Thematic Pattern in Downhome Blues Lyrics: The Evidence on Commercial Phonograph Records Since World War II
by Jeff Todd Titon
The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 90, No. 357 (Jul. - Sep., 1977), pp. 316-330
Thematic Pattern in Downhome Blues Lyrics The Evidence on Commercial Phonograph Records Since World War II [1]
JEFF TODD TITON
MISTREATMENT IS THE SUBJECT OF BLUES LYRICS; the singer's response provides the drama. In literature which, like blues, is lyric rather than narrative, thematic pattern is the thought sequence that controls attitudes toward human experience and selects a narrative pattern (that is, an event sequence) to illustrate those attitudes.[2] Applied to blues, the concept of
thematic pattern suggests that the singer's attitude toward mistreatment and the illustrative incidents he chooses are an expression of culture. Culture is not the same as behavior, nor is it the attitude which produces behavior; rather, culture determines attitude, and it is best defined as the learned and shared ways humans who constitute a social group size up
situations and the available action plans in them.[3]
In other words, culture controls the answers to the questions, "What is it?" and "What can I do?" which arise, consciously or not, in every human situation, be it brushing teeth or investigating UFO's. Here, then, are two critical concepts, one literary and the other anthropological, which, in their proper contexts, are analogous. Both culture and thematic pattern are constructs, invented to account for the cognition which controls the repertoire of human attitudes and actions. Imaginative literature is the domain of thematic pattern, life as it is lived the domain of culture. When any imaginative literature, like blues, deliberately imitates life, we should expect a convergence. Thematic patterns then become, in Kenneth Burke's phrase, "equipment for living"; that is, they define situations and tell what can be done in them.[4]
The earliest analysis of blues songs, by Odum and Johnson, sought in the subjects of the lyrics a reflection of black life in the United States;
recent treatments by Oliver and Charters have continued this approach,
while other writers,i ncludingJ ones, Keil, and Haralambosh, ave extracted
outlooks on black life from ideas expressed in the lyrics.4 Techniques of
blues composition have been explored by Fahey, Evans, Ferris, and Titon,
while ChartersO, ster, and Gruverh ave identified motifs in the course of
their argument that blues lyrics are best understood as poems." It is too
early to determine whether blues lyrics will enter the American literary
canon, but Brooks, Warrena, nd Lewis include them in their recent major
anthology, prefaced by a lengthy essay which concludes, "No body of
folk poetry in America-except, perhaps, the black spirituals-can touch it
[blues], and much of the poetry recognizeda s 'literature,w' hite or black,
seems tepid beside it."6
Since 1959, when SamuelC hartersd elimited the field in The Country
Blues, most writers have employed the term country to describe the
traditional and original blues songs I have elsewhere labelled downhome.7
"Country blues" is troublesome, Oliver has written, because "some of the
best examples of 'country blues' have been recorded by city dwellers."s
3"Literature as Equipment for Living," in Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form
(New York: Vintage, 1957), pp. 253-262.
4Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson, The Negro and His Songs (1925; rpt. Hatboro, Pa.:
Folklore Associates, 1964), and Negro Workaday Songs (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1926); Paul Oliver, Blues Fell This Morning (1960; rpt. as The Meaning of the Blues, New
York: Collier, 1963); Samuel Charters, The Bluesmen (New York: Oak, 1967); LeRoi Jones, Blues
People (New York: William Morrow, 1963), and "The Changing Same," in Jones, Black Music
(New York: William Morrow, 1968); Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1966); Michael Haralambos, Right On: From Blues to Soul in Black America (London:
Eddison, 1974).
sJohn Fahey, Charley Patton (London: Studio Vista, 1970); David Evans, "The Blues of
Tommy Johnson: a Study of a Tradition," M.A. thesis, U.C.L.A., 1967, and "Techniques of
Blues Composition among Black Folksingers," Journal of American Folklore, 87 (1974), 240-249;
William Ferris, Jr., Blues from the Delta (London: Studio Vista, 1971); Jeff Titon, "Ethnomusicology
of Downhome Blues Phonograph Records, 1926-1930," Diss. Minnesota 1971; Samuel
Charters, The Poetry of the Blues (New York: Oak, 1963); Harry Oster, Living Country Blues
(Detroit: Folklore Associates, 1969); Rod Gruver, "The Blues as a Secular Religion," Blues World,
No. 29 (April 1970), 3-6; No. 30 (May 1970), 4-7; No. 31 (June 1970), 5-7; No. 32 (July 1970), 7-9.
6Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert Penn Warren, American Literature: The Makers
and the Making (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), II, 2759.
7The Country Blues (1959; rpt. New York: Da Capo, 1975); Titon, "Ethnomusicology";
"Postwar Downhome Blues: A Selection," Counter/Measures, No. 2 (1973), pp. 18-32;
"Downhome Blues Lyrics since the Second World War: A Selection," alcheringa:ethnopoetics, NS
2, No. 1 (1976), 10-26; and Early Downhome Blues: A Musical and Cultural Analysis (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1977).
8Conversation with the Blues (London: Cassell, 1965), p. 11.
318 JEFF TODD TITON
That is so, but it is also an oversimplification; the continued flow of
migrants to the cities explains the persistence of the transplanted rural
traditions. Nor do other distinctions improve the taxonomy; Oliver's
division into northern and southern, and Keil's contrast of country, city,
and urban share a misplaced attachment to geography.9 In the black
English lexicon the literal meaning of downhome is "down South," but
the word calls up not so much a geographical region as a spirit of place, a
way of life: the black tenant-farming culture, its pattern partly derived
from the slave system and partly extended to the cities where memories
would not let it disappear. As organized sound, of course, blues songs
conform to expectations of structure and performance manner; otherwise
native performers and listeners would not identify them as blues. But few
blues performers, asked what the blues is, have responded with a
structural definition.' o Most have made statements similar to this one by
Baby Doo Caston: "Blues is a sound. It's not all the time the thing that
rhyme; it's a feeling that a sound would put you into."'' A downhome
blues song locates downhome as a feeling in the listener's mental
landscape as it conforms to the structural definitions of the idiom. In the
city, downhome blues (or, for that matter, downhome cooking, or
downhome preaching) remind listeners of the feeling of life down
home.' 2
In 1968 I began the systematic transcription of blues songs from
recordings when, needing a large sample for my dissertation research, I
found that no suitable anthology was available. Later, in preparation for a
critical anthology of lyrics, I listened to more than four thousand blues
recordings made and marketed in black American communities since
World War II. The postwar era-roughly, the decade following the
war-marked the second period when extensive commercial recording
activity documented folk blues songs, if by that one understands songs
which were largely traditional, which circulated orally, and which
exhibited variation over time, space, and performance. Ironically, in
neither period was there significant field recording of blues songs. The
early period, 1926-1930, 3 predates blues field recording, while the small
number of field-recorded blues songs in the later period is of little
interest.1 4
9Paul Oliver et al., Jazz on Record (London: Hanover, 1968), p. 337; Keil, Urban Blues,
Appendix C.
10Oliver, Conversation, passim; Robert Neff and Anthony Connor, Blues (Boston: Godine,
1975).
11 From Blues to Pop: The Autobiography of Leonard "Baby Doo" Caston, ed. Jeff Titon,
JEMF Special Series, No. 4 (Los Angeles: John Edwards Memorial Foundation, 1974), p. 23. The
statement that "blues is a feeling" has become a cliche.
12And downhome blues continues down home, as LPs derived from recent fieldwork by
George Mitchell, Bruce Bastin, David Evans, William Ferris, and Kip Lornell indicate.
13Titon, Early Downhome Blues, focuses on this early period.
14David Evans writes: "Frederic Ramsey and Harold Courlander made field recordings of a
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 319
Just after World War II, newly formed commercial record companies
increased the amount of black music available. The records included pop
standards, jump tunes, jazz, and sophisticated blues; complex and precise,
their sound suggested mastery of the intricacy of city life. But numbered
among the releases were downhome blues and gospel songs cast in a
traditional style that appealed to urban newcomers who wanted-or could
not shake off-memories of their rural past. The drama of escape is played
out again and again in the lyrics of these downhome songs.
Because the singers who made downhome blues recordings in the
postwar period shared broadly similar personal histories, a general
biographical pattern may be illuminated by examining the early life and
musical career of one of them, Muddy Waters. That pattern, essentially
one of learning and leaving, is so similar to one of the narrative patterns of
blues lyrics that one cannot help believing that they reinforced one
another. Waters was born McKinley Morganfield to sharecropping parents
in Rolling Fork, Mississippi. When his mother died a few years later he was
sent to live with his grandmother in Clarksdale. "I was picking cotton,
pulling corn, milking cows (ha ha ha), driving tractors, doing all that
stuff," he told Jim Rooney. "Yeah, I've been a farmer."'" Hating the
tedium of farm work, he saw in music an alternative to debt and drudgery;
music would be a way out, a way to make a name, and a calling: "I always
thought of myself as a musician. The jobs I had back in Clarksdale and so
forth, they were just temporary things. I still considered myself.., .well,
if I wasn't a good musician then, I felt that sooner or later I would be a
good musician. I felt it in me."' 6 He learned the rudiments of blues
singing in the time-honored downhome way. When his grandmother took
him to church each Sunday he was moved by the music of the hymns, the
tone of the chanting preacher, the rhythms of the congregational
response. "I had it in my mind even then to either play music or preach or
do something that I would be known," he said. "I was a good old Baptist,
singing in church. A hard shell Baptist (ha ha). So I got all of my good
moaning and trembling going on for me right out of church."' 7 He took
up harmonica, then guitar, and began singing the folk songs and blues that
the local musicians were performing on the streets, at picnics, and country
broad range of black folk music in the 1950's and issued their recordings on the Folkways label,
but despite some important findings in other musical genres, their blues recordings were
undistinguished from either a folkloristic or commercial viewpoint, and in their commentary they
displayed little familiarity with the influence of commercial blues on the pieces they recorded"
("Folk, Commercial, and Folkloristic Aesthetics in the Blues," Jazzforschung, 5 [1973], 11-32).
Field blues recordings by John and Alan Lomax, Zora Neale Hurston, Willis James, John W. Work,
and others for the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress, were undertaken
during the 1930's and early 1940's, while the present era of blues field recordings began late in the
1950's when Harry Oster, Mack McCormick, Chris Strachwitz, and others collected material for
release on private labels.
15James Rooney, Bossmen: Bill Monroe and Muddy Waters (New York: Hayden, 1971), p.
104.
16Mike Rowe, Chicago Breakdown (London: Eddison, 1973), p. 65.
17Rooney, p. 107.
320 JEFF TODD TITON
suppers. "I really admired music so much-but if they was singing good
blues, I just loved 'em. But my copy was Son House. He traveled through
the area and lived on a plantation too-one way across from me. He didn't
never be still like me, 'cause he'd do a lot of traveling all over the Delta.
And any time I could get a chance to hear him play, I'd go."' 8 Waters was
fortunate in having Son House and Robert Johnson to copy (there was no
such thing as formal lessons) because they were recognized masters of
downhome blues, traveling from one place to the next to provide
entertainment at the Saturday night parties, even making commercial
phonograph recordings. (After Johnson was murdered, Waters studied his
records.) The imitator's chief concern was learning to play; blues was the
sort of music that encouraged singers to make up their own words,
perhaps its most attractive aspect. In fact, however, blues singers also
absorbed lyrics from singers they copied.
Soon Waters was singing and playing guitar in a local string band,
shouting over the noisy crowds in the juke joints, playing at suppers and
barbecues, singing on the streets on Saturday afternoons when everyone
came to town-providing the sort of entertainment countless local
musicians did throughout the rural South. Recordings document this stage
in his musical development. When Alan Lomax and John Work came
through the Mississippi Delta in 1941 seeking to record Robert Johnson
for the Archive of American Folk Song, they were told that although
Johnson was dead, Waters would make a good substitute. In 1941 and
1942 Lomax recorded Waters and the current version of his string band.
Most of his songs, such as the blues "I Be's Troubled," were traditional,
containing stanzas from the common stock, but into many of them Waters
also mixed original stanzas, thus giving them his personal stamp.' 9 Had he
remained in the Delta, he would have enjoyed increasing local fame,
perhaps coming eventually to travel, like his mentor Son House, from one
plantation to the next, stopping in some of the larger towns, reaching on
occasion a large city like Memphis; but recording opportunities and the
chance to establish a wider reputation appeared small. Many people were
migrating North from the Delta, where wages were higher and jobs
plentiful during the War years. Even Son House had taken a job with the
railroad and moved to Rochester, New York. So Waters, encouraged by
the attention Lomax paid him, decided to head north. "I wanted to get
out of Mississippi in the worst way, man," he told Peter Guralnick. "I
figured if anyone else was living in the city I could make it there, too."20
In 1943, bringing with him only his guitar, suitcase, and an extra suit of
clothes, he journeyed to Chicago, staying at first with friends and cousins
1'8bid., pp. 105-107.
19His Library of Congress recordings have been issued on Muddy Waters: Down on Stovall's
Plantation, Testament T-2210, 12" LP. Singers generally considered a song original if it contained
one or two stanzas they believed they had invented.
20Feel Like Going Home (New York: Outerbridge & Dienstfrey, 1971), p. 47.
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 321
while he found a job in a corrugated-paper-carton factory and looked for
work as a musician. Soon he had enough money to move into an
apartment of his own, but musical success was not so easy. "In music then
you'd go in and tell the people you played blues; a lot of 'em they'd shake
their head and say, 'Sorry, can't use you.' "2" Downhome blues was
old-fashioned; its singers could not compete for jobs in the sophisticated
nightclubs where cocktail jazz trios like Nat Cole's, smooth vocal groups
like the Ink Spots, and jump combos like Louis Jordan's put forth a sound
more restrained and tightly organized than the downhome singers were
capable of. But, gradually, the downhome singers found work in the
rougher clubs and the neighborhood bars in the urban ghettos and the
surrounding industrial towns. In order to be heard above the noisy crowds
they amplified their instruments electronically. Instrumental techniques
did not change,2 2 but the sound had a raw edge to it, a new energy. The
people liked it.
Shortly after the War, the major record companies lost interest in
recording blues. Meanwhile, a number of small, newly formed record
companies broke the majors' monopoly on black music. Since a
best-selling record could turn an enormous profit from a relatively small
investment, the owner-producers were willing to experiment with whatever
music might sell. Among the music they recorded, though by no
means dominant, was the downhome blues they found in the neighborhood
joints. "When I first saw Leonard Chess in 1946," reported Lazy Bill
Lucas, "he had a tape recorder no bigger than that [points to a Sony
TC-800, about 15"x 12"x 4"], going around from tavern to tavern
looking for
talent."'23 Although Chess recorded a variety of music, his
most successful singer was Muddy Waters, whose 1948 remake of "I Be's
Troubled" sold more quickly than Chess could supply distributors. Out at
night driving and delivering Venetian blinds (for he could not live by his
musical earnings), Waters heard his own voice as the record blasted out of
apartment windows; "I used to wonder if I had died," he said.2 4
Downhome blues records, sold to black people in the South as well as
in the urban North, Midwest, and far West, never captured a very large
share of the market; most people preferred the modern sounds of cocktail
crooners like Charles Brown, or the more complex big band arrangements
which sometimes showcased blues shouters like Wynonie Harris, Joe
Turner, or B. B. King. Baby Doo Caston ascribed the difference to social
status: "Blues is the thing that if it was done a certain way everybody
21Rooney, p. 110.
22Urbane blues singer-guitarists such as B. B. King and T-Bone Walker, "fronting" jazz bands
with electric guitars, altered the techniques significantly, but the downhome in. guitarists just plugged Amplifying the harmonica did allow for "Little Walter" Jacobs' horn-like playing to be heard
effectively, however, and it encouraged many imitators.
23Jeff Titon, "Calling All Cows: Lazy Bill Lucas, part 2," Blues Unlimited, No. 61 (April
1969), p. 10.
24Rowe, p. 71.
322 JEFF TODD TITON
liked it. And Billy Eckstine came out with Earl Hines's band singing,
'Jelly, jelly, jelly stays on my mind,' and most everybody bought the
record because a big band was right behind it. But if it had been
somebody like Sonny Boy Williamson with his harp [harmonica] and
somebody playing them guitars behind him, an old bass, and beating on a
drum, they wouldn't have bought it because it was kind of a gutbucket
thing. It's just the style of it; it was a class."'2
Whether it was a big, riffing jazz band or a cocktail jump combo, the
modern, urbane sound was precise and finely detailed, the instruments
arrangedh ierarchicallye ach with its distinctiver ange,r iff, and tone color,
charting out and then filling a large musical space. Its elegance-the sense
of great power held in easy restraint-was well suited to the atmosphere
and style of behavior expected at a cocktail lounge or supper club. The
downhome blues sound, on the contrary, often was blurred, the
instruments blending in egalitarian indistinctness as piano, guitar, and
harmonica sometimes doubled each other's riffs, pouncing in response
after the vocalist was through with a phrase. The sound was well-suited to
the rugged bar atmosphere in which it flourished, the makeshift storefront
and garage studios in which it often was recorded. Usually relying on
professionals ongwriterst, he urbanes ingers,h eirst o the vaudevilles ingers
of the 1920's, were as much at home with pop music and novelty pieces as
they were slightly uncomfortable with the limitations of the basic blues
structures; their lyrics reflected a Broadway legacy of self-directed irony
and a certain coyness. Downhome blues singers and their bands, on the
other hand, were not schooled in the precision, the complex harmonic
structures, the plenitude of the urbane sound; they stayed instead in the
well-dugg roove of the traditional" three-changbe lues."26 Theirr ecorded
lyrics gave more evidence of originality and thematic coherence than their
standard fare over the course of an evening's singing in a neighborhood
club. For their lyrics in live performance, they relied upon a stock of
traditional songs and stanzas, upon their renditions of current recordings
and the songs of their down-the-streect ompetitors,a nd their smalls upply
of original songs (which were passing into tradition as other singers
learned them). Irony in downhome blues abounded, but it rarely was
self-directed. Urbane vocals sometimes were crooned, sometimes shouted;
downhome vocalists did not employ so great a dynamic range or variance
in timbre. Urbane lyrics were fit precisely into the common twelve-bar
frame so that musicians could anticipate their entrances and perform their
roles with precision. The downhome singer, who usually accompanied
25 Titon, From Blues to Pop, p. 27.
26Common downhome musicians' language in Chicago to describe the standard blues harmonic
patternw hich, over the course of the ordinaryt welve-measurest anza, is as follows: meas. 1-4 on
the tonic, meas. 5-6 on the subdominant, meas. 7-8 on the tonic, meas. 9 on the dominant 7th,
meas. 10 on the dominant 7th or subdominant, meas. 11 on the tonic, and meas. 12 on the tonic,
sometimes moving to the dominant 7th after the first beat. "Three-change" refers to the number of
chords, not changes.
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 323
himself, was not so careful; if he held a line for a couple of extra beats, or
if he shortened the musical time between lines, or if he got lost during an
instrumental break, he expected his sidemen to follow him. As a result,
the downhome blues songs sometimes exhibit eleven, eleven-and-a-half,
twelve-and-a-halfa, nd thirteen bar 4/4 (or 12/8) strophes, as well as
occasional confusion among the accompanists. Of course if the singer had
no accompanists besides himself, his idiosyncrasies caused no group
problems.27 It should, of course, be understoodt hat there are individual
exceptions to these distinctions between urbane and downhome blues
styles after World War II but, taken as a whole, they outline clearly
audible differences,w hich in turn reflect contrastinga ttitudest owardt he
demands and pace of city life upon people who not long ago were farmers.
Downhome blues steadied the recent migrants; urbane blues appealed to
those who had made the transition successfully.
Freedom is the overarchingth eme in postward ownhome blues lyrics.
(It is, of course, a major theme in prewar lyrics as well.) The
overwhelming number of songs concerned in the broadest sense with
motion, with journeys along mental and physical landscapes, with future
anticipations, suggests that the American dream, the freedom to pursue
happiness, is at the heart of their expression. The singer of a blues lyric
casts himself in the conventional role of mistreated victim. (Because of
that convention it cannot be assumed that the words, often traditional
anyway, speak personally for the singer.) Movement is precipitated in
downhome blues songs by a mistreater, a character who does not respect
the singer's dignity. Sometimes the mistreater is an authority figure, such
as the plantation owner, factory foreman, or the grocer who sells the
singer's family food on credit. More often the mistreater is a lover; and,
since most downhomeb lues songs are sung by men, the mistreatinglo ver
usually is cast in a female role. The occasion for the song is the
recognition of mistreatment. Perhaps the plantation owner wants to work
the sharecropperso hard he refuses him the time to bury his wife: "That
white man says, 'It's been raining. / Yes and I'm way behind. / I may let
you bury that woman one of these old / Dinnertimes.'" 28 Perhapst he
foreman fires the singer: "I went to work this morning, / Was all set to
start. / My boss walked up and told me / Something break my heart:
'Things so slow / Don't think we need you any more.'
",29
The mistreating
lover may spend all the singer's money: "You know she takes my money,
/ She calls me 'Jack.' / She holds her hands out for it, she never give it
27Compare Fahey, p. 9: "When groups record, the members must decide in advance the exact
metrical structure of the performance, or else musical chaos will ensue." But even when the
structure was predetermined, downhome musicians did not always follow it.
28Lightnin' (Sam) Hopkins, "Tim Moore's Farm" Gold Star 640, 10" 78 (Houston, 1947). In
this and almost all cases hereafter the singer is credited as the author of the song. In the interests of
economy I have chosen to quote from stanzas only those lyrics necessary for illustration.
29J. B. Hutto, "Things Are So Slow," Chance 1165, 10" 78 (Chicago, 1954).
324 JEFF TODD TITON
back. / She's a money-takingw oman."3 0 She may come home drunka fter
a night's partying: "My baby went out last night and got drunk, / Came
home raising sand. / She had nerve enough to tell me, 'L. C., / I found me
a brand new man.' "'3' She sleeps with another lover: "Now you know
my mm-baby she didn't go no place / But to church and the Sunday
School. / But now she run around in every notoriety joint in town I And
have every man she meet."3 2 Nor does she care enough to manage the
household: "Yes house it ain't never clean. / My supper it ain't never
done."3 3
The lyrics detail the circumstanceso f the mistreatmenta nd enlist the
sympathy of the listening bystander; the drama turns on what the singer
will do about it. The situation confronts him with a choice: try to make
the best of a bad situation, attempt to reform the mistreater, or leave.
Sometimes the singer imagines another way out-murder-but almost
always he rejects that alternativeC. hoosingt o reformh er, he givesa dvice:
"Well you run all up and down the street, / Running other women's men.
/ You better take it easy, baby. / Take it easy while you can 'cause your
time- / Baby you know your time ain't long."'34 Or he appeals to her
sense of responsibility: "Please come home to your daddy / And explain
yourself to me / Because I and you is man and wife / Trying to start a
family. / I'm beggingy ou baby, / Cut out that off-the-wallj ive." 3 The
would-be reformer may even admit he is partly to blame: "Baby you got
to help me get myself straightened up right now. / If you don't I am /
going / have to go."3 6 But downhome blues singers do not usually admit
fault, nor do they realize that the mistreating lover may justifiably be
liberatingh erselff rom his care and control.
Accepting mistreatment confirms the downhome blues singer in the
role of victim. Sometimest he role seems inevitable,p articularlyw hen he
is a victim of economic conditions: "Well I left home this morning, boys,
you know / 'Bout half-past nine. / I passed the stockyard, you know the
boys were still / On the picket line. You know I need your hundred
dollars.""' 3 The singer may accept the situation's inevitability with a
proverbiale xpression:" Now if you don't have no money, peoples,/ You
can't live happy no more.""'3 But more often the victim's response
30Johnny Young, "Money Takin' Woman," Ora Nelle 712, 10" 78 (Chicago, 1947).
31L. C. Williams, "Hole in the Wall," Gold Star 623, 10" 78 (Houston, 1948).
32Slim Pickens (Eddie Burns), "Bad Woman Blues," Holiday 202, 10" 78 (Detroit, 1948).
33Texas Slim (John Lee Hooker), "Black Man Blues," King 4283, 10" 78 (Detroit, 1948).
34Nat Terry, "Take It Easy," Imperial 5150, 10" 78 (prob. Dallas, 1951).
35Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), "Your Funeral and My Trial," Checker 894, 7" 45
(Chicago, 1958).
36Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller), "This Old Life," Chess 1536, Bummer Road, 12" LP
(Chicago, 1960; orig. unissued).
37Floyd Jones, "Stockyard Blues," Old Swingmaster 22, 10" 78 (Chicago, 1947).
38John Brim, "Tough Times," Parrott 799, 10" 78 (Chicago, 1953).
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 325
includes irony: "Yes you know I bought her a radio; / I even bought her a
'lectric fan. / She said, 'Sam, I'm gon' lay here and God knows I won't
have no other man.' That made me feel so good / Till I don't know what
to do. / Yes, darlin', every dollar poor Sam makes, you know, / He got to
bring it back home to you."3 And occasionally the victim's response is
threatening: "Yeah, / Got so mad this morning, / Broke to the wall right
through there. / Grabbed my shotgun, I started to / Mow that woman
down."4 0
Most often the drama of mistreatment is resolved according to the third
alternative: the victim frees himself, reestablishing his dignity by leaving,
as, for example, in the following lyric:4 1
Mistreated Blues
1. I been mistreated so long
Babe it seems like my time ain't long
I been mistreated so long
Babe it seems like my time ain't long
Yeah you know if that woman don't come back this time
You can bet your last dollar the poor girl is dead and gone
2. Now I'm gonna carry my old shotgun
B'lieve I'll take along my forty-four
Now I'm gonna carry my old shotgun
B'lieve I'll take along my old forty-four
'Cause honey you done dogged me long enough
I declare you won't dog me no more
3. Ever since I been in love with you
Wolf's been hollering all in my door
Ever since I been in love with you
Say the wolf's been hollering all in my door
Yeah this is your last time now baby
Swear you won't dog me no more
4. Now goodbye baby
I declare I'm going down the line
Yes bye bye baby
Honey I declare I'm going down the line
Yes you can have your troubles in this world
Babe I declare I'll have mine
39Lightnin' (Sam) Hopkins,"Lonesome Home," Gold Star 624, 10" 78 (Houston, 1947).
40"Black Man Blues" (see n. 33).
41Buddy Chiles, "Mistreated Blues," Gold Star 660, 10" 78 (Houston, 1949). I have printed
the complete text and numbered the stanzas. The song exhibits the normal three-line, AAB blues
326 JEFF TODD TITON
"Mistreated Blues" opens with a general complaint about mistreatment
brought on by the lover's absence. The singer, who addressed the listening
bystander in the first stanza, turns a threat toward the lover in the second
stanza as he states his intention to look for her, gun in hand. A complaint
cast in the proverbial expression, "wolf's been hollering all in my door,"
continues the threat in the third stanza. Perhaps these words are muttered
while the singer, carrying his gun, is out searching for his lover. But the
threat turns out to be empty, and in the final stanza the singer announces
his intention to depart. As he addresses his lover once more, we may
suppose he has found her, either in this stanza or the previous one. Instead
of shooting her, he declares his independence: "You can have your
troubles in this world; / Babe I declare I'll have mine." The ironic
suggestion is that it will be better to endure the inevitable "troubles"
separated from one another. An ironic parting shot is characteristic of a
great many downhome blues lyrics, and often it displays the compression
of proverbial expression: "I like you all right, baby, / But I just can't
stand your ways"4 2 or "I'm going upstairs; / I'm going to bring back
down my clothes. / If anybody asks about me, / Just tell 'em I walked
outdoors." 4 3 Sometimes the parting is angry: "It took me a long time /
Long time to find out / my mistake (it sure did man), I But I'll bet you
my bottom dollar / I'm not fattening no more / frogs for snakes."4 4 Irony
takes note of lessons learned, but it also shows the singer's ambivalence,
for the mistreating lover remains desirable: "Yes, you know she's a sweet
little girl / But I'm gonna have to let her go."4 S
Whether the mistreater is boss or lover, the mistreating relationship is
exploitative, as this widely-sung lyric makes plain:4 6
stanza, but I have written the stanza in six half-lines because of the singer's duration pattern. A full
explanation of the way blues singers divide three-line, AAB stanzas is provided in Early Downhome
Blues, ch. 4. The unconventional placement of this and the other complete texts on the page is an
attempt to let space guide the reader's eye over the words so that something of the singer's rhythm
is represented. For similar experimental formats, see Eric Sackheim and Jonathan Shahn, The Blues
Line (1969; rpt. New York: Schirmer, 1975), and Titon, "Ethnomusicology," "Postwar
Downhome Blues," and "Downhome Blues since the Second World War."
42Baby Face Turner, "Best Days," Kent 9007, 12" LP (Little Rock, ca. 1952; orig. unissued).
43Howlin' Wolf (Chester Burnett), "Dog Me Around," Crown 5240, 12" LP (Memphis, 1951).
44Sonny Boy Williamson, "Fattening Frogs for Snakes," Checker 864, 7" 45 (Chicago, 1957).
4 5"Hole in the Wall" (see n. 31).
46Eddie Boyd, "Five Long Years," J.O.B. 1007, 10" 78 (Chicago, 1952), complete text. The
first stanza takes the normal, six half-line form (see n. 41), but the three succeeding stanzas take a
quatrain-refrain form, which is written here not to display the rhymed quatrain but to show the
singer's timing. Taken together, the six half-line form and the quatrain-refrain form account for the
stanzas in about ninety-five percent of postwar downhome blues songs. In the quatrain-refrain
form, the quatrain plus the first few syllables of the refrain are fit into the first four measures;
afterwards, the song contines as in the six half-line form, as the refrain is fit into measures five and
six, and nine and ten. Thus both are twelve-measure strophes. Comparison of stanzas 1 and 2 of
"Five Long Years" reveals the differences at the stanza beginnings and the similarities at the stanza
ends.
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 327
Five Long Years
1. If you've ever been mistreated
You know just what I'm talking about
Well if you've ever been mistreated
You know just what I'm talking about
I worked five long years for one woman
She had the nerve to put me out
2. I got a job in a steel mill
A-trucking steel like a slave
For five long years every Friday I went straight home with all my pay if you've
Ever been mistreated
You know just what I'm talking about
I worked five long years for one woman
She had the nerve to put me out
3. I had a death in my family
She wouldn't give me a helping hand
I borrowed two or three dollars from the woman she said hurry up and pay it
back old man if you've
Ever been mistreated
You know just what I'm talking about
I worked five long years for one woman
She had the nerve to put me out
4. I finally learned a lesson
I should have known a long time ago
The next woman I marry has got to work and bring me some dough
I've been mistreated
You know just what I'm talking about
I worked five long years for one woman
She had the nerve to put me out
In "Five Long Years" the singer's independence has been declared for him
by the mistreating lover who put him out of the house. Nonetheless this
victim envisions turning the tables on the mistreater the next time around.
The frequency with which the singers point out that they have worked
hard for a woman and given her their earnings bespeaks the transference
of the relationship from boss to lover. Exceptional downhome blues
artists carry the ironies of paternalistic treatment satisfyingly far.
Plantation owner Tim Moore, a Texan about whom a considerable oral
tradition grew up, was known for feeding his sharecroppers unexpectedly
well on surprise occasions: "Soon in the morning, / He'll give you
scrambled eggs; / Yes but he's liable to call you so soon you'll catch a
mule by his hind legs."4 7 Whether Moore proved generous or unkind,
47"Tim Moore's Farm" (see n. 28).
328 JEFF TODD TITON
the suddenness of his actions confirmed that he controlled his croppers at
his whim. And in a lyric which makes an ironic comment upon New Deal
liberalism, the same artist, Lightnin' Hopkins, asserts his dignity by
throwing away his WPA shovel even if it means conforming to a black
stereotype:4
8
Candy Kitchen
1. Well I don't work in no candy kitchen little girl
God knows I don't sell no chewing gum
I don't work in no candy kitchen little girl
God knows I don't sell no chewing gum
Yes but still I don't have to grab no pick and shovel woman and
Roll from sun to sun
2. Yes I woke up this morning
Man the rain falling on the ground
Yes I woke up this morning
Boy the rain falling on the ground
Yes I had to go work for the W. P. and A. and boys you know it's
Way over crosstown
3. Yes these is awful things
Yes to hear a black man say
Yes these is awful things
To hear a black man say
Yes you know I done throwed my shovel away 'cause I don't have to
Work on that W. P. and A.
In this splendid lyric, the singer gives a long walk in rainy weather as an
excuse for quitting his job. As he talks to his would-be lover, however, it
becomes clear that the nature of the WPA work itself is the problem. To
work in a candy kitchen is the "little girl's" naive view of paradise; his
WPA job, to "roll from sun to sun" with pick and shovel, is about the
same as prison. The triviality of the false excuse he offers is a pose,
asserting the job means little to him. But the job cannot be trivial; after
all, it pays him wages during the Depression. The final stanza gets at the
heart of the matter: unlike a prisoner, he will not be forced to dig ditches
and break rocks. Rejection is his assertion of freedom. The ironic word
awful contrasts the difference between the popular interpretation of his
act, as lazy and irresponsible, with its true meaning: he "throwed [his]
shovel away," an act of defiance.
Freedom from racial discrimination is not a widespread theme in
downhome blues lyrics. The eloquence of songs like "Candy Kitchen" and
48Lightnin' (Sam) Hopkins, "Candy Kitchen," RPM 378, 10" 78 (Houston, ca. 1948).
Complete text.
THEMATIC PATTERN IN DOWNHOME BLUES LYRICS 329
"Tim Moore's Farm" is enhanced by the theme of racial injustice but does
not derive from it. Rather, the exploitative situations provide artists with
the opportunity to explore a universal human theme and make it specific
through the black experience. Whether concerned with bosses or
lovers-or both-the lyrics dwell on the complexities of human entanglements
and the recurring necessity to be free of them.
Downhome blues lyrics pass judgment on behavior and show how to get
along in the world. Although the songs are thought sinful by black
churchgoers, the singers preach an ethic of the Golden Rule. Most of them
exhibit a narrative pattern in which a drama of love is played against a
geography of motion. The singer of a downhome blues song casts himself
in the role of mistreated victim. He introduces an antagonist (mistreater)
and, as he provides incidents which detail the circumstances of mistreatment,
he draws up a bill of indictment. Then, with the listener's tacit
approval, the victim becomes the judge, and the drama turns on the
verdict: will he accept the mistreatment, try to reform the mistreater, or
leave? Resigned acceptance and attempted reform resolve a minority of
songs. Most often the victim, declaring his independence, steps out of his
role with an ironic parting shot and leaves. From the manner of the
indictment it is difficult, if not impossible, to predict the resolution. In
the chronology of performance, only the decision that there must be some
resolution has been made. Thus in outline the thematic pattern of most
commercially recorded postwar downhome blues songs is, simply, the
thought sequence of recognition leading to indictment leading to
resolution. In a genre whose overarching theme is freedom, it is fitting
that its thematic pattern incorporate a choice among resolving narrative
patterns.
Though blues songs do not narrate stories the way ballads do, the
corpus of blues lyrics may be viewed as history: a cycle of journeys in
search of fair treatment and better times. Broadly reflecting the history of
millions of black Americans who migrated, after Emancipation, from one
farm to the next and then to the cities, its irony expresses an attitude
toward progress. Each song-lyric-indeed, sometimes each stanzabecomes
a way-station, a realization, and a declaration. At each phase the
"I" of the lyric, asserting independence yet troubled by memory,
advances by beginning again. If the theme of many Anglo-American
ballads is romantic tragedy-love thwarted by fate and ending in
death-the theme of black American blues is the converse, ironic comedy:
a victim's celebration of a fragile, newly asserted freedom. The one is
linear, progressive, and final; the other is cyclical and regenerative.
Possibly the demands and opportunities of city life were ill-suited to
the traditional lyrics brought from the downhome experience. Certainly,
many upwardly mobile, middle-class urban blacks disapproved of downhome
blues precisely because of the memories associated with it, the
fighting, drinking, gambling, lewd dancing, and womanizing at the
Saturday night parties. In this connection it is well to recall Baby Doo
330 JEFF TODD TITON
Caston's conclusion that the differences in urbane and downhome blues
styles symbolized class distinctions. Viewed in the context of the
downhome social milieu, the immediate function of blues lyrics, if they
were equipment for living, is obvious: to help lovers understand one
another or give them social approval for leaving in response to
mistreatment. The listener who recognized his or her own situation in the
lyrics of a blues song was presented with a definition of that situation and
shown exactly what might be done in response.
In his Depression-era ethnography of black tenant farming in Macon
County, Alabama, Charles S. Johnson reported that because marital
separation was common, there was a ready supply of unattached men and
women in the community. The reason they gave for parting was
mistreatment, which took the form of general dissatisfaction with the
relationship, or specific objection to laziness, physical cruelty, adultery, or
the tedium of farm life. A few statements from Johnson's informants will
illustrate: "Tom Kerns was my husband, but he fight so I jest couldn't live
with him. He treat me so bad." Another responded, "I been married
twice. Both my wives left me. They jest said I run 'bout after the same
women. But they 'cuse me wrong." Johnson concluded that since
households usually did not break up afterwards, it was "more 'respectable'
to separate, and even to experiment further with another mate, than to
tolerate certain conditions with one's legal mate." Or, as another of his
informants explained, "He's nice all right, but I ain't thinking 'bout
marrying. Soon as you marry a man he starts mistreating you, and I'm not
going to be mistreated no more."4 9 Blues songs had become equipment
for living even as living had become equipment for blues songs.
Tufts University
Medford, Massachusetts
------------------------------------------------
1. An earlier version of this essay was delivered as a lecture in the Marshall Woods series, sponsored by the Music Department of Brown University, on February 19, 1976. I am grateful to David Evans for suggesting improvements, and to the National Endowment for the Humanities, whose provision of a 1974 Summer Stipend made possible much of the research.
2. See, for example, Robert Foulke and Paul Smith, An Anatomy of Literature (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972), pp. 19-32; and Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), pp. 52-67.
3. For a compilation, see A. L. Kroeber and Clyde Kluckhohn, Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions (1952; rpt. New York: Vintage, 1963). For a critique of cognitive definitions, see Marvin Harris, The Rise of Anthropological Theory (New York: Crowell, 1968), pp. 568-604. For a current textbook which organizes the field from a cognitive base, see Philip K. Bock, Modern Cultural Anthropology, 2nd ed. rev. (New York: Knopf, 1974).
49Shadow of the Plantation (1934; rpt. Chicago: University of C
hicago Press, 1966), pp. 75-83.