Working The Street Corners-With The Blues Singer Blind
Willie McTell In Mind
By Zack James
Seth Garth, the fairly well-known music critic for the American
Folk Gazette, had always been intrigued by what he called the “blinds,” not the
old railroad jungle hobo, tramp, bum use of the term “riding the blinds” but
his own personal shorthand way to describe the large number of old blue men,
mainly country blues guys who made a living on the streets mostly on the towns
down South who were blind. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, Blind Willie
Johnson, Blind Earl Avery, Blind Amos Morris, you get the point, get the
picture. Get the picture too of guys hanging on the street corners, hat in hand
or maybe in front of them on the sidewalk a guitar at the ready. Guys, and gals
still do that today on urban streets and in subways although Seth never
remembered any of them being blind, at least not really blind although he had
run up against a couple of con artists working a grift faking that blind deal.
He often wondered, and wonder is all he could do since all
those august names had passed beyond well before he came of age, before he
became old enough to appreciate the blues tradition that he got hopped on as a
kid after accidently hearing Blue Blaine’s
Blues Hour out of Chicago one fugitive Sunday night when the airwaves were
in just the right seventh house position in his growing up town of Riverdale just
west of Boston. Or something like that since even though a science wiz in high
school, a guy who went on to be a weather man (not Weatherman like in the 1960s
SDS split-off leftist action of whom he had known a few of them as well after a
series of articles he did on the theme of music and politic using Bob Dylan’s
phrase “you don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”) tried to
patiently explain that it was not some voodoo magic but had to do with airwaves
and wind currents. Whatever had caused that intersession that hooked him for
good even though he did not hear anything by any of the previously mentioned
blues artists that night. That would come much later after he became an
aficionado and became, maybe as a result of those fugitive airwaves, a folk
music critic back in the day for several then thriving and authoritative
alternative folk and blues publications.
According to ‘Bama Brown, the great harmonica player for
Johnny Boy William’s blues band who was the last living link to those “blinds”
the reason that they were able to survive on the streets is because even in the
Jim Crow South a blind black man posed no direct threat to Mister. That they
could walk the streets with their hats or little tin cups, maybe with some
black sister to aid them (true in the cases of Blind Willie and Blind Blake),
maybe sing harmony in an off-hand minute, maybe play a little tambourine to
draw a crowd, to give the word since preaching on the white streets, the
streets where the money was on say a drunken sot Saturday, by a black man was
frowned upon. Whites had their own set of holy-rollers to patronize and did not
need any blacks to draw away from their purses. That would get a black guy,
blind or not a swift kick back to Negro-town, to the cheap streets.
That was ‘Bama’s story anyway and it sounded plausible, and
probably was as close to a reason that the blinds survived as any but later
after some research, after listening to some precious oral histories provided
to the Library of Congress by the Lomaxes, father and son, Seth started to
question whether ‘Bama had the deal down pat as it seemed at the time (and as
he had written about in an article about ‘Bama as the last living link to
a lot of the old country blues singers,
especially the Delta boys from where he had hailed before heading north to
Chicago and fame with Johnny Boy).
Seth had been particularly struck by one
oral interview given by Honey Boy Jamison, a great slide guitarist in the mold
of Mississippi Fred McDowell, who before he passed away in the late 1940s told
Alan Lomax, the son, that the real reason that the “blinds’” were left alone
was that in their heyday, the late 1920s and early 1930s before the Great
Depression hit hard and nobody had spare change for records or for giving alms
to anybody, even blind men was that the record companies from New York and
Chicago mainly would sent scouts out to the small towns of the South looking for
talent. Looking for a sound for their ‘‘race” labels and in the process those
agents would get word out that there was dough to be had if anybody, anybody
okay, could find some talent. Obviously the roughnecks and hillbillies were as
anxious to get dough as anybody else and the only way they could grab some was
listening to the black guys on the streets, on Mister’s streets. And the only
guys allowed on Mister’s precious streets were the “blinds.”
Seth found that piece of news interesting but he was more
than a little pissed off that old ‘Bama whom Seth had good cash to for his
interview had “forgotten” to tell him about that possible explanation.
Especially since ‘Bama at that very time was with Johnny Boy when RCA came
looking for a new black sound and had been scouted by Mac Duran, a well-known
white record agent in Memphis at the time. Damn.
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