Got Them Down-Hearted Blues-With The Empress Of The Blues Bessie Smith In Mind
Sure guys, black guys, on Mister’s 28,000 acres of the best bottomland in Mississippi or some such number, had plenty to have the blues about, especially how Mister and his Mister James Crow laws fitted him and his just fine at the expense of those black guys, their women and their righteous children (righteous when they and their children smote the dragon come freedom summer times but that is a story for their generations to tell I want to talk about the great-grand pa’s and ma’s and their doings). Working all day for chump change in Mister’s fields or worse share-cropper and having Mister take the better portion and leaving the rest. Yeah, so there is no way that black guys could not have the blues back then (now too but that in dealt with by the step-child of the blues, via hip-hop nations) and add to Mister’s miseries, woman trouble, trouble with Sheriff Law, and trouble with Long Skinny Jones if you mess with his woman, get your own. Plenty of stuff to sing about come Saturday night after dark at Smilin’ Billy’s juke joint complete with his home-made brew which insured that everybody would be at Preacher Jack’s Sunday service to have their sins from the night before (or maybe just minutes before) washed clean under the threat of damnation and worse, worse for listening to the devil’s music by a guy like Charley Patton, Son House (who had the worst of both worlds being a sinner and a preacher man), Lucky Quick, Sleepy John, Robert J, and lots of hungry boys who wanted to get the hell out from under Mister and his Mister laws by singing the blues and making them go away.
That’s the guys, black guys and they had a moment, a country blues moment back in the 1920s and early 1930s when guys, white guys usually as far as I know, from record companies like RCA, the radio company. They were agents who were parlaying two ideas together getting black people, black people with enough money (and maybe a few white hipsters if they were around and if they were called that before the big 1950s “beat” thing), buy, in this case, race records, that they might have heard on that self-same radio, nice economics, scoured the South looking for talent and found plenty in the Delta (and on the white side of that same coin plenty in the Southern hill-billy mountains too). But those black blues brothers were not what drove the race label action back then since the rural poor had no money for radios or records for the most part and it was the black women singers who got the better play, although they if you look at individual cases suffered under the same Mister James Crow ethos that the black guys did. There they were though singing barrelhouse was what it was called mostly, stuff with plenty of double meanings about sex and about come hither availability and too about the code that all Southern blacks lived under. And the subjects. Well, the subjects reflected those of the black guys in reverse, two-timing guys, guys who would cut their women up as soon as look at them, down-hearted stuff when some Jimmy took off with his other best girl leaving her flat-footed, the sins of alcohol and drugs (listen to Victoria Spivey sometime on sister cocaine and any number of Smiths on gin), losing your man to you best friend, some sound advice too like Sippy Wallace’s don’t advertise your man, and some bad advice about cutting up your no good man and taking the big step-off that awaited you, it is all there to be listened to.
And the queen, the self-anointed queen, no, better you stay with the flow of her moniker, the empress, of barrelhouse blues was Bessie Smith, who sold more records than anybody else if nothing else. But there is more since she left a treasure trove of songs, well over two hundred before her untimely early death in the mid-1930s. Guys, sophisticated guys, city guys, black guys mainly, guys like Fletcher Henderson, would write stuff for her, big sax and trombone players would back here up and that was that. Sure Memphis Minnie could wag the dogs tail with her lyrics about every kind of working guy taking care of her need, and a quick listen to any of a dozen such songs will tell you what that need was or you can figure it out and if you can’t you had better move on, the various other Smiths could talk about down-hearted stuff, about the devil’s music get the best of them, Sippy Wallace could talk about no good men, Ivy Stone could speak about being turned out in the streets to “work” the streets when some guy left town, address unknown, and Victoria Spivey could speak to the addictions that brought a good girl down but Bessie could run it all. From down-hearted blues, killing her sorrows with that flask of gin, working down to bed-bug flop houses, thoughts of killing that no good bastard who left her high and dry, seeing a good Hustlin’ Dan man off to the great yonder, blowing high and heavy in the thick of the Jazz Age with the prince of wails, looking for a little sugar in her bowl, and every conceivable way to speak of personal sorrows.
Let me leave it like this for now with two big ideas. First if you have a chance go on YouTube and listen and watch while she struts her stuff on Saint Louis Woman all pain, pathos and indignity as he good man throws her over for, well, the next best thing. That will tell you why in her day she was the Empress. The other is this-if you have deep down sorrows, some man or woman left you high and dry, maybe you need a fixer man for what ails you, you have deep-dyed blues that won’t quite unless you have your medicine then you have to dust off your Billie Holiday records and get well. But if the world just has you by the tail for a moment, or things just went awry but maybe you can see the like of day then grab the old Bessie Vanguard Record or later Columbia Record multiple albums and just start playing you won’t want to turn the thing off once Bessie gets under your skin.
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