random percussionists keep the dance rhythm hot

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Images of chaos, of rough black bodies rubbing and sweating and dancing wildly in the heated kerosene haze, powered by a loud pounding rhythm raging with erotic dread. Walls painted randomly in harsh dark shades close in on the shocking scene. People are half seen, acts are half followed, as in dreams. Seated on a chair amid the tumult, a stocky man named Willie Brown frantically knots a broken string on his guitar. In the corner his partner Son House fends off a woman who keeps pouring beer into his battered guitar. Son guzzles the beer out of his guitar until it is dry, as Willie yells to him. The furious momentum increases even without the music. Son rushes toward Willie as his female admirer chugs the rest of her beer. Picking up on the sizzling tempo by stomping his foot and sliding a jagged glass bottleneck over the guitar strings, Son explodes with improvised song. The air is ecstatically wicked. The intense activity is a cross between heated dance and heavy petting. One woman struts like a chicken as her mate makes a face like a fish. Others pound the walls with fists and bones. One guy grabs onto a window and jerks it off its hinges. The surging music ensues.

he would crawl around on all fours, howling like a wolf on the prowl

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Besman did not even expect Hooker to perform the blues — not by any traditional definition of blues music. Instead, he let the guitarist riff on a single chord while improvising a narrative. These weren’t even songs, just freewheeling grooves, without a clear beginning, middle, or end. They concluded after around three minutes each, but that was imposed by the limitations of a 78rpm record. Directing Hooker in the studio was not like producing other acts. Most bands arrive at a session prepared to play well-rehearsed material which they refine into polished, finished performances. Not so for Hooker: a second take would produce, likely as not, a substantially different song. Methodical production would never have worked for the young John Lee Hooker. He would have covered the whole history of the blues in twenty takes, and be no closer to a definitive version of a specific song. Besman didn’t want polished performances; he wanted to capture the heat of the moment. He went with the flow, and if take two sounded like a different song, Besman simply assigned it a separate title.

Just draw my cigarette baby until you make my good ashes come

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"Worse than denying him [the Negro] the opportunities of developing a taste for the higher types of leisure time activities is the practice . . . of forcing upon the Negro a taste for degraded forms . . . [an] example is the quite general practice of larger talking machine companies of America, of almost forcing upon the Negro race records that are distinctly immoral in their title and content. Some of these records are so obscene that the companies have not the courage to advertise them in their regular catalogues, but issue special booklets for Negroes. Not content with issuing these booklets to Negroes these companies also flaunt the suggestive titles of these records, accompanied by obscene pictures, in the Negro newspapers."

unpopular, alienated interlopers with a penchant for cheap liquor

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The crowd at Big Joe’s confirmed that bit about madness: Clauberg had courted a perfect outcast harem. A Greek dishwasher and janitor named Popeye helped keep the place clean, rubbing oil into the floorboards as necessary. According to the former employee Henry Rinard, Popeye was a short, well-muscled man with no teeth, hair, or eyebrows, prone to mumbling to himself for hours “in gibberish not even another Greek could understand.” Clauberg let Popeye crash on the floor at night, and in exchange, Popeye performed additional odd jobs, like bringing Clauberg food from the joint where he washed dishes, cutting his hair, and helping him yank a rotten tooth from his gums using a pair of pliers. Another regular, Abbie the Agent, wore “thick-lensed eyeglasses, smoked continuously, and was seldom sober.” An outcast from a wealthy Connecticut family, Abbie fetched cigarettes and wine for Clauberg, and periodically became so inebriated himself that he passed out on the Popeye-oiled floor. (His other nickname was Horizontal Abe.) Rinard also wrote about a guy known mostly as the Sea Captain, who wore a wool hat, raincoat, and heavy, too-big, laceless boots, even in June. The Captain was something of an enigma, even to Rinard: “He was either Swedish or Norwegian; he understood English, but never spoke,” he wrote. The clientele was no less unique. “Saturday afternoons they met at Indian Joe’s, where they thumbed through the bins in between swigs from the bottles of muscatel that Pete Kaufman brought along from his store, suspending their searches briefly at three, when a man called Bob turned up with a suitcase of pornographic books.”

his massive hips begin to shake. “I’m a tail dragger…”

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Muddy Waters alone turned that style into a vehicle for personal popularity, and fifteen years later it is Muddy Waters alone who retains any wide personal following.

“It was sex,” says twenty-seven-year-old Marshall Chess, whose father, Leonard, discovered Muddy. “If you had ever seen Muddy then, the effect he had on women. Because blues, you know, has always been a women’s market. On Saturday night they’d be lined up ten deep.”

“I like to think I could really master a stage,” says Muddy. “I think I was a pretty good stage personality, and I knew how to present myself right. No, I never developed an act of any kind. I just had a natural feel for it.”

As the music warmed up Muddy began to comment, give encouragement, working himself up to a pitch of excitement that made a tremendous impact when he fronted the group. There was no doubting who was king—the effect was stunning. And frightening too. The sheer physical drive of band and blues singer chilled the spine. Muddy roared, leaped, jerked in fierce and violent spasms. When he came off the stage he was in a state of near-trance and the sweat poured off him.

Sportin’ class o’ women runnin’ up and down the street all night long

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Memphis Minnie sits on top of the icebox at the 230 Club in Chicago and beats out blues on an electric guitar. A little dung-colored drummer who chews gum in tempo accompanies her. Midnight. The electric guitar is very loud, science having magnified all its softness away. Memphis Minnie sings through a microphone and her voice - hard and strong anyhow for a little woman’s - is made harder and stronger by scientific sound. The singing, the electric guitar, and the drums are so hard and so loud, amplified as they are by General Electric on top of the icebox, that sometimes the voice, the words, and the melody get lost under their noise, leaving only the rhythm to come through clear. The rhythm fills the 230 Club with a deep and dusky heartbeat. Memphis Minnie’s feet in her high-heeled shoes keep time to the music of her electric guitar. Her thin legs move like musical pistons. She grabs the microphone and yells, “Hey, now!” Then she hits a few deep chords at random, leans forward ever so slightly over her guitar, bows her head, and begins to beat out a good old steady downhome rhythm on the strings - a rhythm so contagious that often it makes the crowd holler out loud. - Langston Hughes, the Chicago Defender, January 9, 1943

a sexy growl that gradually rose to a series of wild honks and screams

 

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blues queens celebrated freedoms in no uncertain terms: “No time to marry, no time to settle down,” Bessie Smith sang, “I’m a young woman, and ain’t done running ’round.” And if their current lives still involved trials and troubles, blues provided a way to speak out: Smith threatened that if her man interfered with her affairs, “I’m like the butcher right down the street, I can cut you all to pieces like I would a piece of meat.” Ma Rainey sang of the harsh realities of domestic violence, describing a man who would “take all my money, blacken both of my eyes, give it to another woman, come home and tell me lies.” But she also sang about finding happiness in lesbian culture, dressing up in “a collar and a tie” to go out with “a crowd of my friends / They must have been women, ’cause I don’t like no men.”

listened to this strange, seductive, angry, hate-filled bluegrass

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"Listen kid," he went on, "that record is no good. In fact it is evil. It caused a lot of trouble while it was around. Women left their husbands. Husbands left their wives. Children ran away from home and were never seen again. There were sunspots on the moon. Revolutions started, massacres happened, suicides and alcoholism went sky - high, wars started, monsters were seen on the Edge, it was bad, kid. It was bad. Maybe it would be better for you if you didn't hear it again. I mean I just feel like I gotta tell ya that, kid. It's dangerous for anybody your age to get interested in things like that."

his real occupations were bootlegging, card­sharping, and pimping

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He was most attached to Son House, a hapless derelict who could not be entrusted with a pawnable guitar, and had reached the stage of advanced alcoholism known as "wet brain," where a few gulps of wine were sufficient to make him drunk. Yet for three years, Waterman managed to make a concert performer out of the emotional cripple who was Son House, who could not travel alone, or perform without being given infusions of wine, the poison he referred to as "my medicine." Whether it was in House's best interests to pursue a career under such circumstances is another matter.