RTB: Yeah. Yeah, it does. I think one of the curious things, you know, not having gone through the '60s revival and obviously not having been around a lot earlier, is that the image you have of musicians today in a lot of cases is different from what you read about the violence of the juke joint culture. And even in the jazz world, you know, Louis Armstrong's life growing up and how there were like shootings at clubs and things like that all the time.
Calt: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
RTB: And you kind of take those things as a little bit of mythology, but then....
Calt: Oh, no, no, no.
RTB: You kind of think it until you read a book like yours, and you get a little deeper into it and see that it wasn't all built up.
Calt: Oh, no, I don't think any of it was built up.
RTB: Yeah. Well, what do you make of the music starting in such violent conditions or violent circles? Does it just have a lot to do with the Jim Crow thing where there were no options, so that was just another release?
Calt: Um, yeah, that would be a part of it. I think a main part of it was that there was no approval of secular culture. I mean, everything that was respectable in black society back then came out of the Baptist church and the Methodist church basically. The Holiness church. There was no tolerance of anything else. And so if you were to be a Skip James type, you know, you were a consort of Satan and so forth and so on. And so only certain types of people would be willing to go into that. I think it would attract sordid people basically. You know, it would have to.
RTB: You talked at one point about bluesmen of that time maybe only going into the field, so to speak, if he had "a preexisting inner distortion" I think is how you put it, that would make him indifferent to what other people thought about him doing that.
Calt: Absolutely, sure.
RTB: Was the thing about "devil's music" that literal a belief at that time?
Calt: Absolutely. They were fundamentalists--I mean, that was their whole culture. The only book that most people knew about was really the Bible. Which includes Skip James. Bukka White, for example, said that people would actually tell him, like, "If you're playing the guitar, this means you're going to the devil" and so forth. And they believed it. Because there was no real secular schooling that these people were given. And they did not have the intellectual background, you know, where you could say, "Now, wait a minute, this is just one point of view." Which somebody like a Muddy Waters who would move up to Chicago, he didn't think that. But a Skip James type couldn't, really.
RTB: OK. We'll shift gears a little bit here. One of the things that strikes me in listening to Skip James or even some of the early other acoustic bluesmen is that it's hard to picture music that's that introspective in so many ways as being like the centerpiece for dances and rowdy parties.
Calt: Well, Skip James' music wasn't. I think I point out in the book that he only did a few real dance tunes.
RTB: And he was more a solo, uh....
Calt: Like a street player.
RTB: Like a street player, yeah.
Calt: I should mention this just in passing, this is a big gripe I have with people who write blues books and sort of pawn themselves off as authorities. They seem to make no effort to sort out the difference between dance music and non-dance music in assessing old blues records. And they'll routinely describe almost any blues as, well, "This is a swinging dance song" or something like that. Nine-tenths of the time, there's no basis at all for that sort of observation. I mean, you have to look at each song. There's some songs that are dance songs and there's some that weren't, and there's some blues players who played strictly dance music and there's some who didn't play any dance music. And they were in completely different environments. Like this juke joint environment you're speaking of that was so violent, that's just sort of a dance hall environment. I think it behooves people who write about the subject of blues to try to carefully draw these distinctions between those players, and I tried to do that in the James book. As I just said, he had very few out-and-out dance songs.
RTB: Would you say he did more of that type of thing, as uncommon as it was, with the piano as opposed to the guitar?
Calt: You mean dance tunes?
RTB: Yeah.
Calt: No, I don't think so at all because only one of his piano pieces is really--actually, two of 'em could be construed as dance tunes--but he had, his most elaborate pieces, the "22-20"s and so forth, had nothing at all to do with dance music. The impression that I got was when he was playing with Henry Stuckey, he would be playing out at dance parties, and that was par for the course. If you would play one of those places, just for the sake of volume you'd have a couple of players. You wouldn't really be a soloist. Does this help clarify the question?
RTB: Yeah, it does.
Calt: Yeah, but you're right, though. Skip James' music is not party music at all. It just isn't.
RTB: Even with a lot of the other, you know, pre-electric bluesmen, though, on a lot of the songs for me, living in the age we live in now, it's hard to picture it as dance music without really thinking about it quite a bit.
Calt: Well, like who?
RTB: Uh, well, even like with Robert Johnson, you got the waslking basslines....
Calt: Well, Robert Johnson has very little dance music in his repertoire. That's another person. See, I mean, that's a typical example of where people who write about blues, they just sort of assume something is so. He's got about three dance tunes in his, you know, whatever they were, twenty-nine sides. There's very little dance music there.
RTB: OK, so you think that's one of the big, like, myths then? That they were all dance musicians as opposed to some of them being....
Calt: Well, I think it's a result of the fact that you get people writing about blues who don't really either know or care what the hell they're talking about. I think it's somewhat outrageous. If you listen, for example, to Charlie Patton, almost all of his tunes are dance tunes. You've heard Charlie Patton?
RTB: Yeah, I have one of the double albums.
Calt: OK. He's a very strong dance musician, but you're gonna hear it in the person's voice.
RTB: Him being a shouter?
Calt: Well, there'll be an accenting pattern. And also in volume, although there are a couple of guys who do reflect a dance beat without having an enormous amount of volume. Like a Georgia Tom Dorsey will do it, and Willie Walker is another one. But yes, if there's a premium on volume, yeah, you'll certainly get that, it's almost like the James Brown ambience. But you'll get an accenting pattern that'll be right during the singing.
RTB: OK. Yeah, my familiarity with blues across the board isn't as great as I would like it to be--I have my favorites, but I haven't done that much research, if you will, into those types of issues, which is one of the reasons I wanted to talk to you so much.
Calt: I only did it 'cause I'm working on these books, so it sort of behooves me to sit down and try to figure it out. "What is so and so doing here, and why is he doing this?" You know, it's not really a normal thing to do. It's just a blues song in that way.
RTB: Well, it certainly makes for more interesting reading than, like you said, some of the other things that have been on the market.
Calt: Well, yeah, I mean, you just can't assume things. You have to sit down and try to figure out what is this person actually doing. Anyway.
RTB: OK. H.C. Speir, [in a] kind of related comment, you quoted as saying that he thought of blues as "a panhandling gimmick for alcoholoics."
Calt: Yeah.
RTB: How common do you think that view was from so-called, you know, "normal citizens"? Especially the white people of the time. Did they look on the nomadic bluesmen as that extreme a case? In your mind?
Calt: Well, it depends where they would be. In Mississippi, of course, in the Delta, a lot of planters hired blacks to play at their dances. Like the Chatmon brothers and so forth. And so, they wouldn't have that sort of view. And a fellow like Speir, see, he was a scout, and more often than not apparently blues singers of the '20s were found while playing on the streets. Which is probably a reflection of the fact that the scout types like Speir would be out in the daytime and they would be in towns where they would see these people, or also in cities. You know, the average white person back then wouldn't have any contact at all with the blues player because of the Jim Crow situation. And I guess if you would happen to see one, it would likely be on a street or something like that. Speir had enough contact with these fellows to know that they were, for the most part, alcoholics. Which is true. I can hardly think of a blues singer who was not an alcoholic. A Blind Lemon Jefferson they say did not drink a lot. But....
RTB: More the exception than the rule?
Calt: Oh, absolutely. I really think that the reason for that was this whole view that playing blues was such a sinful activity. I think they decided to numb themselves into doing it to some extent. Like somebody like Son House--if you met Son House, he was like a hapless wino basically. And, you know, he had to get drunk even to sing. Otherwise, he wouldn't even bother. I mean, he would just sit there.
[To be continued...]
