.
W.C. Handy and the birth of the Bluesman
W. C. Handy was born in a log cabin in Florence, Alabama in 1873 and was the first to record this native, regional music of the Mississippi Delta, called the Blues. Handy was not a band leader, not a bluesman, and it would be his name that would become synonymous with Memphis and its famous haven for the blues, Beale Street.
Handy, not being from the Mississippi Delta, was a man of his times and was a well-trained musician who prospered and performed with his band during the heady days of Ragtime and riverboat music that was the earliest form of that other distinctively American musical art form known as Jazz.
While traveling through the south with his band, Handy found himself on a railroad platform where he heard, for the first time, a local guitar player, anonymous to this day, playing a peculiar, primitive form of music that Handy found very intriguing. Handy wrote in his autobiography of being awakened by "... a lean, loose-jointed Negro [who] had commenced plucking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar. ... The effect was unforgettable... The singer repeated the line ("Goin' where the Southern cross the Dog") three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard."
Handy did not forget this encounter and later went on to write the first blues song ever recorded: The St. Louis Blues, which he recorded in 1909. Later that same year he moved to Memphis, located himself on Beale Street (wit which he would become synonymous) where he wrote his second Blues song, The Memphis Blues, which he would record three years later in 1912. The singer on this recording was one of the first great blues singers, Bessie Smith. The song, Memphis Blues, was the first to include two repeating stanzas followed by a third, rhyming stanza, which would become the modern Blues form.
By the 1920’s Handy would move to the center of the music world, New York City, where he would continue to record the Blues with artists such as Smith and a young trumpet player and singer named Louis Armstrong. Handy is reme,mbered and immortalized for his contributions to popularizing the blues foirm and taking it to the mases as "The Father of the Blues”, even though he himself never performed it. However, as a pure music empressario, the title is certainly warranted.
The First Bluesmen
Charlie Patton
Charlie Patton (probably) in his only known photograph
Charlie Patton has been called “The Father of the Delta Blues” and was the first man to have ever been recorded performing the Delta Blues. It was Charlie Patton who, along with another prolific Delta Bluesman, Eddie James “Son” House, would come to mentor some of the greatest and most memorable names in the history of the Blues. Men like McKinely Morgenfield (better known as Muddy Waters), Chester Burnett (better known as Howlin’ Wolf) - who was Patton's chief protege and the man most linked with his style, and the greatest of them all, Robert Johnson (he of the crossroads fame).
Patton was the Jimmie Hendrix of his day. Decades before Hendrix’s birth, Charlie Patton, armed only with a single acoustic guitar and a bottle-neck slide, would mesmerize his audience by playing the guitar from his knees, behind his neck and in other acrobatic positions. In fact, one could argue that Patton’s greatest impact, along with his distinctive voice that would come to symbolize that of a bluesman, may have been as a performer. Certainly he inspired great bluesmen like House, Johnson, Howlin' Wolf and others who saw him to become more than just traveling troubadours and bluesmen, but performers.
He was accompanied at times by one of his wives (reportedly he had eight, but that could just be hyperbole, which tended to run rampant in the south where was actually known about these individuals), a woman by the name of Bertha Lee. By 1925 his accompanist became a man named Willie Brown, who would go on to accompany and travel with Son House after Patton’s death. On Patton’s first recordings Brown can be heard playing along, and banging on what sounds like the bottom of a bucket or the body of a guitar, to provide a percussive beat. Brown can be heard clearly in the background on the recording for “High Water Everywhere.”
Patton was born in 1891 and lived near the Dockery Plantation, in Ruleville, Mississippi, where he met Son House, and all the other early bluesmen like Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, John Lee Hooker, and Robert Johnson (a youth at the time who made it a point of showing up and watching intently whenever Charlie Patton, Willie Brown and Son House showed up to play, bound and determined to one day be a bluesman himself, but an annoyance to House and Patton at the time).
Since little has been recorded about the early life of Charlie Patton, little is known. What is known is that Patton mainly recorded at the Jefferies Plantation in Lula, Mississippi, where he made approximately 50 recordings. After being discovered he recorded at Paramount Records in Richmond, Indiana in 1928.
Patton learned the blues and came under the tutelage of a man named Henry Sloan. Sloan is one of the earliest known figures in the history of the blues. He was most likely born around 1870, and moved to Chicago after World War I. He was never recorded. Around 1900 he was living in the Mississippi delta. Between 1901 and 1904 he would be living at the Dockery Plantation, where he would meet, and teach, Patton. Patton played with Sloan for a few years, and as Son House and another early blues legend, Tommy Johnson, would relate, Patton copied Sloan's technique and style very closely. One interesting theory put forth is that it was Henry Sloan who was observed by W.C. Handy playing the "primitive native music" he heard that day at the local train station that stuck with, and ultimately led him to begin recording the blues. It is a pity that this very intetersting, very important piece of information in the history of the blues can never be proven.
Patton, as many young bluesmen apprentices would do, traveled around the region, with his mentor. By the time he was 19, in 1910, he had already written “Pony Blues”, a song he would go on to record years later. By the time Patton was able to record he was already 37 years old, with many miles logged, many towns visited, and countless numbers of songs sung. By the time he recorded he had, if not from the start, the distinctive gravely, whiskey and cigarettes affected voice that became his unique signature, and that came to symbolize the sound of a bluesman.
Along with the recordings of Texas bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, who recorded at about the same time, these records are among the first ever laid-down of anyone playing the Country Blues, and they are certainly the first-ever recordings of the Delta Blues. In so doing, he also became one of the first known artists of American popular music in history.
In 1933 Patton survived having his throat slit near Holly Ridge, Mississippi. Many of the juke joints where the early Bluesmen performed were dangerous places, especially for strangers, such as traveling musicians, who were very much the “Rock Stars” of their day in that part of the country. It was a lawless world where it was not unusual for a man, who wanted a particular woman, to kill the man she was with in order to have her.
Of course, the other side of that coin was that a man might kill another man in order to protect, in his mind, what belonged to him, especially if he felt that his woman was falling under the spell of the performer. Legendary sexual exploits are rife in the early annals of the blues, and not without considerable risk being undertaken.
It is no wonder then that many early Bluesmen found themselves dead at an early age, and not from natural causes. Many who survived spent time in prisons such as Parchman Farm and Angola for killing a man in self defense. Great bluesmen, such as Patton, House, Johnson, and Huddy “Lead Belly” Leadbetter, all found themselves in life and death situations, and paid the price for having been there.
Patton had a gritty, husky, “whiskey” voice that belied his small stature, but evoked the idea of the gravelly-voiced singer that would come to symbolize the modern blues singer. The bluesman that would come the closest to emulating Patton’s singing voice would be Howlin’ Wolf, a man nearly twice Patton’s size. Patton was only 5 feet, 5 inches tall and weighted less than 150 lbs, Howlin Wolf, on the other hand, was 6 feet, 6 inches tall and over 300 pounds, and if legend holds true, it was Patton who's voice was stronger and could carry, unamplified, some 500 yards. He was a small man but he had a huge voice. Later, others, including BB King, would emulate the vocal style created by Patton.
Extremely well versed in guitar and so talented that no less a figure than W.C. Handy offered a spot playing guitar in his band to Patton in 1916 when Patton was 25. Patton’s tremendous showmanship made him very popular in his day at juke joints and plantations in and around the Delta where he was invited to come and play. This is very much unlike the struggles of most itinerant Bluesmen who were constrained to singing on street corners to make ends meet and struggling to get any legitimate, paying gigs at all.
Like Blind Lemon Jefferson, that other great early Blues pioneer from Texas, Patton found fame and popularity in his day and during his lifetime. Although both he and Blind Lemon would die young, they wouldn’t be modern day versions of Vincent Van Gogh. Unlike Van Gogh, who sold nothing in his lifetime and found fame only posthumously, those that heard Patton’s and Blind Lemon’s work while living, knew that they had heard something special.
To be sure, the life of a bluesman was a nomadic life, and one in which you never stayed in one place too long. You were constantly moving along, staying in one place until you had just about worn-out your welcome, or you had gotten on the wrong side of local men who would grow tired of your stealing the attentions of their women, or you simply had a notion, or a hankering, to move on. One town to the next, one woman to the next, such was the life of a bluesman. Patton himself did most of his traveling around this local area
The “Pony Blues”, first conceived by him years earlier, was his first released blues recording. His guitar playing on many of his tracks has been described as “percussive” – a key element that helped to define the Blues, as did his slide guitar technique. He often picked and slapped the body of the guitar to add the percussive element.
Patton did not stick to just one single style. Although considered to be the “Father of the Delta Blues” many of Patton’s recordings tended towards the “Folk” style. For example his recording of “Runnin’ Wild Blues” isn’t really a Blues song at all, but sung in the Folk or Traditional style. This is not terribly unique; many performers, especially from Texas, like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lead Belly, tended to be more from the Folk school than the Blues school, and this makes sense since they felt no particular need, nor reason, to stick to one, and only one, style of song. Chances are, if they heard a song and liked it, it could be added to their repertoire, regardless of style, Folk or Blues.
There is only one known photograph of Patton that exists, and even that one is in dispute. Today that lone photograph is in a private collection, however, a simple Google or Yahoo! search on ‘Charlie Patton’ images will produce a representation of it. If it is authentic, and it seems as though no one is really going to any great lengths to discredit it, it is of poor quality, but certain aspects emerge. He was a handsome man and his light complexion and features led some to question his ethnicity as possibly Mexican or even Native American (a theory subscribed to by none other than Howlin’ Wolf). General consensus, however, points to his being African-American, although the photograph certainly leaves room for debate, based on his features. On the surface of it, and under examination, it appears very possible that Patton is of mixed race, although no hard evidence has emerged to substantiate this claim.
After three recording sessions with Paramount, two in 1929, both with Willie Brown, the second adding fiddler Henry “Son” Sims, and the third in 1930 in Wisconsin with Brown and Son House on guitar and Louise Johnson on piano, in 1934 Patton traveled to New York City where he recorded for ARC records.
Charlie Patton died later that year of heart failure, but it could be said that living the life of a true bluesman is what ultimately did-in Charlie Patton. At his death, Charlie Patton was only 43 years old.
According to the web site Southernmusic.net “Patton defined the life of a bluesman. He drank and smoked excessively. He reportedly had a total of eight wives. He was jailed at least once. He traveled extensively, never staying in one place for too long. Patton’s standing in blues history is immense.”
Certainly it can be said that Patton, along with Son House and Blind Lemon Jefferson, were the fathers of the Country Blues, at least in so far as they were the first to be recorded performing it. It was these three that would go on to influence countless others including three greats; Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and Howlin’ Wolf, who, while they would eclipse them in fame and notoriety, would forever be indebted to them; for if there was never a Charlie Patton, a Son House, or a Blind Lemon Jefferson, there would have probably never been a Robert Johnson, a Muddy Waters, or a Howlin’ Wolf, and therefore, no Rhythm and Blues, and no Rock and Roll.
At the start of it all, becoming the first signature bluesman of note and record, was Charlie Patton. To this day, when one thinks about, or when singers try to emulate the quintessential blues singer with the rough voice, they try to sound like Charlie Patton. Combining his signature vocal style with great prowess over the guitar, and unsurpassed performance skills likened to that of a modern day Jimi Hendrix, it is not hard to see why so many seem to think that Charlie Patton’s influence in the development of the blues, cannot be underestimated.
It should be noted that Patton’s recordings, along with those of other influential Bluesman who recorded early in the twentieth century and who died young, are of poor quality. All of Patton’s surviving tracks are filled with scratches and poor accoustics, typical of the times. It takes repeatedly listening of the tracks before the listener can tune out all of the unwanted noise to actually hear the music, and the genius behind it, but it's there, if you listen long enough.
Patton's chief disciple, Chester "Howlin' Wolf" Burnett, would go on to tremendous fame and help create, along with Muddy Waters, the Chicago Blues sound of the post-war, electric era, and would help carry Patton's husky style of vocals forward to a mass audience.
Some of Patton’s most impressive numbers are: “Pony Blues”, “Runnin’ Wild Blues”, and “High Water Everywhere (Part 1)”.
Eddie James "Son" House
Son House in the 1960's with his National steel guitar, the instrument with which he is identified
Eddie James (Son) House, Jr. was 11 years younger than Charlie Patton (probably, but thanks to shoddy record keeping no one knows for sure), and was born in 1902, and, taken up by the spirit, became a Baptist preacher by the time he was 15 years old. But, as he related years later, he was overcome, and later un-done, by the whiskey and the women.
The story of Son House is actually two stories – one before he left the Delta to work as a railroad worker in Rochester, New York, and the other of the man, rediscovered decades later during the Blues revival of the early 1960’s and the enormous contribution he made to the Blues once he had been rediscovered.
Although Charlie Patton may have set the standard for the modern bluesman, in terms of singing style and performance, and although the two greatest bluesmen who ever lived in terms of influential style and talent were Blind Lemon Jefferson and Robert Johnson, and although men like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf carried the Blues north to the city, where they would become electric, none of them would ever have a more important, more powerful, or better song than Son House’s “Death Letter.”
It can be intelligently argued that “Death Letter” may be the most important song ever written in the Blues, Rhythm and Blues, or Rock and Roll form. In fact, upon a close listen, it may well be the first rock and roll song. “Death Letter”, although performed only with voice and slide guitar, can easily be broken into parts for vocal, lead guitar, bass guitar, and drums, even though just one man, with a lone guitar, recorded and performed it. Perhaps none of the early bluesman came to utilize the percussive style of play that would come to symbolize the blues like Son House. Where he got this style of percussive play from is unknown, but most likely, he first heard it in the music of his friend/rival, Charlie Patton. But clearly, House takes it a step further. He drops the folk-ish nature of a lot of Patton's songs for the more driving tempo and grittier feel that would evolve into Rhythm & Blues and Rock & Roll and separate it from traditional folk songs. "Death Letter" sems to be a song ahead of its time and one that seems written in the future language of Rock and Roll, while at the same time being a powerful and authentic purely blues composition.
Not to be lost are the brilliance of the lyrics and its theme, which remains hauntingly unsuprassed. "Death Letter" to put it simply, is a song about a man who only realizes that he is in love with a woman upon her sudden and unexpected death (evidenced by the key lyric; "I didn't know I loved her, until they began to let her down"). Another interesting fact is that House may well have never sung the exact same words twice. On every performance of this song recorded after he was re-discovered in the 1960's, he never sings the same exact lyrics twice, adding new lines and deleting others as he saw fit.
Unlike many of his comtemporaries, Son House lived to see the advent of television, and also lived to perform on this new medium, and so several versions of Son House performing "Death Letter" on television exist to this day (see below for two TV versions of his performances). Today's rock stars rarely change even a single word of an established song once wrtitten and recorded for fear of alienationg their fans, but that was not the case in the 1920's and 30's. Many artists improvised or altered lyrics to fit the mood they were in on a particular night.
While it can be very difficult to get a modern rock song out of a folk tune, and it’s hard to get a rock song from most of what Blind Lemon and Charlie Patton did, in that there needs to be a step or two added to the song's evolution to get you there, it’s a cinch to get a rock tune out of “Death Letter”, so advanced a song that it was.
Son House did not take up guitar until his calling as a Baptist preacher came to an abrupt halt. Born a few miles from Clarksdale, in Riverton, Mississippi, he was the middle of 17 brothers, and moved to Louisiana as a boy by his mother after she separated from his father. It was there that he got the notion of becoming a preacher and actually began preaching at the age of 15. However he would soon fall in with a woman 10 years his senior, and despite the church’s opposition and view of the Blues as being the ‘Devil’s music’, he none the less couldn’t resist the urge to play, and so his life as a preacher seemed pretty much doomed from the start.
While living near Lyon, Mississippi, a life-changing event occured for the young man with leanings towards the blues. He fell in with local blues legends Rubin "Rube" Lacy, who lived until 1970 and recorded material in Chicago for Paramount in 1928 (although a web search reveals little else about him) and James McCoy, about whom very little is known except that there is speculation that House learned a version of "Death Letter" (called "My Black Mama") from McCoy. In fact "Death Letter's" original title, as recorded by House, was "My Black Mama, Part's I & II." It is thought that House learned the blues at the feet of these two local legends.
While performing at a house party in Louisiana sometime around 1927, House shot and killed a man in self-defence. The man had gone on a shooting spree, and House, himself, had been shot in the leg. He was subsequently convicted and sentenced to prison at Parchman farm. His sentenced was commuted to time served in 1929 (for reasons somewhat unkown), and he was released after a short period, certainly less than two years into his sentence. After being advised by the local Justice of the Peace to leave the area, and seeing the writing on the wall, House got out of the area and relocated back to his native area in the Mississippi Delta, near Clarksdale. Somehow evidence of the self-defensive nature of the shooting must have come to light and lead to his sentance being shortened.
A second life-changing event would occur when, while performing at the local railroad depot, he was befriended by local bluesman and popular, sought after entertainer, Charlie Patton. After their encounter House would take up the life of a bluesman full-time. In so-doing, he utilized the booming vocal style and evangelical fire of a Southern Baptist Preacher that would become his trademark.
Once House got back to Clarksdale and began playing with Charlie Patton and his second (or accompaniast) Willie Brown, he quickly developed his own slide guitar style, described as 'slashing'. More percussive, less traditionally folksy, more bluesy, more driven in rhythm and tempo, Son House is one of those artists not well remembered because his major contributions were as a musician, and as a developer of a style that would be copied over and over again by future bluesmen, despite some brilliant songs that truly seem to be well ahead of their time.
Once established with his own style, Son House mentored two of the most famous names in the history of the blues, or in fact, in the history of all of American popular music; Robert Johnson (whom, in later interviews with the music historian Allen Lomax, he referred to as “Little Robert”), and Muddy Waters (who would later accompany Son House during his revival tour in the 1960's, and whom Water's took to calling "The Old Man"). To an extent, a third legend, Howlin' Wolf was also influenced. It bears noting that the reverance that Muddy Waters had for Son House was enormous.
To put it into perspective, Muddy Waters was the single most important bridge between the early years of Country blues and modern day rock and roll right up to and including the 1970's. Waters played with them all, and was in fact recruited in the 1960's to come to England to perform with local modern-day blues afficiandos like Eric Clapton. Waters always spoke highly about the playing of the young Brits, but always thought they lacked something. But, with Son House, Waters would gladly back him up and play second guitar at shows during House's comeback. Clearly Waters felt that House was the one, true remaining original article, and that is pretty impressive.
Son House and Charlie Patton almost certainly had a complicated, almost sibling relationship, not unlike that of John Lennon and Paul McCartney in that they were half brothers and half rivals, and ended up bringing out the best in each other. House, in later years, was, rather amusingly, not all that forth coming in praise for Patton, most likely due to the fact that back in their day, when they were both performing together, there seemed to be no doubt as to who the star of the show was. The man the people came to see was Charlie Patton. There can be no greater praise for House than the fact that when a young Robert Johnson and a young Muddy Waters wanted to emulate a style, and learn to play, it was Son House, and not Charlie Patton, whom they primarily emmulated.
House got his first opportunity to record on Charlie Patton’s third and last trip to record for Paramount records prior to hi death, but it is unclear as to whether or not those recordings ever came to anything. When Patton died in 1934, his accompaniest, Willie Brown, began playing with House. Better known were his recordings in 1940 and 1941 for music folklorist Allen Lomax, who was recording native, regional musicians, in their element, for the Library of Congress.
Eventually, House gave up the business, most likely with the on-set of World War II, and moved north to Rochester, New York, where he found work with the railroad. He was found decades later by two young blues enthusiasts during the blues revival of the early 1960’s. At the time he was found, he had not been performing since the 40’s and had reportedly not played at all for 7 or more years. He als was reportedly amazed at the fact that anyone remembered him and was unaware of the fact taht anyone was even looking for him. The blues revival itrself had also gone unnoticed by House.
This brings us to House’s third and most invaluable contribution to the blues, and eventually Rock music. By the 1960’s, the original bluesmen that had survived, like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf, and other second generation performers, once removed from the first wave of Mississippi Delta musicians, men like Waters, B.B. King and Lonnie Johnson, had long since gone electric. Even if they had attempted to go back to that original, Country Blues style, performed on an acoustic guitar, it would have been very difficult to re-produce, exactly, the technique utlized that first created the blues, since it had long since been abandoned. But with House it was not this way.
Because House had never gone electric, since he had not been performing since before America had joined the Second World War, his style had not changed, it had not evolved, it was as it was when he stopped playing in the early 1940's. He had never played an electric guitar, never had an amp, and most likely, had only used a microphone during his few recording sessions. He was a living example of the Blues in its native, primitive, most traditional, and purest state.
When the young blues enthusiasts tracked him down, he was a man from another era. When found, there are stories that he was shocked that anyone remembered him and he had no idea that there was a blues revival even taking place. It is even said that once persuaded to perform again, he needed the help of these young men just to re-learn his own songs, in his own style. But, in time, it all came back to him, and before his health started giving out by the 1970's, he toured successfully, eventually as far as the United Kingdom, where he mesmerized audiences and made new recordings both in the studio and live. Son House was a human time capsule. His last previous recordings had been for Allen Lomax for The Library of Congress in the early 1940's, but in 1965, Son House finally recorded his first full-length album, nearly 25 years later.
It is said that when he performed that no one knew what to expect, however, once he began, he transported both the audience and himself back to an age that had long since vanished. Here he was, Son House, a first generation, Mississippi Delta, plantation living and juke joint playing bluesman, and a living link back to the start of the recorded Blues, and a culture that had long since vanished. Here was the man who taught both Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters how to play, and who were both inspired by his driving style.
Upon the revival in the 60’s, Muddy Waters had not forgotten his old mentor, whom he lovingly took to calling “The Old Man.” On occasion, when Son House got up on stage, it was the Muddy Waters, himself, who deferentially took Willie Brown’s place, and accompanied him.
House’s fourth, and most memorable contribution to the legend of the blues, is certainly, by far, his most infamous. It was House, who first told a group of shocked college students, during the revival of the 60’s, about the legend of, his protégé, the man he called “Little Robert”, Robert Johnson. It was the story of how Johnson had gained his amazing prowess over the guitar by going out to the crossroads in Clarksdale, Mississippi (the intersection of state highways 61 and 49), one dark night and selling his soul to the Devil. Certainly House must have know that he was putting folks on - in fact the crosroads legend wasn't even started with Robert Johnson, but with another bluesman, Tommy Johnson (not related). Still, House did lose track of Johnson for a year or so (as did eveyone else) and he recounted many times about how shocked he was that Johnson could have gone away for only a year, and come back a master after having been uttelry hopeless at the instrument only a year before. Who knows, maybe House just decided that the only way Johnson could have done it was by selling his soul. Just who made it up is unclear to this day, but it was House who re-told it to this new generation.
And so was born the greatest legend in the history of American popular music – that Robert Johnson was the bluesman who went down to the crossroads and sold his soul to the Devil in exchange for becoming the greatest guitar player in the world. And so also began the whole “I sold my soul for Rock and Roll” mantra, yelled out by Rock fans to this day, without a clue as to its origin. There will be more, much more, on “Little Robert” Johnson to come.
After finally having had his day in the sun, after developing a percussive, driving style, after writing the prolific and powerful “Death Letter”, after mentoring and schooling a young Robert Johnson and a young Muddy Waters, influencing Howlin' Wolf and countless others that would follow, after becoming a living example of the early Country blues, Son House became the elder statesman of the blues. Outliving all of his peers and most of those that followed in succeeding generations, Son House passed away in Detroit Michigan in 1988 from the affects of Altzheimer's Disease. He was 86 years old.
He was never a household name, but Son House’s contributions to American music are massive and his influence is felt to this day in all those performers from Eric Clapton, to Jimmy Page, to Keith Richards, and others, that seek to play a slide guitar, in that southern Blues style, started by Son House.
As Dick Waterman, Son House's manager put it: " He was the mentor for both Muddy Waters and Robert Johnson, who are clearly acknowledged as two of the most influential bluesmen on not only urban blues but ultimately the modern music scene. If in his prime he had been recorded as much as Charlie Patton, Blind Lemon Jefferson or Robert Johnson, he would be considered the pre-eminent artist of his time. He would have his proper appreciation."
Note: The 2007 film "Black Snake Moan", starring Samuel L. Jackson, begins and ends with clips of Son House, even though "Black Snake Moan" is the name of a song by Blind Lemon Jefferson.
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Here is Son House, himself, performing Death Letter during the blues revival of the 1960's. Just a man and his guitar, which is as close as you can get to what it was like in a juke joint in the Mississippi Delta during the 1930's. A person can cover the song by playing the notes and trying to copy the style, but it is unimaginable to think that anyone could approach the emotional intensity that Son House brought to his performances. Even as an old man, he still plays it with passion and fire, as though the lyrics, composed some 4 decades earlier, still have very real meaning to him.
Here it is played as a duet, as it was probably played many times around the plantations of The Delta.
Notice how he changes the lyrics from the above version:
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Part II - The Birth of the Texas Blues with two of the most important figures in the history of the blues and American traditional folk music, as well:
Blind Lemon Jefferson and Huddy "Leadbelly" Leadbetter. Also: Musicologists John and Allen Lomax.
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COMING SOON:
- New Orleans' Lonnie Johnson, inventor of the single string guitar solo
- The Delta's Second Generation: Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, Howlin Wolf, and Tommy Johnson
- The Birth of the Chicago electric blues: Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Chess Records, and the songs of Willie Dixon
- Rhythm and Blues: Louis Jordan and Big Joe Turner
- Rockabilly; the forerunner of Rock and Roll: The Country/Hillbilly influence, Bill Haley, and Elvis Presley; Sun Records & Sam Phillips
- "This is Rock and Roll": Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Jerry Lee Lewis, Radio DJ Allen Freed
- The End of Rock's First Act: Buddy Holly, the acceptance of Rock and Roll by Tin Pan Alley, "The Day the Music Died"