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BEYOND THE CROSSROADS: BLUES SCENES IN DETROIT AND LANSING
By

Rachel A. Szymanski

A THESIS
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
Musicology

2009

ABSTRACT
BEYOND THE CROSSROADS: BLUES SCENES IN DETROIT AND LANSING
By
Rachel A. Szymanski
This thesis examines the reasons why blues scenes in Michigan cities such as

Detroit and Lansing have been mostly ignored in blues history. Chapter 1 explains how
blues history has been romanticized and how many who write about blues have come to
favor a narrative that privileges the style of rural blues from the Mississippi Delta above
all other blues. Chapter 2 explores how the urban blues scenes in Detroit and Lansing
have struggled for identity and historical presence in the face of a hegemonic blues
narrative that Still centers in the Delta and also has a newer center in Chicago. Chapter 3
looks at the similarities and differences between two modern blues scenes in Michigan,
the scenes in Detroit and Lansing, explains how these scenes are organized, and explores
why blues audiences in Detroit and Lansing go out to hear live blues music. This study
concludes that blues scenes in Detroit and Lansing have been continuously active despite
a persistent center-periphery narrative that has never allowed them much room in blues
history books and suggests that more scholars should challenge the Delta blues-centered

tradition to discover overlooked scenes in other locations.

To the people in the blues scenes in Detroit and Lansing
who made me want to start writing,
and to Nate Bliton, Lauron Kehrer, and my mother, Sue Szymanski,
who made me believe that I could finish.

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the following people: Ken Prouty, Michael Largey, and
Rodney Whitaker, my thesis committee members; Laura Donnelly, Julie Kastner,
Lauron Kehrer, and Margaret Rowley, my classmates in MUS 833 who helped me
refine my topic; Anne Simon, secretary to the Dean of Graduate Studies in the
College of Music; all of the staff at the State Of Michigan archives, the Library of
Michigan, and the Fine Art Library at Michigan State University who helped me find
the books and articles that I needed; Toni Alexander of the Capital Area Blues
Society and Steve Allen of the Detroit Blues Society who helped me begin my
fieldwork in those cities; and all of the blues fans and musicians who served as

consultants for my fieldwork.

iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1
CHAPTER 1

Romancing the Blues: the origins of a Mississippi Delta-centered blues

narrative ........................................................................................... 8
CHAPTER 2

Standing in the Shadow Of Chicago: blues history in Detroit and Lansing......... . . 37
CHAPTER 3

Blues in Motown and the Capital City: the scenes in Detroit and Lansing ............ 67
CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................ 96
BIBLIOGRAPHY ............................................................................ 99

Introduction

Writers who document blues history have a tendency tO include the story Of
how they became interested in the blues in their books. I did not understand this
tendency before I began talking to musicians and fans about the blues. I thought
these writers were self-serving and that they were trying to legitimate their own work
by making themselves part of the story. However, since I started talking to people
about the blues music and blues scenes, I can understand one reason why writers
might feel compelled to include their own Stories as a prelude to whatever part of
blues history they are recounting: they feel that the reader, like musicians or blues
fans they have met, might be expecting an explanation for why they are studying the
blues.

I know this because as I began my research for this document, the people I
spoke to, fans and musicians alike, asked me why I was doing a project about the
blues. This question is a fair one, because if there is a stereotypical blues fan, I do not
fit the image. I am a woman; many blues fans are male. I was 22 years old when my
interest in the blues started and I am 24 now; many fans I have met are over 40. I am
not a blues musician; many fans of the genre are either professional or amateur blues
players. So what saved this project? Why did my consultants, mostly middle aged
men, decide that a young woman who didn't even play the blues could have a part in
recording the history of blues scenes? I had to have a good reason prepared for why I
wanted to Study the blues if I was ever going to hope for honest answers to questions
like, "What is it that you like best about going to blues clubs?" or "Why do you listen

to blues music?"

In the beginning, I was alarmingly unprepared for questions about my own
interest in blues scenes. I would spout Off something about the study being important
work because little research had been done on blues in Michigan and would add that I
also just liked the music. The real story is that I became interested in blues music in
an ethnomusicology class at Michigan State, a decidedly unromantic way to become
acquainted with the genre. From there, I changed my thesis topic from a study of the
career experiences of Michigan jazz musicians to a thesis on blues festivals. One
night when the MSU jazz studies department's combos were playing at a local coffee
Shop, I told Professor Rodney Whitaker, chair of jazz studies at Michigan State, that I
was going to write my thesis on blues festivals. He seemed less than impressed and
said if I really wanted to write something about the blues I should write about white
people going to see traditionally black music. He felt that white fans might be
keeping the music alive. After I some consideration, I decided to take his advice and
try to include the audience for blues music as a major part of my thesis.

There was one other important thing that I also wanted to do with this thesis:
write about Michigan blues scenes specifically. It would not have been too difficult
for me to have done this thesis on blues scenes in Chicago as it is only three hours
away from where I live in East Lansing, MI. The Chicago scene is huge and it
includes a famous, free summer festival. However, many people have written about

the scenes in Chicago. Few have written about the scene in Detroit, let alone any

other scenes in Michigan.1 I knew these scenes existed and wanted to find out why I
had not read anything about them.

Aside from the naive desire for scholarly acclaim for having rediscovered
blues in Michigan - as though blues scenes in Michigan had gotten lost and needed
me to bring them back to civilization - I have realized over the course of this writing
that I wanted to write a thesis about Michigan because of who I am. Before I began
writing this thesis, I was embarrassed to admit that I had never lived outside the state
of Michigan. I have still never lived more than an hour and a half from Detroit, MI
where I was born or Dexter, MI where I spent most of my childhood. However, in
the course of writing this document I became both proud of being a Michigan native
and shocked at all the Michigan history I did not know. I learned history that they
never taught us in grade school like how urban renewal destroyed black
neighborhoods in Detroit and Lansing or how Berry Gordy built up Motown and then
took it all away. I learned more about car companies in Detroit and Lansing than I
ever cared to know. I learned how music was intricately related to class and race in
Michigan in ways I had not expected. Blues history in Michigan is music history,
black history, white history, labor history, Detroit history, and the history of many
other Michigan cities.

This thesis is about white writers who wrote blues history to reach a white
audience and black writers who include the blues in African American music history.

It's about Detroit and Lansing, how the cities are different and how they are the same,

 

1 Some writers who have written about Detroit blues scenes include Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert in
Before Motown: a History of Jazz in Detroit 1920-60, (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan
Press, 2001) and several writers in the 2001 Detroit themed issue of Living Blues magazine.

and how both cities ended up having two of the strongest blues societies in the state.
Most importantly, this thesis is about the professional musicians and blues fans who
talked to me about their scenes and their lives. It is about people who made me feel
like part of a scene that a young white woman who doesn't even play the blues may
have little business being part of. Those people made me feel like I had to finish this
document when it was not going well and I am grateful to them for that.

My primary goals with my thesis are twofold. The first is to explain why
blues scenes in Michigan are mostly ignored in blues history. I do this through a
historiography of blues writing. I argue that blues writers have created a history of
the blues that says the Mississippi Delta style and its urban derivative in Chicago are
the most significant types of blues. This version of history downplays the importance
of early rural scenes in other parts of the south as well as other urban scenes. One
possible explanation for this is that the emphasis on the Delta and Chicago styles by
early blues writers was duplicated by later writers. As African popular music scholar,
Christopher A. Waterman argues “the temptation to read contemporary categories

into the past, especially when authoritative scholarly sources do it as a matter of

course, iS strong.”2 Blues writers in the 19603 created contemporary categories of
blues according to region so they would have categories that would encompass the
older blues music they discovered. These writers became authoritative scholarly
Sources whose ideas about the blues have become so pervasive in the blues discourse
that scenes that they gave little attention to, like the scene in Detroit, have continually

been reduced to footnotes in blues history books.

 

2 Christopher Waterman, “Our Tradition is a Very Modern Tradition", Ethnomusicology 4, I990, 368.

My second goal is to Show that although Michigan blues scenes are on the
periphery of blues history, there have been urban blues scenes in Michigan for as long
as the well-known Chicago scene has existed and that these scenes are still active
today. Along with this, I explain what blues fans and musicians in Michigan get out
of their experiences in blues communities using some of the modern scenes in Detroit
and especially the modern scenes in Lansing as examples. Blues fans are not simply
people who occasionally interact when listening to music; they, with blues musicians,
have formed communities or blues scenes around their love of listening to and
playing blues music. The scenes perspective, as sociologists Richard Peterson and
Andy Bennett refer to as the study of musical communities that focuses on scenes,
looks at how performers, performance venues, and fans collectively create music.3
They explain that while the term “music scene” was formerly used only in journalistic
and everyday contexts, it is now used in scholarly writing to “designate the contexts
in which clusters of producers, musicians, and fans collectively share their common
musical tastes and collectively distinguish themselves from others.”4 This
perspective emerged in the 19905 out of a desire to avoid connotations associated
with the term subculture, e. g. “subculture” presumes that all of a participant’s actions
are governed by the subculture’s standards.5 In contrast, calling fans part of a

“scene” allows for the fluid identities that most people have where they move in and

 

3 . . . . .
Richard A. Peterson and Andy Bennett, Music Scenes (Nashvrlle: Vanderbilt Umversrty Press, 2004),

#0)

Ibid, I .
Ibid, 3.

LI!

out of the scene identity.6 This seems particularly appropriate for blues fans as being
part of the blues scene is a leisure activity which forms one part of their identity
rather than their entire lifestyle, as well as for blues musicians for whom being in a
blues scene can involve work and leisure in the same week or even in the same night.
Thus, blues scenes in Detroit and Lansing are places where people connect and
interact with blues music as the unifying factor.

In Chapter 1, I will explain how blues history has been romanticized and how
many who write about blues have come to favor a narrative that privileges the style of
rural blues from the Mississippi Delta above all other blues. Additionally, I argue
that the formation of this Delta-centered narrative has created an environment in
which the Chicago blues scene, which most closely resembles the Delta blues, has
become better known and more popular than other urban blues scenes. I explore this
further in Chapter 2 when I draw upon a center-periphery model to explain how the
Chicago scene has shifted from being an antidote to the Delta—as-blues-center
narrative to being an extension of the same narrative. I will then explain how the
urban blues scenes in Detroit and Lansing have struggled for identity and historical
presence in the face of a hegemonic blues narrative that still centers in the Delta and
also has a newer center in Chicago. I will also explain historical trends and events
which shaped African American communities in Detroit and Lansing, especially how
urban renewal projects of the 19505 and 19605 devastated African American
neighborhoods and contributed to the decline blues scene in Detroit. In Chapter 3, I

will describe the similarities and differences between the scenes in Detroit and

 

6 Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place (London: MacMillan,
2000).

Lansing, explain how these scenes are organized and explore why blues audiences in
Detroit and Lansing go out to hear live blues music. Blues fans have formed
communities around their love of seeing live blues, communities that blues musicians

are happy to be intimately involved with.

Chapter I: Romancing the Blues: the origins of a Mississippi Delta-centered blues
narrative

Part 1: Imagining History

History books are more like paintings than photographs; rather than being an
exact record of what happened they are the writer’s interpretation of events.
Understanding that interpretation and the way it is expressed are central to any study
of history. As far as blues history is concerned, writers have a proclivity towards
romanticizing the history of the blues. This romanticized view of blues history has
not been created maliciously; quite on the contrary, in has been created with the best
of intentions. It is difficult to classify those who write about blues history as
historians as most are not trained in the art of writing history nor are they generally
musicologists. Rather, they are musicians and fans of the music that have been
moved by it in a personal way and seem to write out of a desire to Show others what
they have discovered about blues history and about themselves. In his book Imagined
Communities, Benedict Anderson argues that the creation of nationalism is not the
fabrication of nations where they do not exist, but rather the imagining of nations
where they did not exist previously. Futhermore, Anderson says,

In fact, all communities larger than primordial villages of face-to—face contact

(and perhaps even these) are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished,

not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.7
The history of the blues, then, can be thought of as the history of blues communities

which have been imagined by different writers for different reasons. There is,

 

7 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflection on the origin and spread of nationalism,
(London: Verso, 1983), 6.

however, one prevalent explanation of blues history that has been imagined by many
white writers, an explanation that focuses on blues from the Mississippi Delta.

Although the audience for and performers of blues music were originally
black, many blues historians and critics are white. Many of these white writers,
especially those who wrote blues history books in the 19605, present a view of the
blues as a music that originated in the Mississippi Delta. As Elijah Wald, a white
blues writer, explains, the tastes of blues audiences after the 19605 have been
influenced by the canonization of blues from the Mississippi Delta. This is canon in
the true Catholic sense of the word; the artists that are included in the canon are
venerated almost like they are the saints of the genre. These musicians who are
highly regarded by many white blues writers are a series of black singer-guitarists
from the Delta including Charlie Patton, Robert Johnson, Muddy Waters, and
Howlin’ Wolf.8

As with all musical canons, the accomplishments and histories of these
musicians are emphasized at the expense of other musicians and other music scenes.
Some groups notably missing from this canon are jug bands and string bands of the
19205 and 19305 whose music sounded like country and western, blues from other
regions of the south like Texas blues and Piedmont blues, and some of the urban
blues of the 19405 and 19505 if it did not feature stars like Muddy Waters and
Howlin’ Wolf who, although they moved to Chicago, had been born in the Delta and
played Delta blues. In addition, vaudeville blues acts and medicine shows of the

19205 and 19305 whose stars were mostly female blues Singers are usually discussed

 

8 Elijah Wald, “The Bluesman Who Behaved Too Well,” The New York Times, 18 July 2004, pp. 22.

in blues history, but they are often set apart as a commercial version of early rural
blues. Michigan blues has been missed in blues history, because it is an urban blues
tradition that does not fit the romantic view of history that gives precedence to blues
that can be easily traced back to the Mississippi Delta.

Unlike many white writers, black writers tend to explore the topic of blues in
their scholarship by integrating the discussion of blues with African American music
history and African American history, in general. For instance, in his book Stompin’
the Blues, Albert Murray spends few pages discussing the Mississippi Delta blues and
many discussing how Duke Ellington’s music is inspired by the blues. Murray calls
Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong blues musicians with no reservations about the
rigid rules of genre imposed by white scholars and critics which suggest that
Ellington and Armstrong were unequivocally jazz musicians. Additionally, Murray
speaks about various uses for blues music giving his chapters titles like “Blues as
Dance Music”, and suggests that in addition to being music, blues can be more than
music; blues can be a feeling. Amiri Baraka presents a similar line of thinking in his
book Blues People, though he favors avante-garde music while Murray takes a more
classicist approach. Baraka’s ideas about blues are also more explicitly tied to African
American history, particularly the history of Slavery. For instance, in the early part of
the book Baraka states,

Blues is the parent of all legitimate jazz, and it is impossible to say exactly

how old blues is -- certainly no older than the presence of Negroes in the

United States. It is a native American music, the product of the black man in

this country: or to put it more exactly the way I have come to think about it,

10

blues could not exist if the African captives had not become American
. 9
captives.
These and other works by Murray and Baraka are used as evidence to support

statements about the intricate connection between blues and other types of music,

particularly jazz. 10

I am not trying to suggest that the romantic view of the Delta Blues that some
white writers have constructed is without some element of truth or that black writers
have written something that is truer; rather, I want to suggest that it does not matter
whether any of these writers are wrong or right. What is important to my study of
blues scenes in Michigan is to understand why these writers have chosen to imagine
blues history in a certain way. White writers have imagined a blues history that
Michigan blues does not fit into and yet there have been blues scenes in Michigan for
as long as there have been blues scenes in Chicago. Conversely, black writers have
imagined a black music history of which blues is a crucial component and this idea
happens to be one that easily accommodates Michigan blues scenes.

Many blues writers are tireless promoters of the blues because of deep
personal connections to the music which they illustrate through stories of their
personal experiences with blues music or blues musicians. For instance, there is a
story that is often re-told about the discovery of the blues. W.C. Handy, an African

American songwriter and band leader, explains in his autobiography, Father of the

 

9 Amiri Baraka, Blues People, (New York: William and Morrow Company, Inc., 1963), 18.

10 Notably, Murray influenced Wynton Marsalis, jazz trumpeter and creator of Jazz at Lincoln Center,

and helped shape Marsalis’s ideas about the importance of jazz maintaining a connection to blues.

11

Blues, how he was awakened while waiting for a train in Clarksdale, Mississippi in

1903:
A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me
while I slept. Hi5 clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face
had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on
the strings of a guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who use
steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.
‘Goin’ where the Southern cross’ the Dog.’ The singer repeated the line three

times, accompanying himself on guitar with the weirdest music I have ever

heard.11
Handy’s depiction is pervasive in blues history texts and each author uses the story to
complement their own arguments. For instance, in Deep Blues, 3 text often
referenced since it was published in 1981, Robert Palmer gives a lengthy account of

Handy’s Story which connects the music in the story back to late nineteenth century

field hollers as well as African roots of the blues.12 In doing 50, Palmer is using
Handy’s story to reinforce the main point of his book; that the blues has deep roots in
both African music and music from Mississippi. Years later, Marybeth Hamilton
includes the story in her recounting of her trip to Tutwiler and points out how the
story has “become a blues legend, repeated by chroniclers from Robert Palmer to

Greil Marcus, all eager to assert the primacy of the Delta in blues history despite the

 

1] W.C. Handy, Father of the Blues: An Autobiography (New York: Da Capo Press, 1991), 45 in
Davis, History of the Blues, 24.

2 Robert Palmer, Deep Blues, (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 46

12

lack of demonstrable proof.”‘3 Hamilton’s use of the term “legend” seems
appropriate as Handy’s description has been used either as an example of how our
perceptions of the blues are overly romanticized or to emphasize the mysterious
origins of the genre. Handy himself used this story to legitimize his identity as the
first to discover blues. For instance, Handy told the story of the man in Tutwiler in
his 1941 autobiography Father of the Blues to support the idea that he was the father
of the genre. Handy was perhaps the first to use personal experiences to legitimize
his claim that he was an authority on blues history, and many have followed in his
footsteps.

There are essentially two generations of blues historians and each generation
has imagined or re-imagined blues history with his or her own style. The first two
blues history books were written by American writer and musician Samuel Charters
and British writer Paul Oliver. Although they were not publishing books during this
period, it’s important to note that John and Alan Lomax are also part of this earlier
generation of historians as their some of their experiences collecting blues songs
predate even Charters and Oliver’s works. The 19605 was also the period of time
when Amiri Baraka wrote Blues People, a history of African American musical styles
and their interaction with culture. A few more books that include blues history were
written in the 19705 and 19805, most notably Albert Murray’s Stamping the Blues in
1976 and Robert Palmer’s Deep Blues in 1981, but it was not until the mid-19905 that
a new generation of blues historians emerged led by Francis Davis in 1994 and

continued with works by several authors in the first decade of the twenty—first

 

‘3 Marybeth Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, (Philadelphia: Perseus Books Groups,
2008).

13

century. This second generation is largely challenging ideas presented by the first
like the primacy of blues from the Mississippi Delta.
Part 2: The First Generation

Although several writers in this first generation privilege the Mississippi Delta
as the birthplace of the blues, this did not happen immediately. Country Blues,
Samuel Charters’s 1959 book about the lives of several blues musicians from across
the country, is his attempt to present a balanced view of blues history along with his
own interest in social justice. Charters, like many blues writers, did not make his
living primarily as a music historian; he was also a record producer, poet, novelist,
and musician. Born in Pittsburgh in 1929, Charters grew up in a middle-class family
of jazz fans. Charters’s writing often reflects his interest in social justice which
began when he went to play jazz clarinet in New Orleans in 1950 and was deeply
affected by the Jim Crow laws that he saw in action. For instance, Charters reports
that he would play in clubs with black bands and “the police would come and take me
away and then they would haul me up and accuse me of reckless driving. I would
say, ‘I was playing the piano.’ And they’d say, ‘T hat’s reckless driving and don’t you
do it again.’”14 It was his disagreement with this type of discriminatory behavior
which led to his participation in the Civil Rights and anti-war movements in the
19605, as well as his eventual move to Sweden.

Charters’s deep commitment to Civil Rights seems to have influenced how he
wrote his blues history books, particularly his first book, Country Blues. For

instance, while other blues historians use the Tutwiler story from Handy’s Father of

 

14 Interview, Don Swain with Samuel Charters, 1984, New York,NewYork
(http://wiredforbooks.org/samuelcharters/>, accessed 15 Nov 2008.

14

the Blues, Samuel Charters uses another part of Handy’s text as an example of what

he sees as Handy’s opportunistic attitude towards blues.15 In his critique, Charters
calls blues “the music of Handy’s own race,” yet he believes that Handy’s position as

a higher class musician meant he was appropriating something that he did not have a

strong cultural connection to.16 It is somewhat audacious of Charters to argue that
Handy is disconnected from blues music because of class when he is separated from
blues music by both class and race.

Charters was not one to shy away from controversial statements, which we see
especially in the 1975 edition of Country Blues. Unlike other blues writers, Charters
explicitly explained that his writing was meant to be a romanticized version of blues
communities with the goal of enlightening white Americans about an aspect of black
culture. In the introduction to the 1975 edition of Country Blues Charters explained
that the book was “a romanticization of certain aspects of black life in an effort to
force the white society to reconsider some of its racial attitudes.”l7 Charters believed
that he had a responsibility to open the consciousness of white Americans to “a fuller
comprehension of the possibility for new expression and self-understanding through
an involvement with black culture.”18 Here Charters suggests that white Americans
have little capacity for new expression and self-understanding through experiences in
their own culture and need to appropriate another culture in order to be creative and

insightful.

 

15 Samuel Charters, Country Blues, (New York: Da Capo, 1975), 37.
16 Charters, Country Blues, 37.

17 Ibid, xi.

‘8 Ibid, xiii.

15

Although Charters exhibits an attitude of white liberal paternalism when he
explains that his book was a cry for help and that:

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

artists. I wanted people to record them and document their lives, their

environment, and their music — not only so that their story would be preserved

but also so they’d get a little money and a little recognition in their last

19
years.

Charters explains that his efforts to
interest the white intellectual in the larger patterns of black life wasn’t
particularly successful. Instead of accepting black culture they tended to

select certain artists out of it - artists who, generally, came closest to a white

concept of what a blues artist should be.20
Interestingly, Charters does not elaborate here on what a white concept of a blues
artist would look or sound like. However, he goes on to say that he thinks that “this
attitude” of white people selecting artists that fit their conception of the blues is not

all bad because “We use another culture to build our own just as we use the past, as

raw material to build our own present.”21 Charters makes several contentious points
with this sentence: first, he sets up an us—versus-them dichotomy in which white
culture and black culture are diametrically opposed; second, he condones using black
culture as “raw material” to “build” white culture as if black culture is a commodity

that can be purchased; and third, he implies that producers of white culture can and

 

19 Charters, Country Blues, xv.
20 Ibid.
2] Ibid.

16

should use other cultures as building material, but that producers of other cultures
cannot or perhaps would not want to use white culture in the same fashion. In a
sense, Charters is saying that black culture exists so white people can use it;
furthermore, he is saying that his book about the blues exists so white people can
learn about an aspect of black culture that they might be able to use to better
understand both black people and themselves.

Country Blues remains a significant part of blues historiography, because it
was the first in-depth study of blues singers and their recordings by any author.
Written in 1959 and released with a new introduction in 1975, the book focuses on
musicians that Charters believed were most relevant to audiences. Charters chose to
determine the historical significance of blues artists by their popularity, which he
measured in record sales. In the introduction to the 1959 edition, Charters notes “it
would be artificial to discuss the music on any other level than that of its relationship
with its own audience,” an audience which he later claims is primarily if not
exclusively black.22 Thus, in an attempt at Objectivity despite his admission in 1975
of intentionally romanticizing the narrative, Charters chooses to highlight musicians
who were popular among the black recording buying audience in the South, but are
not often remembered today.23 Charters explains his reasoning for this in his preface
to the 1975 edition of Country Blues:

Even though I was trying to interest a young middle-class white audience in

the blues I tried to give them a somewhat balanced picture of the blues by

 

22 ..
Charters, Country Blues, xvn.

23 . . . . . . . .

For instance, Charters included srnger-gurtarrsts Lonnie Johnson and Rabbit Brown and Singer Furry
Lewis who sold many records in their day but whose records were not sought after by record collectors
or white musicians in the late 19505.

17

structuring the book around commercial blues marketing. In other words I
tried to keep the emphasis, as much as possible where the black audience
would have placed it. So I didn’t give much space to artists like Skip James
or Charley Patton who became cult figures with young white guitar players.

Instead, I was concerned with artists like Lonnie Johnson, who were

spectacularly successful with their own black audience.24
Consequently, Charters did not limit his study to blues artists from the Mississippi
Delta as other writers did in later blues history books. While Charters approach to
deciding which musicians to include in his blues history has its limitations and his
admission of purposefully romanticizing blues history to entice white readers reduces

his credibility, to his credit he does not artificially limit the blues to one regional

style.25 Conversely, we see writers like Paul Oliver focus almost exclusively on
musicians from the Delta.

British writer Paul Oliver is one of the best known of the first generation blues
historians, and one of the first who accepted the idea of the Delta as the home of the
blues. Oliver was not a musician or musicologist; he was an architectural writer with
a penchant for record collecting. He eventually wrote nine books about the blues,
five of them before 1970, and his scholarship has informed many blues fans and

influenced later historians. His first book entitled Blues Fell This Morning was

 

24
Charters, Country Blues, xv.

25 Charters approach has limitations, the primary one being that the blues musicians who got recorded
were not necessarily those who were most popular amongst black audiences. For instance, Lonnie
Johnson, one Of the musicians that Charters discusses, had many Opportunities to record, because he
was based in St. Louis where there was a recording industry. Conversely, Son House is an example of
musician who was popular with local audiences in his day, but whose recordings were not widely
known.

18

published before his first trip to the Mississippi Delta to record rural blues musicians
in April 1960.26 His first book to come out after this trip was Conversation With the
Blues.27

Unlike Charters’s social justice-centered approach to writing blues history in
Country Blues, Oliver took a scholarly, research-driven approach in Blues Fell This
Morning. Oliver acknowledged the fact that he has not yet been to the United States
and may have lacked first hand knowledge about the blues by saying, “Though
possibly no further removed from my subject in distance than the historian is

removed from his in time, I am acutely aware of my remoteness from the

environment that nurtured the blues.” 28 To justify his ability to write about the blues
without personal experience of hearing live blues in the United States, Oliver points
out that he has a similar type of knowledge of the music and the scene as a historian
looking at ancient manuscripts would have of an ancient culture. Thus, if his readers
are willing to believe other history books that they read, what reason should they have
to not believe his version of blues history? To further legitimize his authority, he
goes on to acknowledge several blues musicians including Big Bill Broonzy, J immy

Rushing, Brownie McGhee, and Sonny Terry who visited Great Britain and patiently
. . 29
answered hrs questions.
Oliver’s role as an authority on the blues may have been confirmed in many

blues fans minds in the glowing commendation he receives in Richard Wright’s

 

26 Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, (New York: Horizon Press, 1960).
27 Paul Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, (New York: Horizon Press, 1965).
28 Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, ix
29 .
Ibid.

19

foreword to Blues Fell This Morning. Wright’s praise would have been indispensible
to Oliver due to Wright’s identity as a famous African American author and
intellectual. Wright proclaimed, “As a southem-bom American Negro, I can testify

that Paul Oliver is drenched in his subject; his frame of reference is as accurate and

concrete as though he himself had been born in the environment of the blues.”30

Wright found Oliver’s perspective as an outsider to the blues scene — as he is not only
white, but also British — to be particularly valuable saying,
[H]is passionate interest in these songs is proof that the songs spoke to him
across racial and cultural distances; he is geographically far enough from the
broiling scene of America’s racial strife to seize upon that which he,
conditioned by British culture, feels to be abiding in them; and, in turn,
whatever he finds enduring in those songs he can, and with easy conscience,
relate to that in his culture which he feels to be humanly valid.31
Wright believed that Oliver has the capacity to be accurate and unbiased in his
interpretation of the blues and seemed to believe a work that judges blues on aesthetic
criteria is needed even though such a work might “come under the racial and political
hammer” for not attempting to delve into social issues.32 The seal of approval from a
black intellectual like Wright likely made Oliver’s book attractive to liberal white
readers and may have given him credibility with black blues musicians when he went

to the American South, as well.

 

30 Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning, xvi.
31 .
Ibrd

32 Ibid

20

On his 1960 trip to the American South, Oliver was interested in recording
music and interviews with as many blues musicians as possible. His goal was to
record their stories while they could still tell them and in Conversation With the
Blues, he presents stories from over 80 of these musicians. While the blues lyrics that
Oliver analyzed in Blues Fell This Morning came from several regions of the United
States, he establishes early in Conversation with the Blues that he believes that
Mississippi was the likely birthplace of the blues saying,

Though its reputation is not unassailable, Mississippi has had the most
advocates as the source Of the blues. Undoubtedly the origins of the blues are
far more complex but the ‘Mississippi Blues’ remains axiomatic as the
essence of the blues feeling. Whole traditions have sprung up in Texas, in
Georgia, in the Carolinas and Tennessee and Mississippi may owe much to
some or all of them. Yet the lifeblood of the blues seems to follow the

Mississippi River, feeding and nourishing the blues of Louisiana and

. . . . . . . . ,33
Mrssrssrppr, parts of Arkansas, Tennessee, Mrssourr, and Illrnors.’

Oliver’s language in this passage is both noncommittal and romantic. He is careful to
say that Mississippi’s reputation as the source of the blues is “not unassailable” and
that the origins Of the genre are “far more complex.”34 Interestingly he then says the
“‘Mississippi Blues’” — he puts the words in quotations marks as though they are an

idea rather than a style of blues — remains “axiomatic as the essence of the blues

 

33 Oliver, Conversation with the Blues, 1 l.
3 .
4 Ibrd

21

feeling.”35 Oliver is less of a historian and more of a romantic philosopher in this
passage as he cannot decide whether or not blues music originally came from
Mississippi, but is quite certain that it is where “the essence of the blues feeling”
came from. While Oliver sees the “‘Mississippi Blues’” as a specific abstract idea,
the blues in Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, and Tennessee are “traditions” which
“may” have affected Mississippi. He then uses a metaphor of “the lifeblood of the
blues” following the Mississippi River and “feeding and nourishing” Louisiana,
Arkansas, Tennessee, Missouri, and Illinois. The romantic language Oliver uses to
describe a blues sentiment somehow diffusing from Mississippi has become common
in blues writing even though it does not mean much.

Oliver expresses his opinions on the blues more strongly in Conversation With
the Blues than he did in Blues Fell This Morning, at least within the short section Of
Conversation With the Blues in which he actually writes original text. Most of the
book is Oliver’s compilation of short snippets Of conversations he had with blues
musicians, and the information he included and the way he ordered it is significant.
While Oliver claimed the distinction between country blues and city blues was
tenuous, he seemed to value rural blues over urban when he stated that he thought the
blues were in a cultural decline with the increasing popularity of the urban Chicago
style of the 19605.36 Additionally, he believed that the blues idiom was being diluted
by copying of the music by rhythm and blues groups in the United Kingdom and

white folk Singers in the United States saying, “Well intentioned though their efforts,

 

35 Ibid
36 Paul Oliver, review of Let Me Tell You About the Blues in Roberta Schwartz, How Britain Got the

Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom (Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2007), 231.

22

well played and sung though their performances might be, theirs is essentially a
derivative eclectic music. Its prevalence has brought much confusion and has led to

considerable misunderstanding of the blues and could inadvertently speed its

death.”37 This type of rhetoric paves the way for later blues writers who would
continue his tradition of valuing unadulterated rural blues over the blues-influenced
popular music he calls “derivative eclectic music”.
Section 3: The Delta Blues Becomes the Center

One might expect that blues history books after the 19605 to focus less on the
Delta blues as the Delta blues had been losing popularity in the Delta in favor of
visiting urban blues and rhythm and blues acts. However, this was not the case. One
important reason that the Delta blues continues to be in the forefront is the folk

revival of the 19605 which included a renewed interest in Delta blues artists among

new blues fans.38

The blues revival in the United States was a subset of this larger boom in the
popularity of folk music. The folk revival included pop-folk artists like the Kingston
Trio and Harry Belafonte, folk-rock artists like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, revivalists

like Pete Seeger whose goal was to preserve the integrity of folk styles, and

 

37 Oliver, Conversation With the Blues, 21.

38There is some debate amongst scholars as to whether revival is an appropriate term to describe the
increasing popularity of folk music in the 19605. For instance, Ralph Rinzler, co-founder of the
Smithsonian Folklife Festival, prefers to think of it as a folk boom rather than a revival because,
although folk music was discovered and commoditized by a new audience in the 19605, the music had
existed in the folk communities all along: therefore, these newcomers to the music could not revive
something that had not died.38 Furthermore, many folk music scholars prefer to think of the folk
revival as a process that is still going on today.38 For that reason, the “great boom,” folklorist Neil
Rosenberg’s term for the surge of interest in folk music during the 19605, seems an accurate way to

describe it.

23

,, . . . . 39 . .
genurne” folk musrcrans who had been drscovered. Among the blues musrcrans

who were involved in the revival were Singer-guitarists from the Mississippi Delta

including Mississippi John Hurt, Son House, Skip James, and Bukka White.40 These
musicians were rediscovered by diligent white revivalists who were either folklorists,
musicians, fans, or some combination of all three. The use of the term rediscovery
here is important, because it demonstrates that these blues artists had recorded and
enjoyed some level of commercial success earlier in their lives. The fact that they
had recorded but did not enjoy much commercial success made them particularly
attractive to blues revivalists; their earlier recordings proved they had been playing
blues when the blues was popular with African-Americans, but their relative
obscurity made the music more like the rediscovered folk music from other folk
communities.

Here a connection emerged between the blues revival and the construction of
blues history. Many white music fans and record collectors were introduced to the
blues during or soon after the folk revival. Some of these fans decide to write books
about the blues. Since the blues revival was taking place as a subset of the larger folk
revival, blues writers looked for a narrative that would show how a modern tradition
related to a folk tradition. Building upon the ideas suggested by writers like Paul
Oliver who thought the Mississippi blues tradition was the oldest and most important,
these new writers went to Mississippi in search of the blues instead of looking in

cities where urban blues scenes had started as early as the 19305.

 

39 Dick Weissman, Which Side Are You On ?: An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America
(New York: Continuum, 2005), 144-146.

40 Weissman, Which Side Are You On ?: An Inside History of the Folk Music Revival in America, 197.

24

Another reason the Delta continued to be known as birthplace of the blues is
because of the preferences of fans in Great Britain in the 19605. Musicologist
Roberta Freund Schwartz wrote her 2007 book How Britain Got the Blues: The
Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in the United Kingdom to
explain how and why the blues gained popularity in Great Britain.“ Although she
discusses the history of the blues in Great Britain from the 1930S, it is her
examination of the cross-cultural exchange between the musicians and audiences in
Great Britain and the United States during the British blues revival of the 19605 that
relates to the perpetuation of the Delta blues narrative. Schwartz contends that the
revival in Great Britain came about because of two blues audiences of the late 19508:
young hipsters and the traditional (or “trad”) jazz cognoscenti.42 Feeling
marginalized by the economic policies of the British government, the young hipsters
felt a kinship to black blues musicians.43 They were also attracted to blues because of
its limited commercial appeal, and believed that listening to this music helped to
show that they rejected consumerism.44 When the trad jazz cognoscenti collected
blues records in the early 19505, they chose rural blues considering it the most
authentic representation of the African American experience.45 As American blues

performers began visiting Great Britain in the mid-19605, most British fans had heard

 

4] Schwartz might be seen as the heir to Paul Oliver’s legacy, cleverly turning the tables and Studying
the development of the blues scene in her own country if she were British, but she isn’t; rather,
Schwartz is Oliver’s foil, an American woman studying blues in Great Britain.

42 Roberta Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues
Style in the United Kingdom (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 73.

43 Schwartz, How Britain Got the Blues: The Transmission and Reception of American Blues Style in

the United Kingdom, 74-75.
44 Ibid.

45 Ibid, 49.

25

the blues only on record. Since they were more interested in seeing musicians they

recognized, this, too, created an environment in which rural blues were valued over

46
urban.

One writer who exemplifies the tendency to favor Mississippi-bom musicians
and Delta style blues is Robert Palmer. Robert Palmer is a white American blues,
jazz, and rock critic who bridges the age gap between the writers like Paul Oliver who
made pilgrimages to the South in search of the roots of the blues and those who began

writing about the blues in the 19905 when most rural blues artists had died. The son

of a white musician and a white schoolteacher, Palmer grew up in Arkansas.47 He
spent most of his career writing about jazz and rock music, but made a significant
contribution to blues literature with his 1981 book Deep Blues. In it, Palmer
demonstrates his preference for the blues that originated in the Mississippi Delta
above the Texas and Piedmont styles saying, “The Mississippi Delta’s blues

musicians sang with unmatched intensity in a gritty, melodically circumscribed,

highly ornamented style that was closer to field hollers than it was to other blues.”48

Palmer argues that the Delta’s blues is unique because of its intensity and uses his
personal aesthetic preferences and its similarity to older African American music to
justify this choice. However, the reason why a type of blues that sounds less like
popular music and more like African predecessors should be focused on more than

other types is not clear. Palmer says that he wants to compare the blues styles from

 

46 Ibid, 50.

47 Chris Nelson, “Famed Music Critic Robert Palmer Dead at 52,” le .com, 1 1/21/97, accessed
11/15/08.

48 Robert Palmer, Deep Blues (New York: Viking Press, 1981), 44.

26

different regions to explain what makes the Delta blues style unique which would

presumably justify his focus on the influence of this region above the others.49
Palmer focuses on several musicians who had been established previously as
being important figures in the history of blues, and the way he writes about them that
is of particular interest. For instance, the first Delta artist that Palmer discusses in
detail is singer-guitarist Charley Patton who performed in the 19205. Palmer inserts
ideas from other blues narratives into Patton’s story; for example, when speaking
about how Patton’s religious father disapproved of his son playing guitar at licentious

parties and picnics Palmer mentions that this was “tantamount to selling one’s soul to

the Devil.”50 It is as though the Mississippi Delta is as much a character in Palmer’s
narrative of Patton’s life as Patton himself. In addition, Palmer justifies Patton’s
inclusion in blues history because of his influence on three musicians who are
considered significant in the blues canon today: Son House, a musician discovered
during the 19605 blues revival who is most famous for teaching Muddy Waters;

Bukka White, and whose early recordings influenced Bob Dylan; and Howlin’ Wolf,

who would go on to become Muddy Waters biggest competition in Chicago.5| By
pointing out not only how Patton influenced House, White, and Wolf, but how they
subsequently influenced other famous musicians, Palmer establishes a blues lineage
that begins in the Delta and spreads to a blues scene in Chicago as well as to folk and

rock through Bob Dylan. Palmer’s discussion of this particular blues lineage makes

 

49 Palmer, Deep Blues, 43.
50 Ibid, 51.
51 Palmer, Deep Blues, 62.

27

sense considering he believed that the Delta blues was more pure and, thus, more
difficult to master than the blues from any other region saying,

The fact of the matter is, Delta blues is a refined, extremely subtle, and

ingeniously systematic musical language. Playing and especially Singing it

right involve some exceptionally fine points that only a few white guitarists,

virtually no white singers, and not too many black musicians who learned to

play and sing anywhere other than the Delta have been able to grasp.52
Thus, in choosing a musician who represented a continuation of the Delta style in
another area he chooses Muddy Waters, the famous blues singer and guitarist who
migrated from Mississippi to Chicago “because he best illustrates the places Delta
blues has been and the places it’s gone.”53 Waters is the central figure in Palmer’s
narrative of blues history and his emphasis on Waters means that setting up Charley
Patton as a sort of grandfather to Waters would automatically justify Patton’s
canonization.

Palmer shares an intense interest in Muddy Waters with another blues writer,
white American folklorist and musicologist Alan Lomax.54 Although Lomax
published his first book on the blues in 1994, his interest in the Delta blues predates
Palmer’s. Alan Lomax’s fascination with blues began during his childhood in Texas
as his father John was a folklorist interested in preserving as much American folk
music as possible including blues music. He took his son with him on trips all over

the American South during which they collected many types of songs, including blues

 

52Ibid, 18.
53 Ibid, 20.

5 Lomax is credited wrth discovering Muddy Waters whrch he did while was on a trip to Mrssrssrppr
collecting songs and looking for Robert Johnson.

28

songs. The elder Lomax was especially interested in recording black prisoners’ songs
and also advocated for their fair treatment as he believed if he did not, no one else

6“

would, because the prisoners were the forgotten ones who had no influential

9”

friends .55 The most famous prison protége’ that John Lomax advocated for was
Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter. He got Leadbelly out of prison early and arranged for
him to have many singing engagements. However, John Lomax has been criticized

and called a racist because some saw his relationship with Leadbelly one of a master
and a servant, but as Marybeth Hamilton points out John Lomax was “a man of his
time and place, worse than some and better than many.”56 Nonetheless, Alan’s father
was known for his incredible song collecting skills which included showing respect
for black prisoners; for instance, Harold Spivake, head of the Library of Congress’s
Music Division went with Lomax to a prison and “watched him Sit for hours with a
blind banjo player, singing songs and swapping life stories.”57

After traveling for years with his father, Alan Lomax eventually began
collecting songs for the Library of Congress on his own.58 The Land Where the Blues

Began is Alan Lomax’s 1993 memoir of his experiences collecting folk songs and

 

55 Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 139-140.
56 Ibid, 138-139.
57 Hamilton, In Search of the Blues, 139.

58 See Alan Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began (Pantheon Books: New York, 1993), 6-7.
Although Alan was more liberal than his father and disagreed with his father’s traditional white
Southern mentality, he found that he sometimes had to play the part of a conservative Southern
gentleman when dealing with white authority figures in the South during his research. For instance,
when Alan was collecting music and stories for the Library of Congress, he had to convince some
white police officers that he was not trying to make trouble while interviewing black musicians.
Lomax tells of an encounter with two police officers in Memphis when he was recording some singers
in a Beale Street shop. He emphasizes the fact that he is from the South which calms their fears about
a white man interviewing black musicians until he makes the mistake of referring to one of the black
musicians as Mister. This term belied Lomax’s respect for the black man, which the police officers did
not appreciate.

29

stories from African Americans in the Mississippi Delta in the 19405 and 19505.59 In
the book, he chronicles not only his interactions with blues musicians, but his other
fieldwork experiences with railroad workers, steam boat workers, levee workers, and
his famous recordings of prison work. songs at Parchman State Penitentiary in
Mississippi. Lomax admired the prison songs so much that he called them
“America’s most moving song tradition” and said nothing could match the songs for
sheer despair.60

As for songs outside prisons, Lomax chose to record the music and stories of
rural Mississippi blues musicians. As the title of the book suggests, Lomax claims to
know where the blues originated: in the Mississippi Delta in the early 19003.61 He
argues that “Delta blacks” have historically had a harsher experience than other
African-Americans and that “through every trial, Delta blacks had been buoyed up
and propelled forward by the nourishing river of black cultural practice, maintained in
the isolation of the Southern ghetto.”62 Thus, he felt that the Delta was the ideal
place for the blues to be born. He extrapolates this point by saying:

[T]he new song style of the Delta symbolized the dynamic continuance of

African social and creative process as a technique of adaptation. Moreover,

the birth of the blues and the struggles of its progenitors could be seen as a

 

59 Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, xv.
60 Ibid, 285-286.

6] Ibid, ix.

62Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, xiv.

30

creative deployment of African styles in an American setting, the operation of

African temperament in new surroundings.63
Lomax thought that that the Mississippi Delta was the logical place for the most
authentic blues to exist, because its culture was closely tied to African traditions.
Thus, he tried to limit his interviews to musicians who were from the Delta, like
Muddy Waters and Big Bill Broonzy. Lomax was not always able to limit his
research in this way, however. Ironically, the chapter entitled “Blues in the
Mississippi Night” contains Lomax’s discussion with Broonzy and two musicians

from elsewhere in the South: Memphis Slim from Arkansas, and Sonny Boy

Williamson from Tennessee.64 To further complicate this situation, they discussed
experiences playing in Arkansas, not Mississippi. Lomax’s inclusion of this story
shows that regardless of how hard blues historians try, limiting blues history to
Mississippi does not reflect reality.
Part 3: The Second Generation

Unlike the Lomaxes, the second generation of blues historians largely
attempted to lead blues history out of the Delta and Francis Davis is the earliest

example of such a historian. An author and journalist, Davis is best known as the jazz
critic for the Village Voice and a contributing editor for Atlantic Monthly.65 In his

book, The History of the Blues, Davis sets himself apart from earlier blues historians

with his compelling argument that perception of the past is often colored by

 

63 Ibid, xiv.

This reference is to John Lee Williamson, the first singer and songwriter to call himself Sonny Boy
Williamson. Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began, 459.

65 “Francis Davis”, The Atlantic Online, accessed 15 Nov 2008,
<http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/by/francis_davis>

31

contemporary tastef’6 Thus, the preference for rural blues musicians from the
Mississippi Delta and the romanticization of blues in general by historians like Oliver
and Palmer shaped public perception of which blues artists were most historically

significant. For his part, Davis claims that the history of the blues is the history of

folk art in the age of mechanical reproduction.67 By this he meant that blues history
was driven by the development of phonograph records in the 19205. When Okeh

Records released Mamie Smith’s version of “Crazy Blues,” black Americans became

a consumer group and their folk music a consumer product.68 Davis’s book,
therefore, focuses on the recorded history of the music and how records affected the
musicians and the audience. In this way his work is similar to that of Charters,
though Davis is not making the same claim that the he can measure the popularity of
a blues artist by the number of records they produced; he is simply making a case for
recordings as the main source of blues history. This is likely in part due to his
identity as a jazz critic since much of jazz history relies heavily on recordings.
Davis’s views on blues history also have a different tone than the authors before him
and those that follow him like Elijah Wald and Mary Beth Hamilton; for instance, he
displays his dislike for typical nonfiction writing that demands a thesis statement

saying, “Not only don’t I have a thesis as such; my philosophy has always been to

distrust anyone who has one.”69 Davis does not exactly succeed in not having a

thesis. Although his prose lacks a central thesis, he gives his opinion on what was

 

66 Francis Davis, The History of the Blues (New York: Hyperion, 1995) pp. 29.
67 Davis, The History of the Blues, 8.

681m, 8.

69 Davis, The History of the Blues, 5.

32

going on in each section of the book. Thus, he cannot follow through on his promise
to be more objective than previous historians; he is simply subjective on a smaller
scale.

A way in which Davis does contextualize blues differently from previous
writers is by focusing on white blues fans instead of black blues fans. Davis asserts

that white blues fans are seeking inclusion in “an oppositional black subculture”

which gives them “a privilege denied to other whites.”70 These fans seek inclusion in

this subculture out of a desire for interracial solidarity and personal authenticity

gained from consuming what they perceive to be authentic music.“ Davis also asserts
that “guardianship of the blues has passed from the black community to white

bohemia.”72 Thus, paradoxically, white fans have become deeply involved with the
blues community even though it is no longer the oppositional subculture that Davis
claims they were looking for.

Unlike Davis who tries to avoid a central thesis in his prose, Elijah Wald is
another white blues writer who is not afraid to make a bold, controversial statement:
that the history of the blues has been skewed by a focus on iconic figures from
Mississippi, especially Robert Johnson. Wald, a guitarist as well as a writer, wrote his
blues history book, Escaping the Delta, in 2004 and caused a stir in the world of blues
scholarship. As Josh Rogers of the Portland Phoenix puts it Escaping the Delta is
“Not only a great book for blues beginners, but a bomb that explodes all the romantic

notion we have about race, class, and the creation of the blues at the crossroads.”
70
Ibid, 238.

71
David Grazian, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs, (Chicago :
yniversity of Chicago Press, 2003), 22-23.

Davis, The History of the Blues, 237.

33

Robert Gabriel of the Austin Chronicle makes a similar, but more concise

observation: “Escaping the Delta does an extraordinary job of sifting through the

myths in order to unearth reality.”73

What these reviewers fail to realize is how similar Wald’s book is to one of
the first blues history texts, Charters’ Country Blues, in some significant respects.
Reminiscent of Charters original intention with Country Blues, Wald wanted to write
a blues history using standards of the original audiences and musicians as opposed to
applying the standards of modern fans, experts, or academics. As Wald puts it, “Over

and over again, the most influential and acclaimed stars of the period have been

belittled or ignored by later writers and fans who happen to find them boring.”74
Wald even duplicates Charters’ method of using record sales to measure popularity
without any notable changes that would combat the limitations that come from using
such a method, i.e. leaving out musicians popular in their communities who did not
record and assuming that such a method will measure the standards of original
audiences without consulting with anyone who lived through the era.

In Escaping the Delta, Wald attempts to demystify the life of Robert Johnson
and in doing so shows how myths fascinate blues audiences, particularly white
audiences. Johnson is considered by many blues fans to be one of the most important

blues musicians of all time. Wald argues that Johnson’s dominance has more to do

with the myth that surrounds his life than his playing.75 In doing so he also explains

3 . . .
The quotations from Rogers and Gabriel are included in the front matter of Wald’s Escaping the
Delta.

74
Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta, (New York: Amistad, 2004), 15

Wald does undermine his argument against romanticizing Johnson when he analyzes Johnson’s
music and suggests that he is one of the great blues guitar players. While he admits to believing that

34

why believing in myths seems particularly important to white blues audiences. For
example, he says blues fans don’t want to believe that rural blues musicians were
influenced by other black popular music, because:
White urbanites, for obvious reasons, are fascinated by a creation myth in
which genius blossomed, wild and untamed, from the Delta mud, and are less
interested in an unromantic picture of Muddy Waters sitting by the radio

listening to Fats Waller, or a sharecropper singing Broadway show tunes as he

followed his mule along the levee.76
Thus, Wald believes that the main reason that white urbanites are interested in a
creation myth where the blues began in Mississippi is because it is a romantic view of
history and is in that way more exciting than a commercial view of history, a
commercial view being the stance that Wald takes.

All of the historians I have mentioned perceive the story of the blues in
slightly different ways. What all of their research Shows, however, is a desire to
present as authentic a portrayal of blues history as possible. Because of this, many
made pilgrimages to cities or even specific clubs they considered influential in blues
history. Unfortunately for them, their trips were often not the authentic experiences
they wanted them to be. Older musicians in 19605 Mississippi were no longer
performing in juke joints and in the 19905 formerly thriving clubs were closed in
Memphis and Chicago. Davis explains that his trip to Beale Street in Memphis in the

19905 was like the 19605 trips to the Mississippi Delta for blues historians like

‘

JOhnson’s playing is exceptional, he insists that this does not mean he was as influential on the
musicians of his day or those that followed immediately after.

Wald, Escaping the Delta, 72.

35

Charters and Oliver. They were all “going to stare at things that aren’t there

anymore.”77

The next chapter will provide more detail on the blues scenes in Chicago,
Detroit, and Lansing. I will also explain why the scene in Chicago is considered by
many white blues fans and blues writers to be more significant to the development of
blues music than other scenes in the Midwest, mostly because it is a continuation of
the Delta blues tradition. I will also argue that blues scenes in Michigan have been

and are currently also important to the history of the blues.

‘_.

77
Davis, The History of the Blues, 5.

36

Chapter 2: Standing in the Shadow of Chicago: Blues History in Detroit and Lansing
Part 1: Blues at the center, blues at the periphery

I arrived at the Chicago Blues Festival on June 13th, 2009. It was a beautiful
late spring day in Grant Park and I was thrilled to finally be at the festival I had been
reading about. As I walked past the three stages they looked much like the
descriptions of the stages from the 1997 Chicago Blues Fest as recorded by David
Grazian in his book, Blue Chicago. There was the Guitar Crossroads Stage
(sponsored by Gibson), the Front Porch Stage, and the Mississippi J uke Joint stage,
but what really caught my eye was a booth just to the right of the Juke Joint Stage.
The booth had a sign above it that read “Mississippi” in bright read script with an
outline of the state as it appears on a map. Below the booth’s counter were the words
“Mississippi Delta” in large black letters set over a partial roadmap of the state’s
Delta region. I went to the booth and was handed a bag which contained a map of a
blues trail through Mississippi, many brochures for different blues tourist attractions
in the state, a list of 2009 blues festivals in Mississippi, and a harmonica with the
same script letters that were above the booth. I felt as though purpose of the booth
was to sell the state of Mississippi to me, a blues fan in Chicago. This was blues
tourism at its most obvious and shows an intentional effort by the tourism board from
Mississippi to connect Chicago blues and Mississippi blues.

This experience was a demonstration of how blues in Chicago is linked to the
Delta blues-centered narrative. As indicated in Chapter 1, blues historians generally
show a strong preference for a Delta blues-centered narrative. As the Delta blues was

being established at the center and interest in the blues grew among white audiences

37

through their interest in British musicians and the folk blues revival, some writers
began turning to urban blues scenes to look for a different type of scene and, perhaps,
connections to the Delta. Many thought they found that scene in the city of Chicago

where several Mississippi-bom blues artists became popular including Muddy

Waters.78 One way to explain the prominence of rural Delta blues in blues history at
the expense of scenes as well as the subsequent success of Chicago blues above other
urban blues scenes is through an adaptation of dependency theory.

Dependency theory presents the world as consisting of two poles. There are
wealthy countries at the center and poor countries at the periphery. In blues scenes,
the center would be the Delta blues scene and the Chicago scene which is included as
an extension of the Delta. At the periphery would be all other blues scenes with
varying degrees of distance from the center based on the age and size of the scene and
any exceptional musicians that came out of them. In Michigan, for instance, a bigger
and older scene like the one in Detroit would be closer to the center than a smaller
and younger scene like the one in Lansing. In the Memphis scene, exceptional
musicians like BB. King put the scene closer to the center than scenes without such
famous artists.

Another part of dependency theory is exploitation which can also be applied
to a center-periphery model for blues scenes. In the global capitalist system, center
countries exploit periphery countries for their cheap labor and abundant natural
resources. In blues scenes today, the Delta and Chicago blues scenes retain a higher

status than the scenes in other locations. The Delta and Chicago have cultural capital

 

78 Before his settlement in Chicago, had been discovered in Mississippi by Alan Lomax while Lomax
was looking for Robert Johnson.

38

which they will continue to have as long as the Delta blues-centered narrative remains
pervasive in blues discourse. This cultural capital can transfer to real capital as my
story of the Mississippi booth at the Chicago Blues Festival suggests. Dependency

theorists believe that underdevelopment at the periphery is a result of development at

the center as the two groups are part of the same global capitalist whole.79 Because
blues scenes in Michigan do not have the same level of cultural capital as blues
scenes in Mississippi or Chicago, musicians, club owners, and Michigan cities in
general cannot get as much real capital from blues music. The close proximity of
Detroit to Chicago has historically kept the Detroit blues from receiving a similar
level of national recognition. Furthermore, the Chicago scene has directly exploited
the Detroit scene. For instance, Chicago blues musicians often play in Detroit and
other Michigan cities at clubs and festivals, but Detroit blues musicians rarely play in
Chicago. Thus, of the urban blues scenes in the Midwest, Chicago enjoys real
economic benefits at the center at the expense of the Detroit scene and smaller
Michigan scenes even further from the center.
Part 2: Chicago Moves to the Center

The urban blues scholarship that emerged in the mid-19605 disputed the

predominant narrative that privileged rural blues, yet the urban blues that got the most

attention was the style that most closely resembles rural Delta blues: Chicago blues.80

Therefore, while urban blues was recognized by scholars after having existed in many

 

79 J. Timmons Roberts. From Modernization to Globalization, (Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, 2000), 12.

0 . . . . . .
There 15 a sonrc connection between the Chicago blues and the Delta blues, but whether it 15 a

stronger connection than the connection of the Detroit blues and the Delta blues or any other scene is
debatable.

39

cities since at least the 19305, it is only the type that is linked to the Delta style that
gets a significant place in history. The first book to focus entirely on Chicago blues
was Urban Blues by Charles Keil. Keil’s view of blues history is more similar to
Samuel Charters’s early work with its attention to social issues than to Paul Oliver’s
aesthetic approach. His choice to write about urban blues and put more emphasis on
social issues may have been in part because Keil comes from an academic

background; he was an American Studies professor at the State University of New

York in Buffalo until his retirement in 2000.8] Keil’s background is significant
because he writes from the perspective of an academic who is not trained in music as
well as a radical thinker on social issues rather than a liberal thinker like Charters.

In Urban Blues, Keil sets himself apart from other blues writers in the first
line of the Preface in which he writes, “I have restrained a strong impulse to write a
soul—baring autobiographical preface for the simple reason that much of who I am
comes out in the book; how I got that way is probably irrelevant.”82 He points out the
trend that most blues historians follow: to detail their personal experiences on
collecting trips and how those experiences made them feel in their books. Another
early indication of the tone of Keil’s book is the dedication to Malcolm X, which as
he explains in the introduction was not simply because Malcolm X had recently died;
rather the dedication was a tribute to discussions he had with Malcolm X when he

was in college which he says, “had a profound effect upon my understanding of the

American malady.”83 Keil’s mention of his relationship with Malcolm X is similar to

 

81 <http://ublib.buffalo.edu/archives/ead/l 064/ I 064.frame.html>
82 Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), vii.

83 Keil, Urban Blues, viii.

40

Richard Wright’s introduction to Paul Oliver’s book; it is meant to give more
credibility to Keil, and, especially, to suggest that he can speak with authority about
racial issues despite his identity as a white male academic.

Keil’s book was the first blues history to focus on the urban blues scene in
Chicago, and he suggests one reason why previous writers have devoted little
attention to this scene. Keil says that several writers including Samuel Charters, Paul
Oliver, and Alan Lomax have much in common, most importantly a quest for “real”
blues. Keil says that for these authors:

The criteria for a real blues singer, implicit or explicit, are the following. Old

age: the performer should preferably be more than sixty years old, blind,

arthritic, and toothless... Obscurity: the blues singer should not have
performed in public or have made a recording in at least twenty years; among
deceased bluesmen, the best seem to be those who appeared in a big city one
day in the 19205, made from four to six recordings, and then disappeared into
the countryside forever. Correct tutelage: the singer should have played with
or been taught by some legendary figure. Agrarian milieu: a bluesman should
have lived the bulk of his life as a sharecropper, coaxing mules and picking
cotton, uncontaminated by city influences.84

Although he admits these criteria are exaggerated, Keil insists that blues writing is

romanticized and the romantic notion of the blues does not include urban blues. He

gives a particularly scathing account of a blues concert he attended in London:

 

84 Keil, Urban Blues, 34-35.

41

Aside from a Slobbery but impassioned harmonica solo by Sonny Boy

Williamson, a couple of numbers in which Howlin’ Wolf coerced the

dilapidated rhythm section into a more cohesive state, and an all too brief

display of artistry by Lightnin’ Hopkins, the concert might be best described

as a third-rate minstrel Show.85
He then contrasts the experience with the Chicago blues scene in black
neighborhoods in 1966.

The same show presented to a Negro audience in Chicago (assuming they

could be enticed into watching a parade of invalids in the first place) would be

received with boots of derision, catcalls, and laughter.86
Keil then attempts to explain other blues writers’ preference for old, Delta blues by
suggesting it is “a semi-liberal variant of the patronizing ‘white man’s burden’
tradition that has shaped white attitudes toward Negroes for centuries. Somehow a
‘we-know-what’s-best-for-them’ or ‘we-know-what’s-best-in-their-music’ attitude
helps to alleviate some of the oppressive guilt that many whites cannot help
feeling.”87 In blues history in particular Keil saw the writer’s intentional ignorance of
urban blues as a way to avoid going into black neighborhoods and coming face to
face with the urban ghetto.

Keil felt other blues writers were out of touch with the scene in urban areas
which Keil thought was a vibrant, emerging tradition that deserved attention. He

wrote, “It is so much easier to reminisce with old bluesmen, collect rare records, and

 

85 Keil, Urban Blues, 37.
86 Ibid.

87 Ibid, 38.

42

write histories than it is properly to assess a career—conscious singer, analyze an on-

going blues scene, and attempt to understand the blues as a Chicago Negro in 1966

understands them.”88 Although this last statement is probably over-generalizing the
situation - Alan Lomax, in particular, was a scholar who worked quite hard at
documenting an entire folk culture - Keil seems to be the first in the discourse on
blues to make the claim that white historians and collectors are suffering from white

liberal guilt like many others during the 19605. In a calculated move, Keil separates

himself from these authors by praising Blues People by black author Amiri Baraka.89
However, in keeping with the theme of Urban Blues, he also criticizes Baraka’s

neglect of the contemporary blues scene and his denial of connection between the

secular and sacred traditions in black music.90

While Keil believed that live blues scenes were alive and well in 19605
Chicago, some later scholars did not agree. In his 1975 book Chicago Breakdown,
Mike Rowe argues that by the 19605 live blues had begun to die out in Chicago. The
book is mostly a history of the blues recording industry in Chicago in the 19505, and
the information it does include about the live music scene in the 19605 and early
19705 is meant to prove that the music had peaked in 19505 and had been on a steady
decline ever since. He contends that their lack of radio airplay hurt blues musicians’
efforts to develop a following and does not attribute this to a simple change in taste or

financial constraints, but the changing social environment. He says,

 

88 Keil, Urban Blues, 38.

89 Baraka was still known as LeRoi Jones when he wrote Blues People.

90 Keil, Urban Blues, 40.

43

While the 605 reduction in blues programming on the black stations was
probably at first due to financial considerations it’s certain that the policy was
enforced by a militant black establishment, which was attempting to raise

‘standards’ and viewed with distaste anything which it imagined smack of

, . , 91
slavery on Uncle Tormsm .

Rowe then concludes that as radio airplay had been a major factor in the growth of

the Chicago style that the lack of airplay would lead to its demise.92 Although Rowe
maintains that blues musicians saw making records as secondary to public
performances, he explains that the two were intricately connected saying,
Records were for publicity and if a hit record ensured stead work in clubs or
on the road, all well and good; any royalties would then be icing on the cake.

So the change in policy of the radio stations meant a serious lack of earning

power through fewer jobs.93
Although Rowe’s assertion that there was a decrease in the popularity of the blues is
valid, blues scenes in Chicago did not disappear after the 19605 as Rowe himself
admits. When talking about the Chicago blues scene in the early 19705, Rowe points
out that while there was blues music being played, it was of questionable quality
saying,

[T]he main argument concerns the quality of the music and it is true that the

sound of Chicago’s blues has changed, as most of the younger men play in a

pastiche of the BB. King style, with its inherent limitations, while those older

 

9] Mike Rowe, Chicago Breakdown, (New York: Drake Publishers, 1975), I91.
92 Rowe, Chicago Breakdown, 191-2.
93 Ibid, 192.

singers who still play in the early ‘505 style obviously do so with less

dexterity than they had 20 years ago.94
Although he does not make it clear what he thought B.B. King’s inherent limitations
were that would prevent modern blues musicians from being successful, Rowe was
convinced that the Chicago blues style would die out.

The Chicago blues did not die out in the 19705, however, as David Whiteis
documents in his 2006 book Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories. In his
introduction, Whiteis states that he intended the book to be “something of a corrective

to the pessimistic conclusion on the future (or even the present) of Chicago blues that

Mike Rowe draws in his landmark 1973 study Chicago Breakdown.”95 Whiteis
recognizes a cycle in the development of the blues where there is tension between

traditional values and modernist challenges to those values in succeeding

generations.96 A writer like Rowe pronouncing the death of the genre at a time where
the definition of Chicago blues was in flux is a typical example of this cycle. Whiteis
shows that blues scenes have persevered in Chicago through interviews with and
stories about three different group of Chicago blues musicians: older musicians who
helped develop the postwar style and then continued playing in the 19705, 19805, and
19905 who he calls Elder Statesmen; younger blues musicians who were playing in
the traditional Chicago blues style at the time of his publication in 2006 who he calls

Torchbearers; and Chicago musicians who categorize their modern style of music as

 

94 Rowe, Chicago Breakdown, 207.

95 David Whiteis, Chicago Blues: Portraits and Stories, (Urbana: University of Illinois
gress, 2006), 4.
6 .

Ibrd.

45

soul-blues. He also includes in-depth descriptions of several venues in Chicago all of
which were active at least into the 19805, and some of which are still active today.
Another writer who uses interviews with musicians and analysis of venues in
his study of blues in Chicago is sociologist David Grazian in his book, Blue Chicago.
This book also includes a special emphasis on authenticity and the blues audience in
Chicago in the late 19905. Grazian confessed that he became interested in going to

blues clubs because they promised an escape from his stuffy life as a white graduate

student.97 He went on to explain the appeal of blues clubs in particular:
[T]he blues club promised the excitement of real action: the music was loud
and fast, the audience was always drunk, and the band was usually even
drunker. At the club, the bouncers and bartenders didn’t care how many

books you had read, only whether you were having fun and paying for another

round.98
While club staff and audience members seemed excited to talk to Grazian about their
experiences in blues clubs, he found it more difficult to gain acceptance with the
musicians. However, when he decided to sit in and play saxophone with the bands,
he had an easier time building a rapport with them. Rather than focusing on stories of
the famous blues musicians who used to live and work in Chicago, Grazian writes
about modern working musicians. He also highlights a phenomenon that began after
many of the first generation blues histories had already been written: the blues
festival. Using the 1997 Chicago Blues Festival as his example, Grazian explains

how the festival shows that blues has always been a cultural product in Chicago. In

 

97 Grazian, Blue Chicago: The Search for Authenticity in Urban Blues Clubs, 10.
98 Ibid, 10

46

addition to festivals, Grazian’s book explores the newer Chicago scene in North Side
clubs where wealthier patrons, many of them white Chicagoans or tourists, go to see
blues performed by all black or mixed race bands. His experiences in this scene Show
how the Chicago blues scene has gone from being a subversive urban scene at the
periphery to being a Mecca for blues tourism and an urban extension of the Delta
blues tradition.

Blues scenes are a big part of tourism in Chicago, but the same cannot be said
of blues scenes in elsewhere in the Midwest. While Chicago stands alone as the
biggest and most vibrant blues scene in the county, even the most famous of the
Michigan blues scenes, the scene in Detroit, is rarely mentioned in blues history, let
alone in a discussion of national blues havens of today.

Part 3: Fighting for recognition in Detroit

“If you is not a fighter, you won’t make it in Detroit. See what I’m sayin’? You will
not make it in Detroit, because Chicago has always gotten all of the recognition. You
got some super good musicians here, but they trapped. They don’t know how to get
out.”99

Blues scenes in Michigan cities are marginalized in most blues history texts
largely because these scenes were overshadowed by the scene in Chicago.100 If the

Detroit scene is mentioned at all, it is usually in reference to two musicians who spent

the formative parts of their respective careers in Detroit: Major Merriweather, a

 

99 Detroit guitarist Eddie Burns in a 1992 interview with Charles Murray, John Lee Hooker’s

biographer in Charles Shaar Murray, Boogie Man: the adventures of John Lee Hooker in the
American Twentieth Century, (New York: Griffin, 2002), 143.

100 . . . . . .
Before Motown, a book that details the history of jazz in DetrOit before the rise of Motown
Records, does include some information about blues in Detroit.

47

pianist who played in Detroit in the 19205 more commonly known by his stage name
Big Maceo, and guitarist John Lee Hooker who achieved fame after WWII. Most
blues fans outside Michigan may not even think of Michigan as a place with blues

scenes because of musicians; perhaps the only way some fans link blues to Detroit is

because of the frequency that the city is mentioned in song lyricsml There are and
were blues scenes in Michigan beyond these two musicians and these song lyrics, but
few blues fans outside of Michigan are familiar with these scenes. I will discuss the
history of blues in Michigan in this chapter and current blues scenes in Chapter 3.

One reason that some use to explain the prominence of the Chicago blues over
the Detroit blues is that the Chicago style sounds closer to the Delta blues. This
difference in the styles of the post-war Chicago and Detroit blues scenes can be
summed up by a former Detroit blues drummer, Tom Whitehead. Whitehead says,
“See, the Chicago [blues style] is exactly like it was in the Deep South. Detroit

doesn’t sound direct from Mississippi or Alabama.”102

Rather, Detroit blues has its
own sound which came out of an eclectic musical tradition in Detroit. The difference
can be heard when comparing Detroit-based guitarist John Lee Hooker’s style to
Muddy Water’s. Blues scholar Mike Rowe contrasted the styles when he said,

While Muddy’s updated Mississippi blues were a readily identifiable model

for younger bluesmen to copy and develop from, Hooker’s maverick style was

a one—off. In its purest form its impossibility to adapt to a band style was

 

101 Lars Bjorn and Jim Gallert, Before Motown: a History of Jazz in Detroit I 920-60, (Ann Arbor, MI:
The University of Michigan Press, 2001), 1 l.

02 Murray, Boogie Man, 175.

48

another deterrent. Hooker’s blues were archaic and primitive and quite simply

defied imitation. I 03
Although Rowe’s characterization of Hooker’s blues as both “maverick” and “archaic
and primitive” is somewhat contradictory and problematic, his assertions that
Hooker’s Style was difficult to adapt to a band style and that it defied imitation are
supported by musical evidence. Rather than following a standard blues form with
two repeated lines followed by a third line, Hooker sometimes writes in a through-
composed style in his verses which would have made him more difficult for other
musicians to follow than a guitarist following a standard from.

Hooker’s inimitable blues is illustrative of a larger trend in Detroit blues, in
particular; live blues shows in Detroit were different from Chicago shows because
when they played live most Detroit blues musicians were backed by variety bands
that played different genres of music along with blues. This was seen as a necessity
in order to satisfy the needs of the audience. As Detroit guitarist Eddie Burns
explained it,

We had that for a long time in Detroit. As a bluesman you featured, but you

got this variety band. That’s been goin’ on here for years. The band is playin’

everything, including your thing. See what I’m sayin’? That way, you gettin’

a mixed clientele. You was gettin’ a mixed crowd when it was like that.

Couldn’t nobody say, ‘Well, I don’t like the blues,’ because they could say,

‘But I like swing music and this rhythm’n’blues.’ ”’4

 

'03 Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown, 176-77.
104 Murray, Boogie Man, 173.

49

Due to these circumstances, blues in Detroit is not as clearly defined as a distinct
genre as blues in Chicago. To further support this idea, in addition to the supporting
musicians playing music from various genres, the featured blues musicians also had
to learn other styles. According to Burns:
Unfortunately, Detroit is not the same kind of scene that Chicago was, or is
today. You got a lot of great musicians here, but [Detroit is] a strange scene,
has always been, still is. To be successful in Detroit you cannot just become a

real successful blues musician only; you have to learn to play something else

in Detroit. You don’t have to do that in Chicago, but here you (10105
Burns felt that in Chicago blues musicians could afford to play only blues music, but
in Detroit blues musicians could not.

Whatever the reasons for the difference between blues styles in Chicago and
Detroit, Chicago has maintained a style of blues that is very closely linked to the
Delta style, and they have also maintained a blues scene that is much better known
outside the Midwest than the scene in Detroit. As the popularity of Delta style blues
increased among white fans in the 19605 as part of the folk blues revival, fans within
and outside the Midwest logically became interested in the urban blues that was most
like the Delta blues; thus, any later interest in the Detroit scene from white audiences
outside of southeast Michigan was less than the interest in Chicago scene.
Additionally, there was a better infrastructure for blues recording in Chicago than in
Detroit. The recording business in Detroit did not do much to support Detroit blues.

Probably more Detroit blues musicians were recorded in Chicago than in Detroit.

 

105 Murray, Boogie Man, 175.

50

Also, blues music has become part of tourism in Chicago. While Detroit is associated

with musical styles like techno and Motown, no musical genre is used by the city of
Detroit to attract tourists in the same way that the city of Chicago uses its blues scene.
For example, although Detroit may sometimes be called Motown, the Motown record
company left Detroit in the 19705 and there is no Motown scene like the blues scene
in Chicago today.

As a consequence of all of this, there have been blues musicians from Chicago
being invited to perform in Detroit since the early days of the genre, but it has never
been an even exchange. This is where the center-periphery model can help explain
how capital flows from Detroit at the periphery directly to Chicago at the center.
Famous Coachman, a recently deceased blues radio host from Detroit, lamented this
problem in a 1992 interview:

Every year we bring Chicago guys in and all through the year we put ‘em in

places, in the nightclubs here, but Chicago never see fit to book any Detroit

acts over to Chicago, not even playin’ in a nightclub, or on the festival. Nine

years they had a festival; this year is the first they put one guy on there; that

was Eddie Bums.m6
So although Detroit club owners and festival organizers have supported Chicago
blues artists by welcoming them to play in the city, people who booked blues
musicians in Chicago never reciprocated.

This phenomenon still persists in Detroit and it happens in other Michigan

cities, as well. For instance, at the 2008 Old Town Blues Fest in Lansing, M1, the

 

06 Murray, Boogie Man, 175.

51

Saturday night headliner was a Chicago blues Singer-guitarist named Carl
Weathersby. At Callahan’s in Auburn Hills, MI, one of the home bars of the Detroit
Blues Society, the club owner prefers to book only national acts meaning Michigan
bands generally only Open at the club, according to Steve Allen, the bass player in the
band Tomas Esperanza and the Boa Constrictors and historian of the Detroit Blues
Society. This is not to say these club owners or festival organizers don’t support
Michigan blues; the 2008 Old Town Blues Festival did have a Michigan-bom blues
singer, Sharrie Williams, headline on Friday night and Callahan’s sponsors
competitions for local bands. However, generally speaking, Chicago musicians have
an easier time getting gigs elsewhere in the Midwest than Detroit musicians due
Chicago’s reputation for excellent blues which originally stemmed from a connection
to the Delta.
Part 4: Early Blues Scenes in Detroit

To understand the history of the blues scenes in Michigan cities requires some
knowledge of the history of racial relations, labor patterns, and housing in Michigan.
This is especially true in the largest urban area in Michigan, Detroit. From the end of
the Civil War until WWI, there was some black migration to Detroit and the black
community was largely confined to the Near East Side.107 As in Chicago, black
migrants from the South began to arrive in greater numbers in Detroit when the Great
Migration began in approximately 1915. Detroit’s particular appeal lay in the number

of well-paying job opportunities the auto industry, which brought in southern

 

'07 Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown. 4.

52

migrants in droves.108 This population shift resulted in a housing shortage in the
19205. Racial discrimination resulted in the black population being crowded into the
Near East side neighborhood which became known as Black Bottom. The exact
boundaries of the Black Bottom are debatable and have shifted over time, but the
largest approximation is that the Bottom went from Russell and Cherie streets to the

east, Van Dyke to the west, south to the Detroit River, and north to the outskirts of
Hamtramck.109 The influx of black workers into the Detroit area led to the creation

and expansion of black businesses, especially restaurants and boardinghouses.110
Another type of business that emerged in the black neighborhood during the
19105 and 19205 is specifically connected to the beginning of the blues tradition in
Detroit: theaters. These theaters were mostly located in Black Bottom on Hastings
Street, though there were a few in the downtown area. The Vaudette and the Koppin

Theatre were both part of the black vaudeville circuit, and they were, therefore, an

important part of the black music Scene in the 19205.1“ The Theater Owners’
Booking Association or TOBA, the vaudeville circuit for African American
performers in the 19205 and 19305, was organized in 1920. Early 1921 the Vaudette
became part of TOBA; however, it was quickly replaced by the Koppin Theater in

June 1921. Black vaudeville acts that came through the Koppin included blues

 

108 In 1915, Detroit’s black population was 7,000; in 1920, 40,000; in 1930, 120,000 or 7.7 percent of
the total population in the city. Holli, Detroit, 271 in Bjorn and Gallert, 4.

Murray, Boogie Man, 97.
110 Richard W. Thomas, “From Peasants to Proletetarians: The Formation and Organization of the
Black Industrial Working-Class in Detroit, I915-1945” in Bjorn and Gallert, 4.

1 1] Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown, 7.

53

singers like Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, Ida Cox, Ma Rainey, Clara Smith, and Sara

Martin.l '2

At the same time, there was an urban blues scene in smaller venues in Detroit
and blues musicians played at house parties, as well. Boogie woogie piano players
like Speckled Red (Rufus Perryman), Charlie Spand, Will Ezell, and Big Maceo were

the most famous Detroit blues musicians who played in clubs that came out of this

period.1 13 Of these musicians, Big Maceo is probably best remembered today. A
migrant from Georgia, Maceo moved to Detroit in 1924 where he worked as a

handyman for the Ford Motor Company during the day and played at house parties

and in bars at night.114 Maceo did not achieve fame until he moved to Chicago to
begin his recording career in 1941. Although Detroit may have been a fine place to
play for a musician who was content to play the club scene, for those who aspired to
record — and thereby become known outside of Detroit — it lacked the record-

producing infrastructure of record labels, booking agents, and talent scouts that

Chicago had.l '5

Guitarist John Lee Hooker’s career mirrors Big Maceo’s in that he also cut his
teeth in Detroit, but did not achieve his greatest levels of success until he left for
Chicago. Unlike Maceo, Hooker did have some experience recording while he was

still living in Detroit, both by recording for the small-time label Sensation in Detroit,

 

112 .
Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown, 11-12.

“3 The term boogie-woogie originated in Detroit according to the patter between Charlie Spand
(piano) and Blind Blake (guitar) on their 1929 recording of “Hastings Street.” Boogie-woogie was
used to refer to music or dancing in Detroit. From Peter J. Silvester, A Left Hand Like God, 7.

“4 Prior to World War 11, Ford was the only car company that hired blacks in large numbers. See

Biiorn and Gallert, 10.

I 5
Murray, Boogie Man, 93.

54

by getting some of those recordings sold to the Los Angeles-based label Modern, and

by making some recordings for a black record store owner from Detroit, Joe Von

Battle, under pseudonyms while still under contract with Sensation.116 Von Battle
was notorious for recording Detroit artists and selling those tracks to Chicago labels;
as Famous Coachman, a former Detroit disc jockey, explains: “Joe Von Battle used to
feed Leonard Chess a lot of Detroit music. Joe used to get the guys together in his
record shop in the back room and cut ‘em one a tape, and the next day he been an’
sold it to Leonard Chess, and they didn’t even known nothin’ about it.”' ‘7 As with
much of the music that was recorded by African-American artists across the country
in various genres, Hooker did not actually get paid much for his legitimate
recordings, so even though he did not get paid much more from doing side work for
Von Battle, he did it because he needed the money.

As time went on smaller venues like bars and clubs completely eclipsed
theaters as the place to commonly hear the blues, but even then, not all of the black
community was interested in hearing the blues, or at least not only the blues. Some

obvious objectors were those who were church going folks who would not go to the

rough part of the Black Bottom where some of the clubs were located.118 There were
also some middle class blacks who favored jazz over blues, because they perceived
the blues as working class music; consequently, jazz players tended to play more
plush clubs and were better compensated. AS guitarist John Lee Hooker’s brother-in-

law Paul Mathis explains it, “Blues was strugglin’. It was jitterbug and jivin’ back in

 

l 16 Murray, Boogie Man, 143.
117

Ibid.
1 18 As a neighbor of John Lee Hooker’s family mentioned in an interview with Murray, “If you have
any type of respect you stay off Hastings.” (See Murray, Boogie Man, 103)

55

those days. The blues singers was playin’ for a nickel over here, and the guy playin’
the jitterbug, he was getting’ a quarter, that sort of thing.”1 '9 Consequently in order to
make more money, Detroit blues musicians sometimes played other types of music to
get higher paying gigs. Despite blues musicians having a necessity to sometimes play
other types of music, there were popular clubs that often featured blues in the Black
Bottom like the Champion Bar, Sugar Hill, Henry’s Swing Club and the Apex Bar,
and outside the Black Bottom like the Caribbean Club. More upscale clubs such as
Sport Reed’s Show Bar and Lee’s Sensation would also feature more well-known
Detroit blues acts like John Lee Hooker when he began gaining recognition in Detroit
in the late 19405 as well as blues players from Chicago. Unfortunately, the popularity
of such clubs could not save Detroit blues from becoming a casualty of massive
economic and demographic changes that would disrupt everyday life for the city’s
African American community.
Part 5: The Urban Renewal Blues

No story of blues in Detroit and Lansing is complete without an explanation
of one of the most significant events that affected the African American populations
of these cities: urban renewal. Urban renewal devastated predominantly black
neighborhoods in both cities and similar projects destroyed inner city neighborhoods
all over the country. The precursors to urban renewal were private and federal
lending policies in the 19405. After World War II, the Federal Housing

Administration and private lenders offered loans to white home buyers moving to the

 

] 19 Murray, Boogie Man, 102

56

suburbs while simultaneously limiting loans in older inner-city neighborhoods.120

After many whites had left cities for the suburbs, federally assisted urban renewal
programs began in the 19505 and continued into the 19603. These projects were
justified as programs designed to build more housing for the poor, but often housing

units were torn down and new housing was never built. Ninety percent of the units

removed for urban renewal were never replacedm Along with urban renewal and
white flight to the suburbs came federally funded highway projects. These highways
were meant to connect the predominantly white suburbs to employment in the
downtown areas of cities, and they also happened to run straight through

predominantly minority areas in many US. cities including Los Angeles, Houston,

and St. Louis.122 Both urban renewal and federal highway projects affected the
Michigan cities of Detroit and Lansing, and the building of I-75 through Detroit had a
direct effect on the blues scene.

While urban renewal was only one of several reasons that blues scenes
declined in Detroit, I believe it is a significant one because urban renewal destroyed
Paradise Valley, the black entertainment center in Detroit. Blues clubs and bars were
still active in the Black Bottom in the 19505 when urban renewal plans were
announced that would destroy the neighborhood. First came the Gratiot
Redevelopment site in 1950 which was a collaboration of the federal government and

the city to clear a large area of the Near East Side. This created a severe housing

 

20 George Lipsitz, "The Possessive Investment in Whiteness”, American Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1995),

373.

'2' Ibid, 374.

122 Ibid.

57

shortage for the displaced residents, 98 percent of whom were black.123 To make
matters worse, the federal government proposed a highway plan which would extend
Interstate-75 through the city of Detroit. The path the government chose was straight
through the Black Bottom neighborhood with several blues clubs scheduled for

demolition along with many housing units and other businesses. In 1959, the

highway was built and Paradise Valley was destroyed'24

In Lansing, the apparent lack of a thriving blues scene before the 19605 is
probably related to later growth of the black population than in Detroit and the
bisection of the existing black community by a federal highway project in the 19605.
I could not find anyone who knew about blues in Lansing before the 19605. This
could be because blues did not take root in Lansing until the folk blues revival in the
19605, a mostly white movement, brought blues to Lansing. However, considering
that blues music was popular at small clubs in Detroit before urban renewal and
changing musical tastes led to a decline in live blues in Detroit coupled with the fact
that the black populations in the two cities were similar in class status and job
functions, it seems reasonable to conclude that there may have been blues music in
Lansing before the 19605. However, Lansing’s African American population grew
later than that population in Detroit and other Michigan cities. Between 1940 and

1950, the African American population in Lansing tripled from 1,638 in 1940 to

3,290 in 1950.125 By 1960, the population had increased again to 6,745.126 Since

 

'23 Bjorn and Gallert, Before Motown, 107.
124

Ibid.
125Bruce Brown, “Residential Relocation Survey: a case study of highway relocation in Lansing,
Michigan”, Master’s Thesis, Michigan State University, 1965, 2

58

urban renewal began in Lansing shortly after the 1960, as I will illustrate further, it is
probable that a blues scene that would look similar to the club scene in Detroit did not
have time to take root in Lansing before the bisection of Lansing’s black community.
Black migrants to Lansing came to the city for similar reasons as black
migrants to Detroit; they were looking for work. As in Detroit, many of these new

Lansing residents had been sharecroppers in the South and came to Michigan after

hearing about jobs in industrial plants.127 As Dorothy Kennedy, a social worker who
came to Lansing in 1946, explained in an interview with the Lansing State Journal,

"Oldsmobile and Fisher Body went to Alabama, Mississippi and Arkansas and

brought workers back to Lansing. That's how the population of Lansing grew.”128

Housing was a major problem for the growing African American population, because
when these African American families reached Lansing, they found a shortage of

affordable housing that was made available to them. As a result, they lived with

friends and relatives or doubled and tripled up in houses meant for one family.129

The situation was made worse by realtors who restricted African Americans’ housing
opportunities to the poorer areas of Lansing, especially the area north of the
Oldsmobile plant. Eventually they expanded this area further north and an area that

had previously been exclusively single family homes turned into two and three family

units to accommodate the growing population.130 In addition, African American

 

'27 Ibid. 23
128 Stacey Range, “Lansing in the 19505: Changing City”, Lansing State Journal, February 13, 2006

Brown, “Residential Relocation Survey: a case study of highway relocation in Lansing, Michigan”,

’3

'30 Ibid, 3.

59

families bought available housing at prices that often exceeded property values by
two or three timesm
In the 19605, various corporate, state, and federal building projects began
eliminating hundreds of units where African American families lived in Lansing.
From 1961-1965, 168 units were purchased and cleared by Oldsmobile. Local

officials estimated that 90% of the families displaced by this project settled in the

immediate area causing “a critical housing shortage and the overuse of existing

facilities?”2 Also from 1961-1965, another 334 units were demolished due to the

State Capital expansion code, the Oakland extension project, and private

demolition.‘33 One project, a road called the Pinetree Connector, would be the first
omen of a greater problem to come. Construction of the Pinetree Connector displaced
100 families in the Urbandale area on Lansing’s eastside, but it was only the first part

of the construction of I-496, the highway that was built straight through the heart of

the black community in Lansing.134 As Lisa Fine wrote in RED Joe, her book about
the REO auto plant and working class life in Lansing:
By the early 19605 Lansing had begun vigorously and successfully to pursue
federal funds for highway construction and the ‘Great Society’ programs
designed to create model US. cities. But what began as an effort to

modernize and to eradicate ‘urban blight’ ended up, tragically, destroying

 

13

3.
'32 Ibid, 4.
'33 Ibid, 5.

'34 Ibid.

lBrown, “Residential Relocation Survey: a case study of highway relocation in Lansing, Michigan”,

60

downtown businesses and residential districts where poor, predominantly

African American families lived.135
The construction of I-496 was a federal highway project, like the construction

of I-75 in Detroit. Also, as with the Detroit highway, 14% bisected Lansing’s black
community and destroyed 600 housing units. 136 Early estimates suggested that 604

families were displaced by the construction.‘37 The federal and state governments
took no responsibility for relocating families which left the City of Lansing totally
unprepared for having over 600 families displaced even though they had known for
years that the highway would be built.

Several different groups designed surveys to determine the needs of the
displaced community. The NAACP conducted a survey with the following
conclusions:

1) Many of black families in the affected area (39%) were buying their own home in
the area that would be destroyed by the highway project.

2) Most of the black families (80%) preferred to relocate to an integrated
neighborhood.

3) If it was necessary to move, 75% of the black families indicated a preference to

buy rather than rent. Over 50% indicated a preference of buying in the $10,000 to

$20,000 bracket. ' 3"

 

135 Lisa Fine, The Story of Reo Joe: Work, Kin, and Community in Autotown U.S.A
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2004), 154.

Brown, “Residential Relocation Survey: a case study of highway relocation in Lansing, Michigan”,

6.
”7mm.
'38 Ibid, 7.

61

After the findings of this survey went public, a Human Relations Committee formed

in Lansing with the intention of developing a study “for local officials to make

decisions based upon documented fact.”139 A meeting took place on June 6, 1964
and at that meeting,
The Greater Lansing Chamber of Commerce endorsed the survey of the ‘vast
human problem’ and assigned one of its members, its Executive Director, to

meet with the Human Relations Committee. The powerful Lansing Board of

Realtors also joined the effort by assigning two members to attend.140

But very soon after the June 6 meeting,
The NAACP publically condemned the proposed survey and recommended
that ‘the [Negro] people refuse to cooperate with any study participated in by
an organization we feel is primarily responsible for segregated housing in the

City.’ Although he did not mention them by name, it was clear that his

accusation was directed against the Lansing Board of Realtorsm

After the NAACP refused to support the survey, the Lansing City Council voted on
July 13, 1964 to unanimously to reject financial support for the survey “on the
grounds that public money could not be expended on a survey which wasn’t in the
best interest of all groups to be affected.”142 Another version of the survey was

proposed and was supported by the NAACP; it was never undertaken.

 

139 . . . . . . . . . .
Brown, “Resrdential Relocation Survey: a case Study of highway relocation in Lansrng, Michigan”,

7.
'40 Ibid, 9.
'4' Ibid.
'42 Ibid, 10.

62

Finally, on October 8, 1964, Michigan State University graduate student
Bruce Brown offered to carry out a survey on a volunteer basis and the Human
Relations Committee accepted. The survey was publicized by local radio and
television stations, the State Journal which is now known as the Lansing State
Journal, and the NAACP. Despite this publicity Brown remarked, “it was interesting

to note that several interviewers reported contacting people who weren’t aware of the

. . . . ,, 3
survey or that a highway was even schedule for construction in their area. ‘4

Months before their homes were to be destroyed, some area residents had not even
heard of the construction project.

The destruction of homes and businesses in Detroit and Lansing devastated
black communities and left many people scrambling for housing. Paradise Valley, a
significant part of the blues scene in Detroit was essentially eliminated by the
construction and the scene never really recovered. The rise of Motown in the 19605
also significantly affected the blues scene in Detroit. While the smooth soul sounds
that Motown produced were exported to the rest of the country including Chicago,
Motown further diminished the importance of blues to the black community in
Detroit. By the time Berry Gordy, the founder of Motown Records, moved the label
to California in 1972, the blues scene in Detroit was hurting even more. Not only did
urban renewal likely devastate any blues scene that might have been in Lansing, the
decline of an important blues scene in Detroit would have had some effect on any

blues scenes in Lansing as big name blues acts from Chicago and other cities

 

43 Brown, “Residential Relocation Survey: 3 case study of highway relocation in Lansing. Michigan”,
16-17.

63

sometimes stopped in both cities in the 19705 and 19805 sometimes hiring local
musicians.144

Urban renewal also affected neighborhoods in Chicago, particularly on the
South Side. In their 1961 book The Politics of Urban Renewal: the Chicago Findings,
sociologists Peter H. Rossi and Robert A. Dentler discussed urban renewal in Hyde
Park, the Chicago neighborhood where the University of Chicago is located. They
described the plans for the Hyde Park-Kenwood Urban Renewal Project on the South
Side of Chicago in this way: “More than 100 acres are scheduled for acquisition,
within which approximately 644 parcels will be acquired for demolition, totaling

some 5,900 dwelling units.”'45

In their sixth chapter entitled “South West Hyde Park:
A Case of Failure to Achieve Popular Consensus” Rossi and Dentler discussed how
the African American population in that part of the neighborhood would be affected
by the urban renewal plans:
One distinction between the fifty-four-acre development area of the southwest
sector and the acquisition site within it should be kept in mind. In 1956, the
racial composition of South West Hyde Park was 54.3 percent Negro [sic],
while the population in the acquisition Site was 79.9 percent Negro [sic].I46

Furthermore, the original neighborhood had 660 residential units and the proposed

reconstruction was to have only 394 units.147 Thus, in Chicago, as in Detroit and

 

This is according to Randy Gelispie, professor of jazz drums at Michigan State and a professional
jazz and blues drummer in both the Lansing and Detroit scenes from a March 2009 interview with this
document’s author.

145 Peter H. Rossi and Robert A. Dentler, The Politics of Urban Renewal: the Chicago Findings, (The
Free Press of Glencoe: New York, 1961), 3.

I46Rossi and Dentler, The Politics of Urban Renewal: the Chicago Findings, 159.
147 Rossi and Dentler, The Politics of Urban Renewal: the Chicago Findings, 159.

64

Lansing, African American neighborhoods were disproportionately displaced by
urban renewal.

The Hyde Park-Kenwood neighborhood is also directly adjacent to the
Bronzeville neighborhood, a South Side neighborhood that was until home to several
blues clubs including the Checkerboard Lounge until it closed in 2003. Notably, the
club was re-opened by Chicago blues musician Buddy Guy and relocated to Hyde
Park close to the University of Chicago. This suggests that Guy felt the club had a
better chance of succeeding if it reopened near the university’s neighborhood where
tourists frequent rather than in the Bronzeville neighborhood. In Blue Chicago,
David Grazian mentions the old Checkerboard as “the South Side’s infamous
Checkerboard Lounge” in his description of his experience on a tour bus traveling

148

through Bronzeville. Grazian explains what it is like as the bus goes down State

Street through Bronzeville’s black neighborhood.
The bus continues to Slowly creep down the street as some of the
development’s black residents turn to stare at the bus in bewilderment,
presumably confused by the lingering presence of a chartered bus in front of
their homes. Meanwhile, as the bus passengers continue to point and gawk at
the residents and their surrounding neighborhood, Mandie persistently
delivers her speech on the Stroll’s hot jazz cabarets, the local celebrity of Jelly

Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong, and the vitality of the area’s once-heralded

Black Metropolis, conveniently ignoring the surrounding blight.

 

I48 Grazian, Blue Chicago, 204.

65

The story of a tour bus in Bronzeville recalls an earlier part of Grazian’s book where
he discussed entertainment zones in the Old Town and DePaul areas of Lincoln Park
and how blues musicians and fans remember the area:
These commercial districts remain emblazoned in their memories as deeply
authentic, in part, because they nostalgically remember them —idea1istically or
otherwise — as bulwarks of community solidarity and bohemian creativity, all
while surrounded by the romantic lure of urban danger. But eventually their
favorite clubs were transformed along with their enveloping entertainment
zones, and the reputations of those places increased among suburbanites and
foreign travelers while consequently diminishing among local scene-makers.
Indeed, Lincoln Park blues clubs began losing their authentic cache among
bohemians because their commercial popularity among mainstream
consumers began to soar.
Thus, given Grazian’s description of the scene in the late 19905 we see that blues in
Chicago has come full circle since Keil’s description of a new, vibrant scene in the
early 19605 that was not like the tired Delta blues that blues revivalists were
interested in. Instead of being a counterpoint to the Delta narrative as Keil originally

described it, Chicago has become a blues center itself despite urban renewal.

66

Chapter 3: Blues in Motown and the Capital City: the Scenes in Detroit and Lansing
Part 1: The State of Blues in Detroit

City leaders in Detroit could learn a lesson from the entertainment zones that
disrupted local blues scenes in Chicago and Detroit’s own history of urban renewal,
but it seems that history may repeat itself; there has been interest in Detroit of
building a new area reminiscent of the old Paradise Valley. An August 2008
Michigan Chronicle article reports that the Kresge Foundation, the Detroit Economic
Growth Corporation, and the Detroit City Council were collaborating for the creation
of a new Paradise Valley. As Rip Rason, president and CEO of The Kresge
Foundation put it, “Whenever a community like ours has the chance to go back and

grab its history, its culture, its past civic pride, bring it into the current situation and

project into the future, it’s something no funder in his right mind would pass up.”'49

The new Paradise Valley would try to duplicate its namesake by having retail
establishments, jazz clubs, blues clubs, and cafe’s.

The assumption that a new Paradise Valley is needed in Detroit is an example
of a desire to recreate the past. However, in this attempt to regain history, culture,
and past civic pride, there seems to be a lack of acknowledgment that there is any
current continuation of entertainment in Detroit that is in the spirit of the old Paradise
Valley. It also seems eerily similar to the idea that urban renewal could and would
clear out urban blight and new and better housing would be built. While it could be
beneficial to the city, in order for such a project to be effective it is necessary to

recognize there are music clubs and bars that already feature blues in the city and the

 

149 . . . . .
Cornelius Fortune, “New Paradise Valley to Replace Harmonie Park”. Michigan Chronicle, 6

August 2008, Al.

67

close suburbs. As my interest is in blues in particular, I will use two bars that I have
attended several times as examples of the existing blues scene in Detroit: Mugshot in
Detroit and Callahan’s Music Hall in Auburn Hills. These bars show that there are,
that thriving blues scenes are not only a part of the past in Detroit and metro Detroit,
but also the present, and that there are different types of scenes within the larger
Detroit scene.

Mugshot is located on the east side of Detroit close to the East English Village
neighborhood of the city. The regular Monday night band is a local band, Johnnie
Bassett and the Blues Avengers and Monday is the only night of the week that the bar
regularly has live music. In the summer of 2009, Bassett and his band played nearly
every week at Mugshot as their regular weekly gig in addition to playing all over the
city and suburbs. This summer, for instance, they played at places like Memphis
Smoke in Royal Oak and Cityfest in Detroit, a festival with food from local
restaurants where they played on the jazz and blues stage. Bassett is an older black
singer and guitar player who is well—known amongst blues lovers in Detroit. I was
encouraged to go hear him at Mugshot by several people including the saxophone
player in the band, Keith Kaminski. Along with Kaminski and Bassett, the band has
an organist and keyboard player, Chris Codish, and a drummer, Skeeto Valdez.

My first experience with Mugshot began long before I arrived at the bar and
culminated before I ever walked through the bar’s door. Before I went to Mugshot,
several people warned me not to go there alone, presumably because I would be
going into the city of Detroit and not to the suburbs. All of the other clubs that blues

musicians and fans had recommended to me were in the suburbs. Given the

68

recommendations about the dangerous neighborhood, I had expected the area around
the bar to look more rundown or at least to have more people on the streets.

However, once I arrived I did not really understand why people had insisted that I
bring a man with me. Like much of the city of Detroit, the businesses around looked
old, but in good repair. There was no one out walking near the businesses, but I
figured this was because it was 9:00pm on Monday night and people were probably at
home watching T.V. or putting their kids to bed. After all, Detroit is still a working
class city for the most part. The outside of Mugshot felt no more dangerous to me
than being at any other bar.

Aside from the fact that I lived in the East English Village not far from the
neighborhood Mugshot is in until I was six years old, my experience is impacted by
my realization that the neighborhood I was in is directly adjacent to a suburb. I
discovered this when I accidentally drove past Harper, the road Mugshot is located
on, and continued driving on Cadieux through a residential area the first time I was
going to the bar. There was a row of duplexes and the people on the porches were all
African American families who had probably finished dinner and gone outside to see
their neighbors. I drove further and passed an old high school with a big lawn
separated from the road by a rusty fence. There were several high school age kids
standing on the lawn talking and fooling around. I drove a couple blocks further and
saw that the street signs had changed and there were more trees along the street. A
young white boy rode by me on a bicycle. A new—looking brick building on my left
confirmed what I had already begun to suspect: it was a Grosse Pointe elementary

school. In a few short blocks, I had left Detroit. While I felt no less safe on one end

69

of Cadieux than the other, being suddenly in a suburb reminded me why people might
warn me about going to a club in Detroit. I am a young, white woman. Although
statistics suggest I am probably far safer in a Detroit bar than I am on the campus of
Michigan State University, many people have the opposite perception. After I turned
around and finally arrived at Mugshot, everything was fine and nothing bad happened
to me.

My experience does Show something important about this scene. The scene at
Mugshot on Monday nights is a particular type of Detroit blues scene: the comer bar
scene in the city. Mugshot is a neighborhood bar. There are drink Specials every
night and you have to spend $25 at the bar to be able to use a credit card. Although
the bar does not serve food, there are a couple of regulars at the bar who bring food
on Monday nights that anyone can eat which they sometimes charge for and
sometimes do not. There are two rooms in the bar, one with the bar and TVs and one
with the stage area and dance floor with pool tables in the back. The area where the
band is set up is not elevated so there is no stage per se. The ceiling tiles have been
taken out in the room where the band plays; Kaminski, the tenor sax player in the
band, told me that they are in the middle of remodeling.

Mugshot is a not a music venue most nights of the week, so the one night that
it hosts live music it must continue serving the other functions that it serves every
other night. The bar tends to see a similar crowd every Monday night. The patrons
are mostly black and most of them sit at the bar in the room without music with some
wandering in to watch the musicians periodically. If there are white patrons,

generally they come to hear or play music. This is because Mugshot is a working

70

class, neighborhood bar and they are fewer white people than black people who live
close to the bar; plus, those that do live close enough to attend might have received
similar warnings to the one I got and decided it was not worth it. The bartender,
however, is a white woman in her 305. She typically wears a T-shirt and jeans as do
most of the patrons. I have only seen a couple of people dance at Mugshot and I have
only ever seen women dance there. Monday nights at Mugshot is not a dancing
scene; it is a scene where people go to drink, hang out, listen to music, or play music.
Depending on the person they could do one of these things or all four. One Monday
night when Bassett’s group was playing, there was a small tournament taking place of
a card game I had never heard of. The tables were full and the people applauded
enthusiastically at the ends of songs, but they had come to the bar to play cards.

In addition to being a place where regular patrons go to hang out and blues
fans go to listen to blues, Mugshot serves as a place for local musicians to play blues
even if they are not in the band or not blues musicians on an everyday basis.
Although Monday nights at Mugshot are not billed as a jam session, the times I have
been there local musicians always sit in starting during the second set. Pretty much
anyone who knows one of the band members can sit in with the group, and as the
band members are all well—connected musicians in the Detroit scenes, most musicians
who come to the bar come to play. Bassett will often call musicians out of the
audience and ask them where their guitars are. Most are reluctant at first, because
they do not want to steal any of the spotlight from Bassett, but eventually acquiesce.
To not play when someone like Johnnie Bassett asks you to play personally is

considered to be bad manners, because in the blues scenes in the Detroit area, Bassett

71

is well-respected amongst musicians. For instance, a guitarist named Bobby showed
off his amp before he sat in one Monday night and explained to Codish, the Blues
Avengers’s keyboard player, that the last time he sat in at the bar, Bassett told him to
bring his own amp. Bobby said that he was really happy about this, because it meant
Bassett had liked his playing. This shows how Bassett is high in the hierarchy of
musicians in the scene.

One might think that with his status as the star of the show on Monday nights
and his reputation as a great blues player in Detroit, Bassett would be resistant to
connecting to his audience, but this is not the case. As the following quote illustrates,
Bassett is eager to connect with the audience and expresses the fact that he is happy to
be there on the microphone: “I don’t know about y’all, but I’ve had one of those blue
kind of days, because it’s a Monday. I’m glad to be out here playing for y’all.”

This exemplifies Bassett’s desire to set up a dialogue with audience members during
his sets. Bassett also sits in the audience and talks with audience members between
sets and when other guitarists are sitting in with the band. The first night I was at
Mugshot he implored the audience to tell two people about the band’s Monday night
performances saying, “I guarantee they’ll have a good time and enjoy themselves.”
Another night Bassett stopped me as I was leaving the bar to personally thank me for
coming. I said that I hoped to see him again soon. He said, “We’ll be here every
Monday night.” I would have gone back to the bar to see them play without him
saying that, but since Johnnie Bassett told me I should come back I am more likely to

return sooner rather than later.

72

Callahan’s Bar in Auburn Hills, MI, a northern suburb of Detroit, is a
different sort of scene than Mugshot and it features local blues artists in a different
way. First and foremost, Callahan’s is not in the city of Detroit, but in the suburbs.
As Steve Allen, historian of the Detroit Blues Society and a bass player who plays in
a blues band called Tomas Esperanza and the Boa Constrictors, said of Callahan’s,
“We’re kind of out in the middle of nowhere here. This is off the beaten path.” Also,
Callahan’s is blues venue every night of the week instead Of just one night. There is a
large stage with expensive looking lighting and sound equipment set up. Along with
this, when I asked Steve about what kind of blues bands got booked at the club he
explained that the owner, Mike Callahan, almost always booked national acts as
headliners and that only Detroit-based musicians who had received national attention

could headline at the venue. Otherwise, bands like Steve’s could only play at the club

as openers.150

Rather than serving as a neighborhood hangout like Mugshot, Callahan’s is a
music venue that attracts patrons that are primarily interested in hearing the music.
This starts with the set-up of the bar which is meant to direct attention towards the
stage. Rather than a two room set-up like at Mugshot, there is one large space at
Callahan’s with the bar near the front door with a few tall tables with stools near it,
booths along the side walls, and long tables that run perpendicular to the stage so that

anyone who sits at them can see what’s happening onstage. There are no pool tables

 

150 I have seen Tomas Esperanza and the Boa Constrictors, the band in which Steve plays bass, open

twice at Callahan’s, once for Jeremy Spencer, the former guitar player in Fleetwood Mac, and once for
Chicago-based harmonica player, Charlie Musselwhite.

73

at Callahan’s and it seems unlikely that anyone would start a card tournament there;
aside from a few TVs above the bar, the music is the only attraction at the bar.

Unlike Mugshot, where many of the patrons are African American, the
patrons at Callahan’s are overwhelmingly white. However, similar to Mugshot’s
close proximity to Grosse Pointe Woods, the racial breakdown of Callahan’s crowd
can only partially be explained by geography. Callahan’s is in a part of Auburn Hills
that borders Pontiac, which is one of the Detroit suburbs with a fairly large non-white
population, yet the audience at Callahan’s is primarily white. I suspect the mostly
white crowd I have seen there has to do with the type of blues that the bar offers —
national acts, some of which are white, that overwhelmingly play Chicago—style
blues. In other words, the bar books headliners that play the type of music that fits
into the Chicago-centered blues narrative rather than regional Detroit style blues.

As webmaster and historian for the Detroit Blues Society, Steve Allen is a
blues history buff who is very knowledgeable about the history of blues in Michigan.
He explains the recent history of the blues venues this way:

There aren’t very many blues places any more. There are some places up

towards Flint that I’ll pop into every once in a while. But blues is a real small

market and Mike here at Callahan’s has done a phenomenal job of capturing
that market... Over on the west side for a long time — well, the Penny Street

Roadhouse in Dearbom was a real popular place. That was a big venue and

that’s where all the big stars went. And before that it was Sully’s in Dearbom.

74

There have been a few others like. . .Dave and Harry’s or I don’t know the

name of the place. It was downriver [meaning south of Detroit].]51
Steve feels that Mike Callahan has captured the blues market in the Detroit area, and
he is right. However, by choosing to book national acts as headliners whenever
possible, Callahan often books out of town entertainment that plays Chicago style
blues. He does not ignore the regional Detroit-style blues completely. As I will
explain in the next section, Callahan’s does support local artists through its
association with the Detroit Blues Society and as I mentioned they feature Michigan
bands as opening acts. However, the blues scene Callahan’s is not a Detroit style
scene like Monday nights at Mugshot. Johnnie Bassett’s band, the Blues Avengers, is
made up of three Detroit-based musicians all of whom play jazz and rhythm and blues
styles in other bands they are in. Bassett himself is a bluesman who has always been
based in Detroit. Consequently, the group is like the old Detroit story of a bluesman
playing in front of a variety band. In short, Callahan’s and Mugshot are different
scenes within the larger Detroit scene.
Part 2: A Sense of Community: The Influence of Blues Societies in Blues Scenes

There are not only different scenes within the larger Detroit scene; other
scenes in smaller Michigan cities like Lansing differ from both of the Detroit area
scenes I have described. One of my consultants, Ben Hall, who has played in the
Detroit scene and the Lansing scene suggests that the large geographical area of

Metro Detroit has something to do with this:

 

l l . .
5 Intervrew With the author.

75

In Detroit, it’s so spread out. I mean, when you say Detroit, there’s Femdale,

Hamtramck, actual Detroit, it was all spread out. So you would have different

guys at different venues.152
Thus, blues musicians who play in suburbs of Detroit and the city may not see each
other often while blues musicians in Lansing get to know each other, because the
scene is smaller and not so spread out. In both areas, however, fans and musicians
have formed communities which they organize through blues societies

Although I have met people — notably Steve Allen and Ben Hall — who attend
events in both the Detroit scene and the Lansing scene, I have found that most blues
fans stick to their own scenes for the most part, especially the blues fans I have met in
Lansing. Many musicians I have met do the same, especially those who are well-
known within a scene. To put it simply, if fans or musicians do not have to travel to
see blues or play blues, they will not do so. As Ben puts it,

The blues scene everywhere in Michigan, the music is hurting, because, like 1

say, you don’t have to leave your house to be entertained anymore. People

aren’t seeking that out.153
I suggest that this speaks to two issues: the poor economic climate in Michigan and
availability of at home entertainment with the increasing impact of cable and the
intemet. Difficultly getting people out to see live entertainment is a common problem
and is not exclusive to blues. However, blues fans and musicians all over the country
including in Michigan have developed an interesting way to help combat these

problems: they have formed blues societies.

 

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Blues societies are a segment of the blues scene in Detroit and Lansing. They
include many of the people in those scenes who do leave their homes to see the blues
and they often have a strong commitment to and investment in blues scenes. Their
goal is to make live blues available and to get people interested in going to see it
performed. I suggest that these blues fans make this commitment not only out of a
desire to support music that they enjoy, but also to maintain what they see as a
particularly welcoming community.

The welcoming nature of the blues community in Lansing and blues
communities in general appeals to many blues fans in the Lansing area. Two of my
consultants in Lansing, Dom Piacento and Bonnie Stebbins, mentioned that they felt
they could walk into any bar where a blues band was playing and feel like they could
strike up a conversation. Another Lansing consultant, Jim Flynn explains his
experience at an Arkansas blues festival this way:

As a matter of fact, I when I went to that festival in Arkansas in October, I

met so many really, nice friendly people. I mean, black and white. Half the

people I met at that festival were African-Americans. But you talk about nice
people, Shootin’ the breeze with them. I’m standing close to the stage
watching the band from Texas. A couple of fellahs from that area, I got to

shootin’ the breeze with them, I told them I was from Michigan. Just really
nice friendly people. I 54

Bonnie thought that blues fans were more welcoming and friendly than fans of other

genres, and drew a particular distinction between blues fans and jazz fans. She relates

 

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a story of her experience at the Lansing Jazz Festival when she had to talk to a friend
during one of the performances:
Like I said, I used to have a bad knee when I was younger, so I said, “I’ll sit
here if you’ll help me get up.” And he and I are talking a little bit and this guy

next to us goes “Shhh.” Okay, that’s it. You jazz snobs, this is an outdoor

festival. It just blew my mind.155
Bonnie felt this type of reaction would be unlikely at a blues festival and much
preferred the more relaxed blues environment. She also felt that people in blues
scenes formed communities in spite of their differences, “The audience for blues is

unique, I think. Young, old, white, black, gay, straight, etc. Everyone is in the

community together.”156 As Dom, a Lansing blues fan, amateur bass player, and
former president of the Capital Area Blues Society, points out: “Since my getting re-
involved in music which was primarily blues I've met so many people. I started

going to open mics to just sit in and play. There's such a network of people even

locally in the small community of Lansing.”157

Some of these individuals are so interested in the blues that they work hard to
promote blues music in their areas and one way to do so is to participate in blues
societies. There are many blues societies in Michigan, but the two societies that I am
most familiar with are the Capital Area Blues Society (CABS) which is based in the
city of Lansing and the Detroit Blues Society (DBS) which is based in metro Detroit.

Blues societies are non-profit organizations formed to promote blues music in a

 

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particular city or region and they serve several important functions. One function is
informing members and other local blues fans about upcoming events with
newsletters both paper and online, event postings on Facebook and other social
networking sites, and calendars of events on blues society websites. In addition to
informing blues society members about blues events in their areas, the DBS and
CABS newsletters include articles written by blues society members about trips they
have taken to see blues events, pictures of recent events sponsored by the societies,
letters from members of the boards, and articles on blues history. The DBS website
includes a Who’s Who of Blues in Detroit, a historical document that includes many
Detroit or metro Detroit-based blues musicians, as well as a history of the Detroit
scene and the organization itself. Another function of the organizations is helping to
put on blues festivals in the fall or summer as well as other blues events throughout
the year which include contests for local bands and benefit concerts.

Another function of blues societies is that, as a result of hosting blues society
events, particular bars in the blues society’s city or area are more popular places than
other bars in the area which also feature live blues. Although those in charge of blues
societies may or may not intend to support one bar over others, this is often the result.
This is somewhat problematic in Detroit where the Detroit Blues Society holds its
monthly meetings at two bars in the metro Detroit area: Callahan’s in Auburn Hills
and Memphis Smoke in Royal Oak. These locations have likely been chosen partly

because they are good music venues and partly because of their proximity to

members of the DBS, many of whom live outside the Detroit city limits.158 These

As suggested by several members of the Detroit Blues Society who I have spoken to.

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venue choices do have one significant consequence; the Detroit Blues Society does
not actually hold their meetings nor do they tend to hold events in the city of Detroit,
yet they continue to call themselves the Detroit Blues Society. This idea is not
exclusive to DBS; many businesses and organizations based in the suburbs use the
word Detroit in their names, probably for various reasons depending on the business
or organization. However, for the blues society in particular, keeping the connection
with Detroit comes out of a desire to connect their modern scene to the historical
scene that existed in Detroit. In this way, the society benefits from the cultural capital
they gain by maintaining a connection to a historical blues scene, while some of their
membership does not actually support live blues within the city limits. It would be
inaccurate to say that DBS bands do not play in Detroit or that DBS fans do not go to
the city to hear music; some of them certainly do. However, DBS has established an
environment where many of them would never have to leave the suburbs to play or
hear blues. This is part of a larger trend as many people who live in Metro Detroit
never have to venture to the city of Detroit for entertainment, which goes along with
the idea that I suggest earlier about the scenes at Mugshot and Callahan’s; people
from the suburbs are unwilling to make an extra effort to go to a part of the scene that
is far from them geographically unless they like Detroit-style blues enough to go into
the city. If they can get their taste of the regional style from Michigan-based opening
acts and blues society events that feature local acts at Callahan’s, there is little reason
for them to leave the suburbs.

Another function of blues societies in Michigan is to provide help for bands

and musicians that become members of the societies. For instance, the blues societies

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will sometimes hold fundraisers for musicians who have fallen on hard times because
they have gotten ill do not have health insurance or musicians who have a family
member who needs financial help. Additionally, a musician or band joining a blues
society can help them get work. In the Capital Area Blues Society, bands are listed on
the membership list with one of the band members as a contact. According to a
Lansing musician I spoke with who prefers to remain anonymous, it can be very
beneficial for a band to become a member of CABS because it will increase that
band’s chances of getting gigs, especially at CABS sponsored events and at CABS
home bar, the Green Door. This consultant feels there is something of a divide in
Lansing between the bands who are members of the blues society and the bands who
are not:
So the music scene in Lansing can be broken into two parts. There’s the
Capital Area Blues Society and then there’s the people who aren’t in the
Capital Area Blues Society... I am not in it. And if you check out like the Old
Town Blues Festival or just bands gigging around town most of them are in
the Capital Area Blues Society. Most of the bands playing at the Old Town
Blues Festival have members on the board of the Capital Area Blues
Society. . .I think you find a lot of guys that have good intentions, but kind of
use the blues society as a means to promote themselves or to self-promote.159
Thus, proven dedication to or earning respect from important members in the blues
society can mean the difference between success and failure for a band or musician in

the Lansing scene. In this way, blues societies provide cultural capital in Lansing

 

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venues. It takes months for a musician to build a relationship with the person who
books at a venue, a relationship that can be established much more quickly by getting
on the bill of a blues society event. In Michigan’s tough economic climate and with
all the competition that live entertainment faces from television and the intemet, most
musicians can use all the help they can get. These are hallmarks of music scenes: fans
support musicians and enable them to continue playing and musicians sometimes help
each other get gigs as well as sometimes being in competition with one another. The
support of an organization of fans like the blues society, especially in a smaller scene
like Lansing’s blues scene, makes a bigger impact than simply having a less
organized following of fans. Whether or not the blues society has as much power as
my consultant thinks depends on who you talk to in the scene, but knowing well-
connected people in a scene will always help a musician get more gigs.
Part 3: CABS and Blues in Lansing

The Capital Area Blues Society was founded in 1994 and the history of the
organization was recorded in a 2007 CABS newsletter by Bonnie Stebbins, one of the
co-founders. Bonnie’s interest in forming the blues society began in the mid-19805
when she joined the Detroit Blues Society. Soon after Bonnie discussed establishing
a mid-Michigan blues society that would be an extension of DBS with George
Seedorff, then president of DBS, but they realized that a partnership would not be
feasible. Bonnie continued her efforts to establish a Lansing—based blues society and
explains her desire this way:

However, like Elwood and Jake in the two Blues Brothers movies, I truly,

sincerely felt that I was on a mission from God as wacko as that may sound!

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Soon, I decided to take the bull by the horns. My passion for the Blues and

dedication to support Blues music could not be denied any longer! '60
After officially registering the name on October 7, 1994, Bonnie bought business
cards, got a post office box, ordered address labels and stationary, and used her
second phone line for CABS business. All of this money came out of her own
pocket. The blues society did not meet for the first time until the following summer
on July 30, 1995 and they held their first meeting at the Green Door Blues Bar and
Grill. Jim Flynn remembers this first meeting:
And they were gonna have a meeting at the Green Door Lounge and that’s
here on the East side. I had never met her. Her name is Bonnie Stebbins.
That’s the lady that came up with the idea of it all, but I had never met her or
her friends, but being a big blues lover and I know a lot of musicians from this
area, I went to that meeting. And that’s how we got started. Actually the
blues musicians nominated me as Vice President, so I’ve been on the board of

directors ever since their inception. Right now I’m their treasurer, of

course!“
This quote brings up important points about CABS and about Jim. Jim felt
comfortable going to this meeting even though he did not know Bonnie or any of her
friends that were helping her organize CABS, but he went because he knew that they

shared a common interest in the blues.

 

Bonnie’s reference to The Blues Brothers movie is not uncommon. Another consultant of mine,
Ben Hall, who was a kid when the movie came out sites it as one of the reasons he first became
interested in blues music.

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Also, Jim says he knew a lot of blues musicians in the Lansing scene which is
typical of many fans in scene, but he also says the blues musicians nominated him as
vice president at that meeting and that he has always served on the board of CABS.
This shows that fans have an ability to achieve prominent status within the Lansing
scene. After the first interview I conducted, my first consultant Dom Piacenti, asked
me if I had talked to Jim yet. When I said no, Dom insisted that I had to talk to Jim,
because he’s the biggest blues fan in Lansing. Since Jim has been on the board of
CABS since its inception and is at more blues events within and outside the city of
Lansing per month than most musicians I know, he has a high status in the Lansing
scene even though he is not a musician. It is partly his involvement with CABS that
has created is identity as the biggest blues fan in Lansing.

I went to my first CABS event knowing that the society was part of the scene,
but not realizing how crucial a connection to the society would be to my research.
The first event I attended was the Old Town Blues Festival in Lansing in September
2008. One of my biggest goals in going to the festival was connecting with CABS.
One significant encounter that I had at the Old Town Blues Festival was with Toni
Alexander, the president of CABS. She was there the second time I stopped at the
booth and Jerry, the man working at the booth, was excited to introduce her to me.
Toni was initially my strongest connection to the Lansing blues community. As
president of CABS, Toni is in a powerful position in the blues community in Lansing.
She was intrigued by my project, and agreed to allow me to access the membership
contact list for CABS. She also demonstrated her knowledge of the membership by

recommending specific members of CABS that I should talk to. She seemed

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genuinely interested in my success, so she chose potential consultants who she
thought would have a lot to say about my questions.

The consultants to whom she directed me expressed a great deal of enthusiasm
about this project partly because I was a young graduate student studying the blues.
For instance, Bonnie saw this as an opportunity to express her concerns about what
she sees as a generation gap in the blues audience. Bonnie commented positively that
I, as a relatively young person, would take an interest in blues saying that, “That is

the one thing that does worry me to some degree, that there aren’t enough young

people who know about blues.”162

Everyone on the board of CABS was also interested and excited that I, a
young person, would be interested in the blues. On October 8, 2008, I went to the
CABS meeting where I got to meet and speak briefly with the CABS board members.
Three of the board members I met were Lansing-based blues guitarists Bill Malone,
S.J. “Frog” Forgey, and Stan Budzynski. The other members that I met were Jennifer
(Jen) Beggs and Jim Flynn. Jen is the youngest member of the board and is not a
musician. This meeting was the first time I met Jim. I was very nervous about
attending the meeting as I was not sure if the board members would be interested in
my project, but when I arrived I soon realized that there was no need to be nervous.
Toni greeted me warmly and introduced me to the rest of the board who were very
friendly. Bill, a tall, middle-aged, black guitarist hugged everyone when he arrived,
including me. When Toni passed out the agendas, I found that I was the first agenda

item. I was given the first few minutes of the meeting to explain my project. They

 

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were all enthusiastic about my project and were willing to help in any way they could.
For instance, before I left, Bill hugged me again and told me that I could contact him
for help if I ever needed it.

One of the board’s main functions is to plan CABS events that happen
throughout the year. CABS hosts events and fundraisers annually such as the Lansing
Blues Challenge which is the local round of a national contest; the Old Town Blues
Festival which is held in Lansing’s Old Town neighborhood every September; Blues
on the Square, a summer tradition of blues music on Washington Square near the
State Capital area of Lansing, and Breakin’ Bread With the Blues, a yearly fundraiser
and food drive held around Thanksgiving. These events are planned and organized
by the board of CABS and run by volunteers.

Although CABS events are attended by people who are not members of the
blues society, the events are places where blues society members go to interact with
other blues society members. There are some members of the blues society who I
have seen at CABS-sponsored events, but have not seen at the other blues shows in
Lansing. In this way individuals who appear to attend CABS events exclusively are
in their own sub-community in the larger Lansing blues scene, a phenomenon Emma
Baulch has described as a scenic fragment.163

There is one particularly interesting group within this scenic fragment. This
group of women who attend most CABS events together is known to CABS members
as the Dancing Ladies. The Dancing Ladies are a group of six middle aged women

who attend blues events together. Many of the consultants I have spoken to so far are

 

163 Emma Baulch, Making Scenes: Reggae, Punk, and Death Metal in [9905 Bali, (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2007), 178-179.

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aware of this group of women and they can be found at a lot of CABS events in
Lansing. They can always be found on or near the dance floor; having danceable
music seems to be the most important part of these events for them. One of the
ladies, Darren, uses a cane when she walks. At Breakin’ Bread With the Blues, a
CABS event at the Green Door in November 2008, she informed me that she has to
sit out some songs, but that she would “be up dancing as much as [she] could” which
illustrates how important it is to Darren to dance with her friends. I danced with the
ladies at this event and between the times we were on the floor dancing, I spoke with
Darren at length. She told me that she used to attend blues events with her sister.
After her sister got married, she met the other Dancing Ladies at a CABS event and
now always attends blues events with at least one of the other women. This small
group within the scenic fragment of CABS serves a significant social function for
Darren, a single woman. Through CABS she has found a group of friends that share
a common interest which is not only listening to, but also dancing to blues music.
Other small scenic fragments within the larger scenic fragment of the blues society
and the Lansing blues scene include the CABS board members and the bands which
are in the society who are also distinct from bands which are not in the society.
Part 4: The Green Door and Lansing blues

The Green Door Blues Bar and Grill is on Michigan Avenue in Lansing,
Michigan. Lansing journalist William Pettit wrote of the bar,

Lansing's east side has much to recommend it, including Lansing's

quintessential experience, the Green Door on a Friday or Saturday night. N o

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place provides the vibration, the gritty character, the blues, and the disparate

and eclectic qualities of what Lansing truly is than the Green Door.'64

The East Side neighborhood is not far from the eastern border of Lansing. This puts

the bar quite close to East Lansing, Michigan, the home of Michigan State University.

The bar is not a student hangout, however. There are several bars very close to
campus in East Lansing, so few students journey to Lansing to go to the bar. East
Lansing bars cater to college students with drink specials and music, recorded or
occasionally live, that differs from bar to bar depending on the crowd. The Green
Door, on the other hand, attracts a crowd of mostly Lansing residents, and the bar is
like Mugshot in Detroit in that some people come to the bar to listen to music and
some come to hang out. Ben is not shy in his opinions regarding the differences
between the live music scenes in Lansing and East Lansing explaining that while
finding live music is difficult in either place, this is especially true in East Lansing.
There’s no place to hear live original music [in East Lansing]. There’s no
place. Maybe occasionally from one of the coffee shops, but there’s no place
to hear live original music. Rick’s has a bunch of crappy, shitty cover bands

every night of the week. How many times can you listen to “Sweet Caroline”,

. 165
seriously?

The crowd at the Green Door is different each night of the week and usually
corresponds with which band is playing that night. The patrons at the Green Door are

generally older than college age, but the average age depends on which night of the

 

164 William Pettit, “Lansing’s East Side is Partially a Fable”, Lansing City Pulse, July 18, 2006. Pettit
wrote this article to dispute the idea that Lansing was a bohemian enclave, and instead argued that the
East Side, like all Lansing neighborhoods, is essentially a working class neighborhood.

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week it is. The night that I have most often been at the Green Door is Sunday. This
is the night that the band Bad Gravy hosts a weekly jam session and many local blues
fans swear is the best place to hear blues in Lansing. Many times on Sunday nights I
would be the youngest person in the bar at 23 years old and the oldest people were
men in their 705. The average age of patrons on Sundays is approximately 40.
However, on Monday nights when the popular local band Steppin’ In It has their
weekly gig, the average age of the audience is closer to 30. On the other nights of the
week, the average age of patrons varies more from week to week as there is a
different band playing every night.

Another important point about the Green Door is that it is one of the only two
venues in Lansing that has live music seven nights a week. The only other bar that
boasts music every night is Mac’s where the crowd is generally college age and the
musical selection changes from night to night; at Mac’s they might feature folk on
one night and metal on another. In addition to marketing itself as place for live
music, the Green Door bills itself as a blues bar — most notably the word “blues” was
added to the name of the bar at some point in the 19905 as it is now called the Green

Door Blues Bar and Grill instead of the Green Door Lounge — but not every patron

agrees with this assertion.166 Ben expresses a sentiment that blues fans have about
the Green Door: that the bar always features blues on Sundays and Thursdays, but
only sometimes on Tuesday, Wednesday, and the weekend. Ben told me he thought

the Door was not really a blues bar and elaborated further:

 

I66 . . .
Some other ways the Green Door announces itself as a blues bar: the Sign outsrde the Green Door

includes a character that is a raccoon playing a guitar; there is a CABS banner on the wall right next to
the stage; advertisements in CABS newsletters that call the Green Door, Lansing’s Home for the
Blues.

89

 

I know they call themselves Lansing’s Home for the Blues, but they only

probably have blues there three nights a week. I guess they are Lansing’s

Home for the Blues, because nobody else is.‘67

Ben is drawing a distinction between the Green Door and blues clubs that he goes to
when he is Chicago like Kingston Mines. He feels the clubs in Chicago are really
blues bars, because they have music that he classifies as blues every night of the
week. I should point out that in addition to being a blues musician and fan, Ben is
also a DJ on the Michigan State University radio station with a Wednesday night
Show called Accidental Blues. Ben knows much about blues history from doing
research for the show and much about the Lansing scene from interviewing local
musicians on the Show.

While Jim and Ben both mentioned that some bands that play at the Green
Door are not blues bands, the weekly Sunday night blues jam session is considered a
blues night by everyone I’ve spoken to. The blues jam session on Sunday night is
well attended by blues musicians and blues fans in Lansing. This is largely because
of the musicians in Bad Gravy, the band that hosts the session. The band is a
collaboration of musicians who are each in different Lansing area bands in addition to
Bad Gravy. For instance, the harmonica and trumpet player Andy Wilson is in
Steppin’ In It and Those Delta Rhythm Kings. The instrumentation of Bad Gravy is
harmonica, guitar, piano/organ, bass, drums, and vocals. Although Andy usually
sings a few tunes at the beginning of the set, he always introduces the main vocalist,

Freddy Cunningham, as the star of the show. Freddy fronts the band Root Doctor, a

 

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Lansing-based band that has a national following which makes him the most famous
member of the Sunday night jam band. Freddy is also the only African American in
the band; all of the other band members are white.

The Bad Gravy jam sessions are a time when other local blues musicians,
some professionals and some amateurs, are invited to come on stage with professional
Lansing blues musicians. The band plays their first set beginning somewhere
between 9:00 and 9:30 depending on when all the members arrive. After a 10 to 20
minute break, musicians from the audience start to sit in. An amateur musician who
is a fixture of Sunday nights at the Green Door is a young man in his late 205 or early
305 named Buster. Buster is a harmonica player who has been coming to the Green
Door for a couple years to sit in on Sunday nights. Although he usually comes into
the bar alone, he is usually joined by several men in their 605 who know him well. If
Buster is the only harmonica player in the bar besides Andy he will typically play for
all of the second set. When Buster is playing it appears that there is no one on stage
enjoying himself more than him. According to Ben, Buster has only played
harmonica for two years and has come a very long way in that period of time. Other
musicians around Buster’s age who I have seen sit in at the Green Door several times
include Ben, who plays harmonica and is bi-racial; Twyla Fleming, an African
American female vocalist; and Big Willie, a white guitarist who is in several Lansing
area bands. All of the musicians who sit on the board of the Capital Area Blues
Society — Stan Budzynski, Bill Malone, and Frog Forgey - play at the Sunday night
jam session from time to time, as well. The people who attend the Green Door to sit

in are a combination of professional and amateur musicians who form their own

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scenic fragment of the Lansing blues scene. Most musicians who Sit in on Sunday
nights do it on a weekly or almost weekly basis, so most of them know each other and
have formed friendships with each other. Most of them are also friends with the
musicians in Bad Gravy who they will talk to on breaks.

A weekly blues jam session at the Green Door is not a new idea. Jim explains
that there was a weekly jam session at the Green Door a decade ago and explains
more about the Green Door in the 19805 and 19905:

They’ve had blues [at the Green Door] off and on for damn near 20 years.

They had some really good bands that played there. They were kind of the

house bands a long time ago, the Blue Avenue Delegates and that band there

back in the late 805, early 905, they played there regularly on a Monday night
and people would be standing there at the front door and back door waiting to
get in there on Monday nights, years ago.168
The Green Door has been around for many years and was not always a blues venue.
Prior to the 19905, the bar was called the Green Door Lounge, not the Green Door
Blues Bar and Grill, and the Sign at the back door of the bar still reads “Green Door
Lounge.” Jim remembers this and says,

Even though they weren’t a blues venue, they always ran great bands through

there, I mean, really good bands. That’s how that place got so popular and

that’s why it’s still probably, I would say, the most popular place in Lansing

 

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as far as, you can go in there and hear a good band. If a band plays in there

that’s not a very good band chances are they ain’t coming back. 169
Although the Green Door is not the only place to hear blues in Lansing, it is the only
place that has blues on more than one night of the week. This means that if a blues
band has a bad Show at the Green Door or cannot get in to play at the Green Door, the
band will have a difficult time finding a venue in Lansing. This is but another
example of how important the Green Door is to the blues scene in Lansing. While the
Green Door and the other venues I have discussed are crucial components of the
scenes in Lansing and Detroit providing places for musicians to play and fans to listen
to music, I believe it is important to note that these businesses would suffer without
the existence of blues scenes. Thus, there is a reciprocal relationship between these
businesses and blues musicians and audiences.

When I began my fieldwork in September 2008, I was initially very
apprehensive about talking to the peOple I met in the blues scenes in Lansing and
Detroit. I thought that they would think I didn’t know enough about blues music to
be asking questions about their interest in it. As I spent more time in these scenes and
began doing my interviews, I realized that this was never going to be a problem. I
have suggested that people come together in blues scenes not only because they like
blues music, but because they feel they are welcoming communities where they meet
musicians and fans that they like spending time with. Bonnie explains her feelings

about people in blues scenes this way:

 

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I mean, they’re more down to earth, more real, more accepting. Like blues
artists, I would say 99% of them are very accessible. Absolutely amazingly

accepting whereas you don’t find that with any other music genre, I don’t

think. I mean, I can’t tell you how many of them are friends of mine.170

Dom explains his interest in the scene this way:
Blues events are an awful lot of fun and I think the key to it, though, is getting
people exposed... Have you ever noticed if you go to a good blues concert or
see a good blues band, have you ever noticed people sitting at a table (knocks
out a beat on the table), you know, they're getting into it? They're tapping
their foot, they're banging the table, they're bouncing their beer bottle... To
me, there's nothing like a really good shuffle beat to get people excited.

There's just something about it. It's hard to describe, but I think that's the

171
essence of the blues.

In reading Dom’s description of the essence of the blues, I recall the idea that
fascinated me about blues in the first place: the idea that there might be such a thing
as a blues feeling. It is probably too romantic to say that the notes and rhythms in a
blues song make musicians and audience members feel a certain emotion; to say that
romanticizes the experience like the mythical tales about the blues emerging from the
Mississippi Delta as told by writers like Oliver and Palmer or W.C. Handy’s story of
finding blues at the crossroads there romanticize history. However, the fact remains

that it is the kind of language that my consultants use to explain their thoughts about

 

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their own scenes. For instance, I asked my consultants what they thought made
someone a blues fan and Jim’s response evoked this feeling idea:
Probably I would say, in general, they’ve got the same feel for the music that
I do and, you know, like a lot of them, I don’t know if they started listening to
it as long ago as I did. A lot of my really good friends are musicians. I’m not
a musician myself. I’m kind of jealous of those guys. I can’t even
whistle. . .The vast majority of musicians I know are blues musicians and their

first love is blues. It’s like just the feel of it, they’re just really into it, too.

It’s kind of hard to totally explain itm
Like all music, hearing blues music and being at blues events has various effects on
people from different background and walks of life and can have various effects on
the same person in a given day. I am not familiar enough with cognitive psychology
to say whether or not one can measure how a piece of music makes a person feel at a
given moment in time. However, I do know that people in Lansing and Detroit see
the blues as energetic and lively, that they value people putting emotion into their
playing, and that they keep going to blues events because they like the way being in

the community makes them feel.

 

2 . .
Intervrew With the author.

95

Conclusion
In his book History of the Blues, Francis Davis made a comment that blues
fans, especially those who write about the blues, go to blues clubs, not for the musical

experience they hope to have, but to remember the music and musicians who used to

be there.173 In some cases this means that blues fans will miss the blues scenes in
their own cities while they go to look at clubs where famous musicians who were
born in the Mississippi Delta used to play. In going to “Stare at things that aren’t
there anymore” many blues fans seem ignorant of the scenes that are still active,
especially scenes that are not in the places that blues history says were most
significant. ' 74

In writing a historiography of blues, I learned that it was the Delta scene from
the 19305 and 19405 that the writers thought was most significant. This is not only an
aesthetic preference, but a preference for the past. In his study of African popular

music, Waterman said that it is tempting to read contemporary categories into the

past, especially if previous scholars have done so.175 Thus, Since blues historians like
Oliver and Palmer developed a strong preference for the traditional Delta blues style
that they heard played by older musicians over the contemporary urban blues scenes,
they projected this into the past and said the Delta blues had always been the best.
Waterman went on to say that if we do not question this type of view presented by

previous scholars we “may distort our analyses not only of the past but also of

 

'73 Davis, The History OfIhe 31““: 5'
174 .
Ibid.

175 Christopher Waterman, “Our Tradition is a Very Modern Tradition.” Ethnomusicology 4, 1990,
368.

96

contemporary sociomusical practices.”176 This phenomenon of reverence for blues
music of the past distorts the audience’s view of contemporary music and influences
which contemporary artists are successful.

This type of thinking causes people to think blues scenes have disappeared or
were never present in the areas outside of the blues centers of the Delta and Chicago.
Blues scenes in cities like Detroit and Lansing have been around for many years and
while they may have changed since they began just as the Chicago scene has
changed, these scenes remain active. It is not only the scenes in Chicago or
Mississippi but all live blues scenes that keep the genre alive. As David Whiteis
wrote when discussing what it takes for a band to succeed in neighborhood clubs,
“Music must be an invocation of life in the present tense, an emotional and often

physical call to action — not an artifact... Roots are only strong when they nurture

something that’s alive and growing.” 177 In short, live music scenes are crucial for
the music to continue developing.

Although they are influenced by past scenes, fans and musicians in Michigan
have created blues scenes that are not mere imitations of Mississippi juke joints or
Chicago clubs. They have created Michigan blues communities in specific bars on
specific nights that maintained the character of the cities they were located in.
Mugshot is a working class bar in an East Side Detroit neighborhood that is a local
blues scene on Monday night. Callahan’s is a music venue in a north Detroit suburb
that features out of town entertainment for an audience that consists of Detroit Blues

Society members, many of them white. The Green Door Blues Bar and Grill is

 

176 Waterman, “Our Tradition is a Very Moden Tradition”, 368.
'77 Whiteis, Chicago Blues, 280.

97

somewhere between a neighborhood bar and a place that is strictly a music venue.
This is perfect for the people that come to the bar some of whom are working class
people who come to unwind after work and others of whom are blues lovers.

In the end, two things matter most; that Michigan blues scenes are recognized
for what they are — vibrant scenes with strong local support - and that more scholars
need to be willing to examine views of history that we have come to accept as
absolute fact. Scenes in Detroit and Lansing have been continuously active despite a
persistent center-periphery narrative that has never allowed them much room in blues
history books or much cultural capital and the history of urban renewal which
destroyed the scene in Detroit and may have resulted in a lack of an early blues scene
in Lansing. I have only scratched the surface of blues scenes in Michigan, and I
believe that the Delta and Chicago centered narrative deserves more challenges in
face of this evidence. Blues scenes exist in the two Michigan cities I have studied,
and there are many other blues scenes around the country that deserve more attention

than they have gotten from past scholars.

98

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