I had the Harry Smith anthology, at least a couple of volumes of it. There were six, but I don't think I had them all. They were released as three two-LP sets, originally in 1952. Dave Van Ronk once said that every folk singer on MacDougal Street knew the lyrics to every song on the Harry Smith anthology, and if he was exaggerating, it wasn't by much. Harry Smith went in a different direction from Moses Asch of Folkways (although Folkways released the anthology) and the young Communists of Stinson, who were interested in the field recordings of pioneers like John and Alan Lomax, and capturing the real ethnic folk music. He was also different from Bob Weinstock, who came along a good deal later (but still early in the process), and who liked to record classic blues artists in Rudy Van Gelder's studio, with some of his great modern jazz musicians backing them up. Harry Smith was interested in what came to be called, in a felicitous phrase, the Old Weird America. He collected commercial recordings made by white country singers and black blues singers in the late 1920s and early 1930s. So I would have heard Furry Lewis back then, because he was on the first Harry Smith album.
I had Blues in the Mississippi Night, Alan Lomax's 1947 recording of three blues singers swapping songs and exchanging stories of what it was like in the Deep South. The stories were too true, and too damning, for Lomax to release until ten years later, and even then it was still so incendiary that he had to withhold the singers' real names, for fear of reprisal against them. Only many years later, and after they were all dead, were the names of Big Bill Broonzy, Sonny Boy Williamson, and Memphis Slim attached to a CD reissue.
And by the late 1950s, I was also collecting 45 RPM records by artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Lightnin' Hopkins, B. B. King, Wynonie Harris. It seems strange now, but to me these records were a different part of my record collection, purchased by a different part of me. The folk blues, the country blues in Samuel Charters' phrase, were part of the grownup world of leftist intellectuals, the music of the people, authentic American folk music. This was also the world of my classmates at Bard College, the red diaper babies from Music and Art High School in New York City, kids who had read Kafka and who I knew without asking were far more worldly and sophisticated than I was. The others were...well, they weren't really a part of any milieu that I was familiar with. Just me, and my best friends Peter and Wendell Jones. And maybe just Wendy and me, because Peter was mostly in his own world of jazz. We were exploring an addiction to which rock and roll was the gateway drug, and rock and roll, even as the decade rolled over, was still a phase you were expected to grow out of. Waters and Wolf were on Chess, the label of Chuck Berry and Bo Diddley (he was on Chess subsidiary Checker) and doowop groups like the Moonglows. Wynonie Harris was on King, the label of Boyd Bennett and his Rockets, Otis Williams and the Charms, Hank Ballard and the Midnighters.
Rock and roll. It wasn't until much, much later that blues which didn't have its origins in the 1920s entered the world of cultural significance. Discovery and rediscovery was a theme of the mid-twentieth century, because so much valuable art of the early twentieth century had been overlooked and dismissed by a racist culture. Heywood Hale Broun traveled to New Orleans in 1940 to record Kid Rena and other older New Orleans musicians, sparking a revival of interest in classic New Orleans jazz. Preservation Hall, first opened in the 1950s, was an outgrowth of this revival. John Hammond, with his 1938 Spirituals to Swing concert at Carnegie Hall, was an important agent in this era of rediscovery. Harry Smith, in 1952, rediscovered the Old Weird America and its music.
Samuel Charters, with his 1959 book The Country Blues and his field work for Folkways, rediscovered Lightnin' Hopkins and a number of other blues singers. But blues was still being narrowly and often capriciously defined, as was folk music (I remember being surprised to see Hopkins, whose records I owned on 45, on rhythm and blues labels, presented as a folk blues artist.)
By the mid-1950s on, one thing that was fairly clear about the new definition of folk music was that it didn't necessarily have to be made by folk--that is, by rural musicians and singers singing the songs that had been handed down through their families or their communities. A lot of it was being made by city kids from New York, or in one particularly notorious case, from Minneapolis by way of Hibbing, Minnesota. Big Bill Broonzy, a jazz guitarist, reinvented himself as a folk singer.
And in the mid-1960s Chess Records, realizing that the market for their rhythm and blues of the 1950s had dried up, reinvented Muddy Waters and released an album called Muddy Waters, Folk Singer, followed by another called The Real Folk Blues. Waters and the other artists whose amplified instruments had left them on the outside of the folk music boom were also to be embraced by young British musicians for whom all of it: folk music (they made it into skiffle in England), rock and roll, and especially the electrified blues coming out of Chicago and Detroit, were the new world of American music which the young Britishers were using to blast the doors off the ossified class system of their country.
As this bounced back to America, it tore the doors off this country's own ossified caste system, and now B. B. King, Eddie Kirkland, T-Bone Walker, James Cotton and the electric bluesmen of the Midwest and California were playing the same folk festivals -- now called blues festivals -- as Son House, Skip James, Mississippi John Hurt and Furry Lewis.
So was I a pioneer of the blues revival? Nah, I was just a scared kid. But I was there.
Furry Lewis had pretty much given up making music when Sam Charters found him in his home town of Memphis, working for the city. He didn't even own a guitar any more. But he hadn't lost his touch, either as a singer or a guitarist.
Lewis is a blues singer who harkens back to the songster days, the entertainers on street corners or rural parties who knew a lot of songs and sang whatever their audiences wanted to hear. Willie Nelson describes growing up with a similar audience--"so country they didn't know they were country." They just knew what they liked, and were as likely to request a song by Irving Berlin as one by Ernest Tubb. Lewis sang the ballads and story songs that people knew, and he sings several of them on these two sessions: "John Henry," "Casey Jones," "Frankie and Johnny," "St. Louis Blues." Lead Belly had presented a similar mix of material, but he was never presented as a blues singer. Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry also had a wide-ranging repertoire, and they had careers that stretched far into the Blues Explosion era, but they were prolific, and their style was well established by the 1960s. Had Lewis been discovered a few years later, a young producer or record label might well have discouraged this diversity. But these songs were a part of Lewis, and in fact "Kassie Jones" had been his most popular recording back in the 1920s.
One of his own twelve bar blues, and one of the first songs recorded on April 3, is "When My Baby Left Me." The first verse of the song is also the first verse of Arthur "Big Boy" Crudup's "My Baby Left Me," later recorded by Elvis Presley. Crudup is now venerated as one of our great blues singers, but back in those days he was still pigeonholed as a rhythm and blues singer, and rhythm and blues was considered the next cousin to rock and roll, not an authentic folk music. (Big Bill Broonzy, asked if rock and roll was folk music, famously responded, "I ain't never heard no horses singin' it.")
Crudup/Presley's "My Baby Left Me" is verse-chorus, the blues variant favored by Willie Dixon and the Midwestern blues artists who recorded for Midwestern labels like Chess. The twelve bar blues is an introspective form by nature, whereas the verse-chorus form is more communicative. The singer of the twelve bar blues repeats the first line as a gesture of reassurance to himself, a way of making sure that it's true, and that he's really saying it--"My baby left me, never said a word." The verse-chorus singer cuts right to the chase--"Was it something I done, something that she heard?" And then drives on into the chorus, which will be repeated not just once, but after every verse, to hammer it home to the listener and also to invite the listener to sing along, aloud or silently--"She left me, you know she left me / My baby even left me, never said goodbye."
Furry Lewis is a communicator, far more than many of the early bluesmen. His choice of songs, his delivery, even his guitar style, are communicative. But he's still a bluesman, and he has a lot of the bluesman's introspection, even in his ballads. He'll linger over words, following them into some private world of emotion. The best of the blues singers make it a rare privilege to be allowed to follow them into those recesses of introspection, and Lewis is one of the best.
The Charters recordings of Lewis are an important milestone in the history of the rediscovery of the blues, and Charters has been recognized as a seminal figure in this movement. Lewis went on to have the renascent career that had been denied to him earlier. He played many blues festivals. He was profiled in Playboy. He was a guest on the Johnny Carson Tonight show, and was featured in a Burt Reynolds movie.
The sessions were released on two separate Bluesville LPs, Back on My Feet Again and Done Changed My Mind. They were rereleased together on CD as Shake 'em on Down.
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