Markin comment:
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
***********
Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 1
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
""Goin to Chicago, sorry but I can't take you" is a classic blues line written and made famous by the late Jimmy Rushing, one of the country's best known blues shouters. It mirrored the truth for black women in the South; the man went north and the woman remained behind. The song was such a success that Rushing wrote another similar blues which could also have served for the title of this album, "Bye Bye Baby."
"Travel and trains have played an important role in the evolution of the blues song. Many songs begin with the sound of steel wheels grinding or the huffing and puffing of steam locomotives or use clanging train bells and whistles. It is easy to understand why the train figured so prominently: it meant escape, freedom, hope, excitement, and new worlds to conquer. The train also meant a way away from the Jim Crow atmosphere of water fountains with signs proclaiming "Whites Only" and all that implied: exploitation, disenfranchisement, physical danger.
""Goin to Chicago" meant going to the "promised land," especially in the 1920's when it was the railroad crossing and the hog-butcher of the world. It meant a chance at a job. The meat-packing industry hired blacks, though the jobs were the least skilled ones. Chicago was North and North meant Detroit too, where the automotive industry hired Negroes, as did Pennsylvania's steel industry...Factory jobs, no matter how menial, carried more dignity than did working in the fields or in lumber or pine camps or on the levees.
"Not that there wasn't also segregation in the North, but it was of a different variety. There was segregation on the way to the North too, for blacks couldn't board a train unless it carried a car for "coloreds."
"The history of all America, particularly black people after the Civil War, has been intertwined with the railroad. The romance and excitement of the train is extolled in books about the blues and jazz as a positive symbol of freedom. It was. But for men only--not for women. These books are written as though half the population didn't exist; nowhere is it mentioned how these forces affected black women..."
***
Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 2
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
"To the women, the train was an unslayable monster, a demon who swallowed up their men, men who usually didn't come back and seldom sent for them. "Sorry but I can't take you." The magic that the sound and movement of the train held for men was a different one filled with terror and envy---for women.
"The factory jobs up North didn't exist for women; they were for men only. Jobs as domestics were not available either because Irish women had been filling them since their mass immigration in the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. A small number of black women worked as domestics but there were not enough jobs to pull them out of the South. There is an historic imperative to correct the belief that the response to the trian by black women in the South was the same as the one for men.
"The male blues songs of the period spell it out:
""I'm going up North, baby, I can't carry you.
""Ain't nothin in that cold country, a sweet gal can do."
These lines were written by Cow Cow Davenport in 1929, and "Jim Crow Blues," the tune they came from, was a big seller for Paramount, in part because of its driving boogie-woogie piano style, but also because of its sentiments..."
****
Rosetta Reitz 1980 Notes to Women's Railroad Blues Album: Conclusion
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
"The train as a positive metaphor goes back as far as the earliest trains. It was a "natural"; that is why the symbolic history is so old. The Underground Railroad meant escape more than it meaant riding on a train. The railroad itself created jobs too and those jobs carried more respect and wages than did agricultural ones. But these jobs did not include women.
"In the vast blues literature, the sadness and sorrow of being abandoned, being left with the "Empty Bed Blues," is the result of the mobility of men in that culture. The freight train was everyman's escape, everyman's panacea. That is why there was always a shortage of men. He could hop a freight train and ride. She could not. This was a significant difference in their lives...
"...The women's lament became personified by Trixie Smith who recorded "Freight Train Blues" in May 1924 for the Paramount "race" label. It was a very big seller, both in black music stores and through mail order; nonetheless it has been virtually ignored in the blues histories...
"Trixie's 1924 version was such a big moneymaker for Paramount that other record companies hastened to cut it too. In September, Columbia had Clara Smith, a big star then, billed as the World's Champion Moaner, in the recording studio and Vocalion had Lena Henry cut it and Josie Miles acompanied by her Choo Choo Jazzers recorded it for Ajax...
"It is important to understand that the women singing these songs at this time were more important than their accompanists. The classic blues singers were looked upon by their public as heroes who made it; as high priestesses who were telling the truth which the listener could identify with in the here and now, not after death as in church songs. In the more than fifty years from the time these blues were originally recorded a historical distortion has taken place because most of the people involved in writing about, collecting, cataloguing and reissuing records have been men who have been more interested in the instrumentalists than in the female singers...
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=7#ixzz0zMO9eVMA
This is great stuff for any music aficionado, especially of folk, social protest, and roots music. I am going to be "stealing" entries off of this site periodically but you should be checking it out yourselves. Kudos, Bob Feldman.
***********
Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 1
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
""Goin to Chicago, sorry but I can't take you" is a classic blues line written and made famous by the late Jimmy Rushing, one of the country's best known blues shouters. It mirrored the truth for black women in the South; the man went north and the woman remained behind. The song was such a success that Rushing wrote another similar blues which could also have served for the title of this album, "Bye Bye Baby."
"Travel and trains have played an important role in the evolution of the blues song. Many songs begin with the sound of steel wheels grinding or the huffing and puffing of steam locomotives or use clanging train bells and whistles. It is easy to understand why the train figured so prominently: it meant escape, freedom, hope, excitement, and new worlds to conquer. The train also meant a way away from the Jim Crow atmosphere of water fountains with signs proclaiming "Whites Only" and all that implied: exploitation, disenfranchisement, physical danger.
""Goin to Chicago" meant going to the "promised land," especially in the 1920's when it was the railroad crossing and the hog-butcher of the world. It meant a chance at a job. The meat-packing industry hired blacks, though the jobs were the least skilled ones. Chicago was North and North meant Detroit too, where the automotive industry hired Negroes, as did Pennsylvania's steel industry...Factory jobs, no matter how menial, carried more dignity than did working in the fields or in lumber or pine camps or on the levees.
"Not that there wasn't also segregation in the North, but it was of a different variety. There was segregation on the way to the North too, for blacks couldn't board a train unless it carried a car for "coloreds."
"The history of all America, particularly black people after the Civil War, has been intertwined with the railroad. The romance and excitement of the train is extolled in books about the blues and jazz as a positive symbol of freedom. It was. But for men only--not for women. These books are written as though half the population didn't exist; nowhere is it mentioned how these forces affected black women..."
***
Rosetta Reitz's 1980 Notes to "Women's Railroad Blues" Album: Part 2
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
"To the women, the train was an unslayable monster, a demon who swallowed up their men, men who usually didn't come back and seldom sent for them. "Sorry but I can't take you." The magic that the sound and movement of the train held for men was a different one filled with terror and envy---for women.
"The factory jobs up North didn't exist for women; they were for men only. Jobs as domestics were not available either because Irish women had been filling them since their mass immigration in the nineteenth century because of the potato famine. A small number of black women worked as domestics but there were not enough jobs to pull them out of the South. There is an historic imperative to correct the belief that the response to the trian by black women in the South was the same as the one for men.
"The male blues songs of the period spell it out:
""I'm going up North, baby, I can't carry you.
""Ain't nothin in that cold country, a sweet gal can do."
These lines were written by Cow Cow Davenport in 1929, and "Jim Crow Blues," the tune they came from, was a big seller for Paramount, in part because of its driving boogie-woogie piano style, but also because of its sentiments..."
****
Rosetta Reitz 1980 Notes to Women's Railroad Blues Album: Conclusion
Current mood: contemplative
Category: Music
In liner notes to the 1980 Rosetta Records vinyl album, "Sorry But I Can't Take You: Women's Railroad Blues," "Blues Women 1920 to 1950" author Rosetta Reitz wrote the following:
"The train as a positive metaphor goes back as far as the earliest trains. It was a "natural"; that is why the symbolic history is so old. The Underground Railroad meant escape more than it meaant riding on a train. The railroad itself created jobs too and those jobs carried more respect and wages than did agricultural ones. But these jobs did not include women.
"In the vast blues literature, the sadness and sorrow of being abandoned, being left with the "Empty Bed Blues," is the result of the mobility of men in that culture. The freight train was everyman's escape, everyman's panacea. That is why there was always a shortage of men. He could hop a freight train and ride. She could not. This was a significant difference in their lives...
"...The women's lament became personified by Trixie Smith who recorded "Freight Train Blues" in May 1924 for the Paramount "race" label. It was a very big seller, both in black music stores and through mail order; nonetheless it has been virtually ignored in the blues histories...
"Trixie's 1924 version was such a big moneymaker for Paramount that other record companies hastened to cut it too. In September, Columbia had Clara Smith, a big star then, billed as the World's Champion Moaner, in the recording studio and Vocalion had Lena Henry cut it and Josie Miles acompanied by her Choo Choo Jazzers recorded it for Ajax...
"It is important to understand that the women singing these songs at this time were more important than their accompanists. The classic blues singers were looked upon by their public as heroes who made it; as high priestesses who were telling the truth which the listener could identify with in the here and now, not after death as in church songs. In the more than fifty years from the time these blues were originally recorded a historical distortion has taken place because most of the people involved in writing about, collecting, cataloguing and reissuing records have been men who have been more interested in the instrumentalists than in the female singers...
Read more: http://www.myspace.com/bobafeldman68music/blog?page=7#ixzz0zMO9eVMA
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