Woke up This Morning Blues America

The blues is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.

BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

# I woke up this morning

# Feeling round for my shoes... #

It's such simple music, it seems timeless.

# Well, I woke up this morning feeling round... #

But the blues does have a history and it keeps changing.

For the 1920's New York record industry,

the blues was a parade of powerful women on stage,

singing about sex, sadness and feeling blue.

# I woke up this morning

# With an awful aching head... #

This is the story of how a folk art met up with new media

and became the bedrock of American music.

# Woke up this morning I looked round for my shoes... #

From the Deep South came the blues that gave birth to rock 'n' roll.

In the 1960's, white kids got the blues.

# I am the little red rooster

# Too lazy to crow for... #

The blues ended the 20th century as the ultimate brand of authenticity.

Music that could be celebrated by prisoners and presidents.

This is music with humble beginnings.

# Woke up this morning

# And found my baby gone... #

It's a bent note here. It's something that says,

"I've been somewhere and you've been there, too,

"but we don't necessarily want to talk about it."

And blues is kind of like that.

It's kind of a mystery and long may it stay a mystery, you know.

The blues may have had its roots in Africa,

but the music was born in the USA.

# I'm going down in Louisiana... #

Why is it that there is no blues in Cuba, no blues in Puerto Rico,

no blues in St Kitts and Nevis?

Why is that not happening?

# I'm going down in New Orleans... #

In 1865, the American Civil War freed the slaves.

By around 1900, the blues had emerged in the deep south.

Their musical roots may have been ripped from the African soil, but to

talk to each other, black Americans needed to forge a new language.

In the United States, the music was broken up,

the people were broken up.

They were not parts of the same tribe,

so there was nothing to express it except the blues.

# Well, you know, I just found out

# My trouble just begun... #

From the start, the blues spoke in the first person,

talking about moving on and leaving your troubles behind.

# I'm going down in New Orleans... #

The blues comes actually as a release from the kind

of strict localism, you call it, you know, being confined.

And it's... you suddenly get songs about people travelling,

and people going to see this and people what they met on the road.

BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

# I'm on my way but I don't know where... #

Appropriately, a railroad station was the setting for a crucial

early encounter with the blues.

Here, a college-educated black man named WC Handy,

the leader of a coloured band, met a "lean loose-jointed Negro" vagrant.

We're in Tutwiler, Mississippi and this place is famous in blues

lore because some time around 1903 this is the spot where

WC Handy recalled that he had first heard the blues.

He was sitting here and heard a musician playing

a guitar by pulling a knife across the strings,

and Handy recalled it was the weirdest sound he had ever heard.

The blues was being improvised all over the south

for pleasure and profit.

FRANTIC BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

Later, Handy heard in Cleveland, Mississippi,

not too far away from here, an African American string band

playing the blues, and that was also a really pivotal moment

because that's when he realised, he saw people throwing

coins at their feet and realised that he could make money off it.

The sort of music Handy heard is played

today by The Ebony Hillbillies.

Early blues music was dance music designed for adults to

get them to come to some place and drink and have a good time,

and so it's mating music, essentially.

It's about men and women.

The driving instrumental part of the blues certainly

comes from early fiddle music, slave fiddle players, banjo players,

but the blues was purposely formed as the dance music

so the musicians would make money, you know, to come to dance halls.

Oh, he got me!

-He got you too?!

-Yeah, me too!

At the turn of the century, the blues was being

played by the poorest people on whatever came to hand.

THEY SING

You see old slavery pictures,

guys working on the railroad track, they get to hitting the hammer the

same way, you know, then they make up a song - ha-poom, ha-poom, ha-poom.

I've heard guys that have put a piece on wire on the side

of a house and played, take the tambourine and play, they take a

washing tub, they take a wash board, take spoons, you know, anything

that you put together like that with a feeling, somebody will listen.

Handy translated the weird sounds that he heard

into a publishing empire.

In WC Handy Park in Memphis,

a statue commemorates the writer, composer and publisher

who gave himself the title, "Father of the Blues".

Around 1914, in the era before records and radio,

Handy's Memphis Blues and St Louis Blues became sheet music hits.

What's really significant about Handy hearing this music is

that within a decade he was writing these and making good

money off of this music, so we often talk about blues as a folk

music, but almost from its inception it was also commercialised.

Soon this new musical form

was crisscrossing the southern states of America.

Today we think of minstrel shows as crude caricatures of black music,

but at the beginning of the 20th century, dozens of African American

minstrels were putting on tent shows across the south.

# Woke up this morning Same thing on my mind

# Woke up this morning Same thing on my mind... #

Minstrel shows and their successors, the medicine shows, which toured

the south right through the first half of the 20th century, were

in a sense, academies for musicians who wanted to become professional.

The tent shows travelled through the countryside, where audiences

heard versions of the latest tunes from the big city.

They were almost like travelling salesmen for songs.

They would pick up stuff all over the place,

whether from the vernacular,

from songs that were being sung in plantations,

or by professional troupes,

by musical comedy troupes that was available on sheet music,

and they mixed it altogether.

LIVELY BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

The men and women writing and performing the blues were ambitious.

They used the latest media to bring their music to the public.

It was New York, the capital of the new recording industry,

that made the blues a driving force in popular music.

Initially, the record business ignored black musicians.

You have to remember that in this period, in the teens and '20s,

the money in songs was in publishing, it was not in recording.

And Perry Bradford, who was a black songwriter,

he was a contemporary and a competitor of WC Handy,

was writing these songs and he wanted to get hits.

# I can't eat a bite

# For the man I love... #

In 1920, Perry Bradford scored a big hit with

Crazy Blues, sung by Mamie Smith.

# So I got the crazy blues

# If my baby went away... #

It's said to have sold a million copies. No-one knows for sure,

but what is certain is that it launched the blues as pop music.

# Now I got the crazy blues... #

In the early 1920's,

record companies began to release race records -

music by black performers for black audiences.

# The blues ain't nothing but your lover on your mind... #

The first successful blues singers were women.

The threat to whites was not black women, it was

black men, so the black men on the stage were forced to black up.

Black women were not.

They could perform with their own skin,

but a black man had to be a clown.

He had to put on funny clothes and do funny dances.

There was always interaction, although not always favourable,

between American white males and black women.

They were allowed to do or be vocal or say certain things that the

black males wouldn't be able to say or do.

# The blues ain't nothing but a slow aching heart... #

They were more showbiz in their own way,

even though they were as gut blues as anybody else,

but they had to dress it up and there is nothing like a dressed up

lady to turn the interests, I think.

# I love my man

# But he treats me like a dog... #

Luckily they were some of the most phenomenally great singers.

Even through those old records,

you can tell the timbre of their voice and their delivery was amazing

cos this was out pre-microphone,

so you know these girls had to be able to project.

In segregated 1920's America, the blues queens performed on a black

theatre circuit and they lived their lives in a black underworld.

When the artists used to perform and travel around, they would have

to stay in people's houses, which turned out to be things that we

called the buffet flats in which you could get entertainment, food,

you could get a bed

and you could get a bed with someone else in it if you wanted.

# Woke up this morning

# When chickens were crowing for days... #

The blues may have been a view from the bottom of society,

but in 1923 the blues produced its first superstar, Bessie Smith.

A dark brown woman from Chattanooga Tennessee,

she was a veteran of ten years touring with minstrel shows.

# Some people call me a hobo

# Some call me a bum

# Nobody knows my name

# Nobody knows what I've done... #

Bessie Smith was talking about the woes of life with women

and that's probably why she was so popular.

She talked about domestic violence, which is what we call it now.

She talked about even fighting back.

Come on out. You're gonna move.

Don't you hit me. Now wait a minute there! Grab the woman.

Emerging from a dirt poor background,

Bessie Smith at her peak commanded 2,000-a-week

for her live performances.

# Woke my baby

# He's done left this town... #

Bessie Smith lives the blues, especially those sexual songs,

because she had a reputation and she lived up to it.

One of my favourites is Sugar in My Bowl, you know.

# I need a little sugar in my bowl

# I need a little hot dog on my roll

# I could stand some loving for so bad

# I feel so funny I feel so sad... #

You know, it's just something to entice.

You know, you're going to listen to things that entice you.

You're going to eat food that entices you, you know.

Why not have a little spiciness in the music?

The blues was black music making a lot of money for its superstars,

but the structure of the music came out of work songs and churches.

If it wasn't for Cavalry, where I would be?

Yeah! Yeah!

The call and response between the preacher

and the congregation came ultimately from Africa.

In tribal music, one singer sang a line and the others sang it back.

-Oh a hill called Cavalry.

-Yeah!

In the blues, the second voice became an instrumental voice.

-Y'all praying with me?

-Yeah!

-Y'all praying with me?

-Yeah!

The call and response, when you sing the blues,

you say a word, a lyric, whatever and then you play behind that, you know.

For instance, I said, "Thank you, sir." Duh, duh, duh.

You know, "Thank you, sir." Duh, duh, duh. You know.

-At Cavalry.

-At Cavalry.

We hear... the words.

Yeah!

The call and response, you can go back to early Africa,

and it's usually based on a form of people returning from a hunt,

saying, "I caught this blah, blah, blah."

And the people say, "Yeah, you sure you caught that."

It's acknowledgement and confirmation.

You know, "Did you hear that?" "Yes, I heard that."

"What did I say?" "This is what you said." "What does it mean?"

"It means this."

-We're going to show them on a hill called Calvary.

-Yeah!

Religion spoke of the life to come,

but the blues was rooted in the here and now.

# I hate to see

# The evening sun go down... #

The music evolved into the 12-bar blues,

turning sadness into stoicism

and misfortune into humour.

The blues is definitely more than just a sadness.

Because basically a blues, especially

if you deal with the 12-bar, it's set up like a joke.

You know, you repeat the line twice,

then you've got the punch line at the end.

"I've got a man that treats me like a rat.

"I've got a man that treats me like a rat.

"He gets me so worried I don't know where I'm at."

It's a happy music, it truly is.

It's just that some of the subject matter of the blues

sometimes had that sad feeling,

but truly, it is not a sad music.

VINTAGE BLUES RECORDING

# When the blues come and take me... #

In 1926, race records got into a new market and a new type of southern

solo artist, Blind Lemon Jefferson, a street singer from Texas.

His high lonesome voice and solitary guitar sounded like another

world from the Vaudeville women who had dominated blues recordings.

It was a different kind of blues.

It's one-on-one. A person is just kind of howlin' at the moon.

There's no ulterior motive

for a cat to do what he does

because he's expressin' his or her soul to the universe.

# You're so good lookin'... #

Blind Lemon Jefferson may have sounded like a voice

howling at the moon, but he was backed by a business plan.

Paramount Records employed black producer Jay Mayo Williams

to run their race records division.

In his catalogue, Williams appealed to his customers, asking

if they could recommend any new blues talent.

And, by God, someone working in a record store in Dallas wrote

to Paramount Records and said there's this guy

plays down by the tracks here, who gets these huge crowds

and if we had a record of him we could sell a bunch of them.

And that was Blind Lemon Jefferson

and the record company thought he sounded terrible,

but they gave it a try and, by God, it sold all over the country.

MUSIC: "One Kind Favor" by Blind Lemon Jefferson

# Well, there's one kind favour I ask of you... #

He became a recording star and his success transported him

far away from singing on street corners in Texas.

# It's a long, long lane, ain't got no end

# It's a long, long lane, ain't got no end

# It's a long, long lane It ain't got no end

# It's a bad wind that never change... #

He did all right for himself. They say he owned his own car, he had

his own chauffeur to drive him around. He was a doozy.

That's it. I don't know about ragged.

Some people say he was mighty sophisticated.

Some people say he had some of the wildest suits you ever seen.

# Have you ever heard a coffin sound?

# Have you ever heard a coffin sound? #

The success of Blind Lemon Jefferson gave birth to a new

style of the blues, as if the vagrant with a guitar

heard by WC Handy at the railroad station had come back to life.

But this time he was selling a lot of records.

THEY SING TOGETHER

All over the south, the songsters were auditioning.

They were street musicians with a big repertory of songs,

but the record companies wanted just one thing.

The reason these fellows got pressed so hard into the blues is

because the recording companies found out that blues was big

business, so all these musicians who'd run around singing pop

songs and ballads of the day end up writing a bunch of blueses.

HE SINGS

The record company would simply go to the

songsters and they would go to the south, go to Atlanta.

They would just say, "Everybody come who wants to sing for us."

They'd get a hotel, everyone would stay four or five people to

a room, they would go and hear the songs.

They would pick the blues and nothing else.

There was one region that supplied spectacular blues

talent for this southern market.

The Mississippi Delta was a flat area

formed by the Mississippi and Yazoo rivers.

# I'd rather be the Devil... #

It was amazingly fertile soil for cotton

and it proved equally fertile for music.

But this was no ancient landscape

of big plantations filled with former slaves.

There was virtually nobody in the Mississippi Delta

until quite late because it was flooded.

They had to build the levees on the Mississippi river.

You needed the army corps of engineers

in order to get the modern Deltas.

And what that meant was the population

that was there at the beginning

of the 20th century when blues was happening was very, very young.

In the Delta everybody was ready to get into the new style, which

was blues, and so it becomes this huge blues centre,

not because it's ancient, but for exactly the opposite reason.

VINTAGE BLUES MUSIC

Will Dockery's farm was hacked out of the wilderness

in the 1890's to become one of the biggest plantations in the Delta.

When Mr Will first got here there were bears and panthers, er,

and the whole place was covered in woods.

And so he set about to clear it, and he needed help, and so that's

how he got so many people to come here cos he realised that these

thousands of acres that he wanted to clear needed lots of helpers.

By 1920, there were more than 2,000 workers living on Dockery.

It was like a small town, a town which needed

entertaining on a Saturday night.

Well, once you had this commissary situation

and people standing out here in front of it being paid on Saturday

afternoon, it was the perfect place for these blues singers to come.

The greatest entertainer based at Dockery was Charlie Patton,

the father of the Delta blues.

Patton sang at the top of his voice.

He liked to clown, throw the guitar behind his head.

He liked to talk to people in the audience,

but he was a performer. He was an entertainer.

# She's tryin' to keep it here

# My rudder got sucked in

# She's tryin' to keep it here... #

He had a lot of the extremes. He had a lot of the hard lives

and he had a lot of women.

He played... Every blues man gets a little but he had a lot!

# But I got something to find them something with... #

He had him a rough wife and they lived a rough life,

and that's what killed him in his 40's...

And that's what almost got him killed

a few times before that, I'd wager!

VINTAGE BLUES RECORDING

The blues singers travelled the south and performed on isolated

plantations, but talent scouts connected them to recording studios.

The most important venue was a furniture store

in Jackson, Mississippi, owned by a white man, HC Speir.

Well, really he's the godfather of Delta blues.

He is to Delta blues and Mississippi blues what Sam Phillips was

to rock and roll with his Sun label in the 1950's.

# Will you kill a man? Yes, I will... #

Gayle Dean Wardlow tracked down HC Speir

and interviewed him before his death.

This is HC Speir, Jackson, Mississippi.

By 1926, I became a talent scout through all the southern states.

Well, he would walk up when he was on the streets

and listen to a musician play.

He was looking for four original songs.

The reason many bluesmen never got recorded is

they didn't have enough original material.

VINTAGE BLUES RECORDING

Speir told tales of drunken blues singers

and bootleg liquor that fuelled Saturday night parties.

People came to drink and they came to dance

and they were drinking moonshine.

And, you know, some of this

moonshine was made through lead radiators, so I mean it had

a high lead content, but there was always booze to be found at a party.

HC Speir said the bluesman, he said he don't fit.

He said he got to have a drink before he can make a record

and he smells a little bit, but he says they're great guitar players.

He said the Delta blues was kind of like the meat barrel -

it smells a little bit. And someone like Bessie Smith,

the city singers, they had dolled it up and put perfume on their blues.

Speir got a letter from Charlie Patton in the Delta

and basically Patton said, "I think I'm as good as anyone who's

"been recorded and I would like to audition for you."

Speir got Patton a record contract.

Patton was good. Patton was one of the best talents I ever had

and he was one of the best sellers, too, on record.

His records made him famous

and he passed on his tips to the next generation.

I done started to make records, I was ploughing,

ploughing on the plantation,

and a man come through picking the guitar called Charlie Patton,

and I liked his sounds.

And so, every night that I'd get off of work,

I'd go to his house and he'd learn me how to pick the guitar,

so I got good with it.

For the musicians who started life on these plantations,

Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, BB King and many more,

the blues offered a way out.

Excuse me. These guys never picked cotton in their life,

that's why they're playing the blues, you know,

to get out of the cotton fields, they were playing.

The black families working in these cotton fields were share

croppers and for many, it was a modernised form of slavery.

# Cos it's harder than ever been before... #

Mississippi was the poorest state in the Union.

Segregation was total and the white man's word was the rule of law.

A white shop keeper like HC Speir

understood why this was fertile soil for the blues.

You take the Negro.

For 100 years, he's been deprived of so many privileges.

They could get into the fields and become more satisfied with themselves

by singing, you understand.

It was singing off something that has happened to them.

A white man would take him and keep him for a week or two and not pay

him anything, and even maybe kill one or two now and then.

BELL TOLLS

It isn't what we hear. It's what we don't hear.

What we don't hear in the blues is the real reason for the blues -

the segregation and the discrimination.

The control was total.

# Sing this song and I ain't gonna sing no more... #

Well, to me, the blues is the expression where a people

couldn't express themselves.

Those riffs and those songs came off of the expression of not being

able to say to their slave master vocally that "I don't like this".

# Down 61 Highway

# It be the only road I know... #

What is the cause of we being on the Highway 61?

129 women and children here starving

and suffering, but we, who have the bite, are dividing with them.

Thousands of black people began to vote with their feet,

leaving poverty in the south for jobs in the north.

Their numbers were boosted by the Wall Street crash in 1929

and the depression that followed.

It signalled hard times for the music industry.

Sales of records slumped and the blues recording sessions dried up.

# Lordy, some folks sat down

# Greyhound busses don't run. #

Delta bluesmen like Son House and Skip James

made records that were commercial flops.

# I'm so tired of here

# So tired of New Orleans

# I'm so tired of... #

Their music would lie buried like a time capsule.

But in the 1960's, they would be rediscovered

and acclaimed as masters of the Delta blues by a young white

audience who adopted the blues as their own.

# If that don't settle my drunken spree

# I'll never get drunk again... #

The path that led these young white people to the

blues began with a new kind of record scout driving south -

the folklorist.

# Be my woman, girl, I'll

# Be your man...

# Be my woman... #

The only white people so far involved in the blues had

been record manufacturers looking for hits.

But the folklorists were looking for music they wanted to preserve.

THEY SING

John Lomax had grown up in Texas

and had a long-standing love of folk music.

# His wife and his sister too... #

In 1933, he and his son, Alan, received a grant

from the Library of Congress to motor through the south,

visiting big penitentiaries to make recordings.

My son and I conceived the idea this summer that the best way

to get real Negro singing in the Negro idiom was to find

the Negro who had the least contact with the whites.

People have written that my grandfather

was obsessed with the prisons

and he wanted to capture something isolated.

But he wanted to find the oldest material,

which is a very important thing to do.

It's like archaeology. It was very scientific.

THEY SING

Prisons in the south were huge farms, which were run for profit.

I think you could almost call it

an extension of slavery in the 20th century.

And the men had to work from sun up to sun down what they called

"from cane to caint",

from when you can't see in the morning until when you

can't see in the night. You know, the whole of the day in unbearable heat.

ALL SING TOGETHER

The music sung by black prisoners inspired an extraordinary

passion in the young Alan Lomax.

He would spend the rest of his life recording music

created by people at the bottom of society.

I had heard all the symphonies there were,

and the chamber music and the best jazz,

and I said, "This is the greatest music."

There were 50 black men, who were working under the whip and the gun,

and they had the soul to make the most wonderful song I'd ever heard.

The most spectacular discovery the Lomaxes made in jail was

a 45-year-old prisoner, Huddie Ledbetter, known as Lead Belly.

HE SINGS SOMBRELY

He was a convicted murderer

and had a fantastic repertory of blues and ballads.

# Take this hammer

# Haaa!

# If he asks you

# Haaa... #

He had a big, penetrating voice.

He was a dynamic presence, almost frightening to some people.

He was, in one sense, a great performer,

you knew it from the second you saw him.

But another way you thought, "This guy is beyond performance."

# My girl, my girl, don't lie to me

# Tell me where did you sleep last night. #

When Lead Belly got out of jail and met the media it became

clear how much American journalists enjoyed writing about bad black men.

Life Magazine published a profile,

"Bad Nigger Makes Good Minstrel".

He was called a "Murderous Minstrel",

a "Sweet singer of the swamplands

"here to do a few tunes between homicides".

# I'm going where the cold wind blows... #

This narrative had been shaped by reporters

and the like who wanted to see, number one, a murderer who was

out walking around and a murderer who sang songs that people

enjoyed, which was, you know, it's priceless.

# My girl, my girl Don't you lie to me... #

In February, 1935, John Lomax took Lead Belly to a mansion

in Connecticut where a newsreel crew staged and filmed a re-construction

of Lead Belly's journey from singing convict to grateful performer.

Lead Belly, what are you doing here?

Boss, I've come here to be your man.

I've come here to work for you the rest of my life.

It is scripted in kind of cringing detail to

show Lead Belly as a servile,

compliant...

plantation negro

who John Lomax shepherds out of confinement.

Thank you sir, boss.

I'll drive you all over the United States.

I'll tie your shoestrings for you

and you won't have to tie your shoestrings

as long as I work for you.

Later, John Lomax was embarrassed by this newsreel,

while Lead Belly was angry because he didn't get paid.

Thank you, sir boss. Thank you, sir.

Despite growing tension between them, Lead Belly performed

with Lomax at Harvard University and literary conferences.

He got a new audience that was unexpected

and that was educated, middle class whites who were very liberal.

He didn't really have an audience among blacks.

Lead Belly was never a success with black audiences, and white society

saw him as wild-eyed and dangerous, an embodiment of his race.

However Lead Belly did find support in left wing circles.

We do not preach the sure hope of socialism in the lives

of these young comrades of ours...

As the blues entered white liberal society,

the music could now be heard in the context of civil rights.

The blues were getting political.

# I want all the coloured people to listen to me

# Don't ever try to get a home in Washington DC

# Cos it's a bourgeois town

# Oooh, it's a bourgeois town

# I got the bourgeois blues and I'm sure gonna spread the news... #

The only support for blacks in the south

in the '30s was the Communist Party, so there was a great symbiosis

between the communists and this black.

And in 1936, a meeting of the American Communist Party, they did

officially recognise the blues as the voice of the proletarian black.

UPBEAT BLUES MUSIC

But proletarian black record buyers were dancing to a different beat.

The blues records that dominated the Harlem hit parade of the 1930's

were by the Count Basie Orchestra.

# Don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees?

# Don't the moon look lonesome shining through the trees?

# Don't your house look lonesome when your baby pack up to leave? #

You say to dance you must have a beat.

Every beat you put your foot down on a beat

and that's what Basie does for you.

You can dance to Basie, it don't matter what he plays, any sound.

And that's why dah-dah,

dah-dah, dah-dah...

That's so pronounced you can't miss it!

# You can't love me, baby, and treat me that way... #

Count Basie's band combined the blues sound of Bessie Smith

with the latest developments in swing.

It was a very successful formula.

He took an eight-bar phrase, made it a 12-bar phrase

and now you got the blues.

And he had 16 guys who can shout it.

Oh, God, they were great!

# In the evening

# In the evening

# Mama, when the sun goes down... #

The blues singers were getting more sophisticated.

The new style of blues crooners,

like Leroy Carr, were no longer shouting the blues.

We have electrical recording - simple as that.

You didn't need to shout, so these singers could be more intimate.

There's another innovation comes at the same time - radio.

So, an intimate voice,

singing softly in a radio late at night - irresistible.

# Well, it's hard to tell Hard to tell

# Which one will treat you the best

# When the sun goes down... #

This melody was not lost on a young man in Mississippi.

# Well, it's hard to tell It's hard to tell

# When all your love's in vain

# All your love's in vain... #

In 1936, a 25-year-old walked into HC Speir's

store in Jackson, Mississippi - his name was Robert Johnson.

He had a bunch of songs

and he wanted an audition to make some records.

# Well, I felt lonesome I was lonesome

# And I could not help but cry

# All my love's in vain... #

Robert Johnson really used his ears and he listened to everything

that was going on around him.

And he took in everything that was

goin' on around him, all the popular musicians,

he took them off other instruments and arranged them for his instrument.

He's the first person we have from the blues world who had heard

all the blues records and, as a result,

he's the first person who doesn't just play a style from his place.

He's like already this compendium of the greatest blues

styles of the '20s and early '30s, and he's putting it all together.

# I woke up this morning

# Looking round for my shoes... #

In his short lifetime, Robert Johnson recorded 29 songs.

He remained almost totally unknown.

But beginning in the 1960's, Johnson's songs would see him

acclaimed as, "King of the Delta Blues Singers".

# I got these old walking blues... #

I think he brought the idea of writing them yourself

and playing them yourself to a new peak, you know, where it

became important that you were actually singing your own songs.

# I've been mistreated

# And I don't mind dying

# Well... #

His guitar playing is on the virtuoso scale.

This is... You're listening to an orchestra.

You're not listening to one guy - this is impossible.

In New York City, Robert Johnson had one very important fan.

John Hammond was a record producer from a wealthy background who

combined left wing politics,

man-about-town sophistication with a very discerning ear.

He discovered and encouraged Count Basie, Billie Holiday and Bob Dylan.

Hammond described Johnson as "the greatest Negro blues singer

"who has cropped up in recent years", in a Communist magazine.

He asked the magazine to sponsor a concert he was planning,

which would showcase the rich heritage of black music.

I'm sure John had never bothered to join anything,

but he didn't mind contributing to the Communist Party

if they would help make it possible to have this concert.

Hammond sent scouts down south to locate Robert Johnson,

but they returned with the news that Johnson had died

in mysterious circumstances.

Nevertheless, the show went on.

In December of 1938, John Hammond put on a concert here at

Carnegie Hall, the most prestigious classical music venue in New York.

He called it, From Spirituals to Swing

and the idea was that he was taking swing music,

which everyone knew as a pop music, and trying to show its depth,

put it in context of spirituals, of blues, of African music,

and suggest that this was serious art.

This was something they should take with the same seriousness

as European classical music.

UPTEMPO BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

Hammond began the show by playing two Robert Johnson records.

Then, as a substitute, he brought on another blues singer -

Big Bill Broonzy.

# Way down yonder in New Orleans

# Looking for a girl that I had never seen... #

Broonzy was based in Chicago.

He had released over 100 records under his own name.

He wore sharp suits and played the latest musical styles,

but because Hammond was in love with the idea the blues came from the

primitive countryside, he presented Broonzy as a simple farmhand.

Hammond wrote, "Big Bill Broonzy was prevailed

"upon to leave his Arkansas farm and mule,

"and make his very first trek to the big city to

"appear before a predominantly white audience."

He was completely a Chicago musician,

but his job in that concert was to represent the rural blues,

and so they turned him into that.

And Big Bill Broonzy was no fool and realised that that was a good

part to play and kept playing it in New York, in London, in Paris.

# I got the key to the highway

# And I'm bound to go... #

# Hey

# Hey-hey

# Hey, Lord, Lordy, Lord

# Hey, Lord, Lord, Lord... #

The blues was being re-defined.

It was no longer just black pop music.

It was now folk art from the era before records and radio.

Its new middle class white audience heard the blues as music

endangered by the modern world.

ARCHIVE: Musicians and sociologists can now study American folk songs

that have never been transcribed and would otherwise be lost

if the Library officials did not go into the field to record

unknown primitive singers.

In 1941, John Lomax's son, Alan, was at the Archive of Folk Song

at the Library of Congress and he was heading back into the field.

# It ain't what you do It's the way that you do it

# It ain't what you do It's the way that you do it

# It ain't what you do It's the way that you do it

# That's what gets results... #

Working with a team of black academics, Lomax set out to

examine every aspect of music in the Mississippi Delta.

They visited juke joints to discover what the locals were listening to.

It wasn't Robert Johnson's blues but recordings by urban,

black hit makers.

In Lomax's notes there's a wonderful

account of late one night he's wandering around,

stumbles across

a juke joint on the edge of a cotton field and opens the door to find the

whole place lit up and everybody in there jitterbugging to Fats Waller.

# It ain't what you do It's the way that you do it

# It ain't what you play It's the way that you play it... #

This could have been any place.

In his field trip through the Delta, Lomax recorded one man who

was to become a blues legend - a 28-year-old tractor driver,

McKinley Morganfield, also known as Muddy Waters.

# Like blowing my horn

# I woke up this morning and found my little baby gone... #

Muddy Waters had a profitable sideline distilling illegal liquor,

so he was suspicious of this white man and his recording equipment.

Muddy thinks that Alan Lomax is going to bust Muddy for bootlegging

moonshine and so Muddy doesn't trust this guy as far as he can throw him.

The way Alan Lomax wins Muddy's trust is Alan, white,

drinks out of the cup that Muddy has just had a sip out of,

and Muddy thinks, "Oh, my God. Even the revenue agent wouldn't

"drink after a black man. This guy must be serious."

I want to know the facts,

how you felt and why you felt the way you did.

That's a very beautiful song.

Well, I just felt blue and the song fell into my mind,

and it came to me and I start to singing and went on.

# I feel mistreated, girl, you know now

# I don't mind dying...

# Yeah I've been mistreated, baby, now

# And I don't mind dying... #

Alan Lomax would return to the blues all his life,

but he had an uneasy relationship with its commercial popularity.

He always felt, of course, that it was

the music of the people who were singing it.

It wasn't an industrial music, it wasn't big business music,

it was actual music that had come from the hearts of people,

and from the lives they lived.

Alan did not see the blues as a commercial form of music.

He was more interested in documenting,

like, the country-style blues, the early proto blues

and field hollers and those sorts of things.

At the same time that Alan Lomax was recording Muddy Waters,

new media were reaching the Delta.

The first blues radio programme

began to broadcast from Helena, Arkansas,

and they publicised themselves with a touring road show.

UPTEMPO BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

# Ain't that a pity?

# I declare it's a crying shame... #

It starts out light as air, white as snow, that's world famous King

Biscuit Flour, the perfect flour for all your baking needs.

King Biscuit Time was sponsored by a local flour manufacturer.

Aimed at black listeners,

its broadcasts were timed to catch the workers at lunchtime

on the plantations, including Muddy Waters.

Muddy used to hear the show on the air every day at 12.15

and Muddy was out on the farmland listening to the show...

and as so many others were.

That's how they knew about it.

They said, "They should hear our kind of blues. We're the blues artists."

UPTEMPO BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

Muddy Waters was beginning to get gigs at the juke joints

in the Delta.

The Blue Front Cafe started in the 1940's in Bentonia, Mississippi.

SASSY BLUES MUSIC PLAYS

Juke joint music, drinking, gambling, eating...

I mean, you name it.

You'd have people come by, they'd have a harmonica in their pocket,

a guitar strapped across their back and they would play solo.

Set a cap or a bucket down in front of them,

and some of them would contribute, nickels, dimes,

pennies or whatever, and they'd play for that.

SASSY BLUES CONTINUES

CROWD CHEERING

But blacks were leaving the south in large numbers,

pushed off the land by new machines on the plantations, and pulled

towards the north especially Chicago by jobs in the factories.

The motivation for Muddy Waters to put on his best suit,

have his picture taken and leave Mississippi

arrived in the shape of a record sent by Alan Lomax.

In an evening at the White House devoted to celebrating

the blues, America's first black President focused on that moment.

Lomax sent Muddy two pressings from their sessions

together along with a cheque for 20.

Later in his life, Muddy recalled what happened next.

He said, "I carried that record up to the corner

"and I put it on the juke box.

"Just played it and played it and said, 'I can do it. 'I can do it.'"

In many way, that right there is the story of the blues.

# Well, I feel... #

Heading for Chicago, Muddy caught the train out of the Delta in 1943.

# Well, babe, I just can't be satisfied

# And I just... #

The trains were segregated.

Black Americans rode in carriages at the back

and the journey itself was an education.

They had a coloured car and a regular car.

One thing I always remember in the coloured car,

they left the windows open, so you'd go through the tunnels, you'd

get all that stuff in your face.

In terms of learning about

the real history of this country,

you know, nothing is sharper than that teaching.

# Well, I know my little old baby

# She gonna jump and shout

# That old train be late, man, and... #

In Chicago, Muddy plugged his guitar into electricity.

The music made by Muddy

and other musicians from the south didn't just change Chicago -

it changed the world.

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd