ARTIST | SONG | ALBUM |
---|---|---|
Lonnie Johnson | Man Killing Broad | Lonnie Johnson Vol. 1 1937-1940 |
Bill Gaither | Bloody Eyed Woman | Bill Gaither Vol. 4 1939 |
Whistlin' Alex Moore | Ice Pick Blues | Whistlin' Alex Moore 1929-1951 |
Walter 'Cowboy' Washington | Ice Pick Mama | Texas Seaport 1934-1937 |
Louisiana Red | Sweet Blood Call | Sweet Blood Call |
Lazy Lester | Bloodstains On The Wall | I'm A Lover Not A Fighter |
Mary Johnson | Death Cell Blues | Mary Johnson 1929-1936 |
Bessie Smith | Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair | The Complete Recordings |
Victoria Spivey | Blood Thirsty Blues | Victoria Spivey Vol. 1 1926-1927 |
Bama | Stackalee | Parchman Farm: Photographs and Field Recordings 1947-1959 |
Skip James | 22-20 Blues | Complete Early Recordings |
Mississippi John Hurt | Got The Blues (Can't Be Satisfied) | Avalon Blues: The Complete 1928 OKeh Recordings |
Charles 'Speck' Petrum | Gambler's Blues | Charlie ''Specks'' McFadden 1929-1937 |
Blind Blake | Playing Policy Blues | All The Published Sides |
Doctor Clayton | Roaming Gambler | Doctor Clayton And His Buddy 1935-1947 |
Lucille Bogan | They Ain't Walking No More | Barrelhouse Mamas |
Memphis Minnie | Down In The Alley | Memphis Minnie Vol. 3 1937 |
Sara Martin | Down At The Razor Ball | Sara Martin Vol. 3 1924-1925 |
Washboard Sam | Razor Cuttin' Man | Washboard Sam Vol. 1 1935-1936 |
Blind Willie McTell | Razor Ball | Atlanta Twelve String |
Walter Roland | 45 Pistol Blues | Walter Roland Vol. 2 1934-1935 |
Leroy Carr | Shinin' Pistol | Whiskey Is My Habit, Women Is All I Crave |
Blind Boy Fuller | Pistol Slapper Blues | Remastered 1935-1938 |
Will Shade | She Stabbed Me With An Ice Pick | Memphis Jug Band Associates & Alternate Takes 1927-1930 |
Black Boy Shine | Ice Pick And Pistol Woman Blues | Black Boy Shine & Black Ivory King 1936-1937 |
Pat Hare | I'm Gonna Murder My Baby | Sun Records - The Blues Years 1950-1956 |
Roy Brown | Butcher Pete | Pay Day Jump: The Later Sessions |
Geeshie Wiley | Skinny Legs Blues | Mississippi Masters |
Josie Miles | Mad Mama Blues | Josie Miles Vol. 2 1924-1935 |
Jazz Gillum | Gonna Be Some Shooting | Jazz Gillum Vol. 4 1946-1949 |
Peetie Wheatstraw | Gangster's Blues | Peetie Wheatstraw Vol. 7 1940-1941 |
Georgia Tom & Tampa Red | Crow Jane Alley | Come On Mama Do That Dance |
Jim Jackson | I'm A Bad Bad Man | Jim Jackson Vol. 1 1927-1928 |
Blind Willie McTell | A To Z Blues | The Classic Years 1927–1940 |
Bertha Idaho | Down On Pennsylvania Avenue | Female Blues Singers Vol. 10 |
Georgia White | I'll Keep Sittin' On It (If I Can't Sell It) | Georgia White Vol. 2 1936-1937 |
Show Notes:
“The blues, contrary to popular conception, are not always concerned with love, razors, dice, and death," Richard Wright wrote in 1941. While that's certainly true, there are in fact a large number of blues songs that do deal with those topics. Today we feature a wide range of songs about violence and vice. The blues emerged at the turn of the century in the midst of virulent racism and violent repression. Blues musicians of the 1920's and 30's existed in a violent culture where fights were common and it was often common to carry a weapon. In the places where the blues were regularly performed in the early days, the juke joints, there was a considerable amount of violence. Memphis Minnie said that at juke joints she and her husband played they would “have to run at night when they start cutting and shooting.” The south was a virtual apartheid society enforced by "Jim Crow" restrictions, with widespread violence, including lynchings. An increased presence of the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920's contributed to an atmosphere of fear. In the South, mobs lynched many blacks for no other reason than their having acted outside the harsh social restrictions of Jim Crow. As writer Gary Buenett wrote: "The blues enabled Southern black to process the oppression they faced, but more than that, to affirm their humanity over against a system that denied that very fact. it enabled them to state the reality of the troubles, powerlessness, dread, and despair, but at the same time assert their essential humanness through expressions of rage, humor, courage, and of course, sexuality."
Today's lurid title is courtesy of Jazz Gillum from his 1949 number "Gonna Be Some Shooting." The song is a cover of Willie "61" Blackwell's 1941 song "Machine Gun Blues" and was modified and refashioned by Sunnyland Slim as "Johnson Machine Gun." Gillum had several songs filled with violent imagery including "I'm Gonna Take My Rap" ("I'm gonna take my pistol/And cock it in my baby's face/Gonna let some graveyard, baby be your hiding place") and "Can't Trust Myself" ("I'm gonna buy myself a pistol/I'm gonna hang it to my side/I'm going to join the gangsters/People I'm gonna live a reckless life") among others. Gillum was himself a victim of violence. He was murdered in 1966 during a street argument. Echoing Jazz Gillum, several decades later is the harrowing "Sweet Blood Call" by Louisiana Red:
I have a hard time missing you baby, with my pistol in your mouth
You may be thinking 'bout going north, but your brains are staying south
Today's show is filled with guns, knives, razors and even ice picks. One of the more famous gun songs is Skip James' "22-20 Blues" which may have been inspired by the success of the song “44 blues” recorded by Roosevelt Sykes in 1929 as "Forty- Four Blues" and the following year by Little Brother Montgomery as “Vicksburg Blues.” In 1936 Robert Johnson covered the song as “32-20 Blues.”
You talk about your forty-four-forty, buddy it'll do very well
But my thirty-two-twenty, Lord is a burning hell
Woman were the target of much of the violence as evidenced in numerous other songs including Leroy Carr's "Shinin' Pistol" ("I'm going to get me a shiny pistol with a long shiny barrel/I'm going to ramble this town over until I find my girl") and Blind Boy Fuller's "Pistol Slapper Blues" ("And I feel like snapping my pistol in your face/Let some brownskin woman be here to take your place"). Walter Roland's "45 Pistol Blues", on the other hand, is for protection when he heads down to a part of town that must be very close to the well known Tin Pan Alley or maybe Crow Jane Alley:
I'm going over to Third Alley, Lord but I'm going to carry my .45 (2x)
Because you know ain't many men go there and come back alive
They will shoot you and cut you, Lord they will knock you down
Lord, they will shoot you and cut you, Lord they will knock you down
And you can ask anybody ain't that the baddest place in town
Mens carry .38s, womens carry their razors too (2x)
Razors, despite Richard Wright's protest, crop up quite a bit in blues. There was Washboard Sam's "Razor Cuttin' Man", Edith Wilson's "Rules and Regulations 'Signed Razor Jim'", Jazz Gillum's "Long Razor Blues", Perline Ellison's "Razor Totin' Mama", Helen Gross' "Bloody Razor Blues" as well as a school of related songs from the pre-blues era. Around the turn of the century there was the "bully song" or more formally "The Bully of the Town" or "Looking for the Bully." There were several songs published with 'Bully" in the title around this period. Paul Oliver noted that the song "reinforced the stereotypes of the razor-totin', watermelon-suckin', chicken-stealin' 'nigger' of that period." The core of the story is an altercation, usually with a razor, between the bully and a rival with the action usually happening at a dance or ball. In the blues era several songs drawn on these earlier sources including Sara Martin's "Down At The Razor Ball" (1925), Blind Willie McTell's "Razor Ball" (1930) and Washboard Sam's "Down At The Bad Man's Hall" (1941). The most famous related song, however, is the Willie Dixon penned "Wang Dang Doodle" (1960) which draws its inspiration from the Sara Martin number. Another razor song is "A To Z Blues" which has the protagonist literally carving the entire alphabet in the victim's body. The song was recorded by Butterbeans & Susie, Josie Miles, Blind Willie McTell and Charley Jordan under the title "Cutting My ABCs."
Ice picks are not something that immediately comes to mind as a weapon (does anybody gets ice delivered to their home anymore?) but they crop up in several songs: Whistlin' Alex Moore "Ice Pick Blues", Walter 'Cowboy' Washington "Ice Pick Mama" ("Every time I meet Roberta she's got an ice pick in her hand/And all frowned up, an wanna kill some poor, poor man"), Will Shade "She Stabbed Me With An Ice Pick" and Black Boy Shine "Ice Pick And Pistol Woman Blues."
Domestic violence is a common theme in many early blues. That being said, there were no shortage of woman who sang songs that turned the tables on the men. Among those featured today are Mary Johnson's "Death Cell Blues" ("I killed my man last year, lord, the man I really love/He did not treat me right, now he's with the good lord above"), Victoria Spivey's "Blood Thirsty Blues" and Bessie Smith's "Send Me To The 'Lectric Chair":
Judge you wanna hear my plea
Before you open up your court
But I don't want no sympathy
'Cause I'm done, cut my good man's throat
Spivey had several lurid titles including “Blood Thirsty Blues”, “Murder in the First Degree” and “Blood Hound Blues.” Okeh Records ran a a striking newspaper advertisement for "Bloodthirsty Blues." The ad is laid out like an authentic news report with graphic illustration and eye-catching titles such as “I Have Killed my Man”, “Never Seen So Much Blood” and “Bloodthirsty Woman Confesses!” The lyrics are equally sensational:
Blood, blood, blood look at all that blood
Blood, blood look at all that blood
Yes I killed my man
A lowdown good for nothing cuss
I told him blood was in my eyes
And still he wouldn’t listen to me
Bill Gaither used similar imagery in his "Bloody Eyed Woman" cut more than a decade later. Spivey didn't have the market corned on that kind of imagery as evidenced in Geeshie Wiley's "Skinny Leg Blues":
I’m gonna cut your throat babe, gonna look down in your face (2x)
Aaaaaaaaa, gonna look down in your face
I’m gonna let some lonesome graveyard be your restin’ place
Josie Miles had an apocalyptic vision in "Mad Mama Blues" from 1924:
Wanna set the world on fire
That is my one mad desire
I’m a devil in disguise
Got murder in my eyes
Now I could see blood runnin’
Through the streets (2x)
Could be everybody
Layin’ dead right at my feet
As Angela Y. Davis wrote: "The performance of the classic blues women-especially Bessie Smith-were one of the few cultural spaces in which a tradition of public discourse on male violence had been previously established. …The blues women of the 1920s…fail to respect the taboo of speaking on speaking publicly about domestic violence …Women's blues suggest emergent feminist insurgency in that they unabashedly name the problem of male violence and so usher it out of the shadows of domestic life where society had kept it hidden and beyond public or political scrutiny." Daphne Duval Harrison has noted that women's blues in the 1920s "introduced a new, different model of black women-more assertive, sexy, sexually aware, independent, realistic, complex, alive. …They saw a world that did not protect the sanctity of black womanhood, as espoused in the bourgeois ideology; only white white or middle or upper-class women were protected by it. They saw and experienced injustice as jobs they held were snatched away when white women refused to work with them or white men returned from war to reclaim them. They pointed out the pain of sexual and physical abuse and abandonment."
Other vices covered today include prostitution and gambling. The most well known prostitution song is probably "Tricks Ain't Walking No More." The song is a prostitute’s lament due to a dwindling supply of customers or "tricks." Lucille Bogan recorded this song three times during 1930 including today's version "They Ain't Walking No More." Curley Weaver, Buddy Moss, Kid Coley and Memphis Minnie, among others, recorded versions of the song. Othe songs sharing this theme include Memphis Minnie's "Down In Alley" ("Met a man, asked me did I want to pally/Yes, baby, let's go down in the alley"), Georgia White's " I'll Keep Sittin' On It (If I Can't Sell It)" and Bertha Idaho's "Down On Pennsylvania Avenue" about Baltimore’s seedy side where you "can’t tell the he’s from the she’s."
Now if you want good lovin’, and want it cheap
Just drop around about the middle of the week
When the broads is broke and can’t pay rent
Get good lovin’ boys for fifteen cents
You can get it every night on Pennsylvania Avenue
Gambling features in numerous songs with quite a few dealing with playing policy. Policy is an illegal numbers game that was hugely popular at the end of the nineteenth and in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Basically you'd pick three numbers and hope they hit. The name comes from the practice of allowing bettors to make an “insurance policy” bet on tomorrow's numbers to offset potential losses, a gambler could make a policy bet that his ticket would come up blank insuring he would get something back on a losing ticket. Eventually the entire game came to be called policy. "Numbers, numbers 'bout to drive me mad/Thinkin' about the money that I should have had" sings Blind Blake on "Playing Policy Blues."
While we don't touch on it much today, the blues has a number of "bad man" ballads about violent men and outlaws like John Henry, Railroad Bill, Frankie and Stagolee. Recorded in Parchman Farm in 1959, we hear Bama sing "Stackalee." The song about the murder of Billy Lyons by "Stag" Lee Shelton in St. Louis, Missouri at Christmas, 1895. The song was first published in 1911, and was first recorded in 1923. Long Cleve Reed and Harvey Hull recorded "Original Stack O'Lee Blues" in 1927, Furry Lewis cut "Billy Lyons And Stack O'Lee" the same year and Mississippi John Hurt recorded a version in 1928.