Music/Society Modern Wrld (W2)

"Shoot Myself a Cop": Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues" as Social TextAdam Gussow

Callaloo, Volume 25, Number 1, Winter 2002, pp. 8-44 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/cal.2002.0017

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8 Callaloo 25.1 (2002) 8–44

“SHOOT MYSELF A COP” Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” as Social Text

by Adam Gussow

One evening I heard a tale that rendered me sleepless for nights. It was of a Negro woman whose husband had been seized and killed by a mob. It was claimed that the woman vowed she would avenge her husband’s death and she took a shotgun, wrapped it in a sheet, and went humbly to the whites, pleading that she be allowed to take her husband’s body for burial. It seemed that she was granted permission to come to the side of her dead husband while the whites, silent and armed, looked on. The woman, so went the story, knelt and prayed, then proceeded to unwrap the sheet; and, before the white men realized what was happening, she had taken the gun from the sheet and had slain four of them, shooting at them from her knees.

—Richard Wright, Black Boy (1945)

I can’t sleep at night, I can’t eat a bite ‘Cause the man I love, he don’t treat me right

—Perry Bradford, “Crazy Blues” (1920), as sung by Mamie Smith

blues ain’t culture they sounds of oppression against the white man’s shit/ game he’s run on us all these blues / yrs. blues is struggle strangulation of our people cuz we cudn’t off the white motha / fucka. . . .

—Sonia Sanchez, “liberation / poem” (1970)

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Not-So-Quiet Riot

The story of how black New York songwriter Perry Bradford convinced Fred Hager, a white executive at Okeh Records, to let Mamie Smith record Bradford’s composition “Crazy Blues” in 1920, thereby inaugurating a decade-long race-records boom, is an oft-told tale—a staple, in condensed form, of both blues histories and histories of the Harlem Renaissance.1 (A complete transcription of the recorded lyrics can be found at the end of this article.) Smith, the first black woman to record a secular song for commercial consumption, was also the first black superstar to be created by the medium: according to the shipping director at Okeh, 75,000 copies of “Crazy Blues” were distributed to Harlem record shops alone within four weeks after the November release.2 Word quickly spread, helped in part by an informal record- distribution network of black Pullman-car porters who bought them by the dozens, according to Bradford, at a dollar per copy and resold them in rural districts for two dollars, half a week’s pay for a black laborer. Within seven months, hundreds of thousands of copies of “Crazy Blues” had been sold nationally, perhaps even a million, the great majority of them to a black public delighted at the chance to consume, in endlessly replayable form, a commodified narrative of one black wom- an’s romantic abandonment. Breathless advertising in black periodicals clearly played a role in Smith’s success, fanning interest in her public appearances and capitalizing on passions already engendered in her record-buying fans. “Hear this World Famous Phonograph Star Sing ‘Crazy Blues’ and all her latest hits,” cried an ad in the Chicago Defender (26 February 1921) before her sold-out week of performances there in March 1921, “and then hear her popular Okeh records, the Greatest ‘Blues’ Records of the century” (4). Abetting the power of advertising was Smith’s skill as a stage performer, noted by reviewers during the several extended tours she made in support of “Crazy Blues.” “Crowds which tax the capacity of the Avenue Theater are greeting Mamie Smith and her company at every performance,” wrote Tony Langston in the Defender:

The famous ‘Blues’ singer is a distinct hit and she is living up to her reputation in the most satisfactory manner. What it takes to put a “Blues” number over Mamie sure has got. She is full of animation and has a voice which seem [sic] to have been built for the purpose. She has a personality and a smile that is infectious and she is aided by a jazz band that is more than capable in every department. (4)

“[S]he made a complete success, equal to any star that has appeared in this city,” wrote another Defender reviewer several days later:

Mamie Smith is a sensation in records and came back and made good on the stage. . . . Her last number, the “Crazy Blues,” justly called the “King of All Blues,” hit the audience in Baby Ruth order and took a real curtain call and would have done honor to any artist in the business. Miss Smith is one of the overnight successes, and made good and will enjoy packed houses wherev- er she appears. (“Mamie” 5)

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The explosive success of “Crazy Blues,” in other words, was both unprecedented and overdetermined: a singular yet seemingly inevitable confluence of emergent technol- ogy, modern advertising, a gifted performer’s virtuosity, and a song that answered the long-deferred dreams of a race. The Chicago Defender had been demanding since 1916 that black female singers (classical rather than blues) be recorded; recent massive black outmigration from the South had swelled northern cities with an audience hungry for folk orality made modern.3 Now the first blues recording, and first blues recording star, had arrived to fill the void.

An oft-told tale, with a curious twist: while blues historians have readily acknowl- edged Mamie Smith’s importance as a race-records pioneer, almost all have held a surprisingly low opinion of both Smith’s abilities as a blues singer and “Crazy Blues” itself, as a blues composition. Smith, it is argued, wasn’t a “real” blues singer, a veteran of the southern tent show circuit, like Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and others who soon overtook her as recording stars. She was a vaudeville chanteuse from Cincinnati, a veteran of Harlem’s cabarets, with little connection to so-called “folk” blues. The prevailing view of her surprise hit, voiced by Chris Albertson, is of “an uninteresting composition sung in a rather ordinary style” (Welding and Byron 50). Francis Davis is even more dismissive in The History of the Blues:

. . . “Crazy Blues” . . .—largely on its reputation as the first commercially recorded blues by a black singer—was inducted into the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences Hall of Fame in 1994. . . . Yet heard today, it sounds like a period novelty, a vaudeville moan essentially no different from such white female singers as Marion Harris and Sophie Tucker. If anything, Smith lacks Harris’s rhythmic finesse and Tucker’s steamroller pizzazz. Despite its place in legend, it isn’t one of those songs that transcends its moment in the process of defining it ever after.4 (65)

Leaving aside for the moment the question of Smith’s skills as a blues singer, I believe that the consensus view of “Crazy Blues”—an uninteresting little period novelty—is profoundly mistaken. The song is, I hope to make clear, an insurrectionary social text, a document that transcends its moment by contributing to an evolving discourse of black revolutionary violence in the broadest sense—which is to say, black violence as a way of resisting white violence and unsettling a repressive social order.

One would not know, from the dozens of retellings of the “Crazy Blues” story, including Perry Bradford’s own, that his composition as Smith sings it reaches an emotional crescendo in the final verse with the following couplet:

I’m gonna do like a Chinaman . . . go and get some hop Get myself a gun . . . and shoot myself a cop (“Crazy”)5

In 1920 these were remarkable words for an African American singer to shout from the rooftops—so remarkable, perhaps, that Bradford deliberately excised the verse that

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contained them from one of the two sheet-music versions of “Crazy Blues” he subsequently published (Born 154). As an event in the history of black popular music, they supply a partial genealogy for the emergence, decades later, of NWA (“Fuck Tha Police”), Ice-T (“Cop Killer,” “Squeeze the Trigger”), and other beer-and-blunts- stoked gangsta rappers of the late 1980s, not to mention Gil Scott Heron’s spoken- word version of Marvin’s Gaye’s “Inner City Blues,” a celebration of New Orleans cop killer Mark Essex.6 As an episode in the larger history of violent black revolt against white American policing, Smith’s deadly fantasy anticipates cultural figures such as Assata Shakur and Mumia Abu-Jamal, both of whom stand convicted (justly or unjustly) of having enacted it. African American novelists such as Julian Moreau (The Black Commandos, 1967) and John Edgar Wideman (The Lynchers, 1973) have proposed black male cop-killers as literary protagonists—coolly calculating rather than “cra- zy,” yet driven to extremity by a depth of frustration that “Crazy Blues” clearly limns.7

As a more localized episode in the history of black Harlem, Smith’s words about cop- killing prefigure a growing alienation between Harlem’s restive citizenry and its white occupying force, an alienation that would erupt in the riots of 1935, 1943, and 1964. “He has never, himself, done anything for which to be hated,” wrote James Baldwin of the white Harlem policeman in 1960, “. . . and yet he is facing, daily and nightly, people who would gladly see him dead, and he knows it” (62). Mamie Smith as the murderous vanguard, an early black revolutionary? To echo the title of Earl Anthony’s 1970 report on his life as a Black Panther, “Crazy Blues” begins as a narrative of romantic abandonment and transforms itself into one woman’s dream of Picking Up the Gun.8

My principal concern here, however, is less with Smith’s inheritors than with her era: the way in which “Crazy Blues” resonates within a cluster of overlapping discursive contexts that helped constitute black subjects at the dawn of the New Negro Renaissance, both in Harlem and across America. One of these contexts was the black folk tradition of “badman” heroism: gun-wielding black male outlaws such as Railroad Bill and Stagolee whose exploits often included the killing of sheriffs and other lawmen. A number of black urban centers in the North had been swelled in the two decades preceding “Crazy Blues” by several waves of southern black migrants for whom such folk figures lived as mythic archetypes, sources of useable power, aids in identity-formation. Recent history had provided these migrants with an indelible example of the badman hero in action. In 1900, a black New Orleans resident named Robert Charles, infuriated by news of the Sam Hose lynching in Atlanta and manhan- dled by a local policeman, had shot not one white cop but seven, four of whom died. Charles himself was ultimately shot to death and dragged through the streets by an enraged white mob. The so-called “Robert Charles song” commemorating his exploits was apparently quite popular among black New Orleanians, but whites were so violently antagonized by it that it was quickly suppressed.9 Perry Bradford performed in New Orleans and worked with local musicians in the years following Charles’s violent outburst; although no version of the Robert Charles song currently exists, there is reason, as I shall show, to view “Crazy Blues” as Bradford’s veiled reinscrip- tion of the song, his way of engaging and updating lingering folk-memories.

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Overdetermined or not, the extraordinary success of “Crazy Blues” was at least partly a result of the complex symbolic rebellion it enacted, the truth it spoke to white power. When Mamie Smith sings of the pain of romantic abandonment, the black male lover whose absence she bemoans is associated not simply with faithlessness but with death, an inscription of his social fate in a white-policed public sphere where countless forms of “bad news”—lynching, race riots, vagrancy laws, back-alley murder—threaten to take him away for good:

Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all that he can But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues

Although these lines may be read as Smith’s acknowledgment that she is murderously angry at her absent man, she seems at the same time to be filled with desperate longing for him, and worried about his fate, invoking the doctor and undertaker as a way of realistically confronting his possible demise. When she transforms that “crazy” agitation at song’s end into imagined revenge against the police—an all-purpose signifier for the Georgia lynch mobs, St. Louis rioters, and New York Irishmen implicated in his disappearance—her blues-flavored threat is addressing the memo- ries, fears, and desires of a black urban public in formation. If Jazz-Age Harlem was the scene of a great race-welding, Smith’s commodified voice was the flux; not long after the song’s release, according to Jervis Anderson, it “was being played in almost every household of Harlem that owned a Victrola” (132). “Crazy Blues” was a quiet riot—one that drew no white disapprobation, yet managed to second the new spirit of violent black resistance visible in Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere during the Red Summer of 1919 and voiced most notably in Claude McKay’s poem “If We Must Die.” “Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack,” McKay had written; “Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!” (Gates and McKay 984). Yet even McKay, for all his stridency, did not dare to suggest that black reprisal should take the form of cop-killing.

That Smith’s was a female voice, even as the author of “Crazy Blues” was male, becomes crucial: sentiments that might have struck contemporary white listeners as insurrectionary if recorded by a black man could be dismissed as allowable hysteria coming from a black woman, not to mention a black woman modeling herself on a drug-addled Chinaman. Southern black women who protested vociferously against lynching were, as W. Fitzhugh Brundage has shown, granted a gender exemption from white reprisal; something of the same principle may have been at work in Smith’s case (279–80). Mingling romantic and political frustration, “Crazy Blues” reconfigures the badman tradition as a badwoman tradition, a lyric discourse of gun-, knife-, and dynamite-inflicted vengeance against black lovers and white oppressors

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elaborated by blues singers such as Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Ida Cox, and by their southern-born literary inheritors: Zora Neale Hurston, Ann Moody, and Alice Walk- er. Doubly displaced from Bradford’s authorial hand, hidden in plain view, the last- second gesture of racial rebellion towards which “Crazy Blues” swerves had no precedent in black popular music. Certainly none of W.C. Handy’s pop-blues of the preceding decade dare to suggest that black romantic pain issue in such a politically- charged act; “the mild-mannered Handy,” suggest Jasen and Jones, “must have cringed the first time he heard [Bradford’s song]” (265). Any attempt to take the full measure of “Crazy Blues” as social text must begin here, with the palpable novelty of a cultural document that uttered—literally—a dangerous, liberating, and widespread public sentiment. A population of roughly a hundred thousand black Harlemites, young and old, southern- and northern-born, purchased tens of thousands of copies of Smith’s record at $1 apiece within a month of its release, a riotous run on uptown distributors.10 What were these black consumers thinking when they heard poor Mamie fantasize, after losing her man, of shooting a cop?

“Cullud Policemans” in the City of Refuge

To begin with, he would have been a white cop. Or a black cop with a demonstrated loyalty to the overwhelmingly white Harlem police force.

King Solomon Gillis, the protagonist of Rudolph Fisher’s short story “The City of Refuge” (1925) and a recent migrant from North Carolina, may have swooned with delight at the sight of “cullud policemans” in Harlem, but black officers were still only a tiny minority in 1920, and by no means universally embraced by the race.11 The first black patrolman in Manhattan, Samuel J. Battle, was appointed to the force in 1911 and assigned to a midtown precinct; the black press reported that Battle was “subject to abusive language from both white and African American suspects who resented being arrested by him,” not to mention precinct-house hazing. By the time he was reassigned to Harlem in 1913, the hazing had stopped. The black press continued its support, demanding in 1914 that Battle and his one black fellow officer be supple- mented by additional hires. There was a reason for this demand, as James Weldon Johnson made clear in a September 1918 column in The New York Age entitled “Law and Order in Harlem”: white police were beginning to lose control of Harlem’s increasingly restive black underclass. “Last week,” wrote Johnson,

Police Captain Ward of the 38th Precinct requested a number of colored citizens to meet with him in conference and discuss the police situation in Harlem. At this conference Captain Ward stated that there were grave possibilities. He said there was a growing spirit of defiance of the police among certain classes of colored people, and that there was a disposition among these same classes to take colored prisoners away from the white police, no matter on what charges they were being arrested. The captain expressed the fear that if these tendencies were not rooted up serious trouble might at any time develop. (4)

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“One of the remedies for the Harlem situation,” Johnson concluded, in a sentiment echoed by the black press in Chicago (1915) and Philadelphia (1919), “would be more colored policemen.” Another bulwark against black mayhem and assassination, it soon turned out, was Samuel J. Battle himself. In 1919, the “serious trouble” Johnson had anticipated took place, as an enraged Harlem mob prepared to wreak vengeance on a white officer who had shot and killed an African American citizen. Battle intervened and saved the officer’s life, earning the confidence of the white brass downtown and eventual promotions to sergeant and lieutenant, the city’s first black policeman so honored (Dulaney 22). Here, in any case, was one index of the civic fury on which “Crazy Blues” was soon to draw: the thwarted mob-murder of a white Harlem cop. But there were others, and they had much to do with the nature of policing in the southern states from which many of Harlem’s residents, like the fictional Carolinian King Solomon Gillis, had recently fled.

Lynch Mobs and Southern Policing

Harlem was the City of Refuge, in the eyes of black southerners, because it promised an escape from lynch-law, vagrancy laws, peonage, convict lease, prison farms—the whole apparatus of Jim Crow justice designed to compel cheap black labor, uphold segregation, and indulge the violent psychopathology that undergird- ed southern whiteness. “Throughout the South,” Edward Ayers has observed of the post-Reconstruction period, “blacks felt themselves persecuted by the entire machin- ery of government, and the police stood as the most visible and galling element of that state” (Vengeance 174). What Ayers terms “[t]he pattern of monoracial law enforce- ment in the South” had deep historical roots, originating several hundred years earlier with the paramilitary slave patrols or “paterrollers” of the colonial era. Staffed primarily by poor whites, the patrols were authorized “to stop, search, whip, maim, and even kill any African slave caught off the plantation without a pass, engaged in illegal activities, or running away” (Dulaney 2). In the aftermath of Nat Turner’s 1831 insurrection, newly-organized police forces in southern cities such as Charleston, Louisville, Mobile, New Orleans, and Richmond were made directly responsible for regulating the slave population. Emancipation and Recontruction led to a significant but temporary shift away from monoracial law enforcement; by the 1870s, Republican administrations had appointed black police officers in Montgomery, Vicksburg, Jacksonville, Charleston, Chattanooga, Houston, and a number of other southern cities. The rise of demagogue-driven Radicalism after 1890 quickly ended this brief flirtation with social progress. By 1910, according to Marvin W. Dulaney, “African Americans had literally disappeared from southern police forces. . . . There was not a single black officer in the Deep South states of South Carolina, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama”—an absolute exclusion that lasted until the 1940s (15, 17, 30).

Even as black participation in southern police forces was being decimated, white southern police officers were expanding their traditional disciplinary function, eras- ing the boundary between law enforcement and lynch-law enforcement. Just as many

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of the most egregious spectacle lynchings followed the murder of white police officers, so were white officers willing, far too often, to let lynch mobs have their way with jailed black suspects.12 “Do you think I’m going to risk my life protecting a nigger?”: this remark by a southern sheriff typified, according to Arthur Raper, “a common attitude of peace officers” in the region (13). Such an attitude led directly, as W.J. Cash has suggested, to the phenomenon of Southern-sheriff-as-lyncher. “[F]ar from attempting to prevent lynchings,” Cash writes, “the police almost invariably connived at them and very often actively participated in them, sometimes serving as masters of ceremonies in the application of gasoline and torch or in adjusting the rope to the victim’s neck” (302). Georgia led the nation in white-on-black lynchings between 1882 and 1923, and Georgia law officers, according to Herbert Shapiro, “did practically nothing to prevent lynchings or to punish lynchers” (98).

The result, in black southern eyes, was a longstanding identification of white southern police with the forces of repressive order at best and death-dealing terror at worst. If “Crazy Blues” was, in its fantasy of copicide, a kind of quiet riot, then the anxiety it purged and the fury it channeled was one that Harlem’s recently-arrived Floridian, Georgian, Virginian, and Carolinian migrants knew only too well. Growing up in turn-of-the-century Georgia, Albon Holsey and his friends always lived in “mortal fear” of the police, “for they were arch-tormentors and persecutors of Negroes. . . . I ran from policemen so often when I was a boy that even now [in 1929], though I am past forty, if one walks upon me unexpectedly my first impulse is to take to my heels” (Litwack 15). Perry Bradford, Holsey’s contemporary, moved to Atlanta with his family in 1899, at the age of six, and lived in a four-room shack next to the Frazier Street Jail. His mother, he remembers in his autobiography Born With the Blues, “used to rock me to sleep singing songs she had heard the prisoners singing through the bars of the jail” (17–18). Bradford never explicitly references the sort of fear described by Holsey, but the future author of “Crazy Blues,” who played piano in the Decatur Street honky-tonks as a pre-teen, was certainly situated to absorb black working- and desperate-class attitudes towards southern policing. “‘We have lived in Atlanta twenty-seven years,’ a local black newspaper observed during the period, ‘and we have heard the lash resounding from the cabins of the slaves . . . but we have never seen a meaner set of low down cut throats, scrapes, and murderers than the city of Atlanta has to protect the peace’” (Litwack 264). Such feelings were widespread among Bradford’s contemporaries, according to Litwack. “The subject of the police often dominated conversations among young blacks. The stories invariably revolved around chases, harassment, clubbings, illegal arrests, and coerced confessions” (15). Virginia led the southern region as a source of black migrants to Harlem during the Jazz Age, and black Virginians, according to a black newspaper in Richmond, regarded the local police “with a distrust bordering on hatred,” a feeling reciprocated “with compound interest” by the police themselves (Litwack 264).

One source, in other words, of the “growing spirit of defiance of the police among certain classes of colored people” in Harlem—noted with dismay by James Weldon Johnson in 1918 and animating the public embrace of “Crazy Blues” two years later— was this preexisting current of black migrant feeling: a demand that the City of Refuge be a refuge, not a reinscription of repressive southern discipline. “For those [Harlemites] who fed their hopes and expectations,” wrote Charles S. Johnson in The New Negro,

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on a new status which would afford an escape from unrighteous and oppressive limitations of the South, there is a sensitiveness about any reminder of the station from which they have been so recently emancipated—a hair-trigger resentment, a furious re- volt against the years of training in the precise boundaries of their place. . . . (Locke 287)

Between 1916 and 1919, hundreds of thousands of refugee black southerners had poured north into key industrial states—New York, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Illi- nois—in pursuit of jobs that had recently been vacated by European nationals returning home to fight in the Great War. This was the hope-driven “pull” half of a push-pull dynamic; the head of the Chicago Urban League had no doubts about what terrors were fueling the push. “Every time a lynching takes place in a community down South,” he observed, “you can depend on it that colored people will arrive in Chicago within two weeks” (Lewis 20). The hair-trigger resentment and furious revolt many of these refugees soon manifested in their new northern home was, in fact, a pre- existing condition. As an unnamed black Mississippian tells Richard Wright in “The Ethics of Living Jim Crow,” “Lawd, man! Ef it wuzn’t fer them polices ‘n’ them ol’ lynch-mobs, there wouldn’t be nothin’ but uproar down here!” (15). The black urban public’s uproarious response to “Crazy Blues”—“The King of All Blues”—was a measure of the psychological liberation it offered from the “precise boundaries of place” enforced through southern terror. Yet the symbolic rebellion enacted in “Crazy Blues,” although it bespoke a tipping point in black public attitudes, was not entirely unprecedented on the cultural front. Mamie’s precursors in southern song and myth were the badmen.

“Crazy Niggers” and the Badman Tradition

The badman hero, like blues song itself, began as an ethical response to the desperate challenge posed to southern black male subjects in the 1890s by spectacle lynching, Radical rhetoric (the “black beast rapist”), disenfranchisement, and a criminal justice system characterized, in DuBois’s words, “by undue severity, injus- tice, and lack of discrimination” towards black men.13 How to survive under such circumstances with a sense of self-worth and personal agency intact? If blues song was a way of coding racial beleaguerment as transcendental restlessness and romantic complaint, the badman was both restless and hard, in a way that thrilled his black public. Both were forms of individuation that staved off a perpetually threatened abjection: the reduction of he who would be a man to one more jailed or dead nigger. As psychological orientations, they partially overlapped; bluesmen sometimes par- took of the badman mythos, like guitarist Luzanna Cholly in Albert Murray’s novel of blues life in 1920s Alabama, Train Whistle Guitar (1974). “[The idea of going to jail didn’t scare him at all,” insists Murray’s admiring young narrator, Scooter, “and the idea of getting lynch-mobbed didn’t faze him either. All I can remember him ever

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saying about that was: ‘If they shoot at me they sure better not miss me they sure better get me that first time.’ Whitefolks used to say he was a crazy nigger. . . .” (13).

The word “crazy,” in such contexts, has a precise meaning, one that the black consumers of “Crazy Blues” would surely have known: a “crazy nigger,” in the Jim Crow South, was an African American willing to use violence against whites in defense of his person, family, and dignity, and in the face of deadly white reprisal that supposedly made such self-defense suicidal. What sane person, after all, would commit suicide? “[W]e had a few Negroes down there [in Mississippi],” blues pianist Memphis Slim said to Big Bill Broonzy in a conversation recorded by Alan Lomax in 1946,

that wasn’t afraid of white peoples and talk back to them. They called those people crazy. . . .”

Big Bill: . . . crazy people. . . . I wonder why did they called them crazy because they speak up for his rights . . .

Memphis: Yeah, they called them crazy. Big Bill: Well they do that you know. I had an uncle like that and

they hung him. . . . They hung him down there because they say he was crazy and he might ruin the, the other Negroes. (Blues n.p.)

“I didn’t take no stuff off of ‘em, those white people . . . ,” claimed blues mandolinist Yank Rachell (b. 1910) of his Tennessee neighbors. “When they wadn’t right I would tell ‘em they wadn’t right. Police or sheriff, I’d tell ‘em all. They say I crazy. I wadn’t crazy” (Congress 62). Blues bassist Willie Dixon’s father, A.D. Bell, was fond of guns. “Nobody messed with him,” Dixon (b. 1915) later insisted. “[T]hey were half-scared of him down there [in Mississippi]. . . . [H]e didn’t believe in nothing but his gun. He had shot several white people around there and everybody said he was crazy” (Dixon 10). The black badman engaged in a heightened, triumphant version of such “crazy” behavior; he was a mythic archetype grounded in historical reality and born out of collective need for an heroic ideal. The badman’s revolt against self-interested white notions of “reasonable” black subservience succeeded, at least for a while, and succeeded brilliantly, disruptively, thrillingly. He picked up the gun—his defining gesture—and used it against white lawmen and the property they were charged with protecting. If Bishop Henry McNeil Turner, despairing at the unchecked ascendance of spectacle lynching in the 1890s, had cried “Get guns! Negroes, get guns!”, the badman was the individualist embodiment of this creed, a cultural icon with a palpable political valence, if not with a specific political agenda.14

Railroad Bill, a black folk hero based on the exploits of Morris Slater, is the best- known of these gun-wielding badmen. In 1893, Slater holstered his pistol after a long week as a turpentine worker in rural Alabama and headed into town, where juke- joints beckoned. Confronted by a white policeman who demanded that he surrender his firearm, Slater struggled with and then shot him, escaping on a freight train. For the next three years Slater eluded capture with a trickster’s dexterity—robbing a series of trains throughout southwest Alabama, selling purloined canned food to poor blacks who lived in shacks next to the tracks, frustrating the efforts of several local sheriffs who were elected on the promise that they would apprehend him. In an 1895

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gun battle, Slater killed a second white lawman, Sheriff E.S. McMillan, who had devoted himself to the black outlaw’s undoing. Finally, in 1896, Slater was ambushed and shot dead by two reward-seekers as he walked into a general store in Atmore, Alabama. Law officers carried his body from town to town for public viewing, according to John W. Roberts, “to demonstrate the power of the ‘law’ to others who might try to follow his example” (171–73).15

Slater’s “badness,” as embroidered by the black folk imagination and transformed into the legend of Railroad Bill, wasn’t entirely directed against white law. Like most black badmen, Railroad Bill could be ruthless towards “innocent” whites and other blacks alike—a lyric violence, however, with its own capacity to inspire heroic identification on the part of his black (and, to some extent, white) public16:

Railroad Bill he was a mighty mean man He shot the midnight lantern out the brakeman’s hand I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill.

Railroad Bill took my wife, Said if I didn’t like it, he would take my life, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill.

Going up on a mountain, going out west, Thirty-eight special sticking out of my vest, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill

Buy me a pistol just as long as my arm, Kill everybody ever done me harm, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill.

I’ve got a thirty-eight special on a forty-five frame, How in the world can I miss him when I got dead aim, I’m going to ride old Railroad Bill. (Gates and McKay 49)

The ballad-singer “rides” Railroad Bill towards psychospiritual deliverance, celebrat- ing and reenacting the badman’s expansive, rule-defying bad behaviors. One of these behaviors, the fantasy of gun acquisition and vengeance-driven mass murder (l. 10– 11), resurfaces in later blues songs such as Sunnyland Slim’s “Johnson Machine Gun” (1930s), Violet Mills’s “Mad Mama Blues” (1924), and Ida Cox’s “One Time Woman Blues” (1925); it also points towards the retributive fantasy Perry Bradford authored for Mamie Smith, in which “a” cop—any and every human embodiment of an oppressive order—will serve as a scapegoat for the thwarted lover’s wrath. Guns, absent from “This Thing Called Love” and other of his pre-1920 compositions, were a deliberate mid-career addition to Bradford’s songwriting lexicon, which had previ- ously tended towards sentimental torch songs and rollicking dance tunes such as the “Bullfrog Hop” (1907) (Oliver 35). In both “Wicked Blues” (1922), a follow-up to “Crazy Blues,” and “Sinful Blues” (1924), a song he composed for Bessie Smith, Bradford recycles the long-gun trope from “Railroad Bill.” The three related compo-

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sitions together limn what might be called the badwoman blues narrative, a hybrid genre in which the abandoned or mistreated woman, rather than dwelling in remorse, suddenly turns murderously hard (crazy, wicked, sinful) with the help of fantasy- vengeance:

Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t had no time to lose I must find him today I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues

* * *

Now I’ve got the wicked blues ‘Cause my baby went away If I thought he loved me true I would have asked him to please stay I will buy a gun as long as my right arm Shoot at everybody done me any wrong Now babe I am all confused Cause I’ve got the Wicked Blues

* * *

I got my opinion and my man won’t act right So I’m gonna get hard on him right from this very night Gonna get me a gun long as my right arm Shoot that man because he done me wrong Lord, now I’ve got them sinful blues. (Bradford, Born 62–63; A. Davis 336)

What distinguishes “Crazy Blues” from its two successors is its willingness to make manifest the racial discontent simmering below the surface of romantic disillusion. “Wicked Blues,” like “Railroad Bill,” threatens a mass murder (of “everybody done me any wrong”) that hints at racial discontent while allowing a more benign reading. “Sinful Blues” restricts the scope of vengeance still more narrowly, to the dimensions of the errant lover. “Crazy Blues,” by contrast, veers towards the underlying source of heartache, the visible embodiment of white repression: the white beat-cop who, as James Baldwin would note four decades later, “moves through Harlem . . . like an occupying soldier in a bitterly hostile country” (62).17

“Railroad Bill” and the badman tradition are, I am claiming, the prime folk-cultural source of the cop-killing trope “Crazy Blues” deploys. Like most folk ballads,

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“Railroad Bill” appears in several printed versions; the version quoted earlier leaves out the following verses, in which the black badman encounters various white lawmen, and shoots them up:

Standin’ on corner didn’t mean no harm, Policeman grab me by my arm, Wuz lookin’ fer Railroad Bill.

Railroad Bill was mighty sport Shot all the buttons off high Sheriff coat Den holler, “Right on desparado Bill.”

Railroad Bill, he went down Souf, Shot all de teef, out o’ de constable’s mouf Wa’n’t he bad, wa’n’t he bad, wa’n’t he bad. (Roberts 171–72)

As the first verse hints, the black audience’s emotional investment in Railroad Bill as badman hero was grounded in a shared racial subjection: the black folk-speaker and the black outlaw are interchangeable in the eyes of white (in)justice. The badman’s heroism, seen through black folk eyes, is thus his “mighty sport”: his willingness to confront and vanquish white law with a virtuosic display of prowess. The political valence of this gesture is clear, and should help us read “Crazy Blues” as the proto- revolutionary text it was for its black listeners. “The people,” Fanon reminds us in The Wretched of the Earth,

make use of certain episodes in the life of the community in order to hold themselves ready and keep alive their revolutionary zeal. For example, the gangster who holds up the police set on to track him down for days, or who dies in single combat after having killed four or five policemen . . . these types light the way for the people, form the blueprints for action and become heroes. Obvi- ously it’s a waste of breath to say that such-and-such a hero is a thief, a scoundrel, or a reprobate. If the act for which he is prosecuted by the colonial authorities is an act exclusively di- rected against a colonialist person or colonialist property, the demarcation line is definite and manifest. The process of identi- fication is automatic. (69)

Most badmen did not direct their violence exclusively against “colonialist” represen- tatives of white law, a fact that helps account, as Roberts has noted, for their frequently ambivalent portrayals in black folk song. Black badmen were often habitués of bars, saloons, jooks, and gambling dens, rubbing shoulders with other rough characters; badman lore “did not skirt the harsher realities of the consequences of participating in the lifestyle with which [these individuals] were associated” (209). Jack Hardy, a novice gambler, loses at cards to a “Chinaman” and shoots him dead— an act bespeaking nativist aggression more than racial liberation. Stackolee may have

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been cheated out of his prized Stetson hat by professional gambler Billy Lyons, but the gusto with which he exacts intraracial vengeance is unsettling:

Stackolee shot Billy four times in the head And left that fool on the floor damn near dead Stackolee decided he’d go up to Sister Lou’s. Said, Sister Lou! Sister Lou, guess what I done? I just shot and killed Billy, your big-head son. Sister Lou said, Stackolee, that can’t be true! You and Billy been friends for a year or two. Stackolee said, Woman, if you don’t believe what I said, Go count the bullet holes in that son-of-a-gun’s head. (Gates and McKay 50)18

Yet here, too, as so often in the badman tradition, a subsequent verse reveals the latent revolutionary content of the badman’s outsized aggression: white law has no power over him:

She got on the phone, Sheriff, Sheriff, I want you to help poor me. I want you to catch that bad son-of-a-gun they call Stackolee. Sheriff said, My name might begin with an s and end with an f But if you want that bad Stackolee you got to get him yourself.

Two-Gun Charlie Pierce, a black Memphis desperado in the early 1920s, was another celebrated badman, part of the continuing narrative of black revolt against white policing that Bradford had shrewdly sampled into his universal pop hit. “In the spring of 1923,” write Margaret McKee and Fred Chisenhall in Beale Black and Blue, quoting the unpublished reminiscences of Sam Bledsoe, a police reporter for the Commercial Appeal,

Two-Gun had shot a couple of policemen in a fight at the intersection of Trigg Street and Louisiana Avenue. He got his nickname on that occasion by using two weapons. He had sever- al other brushes with officers and shot a couple more. Two-Gun was a hero to the blacks. There was a ditty about him, rendered to the tune of “Casey Jones.” Few dared sing it openly, but a drunken Negro in the jail one night defiantly yelled it until the jailer went back and silenced him with a blackjack. I remember one verse:

Two-Gun Charlie is a mighty man. Mows down ‘dem cops wherever he can. Got two pistols that sho’ am fine. Gives ‘dem bastards a hot old time. (27–29)

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Here is Fanon’s cop-killer as black community hero, his violence against “colonialist” enforcers later transformed by the people into a song that “keep[s] alive their revolutionary zeal.” That the community’s fear of white reprisal keeps the song an in- group affair helps us appreciate Bradford’s achievement with “Crazy Blues”: by morphing the bad nigger of white nightmare into a bad negress, an emotionally distraught woman with a “crazy” throwaway fantasy of shooting a cop, Bradford defused potential white anger while placing longstanding black antipathies in full pop-cultural view. Bradford seems, moreover, to have had a particular black badman in mind when he wrote “Crazy Blues”—a historical figure whose exploits, like Two- Gun’s, inspired a folk ditty so infuriating to whites that few blacks dared sing it openly.

Robert Charles in New Orleans

The Robert Charles affair hardly needed the embellishment of legend. The bare facts alone were shocking enough to white residents of New Orleans, and thrilling enough to black residents.

A native of Copiah County, Mississippi—“bloody Copiah,” a black New Orleans newspaper called it—Charles had come to the Crescent City in the early 1890s, like many other young black men and women, in an effort to escape racial violence and make a better life for himself. Literate, ambitious, and politically engaged, frustrated at every turn by Jim Crow restrictions, Charles soon found himself radicalized by Bishop Henry McNeil Turner’s strident writings for the African Emigration Society. He began to distribute the Society’s newsletter, showing every sign of becoming what Joel Williamson has arguably called “the first fully self-conscious black militant in the United States” (202). When Charles read of Sam Hose’s lynching, burning, and dismemberment in Newman, Georgia, in 1899, he went into a rage. He was “beside himself with fury,” one of his acquaintances said later. He told another acquaintance, a black levee worker, that “it was the duty of every negro to buy a rifle and keep it ready against the time they might be called upon to act in unison” (Litwack 405, Hair 107).

On July 23, 1900, while waiting with a friend outside the home of a woman he knew, Charles was harassed by three policemen, one of whom grabbed and began to beat him. Charles drew a pistol, he and the white cop shot each other, and Charles escaped to his apartment. When the remaining officers, including a precinct captain, tracked him down, he shot and killed one with his Winchester rifle, drove the other two into panicked hiding, and fled. Word of his brazenness roared through town, prompting whites to riot. Scores of innocent black people were beaten and a dozen were killed over the next four days. The police manhunt finally caught up with Charles. Cornered in his hiding place, the wood-frame apartment building of a friend, surrounded by an armed and infuriated New Orleans mob of a thousand, Charles managed to shoot twenty-seven whites, killing seven, before being forced to flee from the burning structure. The mob stomped and shot him to death, his face flattened by the crowd’s

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boots. He was buried secretly a few days later, under military guard, in an unmarked grave. He had killed four white policemen, all told, and seriously wounded three others.

During the manhunt and after his death, white newspapers referred to Charles as a “monster,” “an unreasoning brute,” “bad nigger,” “woman beater,” “dangerous agitator,” “worthless crapshooting negro,” “ruthless black butcher,” and “blood- thirsty champion of African supremacy” (Litwack 407–8). “His feat,” according to Leon Litwack, “almost immediately assumed legendary proportions” among New Orleans blacks, and the legend expressed itself in song (407). New Orleans pianist Jelly Roll Morton described both to Alan Lomax:

[I]f you shoot one officer like Robert Charles had, it’s no more than right that another one should take his place, but the way that newsboy was killing them off it looked like the department might run out of officers. Every time he raised his rifle and got a policeman in the sights, there’d be another one dead. It was never learned how many police were killed. Some said thirty-two. Some said eighteen.

. . . [L]ike many other bad men, he had a song originated on him. This song was squished very easily by the department, and not only by the department but by anyone else who heard it, due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder. So that song never did get very far. I once knew the Robert Charles song, but I found out it was best for me to forget it and that I did in order to go along with the world on the peaceful side. (Mister 69)

“Poorer blacks,” according to William Ivy Hair, “. . . were reportedly regretful only that he had not taken more policemen with him when he died. Among lower class blacks he became an immediate folk hero and ‘the Robert Charles song,’ praising his exploits, would occasionally be played at all-black gatherings for years to come” (178– 79).

There are several provocative, if admittedly speculative, connections between the so-called “Robert Charles song”—no published or recorded version of which exists— and “Crazy Blues,” not least of which is the overwhelming popularity of Perry Bradford’s national hit among New Orleanians themselves. “That record really turned around the recording industry,” remembered jazzman Danny Barker of the Crescent City response. “. . . Every family had a phonograph in their house, specifi- cally behind Mamie Smith’s first record” (Obrecht 23). Did black New Orleanians embrace Bradford’s song so ardently because it drew on folk-memories of Charles, their own most notorious cop-killer? While Bradford never mentions Charles in Born With the Blues, he would have had many occasions to hear the illicit ballad at the sort of all-black gatherings described by Morton. In the fall of 1907, when Bradford was fourteen, Allen’s New Orleans Minstrels played in Atlanta and Bradford left town with them, spending most of that season as a company member. In 1908, he and the troupe had what Jasen and Jones terms “a wild, week-long booking in New Orleans” during Mardi Gras (257). Such experiences are one possible route of lyric cross-

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fertilization; another dates from 1913, when Bradford began a close, if occasionally competitive relationship with Morton himself. Morton, who referred to Bradford in letters as “Dear Friend Mule,” crossed paths with the young songwriter in a Chicago hotel room and did his best, according to Bradford, to pull rank:

“Charlie, bring that lamb into the front room to the piano so I can slaughter him.” Jelly howled with laughter.

We went into the front room to the piano and Jelly played what afterward became widely known as the “Jelly Roll Blues.” I asked him to play some more but he refused. I greeted him with “Man, that’s a good blues, very intricate, but move over and let the ‘real Blues King’ smack you down.” I played and sang a whole gang of blues; among them was “I’m Alabama Bound,” the song I changed the title to “Don’t Leave Me Here,” and then I played “Cannon Ball Blues.”

After that early morning blues session, Jelly and I became fast friends. (49, 94–95)

Did Morton, on some other occasion, try to one-up Bradford by pulling out and dusting off the “forgotten” ballad of New Orleans’s legendary cop-killer? Did Brad- ford, who makes clear here his willingness to “compose” new songs by changing the titles of extant songs, draw on memories of the ballad when composing “Crazy Blues”? Lending credence to such speculations are two other details of the Robert Charles affair that appear to surface in Bradford’s hit.

The first concerns a widespread rumor in the aftermath of Charles’s rampage that he had drawn his “courage and coolness” from cocaine. The rumor had begun after a painstaking search of Charles’s room disclosed both a bullet mold on the mantel- piece and a small amount of a substance which the police never identified but which white New Orleans newspapers variously labeled “a bottle of cocaine,” a “box” of cocaine, and morphine. None of Charles’s black acquaintances remembered ever seeing him intoxicated; he was known, if anything, as a self-regulating social drinker (Williamson 208, Hair 98). The accusation of drug use, in any case, helped make Charles the focus of growing white anxieties over black working-class pleasures in the Storyville section, where jazz was in the process of being born. Only two years earlier, in 1898, cocaine—first used in New Orleans by overworked black stevedores—had exploded in popularity, mingling with and in some quarters displacing the preexist- ing menu of intoxicants. “Certain drugstores,” according to Hair, “were known to sell it to anyone. . . . Morphine was still favored by some addicts, while others smoked opium; one bar near the French Market apparently stirred either morphine or opium into fusel oil and whiskey. . . . [B]y 1900 cocaine had become by far the most common hard drug taken by poorer blacks . . .” (76–77). Opium, known colloquially as “hop,” is not something Charles was rumored to have used, but we may be misled by a spurious specificity here: a “hop-joint,” according to one of folklorist Dorothy Scar- borough’s white southern informants, “is the vernacular for a drug-shop, and all that implies, and ‘drug’ to a Negro means cocaine, ‘coke,’ ‘dope,’ etc, being synonymous with ‘hops’” (89).

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What I suggest is that Robert Charles was associated in folk-memory, white and black, with drug-inspired, gun-enabled cop-killing, and that the pertinent couplet Bradford inserted into “Crazy Blues”—“I’m gonna do like a Chinaman, go and get some hop / Get myself a gun, and shoot myself a cop”—directly engaged this folk- memory, regardless of the pharmacological distinction between cocaine (a stimulant) and opium (a depressant and euphoric). In two decades separating the Robert Charles affair from “Crazy Blues,” moreover, cocaine use had become specifically associated in the public mind with violent black antipathy towards white police. “Negro Cocaine ‘Fiends’ Are a New Southern Menace,” read a New York Times headline of February 8, 1914. “When negroes get too much of it,” warned the Police Chief of Louisville, Kentucky, in a 1909 report, “they are inclined to go on the war-path, and when in this condition they give a police officer who attempts to arrest them a hard time” (Courtwright 97). In the cultural context within which “Crazy Blues” functioned, “hop” could easily partake of cocaine’s primary social meaning: explosive black unrepression. Nor should we neglect the obvious: the word “hop” has, from a songwriter’s perspec- tive, the virtue of rhyming with “cop.” By any measure, Robert Charles had the Crazy Blues, and acted on them, long before Perry Bradford cast them in lyric form.

The word “crazy” seems, in fact, to have played a notable role in the public discussion surrounding Charles’s one-man rebellion. Shortly after Charles died, anti- lynching crusader Ida B. Wells-Barnett received a letter from one of his black New Orleans associates. “You will also find [enclosed],” the man wrote, apparently speaking of the materials Charles had been distributing as an agent for Bishop Turner’s African Emmigration Society,

one of the circulars in which Charles was in possession of which was styled as a crazy document. Let me say, until our preachers preach this document we will always be slaves. If you can help circulate this “crazy” doctrine I would be glad to have you do so, for I shall never rest until I get to that heaven on earth; that is, the west coast of Africa, in Liberia. (Hair 99–100)

Is this letter the sheerest coincidence, or did Bradford write “Crazy Blues” with Charles and his doctrine of violent black self-defense—styled as insane by whites, admired as “crazy” by blacks—explicitly in mind? While there exists no proof that the Harlem songwriter even knew who Charles was, the circumstantial evidence remains tantalizing, and deserves further research.

“A New Menace to Be Faced”: the Red Summer and the Ku Klux Klan

Robert Charles and the badman ballad tradition are the cultural texts that hover, visible if not quite determinant, behind “Crazy Blues” and its badwoman’s fantasy of cop-murder. But the national black audience ultimately discovered by the song was

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consolidated by more proximate events unfolding during the so-called “Red Sum- mer” of 1919—indeed, during the preceding half-decade, when almost three hundred African Americans were lynched. Even as southern lynching prompted a northward exodus, it helped swell Harlem, Chicago, Detroit, and other urban centers with a black public who had come of age on down-home and “pop” blues—W.C. Handy himself left Memphis for Harlem in 1918 on the heels of a lynching—and whose attitude towards white mob violence was one of restive militancy. “Crazy Blues” would captivate this audience by reflecting both its musical tastes and its political attitude, crystalizing a paradox in the song’s final line: “I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news, now I’ve got the crazy blues.” If the crazy blues are the despairs bred by a seemingly unending barrage of racial “bad news,” they’re also the black subject’s determination to contest that bad news—as Mamie has just revealed in the couplet that precedes this line—by picking up a gun and shooting at what most oppresses.

That guns should be seen as instruments of black righteousness in the battle against white aggression was a notable element of black public discourse in 1919. The vanguard of this movement were returning black infantrymen, soldiers who had proved their valor by shooting German white men and bridled at the thought of reinhabiting their expected “place” within the lacerating indignities of Jim Crow.19 Du Bois’s ringing declension in the May 1919 issue of Crisis set the summer’s tone: “We return. / We return from fighting. / We return fighting” (Shapiro 157). A tipping point in race relations had clearly been reached, a wildfire spread of violent black resistance to white antagonism that eerily anticipated the black public’s unprecedent- ed nationwide response to “Crazy Blues.” “1919 represented something new in American history,” observes Shapiro:

within a span of weeks racial violence spread from one city to another, and every city feared its turn was next. It was clear that these confrontations could not be explained as simply a local phenomenon. As Americans learned the news of racial outbreaks in such diverse cities as Omaha, Washington, Knoxville, and Chicago, it was apparent that these explosions expressed ten- sions afflicting the national society. There was something new to be seen in the rapid spread of violence, and within the various incidents there was also a component of more determined and effective black resistance to assault by white racists. Resistance by one means or another has always been the core of the black response to violence, but in 1919 the resistance was more often overt and direct, defiant in its willingness to inflict as well as suffer casualties. (Shapiro 149–50)

Even as lynchings soared during the summer months, black men with guns were inflicting widely-reported casualties on white mobs. In Longview, Texas, after a black high school teacher wrote a detailed account of the murder of a young black towns- man, he and a black physician were ordered out of town by local whites. Trapped in the teacher’s house by a mob, the physician fired more than a hundred and fifty shots, killing four whites, before escaping. On July 19 in Washington, D.C., police who stopped a group of blacks on the street were fired upon and one officer was wounded.

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In the rioting that shook the city over the next several days, mobs of white soldiers, sailors, and marines were met by determined black resistance; of the fifteen individ- uals killed or seriously wounded, ten were white. Two weeks later rioting spread to Chicago and raged for a week; twenty-three blacks and fifteen whites died, with hundreds injured on both sides. One black witness, insisting that the black commu- nity was ready for armed combat, claimed that blacks had 1,000 rifles “and enough ammunition to last for years if used in guerilla warfare” (Shapiro 151). “At the level where feelings are translated into action,” notes Shapiro, in words that gloss Mamie Smith’s turn from romantic frustration to violent reprisal, “blacks individually and collectively resisted violent assault more openly and boldly, both taking measures of self-defense and passing over to the counterattack” (155).

If one clear lesson could be drawn from the events of the Red Summer, in the eyes of the black press, it was the need for armed black self-defense in the face of police collusion with, and active participation in, white mob violence. The black Christian Recorder blamed white police officers outright for the rioting; the Messenger, while insisting that blacks resort to violence only as a last resort, called it “indispensable at times.” “A bullet,” the paper proclaimed, “is sometimes more convincing than a hundred prayers.” More black police were clearly called for, too, since white officers and white soldiers were unlikely to act impartially “when they are a part of the race doing the mobbing” (Dulaney 23, Shapiro 173).

Black Harlemites were spared the sort of violence that raged through many other communities during the Red Summer of 1919, but the following summer brought heightened anxieties. In the months leading up to the release of “Crazy Blues,” Harlemites were dismayed by the possibility that the resurgent Atlanta-based Ku Klux Klan might soon open a chapter in New York. “While conditions to-day are not the same as they were when the original Klan was organized,” Imperial Wizard William Simmons was quoted as saying in the The New York Age in late July, two weeks before “Crazy Blues” was recorded, “the need for [an] organization like the Ku Klux Klan is just as pressing now as it ever was” (“Georgia” 1). The “maintainance [sic] of white supremacy” was one of Simmons’s stated goals; the Klan, he proclaimed, was ready to obey a New York call whenever it might be made. A Harlem audience would have needed no help translating such intentions: The Chicago Defender, The Crisis, and The Age itself had been routinely publishing stories about southern lynchings—what might be called white supremacy in its extreme policing mode. During the Red Summer, according to David Levering Lewis, lynching had been pursued, “with a relish approaching that of the 1890s” (Lewis 18). Ellisville, Mississippi; Longview, Texas; and Washington, D.C., were a few of the many theaters in which brutalized black male bodies—sometimes nude, often bullet-ridden—were put on display, then reported in the black press with vividness and outrage. Reinvigorating memories of southern humiliations left behind, mingling with current antipathies for Harlem’s white police, such images were what would have first come to mind when a Harlem audience contemplated virulent white supremacy following them north. If lynched black bodies symbolized white power at work, then the cop Mamie Smith (with Perry Bradford’s help) fantasizes about shooting represented to black Harlemites the black- power response, a way of discharging anxious outrage at the possibility that the Klan might have the City of Refuge in its sights.

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In early December 1920, even as “Crazy Blues” was flying out of the stores and Smith was proving herself “a strong magnet” at Harlem’s Lafayette Theatre, James Weldon Johnson was seconding the song’s badwoman fantasy of violent black assertiveness in an editorial in The New York Age entitled “The Ku Klux Klan in New York” (“Thanksgiving” 6, Johnson 4). After reminding his readers of the Imperial Wizard’s declaration that a lodge would soon be organized in the Empire State, he scoffed at the Klan’s avowed purpose of “maintain[ing] the peace and security of the people.” “[I]f the New York lodge should contemplate carrying out any of its ‘purposes’ in Harlem,” he warned, “it will have our sympathies, even our condolenc- es in advance.” Johnson’s tone of self-assurance is both cool and a little jaunty; it is the voice of the nerved, gun-toting southern badman—Luzanna Cholly at the typewrit- er—projected as Harlem’s collective intent. Smith and Johnson were working in concert, albeit unknowingly, to reinforce black public morale.

Only three weeks later, on Christmas Day 1920, the threat of nightriders barreling down Lenox Avenue seemed miraculously to have been averted. “Ku Klux Are Barred From New York State” read the headline in The New York Age. Alfred J. Talley, Chief Assistant District Attorney of New York County, had issued a statement declaring, “There is no room in this great broad-minded State of New York for so un-American an organization as the Ku Klux Klan” (“Ku Klux Klan” 1). Johnson quoted parts of Talley’s statement with approval in his Christmas “Views and Reviews” column, but added a warning: “These threats of organizing Klans in other northern cities are not idle ones, and the colored people of the country, especially of the north, had better bestir themselves” (Johnson, “Ku Klux Klan” 4). One week later, as Mamie Smith and her Famous Jazz Hounds were preparing for a spring tour that would bestir black Chicago and other cities swelled by the Great Migration, Johnson headlined his New Year’s editorial “A New Danger to be Met.” “There is a new danger,” he insisted,

facing colored people in Northern cities, especially in the large industrial centers. Business depression has brought about cur- tailment in employment and colored laborers and workmen are the first to be made victims of this curtailment. . . .

. . . When men are suddenly thrown out of employment there naturally follows a “crime wave.” Now, all the great cities of the North are suffering from “crime waves,” and the criminals are white men. The police are struggling as best they can to preserve safety and order; nevertheless, they are dealing with the situa- tion by methods wholly within the established police powers. But let two or three of these crimes be committed by colored men, and you will hear cries of “Run the Negroes out of town!” and even cries of “Lynch ‘em! Lynch ‘em!” With such cries as these ringing in the people’s ears, not even the most honest and respectable colored people will be safe. The latter is a danger we should prepare at once to meet. (“Danger” 4)

Johnson was playing on the collective fears of Harlem and other northern black communities here, and not unwisely. The police, content to work within “established . . . powers” when crime presented a white face, had proved during the Red Summer

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to be willing accomplices of white mob violence when black misbehavior of any sort was involved, or merely imputed. Too, armed black self-defense had proved its efficacy in the face of such violence. The raging popularity of “Crazy Blues,” I am claiming, was grounded in the psychological preparation it offered its black audience to meet the danger Johnson outlines. If white mob violence begins, in Johnson’s view, as a public declaration of violent intent—“Lynch ‘em!”—which quickly turns indis- criminate, then “Crazy Blues” flips the script and personalizes the response. Mistreat me, Smith declared on behalf of all who dwelled in the presence of her plaintive voice, and I’ll shoot myself a cop, any cop. Nightmarish black fears of indiscriminate victimization were countered with a sustaining black fantasy of indiscriminate reprisal. It was a loud fantasy, multiplied by the process of commodification, boiling out of countless thousands of Victrolas across America.20

The Abandonment Blues: Lynching, Sound Recording, and Fantasies of Badwoman Vengeance

If “Crazy Blues” swerves in its final stanza towards the singer’s imagined murder of a faceless (white) policeman, then for most of its length it is apparently something quite different: an unremarkable pop-blues in which an abandoned woman bemoans her (black) lover’s disappearance, bewails the fact that he “don’t treat me right,” affirms the immutability of her love, contemplates and rejects suicide, and describes the physical manifestations (restlessness, loss of appetite) of the “crazy blues” that possess her. Such abandonment narratives, a familiar subset of women’s blues, are generally read as social rather than merely personal inscriptions, a marker of the spiritual toll wrought on black women by the material conditions within which their black male lovers were compelled to labor. In Blues Legacies and Black Feminism, Angela Davis sees the grief of female abandonment as a correlate not just of the wear- and-tear suffered by laboring black men, many of whom were forced to travel long distances in search of work, but of the exhilaration those same men felt at their freedom to range widely. “A poor black woman of the era,” writes Davis in words that would seem to apply to “Crazy Blues,”

who found herself deserted or rejected by a male lover was not merely experiencing private troubles; she also was caught in a complex web of historical circumstances. However smoothly a personal relationship may have been progressing, a recently emancipated black man was compelled to work, and even if he found a job near the neighborhood where he and his partner had settled, he nevertheless might also be seduced by new possibil- ities of travel. In search of work—and also in search of the elusive guarantees of security and happiness—men jumped freight trains and wandered from town to town, from state to state, from region to region. There were imperative economic reasons for undertaking journeys away from home, yet even when jobs were not found and available employment was backbreaking and

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poorly compensated, the very process of traveling must have generated a feeling of exhilaration and freedom in individuals whose ancestors had been chained for centuries to geographical sites dictated by slave masters. This impulse to travel would infect great numbers of black men as a sociohistorically initiated compulsion. . . .

Many of the absconding and unfaithful lovers memorialized by blues women were in pursuit of that fleeting glimpse of freedom. (18–19)

Davis is surely right when she claims that the “absconding and unfaithful lovers” who form the subject of so many abandonment narratives in black women’s blues song are an inscription, among other things, of black male liberation, the positive pleasure black men took in claiming their right to simply get up and go, geographically speaking, when such freedom-of-movement had been denied to generations of their enslaved ancestors. Yet such freedom brought with it a corresponding danger to life and limb that Davis leaves unaddressed—a danger that also registers in the sense of hurtful loss communicated by black women’s blues song. A working-class black man at large in the Jim Crow South, far from family and friends and shorn of the protection of his local white boss or patron, was shadowed always by the possibility of a disastrous confrontation with white law, such as it was. He could be arrested as an unemployed transient or vagrant and end up as a leased convict on a chain gang. Or, as happened in so many cases, he could find himself arrested as a suspect in a white woman’s rape or murder and end up as one more lynching victim. “[G]angs of colored wandering beggars have . . . begun [to pass by],” wrote a southern correspondent to The Nation in 1893. “Usually such negroes are willing to work on odd jobs only. It is probable that these vagrant bands furnish the wretched victims for the horrible lynchings described in so much detail in the local papers” (Ayers, Promise 153). Disappearing from their women’s beds—for months or years if arrested, forever if lynched—these “absconding” lovers, too, were the absent black male subjects of abandonment blues narratives.

It is worth remembering, even as we consider “Crazy Blues” as a pivotal first blues recording, that the handful of black male voices who preceded Mamie Smith onto shellac included not just minstrels such as George W. Johnson (“Laughing Coon” 1895) and comedian Bert Williams (1901), but several victims of spectacle lynching.21

“It is said,” wrote Robert Shufeldt of Henry Smith’s 1893 lynching in The Negro a Menace to American Civilization (1907),

that the victim screamed and howled at a terrible rate, and that all this, from start to finish, was recorded by a graphophone, and that this has been used at various exhibitions to illustrate a full set of biographic pictures which were made at the same time. . . . It is said that the man begged the crowd to kill him,—to shoot him, a dozen times before the burning fagots caused his death. (139)

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Edward Ayers cites another instance of a spectacle lynching providing the material for an early recording:

. . . . Mell Barrett, a young white boy, . . . spent a nickel to hear his first Edison talking machine at a country picnic in 1896. “With the tubes in my ears, the Pitchman was now adjusting the needle on the machine. . . . My excitement increased, my heart was pounding so I could hardly hold the tubes in my ears with my shaking hands.” At first, he thought he was listening to a conven- tion of some sort. “‘All Right Men. Bring Them Out. Let’s Hear What They Have to Say,’ were the first words I understood coming from a talking machine.” The young boy listened to two men confess to a rape, then beg for mercy. “The sounds of shuffling feet, swearing men, rattle of chains, falling wood, brush, and fagots, then a voice—shrill, strident, angry, called out ‘Who will apply the torch?’ ‘I will,’ came a chorus of high- pitched, angry voices.’” Barrett could hear “the crackle of flames as it ate its way into the dry tinder,” and the victims asking God to forgive their tormentors. The crowd fell quiet; only the sound of the flames remained.22

If Henry Smith and these two unnamed lynching victims can’t quite be called Mamie Smith’s precursors in the field of black popular music, then we may nevertheless read “Crazy Blues” and other abandonment blues as symbolic responses to such murder- ous spectacles, a way of mourning their victims and contesting their white propaga- tors. In “Haunted House Blues” (n.d.), for example, Bessie Smith depicts herself as the haunted survivor of a series of dead black male lovers in a way that may help us hear the deathly subtext of “Crazy Blues”:

[spoken] 1 Don’t bring no ghosts in the front, carry ‘em ‘round to the

back door

[sung] This house is so haunted with dead men I can’t lose This house is so haunted with dead men I can’t lose And a sneaky old feelin’ gives me those haunted house blues

5 I can’t sleep no more, I done lost my appetite I can’t sleep no more, done lost my appetite ‘Cause my mistreatin’ daddy hangs around me day and night

He moans when I’m sleepin’, he wakes me at two A.M. He moans when I’m sleepin,’ he wakes me at two A.M.

10 And he makes me swear I’ll have no other man but him

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Now I’m so worried and I’m blue all the time Now I’m so worried and I’m blue all the time Go tell the undertaker to fix that old coffin of mine

[spoken] Lord, help us to get it right

[sung] 15 I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town

I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town But a feelin’ just tell me to burn this house on down, hainted

house on down. (A. Davis 256)

“Haunted House Blues” was authored by J.C. Johnson, who also wrote “Empty Bed Blues,” one of Smith’s best-known recordings and a paradigmatic abandonment blues. What “Haunted House Blues” depicts is the trauma suffered—a kind of charnel-house overwhelm—by the black female blues subject whose bed has been emptied not by infidelity, but by death: the blues-lyrical rendering of “many thou- sands gone.” The role of white racist terror in this process is hinted at in the spoken introduction (l. 1), where Smith, hardening her grief with blues-laughter, instructs an unnamed black ghost-bearer to carry his latest cohort “‘round to the back door.” That Jim Crow protocols must be maintained at such a moment of extremity suggests just how extreme they are—and with what ghost-producing violence they are, in fact, maintained. Phantasmic death hovers over the black female blues subject throughout the song, producing an anxiety that surfaces in lines 11–13 as the anticipation of her own death, the “fix[ing]” of her “old coffin,” and crystallizes in lines 15–16 as a classic blues paradox: “I’m scared to stay here, I’m scared to leave this town.” She is scared, she tells us, because her “mistreatin’ daddy hangs around me day and night.” Mistreatment in this case has little to do with the familiar blues theme of domestic violence and much to do with a deadly subtext that rarely surfaces so overtly in blues song. The singer’s dilemma is not that she’s alone—or not only that she’s alone—but that she is forced to acknowledge, and in this fashion is “mistreated” by, not just her dead “daddy,” but numberless ghostly victims of the black southern holocaust: lynched, prison-farmed, race-rioted. This “mistreatment” fills her with dread for the fragility of her own life. Subtending many abandonment blues is the continuing presence of such violence, suffered by black folk as a group, and the cultural haunting that results.23

I use the term “cultural haunting” as a way of addressing this collective resonance, a resonance that makes “Haunted House Blues” something more than a mere ghost story designed to provide chills and thrills. In Cultural Haunting: Ghosts and Ethnicity in Recent American Literature, Kathleen Brogan explores the way in which ghosts function, in a series of recent novels by Toni Morrison (Beloved), Gloria Naylor (Mama Day), Leslie Marmon Silko (Almanac of the Dead), Carole Maso (Ghost Dance), and

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others, as agents of ritual commemoration for beleaguered ethnic groups. Such ghosts occupy a liminal space within which, if properly attended to by the living, they may transform themselves from cannibalistic, vampiric besiegers to revered, life-sustain- ing ancestors. “The story of cultural haunting,” according to Brogan,

needs to be distinguished from the more familiar ghost story, that genre of short fiction that blossomed during the nineteenth century, leaving us with thrilling fireside tales of haunted hous- es, graveyard revenants, and Christmases past. . . . [T]he focus of . . . [such] work[s] is first and foremost on the tortured mind of an individual . . . The story of cultural haunting, however, brings to the foreground the communal nature of its ghosts. . . . Stories of cultural haunting differ from other twentieth-century ghost stories in exploring the hidden passageways not only of the individual psyche but also of a people’s historical consciousness. Through the agency of ghosts, group histories that have in some way been threatened, erased, or fragmented are recuperated or revised . . .

Centrally concerned with the issues of communal memory, cultural transmission, and group inheritance, stories of cultural haunting share the plot device and master metaphor of the ghost as go-between, an enigmatic transitional figure moving between past and present, death and life, one culture and another. . . . (6– 7)

The “mistreating daddy” and “dead men” who beleaguer Bessie Smith in “Haunted House Blues” function, I suggest, as black cultural go-betweens, agents for the dead- but-not-sufficiently-mourned; they’re jealous spokespersons for that element of re- cent black history—the “sentence of death” described by John Dollard, under which so many black men labored and perished down home—which had been threatened with erasure by the understandable desire of northwardly migrant, newly urbanized black folk to forget, repress, and otherwise leave the misery of Jim Crow behind. The song serves, in other words, to consolidate ethnicity, insisting that jazz-age black folk acknowledge where they’ve come from and what they’ve survived by attending to those who were scythed from the ranks. If cultural haunting in “Haunted House Blues” takes the form of possession, a possession represented wittily in the third stanza as the moaning jealousy of Smith’s deceased “mistreating daddy,” then that moaning—and Smith’s answering blues-moan—is a crucial border, marking as it does an escape from invisibility and voicelessness, a difficult first step towards cultural health. “The saving movement from reenactment to enabling memory,” argues Brogan, “is represented as a movement from traumatic silence into language” (10). Smith’s song, breaching silence with audible fear and gallows humor, enables a needed cultural mourning by offering its listeners a representation of what Roberta Rubenstein calls “loss”: “a lack that continues to occupy a palpable emotional space: the presence of absence” (150). Absence in this case is a social inscription, the wholesale death of black men for no obvious reason; presence is their unwanted reappearance as ghosts in the “house,” a free-floating metaphor that signifies not just

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a domestic space, but a black cultural space and—when Smith imagines revenge—the (white) civilization responsible for so much death. “Haunted House Blues” is a song of loss in the deep sense evoked by Rubenstein: a darkly witty ghost story that is also a way of mourning the immemorial victims of Jim Crow.

“Crazy Blues,” like “Haunted House Blues,” is a song of cultural haunting and cultural mourning that ends with fantasized vengeance. Evoking the loss of the singer’s male lover as a kind of possession-by-the-blues in the first two stanzas, it moves quickly towards the grave that seems prepared to embrace him with the help of the “undertaker man” (l. 20). The opening stanza (l. 1–4) parallels the second stanza of “Haunted House Blues” (l. 5–7), with its talk of sleeplessness, appetite loss, and romantic mistreatment:

1 I can’t sleep at night I can’t eat a bite ‘Cause the man I love He don’t treat me right

5 He makes me feel so blue I don’t know what to do Sometimes I’m sad inside And then begin to cry ‘Cause my best friend . . . said his last goodbye

10 There’s a change in the ocean Change in the deep blue sea . . . but baby I tell you folks there . . . ain’t no change in me My love for that man Will always be

15 Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can

20 But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues. . . .

I read lines 15–20 not as an evocation of murderous romantic despair—or not only as that—but as a desperately lonely woman’s elegy to a dead lover whose death is, as in “Haunted House Blues,” a social inscription: he is Everyman who has been lynched, killed in a race riot, imprisoned and worked to death in a distant location. Such a reading helps account for the protestation of undying love in lines 10–14, a protesta- tion that makes more emotional sense if the lover’s “last goodbye” was involuntary: not a pursuit of the “fleeting glimpse of freedom,” as Angela Davis suggests, but a

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deadly encounter that has, so to speak, disappeared him. The romantic despair felt by any abandoned lover is a kind of mourning, bespeaking pain at the loss of the cathected object; “Crazy Blues” grounds this mourning in social reality, the plague of “bad news” confronting African Americans—particularly, as lynching surged after 1915 and race riots swept through community after community, violence to black bodies requiring the undertaker’s ministrations.

The black female subject’s “crazy” blues-response to such a situation is to avenge herself on violence with a fantasized violence of her own. In “Haunted House Blues,” Bessie Smith confesses that “a feelin’ just tell me to burn this house on down, hainted house on down”; Mamie Smith hungers to commit copicide. Such proto-revolution- ary imaginings have a long and covert history in African-American culture; they emerge, among other places, in the spiritual from which James Baldwin took the epigraph to his 1963 jeremiad on the crisis of American race relations:

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time!

Vengeance in this case is a second-hand affair, enabled through black communal identification with God’s wrath. Another antebellum spiritual, “Sampson Tore the Building Down,” places the singer and audience in Sampson’s first-person subject position, making his threatened vengeance theirs:

If I had-a my way I’d tear this building down. (Lovell 645)24

Blues song draws on this sacred tradition, modernizing and individualizing it still further, transforming Old Testament apocalypse into the blues subject’s own wrath- ful fantasies. In “Ease it to Me Blues” (1927–30), Barbecue Bob invokes a distinctly modern catalogue of armaments:

I’m gonna buy me a gun, airplane and a submarine I’m gonna buy me a gun, airplane and a submarine I’m gonna kill everbody ever treat me mean. (Sackheim 324–25)

In “Mad Mama’s Blues” (1924), Violet Mills (Josie Miles) offers herself as a badwoman avenger of Biblical proportions and hellish ferocity; the white world’s violent provo- cations are everywhere felt, but left unsaid:

Wanna set the world on fire, that is my one mad desire I’m a devil in disguise, got murder in my eyes

Now I could see blood runnin’ through the streets Now I could see blood runnin’ through the streets Could be everybody layin’ dead right at my feet

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* * *

Give me gunpowder, give me dynamite Give me gunpowder, give me dynamite Yes I’d wreck the city, wanna blow it up tonight

I took my big Winchester, down off the shelf I took my big Winchester, down off the shelf When I get through shootin’, there won’t be nobody left. (Miles)25

In Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), Ann Moody explicitly names the bodily trauma suffered by black people as the motive for her fantasy of indiscriminate violence against white people:

Two weeks later, Samuel O’Quinn was murdered. One night as he was walking the few blocks from town to his house he was shot in the back from close range with a double-barreled shot- gun. The blast left a hole through his chest large enough to stick a fist through.

His death brought back memories of all the other killings, beatings, and abuses inflicted upon Negroes by whites. I lay in bed for two days after his death recalling the Taplin burning, Jerry’s beating, Emmett Till’s murder, and working for Mrs. Burke. I hated myself and every Negro in Centreville for not putting a stop to the killings or at least putting up a fight in an attempt not to stop them. I thought of waging a war in protest against the killings all by myself, if no one else would help. I wanted to take my savings, buy a machine gun, and walk down the main street in Centreville cutting down every white person I saw. Then, realizing that I didn’t have it in me to kill, I slowly began to escape within myself again. (187)

Moody’s text and this chapter’s epigraph from Black Boy foreground what “Crazy Blues” merely hints at: that a black woman’s suicidal fantasy of picking up the gun and exacting revenge is a way of leveling the field, in psychological terms; of exacting rough justice for the continuing murderous flow of violence from white hands to black bodies. The fantasy remains, for all that, suicidal—a vital imaginative relief valve, but one whose grave consequences place a corresponding psychological check on she who would seriously consider enacting it, as Moody’s subsequent inward retreat suggests.

Yet the subject’s inward turn may just as easily spur fantasies of badwoman (or badman) vengeance as reflect the spiritual paralysis of their would-be enactor. Mamie Smith imaginatively girds herself to shoot a cop by “get[ting] [her]self some hop,” as though the requisite psychological liberation can only be achieved in a drug-induced trance. (The word “assassin,” we might remember, derives from the Arabic “hashash- in,” an order of Muslim warriors from Persia and Syria who ate hashish to inspire themselves for the task of murdering Crusaders.) And “Crazy Blues” shares a family

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resemblance with Peetie Wheatstraw’s “Drinking Man Blues,” a slyly humorous badman confessional in which consumption of alcohol leads the singer not merely to assault a cop in a moment of “crazy”-ness, but to usurp his identity entirely:

The dealer ask me, “Peetie, how come you so rough?” (2x) Well, now, I ain’t bad, ooooh well, well, but I just been drinking that stuff.

That stuff will kill you, but it just won’t quit. (2x) It will get you to the place, ooooh well, well, that you don’t care who you hit.

I been drinking that stuff, and it went to my head. (2x) It made me hit the baby in the cradle, oooh, well, well, and kill my papa dead.

It made me hit the policeman, and knock him off his feet. (2x) Taken his pistol and his star, oooh, well, well, and walking up and down his beat.

I been drinking that stuff, I been drinking it all my days. (2x) But the judge give me six months, oooh, well, well, to change my drinking ways.

(Cruz 177–78)

The proto-revolutionary moment of “Crazy Blues”—that song’s fantasy of a drug- induced and murderous act of violence against the embodiment of a repressive order—surfaces here as real (if less-than-murderous) aggression, although the song itself remains, as far as we know, an imaginative projection rather than a report on Wheatstraw’s actual behavior. What the two songs share is the unexpected last- second swerve towards rebellion, as though the black subject, progressively losing control, has finally lashed out “accidentally” at what emotional logic tells us was the forbidden-but-quested-for antagonist all along. In both cases, the gesture of black-on- white violence is prepared for by black-on-black violence: emotional violence in “Crazy Blues” (the singer’s “mistreat[ment]” at the hands of her lover), physical violence in “Drinking Man Blues” (the singer’s hitting of a baby and murder of his own “papa”). In both cases, too, the gesture of black-on-white violence is masked by the black subject’s claimed loss of reason: the “crazy blues” that render Mamie sleepless, appetiteless, reckless, and thus willing to shoot a cop; the fact that inebri- ation has taken Peetie to a “place,” emotionally speaking, where he doesn’t care who he hits, and is thus willing to hit a cop.

If “blues is the truth,” as a number of blues performers have insisted, then Paul Garon reminds us of the crucial role played by fantasy, particularly violent fantasy, in the truth blues song delivers. “The most vital sense in which the blues singers act as ‘reporters,’” Garon observes,

is the way they become reporters of the mental processes. Not so much the social or economic conditions of black life in America, but the effects of these conditions on the mind are expressed in the blues. Thus

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what the songs contain may be “reflections” of reality, but they might also contain images projected with the purpose of over- coming reality. (65, italics in original)

Drawing on the southern-born tradition of badman heroism, playing on her mass black audience’s memories of distant and recent racial violences, addressing Har- lem’s anxieties about new white threats to be met, Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” projected an image of badwoman vengeance that offered those who consumed it a way of sustaining themselves in the face of harsh realities. We are mistaken, “Crazy Blues” reminds us, if we think of blues song as solely or even primarily an evocation of helplessness, a report on the mental processes surrounding painfully failed love. Existential revolt, which is to say affirmation in the face of romantic despair, is an equally vital component of the blues response. And romantic despair, as I have tried to show, may transcode black female mourning as the nearly unbearable burden of murderous white violence falling on the “absent” men whose loss she lyrically bemoans. All the more reason why revolt—violent, expressive, and inspiring symbol- ic action—is demanded of the blues singer. “[W]hat is ultimately at stake,” writes Albert Murray in Stomping the Blues, “is morale, which is to say the will to persevere, the disposition to persist and perhaps prevail; and what must be avoided by all means is a failure of nerve” (10). The blues often take the form of pain hardened with laughter, as Hughes defined them, but they sometimes also take the form of pain hardened with nervy, morale-sustaining violence against any and all who would compromise the singer’s, and community’s, peace of mind. “Crazy Blues,” animated by a fantasy of copicide, falls into this latter category. The cultural enemy against which it imagines retributive violence has shown no signs of disappearing from black popular song, these many decades later.

* * *

“Crazy Blues,” Mamie Smith (1920, Perry Bradford, composer)

1 I can’t sleep at night I can’t eat a bite ‘Cause the man I love He don’t treat me right

5 He makes me feel so blue I don’t know what to do Sometimes I’m sad inside And then begin to cry ‘Cause my best friend . . . said his last goodbye

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10 There’s a change in the ocean Change in the deep blue sea . . . my baby I tell you folks there . . . ain’t no change in me My love for that man Will always be

15 Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t got no time to lose I must find him today Now the doctor’s gonna do all . . . that he can

20 But what you gonna need is a undertaker man I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues

Now I can read his letter I sure can’t read his mind

25 I thought he’s lovin’ me. . . . He’s leavin’ all the time Now I see . . . My poor love was lyin’

I went to the railroad 30 Hang my head on the track

Thought about my daddy I gladly snatched it back Now my babe’s gone And gave me the sack

35 Now I’ve got the crazy blues Since my baby went away I ain’t had no time to lose I must find him today I’m gonna do like a Chinaman . . . go and get some hop

40 Get myself a gun . . . and shoot myself a cop I ain’t had nothin’ but bad news Now I’ve got the crazy blues

Those blues

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NOTES

1. The most detailed standard account of the “Crazy Blues” story is Charters and Kunstadt (82– 92). Two other vital sources are Bradford and Jasen and Jones. For “Crazy Blues” as an episode in blues history, see Charters (45–46); LeRoi Jones (99–100); Oakley (92–94); Barlow (126–28); Harrison (43–62); and Francis Davis (57–67). For “Crazy Blues” as an early event in the Harlem Renaissance, see Anderson (130–32), and Lewis (33, 173–74).

2. This sales figure is from Charters and Kunstadt (85–86). Their estimate of one million total copies is unreliable and may well include sales in other formats (sheet music, piano rolls) and cover versions by other artists (Mary Stafford, Noble Sissle). I’d like to thank David Evans for clarifying this point. For the role of Pullman car porters in distributing “Crazy Blues” and other blues recordings, see Levine (225); Obrecht (22–23); and Neal (14). On the nationwide craze for “Crazy Blues,” see also Anderson (132); James (60); Titon (200); Jasen and Jones (264–65); and Bradford (126).

3. For a description of the Defender’s advocacy, see Francis Davis (61). For more on the role played by commercialism on the “public emergence of a folk orality,” see Higginbotham (157–77).

4. For other dismissive views of Smith and “Crazy Blues,” see Stewart-Baxter (12); Charters (46) and Keil (55). Carby offers a usefully revisionist perspective on the presumed inauthenticity of urban women’s blues.

5. Two published versions of “Crazy Blues” are available at the Lincoln Center branch of the New York Public Library. Published Version 1—the “clean” version, trimmed of the final chorus— can be found in Shirley. Published Version 2—uncollected original sheet music with the final chorus intact—can be found on microfilm with assorted uncatalogued sheet music published in 1920. The only published mention of these “cop-killing” lines to date (2001) is provided by Jasen and Jones (265).

6. The lyrics for Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” released on Body Count (1992), include, for example:

I’m ‘bout to bust some shots off I’m ‘bout to dust some cops off Cop killer! it’s better you than me Cop killer! Fuck police brutality

For more on anti-police revenge fantasies in gangsta rap, see Rose (128–31, 183); Potter (87–88); Werner (256ff); and Light (19, 31). “Ice says a Time Warner ‘crisis attorney’ reviewed the tapes for Home Invasion,” reports Light, “and requested that he drop one track, ‘Ricochet,’ for the line ‘got sticky sneakers from the blood of a shot cop. . . .’”

Mark Essex, celebrated in Hernon’s recording, was a 23-year old black serviceman, radicalized by a book called Black Rage and his own experience of prejudice in the Army, who killed nine persons, five of them white police officers, in a December 1972 sniper attack in New Orleans. See Hernon.

7. For more on the subject, see “Wish Fulfillment Fantasies in Five Black Power Novels,” in Bryant (246–50).

8. “I decided to join the Black Panther Party and pick up the gun, in April of 1967. . . . [W]hen I first came into contact with the Black Panthers—with the particularly arrogant way they talked of revolution, their total disdain for the police, and their cold blue steel pistols and rifles—I felt confident . . .” (Anthony vii, 2). Aunt Molly Jackson, a white Kentucky-born coal miner’s wife, folk-singer, and unlikely political activist, achieved notoriety in the early 1930s, according to Romalis, as the real-life “Pistol Packin’ Mama,” inspiration for a vaudeville song by that name. Jackson carried a gun not for the purpose of shooting agents of the law, but for protection while “delivering them babies” up in the Kentucky hills. See Romalis (1, 3, 83).

9. For Morton’s comments about the Robert Charles song, see Lomax’s Mister Jelly Roll (70). 10. The black population of Harlem in 1920, and New York City as a whole, is a matter of some

scholarly disagreement. The same month that “Crazy Blues” was released, James Weldon Johnson claimed that “[t]here are approximately 200,000 negroes in this city,” but of course not all black New Yorkers lived in Harlem (“Thanksgiving” 6). Osofsky, invoking U.S. Census figures, lists New York’s black population in 1920 at 152,467 (128). Lewis claims that while the 1923 Federal census estimated an overall New York black population of 183,428, “[a] more

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likely figure of 300,000 was provided by the Information Bureau of the United Hospital Fund— ”most—perhaps two-thirds of them— . . . in Harlem . . .” (26).

11. Fisher, “The City of Refuge,” in Locke (59). My account of Harlem’s negligible black police presence is drawn primarily from Dulaney (22, 28), and from Douglas (26). For general background, also see Alex. Riis cites a turn-of-the-century coon song by black composer Bob Cole that “express[es] skepticism about the creation of a black police force”:

Dey’s gwine to be colored policemen, all over dey say If dey do, it’ll be [the] leading topic of de day, I’d like to see colored people rise up to de mark, But I’d rather not see a coon on de street or in a park, For its hard enough to find a white policeman after dark. (52)

The most fascinating of all Cincinnati blues recordings, according to Tracy, is “I’m Going to Cincinnati”; it memorializes, among other figures, a well-known black policeman, Stargel Bull: “Now when you come to Cincinnati don’t get too full [of booze] / You’re liable to meet the cop that they call Stargel Bull.” Bull—also known as “Police Stargel”—was Willard R. Stargel, Sr., a 23-year veteran of the force and cousin to bluesman James Mays. According to local resident Cleveland Green, “Stargel was not a bully. . . . Having spent all of his life in the Sixth Street area, he knew the people and they knew him as a tough and honest cop to be respected” (50–62).

12. On the connection between spectacle lynching and the murder of white police officers, see Roberta Senechal de la Roche, “The Sociogenesis of Lynching,” in Brundage (57).

13. DuBois, quoted in Ayers, Vengeance (183). For more on the emergence of “bad niggers” in the late 1880s as figures haunting the anxious white southern imagination, see Ayers (155 ff, 231).

14. Turner’s speech was reported, and offered qualified support, in an editorial in the Indianapolis Freeman, 10 Apr. 1897 (4).

15. See also Levine (410). 16. Although “Railroad Bill” was based on the exploits of a black outlaw, and thus enabled a

particularly close heroic identification on the part of black listeners, the song was performed widely by white hillbilly singers, too; the ballad’s freedom from explicit racial markers allowed them and their audiences to savor a desperado’s exploits qua exploits, rather than as a form of racially-inflected rebellion. For more on the ballad, see Cohen (122–31).

17. For more on the way in which the police function in blues song as a kind of cultural super-ego, a sometimes benevolent but frequently malevolent agent of control over the working-class id- subject who sings blues songs, see Garon (141).

18. This “toast” version (a continuous text rather than separate verses) is entitled “A Harlem version” and reprinted along with “an old version” (also a toast) in Hughes and Bontemps (359–63).

19. Evans relates the story of Joe Pullen, a black sharecropper in Drew, Mississippi, and veteran of the war, who killed four white men and wounded eight others in 1923 before being killed himself after his plantation boss tried to cheat him out of his end-of-the-year settlement and then force him to stay and work off his debt (190–93).

20. Did “Crazy Blues,” released in November 1920, actually incite black New Yorkers to shoot white cops? Clarinetist Garvin Bushell, a member of Mamie Smith’s Jazz Hounds who toured with Smith in the early months of 1921, recounts a tantalizing anecdote. In the fall of 1921, on tour with Ethel Waters in Chicago, Bushell and a fellow musician were accosted one night by three white men whom they assumed were muggers. Bushell pulled out his gun, his friend pulled out a knife—at which point the white men revealed themselves to be detectives. Bushell and his bandmate were thrown in jail for three days. “It turned out,” according to Bushell, “a lot of cops had been killed in New York that year [1921], and when they found out we were from New York, they held us until they communicated with the New York Police” (38).

21. “At the end of 1919, there were only three black singers who were known as solo recording artists. Bert Williams, Noble Sissle, and the baritone C. Carroll Clark. [Williams had 59 sides since his debut in 1901. Noble Sissle had made 19 sides since 1917. Clark had sung light classical selections since 1907.] The solo voice of a black woman had never been heard on a commercial recording” (Jasen and Jones 255). For more on the early history of recording, see Harrison (43– 45).

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22. This recording may possibly have been a skit or reenactment of some sort, since a real lynching would presumably have taken longer than the two minutes granted by a standard cylinder (Ayers, Promise 159).

23. Ida Cox recorded a number of death-haunted abandonment blues songs, including “Graveyard Dream Blues,” “New Graveyard Blues,” “Coffin Blues,” and “Death Letter Blues.” See Harri- son (74–76).

24. Blind Willie Johnson was reportedly arrested for causing a riot by singing this in front of the New Orleans Customs House. See Charters (161–62).

25. For a pacifist variant of blues-as-civic-fantasy, see Ferris’s transcription of a 1967 song by James “Jabo” Collins of Como, Mississippi: “I had a dream, dream I had last night. / I dreamed I went to the U.N. and set the whole nation right” (9).

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