Listening to Prestige 460: Henry Townsend

This was recorded in St, Louis, where Henry Townsend came in his youth, and spent most of his life. It wasn't his first recording (it was his first LP) and it wasn't his last. In fact, it didn't even come close in either direction. Townsend is perhaps the only, certainly one of the only recording artists to make records in nine decades, starting in 1929, and finishing up with a last session in 2006, shortly before his death.

When I said Townsend came to St. Louis in his youth, I was understating the case. Born in Mississippi, he was raised in Cairo, Illinois, until the age of nine, when he hopped a freight in order to avoid a beating from his stepfather, and headed south. He got by doing the sort of odd jobs available to a small boy in the city, shining shoes, serving as a runner for bootleggers, and cleaning theaters. It was while cleaning the Booker T. Washington Theater that he heard Lonnie Johnson play and decided to become a blues musician.

He was in the army during World War II, spent some time in Chicago after the war, and toured Europe in the 1950s when interest in his kind of blues was on the wane stateside, but St. Louis continued to be his home base, and the city to which he always returned.

Townsend was recorded in his home city by Kenneth S. Goldstein and Samuel Charters, with the assistance of Ann Charters, as part of their continuing commitment to finding and recording original blues musicians for Bluesville. His repertoire seems to come partly from his head, partly from recordings: "Cairo's My Baby's Home," though it references the city that he too once called home, was originally recorded in 1929 by Henry Spaulding, with whom Townsend hung out in the early days, and who recorded for Brunswick around the same time Townsend was making his first recording for Columbia.

Townsend described his recording process in a 2002 interview with Steve Pick:

I don't (decide what songs to record). It's all up to me. I don't decide, I just ad lib. I don't have anything written down, I don't know what I'm gonna do until I do it. I carry a little tape recorder with me. It will pick up whatever I sing. To keep it from getting stolen, I do a quick copyright on it. I go to the Post Office and mail it back to me, sealed in an envelope.

If something goes wrong, I've got that proof."

Townsend worked a lot with other blues musicians, like Roosevelt Sykes and Walter Davis. For this session, he was accompanied by St. Louisan Tommy Bankhead, a cousin of Elmore James and a popular fixture on the St. Louis blues scene.

Jon Pareles of The New York Times described Townsend, aftera 1993 New York concert:

Townsend sang epic-length blues, many stretching far beyond 10 verses, that presented a landscape of unending desolation and betrayal.

 He sings in weary, plaintive tenor, with quavers and slides that make remembered pain sound immediate. His gentle vocal lines, and a silently tapping left foot, hold together music that always seems on the verge of shattering. 

Samuel Charters, who wrote the liner notes for the album, used his soapbox to get in a few digs at blues trends he deplored:

Already [by the late 1930s] there was considerable commercial exploitation of the blues, particularly by the Bluebird label, and it seemed for a number of years that the music had lost its vitality. Instead of the individual performance of the single performer, there were "jump" or "jive" blues bands ...and so-called "rhythm and blues"... rushing the singer along with an incessant rhythm and with reiterated accompaniment patterns that became almost banal. It was during this period, too, that the electric guitar first [became] widespread, and techniques developed on the acoustical guitar, the variations in tone and the use of string sounds to emphasize the vocal line, were replaced by the flat, blaring tone of the mechanical instrument.

Charters may have had the purist's tunnel vision in his inability to recognize the artistic validity of newer trends in the blues (and even Henry Townsend used an electric guitar), but God bless him for it. His purist's vision enabled him to rescue an important American art form that was in danger of being forgotten. Folklorists John and Alan Lomax, in an early generation, did much the same thing. At a time when the blues were at a pinnacle of popularity, the folklorist-purist Lomaxes viewed the blues much the way a blues purist would view disco. They were looking for a singer who recalled the ballads and play-party songs of an earlier era. That's how they found Lead Belly, who had spent most of the years of the blues explosion in prison, and that's how they were able to give us one of the great talents of the twentieth century.

The Bluesville release was called Tired of Bein' Mistreated. The same album would be rereleased some years later by Folkways as The Blues in St. Louis, Vol. 3.