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| Blues Music |
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The earliest reference to what might be considered
blues in Texas was made in 1890 by collector Gates
Thomas, who transcribed a song titled "Nobody There."
Thomas doesn't mention whether the singing was
accompanied by an instrument, but he does indicate that
it was a pentatonic tune containing tonic, minor, third,
fourth, fifth, and seventh chords, all of which combined
to produce something similar to a blues tune. Later,
Thomas published other song texts that he had collected
from African Americans in South Texas. Some of these
included verses that had been noted by other writers in
different areas of the South. The song "Baby, Take a
Look at Me," for example, was transcribed both by Thomas
and Charles Peabody in Mississippi, and "Alabama Bound"
and "C. C. Rider" are variants of blues songs that Jelly
Roll Morton sang in New Orleans. |
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Geographically diffuse sources suggest that blues
musicians were itinerant and that blues was part of an
oral tradition that developed in different areas of the
South. By all accounts, the blues was widespread in the
early 1900s. Thousands of blacks during this period were
migratory, looking for work and escape from all too
prevalent racism. Blues singers were often migrant
workers who followed the crop harvests or lived in
lumber camps and boomtowns. Many settled down and
labored as sharecroppers, leasing small tracts of land
controlled by white landowners. Others continued roving
from town to town, working odd jobs in the growing urban
centers of Dallas, Houston, Shreveport, and Atlanta;
some went north to Chicago and New York. |
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| Blues music expressed the hardships
of newly-freed African American slaves. The freedoms
offered by Reconstruction were hard-won. Racism, Jim
Crow laws, and the Ku Klux Klan were major obstacles to
economic independence and self-determination. Still,
leisure, even under the most desolate circumstances, was
vitally new and served as a catalyst in the development
of the blues. Early blues answered the need for a
release from everyday life. The blues is an intensely
personal music; it identifies itself with the feelings
of the audience—suffering and hope, economic failure,
the break-up of the family, and the desire to escape
reality through wandering, love, and sex. In this way,
blues is somewhat different from African songs, which
usually concern the lives and works of gods, the social
unit (tribe and community), and nature. |
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Early blues music was derived from African-American
field hollers, shouts,
and call-and-response singing. Folklorist John A. Lomax
collected black American songs in Texas and took this
picture of "Lightnin' and his gang singing at the
Darrington State Prison Farm, Sandy Point, Texas in
1934." Library of Congress, AFS L13. |
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With its emphasis on individual experience, blues
reflects a Western concept of life. Yet, as a musical
form it shows little Western influence. The traditional
three-line, twelve-bar, AAB verse form of the blues
arises from no apparent Western source, although some
blues does incorporate Anglo-American ballad forms that
have six, ten, or sixteen-bar structures. Early blues
drew from the music of its time: field hollers and
shouts, which it most closely resembles melodically;
songster ballads, from which it borrows imagery and
guitar patterns; spirituals and gospel, which trained
the voices and ears of black children. These, with the
exception of the ballad, were the descendants of African
percussive rhythms and call-and-response singing. |
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| Although blues drew from the
religious music of both African and Western cultures, it
was often considered sinful. Blues singers were
stereotyped as "backsliders" in their own communities.
In many areas blues was known as the devil's music. As
historian Larry Levine points out, blues blended the
sacred and the secular. Like the spirituals and
folktales of the nineteenth century, blues was a plea
for release, a mix of despair, hope, and humor that had
a cathartic effect upon the listener. The blues singer
had an expressive role that mirrored the power of the
preacher, and because of this power, blues was both
embraced and rejected by African Americans and their
churches. |
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In Texas, blues musician Lil' Son Jackson explained
to British blues aficionado Paul Oliver that it was,
in effect, the spiritual power of the blues that
made the music sinful. "If a man hurt within and he
sing a church song then he's askin' God for
help....if a man sing the blues it's more or less
out of himself....He's not askin' no one for help.
And he's really not really clingin' to no one. But
he's expressin' how he feel. He's expressin' to
someone and that fact makes it a sin, you
know....you're tryin' to get your feelin's over to
the next person through the blues, and that's what
make it a sin." Because of the frequent lack of
centralized authority in black churches, however,
community opposition to the blues varied from place
to place. Rarely were blues singers completely
ostracized. They lived on the margins of what was
acceptable and derived their livelihood from
itinerant work at house parties and dances. |
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In Texas, blues has developed a unique character that
results from the cross-pollination of musical
styles—itself a result of the migratory patterns of
African Americans—as well as the impact of the recording
industry and mass-media commercialization. Not only is
the black population of Texas less concentrated than
that of other states in the South, but blues music in
Texas also evolved in proximity to other important
musical traditions: the rural Anglo, the Cajun and
Creole, the Hispanic, and the Eastern and Central
European. |
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| The white crossover to blues in
Texas began in the nineteenth century, when black
fiddlers and guitar songsters played at white country
dances. Eddie Durham recalled in interviews that his
father was a fiddler who played jigs and reels as well
as blues. Mance Lipscomb's and Gatemouth Brown's fathers
were songsters who played fiddle and guitar. White
musicians were exposed to blues at country dances and
minstrel shows and among black workers in the fields,
road gangs, turpentine camps, and railroad yards.
Country singer Bill Neely said that he first heard blues
when he picked cotton in Collin County north of Dallas
in the 1920s, but he learned to play blues by listening
to the recordings of Jimmie Rodgers. Although he was
known as a country singer, "Jimmie Rodgers was a
bluesman," Neely maintained. "A lot of those songs
Jimmie Rodgers didn't write. He got them from the blacks
he heard when he was growing up in Mississippi and when
he worked as a brakeman on the railroad." The influence
of blues and jazz is also apparent in the early western
swing bands of Bob Wills and Milton Brown, where the
horn sections of the Territory jazz bands were imitated
and developed through different instrumentation. In
addition, blues and jazz influenced the growth of zydeco
among African-American Creoles and impacted the Mexican
American orquesta tradition, as well as a younger
generation of musicians, including Freddy Fender and
Ildefonso "Sunny" Ozuna who emulated the
rhythm-and-blues sound. |
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With the growth of the recording industry during the
1920s the audience for blues expanded among African
Americans nationwide. Dallas became a recording center
primarily because it was a geographical hub. The major
labels to produce "race records," those catering to a
black audience, held regular sessions in Dallas. OKeh,
Vocalion, Brunswick, Columbia, RCA, and Paramount sent
scouts and engineers to record local artists once or
twice a year. Engineers came into the city, set up their
equipment in a hotel room, and put the word out.
Itinerant musicians found their way to Dallas, among
them the legendary Delta bluesman Robert Johnson, who
recorded there in 1937, after having recorded in San
Antonio a year earlier. |
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In March 1926, Blind Lemon Jefferson became the first
male folk blues singer and guitarist to record.
Jefferson was from the rural East Texas farming
community of Couchman (near the town of Wortham) and
made his way to Dallas, where he played for tips at the
corner Elm Street and Central Avenue and was discovered
by a Paramount recording scout. His first two recordings
were made in December 1925 with the pseudonym, Deacon
L.J. Bates, apparently because they were religious
songs, but for his subsequent recordings he used his
given name. Between 1926 and his untimely death in
December 1929, Jefferson made more than eighty
recordings for Paramount and was the biggest selling
country blues singer in the country. However, studies
indicate that Jefferson's records sold thousands of
copies to blacks in the urban ghettos of the North, but
did not sell especially well in Texas. |
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| Nevertheless, as a result of
Jefferson's overall commercial success, blues singers
from around the South flocked to Dallas with the hope of
being recorded. Generally, these musicians lived and
worked in the area around Deep Ellum and Central Track.
Deep Ellum was the area of Dallas north and east of
downtown, where black newcomers to the city came.
Branching off from Elm Street was Central Track, a
stretch of railroad near the Union Depot, where the
Texas and Pacific line crossed the Houston and Texas
Central line. Lying east of the downtown business
district and north of Deep Ellum, Central Tracks was the
heart of the black community. In the area were Ella B.
Moore's Park Theater with vaudeville, minstrel, and
touring blues and jazz shows, the Tip Top, Hattie
Burleson's dance hall, the Green Parrot, and the Pythian
Temple, designed by the black architect William Sidney
Pittman. |
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| In addition to Blind Lemon Jefferson, other
important blues musicians recorded in Dallas during the heyday
of Deep Ellum and Central Track. These included Lonnie Johnson,
Lillian Glinn, Little Hat Jones, Texas Alexander, Jesse Thomas,
Willard (Ramblin') Thomas, Sammy Hill, Otis Harris, Willie Reed,
Buddy Woods, and Babe Kyro (Black Ace) Turner. Jefferson was a
major influence upon the development of Texas blues, influencing
not only Huddie "Lead Belly" Ledbetter but also Aaron "T-Bone"
Walker. What distinguishes Jefferson from the other blues
performers of his generation was his singular approach to the
guitar, which established the basis of what is today known as
the Texas style. He strummed or "hammered" the strings with
repetitive bass figures and produced a succession of open and
fretted notes, using a quick release and picking single-string,
arpeggio runs. T-Bone Walker later applied this technique to the
electric guitar and combined it with the influences of the jump
and swing blues of the regional or "Territory" jazz bands of the
1920s and 1930s to produce the modern sound. |
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In the Territory jazz bands of the Southwest, the guitar was
used as a rhythm instrument to underlie the voice and horn
sections. The introduction of the electric guitar occurred first
in these bands, pioneered by Eddie Durham of San Marcos and
Charlie Christian of Fort Worth. By using electric
amplification, jazz guitarists were able to increase the
resonance and volume of their sound. Charlie Christian is
credited with teaching T-Bone Walker about the electric guitar
and its potential as a solo instrument. In the rhythm-and-blues
of T-Bone Walker the electric guitar assumed a role that
superseded the saxophone, which had until then been the
prominent solo instrument in jazz. The interplay between the
saxophone and the guitar remained important in rhythm-and-blues,
but the relationship between the instruments was transformed.
The rhythm-and-blues band sound became tighter and depended more
on the interplay of the electric guitar with the horn section,
piano, and drums. |
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With the Great Depression of the 1930s, "race" recording
declined. Among African Americans in Dallas, the locus of blues
activity in the 1940s and 1950s shifted from the legendary Deep
Ellum and Central Track area to North and South Dallas. The Rose
Ballroom, opened by T. H. Smith in March 1942 and reopened as
the Rose Room in April 1943, became a showplace for the best of
the local and nationally known blues artists. T-Bone Walker
performed there, as did Big Joe Turner, Pee Wee Crayton, Lowell
Fulson, Eddie Vinson, Jimmy Nelson, and Henry (Buster) Smith.
The Rose Room was renamed the Empire Room in 1951 and continued
to feature the most popular R&B of the day: Zuzu Bollin, Lil'
Son Jackson, Clarence (Nappy Chin) Evans, Mercy Baby, Frankie
Lee Sims, and Smokey Hogg. By the late 1940s, the railroad
tracks on Central Avenue were torn up to make room for Central
Expressway, which was built in the 1950s, and for R. L. Thornton
Freeway in the 1960s. These changes choked Deep Ellum off from
downtown, and the area became a warehouse district with
industrial suppliers and small businesses mixed in. |
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| In Houston, African Americans settled mostly
in three segregated wards: the Third, Fourth, and Fifth. It was
in the Third Ward where guitarist Sam "Lightnin'" Hopkins
accompanied his cousin Texas Alexander in the late 1920s, and
where Hopkins returned by himself in the 1940s to play on
Dowling Street. The Santa Fe Group gathered in the Fourth Ward.
They were a loosely knit association of itinerant black pianists
in the 1920s and 1930s that included Robert Shaw, Black Boy
Shine, Pinetop Burks, and Rob Cooper, who performed in the
roadhouses and juke joints along the Santa Fe tracks, playing
their distinctive style of piano, which combined elements of
blues with the syncopation of ragtime. In the Fifth Ward also
there were black blues pianists, but their style of performance
was even more eclectic. Probably the most well-known of these
were members of the George W. Thomas family. The eldest, George
Thomas Jr., was born about 1885, followed by his sister, Beulah,
better known as Sippie Wallace, and her brother, Hersal Thomas. |
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In Houston there were fewer opportunities for recording than
in Dallas until after World War II, when several independent
labels were started. The earliest to record blues was Gold Star,
founded by Bill Quinn in 1946 as a hillbilly label to record
Harry Choates. In 1947 Quinn decided to enter the "race" market
by recording Lightnin' Hopkins, whose down home country blues
expressed the foibles, hardships and aspirations of rural blacks
and their migration to the city looking for a better life. By
the early 1950s, competition among independent record labels in
Houston was intense. Macy's, Freedom, and Peacock (as well as
Bob Shad's New York-based Sittin' In With label) were all
involved in recording local and regional blues musicians,
including Lightnin' Hopkins, Goree Carter, Lester Williams,
Little Willie Littlefield, Peppermint Harris, Grady Gaines, and
Big Walter Price. |
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| Of the Houston-based independent labels,
Peacock emerged as the most prominent. Houston businessman Don
Robey founded Peacock Records in 1949 to record Gatemouth Brown,
who was the headliner at Robey's Bronze Peacock club. The first
rhythm-and-blues singer with whom Robey made the charts was
Marie Adams, whose song "I'm Gonna Play the Honky Tonks" was a
hit in 1952. With this success, Robey expanded his recording
interests by acquiring the Memphis label Duke Records. Through
this acquisition Robey secured the rights to the stable of
musicians who were then under contract to Duke. These included
Johnny Ace, Junior Parker, and Bobby Blue Bland. In addition to
Peacock and Duke, Robey started the Song Bird and Back Beat
labels, as well as the Buffalo Booking Agency, which was
operated by his associate, Evelyn Johnson. |
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During the 1950s, Robey's Duke–Peacock sound rose to national
prominence, but by the mid-1960s, his business started to wane.
He tried to keep pace with the ever-changing popular music
scene, and even recorded the white musician, Roy Head, who
scored a hit with his song "Treat Her Right" on the Back Beat
label. In 1973, Robey sold his recording and publishing
interests to ABC/Dunhill. |
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Concurrent with the growth of Peacock Records, a new
generation of Houston-bred rhythm-and-blues musicians began
their careers, but were not recorded by Don Robey. These
musicians included Albert Collins, Johnny Copeland, Joe Hughes,
Johnny Watson, Cal and Clarence Green, and Pete Mayes. Playing
at the Club Matinee, Shady's Playhouse, the Eldorado Ballroom,
and other nightspots around Houston, these musicians emulated
the music of T-Bone Walker and eventually developed their own
distinctive performance styles. |
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Austin was slower to develop as a recording center than
Dallas or Houston, although there is a long history of blues in
Central Texas. In addition to rhythm-and-blues, Austin had also
been the home of barrelhouse blues pianists Grey Ghost, Robert
Shaw, and Lavada Durst, and of country blues guitarist Alfred
(Snuff) Johnson. However, the relatively small black population
of Austin made the capital unappealing for record producers
until the 1960s, when the "Austin Sound" began to attract
national attention. With the influx of white musicians,
including Jimmie Vaughan, Stevie Ray Vaughan, Joe Ely, Angela
Strehli, and Kim Wilson, the enthusiasm for blues grew
significantly. The success of these musicians also benefited
many older African-American blues musicians who gained a larger
audience outside of their own community and performed at
Antone's the Continental Club, and other venues near the
University of Texas campus. In Austin, T-Bone Walker clearly had
the biggest influence upon aspiring black blues musicians,
including Dooley Jordan, Jewel Simmons, and T. D. Bell. Bell
himself also inspired younger blues artists, such as Herbert
(Blues Boy) Hubbard and W. C. Clark. The Victory Grill, opened
by Johnny Holmes on Victory over Japan Day, 1945 on East
Eleventh Street was an important venue for local musicians as
well as for nationally touring acts. |
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| Over the last four decades, the interest in
Texas blues has swelled, especially in the cities of Dallas,
Austin, and Houston. As early as the 1960s, Chris Strachwitz of
Arhoolie Records was a major force in recording Texas blues
musicians--from the barrelhouse blues of Robert Shaw and
Alexander H. Moore to the country blues of Sam "Lightnin'"
Hopkins and Mance Lipscomb, as well as the urban blues of Lil'
Son Jackson and L.C. "Good Rockin'" Robinson, who was part of a
generation of Texas musicians that moved to California in the
1940s and 1950s. In Austin, Antone's, opened in July 1975,
continues to be a showcase of blues musicians from around the
country, and Texas Folklife, founded as Texas Folklife Resources
in 1984, has produced touring programs and public concerts. The
Dolph Briscoe Center for American History at the University of
Texas at Austin is an important repository for blues
recordings, posters, photographs, and memorabilia in its
numerous collections, including the John A. Lomax Family Papers,
the Texas Music Collection, the Mance Lipscomb/Glen Alyn
Collection, and the William A. Owens Collection. In Houston,
Juneteenth Blues Festival, started in 1976 by Lanny Steele, has
been a major catalyst for the recognition of the blues
musicians, not only in Texas, but also across the nation. Since
1985, Documentary Arts, a nonprofit organization in Dallas, has
been involved in the documentation and preservation of Texas
blues through the production of folk festivals, radio features,
films, videos, audio recordings, and the development of
educational outreach materials. In 1987 Dallas pianist Alex
Moore became the first African American blues musician from
Texas to receive a National Heritage Fellowship from the Folk
Arts Program of the National Endowment for the Arts. |
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