Leadbelly : The Titanic

Huddie Ledbetter's Titanic, April 1912.

Buried deep in the mythology of the doomed voyage is the story of  Shine , a fictional character who lives on through the folk traditions of the African American community. Legend has it that the only black man on board the Titanic was a laborer called  Shine — "shine" being a derogatory term for blacks. Because he worked below deck, Shine was the first to realize that the Titanic was sinking, and thus was able to escape while more than 1,500 passengers perished in the April 14, 1912, disaster. The Titanic leaving England on April 10, 1912. Most stories about Shine take place in the form of "toasts," an improvisational oral narrative popular in black communities from the 1920s to the early 1960s. A form of street poetry, toasts were usually performed in the male provinces of pool halls and street corners, and were passed on from friend to friend. Often as profane as they were misogynistic, the raplike verses reveal a different perspective on historical events. The Shine toast revels in sharing a smug satisfaction that the Titanic — a symbol of white European arrogance and affluence — sank on its maiden voyage. The irony that African Americans were not allowed to make the crossing, thus sparing their lives, inspired a wealth of jokes, toasts and ballads. Numerous verses of the various Shine toasts, particularly those that refer to the female anatomy, are not suitable for polite society. But the rhyming verses, which could last for up to 10 minutes, go something like this: Up stepped a black man from the deck below that they called Shine. Hollerin, "Captain! Captain! Don't you know? There's forty feet of water on the boiler room flo'. "The captain said, "Go back, you dirty black!  We got a thousand pumps to keep this water back." Because Shine exists solely in the oral tradition, verses would vary from teller to teller. Roger Abrahams, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania, was one of the few folklorists to record them. "Most versions of the Titanic fit into the same general pattern," he wrote in his 1963 book "Deep Down in the Jungle: Negro Narrative Folklore From the Streets of Philadelphia." There's a "prologue about the terrible day on which the ship sank; the introduction of Shine, the mythical Negro stoker on board the ship; a description of his argument with the captain about whether the ship was sinking; his jumping into the water and his amazing swimming ability described; the captain's offer of money to save him, which he refuses; the offer of the captain's wife and/or daughter of sexual relations with him, which he likewise refuses; a conversation with the shark and/or whale where he claims to be able to out-swim them (which he apparently does); and a final ironic twist in which it is mentioned that Shine swam so fast that by the time news of the sea tragedy arrived, Shine was already inebriated in some specific location. "When the news got around the world that the great Titanic had sunk, Shine was in Harlem on 125th street, damn near drunk."  Or: When all them white folks went to Heaven, Shine was in Sugar Ray's Bar drinking Seagram's Seven.' "Shine is the clever black," says Bruce Jackson, a professor of American culture at SUNY-Buffalo who traveled around the country recording toasts in the 1960s and '70s. "He's the only one on board smart enough to save his life, and he's the only one strong enough to physically swim to shore." Other toasts include stories about a barroom brawl involving Stagger Lee, or tales of the Signifying Monkey, an animal fable in which a clever monkey outwits a lion. "There are a number of toasts," Jackson says of his field recordings. "But I heard the most toasts about the Titanic. It made an enormous impact on the popular imagination of the time. People knew in the black community that it was an all-white ship -- it was part of the White Star Line. When it went down, that was not lost on the community." But the sinking of the Titanic was not solely the province of toasts. Numerous musicians, from guitarist Blind Willie Johnson to the New Lost City Ramblers, recorded songs that told the Titanic tale. Some versions, recorded as "God Moves on the Water," were widely circulated in the 1920s and focused on the spiritual aspects of the accident. The Titanic was a symbol of technological prowess, and some people saw the disaster as divine intervention. It's possible to spend hours listening to Titanic tunes in the majestically dusty archives of the Smithsonian. Ask an archivist  for Titanic songs, and they'll pull out album after album: Pink Anderson's Carolina Medicine Show Hokum & Blues, Bessie Jones and the Georgia Sea Island Singers, Mance Lipscomb. Others recall singing a song about "When That Great Ship Went Down" at summer camp. The famed blues guitarist Leadbelly also recorded a Titanic song. His lyrics included the common folklore that Jack Johnson, the black man who was world heavyweight boxing champion at the time, was denied passage on the boat. Captain, he said, "I ain't hauling no coal" Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well. "There are a lot of songs about the Titanic, in part because the story itself is so dramatic," says Anthony Seeger, curator of the Folkways Recordings archives. "Versions of songs about the Titanic have been done with rock, gospel and blues. The clarity in which class distinctions were made on the voyage really resonated in folk culture, and by singing about it Americans were able to comment on their feelings." As Leadbelly sang it:  When he heard that mighty shock, Mighta seen that man doin' the Eagle Rock Fare thee, Titanic, fare thee well.

Bigotry in Bronxville. 1946.

     My area of expertise is: some knowledge of the region Leadbelly inhabited in his younger days, along with some people that Marsha and I have personally met and interviewed. Relatives and friends of Huddie Ledbetter who give a different perspective on his life. For instance, the idea that he was some sort of itinerant bluesman, a homeless wandering minstrel with a beaten-up old guitar [ghee-tar] is countered by local impressions that he was much more of a family man, a homebody and a community member.

     

     His community was the environs of Caddo Lake spanning the Louisiana-Texas state line. His family included Ledbetters, Pughs, Promises, and members of the Shiloh (La.) Baptist Church. His closest "village" was Leigh, Texas, which hardly exists any more, since the emigration of cotton farmers to the North, or to cities like Houston and Shreveport around the time of World War II. There was once a vibrant community covering parts of Caddo Parish [around Mooringsport] and Harrison County [Marshall.]

     But for much of my information I have to rely on written sources; like most historians I scour the sources, hoping to find interesting information that ties in with my own view of the subject. For the last few years of his life, Sean Killeen gathered lots of first hand knowledge and, apart from collecting it in his Lead Belly Letter, I'm not sure what he did with it. Here is the story of Leadbelly's visit to Sarah Lawrence College.

Part 1.

     Forty minutes by train from Manhattan's Penn Station is Bronxville and Sarah Lawrence College. In the summer of 1946 Lead Belly was invited to perform there in a special summer session program. He had been living and playing in New York City for about a decade with travels to Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania, Kentucky, Louisiana and  California. In fact he had recently returned from an extended stay on the West Coast. 

     In Washington he had run up against racial discrimination and immortalized the experiences in his song "Bourgeois Blues" with the lyric "Home of the Brave, Land of the Free/I don't want to be mistreated by no bourgeoisie." In Bronxville in 1946 Lead Belly ran into the same old thing. With WWII victoriously decided by the defeat of the fascists, Bronxville was still a bourgeois town.

     Lead Belly sang and played for a small group of students attending the summer session. Harold Solomon, director of Field Work at Sarah Lawrence and a native of Georgia introduced Lead Belly who performed in front of the Karl Roesch murals on the walls of the faculty dining room and lounge in Bates Hall. Joe Papaleo, a returning veteran, was a student in the audience and remembers that he had never "heard such a pure performance as if the music he sang was being created out of the person that he was." Lead Belly's music for Papaleo was a "creative construction of the man."

     "In his performance, Lead Belly's expression was both calm and alive. His face in repose seemed heavy like a statue, more stoneish than boneish. But as soon as he started talking to us, Lead Belly lit up, counting on his words and melody to do the major defining." For Papaleo at that summer concert in Bronxville, Lead Belly was most eloquent when speaking about his 12-string guitar and recalling before each of his tunes historical legends of bygone times.

     After the concert, Harold Solomon and a group of students took Lead Belly to a popular Bronxville gathering place called The Tap. The management refused to seat Lead Belly because he was black; another public place was tried but again the same refusal of service. The group walked to the Bronx River, and under the bridge on that hot summer night in 1946, Lead Belly sang a few more songs.

     In the early fall of 1946, Harold Taylor, President of Sarah Lawrence College (1945-59) was approached by the Student Council to take steps to redress the matter of racism and discrimination in Bronxville. A Committee was established which included campus and community representatives. Local ministers were invited to join the Committee's effort; both declined.

     The students on the Committee visited every food and drink place in Bronxville explaining why the College had created the Committee. Furthermore Bronxville hospitality proprietors were advised that New York State legislation forbade refusal of service.

Part 2.

     On February 4, 1947, a few months after the summer experience, Lead Belly again played at Sarah Lawrence at a Tuesday evening College Assembly. His fee was $33. As Arthur Edelman noted in his Feb. 12th, 1947 review in the student paper, The Campus, Lead Belly's "program was very well appreciated." The people who heard him realized that "his was the kind of music you don't always hear." Edie Boorstein and Lenore Fuerst applauded Lead Belly in a letter to the editor, saying he "has a richly varied stock of material" which he uses "freely and with originality." The "splendor" of Lead Belly's guitar tone was admired as well as his exciting "expedition into the origin of the blues." Most importantly Boorstein and Fuerst recognized that by bringing Lead Belly to campus "new areas of cultural understanding" had been opened, and more remained to be done.

     After the performance, two faculty members and a few student members of the Committee, entertained Lead Belly at a Bronxville restaurant. They were all seated, and served. Lead Belly took the forty minute train trip back to New York City. 

     As Arthur Edelman had said in his concert review: "Here was authenticity backed by a driving force so imbedded with song that people couldn't help moving along with him when he sang." Edelman continued, "We also felt that here is a Negro who tries to speak for his people, too; prefacing the 'Bourgeois Blues,' Lead Belly said, 'This is a request, and a request is best' . . . and then the song spoke for itself."

     Lead Belly was like an oral history; almost everything he said and sang was a tale of his journey, remembered Joe Papaleo. The way he talked "showed he had a strong awareness of his important place in music (sometimes referring to himself in the third person, a mark of people who see themselves in history already.)"

     For Lead Belly at Sarah Lawrence College, many, many years ago, he sang his song, which continues today, without end. He was consistent in his principles; committed to his craft; and unswerving in his opposition to unfair practices. Lead Belly demonstrated in Bronxville that belief in oneself and in the continuing betterment of the human condition was the message he brought to Sarah Lawrence, and the mission of his life.

      Written by Sean Killeen after speaking with WWII veteran Joe Papaleo in 1992. Bronxville remains one of the wealthiest enclaves in the USA. I guess you might expect some bigotry. These people have a lot to lose. 

     

       

Tiny Robinson One

Queen "Tiny" Robinson, Leadbelly's niece. 

(May 27, 1923-March 12, 2017) 

Interview Dec. 7th, 2004.

Tiny in 2007.

Tiny Robinson was the daughter of Mary Promise, whose twin sister, Martha, was Mrs. Huddie Ledbetter. Tiny graduated from High School in Shreveport in 1941; she then moved to New York City and lived in the apartment below Huddie and Martha. By the time Huddie died in December, 1949, Tiny had become his agent and business manager. After his death she continued to promote his music and was responsible for keeping his achievements in the public view.  Interview was at her house in Murfreesboro, TN.

Q is either Monty or Marsha Brown. Tiny is TR.

Q:   Whereabouts in Shreveport were you raised?

TR: You know Allen Avenue? (Yes) You know Ashton Street? (No)

Tiny's Aunt Martha. Her mother's twin.

Q: How about when you were smaller. Were you into music a lot?

TR: No, but I was around it every day and night. I wasn’t a singer or a musician or anything.

Q: Do you remember children’s games when you were real little. Did you ever play children’s games?

TR: I remember Leadbelly's children’s albums. Like “Skip to M’Lou.” That’s one famous one, then “Little Sally Walker.” Play that game, you’d walk around and they’d try to catch you. And there’d be a partner. We’d play games like that. We didn’t have no television to look at, so we did those kind of songs.

Q: What would you do for “Skip to M’Lou?”

TR: We’d skip around, skip around each other until you’d find an opening to the circle. There’d always be a partner in there. Was a nice little skip and hop dance.

Q: So, Allen Avenue and Ashton Street. . .

TR: Yes. Ashton Street runs across Pierre Avenue and Norman. 

Q:  When you were raised there how many brothers and sisters were raised with you?

TR:  There was four of us. Me and my sister, the one nearest to me, a year and a month older. Then we had a brother two years older than us. Then we had another sister; she was about five years older, and when her husband died, she remarried, and he had a big farm out by the Republican (?) Church. 

Q:  So they moved out there?

TR: Yes. We was in High School then.

Q:  Which High School?

TR: CCHigh. (She leans forward, underlining) Central Colored High School. The only one in Louisiana! Yes, I graduated from there. It says “Central Colored” High School, ‘cause there was a Central High School out in Hollywood, but it was all white. They put “colored” in there so that we’d know which one we’re supposed to go to. 

Q: Who cares for Huddie's grave?

Central. (Now, Elementary.)

TR: Yes, I have a brother who takes care of it. He never was a talker, nuh-uhn. But he wouldn’t mind if you met him out there at the grave. Coz a lot of people go there every day from all over the world. We see articles in the paper that . . . I’d like to see some articles that John (Andrew Prime) puts in there (The Times of Shreveport).

Q: He did one about Robert Plant one time, that was about fifteen years ago, I don’t know if Robert Plant’s been there recently. (Tiny is going to try to get in touch with John about his Leadbelly writings.) Now this Central Colored HS, which I’ve never heard of before, was it the only . . . 

TR: . . .only high school for blacks, as far as I can remember, from Mooringsport to Texas and down to Shreveport. People from Bossier went there and over in Ruston, Louisiana, that whole group of people down there, where those creole people live (Cane River), they all came to that school, it was the only high school. People from Texas went there. 

Q:  So, it included a whole big area, not just Shreveport.

TR: A lot of parents couldn’t afford to bring them there, and stay, now some of those people had family live there and they lived with the family. But if they had no family they’d have to pay to live and they couldn’t afford it. They just could not afford it and go to school, too.  

Q:  This was just a regular High School, except for colored people?

TR: You graduate from High School in them days, it was just like college. You went to grade school until 9th grade and then you went to High School for three, four years, just like college. You came out of high school in those days you could get a job anywhere, not like it is now, four years of college and there ain’t nothing out there.

Q:  I guess the only actual college (for blacks) was in Baton Rouge, was it Southern?

TR:  Southern.

Q:  What were the parties the children would have at the end of their school year? These big parties where the girls would wear white dresses. At the end of the year. The school closings!

TR: Now when we graduated from Central High School, we had our Commencement at the Municipal building (Auditorium.) I was so glad to go back in there last year when we went back in there for something Ron Hardy had. It was the first time I’d been in this building since, we’d go there and we’d have our gowns on, that was a big thing — to graduate from high school. We went there, and we’d have our gowns and we got our certificates and everything, and we’d have a beautiful program, somebody’d speak to us 

Q: We’ve been told that Huddie use to play at school closings out in the country.

TR: He did.

Q:  I mean, they would be the small schools.

TR: Small schools from first grade to, like, seventh.

Q:  And he would come and sing for them. How big were the classes (at CCHS)?

TR: My class had 141 people.

Q:  When did you go there?

TR: I went there in the late ’30’s and early ’40’s. ’41 when I graduated.

Q:  And how much longer did it go on?

TR: It’s still going on. They moved it down, they built Booker T. Washington, you know where BTW is? Well, they all go there.

Q:  Do you remember some of your teachers?

TR: I remember practically all of them. Two of them just died, believe it or not, since we went. . . When we first started having the classmate re-unions, there was two teachers still alive. And they started teaching in that school in 1917, something like that. And the two of them used to come to all the re-unions, and one of them just died, I would say about maybe 20 years ago. Quite a few of them live up a long time.

Q:  What about music. They have music at the school?

TR: Oh yes. They taught music. Her (the teacher’s) name was Ethel (?) Doherty. She taught music, piano, and she had a choir going. She was very good. Big Major, he had all the bands that used to come in. Like Duke Ellington and Count Basie. All those big band people used to come in to play.

Q:  Do you remember seeing anybody like that when you were growing up ?

TR: I couldn’t go to a place where they was playing at. Coz I wasn’t old enough. They was playing at a place called Palace Park and your mother and father would not let you go there until you was 30 years old, practically (laughing). No, it wasn’t 30 but they wouldn’t let you go to nothing like that.

Q: It was like a big dance hall?

TR: It was a big dance hall. That’s what it was, a tremendous dance hall, they used to have the best bands there. Like, Duke Ellington, Jay McShann, Louis Armstrong, all those guys was there. Those who was there were people who were drinking and dancing and we weren’t allowed to go there. We’d sometimes sneak around and stand outside and hear the music . . . that’s when . . . you know about Fannin Street, don’t you? 

Q:  Sort of heard rumors.

Leadbelly (w.Marsha) pointing towards Fannin St.

TR: Fannin Street was a red light district. It was a lot of prostitutes lived there, the whole street, Fannin Street. They just about has torn down the majority of the houses there, and they’re naming it Ledbetter Heights. Coz Leadbelly remembered when his father would take things to Shreveport to sell, like fruit, vegetables, he would be in a wagon with him and when they come in through that street, his father’d make him lay down in the wagon coz he didn’t want him to see the women’d be sitting in the window with negligees on and that’s why Huddie said when he was grown he’s going on Fannin Street, and the first place he went when he got grown was on Fannin Street. And then he made a song about Fannin Street. Very popular song.

Q:  Well, it must have been, was it like also bars and music?

TR: No bars there. Maybe a bar on the corner. But it was those old shotgun houses, all the way from Ford Street up to, O God, to Allen. Little houses in there.

Q:  So, if you got caught on Fannin Street, pretty much people knew what you were there for.

TR: You on Fannin Street, you knew what you were there for. And the thing about it, it was all white people. Living there. Until later on in years, I think about ’30, middle ’30’s, some blacks started moving in. And then when the blacks started moving in, the whites started moving out. 

Q:  So when it was Fannin Street the Red Light District it was white people . . .?

TR: Yes, ma’am, that’s for sure. And they was begging for anybody who had pants on (laughs)

Q:  So if you were black or white you could go to Fannin Street?

TR: Sure you could. (As long as you had some money).

Leadbelly's Horse

Huddie’s "Booker"

"Did I know Huddie Leadbetter? He was my next door neighbor."








[This article, written in 1992 by Marsha Brown, was originally published in the Leadbelly Letter, Sean Killeen's wonderful publication which ran from 1990 to 1996.]

I love horses. I have always loved horses and my strongest memory of growing up in upstate New York was wanting to have my very own horse, but that didn’t happen until years later, after moving to Shreveport, Louisiana. “Mack’s Pride” was his name, and he was big and beautiful: all black, except for a white blaze face and four white stockinged feet. I fondly recalled Mack when I heard a description of Huddie Ledbetter’s favorite horse, “Booker.”
We heard about Booker, my husband and I, from one of the Ledbetters’ Texas neighbors. We were driving down a dirt road looking for Swanson’s Landing, the supposed site of an East Texas riverboat disaster in the late 1800’s when we stopped by a small wooden house to ask directions. Preston Brown, a sprightly 93-year-old with a twinkling eye and a friendly manner, told us which way to go. For some reason it popped into my mind to ask him if he knew of Huddie Ledbetter.
“Knew him? He was my next door neighbor!” said Preston. “We used to draw water out of the same spring.”
Needless to say, we were thrilled at this chance meeting with someone who actually knew Huddie and we stayed for a long chat. We have been invited back several times and this has led to a warm acquaintanceship with Preston and his wife Mary Jenkins Brown. She is in her eighties but prefers to be thought of as a spring chicken of perhaps seventy. That’s the way she looks and acts, and she has a delightful sense of humor.
Preston was the baby of the Brown family. He was born in 1897, eight years after Huddie, and he had several older sisters including Matilda, Clara and Cora Brown.
“Huddie went with Cora,” says Preston, thinking of a simpler, more innocent time. “He courted her. He used to come up here in the summertime, sat there and played guitar, and us kids, we’d sit out there on the front porch.” His face breaks into a smile here. We weren’t allowed into the room, you know, we’d be outdoors, dancing, and they’d be in the house.” He and Mary both laugh and we laugh with them.
But the horse? Huddie’s horse?
“He was black as a crow,” Preston recalls. “He had a blaze and four white feet and his name was ol’ Booker. I used to ride behind Huddie, you know, on him. Used to go down to help him wash in that spring down there that runs right through their place. Used to take rags, take ol’ Booker down there, lather him all over, wash him, you know, and we’d have brushes. He’d look so pretty. He had a curly mane, curly tail. He was pretty.”
We all compared Huddie’s grooming and pride in Booker at that time to a teenager today, polishing the chrome on his first Ford.
Preston helped with Booker in other ways, too. When Huddie had a trip to take on the train, to play a house dance or just visit Dallas, Jefferson or Shreveport, he’d come and ask Preston’s father if he could take the youngster along to the depot. Many times they rode together to the station in Leigh, Texas, about two miles away. Huddie caught the train and Preston brought back the horse. He took care of Booker until Huddie returned and then he’d ride to Leigh to meet the train.
“He’d be gone two or three days, “ said Preston. “That was fun for me ‘cause I liked that horse. Liked to ride that horse.”
Preston and Mary still have horses today, two of them grazing next to their small house. They are among the few remaining inhabitants of what was once a thriving African-American farming community on Caddo Lake. They continued farming until retirement and witnessed the many changes in the area. In the 1920’s, people started working in the nearby oilfields, or going off to Dallas and Houston. In the early ‘40’s an ammunition plant was built in nearby Karnack, luring more workers from the land. Huddie Ledbetter left the farm in 1915, and he left the area in 1930 and eventually moved to New York. But he’s still remembered fondly in the beautiful countryside of North Louisiana and East Texas as the favorite local musician. And ol’ Booker is still remembered, too.

Leadbelly & Babyface & Little David Alexander

Lead Belly and Baby Face 

Lead Belly: King of the Twelve String Guitar Players of the World

[This article, written by me (Monty Brown), was originally published in the Fall 1996 issue of Sean Killeen’s Lead Belly Letter. It was also published on this blog on 14th October, 2007. Sean Kileen was an ardent fan of Lead Belly and his magazine, (which also can be seen elsewhere on this blog) lived from 1990 to 1996, and reflected his passion. Sean, who hailed from Ithaca, New York, eventually gave up publishing the Letter, partly because there was not a large circulation, but mostly because he was battling for his life. He eventually lost that battle, but his legacy lives on with the back issues of his publication.]

The death of Jesse “Baby Face” Thomas (1911-1995) was reported in the Lead Belly Letter (5,3:2), appropriately, I thought, because of the shared musical heritage of the two men. Lead Belly and Baby Face were two very different characters whose lives, like their nicknames, were often poles apart. The last time their names appeared in such close proximity was in the pages of England’s Melody Maker (12/31/49). There it was reported that Jesse had been “assistant vocalist” to Troy Ferguson in Atlanta in 1929. The death of Lead Belly — Huddie Ledbetter (1889-1949) — was reported in the adjacent column.
I was a friend and a fan of Jesse’s and we spoke many times during the last decade of his very productive life. He was a small, almost frail man, the twelfth of thirteen children born to a sharecropper family in Logansport, Louisiana, thirty miles south of Shreveport. In contrast, Huddie Ledbetter was hefty and muscular, the only child of Wes and Sallie Ledbetter of Mooringsport, Louisiana, twenty miles north of Shreveport.
Huddie played the raucous music of the country house dances, pounding out basic, compelling rhythms, singing, dancing and generally overwhelming his audiences with the power of a one-man minstrel show. He charmed Governor Neff of Texas into a pardon in 1925. He could always charm a gang of children with whimsical words and rhymes recalled from his own childhood. Several people remembered him as being at least six feet tall, though he was only five-seven. Neff was alone in remembering him as a banjo picker; others recalled his ability on the mandolin and church organ. There are recordings of him playing the piano and Cajun accordion in addition to his trademark twelve-string guitar. It’s easy to see how he became a legend in his own time.
Jesse’s instrument was the six-string guitar. He was constantly refining his technique, striving to play in the more sophisticated style of the jazz-oriented musicians of his prime. Though he usually recorded solo, in live performance he was comfortable in the confines of a well-tempered combo. He was an early exponent of the electric guitar and later in life played a double-neck guitar/bass. During his lifetime, Jesse never ceased to be a student of music and the craft of song writing.

Baby Face at 80

Jesse Thomas was a naive fifteen-year-old when, in 1926, he arrived in Shreveport to stay with relatives. He was straight off the family farm. At the same time, Huddie was a bruised and battered thirty-seven, recently released — pardoned — after eight hard years on a Texas prison farm. Like Huddie, Jesse was raised with the guitar. Unlike Huddie, he was surrounded by older siblings who played. His father, Joel, played the fiddle at local house dances. One brother, Willard, was about to land a recording contract with Paramount records under the name Ramblin’ Thomas.
But at fifteen, Jesse became fascinated with the piano, and this is where his life brushed up against the life of Lead Belly. At the time of his arrival in Shreveport, he couldn’t get enough of the piano. He went to movies at the palatial Strand and the other big downtown theaters primarily to hear the players who accompanied the silent pictures.
Did he have any favorite piano players?
“Yeah, there was a guy here named Dave Alexander,” said Jesse in a 1991 interview at his Abbie Street house in Shreveport. “He was good and I wanted to play like him. But I never did play piano like I would’ve like to played, ‘cause I didn’t have a piano to practice on.”
The name of this almost-forgotten piano man reverberated in my mind. Was this “Little” David Alexander who turned up in some lists of old blues recordings? Maybe. It certainly wasn’t the Dave Alexander who recorded for Arhoolie — too young. But there, in an old interview, was Huddie Ledbetter telling about the influence of a piano player named Dave Alexander. Huddie was sure he had incorporated some of Dave’s bass runs into his guitar style, but he couldn’t remember was it Houston or Shreveport? 1906 or 1926?
“I would see (Dave) playing all the time,” said Jessie, who also imitated those piano sounds on his guitar. “He would play in homes where people had pianos. He would visit different places where a piano was. That’s where I heard him playing. Mostly in homes.”
So, he played for house dances — that sort of thing?
“Yeah. And minstrel shows, places like that.”
Did you go to minstrel shows then?
“Oh, yes, it cost ten and fifteen cents and like that to see a good show. The minstrel show would be in a tent going from town to town, traveling. But they’d often pick up a local musician to play piano or maybe some other instruments for them. I played one time in a little minstrel show like that.”
How old was Dave Alexander then?
“Oh, he seemed to be in his twenties. He was a young man in his twenties, I was fifteen.”
This had to be around the same time Huddie had seen him!
Jesse went on, “Dave was pretty popular around here with people at that time. And at that same time those guitar players like Ed Shafers and (Oscar) Woods, they were here but I never did meet them. I’d just hear a lot about them. Never ran across them. And I don’t know where Ledbetter was at that time, either. He probably was in and out of here I guess.”
Jesse never heard Huddie play — he would have remembered — but it’s entirely possible that the two were in the same shotgun house together, enjoying the magic of Dave Alexander. From 1925 to 1930, Huddie was indeed in and out of Shreveport, but not well-known there. He was based some twenty miles north, living in the Caddo Lake area of his youth, working for an oil company and in great demand at Saturday night suppers.
“He was the one they used to follow,” said Liz Choyce, who was in her teens at the time, “Mister Huddie.”
When you say “they used to follow,” you mean his guitar playing?
“People, when they heard tell he was playing somewhere,” she said emphatically, “they would always go.”
“He’d have a crowd. Have a big crowd,” added her husband Leonard. “Awful good music player. When you say you’re going to have a dance there, you’re going to have Ledbetter . . .”
“. . .they’d say ‘Who?’,” Liz cut in, “and you’d say, ‘Huddie.’ Boy! you’d hear them say they were going. Mister Huddie — yes, I knowed him good.”
While Huddie was confining himself to the familiar Texas-Louisiana border country north of Shreveport, young Jesse was striving to get onto record. In Fort Worth he roomed with his big brother Willard. In Dallas he saw successful performers like Blind Lemon Jefferson and Lonnie Johnson. They taught him you could make money with the guitar, so he dropped his dream of being a pianist. Single-mindedly he hitchhiked from place to place — Shreveport to Fort Worth to Houston to San Antonio to Dallas — in pursuit of the portable recording studios. In small towns along the way he bartered music for lodging and a few dollars. Often he took temporary work in the cotton fields. Eventually, persistence paid off: Victor Records sent him a train ticket and he rode from Oklahoma City to Dallas to record four of his own tunes, including Blue Goose Blues.
“Blue Goose?” Jesse smiled a knowing smile. “Oh that’s a little place here in Shreveport, a little area they used to call the Blue Goose. You remember where the Union railway station used to be? Well that was just the name of that area. Like Mooretown, South Highland, Blue Goose. So I just thought of that ‘cause that’s where I stayed when I first came here, and I just — made up some words, put it on record.”
Blue Goose is like Silver City, I thought, the place that Huddie sang about traveling to with Blind Lemon in Dallas back before the Great War. I wondered why Huddie couldn’t have got himself on record just like Jesse did. Here was this green youngster, fresh off the farm and new to the business, getting onto Victor Records at age eighteen. Why not Huddie? The astonishing success of Blind Lemon during the latter part of the 1920’s had encouraged the record companies to scour the Southland for talent. And Huddie certainly had the talent. Plus, he was an old friend of Blind Lemon’s, wasn’t he? Led him around and played duets with him?
Oscar Woods and Ed Shafers got themselves recorded several times during the late ‘20’s and early ‘30’s. They even broke through the color bar on one occasion by providing backup for the white country-bluesman and future Louisiana governor, Jimmie Davis. Ramblin’ Thomas made quite a hit on Paramount and would probably have done much better had he not been addicted to the bottle. None of these performers was superior to Huddie, yet Huddie remained undocumented during this first Golden Age of blues recording. Why?
It’s true he had himself a steady job and maybe couldn’t get away to Dallas, San Antonio or Memphis for a few days, but there was even one recording session in Shreveport in 1928, and there’s no evidence that Huddie tried out for it.
Could it be that he had no wish to leave his safe and friendly environment? He’d been off in the world before and it had brought him much pain. The eight years in a Texas penitentiary, the subsequent estrangement of his first wife, the heartbreaking death of his father, and his commitment to his aging mother, all of these combined may have led him to re-examine his life. He was approaching middle age, perhaps thinking it was time to settle down. Whatever the reasons, Huddie never recorded during the 1920’s when all around him, artists of lesser talent were busy making names for themselves.
This is not to say that Jesse Thomas was a lesser talent. Listen to any of the spate of sides that he recorded in Los Angeles during the late ‘40’s and early ‘50’s and you’ll be delighted with his drive and originality. But Jesse would be the first to admit that he didn’t possess anything like the charisma of Lead Belly. He was Baby Face, a cute little guy who charmed his early audiences with his ingenuousness. He was also known as “Careless Love,” not because of any tendency to womanize, but because he did such an appealing rendition of Lonnie Johnson’s hit recording of that name.
After he told me about Blue Goose, Jesse picked up his guitar and played Blue Goose Blues instrumentally. Even though his hands were often cramped by arthritis in his last five years, he still played with fluidity and distinctness. He finished with a flourish and a laugh.
“Got to get the words down. The music still sounds alright.”
“That’s a good song,” I said.
“Think so?” he laughed. "You know, I didn’t even know what I was talking about at that time. I think I saw some old man and he was real good on the guitar, on the chords. He didn’t sing that good, just play something like that, and I copied some of that and put the words to it. And Blind Blake used to have something kinda in that style. He would play in that style and I thought he was a real good guitar player. Nice chords. Played finger style.”
Jesse picked his guitar a little more and ended by singing the line, “I’m going down to old Blue Goose, got no time to lose.”
That’s it, I thought. Young Baby Face, with the impatience of youth, figured he had no time to lose, so he pursued the recording companies relentlessly. Lead Belly, on the other hand, was patiently biding his time. Which finally arrived.
In 1935, after a further five years of penitentiary time, Lead Belly was given his chance, and his musical career began in earnest. He recorded abundantly through 1948, which was the year Jesse Thomas took up his recording career again, after a nineteen year hiatus. For most of the years Huddie lived in New York, Jesse lived in California. They were both on the West Coast for one of those years, and both of them tried and failed to get into the movies.
Lead Belly returned home to Louisiana in 1949. He was in a coffin. Jesse returned in 1957 and kept on playing for thirty-eight more years. For many of those years he performed with a blind piano player named Peaches, led him around, drove him to and from the gigs. Like Huddie with Blind Lemon. The duo “Jesse and Peaches” was very popular in the Shreveport area. I suspect that Peaches played piano the way Jesse once wished he could.
Lead Belly and Baby Face — poles apart in many ways, yet in some ways quite close. Most of Huddie’s success has been posthumous. Jesse’s success may be bounded by his lifetime. But for those of us who knew him, like for those who knew Huddie, that will be quite sufficient.

Posted 14th October 2007 by Monty Brown

  

Jerry's Saloon Blues

Jerry's Saloon Blues, 1940 Field recordings from Louisiana:—go-to-this-link: 

https://www.wirz.de/music/flyright/grafik/260n4.pdf

Jerry's Saloon Blues, 1940 Field recordings from Louisiana.

What you'll find:

Information on recordings and interviews by John Lomax, with the aid of his wife, Ruby. Musicians include Oscar Woods, Noah Moore, Kitty Gray, Kid West & Joe Harris. Liner notes and Shreveport history assembled by the British Blues researcher, Paul Oliver.

This is Leadbelly country, so there are lots of references to The Man and Noah Moore, one of the musicians on the album is related to Huddie.