Review
I Ain’t a Gamblin’ Woman, I Got Such-a Rowdy Ways. Raunchy Women’s Blues 1923 – 1937. Liner Notes Essay by Max Haymes (1)
JSP Records have released a 4 CD set of early popular blues songs. Sub-titled Raunchy Women’s Blues 1923 to 1937, the collection was chosen by Max Haymes, who also wrote the liner notes. A glance at the full ‘essay’ from which the liner notes were taken leaves the reader hoping that the quality of the remastering is significantly better than that of the written commentary (2).
The magazine Blues and Rhythm published a review of Haymes’ 2006 book Railroadin’ Some: Railroads in the Early Blues (3). Reviewer Howard Rye praised many aspects of the book, but made the following critical points about the writing and preparation of the text:
• The publishers ‘evidently don’t believe in sub-editing’;
• the poor sentence structure ‘erects an instant barrier before the reader’;
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• ‘contentious and irrelevant amplification’, at times amounting to ‘breathtaking … flights of fancy’, wastes space and undermines the credibility of the author;
• the structure is rambling, with too many digressions;
• there is a lack of discrimination between primary historical sources and secondary ones, with some sources better described as ‘tertiary’; and
• lyrics are sometimes used unconvincingly as sources of biographical conjecture.
These comments apply equally well to the essay about ‘raunchy black women’ that Haymes has published online in connection with his new collection of songs.
In addition, there is a tendency for the writing to swing from style to style. There are what appear to be attempts to mimic African-American expression, such as ‘More smokin’ sensual/sexual symbolism..’, and ‘…{Lil Johnson} really digs Sam the Hot Dog Man‘ scattered throughout.
All this is a shame, since Haymes plainly has both an encyclopaedic knowledge of blues lyrics and measureless dedication to the topic.
Haymes claims that his inspiration for this collection of ‘highly sexual/sensual’ material was a BBC radio show broadcast in February 2017. The programme was about the phenomenon known as ‘colourism’, or ‘shadeism’, especially as it operates within black communities and affects women. Its title was Michele Obama: “Black Like Me”?
Blues enthusiasts may recall a Parchman Farm song with the line ‘I don’t want no jet black woman.’ This sentiment might be considered an example of colourism.
Haymes fails to provide the correct title of the BBC radio programme as a reference. He even omits the name of Valley Fontaine, the black British journalist who made it. Given that one of Fontaine’s themes was precisely the difficulty that darker-skinned women have in ‘finding value and acceptance’, this example of the poor referencing noted by Rye seems especially regrettable.
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Other than this comment, colourism gets barely a mention in the piece. There is no explanation of why the topic inspired Haymes to compile a CD of ‘raunchy’ songs.
There is, however, a mention of skin shade in the section on Bessie Tucker: ‘Although light-skinned to the point of appearing nearly white, Bessie’s blues are as raunchy as the other darker singers on this essential JSP set (SIC).’ As it stands, this remark is, as they say, ‘wrong on so many levels’.
Colourism was, of course, a feature of the early commercial blues world which produced the singers represented in this selection. Several writers, including Harrison (13), comment that some New York venues preferred lighter-skinned African American performers. ‘High yaller’ was the desired standard (Harrison, p 32). Artistes often used make up and skin treatments in order to lighten the appearance of their skin. Some blues artistes even appeared in promotional material for these products.
Haymes’ essay has many examples of the disorganisation and digression noted by Rye in his review of the book. Haymes even wishes after the fact that he had given the CD a different sub-title, Raunchy and Dangerous Black Women’s Blues, as many of the selections are, he says, ‘fraught with danger of the terminal kind.’
Predictably, we soon encounter the topic of railway lines and trains, one of Haymes’ favourites, via a discussion of a song called The L and N Blues which is not even included in the set. This song has nothing to do with either the actual sub-title or the one Haymes later wishes he had chosen instead! There was, perhaps, a missed opportunity here to refer to the social context in which the songs was sung: Harrison suggests that the lyrics of this one illustrate the need to leave the Pullman coach after crossing the Mason Dixon line into the segregated south.
On the other hand, some of the songs that are featured in this set are neither fraught with danger nor examples of the erotica promised in the marketing material.
The singer, not the song?
Haymes’ usual practice is to refer to male bluesmen by their surname; he is on patronising first-name terms with ‘Clara’ and ‘Lil’, as if the choice of name reflected some imagined intimacy between the writer and the women he so desires and fears.
The focus in the piece is largely on the women themselves. As Haymes’ sub-title suggests, it is mainly the women, as opposed to the songs, who are represented as raunchy and dangerous, and song lyrics are used as if they provided a biographical window through which the real person could be glimpsed. This approach is weak even in respect of country blues; for the output of what was essentially part of the ‘Tin-Pan Alley’ production line it is even less convincing. If, for example, one is going to assert, as Haymes does, that Clara Smith is addressing her ‘husband’ through the words of a song, one has to deal with the fact that the song (Ease It) was apparently not written by Smith, but by Lem Fowler, (aka Relphow James) (5).
The potential absurdity of this approach to biography is illustrated by the fact that one of the songs in the selection, Waiting for the Evening Mail, was recorded by a number of other artists at the time, including the Jewish ‘blackface’ singer Al Johnson.
Almost all of the Clara Smith songs used by Haymes in support of character and biographical assertions about the singer were written by men whose contribution gets no acknowledgment in his essay and whose gender is ignored in what purports to be a discussion of women’s lives and attitudes.
Haymes is incorrect when he asserts that Smith ‘literally puts the boot in’ during one of her songs, I’m Gonna Tear Your Playhouse Down, by Billy Gray and Charles Handy. There is a difference between a threat of violence and the actual use of it. Moreover, his comment on this piece misses the humour, which is evident from the accompaniment. Humour, according to Harrison (13), was one of the main features of Smith’s live performances, but you would hardly know this from reading Haymes’ account, which emphasises how ‘mean’ she was.
The references for the Clara Smith section should have been proof-read before publishing, but when the reader has waded through the mess, it turns out that in terms of biography there is one reference. This is to a book about Josephine Baker co-written by a journalist and a person who claimed to be an unofficially adopted ‘son’ of Baker, a text that would at best fall into Rye’s category of ‘tertiary’ references when used as a source about Smith.
If this is the sort of material Haymes is relying on for his ‘WIP’ biography of Smith, then this reader for one won’t be buying it, not even if somebody has copy-edited it before publication.
The section on Texan blues, including singer Sippie Wallace and the Thomas family, Thomas being Wallace’s maiden name, is simply chaotic.
A Gendered Approach
Gender is central to this essay in another way: the piece provides an example of what Davis (6) has called a ‘gendered’ reading of the blues.
For example, the alleged ‘danger’ presented by the female persona in these songs is, overall, directed at men who have treated them badly. One might consider that treating women badly was something wrong in itself, whereas in this piece it seems to be regarded from a particular male perspective as something that is merely dangerous if one tries it on with the wrong woman.
The same male perspective presumably explains the inclusion of Lucille Bogan’s They Ain’t Walkin’ No More on a CD marketed as offering raunchy delights to the listener. It takes a specific mind-set to respond with lascivious lip-smacking to this particular song.
Perhaps a more rounded perspective on female sexuality might have been achieved if more lyrics expressing disappointment – like those quoted by Harrison (op cit) from Virginia Liston’s composition Rolls Royce Papa – had been included?
Your carburettor’s rusty … your gas tank’s empty …. steering wheel wobbly
Stereotyping?
More generally, it could be argued that when producing notes on a collection like this, more care should be taken to avoid evoking racist stereotypes of African-American women as being somehow ‘hypersexualised’. One might not agree with everything that Davis says, but her discussion of the historical context is invaluable here, and is recommended to anybody interested in early women’s blues. One of the points she makes is that under slavery, African-American women lacked sexual freedom and choice, and that the ability to choose sexual partners freely was, together with freedom of movement reflected in many songs about travelling, one of the few actual benefits of emancipation. For a first hand account of this lack of sexual freedom, we can turn to Harriet A Jacob’s 1861 account Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. This lack of freedom, for Davis, is one of the main reasons that so many African American women later sang songs celebrating their sexuality.
What Davis says is no doubt true, but, as Karl Hagstrom Miller (14) suggests, we should be careful not to mistake the part for the whole when constructing narratives explaining American music.
One way to avoid stereotyping and to contextualise the ‘raunchy’ songs that African-American women recorded in the early 20th century might be to compare African-American vaudeville with contemporary white British Music Hall and American vaudeville performances and songs, thus achieving what Karl Hagstrom Miller might call a ‘desegregated’, and perhaps, more realistic, view of things, without disrespecting the differing perspectives that white and African American performers and audiences will have brought to the songs and their live performances, and without denying that African-American women of the 1920s faced both racism and sexism as well as poverty and hardship in their daily lives.
Suggestive lyrics and burlesque were not limited to African-American singers and performers. The English music hall performer Marie Lloyd was famous for using double entendre in her act. No doubt both white and African American women in the entertainment industry of the Roaring Twenties were subject to the sorts of pressures described by Edith Wilson in her interviews with Harrison to go further down the route of titillating customers than they were comfortable with. ‘ Sex’, after all, ‘sells’ – a thought that was no doubt not far from the minds of those who produced this selection.
It isn’t that Haymes is ignorant of the literature bemoaning the adverse effects of stereotypical views of African-American women. We know that he has read, for example, Michele Russell’s piece Slave Codes and Liner Notes (16), which lists a number of these stereotypes, because he refers to it in a piece on Lucille Bogan on the same web site as the RaunchyWomen liner notes essay. He references Russell’s piece incorrectly and grudgingly – ‘I include the following title although less than ten pages actually concerns blues,’ he says. The book Haymes treats so discourteously is said to have been the first comprehensive collection of black feminist scholarship, and to have been a highly influential work.
The stereotypes of African-American women listed by Russell include ‘Saffire’, a stereotype perhaps hinted at in Haymes’ emphasis on how ‘dangerous’ the blues singers of the 1920s were. Russell discusses a number of songs, including a version of Bessie Jackson/Lucille Bogan’s Tricks Ain’t Walkin’ No More. Rather than engaging with the points Russell makes in the piece, Haymes provides a rough, and, arguably, misleading, summary of Russell’s discussion of this song, quotes a different version of the lyrics, and then calls Russell ‘mistaken’.
Flights of biographical fancy?
Haymes’ dubious biographical approach leads to an outrageous (and very badly-written) assertion that Victoria Spivey ‘confesses to murder’:
The two remaining artists here are represented by Victoria Spivey with her superb Bloodhound Blues [Vi 38570] in which she confesses to murder and backed by a tremendous band headed by Luis Russell which featured Henry Allen on trumpet and Pops Foster slapping his double bass (SIC).
Presumably this song and its interpretation are intended to fit in with Haymes’ thesis that these women are dangerous. However, Haymes misrepresents both Spivey herself and the persona in the song. Bloodhound Blues is a sensitive piece about the guilty and fearful state of mind of a woman who has been on the receiving end of domestic violence, and who has poisoned her tormentor. A better analysis of this song, and an account of Spivey’s career, which spanned over half a century, may be found in Daphne Duval Harrison’s study Black Pearls. Blues Queens of the 1920s (13). Returning to Spivey’s piece after reading Jacob’s autobiographical work, one is reminded that bloodhounds were used to track escaped slaves, often with fatal consequences for the slave. Whether Spivey intended this song to provide an echo of the horrors of the past, we shall never know. What is certain is that Spivey’s life and work deserve better than Haymes’ rough-hewn notes on this song.
Another astonishing flight of fancy appears in the section on Lil Johnson. Haymes conjectures that Johnson could have been in prison, possibly on a ‘homicide rap’. Since, as Haymes himself points out, more or less nothing is known about Johnson, he is unable to provide sensible evidence in support of his idea. Haymes’ problem here may be that he asking the wrong question. The question, I suggest, isn’t why there was a gap in Johnson’s recording career: most of the blues queens’ careers ended as the Great Depression took hold. It would be better to ask would be how Johnson managed to find her way back into the industry, and at least part of the answer might be found by looking closely at the material she was singing, and her style of delivery, and how these related to the changing musical fashions of the time.
Blues at the court of Henry VIII?
It has been demonstrated to most people’s satisfaction that aspects of 20th century African-American music can be traced back to British antecedents (7). Haymes’ attempt to add to the genealogical tree is confusing and confused, and it involves at least one of the breathtaking leaps mentioned by Rye.
The leap in question is from poetry written by a high-ranking English courtier in the early 1500s to 20th century blues. Haymes states that the ‘lyrics’ of what he calls ‘a poem or “ballade/folk poetry”’, which begins ‘At most mischief’ and was written by Thomas Wyatt in Tudor times, seem to ‘foreshadow a blues in the making.’ (8)
Haymes’ argument seems to be built on a contentious belief that Wyatt intended this piece to be a song, as implied by Haymes’ use of the word ‘lyrics’. There is, however, no evidence that Wyatt wrote the piece as a song and not as a poem using conventional tropes (such as the mention of a ‘lute’) on a theme that was fashionable at the time (9).
(NB If a reader is interested in comparing blues with 16th/17th century music, Muir [2010] has a section on the fashion for lute-accompanied songs expressing the fashionable melancholia of the times that came in after Wyatt’s lifetime.)
Haymes found the poem At most mischief in a book called Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (10). The word ‘lyrics’ in the title means, put simply, a short poem, as opposed to longer ones like The Canterbury Tales. Perhaps Haymes misunderstood the title of the book, and believed it to be a collection of ‘song lyrics’? This seems to be the best explanation for Haymes’ muddled comments.
Most of what Haymes says about this poem is simply incorrect. This is strange, since he plainly has access to a critical anthology in which an expert explains medieval English lyrics. Wyatt’s poem is neither a ‘ballad’ in any sense of the word nor a ‘ballade’, a distinct poetic form (11). It is an example of a ‘plaint’ or ‘complaint’, a poem about unrequited love of a type that was fashionable in Wyatt’s time.
Moreover, Haymes’ claim that Sir Thomas Wyatt, a high-ranking member of the court of Henry VIII who is sometimes credited with introducing the sonnet form to England, produced ‘folk’ anything is baffling on almost any definition of ‘folk’.
Haymes attempts to link this poem, which features the verb ‘mone’, with what he perceives to be a ‘high degree of sensuality’ in the humming (or, in what Haymes terms ‘black-speak’, moaning) of Clara Smith. His argument is weakened by the fact that the use of the verb ‘moan’ to mean ‘make an … inarticulate noise indicative of mental or physical suffering (or in later use) also pleasure’ post-dates Wyatt by many years (12). Wyatt was definitely not writing about humming.
Part of Haymes’ problem here is that though he does attempt to use dictionaries to trace the origins of words, he doesn’t use a decent dictionary, and he doesn’t understand how word classes function within etymological explanations. In another piece on the same web-site, this lack of understanding leads him to claim absurdly that the word ‘nigh’, which is centuries old, is 19th century in origin.
Another weak link in Haymes’ chain of argument about the term ‘moan’ is the anguished howls of slaves packed together in the holds of the slave-traders’ ships. (Once again, the referencing is flawed, with quotations from two sources run together as if they were one; only the book in which Haymes found both quotations is referenced, not the primary sources in question.)
This alleged connection between howling noises made by suffering captives and the sensuality of Smith’s humming, in the context of a collection of ‘raunchy’ material, is dark stuff indeed. The reader is left feeling deeply grateful that Haymes did not explore this idea in depth.
Incidentally, it is sometimes suggested that Smith might sound out of tune, though her singing has been defended on the basis that she was using quarter notes. If you listen carefully to Awful Moanin’ Blues, you will find one or two examples.
Final thoughts
Purchasers of this annotated CD set will not find any real analysis of these songs as music or of the singers as musicians. The sentence on Bloodhound Blues quoted above demonstrates the quality of the musical discussion.
Nor will the reader find any historical discussion of how the products of this sector of the U.S. popular music industry changed during the dates under discussion, a period during which the Great Depression affected this industry as much as any other and helped to end the careers of many female blues singers. Even the reason for the selected dates (1923-1937) is left unexplained.
Nor will they find a focus on songs that were actually written by women, as opposed to songs that were written by men for women to sing.
In terms of social history, given that at least one song written from the perspective of a prostitute appears on the set, there is a missed opportunity to draw on the work of Paul Oliver, who wrote about the dangers involved in this line of work.
At one point Haymes gives an explanation of the words to a Clara Smith song which is dubious. In Awful Moanin’ Blues, she sings ‘Everything’s in soak’, which Haymes interprets as meaning her only change of clothes is soaking in the washing tub. A more sensible interpretation, it is suggested, would be that the character has pawned everything of value, a definition supported by a definition of ‘soak’ given in online extracts from the American Heritage Dictionary, and by the reference to the lack of options for loans in the next lines of the song.
While accepting that this selection does not attempt to provide a snapshot of the themes of women’s blues, it is perhaps considering how representative these songs are of the themes of early recorded women’s blues? The listener must judge for themselves. Davis, drawing on a study of blues queens by Harrison (13), lists the following topics as appearing in their songs: advice to other women; alcohol; betrayal or abandonment; broken or failed love affairs; death; departure; dilemma of staying with man or returning to family; disease and afflictions, erotica; hell; homosexuality; infidelity; injustice; jail and serving time; loss of lover; love; men; mistreatment; murder; other woman; poverty; promiscuity; sadness; sex; suicide, supernatural; trains; traveling; unfaithfulness, vengeance; weariness; depression, disillusionment and weight loss. Had Haymes referred to the seminal studies by Davis and Harrison, he might have come to a more realistic and nuanced view of the songs he has collected together for this set.
Judging by the quality of this essay, buyers might wish to think carefully before purchasing this CD set in the hope of obtaining a well-written, well-organised, and carefully argued historical commentary on the lyrics, the musical genres represented, or the performers. They are likely to be disappointed. And so, arguably, is anybody seduced into a purchase by the hyperbolic (and oddly-worded) warning to the ‘young and sensitive’ on the CD cover.
On the basis of experience with other blues re-issue sets, it seems that both the quality of the information and the quality of the written expression in liner notes vary wildly. Yet for many of us, especially as so many of these songs are available through platforms like Spotify and iTunes, these notes are part of what we are paying for. Perhaps it is time for the industry to apply some quality control in this area?
References
1 JSP Records Catalogue Number: 0077203
2 http://www.earlyblues.com/essay%20-%20I%20aint%20a%20gamblin%20woman.htm
3 Issue No 215. And see http://www.bluesandrhythm.co.uk /
4 Available at the time of writing at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p04smw2z
Gambling Woman Blues Book
5 http://www.chicagosouthsidepiano.com/lem-fowler/ and https://www.discogs.com/artist/412671-Clara-Smith
6 Davis, A Y (1999) Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. New York. Vintage Books/RandomHouse
7 See, for example Peter C Muir (2010) Long Lost Blues; Popular Blues in America 1850-1920. Chicago, University of Illinois Press, especially Ch 6. Muir’s discussion draws on work by the English writer Paul Oliver, one of Haymes’ heroes.
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8 The poem is no 17 here: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/Archive/Wyatt5.htm Wyatt appears to have given the piece no title, as was common at the time.
9 See for example, Bullett, G. (Ed.) (1947) Silver Poets of the Sixteenth Century. London, Dent, especially the introduction.
10 Davies, R. T. (1964) Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology. London/Faber, Northwestern University Press. Cited by Haymes in his liner notes essay (Op Cit)
11 See Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms. (2015, Kindle Edition) Chris Baldick, Oxford, OUP, and Bullett, G (1947).
12 See the Oxford English Dictionary (available online via public libraries’ digital resources) entry for the intransitive verb ‘moan’.
13 Harrison, Daphne Duval (1988) Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s. Rutgers University Press. Cited by Davis (Op Cit).
14 Miller, Karl Miller (2010) Segregating Sound. Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow. Durham and London, Duke University Press.
15 Muir, Peter C (2010) Long Lost Blues. Popular Blues in America, 1850-1920. Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press.
16 Russell M (1977) Slave Codes and Liner Notes. The Radical Teacher
No. 4 (March, 1977), pp. 1-6