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The Blues Image in the White Mind: Blues Historiography and White Romantic Racialism Steven P. Garabedian

Applying the historical concept of “romantic racialism” as introduced by George Fredrickson in The Black Image in the White Mind, this article highlights the paradoxical continuum of racialism running through opposing schools of dominant blues

historiography in the United States. From right, center, and left, white researchers on African-American blues music and people approached their work with competing

political outlooks, and yet they shared an underlying collective investment in the blues that was always more than musical. Whether derogatory or sympathetic, the blues image

in the white mind was one of certain contradiction, but also surprising continuity.

As a distinct genre of African-American music, the blues is at least a century old. The

same goes for dominant blues historiography. Since the early 1900s, white collectors

and enthusiasts have roamed the US South in search of “authentic” African-American

blues music and people. From early conservatives to New Deal liberals to 1960s folk

revivalists, white field-workers have embarked on their musical journeys with distinct

political investments. Whether right, center, or left, however, they shared a common

impulse of discovery that took African-American vernacular expression as something

more than mere entertainment. Everyday black music-making, they held from their

respective subject positions, was meaningful and important; it reflected deeper truths

and could serve a higher purpose. It had the power to move individual bodies in

rhythm and souls in spirit, of course, but it also had the power to reveal a collective

black racial psyche or to redeem a nation astray in a period of crisis. How is it that

white interpreters with rival political perspectives could find so much to share in

vernacular black music tradition? How is it that outside intellectuals of dissimilar

preparation and outlook could find so much in common in their respective projects in

blues discovery? In 1971, historian George Fredrickson published The Black Image in the White

Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914. A “sleeper in

q 2013 Taylor & Francis

Popular Music and Society, 2014 Vol. 37, No. 4, 476–494, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2013.836414

its own day,” relates author Mia Bay in a contemporary review essay, the book endures

in its essential elucidation of the “complex and contradictory interplay of ideas, anxieties, and economic imperatives at work” in the social construction of race in America (647, 655). A foundational text in the intellectual history of white racial

thought, the critical insights in The Black Image in the White Mind have never been extended to the intellectual history of the blues. Since dominant blues historiography

has been dominated by white people, the extension of Fredrickson to blues scholarship is overdue.

This article examines a paradox of white historiography on African-American blues music in the United States. It surveys three iterations of white expertise on the genre in

its key decades of development from the early 1900s to its major period of crossover in the “blues revival of the 1960s.” The white researchers whom I cover here approached

their work at cross-purposes politically, and yet they shared, I argue, a symbolic investment in the blues that was always more than musical. In this article, I employ the historical concept of “romantic racialism,” as introduced by George Fredrickson, to

highlight the paradoxical continuum of racialism running through opposing schools of dominant blues historiography. For conservative founders Howard Odum and

John A. Lomax, the blues was a window on the strange inner mind of “the Negro”; for New Deal and ’60s revival liberals Alan Lomax and Samuel Charters, it was a key to

national redemption; for radical left-winger Lawrence Gellert, it was the harbinger of revolution. But, in all three schools of orientation, whether derogatory or

sympathetic, the blues image in the white mind shared a basic consistency rooted in the tradition of white racialism.

Setting Terms

It will be useful at the outset for me to lay out a few of the terms that define my conceptual framework. I am an interdisciplinary cultural historian, not a folklorist or musicologist, for instance. The questions and concerns that drive my research differ

accordingly. First, what do I count as “blues historiography”? By that wording, I mean the

collective written and aural research, commentary, and documentation on blues, and secular black folk-song more generally, that was established over the course of the 20th

century by field-workers, folklorists, music aficionados, writers, and academics. Some of these researchers had formal credentials; most did not. Regardless, their collective

output came to stand as authoritative knowledge on the origins and meaning of African American vernacular expression.

Second, what do I mean by “blues”? In musical terms, we have a baseline from which to work on this question. Typically, blues, or “the blues,” is characterized by a handful of signature elements that emerged in black communities of the US South just

over a century ago. These are: a “blue” melodic quality owing to dropped or bent tones at the third, fifth, and seventh degrees of the Western scale; a 12-bar, three-line

stanza pattern over a three-chord harmonic sequence of tonic (I), subdominant (IV),

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and dominant (V); and, perhaps most recognizably, the familiar AAB rhyme scheme

of opening lyric line, line repeated, and then third, and final, answering line. For a musical item to be classified as “blues,” one, or several, of these signature elements is

usually in place. But really, that is not so important for these purposes anyway. As both a distinct

musical genre and a foundational cultural aesthetic, “the blues” was and is more than

the sum of its strictly musical parts. It is a genre, but it is more deeply an outlook, a source modality, and an expressive wellspring. The field-workers I study did not

always know or care if they were collecting “blues.” Sometimes, lyric texts recognizable to us today as part of blues tradition showed up in their collections as work songs,

hollers, reels, social songs, or common songs, to use some of the original taxonomy. Sometimes they did, in fact, show up under the category “blues,” but were printed in a

four-line transcription, or couplet, rather than the conventional three-line AAB pattern. Sometimes, lyric texts overlapped in multiple song categories because they

were encountered as ubiquitous and free-floating. In a way, the gray edges of genre certainty and uncertainty were beside the point. What these collectors were sure of in

their journeys of cross-racial discovery was that they were rooting out a core element of African-American nature. With their music research, these investigators presumed, they were establishing important inroads into the hearts and minds of everyday black

“blues people”—that is, “those who accepted and lived close to their folk experience,” as Ralph Ellison put it and LeRoi Jones theorized it later in Blues People: Negro Music

in White America (Jones 176). Finally, why focus on white researchers and historiography in my particular

angle on blues studies? My focus as a cultural historian has always been more on “representation” than strictly on “referent.” Though Fredrickson’s “romantic

racialism” has not formally penetrated the field, recent decades have witnessed a blossoming of relevant literature in a revisionist mode. In blues studies specifically,

and in African-American music and folklore scholarship more generally, interventions by Paul Garon, Jon Cruz, Benjamin Filene, Marybeth Hamilton,

George Lipsitz, Karl Hagstrom Miller, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Barry Lee Pearson, Ronald Radano, Neil Rosenberg, and Elijah Wald have opened new doors of critical interpretation. For me, Jeff Todd Titon’s “Reconstructing the Blues” from 1993 was

instrumental early on, and Marybeth Hamilton’s recent In Search of the Blues was especially timely and gratifying. My work here, and in its broader ongoing

dimensions, engages this literature. While it is necessary for me to deal in some specifics, establishing the facts of the blues (its musicology, key artists, folkloristics,

and history) is not my stated point of inquiry. Instead, it is the dominant cultural representation of “the blues” that interests me most. This school of discourse has

largely been the terrain of white authorities—almost entirely male, middle class, and from the urban or suburban North and West. While there are essential black

authorities such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, Zora Neale Hurston, LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), and Angela Davis, whose counter-points ground my

outlook, these figures have been routinely under-represented in the mainstream

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canon. In my effort, I turn the spotlight on the canonizers. The contradictions of blues

historiography afford critical insights into the contradictions of US culture and society in the past and present.

The Scholars and their Projects

Science and Self-Pity: The Conservatives, Howard Odum and John Lomax

Working in the early decades of the 20th century, just as blues was surfacing as its own vernacular genre in the South and before it proliferated nationally on commercial records in the 1920s, Howard W. Odum and John A. Lomax are commonly credited

as founding figures in this story of dominant blues historiography. In 1911, Odum published his seminal “Folk-Song and Folk-Poetry as Found in the Secular

Songs of the Southern Negroes” in the Journal of American Folklore. John A. Lomax followed with his classic “Self-Pity in Negro Folk-Songs” in The Nation in 1917.

Featuring detailed lyric transcriptions of original field-work and interpretation, both items are considered milestones. For the first time, white scholars were

taking secular (as opposed to only sacred) African-American vernacular music seriously.

Odum and Lomax were racial conservatives and, unlike the mass of collectors to follow, southerners. For each, the investigation of black folk music was an exploration into the perplexing inner-life of “the Negro” at a time when legal discrimination

codified the racial divide and pseudo-science clouded intellectual authority. In his pioneering journal article, Howard Odum asserted: “The Negro sings his flowing

consciousness into expression” (379). In his Nation piece from six years later, John Lomax concurred: “A Negro singing the folk-songs of his race might be termed a

Negro thinking aloud” (141). Though they did not always identify it as such or transcribe the music in the

standard AAB format, Odum and Lomax printed numerous sets of lyrics now recognizable as part of blues tradition. A representative sampling follows:

Got up in the mornin’, couldn’t keep from cryin’. Got up in the mornin’, couldn’t keep from cryin’. Got up in the mornin’, couldn’t keep from cryin’. Thinkin’ ’bout that brown-skin man o’ mine.

I got the blues, but too damn mean to cry. I got the blues, but too damn mean to cry.

Well, my mamma sick an’ my papa dead, papa dead, Well, my mamma sick an’ my papa dead, papa dead, An’ I ain’t got nobody to pity po’ me, po’ me.

Some folks say dat de worry blues ain’t bad. Mus’ not a bin de worry blues I had.

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The first two examples come from Odum (271, 272), and the second two from John

Lomax (142, 143). They are characteristic of the general run of secular material that each collector submitted to the record of white consideration.

By compiling blues and other song texts, these researchers felt they were capturing

direct evidence of collective black nature and experience. Odum, a psychologist and sociologist by training, saw his research as a means to an end, an untapped methodology

by which to explore “what made those strange Negroes tick,” to borrow historian Benjamin Filene’s phrasing (Romancing the Folk 31). With his tutelage in the English

ballad tradition, John Lomax was more the devoted folk-song aesthete than the scientist Odum. Even so, Lomax made similar claims to the larger scientific value of his work.

“Genuine negro folk-songs—spontaneous outburst of intimate affections and impulses,” he stated, “will afford an insight into the negro mind that will prove interesting to the

psychologist, the sociologist, and, perhaps, even to the historian” (141). In Big Road Blues: Tradition and Creativity in the Folk Blues, David Evans

determines that Odum, Lomax, and their more amateur peers in the field in these

formative years “all saw the lyrics of the songs they printed as reflections of the secular life of ‘the Negro.’” “It did not occur to any of them,” he continues, “that the songs

dealt only with certain problem areas of black life, that they might be imaginative or even humorous exaggerations of certain facets of black life and thought, or that they

might represent the lives and thoughts of only certain individuals within the larger black society.” The “result,” concludes Evans, “was a stereotyped view of black secular

society” (38). For Odum and Lomax in this early period, black music was an index to black

inferiority. Neither collector took his black informants as equals. Howard Odum

approached African-American blues people as an anthropological curiosity. “Little need be said concerning social and political equality,” he remarked. “There is no

absolute race equality in any sense of the word” (qtd in Filene, Romancing the Folk 31). From the outset, John Lomax was impressed by the easy artistry and relative

sophistication of vernacular black music-making, even judging it superior to that of “other American folk-singers.” Nevertheless, beyond the music, Lomax too was

bemused and dismissive. “No negro ever admitted that his hard situation, which he sets forth so eloquently,” wrote Lomax, “is in any sense his own fault; rather, he shows

a shrewd agility in shifting responsibility” (142). Lomax stated:

The race problem is one which is insistently present. Neighbors with the white man, living side by side, coming into daily contact, made equal by law while yet unequal in fact, differing widely in inheritance and instinct—the conditions of life must appear to the negro mind totally unfair. And it seems further credible that he has come to lump the troubles for which he himself is largely to blame along with the inevitable hardships of his situation until he has grown to regard himself as the victim of hard luck, generally abused by everybody; and, at least in many instances, he seems not averse to nursing his gloom a little. (141)

In his 1917 article, John Lomax posited “self-pity” as the dominant theme in black

folk-song tradition. But he could not explain why. If everyday African-American

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southerners had the blues, in other words, it was owing to an over-developed victim

complex and a defeatist racial predisposition, not racism in the United States, not segregation, not exploitation. Slavery, after all, “has been a thing of the past

these many years,” held Lomax, and anyway “formed but a brief interlude—an episode—between many generations of barbaric freedom and the present status of liberty in a civilized land” (141). The “Negro” may have been an accomplished

natural singer, Lomax avowed, but he was indeed a social primitive with curious habits of mind.

As conservative racialists, John Lomax and Howard Odum established an awkward foundation for the tradition of dominant blues historiography in the 20th

century. Their respective efforts opened up new avenues of scholarly inquiry, but it cannot be said that their pioneering research opened them up to the realities of

white domination, past and present, in the United States. African-American blues people were a source of fascination, but in the interpretative treatment of

Odum and Lomax their musical culture served only to reinforce an iniquitous racial status quo.

Redemption Song: The Liberal at the Center, Alan Lomax

In the 1930s, John Lomax teamed up with his son, Alan, to form the most revered scholarly partnership in American folk-song. “The father’s politics were considerably

to the right of the son’s,” summarizes historian Ronald Cohen, “yet both believed in the uniting and rejuvenating powers of folk music” (9). Working on behalf of the

Library of Congress, John and Alan, together and on individual trips, crisscrossed the South compiling interviews, song transcriptions, and sound recordings. The

legendary Huddie Ledbetter, or Lead Belly, was their essential “find” on their first trip in 1933. On a subsequent trip without Alan in 1940, John happened upon the

incomparable Blind Willie McTell playing for change as a street performer in Atlanta. In 1941, Alan made the first recordings of Muddy Waters, still working as a tractor

driver on a plantation in Mississippi. In their joint and individual ventures, the Lomaxes were instrumental in the project of American folk and blues music

documentation and appreciation. They were opposed politically, but they found common ground in a shared romantic idealization of an unspoiled homespun

American republic. Vernacular music, they held, carried the spirit of this redemptive grassroots national culture.

The Roosevelt years of the Great Depression, the New Deal, and World War II in the

1930s and 1940s were the era of the first major American folk-song revival. Searching for meaning in a time of crisis, US culture workers undertook far-flung pilgrimages of

recovery and preservation. As he surpassed his aging father as the quintessential American folklorist, Alan Lomax exemplified the new liberal tendency that coalesced

in this surge of consensus folk-song revivalism. In his effort to rescue an America imperiled by mass consumerism, materialism, and industrial dislocation, Alan

endeavored to unite and re-energize its people through what he heard as their

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noble folk heritage. The nation, he asserted, was “a singing country,” with a wealth of

“folk song and folk music equal to any in the world” (Lomax and Lomax, Our Singing Country, xxiii). From the start, southern African-American vernacular music assumed a privileged place. It was, as Alan had learned from his father, the “least contaminated”

by modern dominant culture and commercial debasement (qtd in Porterfield 298). Together in the 1930s and 1940s, the Lomaxes published a series of hefty folk-music

songbooks that elevated their archive to the center of the American folk canon. Their first release, American Ballads and Folk Songs, was published in 1934. It was followed

by Negro Folk Songs as Sung by Lead Belly (1936), Our Singing Country: Folk Songs and Ballads (1941), and Folk Song: U.S.A. (1947). In the latter two of these releases, Alan

stepped to the fore as the lead author in their joint partnership (Szwed 109, 220), and it was his legacy that ultimately shaped the liberal leanings that took hold in the field.

Each of the above songbooks featured blues. American Ballads and Folk Songs included lines carried over from John Lomax’s original Nation piece, but it added significantly to the record of documentation. “An eighteen-year-old black girl, in

prison for murder,” related the authors in the book, “sang the tune and the first stanza of these blues” (Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads 196). Though strained by a

dated dialect transcription, select lines will no doubt be familiar to some readers today:

I know you, rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone, I know you, rider, gonna miss me when I’m gone, Gonna miss yo’ li’ mama, baby, f’um rollin’ in yo’ arms.

De sun gwine shine in my back do’ some day, De sun gwine shine in my back do’ some day, De win’ gwine rise, baby, an’ blow my blues away. (Lomax and Lomax, American Ballads 196–97)

The figurative theme of the above verse surfaced again under the title “Sun Gonna Shine in My Door Some Day” in Our Singing Country in 1941, and there were other

lines and musical references included as well, both more and less familiar to a contemporary student of blues lyricism. In the Lomax canon, the blues represented a

special variety of folk artistry. “[S]ung by an unspoiled singer in the South, sung without the binding restrictions of conventional piano accompaniment or orchestral

arrangement,” the form was “like a wild flowering vine in the woods” (Lomax and Lomax, Our Singing Country, 364–65).

Always at odds with his father politically, Alan Lomax was an ardent proponent of black civil rights. Where John Lomax heard “self-pity” in African American blues,

Alan heard “an artful response to pain, suffering, and oppression,” writes his biographer (Szwed 185). Still, it was the art that Alan stressed. The focus was redemption through song.

In 1946, in a now-famous exchange, Alan assembled three iconic bluesmen for a recorded interview and song demonstration on “what the blues are all about”

(A. Lomax, The Land 460). Over the course of two hours, while Lomax changed Presto

482 S. P. Garabedian

acetate discs to keep up, Bill Broonzy, Memphis Slim, and Sonny Boy Williamson

opened up with a candor that Lomax considered a breakthrough. The blues is “kind of a revenge,” revealed Peter “Memphis Slim” Chatman. “You know you wanta say

something, you wanta signifyin like—that’s the blues. We all have had a hard time in life, and things we couldn’t say or do, so we sing it” (The Land 461). In his 1993 memoir, Lomax characterized the episode as a breakthrough. “For me,” he stated, “the

session was a triumph. Here at last, black working-class men had talked frankly, sagaciously, and with open resentment about the inequities of the Southern system of

racial segregation and exploitation” (The Land 473). This interview is now available as the commercial release, Blues in the Mississippi

Night. In the late 1940s, however, it was too sensitive an item for full public disclosure, not least because Broonzy, Slim, and Williamson themselves were horrified at the

implications of what they had shared. “The bluesmen listened with mounting apprehension,” recounted Lomax, “and, in a powerful rush of words, attacked me for

making the records, demanded that they be destroyed, then finally asked me to promise that I would never reveal their identities” (The Land 473). Lomax assured

them and kept to his promise. But the point was that he had made the breakthrough, and this ideal moment of cross-racial communication through song had to get out one way or another.

In 1948, Lomax fictionalized the interview as “I Got the Blues” in the progressive quarterly Common Ground. Broonzy became “Natchez,” Slim became “Leroy,” Sonny

Boy became “Sib,” and the real setting of Decca Studios on a Sunday in New York City became “Hamp’s place” in the middle of the night “somewhere out in the Arkansas

blackland across the river from Memphis” (38). In “I Got the Blues,” the three bluesmen and folklorist initially bonded when they “piled into my car and headed out

of town” to evade a “dribble-chinned Memphis cop” (38–39). In the piece, Lomax relates the same quotations, including the sensational statement that “blues is a

kind of revenge.” But, unlike the real episode as detailed in Lomax’s memoir, the fictionalized version ends with laughter and communion. “We were howling down

the absurdity, the perversity, and the madness that grips the land on which we stood,” he wrote. “Now for an instant we understood each other.” Though “our night’s friendship and understanding would vanish” in the morning “under the pitiless

southern sun” (52), he lamented, the lesson was at least there, finally, for all who would listen. “We were warmed with the undeniable vitality and humanity that the

blues carry beneath their melancholy” (38), Lomax asserted. Common Ground was published by the Common Council for American Unity, and

Alan Lomax’s blues representation ultimately served to reinforce an emergent liberal mantra of diversity in unity and social change through cultural understanding. With a

thematic core that dealt in universal themes of heartache and catharsis (sometimes romantic, sometimes social), the blues in Alan Lomax’s populist representation was

among those essential national folk-song traditions that operated as “enzymes to assist in the digestion of hardship, solitude, violence, hunger, and the honest

comradeship of democracy” (Lomax and Lomax, Our Singing Country, xxv).

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A “Red” into the Blues: The Radical on the Left, Lawrence Gellert

For Alan Lomax, the “river of black African tradition flowing through Delta life” and

into the nation’s cultural bedrock (A. Lomax, The Land, xviii) was at once a vital racial

and national ancestry. Enacting a modern liberal cultural nationalism of healing and

harmony, Lomax’s black music research in the 1930s and 1940s was meant to redeem

the United States as a more perfect union by recovering the promise of its populist

heritage and extending this into a 20th-century inter-racial democracy. Left-wing

collector Lawrence Gellert, a relative contemporary also at work in the 1930s and

1940s, stands in contrast. At the beginning of the 1930s, Gellert’s articles with song

lyrics and commentary began appearing in the Communist Party journal New Masses

and elsewhere under the title “Negro Songs of Protest.” With no prior knowledge of

folk music, black or white, Gellert had moved from New York to Tryon, North

Carolina, in the early 1920s simply owing to health concerns. He developed an interest

in black vernacular music and over the course of some three decades compiled an

archive of lyric transcription and field recordings numbering in the hundreds. In the

1930s, Gellert published two documentary songbooks and garnered considerable

acclaim; today, his work goes largely unknown, a casualty of disciplinary partisanship,

post-war American anti-communism, and Gellert’s own personal idiosyncrasies.

Lawrence Gellert’s project of black music discovery was one of activism and overt

agitation rather than of aesthetics or academia. As he later expressed it in his recorded

interviews from the 1960s, the collector was more concerned about “the plight of the

Negroes” than “in folklore, per se,” in his years of field-work in the South. “I wanted it

for propaganda,” he said plainly. “I wasn’t interested in just music” for its own sake,

but rather music “as a weapon” in the service of black freedom and, ultimately,

anti-capitalist revolution (Gellert, “United States”). In Romancing the Folk, historian

Benjamin Filene writes that the Lomaxes’ joint output may have been “in tune with

the left wing’s agenda,” but was “hardly radical by 1930s standards.” Compared to

Lawrence Gellert, Filene elaborates, the Lomax legacy appears “relatively moderate for

the time.” Whereas Gellert’s collection presents songs in which “oppressed southern

blacks express anger and sorrow at their plight and threaten revenge against their

white oppressors,” the Lomaxes’ work reveals the two “to be largely uninterested in

songs that posit ways for African Americans to change the system that has caused

them so much suffering.” In their formative partnership, Filene concludes, the

Lomaxes “respected black culture and lamented the injustice that helped to shape it,

but they did not challenge the system of segregation that produced the injustice”

(Filene, “‘Our Singing Country’” 607–09). To Lawrence Gellert, academics were “hackedemics” (Gellert, Liner Notes). He

railed, “I’m not a folklorist; I hate folklorists” (Gellert, “United States”). With their

authoritative arrogance and pretense of scientific objectivity, Gellert alleged, outside

experts of the Lomax and Odum ilk felt theycould simplydescend on insular black local

communities in the remotest South to collect and catalogue, as if this were a

purely straightforward and unencumbered empirical exercise. “Long and painstakingly

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I cultivated and cemented confidences with individual Negroes,” Gellert stressed by

comparison in introducing his first songbook in 1936. Without similar efforts, he asserted, “any attempt to get to the core of the living folk lore is foredoomed to failure” (Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest n.pag.).

Off and on for 30 years, Lawrence Gellert lived in and around Tryon, North Carolina. He enjoyed the protection of a wealthy local benefactor, traded favors for

songs from local black residents, and, on the word and blessing of these locals, extended his searches and sophistication to an expanding network of African-

American informants. He explained, “There were people in Tryon, and when I started off on trips . . . they’d give me names of people to look up along the road. And, when

somebody gave me a name . . . by the time I got there, he’d already gotten word to him that ‘a white man was gonna come there’ and ‘you needn’t be afraid of him’”

(Gellert, “United States”). Much of what Gellert documented is best described as unaccompanied solo field hollers or group work songs, and not all of his hundreds of collected song items are classifiable as “protest.” Still, there a great many lyrics of

striking anger and outspokenness, and there are transcriptions and sound recordings that are, or point directly to, the blues. Rather than laments of self-pity and defeatism,

this material is striking in its candor, bitterness, and unabashed agency. To highlight just a few, there is “Work All the Summer,” one of the items that was

“everywhere” (Gellert, “United States”), as the collector later remembered it, and bears a marked resemblance to the commercial blues standard “Sitting on Top of the

World,” popularized in 1930 by the Mississippi Sheiks. In part, Gellert’s lyric transcription reads:

Work all de Summer Work all de Fall Gonna make dis Chris’mas In mah overhall

Way far f’om home Wit hammer in mah han’ Ahm so tire’ hammerin’ Ah cain’ stan’

Ah feels mah Hell arisin’ Six feet a day Lord ef it keep arisin’ Gwine wash dis damn lan’ ’way. (Gellert, Negro Songs of Protest 18–19)

“How Long, Brethren?” is an additional standout. In text and tune in the Gellert archive, it appears a politicized cousin to the popular “How Long, How Long Blues,”

recorded by Leroy Carr and Scrapper Blackwell in 1928. The Gellert lyrics are excerpted below:

How long, brethren, how long, Must my people weep and mourn? How long, how long, brethren, how long?

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Too long, brethren, too long We just barely miserin’ along Too long, too long, brethren, too long.

White folks ain’t Jesus, he just a man, Grabbin’ biscuit out of poor nigger’s hand. Too long, too long, brethren, too long. (Gellert, “Negro Songs of Protest” 16–17)

Finally, I will mention “Work Ox.” Included in Me and My Captain, Gellert’s second and final songbook anthology, published in 1939, “Work Ox” features lyrics that

parallel Texas Alexander’s “Work Ox Blues,” released to the commercial market in 1928. The lines from the Gellert version do not just rail with resentment, but threaten

retaliation:

I ain’t gonna be your old work ox no more, I ain’t gonna be your old work ox no more, I ain’t gonna be your old work ox no more, I done my due, ain’t gonna do no more.

Up early in the morning, way ’fore break of day, (3x) Can’t find no breakfast, got to hurry on my way.

Good God almighty, got it tough and hard, (3x) The Captain I has never satisfied.

Drive you in the sunshine, cuss you in the rain, (3x) Work you all day till you can hardly stand.

Well, I tell you people, and I tell you true. (3x) You can never tell what your old work ox gwine do. (Gellert, “Me and My Captain” 7)

These blues songs of protest are hardly the stuff of paralyzed “self-pity” and resignation, or even of a redemptive democratic “comradeship.” In the 1930s, Lawrence Gellert made a specialty out of promoting such material. His predecessors

heard defeatism in African-American vernacular culture, and his liberal peers heard cross-racial healing. Gellert, on the other hand, heard revolution.

Lawrence Gellert was most active and most visible in the folksong revival of the mid- 1930s. He was never subtle in his efforts, and his published statements left a lasting

impression. “[L]ook for the complete liberation of all the Negro masses only under a Soviet America,” he proclaimed for instance in 1934 in an attack on the Lomaxes

(Gellert, Correspondence 22). For Gellert, the “underground” music of African- American blues people represented a different kind of discovery. “I recognized the

clearly voiced protest of the Negro against the denial of his manhood; the mimicking of his speech, the slandering of his character, the debasing of his person—all [were] purposive links,” he explained, “with his poverty and debasement as deliberately

forged as the clanging chain he wore before freedom came” (Harrah-Conforth 43). After World War II—as the political climate in the United States shifted to the right,

a new imperative stressed consensus in the service of Cold War unity, and the

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organized political Left imploded under the weight of Stalinism—Lawrence Gellert’s

name and work fell into contention and obscurity. The line emerged that Gellert’s

special collection of “Negro Songs of Protest” was too special, too striking and unique

to be credible. Gellert was accused of “ghosting” the songs in his archive. The material,

as the charge went, was likely the product of white subversive propaganda rather than

black vernacular creativity. Recently, in a long-awaited biography, even his longtime

leading champion and researcher, Bruce Conforth, has reversed himself and is now

calling Gellert’s protest items into question.

But the Gellert archive is not wholly unique, and, as I have written elsewhere, I see no

reason to question the black culture of opposition that the collector documented

(Garabedian, “Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Blues Music,” “Reds, Whites, and the Blues:

Lawrence Gellert”). If one examines the larger store of white blues historiography from

before and after, direct and indirect parallels predominate. Moreover, the larger point

for our purposes here is that from conservatism to liberalism to radicalism, black

vernacular music could be put to multiple uses in dominant cultural interpretation,

and with very different dynamics of reception. The white blues collectors under

consideration here were all looking for something in their southern field-work,

searching in African-American music for answers to the social and political problems

they perceived in their respective ideological frames. The difference in their interpretative projects comes into glaring focus with this last

comparative example. Through the years, “Ain’t It Hard” was a single song with

multiple meanings. It appeared as “Ain’t It Hard to Be a Nigger” in Howard Odum’s

and John Lomax’s original articles. Odum’s 1911 transcription is characteristic:

Ain’t it hard, ain’t it hard, Ain’t it hard to be a nigger, nigger, nigger? Ain’t it hard, ain’t it hard, For you can’t git yo’ money when it’s due.

Well, it make no difference, How you make out yo’ time; White man sho’ bring a Nigger out behin’.

Nigger an’ white man Playin’ seven-ups; Nigger win de money— Skeered to pick ’em up.

If a nigger git ’rested, An’ can’t pay his fine, They sho’ send him out To the county gang.

A nigger went to a white man, An’ asked him for work;

Popular Music and Society 487

White man told nigger, “Yes, git out o’ yo’ shirt.”

Nigger got out o’ his shirt An’ went to work; When pay-day come; White man say he ain’t work ’nuf.

If you work all the week, An’ work all the time, White man sho’ to bring Nigger out behin’.

Well, it makes no difference How you make out your time. White man sho’ to bring a Nigger out behin’

Ain’t it hard? ain’t it hard? Ain’t it hard to be a nigger? nigger? nigger? For you cain’t get yo’ money when it’s due. (Odum 267)

Identical lines surfaced in John Lomax’s 1917 article in The Nation (144–45), and again in the first run of full-length songbooks occasioned by the blues recording boom

of the 1920s (Odum and Johnson 254–55; Scarborough 227–28; White 203, 385). In 1934 and 1941, versions of the tune were printed in the Lomaxes’ American Ballads

and Folk Songs (233) and Our Singing Country (282). In 1931, Lawrence Gellert included it in the second installment of his semi-regular series in New Masses (“Negro

Songs of Protest” 16). In the early treatments by Odum and Lomax, “Ain’t It Hard” is cast as a curiosity,

and then ultimately dismissed in importance. Odum relates that the item is “now well known” in the field of folklore, and that it “is composed of two popular rhymes about the negro and the white man, together with other verses composed to make an

agreeable song and to make suitable rhymes and combinations.” He grants, “There are apparently a good many sayings current among the negroes about the whites.” Songs

such as “Ain’t It Hard,” he suggests, are in common circulation, but “would scarcely be sung where the whites could hear them.” Still, Odum seems strangely uninterested in

this apparent research lead into a hidden reservoir of black expression. Instead of investigating, Odum opts for a strictly technical analysis. “The above song illustrates

the method of making song out of rhymes, fragments, sayings, and improvised rhymes,” he writes. The “mixed assortment of verses and sentiments made a most

attractive song when sung to a common tune . . . . The tune may be one that the singer happens to think of; it matters little which he chooses.” Focusing narrowly on technique over content, Odum uses this example of black cultural resistance as an

additional instance for illustrating the workings of black whimsy (266–68). With his stated emphasis on “self-pity” in black music-making, John Lomax turned

his interpretation of “Ain’t It Hard” in a different direction, but to a similarly

488 S. P. Garabedian

dismissive end. As Lomax heard it, such lyrics reflected an essential “phase of the

negro’s mind.” Not all black folksongs were “songs of gloom,” he noted, but many were. “[C]are-free and joyous as he is by nature, and looking forward as he does to another life of perfect satisfaction,” Lomax concluded, “the hard fact remains that race

differences cannot be blinked; and it is the present, not the mystic future, with which the individual negro is concerned each day” (J. Lomax, “Self-pity”144–45). Not able

to accept his inferior status, and yet incapable of changing his lot for the better, the collector suggested, black Americans were resigned to a culture of victimization and

self-loathing. As the song asked, who was “to bring the nigger out behin’”? According to John Lomax, not the “white man,” but the “negro” himself.

In the dominant interpretation of the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, the major figures in African-American folksong research continued to reference “Ain’t It Hard.” Some

authors were frank in their acknowledgment of the song as a statement of racial commentary, and some ignored the protest element altogether. None, however, made an explicit and determined argument endorsing the lyrics’ clear statement of

injustice, as would Lawrence Gellert. His overt identification of the item under the agitational label “Negro Songs of Protest” marked a crucial difference. For

Gellert—the activist with an aversion to folklore scientism—form shrank under the importance of content. “A tray boy in an Asheville, N.C., sanatorium sang this one,” he

explained in the prefatory comments to “Ain’t It Hard” in his January 1931 dispatch in New Masses. “The tune is light, lively—flippant even. Not at all in keeping with the

lament and plaintiveness with which the lines are burdened. It may be that the words are a parody on others—more cheerful—about love perhaps or whiskey” (16). The inference from Gellert is that these African-American singers are resisters, clever and

sophisticated cultural agents who fight for dignity in their musical expression through wit and misdirection. Even the Lomaxes, in their landmark works setting the terms of

liberal folksong revivalism starting in the 1930s and 1940s, stopped far short of this degree of interpretation. In American Ballads and Folk Songs from 1934, the pair

included “Ain’t It Hard” in the section on “Reels.” There is no accompanying explanatory commentary, and the song is placed between the spirited selections “Pick a

Bale O’ Cotton” and “Shortenin’ Bread” (231–36). Where Gellert heard social critique, the Lomaxes evidently heard an up-tempo dance tune. From the Lomaxes, the reader

gets no hint of black protest; from Gellert, that is the entire meaning and motivation.

Competing Visions and a Shared Racialism

With their very different ideological stances on race, politics, and culture, what do

these collectors share? How do they constitute a single tradition of blues historiography if they ran the political gamut from conservative segregationist to liberal centrist to far-left radical? In the end, my intention is to stress similarity as

much as difference in this accounting. For this final section, I want to apply the idea of “romantic racialism” as formulated

by historian George Fredrickson. In The Black Image in the White Mind, Fredrickson

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devotes a chapter to what he identifies as this conflicted racial doctrine. He proceeds

from the now-common academic premise that “race” is a social construction representing an ideology of hard biological difference that is recent and modern, not

ageless and eternal. From the founding of the United States, Fredrickson grants, there was anti-black prejudice. Still, he explains, “articulate whites” had nothing “that resembled a ‘scientific’ or philosophical case for the innate moral and intellectual

inferiority of the black race” by which “to defend their anti-Negro predispositions” (1). This began to change in the middle third of the 19th century as Americans

polarized over the question of slavery. By the time of the US Civil War and post-war Reconstruction period in the 1860s and 1870s, the notion that there was a scientific

basis to perceived racial differences—that, in fact, different races were different species of humanity—had been elevated to the common-sense of white thinking for parties

on all sides of the so-called “Negro problem.” Among whites sympathetic to enslaved and freed people in the 19th century, this

hard turn in race thinking could lead in peculiar directions. As Fredrickson explains, some whites embraced a variety of liberal advocacy that “acknowledged permanent

racial differences but rejected the notion of a clearly defined racial hierarchy” (107). Though they subscribed to the emergent racist pseudo-science, in other words, these romantic racialists, as he calls them, inverted it toward what they believed were

progressive ends. They agreed with their opponents that “Negroes” were innately docile, childlike, simple, and submissive. But, they lauded these very characteristics as

a redemptive counter to Caucasian materialism, aggression, and cold-hearted rationalism. In an age of Western ignobility, they claimed, the “Negro” was a noble

soul. He was not only equal, but perhaps better than his white oppressors (Fredrickson 114–15). “For romantic racialists,” determines Fredrickson, “the Negro

was a symbol of something that seemed tragically lacking in white American civilization . . . . Hence benevolent reformers,” he continues, “tended to see the Negro

more as a symbol than as a person, more as a vehicle for romantic social criticism than as a human being with the normal range of virtues and vices” (108–09).

In his closing thoughts in The Black Image in the White Mind, George Fredrickson pursues his discussion of romantic racialism into the 20th century. It was revived in a “jazzed-up” variant, he contends, by “would-be Negrophiles” during the New Negro

Renaissance of the 1920s. It eroded finally, he asserts, among the “white liberal intelligentsia” of the 1930s (327–29).

I would argue otherwise. Certainly, for some white patrons and audiences, the cross-racial forays of the Renaissance amounted to little more than recreational

slumming and a voyeuristic fetishism of “blackness.” But were the contacts of the 1920s so categorically crass? And did the 1930s represent such a clear and decisive end

to romantic racialism in the United States? The record of dominant blues historiography shows otherwise. As Fredrickson delineates it, modern racial ideology

could proceed in the explicitly hostile direction of the “inherent-inferiority school” of pro-slavery advocates and segregationists or it could assume the putatively

sympathetic form adopted by liberal romantic racialists.

490 S. P. Garabedian

When we look past the immediate political differences, we can discern a shared

tradition of racialism in the deeper contours of white blues historiography. In the nascent period of African-American folksong research initiated by seminal collector-

scholars Howard Odum and John Lomax in the early 1900s, a conservative brand of racialism emerged that derided and exoticized blues people and culture as primitive and curious. In the “New Negro” Renaissance of the 1920s, a new generation of white

observers was awakened to the inventiveness and dignity of black popular arts. As the Great Depression shook sensibilities further, a new politicized manifestation we might

call “revolutionary racialism” followed in the 1930s and 1940s. In and around the cultural left of the era, white collector-partisans like Lawrence Gellert touted the

revolutionary meaning of vernacular expression from the very “bottom” of racial and class oppression in the United States. Still, the racial consciousness of these

revolutionaries shared something with the conservative racialism that had come before. For Gellert, African-American blues culture again answered big questions and

served a big cause of salvation. Blues people and music continued to be used in dominant representation as natural, authentic, and redeemed.

Concurrent with the creed of revolutionary racialism in the 1930s and 1940s, a less politically strident and more populist-oriented ideological stream came to the fore. This modern variant of the original romantic racialism of the 19th century, I contend,

ultimately prevailed over Gellert-type radicalism in the middle 20th century within the contours of Roosevelt-era pluralism, egalitarianism, and liberal capitalism.

In what has come to be called the “blues revival of the 1960s,” it was revisited by a new generation of white investigators.

As a popular field of mainstream interest and intellectual prestige, blues historiography exploded in visibility and volume in this period of mass musical cross-

over. The 1960s was “the ‘re’ decade of the blues—revival, rebirth, rediscovery,” writes historian Jim O’Neal in describing the unprecedented surge of interest in the blues in

the dominant culture (O’Neal 347). In the literary realm, the beginning of blues historiography proper is most often dated in the United States to the publication of

Samuel Charters’s The Country Blues in 1959. Charters’s influential release, and then British author Paul Oliver’s Blues Fell This Morning in 1960, set off a boom in scholarship that legitimized the music as a formal field of study that remains vital to

this day (O’Neal 375). Though Howard Odum, the Lomaxes, and Lawrence Gellert, all at work before this time, contributed to the developing record of blues studies, they

were never formally identified by the new professional title “blues scholar” in the way Charters, Oliver, and others have been since the 1960s.

In Samuel Charters’s generation of blues historiography, the liberal pluralism of Alan Lomax was present, but the overt political stridency of Gellert was gone. Blues

music continued to offer salvation, but not revolution. The “re” decade of the blues, ultimately, amounted to a re trenchment in the liberal romantic racialism of the past,

where African Americans were embraced as symbols for white redemption rather than as agents in a world of their own making. “There is little social protest in the blues,”

runs the founding assertion from Charters that has become almost axiomatic in

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dominant blues historiography. “There is often a note of anger or frustration,” but

“there is little open protest at the social conditions under which a Negro in the United

States is forced to live” (The Poetry of the Blues 152).

Samuel Charters was no conservative, and his denial of African-American blues

protest was not a denial of Civil Rights or the other major social movements for

change in the 1960s. Charters’s outlook was in fact so “far out” that in the latter part of

the decade he was the producer of the San Francisco psychedelic rockers Country Joe

and the Fish. Indeed, after the Kent State shootings in 1970, his radical disgust with

the US war in Vietnam was such that he left the country as a political expatriate,

moving with his family to Sweden (Charters, Interview).

Still, Charters’s blues scholarship in these years seems to have operated on a

different track, and race and romance were integral. “If my books from this time seem

romantic,” the author stated in retrospect in 1975 in a new preface to the revised

edition of The Country Blues, “it’s because I tried to make them romantic. I was trying

to describe black music and black culture in a way that would immediately involve a

certain kind of younger, middle-class white American” (x). Charters explained:

The books, articles, and the field recording I’d been doing were my own private revolution. In simple terms I was trying to effect a change in the American consciousness by presenting an alternative consciousness . . . . In the black expression I found a directness, an openness, and an immediacy I didn’t find in the white. (ix)

He added, “I could have shouted, and I could have criticized—but instead I tried to

present an alternative” (x). If the nascent generations of blues researchers, from Odum to the Lomaxes to

Gellert, approached the blues in the present tense, as a contemporary phenomenon

with urgent social meanings for present-tense concerns, the blues scholars of the

1960s privileged the blues of old in the search for alternative pasts for a usable future.

As Charters avowed, his work was “a romanticization of certain aspects of black

life . . . . I wanted hundreds of people to go out and interview the surviving blues

artists . . . . I was trying to make the journey to find the artists as glamorous as

possible” (xi–xii). With its wide influence of style and substance, Samuel Charters’s

The Country Blues can be called the On the Road of blues historiography. Like

Kerouac’s pivotal 1957 novel, it inspired countless ’60s successors. And it perpetuated

a continuum of romanticism in revival blues scholarship that runs as strongly today as

it has remained under-recognized in the dominant culture throughout. Musicologist

Jeff Todd Titon, in reflecting back on the period, has written, “Revivalism is peculiar

politics; is it reactionary or revolutionary?” (235). Titon seems to side more with the

former, and indeed, his question is an apt critical statement with which to conclude. Though they approached their southern field-work and black music research with

different ears, and though they were hardly advancing a hostile biological

determinism, the revivalist scholars of the 1960s did, nevertheless, reveal a profound

investment in black cultural difference that was reminiscent of their forebears earlier

492 S. P. Garabedian

in the 20th century and reaching all the way back to their liberal ancestors in the

racialism born in the 19th century. In popular and scholarly thinking on the blues still

today, their legacy remains with us. Romantic racialism continues to shadow

dominant blues historiography.

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Notes on Contributor

Steven P. Garabedian is Assistant Professor of History at Marist College in Poughkeepsie, New York. He is a twentieth-century US historian, with a specialization in music, cultural politics, and social resistance. Currently, he is at work on a book, Reds, Whites, and the Blues: Lawrence Gellert, Blues Protest, and White Denial.

494 S. P. Garabedian

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