When he became a more prolific writer of protest songs, this was a theme he returned to again and again: Change is not always for the better, and change for the sake of change is never better. He seems like an early agrarian or one of Robert Penn Warren’s Fugitives, trying to hold on to a mythic South that had been slipping through Southern fingers ever since the War. He believed in flesh and blood. He had more faith in a beast of burden he could talk to rather than some mechanical contrivance that would not do his bidding. In days to come he would own cars and even write a paean to Henry Ford’s invention, but he never learned to drive one and he was always a little surprised when they performed as they were supposed to.
Now here’s a stop on the road that doesn’t exist anymore. Fiddlin’ John Carson had a Victrola record released that sold way beyond expectations. It was the first country-music hit. Folks scraped up the money to buy it and hoped later they could scrape up the money to buy a phonograph to play it on. It seemed an occasion of country people embracing one of their own who’d in some manner made good and transcended them but managed to keep intact the roots they held in common.
The record companies were amazed, but they were not stupid. They began to look around for other rural musicians.
Records were largely a sideline then, carried in furniture stores rather than music shops. The Sterchi brothers owned a chain of furniture stores that carried a line of Vocalion recordings. Dave had hauled a lot of furniture, and by now he was the best-known musician in the region. He’d been performing informally (one can’t imagine a formal performance by Uncle Dave Macon) for years at dances and private parties or wherever anybody wanted to hear a banjo played. He even had a partner now, a young man named Sid Harkreader who played guitar and fiddle and sang harmony with him. So when Vocalion asked the Sterchi brothers to help line up new talent, the first name out of the hat was Dave Macon’s.
It must have been a potent moment: He’d been making music for free all his life and now he had the chance to perhaps get paid for it and lay everything else aside. But he was already fifty-three years old, a little late in life to be changing careers. But there seemed little choice. The freight business he knew had been supplanted by automobiles and he still had children at home to feed. He signed with Vicalion and headed for New York, not knowing that he was blazing a trail that countless musicians would follow: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, plus scores of others whose epitaphs are just names on old phonograph records.
His first recording was Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy, a song that in later years he would say he learned from a black man named Tom Davis, but history has forgotten Davis’s story and no one knows where he learned it or how close to the original (if such a thing exists) Macon’s version is. By making it his first record, Macon must have considered it his best shot at launching a new career and it is a song he returned to again and again and recorded numerous times, as if striving toward some ideal of musical perfection.
All the versions have the same feel of not only lost landscapes and lost times but a lost people, a race supplanted. The banjo rolls hollowly out and it seems to be coming from some place enormously distant, from some alternate world outside time itself, and the voice when it comes, conspiratorial and amused, jerks you abruptly into a plot that’s already started: There’s stolen meat in your knapsack, hounds on your track, and you’re pulling for your shanty home where Mandy is waiting. The song is all motion and action, there’s no time for rationalization or introspection but, above all, it is so caught up in the joy of life that everything else seems incidental.
In this song and in songs like Way Down the Old Plank Road and Buddy Won’t You Roll Down the Line (both included by Harry Smith, no slouch in taste, on his Anthology of American Folk Music), the music creates a visceral three-dimensional world then draws you in to a time that doesn’t exist anymore but stills feels prescient. Times and circumstances alter, the music says, but the eternal human frailties and verities remain the same. There’s always that sense of being vividly alive. In Way Down the Old Plank Road, the feeling of desperate abandon when Macon cries KILL YOURSELF! sounds as if the words could be either a command or a mental note to himself. Hard times or good times, there is a stoic, dark-humored core that seems to render qualifiers or modifiers irrelevant. It is not the good times or the bad times that matter but the experience of living itself.
The reaction to these first recordings was immediate. There seemed to have been an audience already poised and waiting on Uncle Dave, and all that was needed was this connection to bind them together.
When he was booked into the Loews Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, there weren’t enough seats for all the folks who wanted to sit in them. A two-week engagement extended to five, and still the place was packed. The theater manager was arrested by the fire marshal for permitting too many fans inside.
Soon Macon was playing the Loews chain from Boston to Florida and beyond. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, Uncle Dave Macon was on the road to becoming country music’s newest superstar.
Macon was far luckier than most: The crash of 1929 sent most rural musicians back to sharecropping and coal mining, but Macon had a job on the Grand Ole Opry, and he always had a label willing to release his music.
He wrote protest songs about prohibition (Dave took it personal that it had become so hard to buy a decent drink of whiskey), about the downtrodden farmer (Eleven Cent Cotton), and about whatever peeved him at the moment always with a stoic humor that regarded the world with a sort of sardonic fatalism.
Time and Change–always Macon’s enemies–were rolling on down the line. The Opry was big business. He had grown old, beginning to sound dated to more modern ears. The Young Tucks of county music were coming aboard, and Macon regarded them with a jaundiced eye. To him, showmanship was half the music, and most of these trespassers came up wanting. They didn’t have the requisite style. You’re a pretty fair banjo picker, he told Earl Scruggs, but you’re not very funny.
By the end of the 40s, the music was changing and the audience was changing with it. Hank Williams had arrived and country-music singers were beginning to be judged as sex idols the way that movie stars were. Macon’s wife had died and he was spending lonesome nights in a Nashville hotel. Before he died in 1952, he willed one of his banjos to a young entertainer named Stringbean Akeman whom he considered his protégé, but he must have seen the time coming when clog-dancing banjo pickers would be reduced to comic relief between modern songs.
He couldn’t have known the whole of it, the arrival in Nashville of a new breed of producers like Chet Atkins and Owen Bradley and crooners like Jim Reeves who sweetened the music and diluted it until it was more palatable to audiences with an affinity for mainstream pop. Perhaps he would have harkened back to his days with the showmen in the basement of the Broadway House and found it ironic that style was still supplanting substance, veneer more than ever disguising reality.
Even banjo-playing altered. There would come a time when newgrass pickers would try to force the banjo into the realm of quantum physics. But Macon’s own playing was not as simple as it sometimes sounded. In his later days, nearing eighty, he relied mostly on a frailing or clawhammer technique, but scholars dissecting his 1920’s recordings have identified almost a score of different styles that he had mastered running from ragtime to blues and they’re still finding more. And any one of them sounds realer and truer than anything that has come along since.
HAND ME MY TRAVELING SHOES
Not long after Blind Willie McTell graduated from the school for the Blind in Macon, Georgia, he turned up in Atlanta. (There’s a theory that says he’s Blind Willie McTear, that an instructor at the school misheard McTell and wrote the name down wrong, so perhaps the mythic weight of having your name committed to some sort of legal document in that time and place made you beholden not only to the authority that signed the papers and affixed seals of legality, but to the lesser authorit
y that served and interpreted them.) Something was beginning to happen in American music, and a lot of it was happening in Atlanta. Street musicians dependent upon coins tossed in guitar cases or passed hats were drawn there by the city’s size and relative prosperity. If you only counted the blind musicians and ignored the sighted, you’d still come up with an impressive number.
Truly there must have been giants on the earth in those days. All those blind blues singers were steady on the move, crisscrossing the South like black spores on a glass slide, setting up on street corners and opening their guitar cases, ears attuned for the clink of change, always alert for a new song they could borrow and make their own with lines from the floating debris of a thousand other blues songs. They lugged their guitars and coat-hanger harmonica racks, uncertain where they’d be when night fell on them, whose floor they’d sleep on, where the next meal was coming from and when it would get there. The corners on Decatur Street must have thronged with them; the competition for prime locations must have been fierce. Imagine the traffic jams, the fortunes a seeing-eye-dog franchise could have made. It was a harsh and provisional world McTell had come into. You had to be tough just to survive.
Dark was the night, cold was the ground. When Blind Willie Johnson turned up in Atlanta, McTell almost immediately hooked up with him. Johnson was a slide-guitar player of great technical proficiency, and he was also a Baptist minister, and between them they covered the field, both the secular and the washed in the blood.
Riley Puckett was there. He was a white guitarist (blind too, of course, and also working the streetcorners) who within a couple of years would play lead guitar with the Skillet Lickers, his innovative picking and odd bass runs helping the Skillet Lickers to sell a lot of records and making this white string band the Rolling Stones of their day. (Bootleggers rejoiced and laid on an extra shift when the Skillet Lickers came to Atlanta to record.)
A lot of things will remain mysterious about Blind Willie McTell, and not the least of them is whether or not he ever played with Puckett. But the odds are that they met. Some of the Skillet Lickers’ recordings, like Georgia Rag and Razor Ball, have the ragtimey feel of McTell songs, and there was at this time an enormous amount of cross-pollination going on in music. You are what you hear, perhaps. McTell’s own music is more Piedmont than Mississippi Delta blues. His voice is higher and more nasal than the conventional blues singer’s voice, and the music is more accessible than, say, Son House or Charley Patton. (Having recorded McTell, the archivist John Lomax initially declined to release the sessions. He had recorded McKinley Morganfield and Son House, and being more familiar with the traditional country blues sound, he complained that McTell did not sound enough like a blues singer.)
Of course, if you’re playing for an audience and you expect to get paid, the idea is to play something the audience wants to hear. A background of performing in carnivals and tent shows and the picnics that at the time were part of the African-American social scene had given McTell’s repertoire a broader sweep than most Bluesmen. Listening to his catalogue, you hear music that ranges from traditional twelve-bar blues to ragtime to sly, ribald songs that must have made him the life of the party, to songs that existed for no other reason than to allow him to do some virtuoso guitar-picking, and that hat must have come back heavy then. The conclusion that he knew what he was doing is incontestable.
McTell and Blind Willie Johnson traveled what was known as the Georgia circuit: Atlanta and Augusta, Savannah and Macon. Had they wandered south and stumbled across the fabled crossroads where a decade later Robert Johnson would deal with Satan, McTell might have bargained for his vision: He had been blind all his life and he could already play the guitar.
Still, he was luckier than most. He’d learned at the blind school in Macon not only to read words but to read music by feeling out the shape of the notes with his fingertips, in a time when even most sighted musicians learned and performed by ear. And he could take care of himself. He’d been a hard worker since his early teens, working with carnivals and traveling medicine shows and minstrel shows.
He was born in Thomson, Georgia, either in 1898 or 1901, depending on which source you want to believe. By the time the McTells (or McTears: there’s another story that someone on the father’s side of the family had changed the name from McTell because of trouble with whiskey stills and government revenuers) had moved to Statesboro, Willie had been shown the rudiments of guitar playing by his mother, and he gathered more skill from neighbors and visiting pickers and whomever he met, soaking it all up. Already he was writing songs in his head and changing other tunes to his liking and already he was developing an affinity for wandering, a habit that would stay with him all his days.
By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he’d also taken up the twelve-string guitar. He’d learned on the six-string, but had seen that for his purposes the twelve was infinitely better. With its complementary strings tuned an octave higher than the regular strings, not only was there more volume, but whether fingerpicking or using a bottleneck, the higher strings enriched the melody and elaborated on it. It also set him apart from other street musicians.
All these street pickers were living too close to the ground to know that they were part of the dawning of the richest, most complex period of American music. This period began around 1926 and would last only until the beginning of the Depression, and it would not come again.
Though McTell couldn’t have known it, by 1926 the record business was turning toward him. The sales of phonograph records had grown exponentially, and things were to a point where there was a lot of money to be made. To the surprise of executives in New York, people in the rural South bought a lot of music. A record by a fiddle player named John Carson sold faster than Atlanta record stores could restock it. This was the sort of news that got noticed in New York. People so poor they sometimes had to choose between a phonograph record or a new pair of shoes were opting for the music, choosing the magic over the practical, the mystery and wonder of their lives encoded into spiraling grooves of shellac.
McTell sings in Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo:
I’ll take all my money
put up against the wall
I’ll take what sticks
and you can have what fall.
Record-company owners were doing essentially this very thing. They were in the process of figuring out what sold best; they had not yet learned how to homogenize and move it toward a one-size-fits-all center, so they were throwing everything at the wall.
A lot of weird music was sticking; like Frank Hutchison’s bizarre take on the sinking of the Titanic, with do-si-do square dances being held on the lower decks and the captain inquiring, How’s your machinery? Or Dick Justice’s Cocaine, its imagery and cast of characters, furniture repo men, whipped babies, and women in alleys, the narrator simply wild about his good cocaine making a sort of jagged, surreal poetry that would soon vanish from popular music and not come around again until Bob Dylan surfaced in the early 60’s. The Okeh label was recording Dock Boggs, a Virginia coal miner whose dark music and eerie hollow banjo sounded like what you’d hear if you leaned your head against the door to hell to eavesdrop.
These three performers had in common not only that they were white, but the fact that they didn’t much sound like it. All three were steeped in the blues, a variant of it that would come to be thought of as white or mountain blues. The record companies were also recording a Texan named Blind Lemon Jefferson and a street singer named Blind Blake, and in 1927 Victor got around to Blind Willie McTell.
For a blind man, McTell possessed an amazing degree of self-sufficiency. He figured out the intricacies of the New York subway system and got wherever he needed to be.
He recorded again in 1928, this time for Columbia, and these two sessions produced classic songs like “Broke Down Engine” and “Mama, Tain’t Long Fo’ Day” and “Statesboro Blues” that would roll down the years and resonate with musicians like the Allman Brothers and the White Stri
pes long after McTell was gone.
His song Delia, a stoic, dark-humored account (took Delia to the graveyard, never brought her back) of a woman murdered by her lover (say you love them rounders, and don’t love me), reads like an O’Connor story or E.A. Robinson poem. Dylan covered it in the early 90s. Johnny Cash rewrote it as Delia’s Gone, but he kept the son’s air of detached, matter-of-fact violence.
Almost before it had begun, the boom was over. Something had fallen on Wall Street, folks said. Whatever had fallen, its echoes rippled on and on. The record business was hit hard, nowhere harder than in the rural South, sharecropper or millhand, black or white. First Reconstruction and now this Wall Street debacle. A choice between a new record and a little flour and lard is not really a choice.
Dock Boggs went back to the coal mines, Frank Hutchison went to work in a West Virginia grocery store, John Hurt went back to sharecropping in Mississippi. William Samuel McTell had nowhere to go except to the music he hadn’t even left, so he went back to Decatur Street and wherever his traveling shoes and traveling blues would take him. In the early 30’s, he sojourned all over the South with Blind Lemon Jefferson.
In 1934 he married Ruth Kate Williams, who long after McTell was dead would remember what he told her when she asked why he stayed on the road so much: “Baby, I was born a rambler. I’m gonna ramble until I die.”
Listening through McTell’s recorded work is almost like participating in a séance. Spirits come out of the dark, dead voices and the voices of folks not yet born when the recordings were made speak through the music, and amaze you at how much came from McTell.