Boogie Man (14 page)

There is more. They are forbidden to travel in the same rail carriages and streetcars as descendants of the former masters, to eat in the same restaurants, to drink from the same fountains, and
relieve themselves in the same toilets. Even when they gain the right to serve in the armed forces, they may not serve in the same units. They receive rare and minimal promotion, are discouraged
from learning to operate more complex equipment, generally on the grounds that their intelligence is unequal to the complexity of such tasks. They are given the most menial tasks away from the
battlefield and the most dangerous duties upon it. They are required to fight and die in the nation’s wars, ostensibly to protect the basic principles of freedom and democracy at home and
abroad, but they see precious little of either in the nation which is nominally theirs. In their nation’s cities (with very rare exceptions), even those few who could afford to do so are
barred from living in the same areas as the master race. In the areas designated for them, they are charged higher rents for worse accommodation. Even when they are permitted access to the same
jobs as members of the master race, they receive lower wages and infrequent promotion. It is considered just about permissible for a male of the master race to have sexual relations with a female
of the People, provided that he pays for the privilege in cash and does nothing so foolish or self-incriminating as to form any kind of emotional attachment to her. Sexual relationships between
males of the People and females of the
master race are unacceptable under any circumstances. Even the unsupported allegation that a male of the People has made a sexual approach
to a female of the master race is a capital offence: formally in some parts of the country, informally in those regions which are considered to be more enlightened. In this context, eye contact,
however brief, is considered adequate evidence of a sexual approach. Any attempt by any former slave, or descendant thereof, to advance his or her circumstances is mocked or blocked. Any expression
of anger, discontent or dissatisfaction with their lot is blamed on the activities of ‘outside agitators’; the descendants of the slaves are deemed insufficiently sensitive or
intelligent to realise when they are being ill-treated without some form of external prompting.

Nevertheless, many succeed even against such concerted opposition. Former slaves and the children of former slaves enter the arts and the professions. They migrate from the rural regions, the
scene of their centuries-long humiliation, to the bigger cities where discrimination needs to be enforced by law rather than simply occurring as custom. They are mocked and caricatured in the
masters’ theatres, in which they are not permitted to perform, and the masters’ newspapers, for which they are never employed to write; they thus have no means of redress and no forum
in which to state the case for their defence. Against all the odds, authors and poets, musicians and athletes, philosophers and scientists, dentists and accountants, soldiers and entrepreneurs,
activists and leaders all begin to emerge. And all of the People have learned, with their mothers’ milk, how to survive in two worlds. One is the world of the master race, who control the
laws and the money; the homes and the jobs; the frames of reference and the rules of the game. The other is their own world, which they themselves have created, and recreate daily, from scraps: the
scraps which they managed to retain from their original, faraway homelands, and the scraps tossed them by the master race. The world of the former owners is the one in which they are compelled to
exist; their own world is the one in which they actually
live
. They apply their creative skills, the only bequest from their ancestors which they have ever been allowed
to keep, to the task of reinvention. Stripped of their traditional resources, they generate new ones; force-fed another’s culture, they transform it to meet their own needs. Barred from the
institutions of the master race, they institute their own. And from the materials and implements of the master race’s music, they create their own. In one place – a comparatively
sophisticated and cosmopolitan urban centre – the discarded military-band instruments of one of the now-departed minor occupying powers stimulates the creation of one kind of new music. In
another area – harsher, more rural and vastly less tolerant – something else emerges.

Somewhere around the beginning of the twentieth century, what we now call the blues began to be heard in the Southern part of mainland America. It was a scion of a whole extended family of
musics: the field holler and the ballad, the hymn and the rag, the vaudeville showpiece and the work-song and the chain-gang shanty. In the blues, we hear the raw materials of the master
race’s music filtered through the tonalities, textures, rhythms, intonations and agenda which centuries of brainwashing and intimidation had failed to eradicate from the collective
consciousness of a People inadvertently brought into being by abduction and slavery. It was sung on back porches and in taverns, in work camps and in urban theatres, in tents and jails. It was
played on whatever instruments were available: here on pianos and trumpets, there on drums and mandolins, elsewhere on fiddles and saxophones and, in the South, most of all on the guitar, an
instrument which – in a singular and felicitous example of cultural synchronicity – was ready for the blues around the time that the blues was ready for the guitar. Slowly evolving from
a series of families of stringed instruments, the guitar had eventually divorced itself from the mandolin family by abandoning the notion
of a variable number of
‘courses’ (sets of paired strings) in favour of six single strings, tuned (from low strings to high) E-A-D-G-B-E. This instrument emerged in France and Italy during the last years of
the eighteenth century, but revealed its full potential most dramatically in Spain, where gifted luthiers refined and strengthened its structure and, through the medium of flamenco, gypsy musicians
began to explore its expressive range.

By contrast, its earliest years in America recalled the courtly tradition of the instruments which were the guitar’s immediate predecessors, rather than the flamboyant
duende
of the
flamenco guitarists. The typical American guitar of the nineteenth century was a small-bodied, short-necked, gut-stringed instrument: fragile of construction, low in volume, easy on the fingers and
essentially delicate in nature. It was therefore considered to be a ladies’ instrument, ideally suited for boudoir and parlour; a very different beast from the ‘special rider’, an
itinerant Southern bluesman’s powerful, resilient travelling companion. The transformation of the genteel ‘parlour guitar’ into something that could travel unscathed in a boxcar
and still holler like a bird the next night came at the hands of a couple of innovators and a host of popularisers. In the early 1890s, Orville Gibson applied principles derived from
violin-building – principally a carved, arched top and specially tooled steel strings – to his guitars; by 1900, the C.F. Martin company (founded in the 1830s by C.F. Martin himself, a
recent immigrant from Germany) had combined Gibson’s steel strings with the reinforced necks and bodies which they had been developing for their gut-string models since the 1830s. The result
was a flat-top guitar sturdy enough to take steel strings: a template for the majority of acoustic guitars constructed since. Other major luthiers followed, and so did a host of mass-production
houses who flooded the nation with cheap but highly serviceable guitars. Thousands of customers who weren’t fortunate enough to live in a town which
could support its own
music store ordered guitars made by Stella and Harmony from the mail-order catalogues of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward: in 1908, you could pay anything between $1.89 and $28.15, and have
yourself an instrument. To be precise, a new instrument: fundamentally related to an older one, but essentially an instrument which had never before existed; exactly what was required in order to
conjure into existence a music which had never before existed.

Were it at all possible to rob a human being of absolutely everything that makes someone human, to transform a human being into nothing more than a dumb beast of burden, the
aforementioned treatment would have done it. What the blues tells us is that humanity is indestructible. When everything that can possibly be taken away is indeed taken away, the blues is
what’s left: the raw, irreducible core of the human soul.

The first known account of the music we now call Delta blues is a description, by the pianist, composer and entrepreneur W.C. Handy, of a guitarist whom he encountered while waiting for a train
in a Mississippi railroad station in 1903. It has been frequently quoted, and quite rightfully so: it is perhaps the first truly significant American cultural signpost of the new century, so
– with your indulgence – here it is again.

Virtually everything Handy tells us has a specific significance. First of all, he notes the guitarist’s obvious signs of destitution. The travelling bluesman was the poet and entertainer
of an underclass within the underclass. Delta people were considered hicks and peasants by the more educated and sophisticated blacks who had established themselves in the cities; and within those
rural communities the bluesman was, in turn, frowned upon by the upwardly mobile. Specifically, he was hated and despised by the black churches, who believed his trade to be the Devil’s
Music, a living reminder of all that evil African stuff they were supposed to have left behind as part of their painful induction into the social mainstream. With his workshy ways, his never-ending
perambulations, his bawdy, earthy songs and his fatal attraction to normally respectable women, he was an outlaw, a virtual pariah. Even when a bluesman was popular and successful, with a smart
suit on his back, rings on his fingers and a fistful of money to buy a round of drinks, rather than poverty-stricken and ragged like Handy’s avatar, he was still a virtual out law among the
devout and respectable. Maybe our faceless, nameless vagrant was a professional musician down on his luck, waiting for transport to somewhere offering richer pickings to an itinerant entertainer;
or maybe he was just a working man on his way to where the work was – to a levee camp, a construction project, or simply day labour on a plantation or farm – whiling away the time with
a meditation on his circumstances.

Then Handy describes the guitarist playing slide, fretting his instrument with a knife. Since he cites the ‘Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars’, we can presume that in this
particular case the guitar was played flat on the lap, rather than in the conventional guitarists’ position used by those who played with a glass bottleneck, or a short length of metal tube,
on one left-hand finger. Nevertheless, while the
technique of slide or bottleneck guitar may owe something to the touring Hawaiian ensembles so popular in the late 1880s and
’90s, the sub stance and content was an unmistakable African retention. One traditional practice which predated the cheap mass-produced mail-order guitar – and in fact survived well
into the mid-twentieth century among those for whom even an instrument costing a buck eighty-nine was an inaccessible extravagance – was the trick of nailing a length of wire to a barn wall
and using a piece of glass or metal to change the pitch. Known as a ‘diddley-bow’, such contrivances provided a first experience of plucked-string instruments for many a wannabe
guitarist, including the young John Lee Hooker and B.B. King. Under the influence of the slide or the hand-bent string, the rigid, tempered European scale melted to reveal all the hidden places
between the notes: the precise, chiming instrument giving forth a liquid African cry.

If we were doing this as a TV movie, or if we had any other motive to milk this event for spuriously augmented dramatic irony, we could cheat by replacing that nameless guitarist with someone
with mythic resonance of his own. Charley Patton, the Father of Delta Blues his own self, for instance; or a still more enigmatic figure, like the mysterious, unrecorded Henry Sloan, the bard of
Dockery’s Plantation, from whom Patton had learned; or even the sinister Ike Zinneman, who taught Robert Johnson and who, according to Robert Palmer, claimed to have learned to play the blues
by visiting graveyards at midnight. If we wanted to be
really
portentous in a Movie-of-the-Week sort of way, we could go the whole hog and speculate that it might have been Hooker’s
stepfather, Will Moore himself.

Or maybe it was just some ordinary guy who happened to play a bit of guitar, some working stiff eking out his survival on the road, someone completely unknown outside of his own community, one
forgotten drifter amongst many. Whoever he was, whatever he happened to be doing in that particular station on that particular
night, wherever he was going, whatever his story
had been, whatever fate finally overtook him along those highways and railroads on those dark spectral Mississippi nights, he stumbled into history that night and never knew it. What Handy heard
him playing, right there in the station, was undoubtedly among the first Delta blues, a music that anyone who travelled extensively through the black Delta would end up hearing sooner or later.
This was the earliest stirring of one of the most profoundly influential movements in all of the popular culture of the twentieth century, but at that time the sound was still sufficiently
localized for Handy to find it strange and unfamiliar. And if this music sounded weird to W.C. Handy, an urban black man and an experienced, gifted professional musician, just imagine what the
average turn-of-the-century white person would have made of it.