Listening to Prestige 491: Pink Anderson/Baby Tate

August 1961 seems to have been blues month in the Prestige family. Perhaps all the jazz musicians (and producers) were over in Europe at jazz festivals. In any event, we don't see any jazz until near the end of the month, but lots of good blues, from various points south and then from New York City (but except for Gary Davis, not Englewood Cliffs--maybe it was Rudy Van Gelder who was on vacation). August 14 saw Sam Charters returning to Spartanburg, South Carolina, where he had first recorded Pink Anderson for Bluesville back in April.

LISTEN TO TWO

Anderson is another rediscovery by Charters of a bluesman from the 1920s, although he wasn't entirely lost (folklorist Paul Clayton recorded him for Riverside in 1950) and for that matter wasn't entirely a bluesman. Unlike Memphis Willie B. and many of the other old-timers, Anderson had never abandoned music. He continued through the decades to scrape out a living by busking, playing the streets and backyard barbecues, and doing something that really does seem to belong to a much earlier time: traveling with a medicine show.

The medicine show was a feature of the American countryside in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In a time when doctors were scarce and not always reliable. traveling peddlers, giving themselves bogus medical credentials, would travel through rural areas selling magical elixirs to cure anything--mostly harmless herbal concoctions with maybe some alcohol or opiates thrown in. And they would draw a crowd with entertainment, so that the snake oil salesman could start to work his wiles.

Remarkably, these traveling medicine shows lasted a lot longer than most people realize--certainly more than I realized. The one Pink Anderson toured with didn't fold up until the mid-1940s. And the tradition lasted longer than that. The "jig shows" that Buck Clarke describes touring with in the 1950s were essentially medicine shows without the snake oil.

So although Pink Anderson's professional career dates back to the late 1920s, the era of the first blues craze, he followed a tradition that went back much further--the tradition of the songster, the street singer, the medicine show performer, the entertainer who would sing anything passersby wanted to hear. Willie Nelson talks about getting his start playing rural honky tonks in Texas where audiences were so country that they didn't know what country was. They'd request an Ernest Tubb song and then one by Irving Berlin--they'd heard it on the radio, or in someone's parlor, and they liked it, so sing it, young feller.

And that describes Pink Anderson's repertoire. He certainly didn't learn "Wreck of the Old '97" from any blues record, because no blues singer ever recorded it. More likely, it came from Vernon Dalhart, one of the first recorded country music stars. Anderson gives it his own tempo, is own intonation, his own guitar part, and it comes out with a bluesy feel, but still not exactly the blues, and what does it matter? Anderson played for the people, and that's a noble undertaking.

Lead Belly did a version of "The Titanic," one that included the ship's racist (and apocryphal) denial of passage to Jack Johnson, and the heavyweight champion's revenge when the ship sank. Anderson does the more familiar folkie version, the one his streetcorner audiences--later, folk festival and coffehouse audiences--would have known, and could sing along with on the chorus. 

The danger of tailoring your material and your delivery too closely to the tastes of your audience is an obvious one. When that audience dries up, you may find yourself irrelevant. The great blues singers like Charley Patton and Robert Johnson were singing for themselves, of private frustrations and miseries and demons, and their songs have a universality that others may lack. But Anderson's warmth and professionalism, and especially his guitar playing, hold up.

Charles Henry "Baby" Tate was another South Carolinian who frequently performed with Anderson (and with Blind Boy Fuller and Peg Leg Sam), but on this particular day, Charters chose to record each of them separately. Tate is much more of a traditional 12-bar bluesman, but it's not hard to imagine them performing together: both play in that Atlantic coast blues fingerpicking style known as "Piedmont blues," well known in New York folkie circles through the playing of the Reverend Gary Davis and Brownie McGhee. 

Each plays his own version of "Betty and Dupree," called "Dupree Blues" on Tate's album. The versions are similar, with more guitar fills from Tate, and some variations in the lyrics, but the same story of the poor Joe who can only get his girl a diamond ring by robbing the jewelry store. Tate does "

Both sessions were supervised and engineered by Charters, with Charters and Kenny Goldstein sharing the producer credit. Anderson's Bluesville session was released as The Blues Of Pink Anderson - Ballad And Folksinger, Vol. 3. Tate's was The Blues Of Baby Tate - See What You Done Done.