HUM 223: W.C. Handy, Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and the birth of the blues 'where the Southern cross the Dog'

W.C. Handy is known as the "Father of the Blues." Fair enough. But he was an accomplished, classically trained musician who taught at Alabama A&M College and played at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. He first heard the blues, when he was waiting for a train one night in Tutweiler, Miss., when a heard a street musician playing slide guitar country-style. Years later Handy recalled the moment like this:

As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who use steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.

"Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog"
The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind. When the singer paused, I leaned over and asked him what the words meant. He rolled his eyes, showing a trace of mild amusement.

Perhaps I should have known, but he didn't mind explaining. At [the nearby town of] Moorhead, the east and west bound met and crossed the north and south bound trains four times a day. This fellow was going where the Southern railroad crossed the Yazoo Delta railroad, (nicknamed the "Yellow Dog"), and he didn't care who knew it.

Steve Cheseborough, program host for Mississippi Public Television, tells viewers what it must have been like that night to hear the country blues in 1903. Here's what it may have sounded like, a sound file of Charlie Patton's "Green River Blues" with the same refrain. The recording is from the 1920s, but Patton played in the old country blues style. Notice how intricate and polyrhythmic his guitar-picking is. He is simply one of the best guitar players ever.

Handy saw commercial possibilties in the blues (see the handout I give you in class about his reaction when a "rain of silver dollars becan to fall around the outlandish, stomping feet" of a country blues band in Cleveland, Miss.), and he published "St. Louis Blues" in 1914 (as played here on a 78rpm record by Louie Armstrong in 1933. It was the first huge crossover blues hit, although purists would say it doesn't really have the structure of a 12-bar country blues song.

Gertrude "Ma" Rainey was one of the most successful blues singers of the 1920s. She made the transition from minstrel shows and the TOBA circuit to movies, and perhaps more importantly she was popular as a crossover artist. But her music kept the earthy beginnings of the blues with what our textbook calls "the down-and-out [musicians] who had gravitated to the larger cities to make the street music that became their prime means of livelihood and independence" (p. 112). I couldn't find "Hustlin' Blues" (discussed on pp. 113-14) on YouTube. Instead, we'll listen to her sing "Black Bottom Blues" backed by her Georgia Jazz Band. The piano player at the far right is Thomas A. "Georgia Tom" Dorsey, who later wrote gospel songs including "Precious Lord, Take My Hand." But first, we'll watch a 1920s-era silent movie about the Black Bottom. (There's s more about the dance itself available in Wikipedia.)

Then we'll listen to Ma Rainey sing. You can -- and should -- follow the lyrics in another window. They're full of double meanings, as when she sings, "Ma Rainey's going to show you her black bottom." The double meaning is intentional:

I want to see that dance you call the black bottom
I want to learn that dance
Don't you see the dance you call your big black bottom
That'll put you in a trance.

But Ma Rainey had the last laugh. Unlike many musicians of the day (or any other), she invested her money wisely and made enough to build and manage two successful theaters in her home town of Columbus, Ga., even in the middle of the Great Depression.

Bessie Smith got her start as a street musician in Chattanooga, Tenn., and in 1912 joined Ma Rainey's minstrel show on the TOBA circuit. According to the RedHotJazz.com website, she was "the greatest of the classic Blues singers of the 1920s."

Two passages in our textbook by Candlearia and Kingman discuss the structure of the blues. They're important.

• Bessie Smith's "Lost Your Head Blues" is quoted and analyzed in our book (pp. 114-15).
  
• Ma Rainey's "Counting the Blues" is on page 116. We'll listen to it in audio.

Then we'll complete the circle, with a sophisticated musical tribute to the earliest country blues. Years after that night at the railroad station in northern Mississippi, Handy wrote a song called "Yellow Dog Blues," and he incorporated some of what he remembered of the night. In 1926 Bessie Smith recorded it with a band including Joe Smith on cornet, Charlie Green on trombone, Buster Bailey clarinet, Coleman Hawkins tenor saxaphone, Fletcher Henderson piano, Charlie Dixon banjo and Bob Escudero on brass bass. You can follow the lyrics by opening this window. Handy's treatment of the song is sophisticated, but it harkens back to the very earliest blues.