The Promise of Black Music Month

Written By: Kyle Thompson

“Music is a world within itself, with a language we all understand.”
- Stevie Wonder 

As the month of June concludes and we enter July, Black Music Month (or African American Music Heritage Month) follows in tow. The uniqueness of our time is the dynamism of Black music operating in the popular consciousness now more than ever. From Kendrick Lamar’s legendary Super Bowl performance, the box office hit Sinners, and Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour, there is no shortage of great music and reflective art emerging during this time. One of the most fundamental questions, however, is what the “promise” of Black music is to the history of African Americans as a people, and the broader implications it has on America and the world.

Black Music Month – Some background.

Black Music Month was established by President Jimmy Carter in 1979 as a way to support the work of the Black Music Association, which was created by Philadelphia artists Kenny Gamble, Leon Huff, and Cleveland-Based DJ Ed Wright. 

The first Black Music Month Celebration was hosted at the White House. Artists like Chuck Berry and Billy Eckstine were in attendance, along with many other musicians, to commemorate African American music. The month would not receive an official presidential proclamation until 2000, under President Bill Clinton. Later, President Barack Obama would rename the commemorative month “African American Music Appreciation Month” in 2016. In the proclamation, President Obama stated, “African-American music exemplifies the creative spirit at the heart of American identity and is among the most innovative and powerful art the world has ever known” (para. 1). 

Why is this moment in time distinct?

The movie Sinners has brought revitalized attention to Blues music, which contributes to the broader zeitgeist on musicality in America. Sinners effectively presents folkloric and supernatural motifs in Blues music in a unique and stylized manner that has not been explored prominently in film up to this point. At the same time, the everyday lives of Black people continue forward. The Black church continues to operate as a fixture in the lives of Black people, and rap remains a dominant secular art form. Above all else, the humanity of Black people is central to these experiences, whether at the cookout, praising God, or attending concerts of prominent Black artists. Upon further analysis, one would find that musicians who play blues, perform in churches, or create the next viral rap summer anthem do so not just as an expression of a specific genre, but to provide a soundtrack to the Black experience at a given point in time. This soundtrack is lived by people who seek comfort in the divinity of God, escape from life’s challenges through relatable lyrics, and camaraderie at social events.

What is the Promise of Black Music Month?

Black music touches every corner of the globe and resonates across history, languages, and personal experiences. It honors the complexity of the Black experience by the multitudes of artists who put pen to paper, recorded in studios, or performed on stages to express themselves. How, then, can we think about what I call the “promise” of Black music month? What does this mean in terms of looking at Black music beyond just a simple monthly designation, but as an ongoing, persistent feature of the human condition expressed by African Americans? 

To me, the promise of Black Music Month is honoring the expression of humanity across genre, style, and approach to music in the Black community. So much so that anyone, around the world, can find some piece of themselves in the music, too. I would furthermore suggest that Black Music Month is a reflection of America, and the diversity that is cultivated by lived experiences and regional differences, unified by cultural similarities that have shaped the essence of what it means to be Black in America. The ability for Black people to express themselves is the ability for America to see itself reflected in a community that survived challenges for centuries, yet still continues to thrive. It is this promise that opens the door for new artistry and genres to emerge, reflecting the soul of America. 

the blues that sprung from my roots

BY: KYLE THOMPSON 

Growing up, I was often teased by my peers in school for liking blues. I did not mind though. I preferred the culture and history of the Blues instead of consuming dominant pop culture at the time. I had no true explanation as to why I felt the way I did about the Blues- I just did. Being a black man from the suburbs was my way of engaging with my environment. Some people say the Blues is something that comes to you, rather than you coming to it. Other people say you get the blues over a person you love. I think both are true, in a way, but no one has to live a hard life to feel the Blues. I got the blues yesterday when I dropped my sandwich on the ground.

There is something to this magnificent music that draws my ears in a way like no other. People always say that there is that one song that you hear, and when it grabs you, it holds you to your very core. I would say most, if not all blues music I came in contact with had that effect on me.  One benefit of growing up in the age of the internet was that I had options to craft my individuality the way I saw fit. In this case, I dived deep into the blues, because it was always at my fingertips. The way I saw it, why would I only listen to what was popular when I could literally explore any genre I wanted? I listened to punk, afrobeat, hip hop, gospel, and classical music. In each of these genres, I found the blues. It was so interesting to me understanding how everyone’s favorite band loved and admired the blues so greatly, yet everyday people didn’t seem to care about blues. 

I quickly learned that people’s perception of the Blues were heavily misguided. Some people thought it was just a black man strumming a guitar down south singing about whiskey and women. Other people reduced its complexity to being just a music that gave birth to Rock n’ Roll. The Blues in this narrative was an antiquated sonic form, its only purpose being a stepping stone to the development of rock and roll. Very few people were intentional in saying what it actually was though- an African American art form. I see the blues as a folkloric element to the Black experience that is passed down through generations- verbally or nonverbally. When I was a child growing up, my grandfather would sit in the back of his truck and listen to the radio. Oftentimes, I would tag along, and together we would spend afternoons sitting in his car listening to Blues music on the radio. I was much younger then, barely past four or five, however I knew that what I was experiencing was something special. I had no words to describe what that experience felt like until years later, when I came across a well-known painting called The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner. In that image, I saw an aesthetic contextualizing the relationship with my own grandfather- a Black man passing down culture and folklore to a younger generation. 

The blues has roots in field hollers, slave spirituals, and work songs meant to uplift the spirits of enslaved Africans brought to America. The pain, hardship, and inequality of slavery would naturally bring about a sound of music and cultural expression reflective of their environment. As slavery became replaced by the impact of Jim Crow, it became a new barrier to the success of the Black community to achieve and thrive. The blues acted as that healing, secular music that would be a form of release after a long day of work. Musicians would channel their experiences into singing about their lives, their experiences, and their emotions. I hear more than an aesthetically pleasing sound of music listening to blues. I heard the sounds of grandparents and their elders, recorded so long ago. I hear backyard fish fries, I hear trains bustling down the railroad, I hear cottonfields, I hear cars driving up and down the city highway, I hear community centers, I hear Thanksgiving, I hear Christmas with family, and I hear vestiges of African culture. The lives, slang, style, and morals were wrapped in the painful and profound. In a sense, when I listened to the blues, I was receiving this heritage that was apart of a larger narrative and experience. I found where I fit in my own culture, and in turn, where America and the world fit in with my expression. 

OKLAHOMA BLUES

BY: SELBY MINNER AND IRENE JOHNSON 

“Da-dut – da-dah-duh – dah-de-dup!” My bass rang out across the crowd… I could hardly breathe! He had me starting the song as a solo – indeed the whole set! Up the steps he came, out from behind the stage and into the light, sporting a yellow ice cream suit and a big red guitar. The drums kicked in, the rest of the band, and then… Mr. Lowell Fulson hit the microphone and the place came alive: “TRAMP! You can call me that! But I’m a LOVER!” I was holding the bass line – one of the greatest bass lines. The man at the top of the West Coast blues was back home in Tulsa, and Juneteenth on Greenwood was rocking! D.C. was wearing “old shiny” – his green and red tux jacket – with his red guitar, Big Dave 'Bigfoot' Carr was in from Spencer, OK, with his sax, Jimmy Ellis on guitar and vocals, and Bob ‘Pacemaker’ Newham on traps. It was 1989 and Lowell Fulson was at home to be inducted into the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. He later said he would come back to play the Traditions Festival in Oklahoma City in the fall, but only if he had the same backup band! Such an honor to play with an Oklahoma legend!

Oklahoma’s unique history and heritage provided fertile ground to grow its particular blues sound. Before we can dive into the blues, though, we need to travel back to Oklahoma before it gained statehood in 1907. I call it the wild west – where anything could happen.

Between the 1830s to 1850s, Native Americans of the Five Tribes were forcibly marched on the Trails of Tears from their homelands in the southeastern United States to the eastern part of modern Oklahoma, then called “Indian Territory.” With them, they brought their African American slaves. It must be understood that slavery in Indian Territory varied widely – ranging from resembling white cotton plantations, to commonly practicing intermarriage and allowing other extended freedoms. Linda Reese cites, “By the time of the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, the tribes' members owned approximately ten thousand slaves.”1

The Civil War was fought from 1861 to 1865. Dr. Hugh W. Foley, Jr. writes, “The Civil War’s presence in Indian Territory is directly related to Black pride in the area, as the Battle of Honey Springs, fought July 17, 1863, witnessed the first pitched combat by uniformed African American troops, the First Kansas Colored Volunteer Infantry Regiment, who fought alongside Anglo and American Indian troops. Fought just north of what is now Rentiesville, the battle has been called the ‘Gettysburg of the West.’”2 It was a running battle there at Honey Springs – some of it actually took place on our land where my husband D.C. Minner and I established the Down Home Blues Club (which hosts the Rentiesville Dusk ‘Til Dawn Blues Festival, the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame and the D.C. Minner Rentiesville Museum). Some of the soldiers from that battle went on to help found Rentiesville. 

The end of the Civil War sparked big transitions for the “Twin Territories” of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory. Reese explains, “The government insisted on the abolition of slavery and the incorporation of the Freedmen [former slaves] into their respective tribal groups with full citizenship rights. All of the Indian nations were willing to end slavery, but citizenship rights conferred access to land and tribal monies as well as political power.”1 Despite tribal attempts to maintain control of their land and tribal monies through the U.S. courts, Freedmen were ultimately given full rights. The Dawes Act, which was the federal government’s way of breaking up commonly held tribal land into individual allotments, granted Freedmen “approximately two million acres of property, the largest transfer of land wealth to Black people in the history of the United States.”3

Reese goes on, “Freedmen from adjoining states had slipped into the territory for years, intermarrying with their Black Indian counterparts or homesteading illegally, but now the opening of Indian lands to non-Indian settlement gained momentum and brought hundreds of migrants both Black and white.”1 Oklahoma, considered the “First Stop Out of the South,” was indeed the “promised land” for about a 30-year window, offering land allotments and opportunity. It was close enough to the South to travel by wagon, folks could grow the same crops, and since it was not yet a state, there were no oppressive Jim Crow laws. 

Freedmen often decided to settle together. It was at this point that the idea for all-Black towns developed. Larry O’Dell explains, “They created cohesive, prosperous farming communities that could support businesses, schools and churches, eventually forming towns. Entrepreneurs in these communities started every imaginable kind of business, including newspapers, and advertised throughout the South for settlers.”4 I’ve heard it said, the word was “tremendous opportunity, come help us do this… don’t come lazy and don’t come broke!” 

The upshot of this opportunity was that more than 50 all-Black towns were established. These towns emphasized education, self-governance, strong churches and communities, and were held together by the economic security of their agricultural land. They believed that education was the key to a better future; the schools were strict and people graduated high school. My husband, Rentiesville native and bluesman D.C. Minner used to say, “If I did not get my lesson, I got a whoopin’ from the teacher. On my way home, my friend’s mom would give me a whoopin’, and when I got down here to the house Mama [his grandmother who raised him, Miss Lura] would give me a whoopin’, and she didn’t even want to know what I did wrong! If I got it from the others, she just had one coming too!” 

Here’s where we can pick up on the music coming out of Oklahoma. Foley explains that the opportunities available during this time crafted the music legacy of the region; “Access to music lessons, instruments and mentors help explain why more African American musicians from Oklahoma developed the advanced musical skills necessary to evolve into jazz artists… As social and economic conditions changed for the state's African Americans by the 1920s and 1930s, more musicians born during that time period evolved into traditional, guitar-based practitioners of the blues.”5 Musicians who could read jazz charts went east and worked in almost every major jazz ensemble out of New York. 

The jazz and blues players in Oklahoma were, in many ways, one community, particularly in major cities, such as Oklahoma City, Tulsa and Muskogee. In an interview with Bill Wax on Sirius XM’s B.B. King Bluesville, B.B. King said, “Jazz players say you can’t play good jazz unless you know the blues.” And D.C. said, “The R&B and blues bands here in the ‘50s and ‘60s all started their blues sets with an hour of instrumental jazz, so people could come in and get comfortable, and so the horn players could work out and do solos before they had to settle down to ‘blow parts’ – be rhythm players, essentially.” So, you see, there’s a blurred line there between jazz and blues here.

Given its history, plus the connection to Texas and the West Coast (you can drive to California without scaling the Rocky Mountains; there is a lot of work out there for musicians), I call Oklahoma – and Texas – “the cradle of the West Coast Blues.” Blues from Oklahoma is unique. Its sound includes horn sections, it’s a little smoother and the players dress – they consider themselves a little more “city” or “slicker.” 

An integral part of Oklahoma’s blues sound developed with the Texas-Oklahoma “Hot Box” guitar style. Unlike the slide playing or finger picking styles from the Piedmont and Mississippi-Chicago sounds, the “Hot Box” guitar style is a single-note lead style that has a great local lineage that eventually crossed over to rock ‘n roll. Starting around 1900, players of this style include Blind Lemon Jefferson (possibly the earliest to record this style), jazz innovator Charlie Christian (the first to put electric guitar solos into jazz), T-Bone Walker, Freddie King, Stevie Ray Vaughan, B.B. King to Eric Clapton and beyond. The Hot Box single-note lead style is the style of most American rock ‘n roll to this day! B.B. King said in another Bill Wax interview, “I am from Mississippi, but my fingers are too lazy to play Mississippi style, I play Texas!” 

There is no “music industry” per se in Oklahoma like there is in Nashville, Austin or Chicago; most people who play professionally work out of state. But since there are lots of juke joints in these towns – five in Rentiesville alone – there’s still a lot of music! Oklahoma has produced numerous great musicians and I’d love to tell about each and every one, but I’ll have to settle for highlighting just a few, with the help of Hugh W. Foley, Jr.’s “Blues” for the Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture.5 

Hart Wand of Oklahoma City actually published “Dallas Blues,” the first 12-bar blues on sheet music, in March of 1912 – the same year W.C. Handy published “Memphis Blues,” widely considered the first blues song.  

There were several territorial bands that played a circuit in the early 1900s across Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. The best of these bands was the Oklahoma City Blue Devils, which later became the core of the Count Basie Band out of Kansas City. Truly the bluesiest of all the touring jazz bands, I would say. 

Jay McShann supplemented his passion for the blues with what he learned in the Manual Training High School band of Muskogee, OK, and went on to lead one of the great blues-based big bands of the 1930s and 1940s out of Kansas City. His "Confessin' the Blues" was one of the biggest selling records for a Black artist in the early ‘40s.5 

Joe "The Honeydripper" Liggins charted a number of singles, including "The Honeydripper" and "Pink Champagne,” during the late 1940s and early 1950s with his streamlined rhythm and blues. His brother, Jimmy Liggins, led an amplified R&B group that preluded rock ‘n roll with hits like "Cadillac Boogie," "Saturday Night Boogie Man," "Drunk" and later, his now-classic blues song "I Ain't Drunk." Bandleader, drummer and songwriter Roy Milton’s “jump blues” served as a precursor to rock ‘n roll.5 

Jimmy “Chank” Nolen was another of Oklahoma's important blues guitarists. Credited for inventing the "chicken scratch" guitar style, Nolen is considered the “father of funk guitar.”5 The chord on the guitar is played in such a way that is very percussive, like a drum beat. Since it makes guitar rhythms very danceable, James Brown picked Nolen up to record as primary guitarist on several major hits. 

Gospel and soul-blues singer Ted Taylor experienced success with his falsetto-driven voice in the 1950s- ‘70s. Guitarist Wayne Bennett worked with Elmore James, Jimmy Reed, Otis Spann, Otis Rush and Bobby "Blue" Bland. Verbie Gene "Flash" Terry recorded the hit, "Her Name is Lou,” and later toured with T-Bone Walker, Bobby "Blue" Band, Floyd Dixon and others.5 

Guitarist Jesse Ed Davis, a Native American with Comanche, Kiowa and Muscogee heritage, toured with Conway Twitty in the early ‘60s before moving to California and joining Taj Mahal. Davis’ “reputation led to sessions for Leon Russell, Jackson Browne, Eric Clapton, John Lennon, Ringo Starr and Captain Beefheart, as well as four of [his] own solo albums.”5 

Larry Johnson and the New Breed (with D.C. Minner on bass) were the house band at the Bryant Center in Oklahoma City, playing several nights a week and backing up touring headliners like Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley for almost 10 years.

Lowell Fulson is probably Oklahoma’s most widely recognized blues guitar star. “By adding a horn section in the mode of swing bands to his electric blues lineup, Fulson created what is typically called the ‘uptown blues’ sound, which B. B. King made famous. Fulson's huge 1950 R&B hit, ‘Everyday I Have the Blues,’ became King's theme song”5 – surfacing the Texas-Oklahoma “Hot Box” guitar sound once again to evolve into what we know as the popular blues style!

Foley concludes, “Anglo-American blues men who emerged primarily from the Tulsa scene in the 1960s include pianist Leon Russell and guitarists J. J. Cale and Elvin Bishop.”5

I could keep going – multi-award-winning Watermelon Slim, extraordinary blues belter Dorothy “Miss Blues” Ellis, Jimmy Rushing of the Blue Devils and Count Basie's Orchestra, and so many more – but I’ll end my abridged round-up with my late husband, blues guitarist D.C. Minner.

D.C. was raised in Rentiesville by his grandmother, who owned and operated a grocery store/juke joint called the Cozy Corner in the 1940s- ‘60s. Here, he was exposed to all the music coming through. He toured, playing with Larry Johnson and the New Breed, Lowell Fulson, Chuck Berry, Freddie King, Bo Diddley, Jimmy Reed and Eddie Floyd before starting our own band, Blues on the Move. In 1988, we got tired of the road and moved from the California Bay Area back to Rentiesville, and reopened his grandmother’s old juke joint as the Down Home Blues Club. 

In 1989, we established the Blues in the Schools program through the Oklahoma State Arts Council. In 1991, we started the Rentiesville Dusk 'Til Dawn Blues Festival to feature local and regional blues artists, and it has become the longest running blues festival in the state and renowned nationwide. It’s here, where I also still run our other projects – the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame and the D.C. Minner Rentiesville Museum. 

In 1999, we received the Keeping the Blues Alive Award from The Blues Foundation for our efforts and contribution to music education and blues history. D.C. went on to being inducted into seven Halls of Fame, including the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame in 1999 and the Oklahoma Music Hall of Fame in 2003. 

D.C believed, “This is one of the few places where this history is still left,” and I work diligently and joyfully to keep the blues – and this rich history – preserved and alive in Oklahoma. 

Blues singer-bassist Selby Minner toured for 12 years with her husband D.C. Minner and their band Blues on the Move before settling in Rentiesville, OK. She continues to perform and teach, and keeps the Oklahoma blues tradition alive through her weekly Sunday Jam Sessions, the Dusk 'Til Dawn Blues Festival, the Oklahoma Blues Hall of Fame (OBHOF), and the D.C. Minner Rentiesville Museum. For more information, visit: DCMinnerBlues.com.

References

1. Linda Reese, “Freedmen,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=FR016.

1. Dr. Hugh W. Foley, Jr, “From Black Towns to Blues Festivals,” Funded by the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. http://dcminnerblues.com/?page_id=167. 

2. Victor Luckerson, “The Promise of Oklahoma,” Smithsonian Magazine, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/unrealized-promise-oklahoma-180977174. 

1. Larry O'Dell, “All-Black Towns,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=AL009.

2. Hugh W. Foley, Jr., “Blues,” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=BL016.

MAKE SURE TO CHECK BLUES FESTIVAL MAGAZINE FOR MORE!

Exploring the Past through Ring Shout in Paule Marshall’s “Praisesong for the Widow”

BY CHELSEA ADAMS 

Scholars and writers often use the idea or geography of Africa to indicate a return-to-roots journey for black people. The focus of the roots theme is a temporal shift, moving from the present to the past to discover ancestral roots, ceremonies, and cultural traditions that existed before slavery pillaged and plundered tribal lands. While recovering and remembering these people, cultures, and traditions is important work, it is often used as proof of African evolution from primitive to sophisticated cultural formations. Romanticism of the past often contributes to the idea that at its heart, black culture has a “wildness” to it, instilling Western ideas about blackness to the cultural mainstream. David F. Garcia states in his work Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins, that scholarly intent to establish proof of racial equality by focusing on black bodies may have unintentionally damaged the cause of freedom.

Looking at black music and dance development in both the US and the Caribbean, Garcia identifies how Western cultural standards dominated discussions of culture, focusing on how racialized and sexualized bodies represented the primitive and savage through performance. Using theatrical productions, film, and performance hall recitals that “reproduced” African dance as historical “evidence,” viewers and scholars alike came to believe in Africa as a space that had not changed over the centuries, a haven for historical origins to which each member of the African diaspora could trace their roots. The “evolution” of culture for black people, then, could be said to come from the influence of Western European standards, as evidenced by the achievements of African Americans. Such racial categorizations were vital in maintaining racial boundaries, associating new, popular music styles with African origins to keep societal norms in place, associating blackness with the primitive and “wild,” whiteness with advancement and sophistication. 

According to Garcia, perhaps the greatest danger of this scholarly and now even popular practice is “these contexts’ blockages that transform sound and movement from affective flow to, for example, African and European, black and white, or primitive and modern music and dance such that people are made temporally and spatially distant from each other” (270). While Garcia acknowledges that it may be impossible to rid discussion of historical timelines and individual motivations, he does advocate for a more complete look at art forms instead of segmenting them into categories of black and white, us and them.

Garcia’s approach is useful when reading Paule Marshall’s Praisesong for the Widow, which at first seems to fit in the category of the back-to-Africa novel, one that offers a temporal shift that takes its main character, Avey Johnson, from a US, middle class society to a Caribbean, working class society to recover her cultural origins. Avey is able to participate in a blending of cultures, traditions, and names, where “as the names transcend their original identity, they enter a space of total possibility. Their combinatory potential is now virtually infinite” (Boelhower 23). The spatial shift from the U.S. to the Caribbean, to the island nearest Africa, serves not as a complete return to ancient traditions, but as a space to view the diaspora and new cultural growth, both Avey’s own and other diasporic cultures. I suggest that what is at stake in Praisesong for the Widow is the recovery of individual identity and expression through a remembrance of family, rather than purely ancestral, traditions that bring Avey to self-fulfillment as she reorients herself to accept that culture should exist outside of the Western understanding of cultural binaries. The main recovery tools are African American art forms that come from a combination of cultural traditions in the U.S.

Avey receives cultural and spiritual renewal when she goes to the Big Drum ceremony on Carriacou. It is at the ceremonial proceedings that she reconnects with her Aunt Cuney through the ritual dance of the Ring Shout, and then her namesake, Avatara. Speaking of this event, where Avey becomes an active participant in the cultural traditions of the island, Lean’tin Bracks states, “The Beg Pardon dance is a crucial part of Avey’s island experience, for it proclaims that all are able to return to the celebration of ancestors, rituals, and traditions even after being lost” (116-7). Such a return through the Beg Pardon would not be possible for Avey, however, if it weren’t for Lebert Joseph and the elders in the group who sit in a sacred circle with “arms opened, faces lifted to the darkness, the small band of supplicants endlessly repeated the few lines that comprised the Beg Pardon, pleading and petitioning not only for themselves and for the friends and neighbors present in the yard, but for all their far-flung kin as well” (236). Without help, she would not experience the healing and renewal at the ceremony, because she does not know how to perform the ritual herself. The circle of elders holds significance for two main reasons: first, as Katrina Hazzard-Donald states, the sacred circles formed in ceremonial dances “represented a reality which connected one to the ancestors and reconfirmed a continuity through time and space” (196). The circle dance creates the opportunity for Avey to connect with her memories and her ancestral heritage to be filled with the strength and cultural knowledge. Second, as Bracks states, the intercession of the elders during the Big Drum Ceremony to offer up the Beg Pardon for their families and the world offers Avey an opportunity to see that “knowledge found in ancestral experiences is not only a function of historical memory as passed down from generation to generation, but also of current cultural practice that is available firsthand from those who are still alive. People of the diaspora can learn much from the living elders of their communities whose physical presence is a testament of their ability to survive and endure” (113). Before she attends the Big Drum Ceremony, Avey begrudges contact with the elders of black communities because they enshrined the very elements of black culture that she sought to run away from in order to fit into the middle class, white American mainstream lifestyle. At the Beg Pardon, she finally comes to understand and respect the role they play in such a sacred space, a crucial step to opening herself up to the wisdom they hold. 

In fact, it is after the elders make intercession through the ritual that she can see someone who “seemed to be her great-aunt standing there beside her” (237). Like when Aunt Cuney used to take her to watch the Shouts performed in August, observing those “who still held to the old ways . . . slowly circling the room in a loose ring” (34), Avey watches the nation dances, her great-aunt spiritually with her on one side, Joseph Lebert with her on the other, explaining each dance they watch. Eventually, as is the nature of the circle dance, Avey must join in the performance. She spends time reflecting the open space they occupy begins to fill with dancers, expanding the longer the dancing goes on as more people join in the dance. The creole dances performed are a blend of many different African dance aesthetics that were shared across nations, meaning the space becomes more amenable to Avey’s participation. 

When Avey finally joins the circle of older people and performs the Carriacou Tramp, she is performing a circle dance, the Ring Shout. The dances hold considerable similarities. According to Edward Thorpe, the dance “had certain affinities with the competitive Juba and consisted of a dance performed ‘with the whole body—with hands, feet, belly and hips’. The dancers formed a ring and proceeded with a step that was half shuffle, half stamp, and much pelvic swaying” (30). All the types of movement included in the dance are familiar to Avey, who has a long history of using the aesthetics of black dance as she danced to jazz music. According to Hazzard-Donald, 

The shout ritual was the arena in which the motor muscle memory of African movement could be learned, sustained, relexified, and reborn eventually as secular dance forms. These forms would go on to become the famous African American dances that have circulated around the world; dances like the “Twist,” the “Black Bottom,” the “Pony” and, of course, the touch response partnering dance known as the “Lindy Hop” and all its various forms. (200) 

The evolution of the dance allows for Avey to both be part of an older tradition and to be part of a new cultural tradition in the US. Even though Avey had not ever participated in a Ring Shout, she embodied the Africanist aesthetic as she performed the various dances done to jazz music, the Lindy Hop holding the greatest importance with its circular motion in partnership with another person. She holds a sense of ephebism and aesthetic of the cool as she slowly integrates herself into the dance. The elders in the circle dance, rather than try to teach her or push her out of the circle, welcome her in to work through the process and discover how her style of dancing can meld with their rhythms. 

The moment offers a full realization of what it means to have African American heritage. Hazzard-Donald describes participation in the counterclockwise circle of the Ring Shout as engaging in “a ‘spirit-gate’ through which humans could connect to a higher spiritual reality” (203). That gate allows Avey access to what Hazzard-Donald calls “an intermediary religious form” which bridges the gap between traditional African religions and American religious forms (199). Barbara Frey Waxman discusses the importance of Avey’s dancing, because as 

Avey carefully follows the rule of not letting her feet lose contact with the ground, a rule which metaphorically implies the principle of maintaining contact with her ancestral soil, her people, and their traditions. That is why Marshall calls this dance “the shuffle designed to stay the course of history” (250)—designed to subvert the drift of historical events that have prevented African Americans and Afro-Caribbeans from maintaining contact with their ancestral cultures. (98)

The dance she performs allows her to connect with her ancestors and reverence both her great-aunt and her namesake, Avatara; the dance allows her to finish healing from the spiritual malady caused when she cut herself off from her cultural heritage; and the dance allows her the opportunity to reclaim her past and look forward to the future opportunities she has to share her cultural knowledge with her own grandchildren. Avey is transported to Tatem and back to her childhood, where “under the cover of the darkness she was performing the dance that wasn’t supposed to be dancing, in imitation of the old folk shuffling in a loose ring inside the church. And she was singing along with them under her breath. . . . she used to long to give her great-aunt the slip and join those across the road” (248). In joining in the circle dance at the Big Drum Ceremony, she symbolically returns to Tatem to perform the Ring Shout with the church members, participating in a ritual she had longed to perform as a child but could not. The spiritual return to Tatem melds African-American and Afro-Caribbean traditions as everyone celebrates their shared African heritage. 

It is this shared heritage on which Marshall ends her narrative, leaving readers to understand that the heritage Avey is to share is not purely African, but rather a rich mix of African and American heritage which make up her culture. Accepting the many influences of the diaspora is how to be self-fulfilled and a positive influence on continuation of cultural heritage. Doing so requires throwing out the linear, Western understandings of time and cultural evolution and replacing them with a circular understanding, which allows for the living and the dead to communicate shared wisdom and knowledge through generations as cultural tradition grows into new renditions and expressions of ancient values, which inspire new ways to deal with the present.  

Works Cited

Boelhower, William. “Ethnographic Politics: The Uses of Memory in Ethnic Fiction.” Memory and Cultural Politics: New Approaches to American Ethnic Literatures. Northeastern UP, 1996, pp. 19-40.

Bracks, Lean’tin L. Writings on Black Women of the Diaspora: History, Language, and Identity. Garland Publishing, Inc, 1998.

Garcia, David F. Listening for Africa: Freedom, Modernity, and the Logic of Black Music’s African Origins. Duke UP, 2017.

Hazzard-Donald, Katrina. “Hoodoo Religion and American Dance Traditions: Rethinking the Ring Shout.” The Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 194-212.1. 

Marshall, Paula. Praisesong for the Widow. Plume, 1983. 

Thorpe, Edward. Black Dance. The Overlook Press, 1990. 

Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Dancing out of Form, Dancing into Self: Genre and Metaphor in Marshall, Shange, and Walker.” MELUS, vol. 19, no. 3, 1994, pp. 91-106. www.jstor.org/stable/467874.

John Wesley Work III - composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, and choral director

Published By: Lamont Jack Pearley

In this broadcast, Todd Lawrence and I discuss the scholarship and work Of John Wesley Work III and the newly launched Award named in His honor.  The AFS African American Folklore Section is proud to issue the first call for submissions for the new John Wesley Work III Award, which the section has launched to honor and spotlight applied folklorists, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists who actively focus on the research, documentation, recording, and highlighting of African American culture through performance, written word, and music in their scholarly works.   

Our Featured Guest is Fisk Alumni George ‘Geo’ Cooper, a pianist, composer, and music educator. While at Fisk, he was a member of the world-renowned Fisk Jubilee Singers.

Fisk Alumni George ‘Geo’ Cooper

The AFS African American Folklore Section is proud to issue the first call for submissions for the new John Wesley Work III Award, which the section has launched to honor and spotlight applied folklorists, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists who actively focus on the research, documentation, recording, and highlighting of African American culture through performance, written word, and music in their scholarly works.

The prize is named for John Wesley Work III, a composer, ethnomusicologist, educator, and choral director devoted to documenting the progression of Black musical expression. His notable collections of traditional and emerging African American music include Negro Folk Songs and the Archive of American Folk Song in the Library of Congress/Fisk University Mississippi Delta Collection (AFC 1941/002). The Stovall Plantation recordings for the Library of Congress where the world is introduced to blues legend McKinley Morganfield, aka Muddy Waters.

In honor of Work, this award is offered to celebrate and encourage African American traditional cultural expression and galvanize folklorists, ethnographers, and ethnomusicologists of color to participate in the documentation of African American folklife.

TO SUBMIT FOR THE AWARD, PRESS THE LINK THAT WILL TAKE YOU TO THE AMERICAN FOLKLORE SOCIETY PAGE!

Stagolee and John Henry: Two Black Freedom Songs?

Published By: The African American Folklorist Newspaper (Editor Lamont Jack Pearley)

Written By: Jim Hauser

Are the African American ballads “Stagolee” and “John Henry” freedom songs?  What I mean is, Do they express racial resistance, protest, and rebellion?  I’ve been researching both ballads for well over a decade, and I believe the answer to this question is “Yes.”  A key thing necessary to really understand these songs is to realize that they are both about black manhood and that they both originated and became extremely popular during a time when African Americans were denied their manhood—and their humanity–by the dominant white majority.  It also helps to have some knowledge of black history and what everyday life was like for African Americans in the Jim Crow era.  If we possess that knowledge and keep in mind the importance of black manhood in both ballads, then we are better equipped to “hear” the resistance, protest, and rebellion when we listen to recordings of these ballads.  And maybe we might even see the possibility that Stagolee’s fight with Billy over a Stetson hat and John Henry’s race against a mechanical steam drill could be symbolic of the African American fight for manhood and the struggle for black freedom.  But before taking a closer look at these ballads, I want to bring your attention to the quote below.

These songs didn’t come out of thin air… If you sang “John Henry” as many times as me– John Henry was a steel-driving man / Died with a hammer in his hand / John Henry said “a man ain’t nothin’ but a man / Before I let that steam drill drive me down / I’ll die with that hammer in my hand.”  If you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written “How many roads must a man walk down?” too.   —Bob Dylan (from his MusiCares Person of the Year speech, February 2015)  

Let’s start by looking at an important function of ballads.  According to Paul Oliver in his book Blues Fell This Morning, “A ballad symbolized the suppressed desires of the singer when he could see no way of overcoming his oppression.  It is a vocal dream of wish-fulfillment.”  He goes on to say that the ballad singer “projected on his heroes the successes that he could not believe could be his own.”  So when a black musician sang about Stagolee fighting Billy to get back his stolen Stetson hat, exactly how did that battle symbolize fulfillment of the singer’s wishes?  And when a black worker sang about John Henry challenging a steam drill to a race and defeating it, what unreachable success was that worker projecting on his hero John Henry?  Could it be that the fight over the Stetson and the race against the steam drill symbolized something of great importance to them and had something to do with their freedom?  It certainly seems possible to me.  Let’s investigate that possibility by taking a closer look at each of the ballads.  

Let’s begin with “Stagloee.”  According to folklorist and educator Cecil Brown, in his book Stagolee Shot Billy, to understand the meaning of Stagolee “we must search for the symbolic meaning behind constantly recurring motifs such as the Stetson hat.”  He explains that at the time the ballad originated in the late 19th century, African American men wore Stetsons as symbols of masculinity, status, and power.  In other words, the Stetson was a symbol of manhood, or to be more specific, black manhood. 

Is Brown correct about what the Stetson represented?  Through my research, I’ve found a good bit of evidence which supports his claim.  Specifically, I’ve identified a number of early black musicians who clearly wore Stetsons to project a certain image, and that image had much to do with male sexuality and manliness.  For example, in his autobiography Stachmo:  My Life in New Orleans, Louis Armstrong wrote that Stetson hats were a prized possession which were often purchased by African Americans on an installment plan.  He also noted that “when a fellow wore a John B. Stetson, he was really a big shot.”  Armstrong’s book also describes an incident in which his woman chased after him with a razor because she believed he had cheated on her.  He lost possession of his Stetson while fleeing, and she took it and immediately sliced it up with the razor.  With her use of the razor, she was sending a message to Armstrong about what she was angry enough to do to him… or certain parts of him (i.e. his “manhood”).  Also, two of Armstrong’s fellow jazz musicians wore Stetsons.  The stride piano player Willie “The Lion” Smith wrote in his autobiography, Music on My Mind, that he regularly wore a twenty-five-dollar Stetson hat.  And in Jelly Roll Morton’s 1938 Library of Congress recordings with Alan Lomax, the jazzman related that there was a time when he yearned for a Stetson and didn’t rest until he got one.

An article written by David Joyner in the October/November 1997 issue of Jazz Player magazine, titled “Early Jazz Pianists:  Issues of Image and Style,” helps us to understand why Stetsons were so popular.  Joyner points out that early jazz piano players such as Morton and Smith were particularly concerned with their image and sexual identity.  He writes that Morton revealed to Lomax that he was reluctant to take up the piano as a youngster because it was thought of as a woman’s instrument.  In Morton’s words, “I didn’t want to be called a sissy.  I wanted to marry and raise a family and be known as a man among men when I became of age.”  It sure seems likely that this fear of being thought of as womanly  played a part in creating Morton’s great desire for a Stetson.  Joyner’s article also discusses Willie Smith’s commanding appearance and his reputation for intimidating fellow pianists.  His nickname “The Lion” appropriately reflected the image of authority and manliness which he projected, an image which he must have deliberately reinforced through his sporting a Stetson hat.

So if the Stetson represented manhood, then Stagolee and Billy’s fight for possession of it could have been symbolic of the black man’s fight for manhood.  And I believe that we could take that one step further and say that if it symbolized the black man’s fight for manhood, then it also symbolized the struggle for black freedom.  And that’s because black manhood and freedom are inextricably linked.  I can quote a fairly long string of black leaders and writers who have commented on the connection between the two, but I shouldn’t need to go any farther than to quote Martin Luther King, Jr. who said, “If the negro is to be free, he must move down into the inner resources of his own soul and sign with a pen and ink of self-assertive manhood his own emancipation proclamation.”  

Those readers who are familiar with the historical roots of the legend of Stagolee might argue that it does not make sense to claim that the fight over the Stetson symbolized the fight for black freedom.  They would point out that the legendary figures Stagolee and Billy DeLyon were based upon the real-life historical figures Lee “Stag” Shelton and William Lyons, both of whom were black.  And they would ask how a fight between two black men could have come to symbolize a struggle between the black and white races.  They’d ask, wouldn’t one of them have had to be white and the other black?

I can think of two possibilities to counter that argument.  First, the symbolism may not have developed until years after the song was created and history had been transformed into legend.  As the years passed and as the ballad spread from St. Louis (its place of origin) to other parts of the country, the connection between the ballad and the historical event which inspired it would have been lost.  At that point, those who sang “Stagolee”– and those who heard them sing it — would not have known that the real-life figures behind the ballad were both black, and this would have freed them to use their imaginations as far as the racial identities of Stagolee and Billy were concerned.  And considering the symbolic nature of the Stetson to African Americans, it’s likely that many of them would have imagined Stagolee to be a black man and Billy a white man.  

Now let’s look at a second possibility of how the Billy DeLyon of legend could have been thought to be a white man even though the historical William Lyons was black.  Possibly Lyons occupied the role of a black surrogate for the white power structure.  If that happens to have been the case, then the ballad about Stagolee and Billy may have symbolically represented the black struggle for freedom right at the very moment it first took shape.  And that’s because even though Lyons was black, he would have been an ally, a tool, an agent of the white system of power.

So if Lyons was a black surrogate for white power, how did that happen?  Possibly through his occupation and through his reputation for being a bully.  According to Brown’s book, Lyons worked as a levee hand and the local police knew him as “Billy the bully.”  “Levee hands” were men who built and repaired levees, but the term may also have been applied to other men who labored on the levees such as the roustabouts who loaded and unloaded cargo from steamboats.  But it doesn’t seem likely to me that Lyons would have performed the dangerous and backbreaking work of constructing/repairing levees or loading/unloading the heavy cargo of steamboats.  Not likely because he probably lived a relatively advantaged life for a black man – according to Brown’s book, Lyons came from a family that was fairly well-off financially and he was the brother-in-law of Henry Bridgewater, one of the wealthiest and most politically connected black men in St. Louis.  Considering his relatively high status, Lyons’s job on the levee must have been less dangerous and less physically demanding than performing the hard manual labor involved in levee construction or in being a roustabout.  Possibly he worked on the levee in a position of authority.  His bullying disposition may have led him to be employed as black muscle for controlling the levee hands, roustabouts, and other tough rivermen who worked on the levee.  In that case, his occupation would have been the St. Louis counterpart to Mississippi’s armed shack bullies and murderous hired guns that Alan Lomax wrote about in his book The Land Where the Blues Began.  Black muscle was used to redirect the anger of the brutally treated laborers away from the white bosses and towards other black men.  So if William Lyons – the historical figure behind the legendary figure of Billy DeLyon – worked in a position in which he bullied black levee hands, this may have become incorporated into the legend and this would have resulted in Billy being a surrogate, a black agent for the white system of power.  And it would have followed that, in doing battle with Billy, Stagolee also would have been symbolically doing battle with the white system of power.  And, of course, the connection between history and legend would eventually have been lost, thereby allowing Billy to be transformed from a black surrogate for white power into a white man who was part of the white power structure.

One big reason I believe that many African Americans envisioned Billy DeLyon as a white man deals with Stagolee’s reputation as one of the baddest of all black badmen.  In African American speech, referring to someone as “bad” could denote that the person is viewed unfavorably, as in “no good”, “mean” or “evil.”  Or, it could mean that the person is viewed favorably, as in “good,” “impressive,” or “great.”  But, regardless  of the intended meaning, for a man to become famous as one of the baddest of badmen there exists the implication that he is extremely powerful, tough, aggressive, and/or fearless.  During the days of Jim Crow, probably the baddest thing a black man could do was challenge or fight a white man, especially a white bully or a white lawman or other white authority figure.  It rarely happened, and that was because of the terrible consequences it would bring.  Professor Molefi Kete Asante, in his book Erasing Racism, points out that “even the baddest man in town would seldom attack the vilest white man.”  If that was the case, then the key to measuring the degree of Stagolee’s badness involves looking at how the ballad’s figure of Billy existed in the minds and imaginations of the black singers of “Stagolee” and their black audiences.  Was Billy thought to be a white man or a black man?  If Billy was thought to be black, then Stagolee’s reputation for being one of the baddest of black badmen would seem to have been extremely overblown.  But what about the other possibility?  What if Billy actually did exist in the minds and imaginations of African Americans as a white man, and possibly even as a white bully, or a bullying or racist white lawman?  If that was the case, then Stagolee’s battle with and victory over Billy would have served as proof that he truly did possess an exceptional degree of badness,andhis reputation as one of the baddest of black badmen would indeed have been well-deserved.

One version of “Stagolee” in which Billy most likely played the part of a white man is the classic 1927 recording titled “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues” by The Downhome Boys, a duo made up of two obscure black musicians named Long “Cleve” Reed and Papa Harvey Hull.  In this version, Billy is clearly a lawman because one verse references him putting people under arrest.  At the time the recording was made, some black men did serve as police officers or other lawmen, but probably most African Americans who heard this version of the ballad, would have envisioned Billy as a white lawman – one of the most potent symbols of the white system of power.

One particularly outstanding feature of this version is that it makes no mention of the Stetson hat.  The symbol of black manhood and the struggle between Stagolee and Billy over that symbol are absent.  They have been replaced by a new struggle:  Stagolee’s fight to survive Billy’s intention to murder him.  “Original Stack O’ Lee Blues” is a story of police brutality in its most extreme form.  This version of the ballad strips away the symbolism of the battle over the Stetson and replaces it with a cold hard reality of African American life in the days of Jim Crow.  Here is the key verse:

Stack said to Billy, “How can it be?
You arrest a man just as bad as me,
But you won’t ‘rest Stack O’ Lee

I listened to this recording numerous times before I finally understood the meaning of Stagolee’s words in the above verse.  Before I came to realize their actual meaning, I assumed that Stagolee’s words were a taunt.  Stagolee’s great reputation for badness misled me into thinking that he was taunting Billy over his failure to arrest him.  But, in actuality, Stagolee (Stack) was asking Billy to arrest him.  More specifically, he was asking Billy to arrest him rather than kill him.  He was saying, You’ve arrested other men who were just as bad as me, so why are you going to kill me instead of arrest me?  

In the next verse, Stagolee pleads with lawman Billy for mercy while he is apparently being held at gunpoint.  This verse makes it clear that in the prior verse Stagolee was not issuing a taunt but making a request to be arrested rather than killed.

Stack said to Billy, “Don’t you take my life
Well I ain’t got nothin’ but two little chillens and a darlin’ lovin’ wife

In almost all other versions of the ballad, it is Billy (not Stagolee) who asks for mercy, and this led Paul Oliver, in his book Songsters and Saints, to claim that there is an error of reversal in The Downhome Boys recording.  But it is clear there is no error once you recognize that, in this particular version of the ballad, Billy intends to murder Stagolee.  

In the next verse, Billy responds to Stagolee’s request for mercy by telling him that the next time he sees his children it will be in another world, thereby revealing that he has decided not to arrest but instead kill Stagolee.  In a later verse, Stagolee emerges triumphant as he overcomes Billy’s advantage and kills his oppressor.

Stagolee’s execution by hanging is another reason I believe that many African Americans imagined Billy to be a white man.  According to the book Deep South (which reported on the findings of a study of race and class in Jim Crow America), executions were not normally carried out as punishment for homicides involving one black person killing another black person.  The guilty person would have been sent to prison, not executed.  But since Stagolee was executed, many African Americans must have imagined Billy to be a white man.  

Another reason I believe that “Stagolee” may be symbolic of the black struggle for freedom is that this symbolism would explain how Stagolee could have been such an important black hero despite the fact that he is often portrayed in the ballad as a cruel killer, a man so heartless that he refuses to spare Billy’s life for the sake of his wife and children.  According to Zora Neale Hurston, Stagolee was the equal of John Henry.  In an article titled “Characteristics of Negro Expression,” she wrote, “John Henry is a culture hero in song, but no more so than Stacker Lee, Smokey Joe, or Bad Lazarus.”  And Sterling Brown, in his 1932 poem “Odyssey of Big Boy,” places Stagolee in a place of honor alongside John Henry and Casey Jones.  How could a cruel killer be the equal of these other folk heroes?  The answer must be that the ballad is coded.  James Cone, in his book God of the Oppressed, writes, “The victories of Stagolee and High John the Conqueror embodied [an oppressed people’s] struggle for dignity.”  And in Risks of Faith, Cone writes, “If freedom is found in our experience, it must have something to do with the triumph of the weak over the strong.  This is the theme of black folklore with Br’er Rabbit, High John the Conqueror, and Stagolee.”  

Why do some recordings of “Stagolee,” including versions by The Downhome Boys, Vera Hall, and Blind Pete, refer to the battle between Stagolee and Billy as a “noble fight?”  Could it be because the fight was not really about a piece of headwear but about something much, much more important?  My best guess is that the noble fight was a fight against oppression, a fight for freedom.  And black writers have created stories about Stagolee in which he takes on that fight, including a 1973 novel by John Dee titled Stagger Lee, a story by Julius Lester titled “Stack O Lee” which appears in his 1969 book Black Folktales, and a 1949 radio drama titled “Tales of Stackalee” written by Richard Durham.  All of the above suggest that Stagolee’s killing of Billy was not a senseless murder but a symbol of a great victory, a victory of the weak over the strong.

Now let’s move on to look at the ballad about the great black steel drivin’ man named John Henry.  Before discussing the ballad, I want to stress that in order to understand what “John Henry” meant to African Americans, I believe it is of utmost importance that we put his story in the context of the African American experience during the days of Jim Crow.  This is because, after many years of being a part of popular culture, the legend of John Henry has been transformed from being the story of a heroic black worker trying to make a place for himself in a world of white oppression into a tale of a race-neutral “everyman hero” trying to prevent his job from being replaced by a machine.  An attempt to interpret the real meaning of the ballad – that is, its meaning to the people who originally composed and sang it – hasn’t got a chance to be successful if we view John Henry as a race-neutral everyman.  The real-life man or men upon whom the legend was based lived in a world in which the black worker was routinely treated inhumanely and did backbreaking work under extremely dangerous and difficult conditions.  These men’s lives were considered to be expendable by the white men who put them to work.  “Kill a mule, buy another.  Kill a ni**er, hire another” is a saying that I’ve come across regularly in books about black history and music.  It meant that the life of a black worker had less value than the life of a mule – if a black worker was killed on the job, his employer would simply replace him with another black worker; but if a mule was killed, the employer would have to go to the expense of buying a new mule to replace the dead one.  Putting the story of John Henry in the context of the black worker in Jim Crow America helps us to realize that his job of carving tunnels out of mountains with a long steel rod, a sledgehammer, and explosives was extremely brutal and life-threatening.  And it helps us to see that John Henry’s greatest struggle was not to save his job, but to survive his job.  

It also helps us to gain a better understanding of the meaning of certain key verses of the ballad, including one frequently appearing verse in which John Henry tells his baby son, “I want you to be a steel drivin’ man.” According to Russell Ames in his article “Protest & Irony in Negro Folksong,” African Americans often used irony to express protest in their music.  I believe that when a black man sang that verse in which John Henry expresses his wishes to his son – his hopes for his son’s future – the words spoken in that wish were pure irony.

Looking for the meaning of John Henry by keeping in mind the world and time in which he and other black workers lived helps reveal certain aspects of racial protest in the ballad, protest which has largely gone unrecognized for some 150 years.  For example, let’s take a look at a verse which appears in many versions of the ballad.

When John Henry was a little baby, sittin’ on his mama’s knee
He picked up a hammer and a little piece of steel
And said “This hammer’s gonna be the death of me.”

This verse is often commented upon as being about John Henry, while still only a baby, seeing his fate or predicting his tragic end.  But what went through the mind of an African American mother of a newborn baby son in Jim Crow America as she heard this verse?  Is it possible that she thought of her own child and the fact that he shared a similar fate with John Henry, a fate in which he would have to work himself to death in order to survive?  Of course!  Surely, this would have crossed the minds of many black mothers.  And also the minds of many black fathers, fathers who saw that their son’s fates were sealed at birth, just as John Henry’s was, and just as their own fates were sealed when they were born.  And the same could be said of black mothers and fathers of baby girls.  There is a protest hidden in that line in which the baby John Henry predicts his death, a protest which he makes for all black children.  And for their parents.

Just as black manhood played a crucial role in the legend of Stagolee, it also had a crucial part to play in the legend of John Henry.  John Henry was the black man’s “greatest symbol of manhood” according to the black writer Sterling Stuckey.  And Sterling Brown, another black writer, paid tribute to John Henry and his manhood in the poem “Strange Legacies” by praising him for his courage, strength, persistence, and pride, and for showing African Americans how to “go down like a man.”  John Henry was a quite potent symbol of black manhood, and he held that symbolic value during a time when black men were denied their manhood by the social, legal, governmental, and economic systems of America.  Therefore, it seems quite possible that John Henry’s race against the steam drill – a race which was an epic battle in which John Henry’s manhood was put to the test – was not just a contest between man and machine, but a symbol of John Henry fighting a heroic battle for black freedom.  

Is there any evidence to support the idea that John Henry’s race with the steam drill symbolized the fight for freedom?  Yes.  For one thing, the race was a battle between black and white forces:  John Henry and his black manhood on one side and the steam drill – a product of the white man’s technological know-how – on the other side.  This idea that the race represented a battle between black and white is further supported by the fact that there are a good number of versions of the ballad in which John Henry challenges not only the steam drill but also the captain, a white man.  He does this by referring to the steam drill as your steam drill when he addresses his captain.

John Henry said to the captain
A man ain’t nothin’ but a man
Before I let YOUR steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand.

That the race was a contest between John Henry and his captain – and therefore a contest between black and white – can also be seen in verses in which John Henry’s victory over the steam drill is clearly also a victory over his captain as he openly gloats to the captain of defeating him and the steam drill.

John Henry said to his captain,
“Look yonder at what I see
Your steam drill is broke and your hole is choked
And you can’t drive steel like me.”

Of crucial importance is the fact that the adversarial relationship between John Henry and his captain is based upon racial opposition and oppression.  We can see this when John Henry defiantly asserts racial equality to his captain.  He makes that assertion in the most frequently appearing verse of the ballad, a verse which I refer to as the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse.  The first two lines of that verse are:

John Henry said to the captain
“A man ain’t nothin’ but a man”

The line “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” is an assertion of racial equality, a way of saying, I am a man.  And a man, whether he be black or white, is only a man.  I know this phrase is an assertion of racial equality because through my research I have found six examples in which African Americans have used those words, or variations to them such as “A man ain’t but a man,” to assert racial equality.  One of those examples appears in bluesman John Lee Hooker’s “Birmingham Blues,” a song he wrote in response to events which occurred in Birmingham, Alabama during the series of civil rights protest demonstrations which took place during the spring of 1963.  (You can find all six examples on my website John Henry: The Rebel Versions.)  

The third, fourth, and fifth lines of the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse are:

Before I let that/your steam drill beat me down
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand
I’ll die with a hammer in my hand

If the first two lines of the “A man ain’t nothin’ but a man” verse consist of John Henry asserting racial equality to his captain, how should we interpret the third through fifth lines?  One possible interpretation would be that these three lines are coded, and they are coded to conceal a threat of racial rebellion.  Specifically, John Henry may be telling his captain, I am a man.  And if you do not treat me like a man – if you mistreat or overwork me, or if you physically beat me – I’ll fight back with my hammer and I won’t stop until I’m dead.  That’s right.  Not until I go down and die like a man.

Is my suggested interpretation above correct?  Is John Henry threatening to fight back to the death if his captain beats or mistreats him?  If I’m correct, then the uncoded meaning of “Before I let that/your steam drill beat me down” would be Before I let YOU beat me down.  Regardless of whether or not I’m correct, there do exist at least two documented versions of the ballad which contain a verse in which John Henry asserts racial equality and then makes that defiant Before I let you beat me down threat.  One of them appears in Guy B. Johnson’s John Henry:  Tracking Down a Negro Legend, and the exact wording of the defiant line is “Before I’d let you beat me down.”  The other one appears in Howard W. Odum and Guy B. Johnson’s Negro Workaday Songs, and the wording is “Befo’ I let you beat me down.”  In these two versions, the threat that John Henry makes to his captain is not coded, but direct and clear.  A similar line in which John Henry expresses that same defiant threat after asserting racial equality appears in a version performed by Minerva Williams (collected by Mary Wheeler); the exact wording of that threat is “And before I take any abuse from you.”  

The verses which I have just discussed strip away the coded symbolism of the race with the steam drill to reveal the race rebel in John Henry.  I refer to these as “rebel verses” or “rebel versions” and have identified a total of 12 of them on my website.  In these rebel versions – almost all of which are from black performers or informants – John Henry does something quite extraordinary:  he challenges his captain by refusing to be physically beaten, mistreated, or overworked.  In doing so, he steps over the boundaries established by white society for black men in the days of Jim Crow.  In those days, acts of resistance such as the ones by John Henry against his captain – by a black man against a white authority figure – amounted to acts of defiance and rebellion against the white system of power, and were threats to the existing racial hierarchy.  These rebel versions serve as evidence that at least a substantial number of African Americans associated the story of John Henry with racial rebellion and protest.  And who knows, possibly it was more than just a substantial number and actually a large majority.

When Paul Oliver wrote about ballads symbolizing the suppressed desires of the singer, he referred to the racehorse in the ballad “Stewball” – a chain-gang song which was extremely popular among African Americans – as “the unbeatable Stewball,” and pointed out that he “ran a race for the Race.”  If “Stewball” held that symbolism for African Americans, then maybe John Henry’s race against the steam drill held that same symbolic meaning of being “a race for the Race.”  Personally, I believe that when African Americans sang about John Henry racing and defeating the steam drill, many of them would have imagined that race – that epic struggle between a flesh and blood man and an unfeeling machine – as symbolic of a struggle between two combatants, a black man and a white man, a struggle between a heroic John Henry and the man who oppressed him each and every day:  his inhuman, unfeeling captain.  And after a long hard day of working for that cruel and abusive captain, some laborers would sing “John Henry” and others would listen.  And as they sang or heard about him defeating that steam drill, they would imagine that John Henry was overcoming his captain.  And they would also have had in mind their wish that they themselves could overcome their own captain.  For them, singing the line from an old work song that went, “If I could hammer like John Henry I’d be a man” may have actually meant, If I could hammer like John Henry I’d be free.  The ballad may have carried an unspoken message, a message of what it meant to be a black man and a free man, and of the price that many black men – men like John Henry and men like Stagolee – would have to pay in fighting for that manhood and for attaining that freedom.