The book Devil At The Confluence profiles the musicians of St Louis and the songs they wrote about events in St Louis. Blues music's peak of popularity was the late 1920s and 1930s, and in the late summer and early fall of 1927, St Louis and its musicians had plenty of reasons to sing the blues.

On August 1, 1927 the Mississippi river flood crest reached the confluence of the Mississippi at St. Louis and pushed the river to a new record crest. The flood and the hardships caused by it inspired Charley Patton, Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson to make music about the event. St Louis bluesman Lonnie Johnson recorded “South Bound Water” within days of the flood, and later he recorded “Backwater Blues” and “Broken Levee Blues.” Bessie Mae Smith made “High Water Blues” as her response to the flood that year.

On the last days of September of that year a tornado struck St. Louis killing nearly a hundred people in the few minutes that it tore through the city and Johnson again recorded a song about the disaster within a week afterwards. 

“St. Louis Cyclone Blues”

"I was sitting in my kitchen, looking way out across the sky, I was sitting in my kitchen, looking way out across the sky. I thought the world was ending. I started in to cry.

The wind was howling, the buildings beginning to fall, wind was howling, the buildings begin to fall. I seen that mean old twister coming, just like a cannonball.

The world was black as midnight, I never heard such a noise before, world was black as midnight, I never heard such a noise before. Sounded like a million lions, when they turn loose their roar.

Oh, people was screaming, and running every which away, people was screaming, and running every which away. Lord have mercy on our poor people! I fell down on my knees, I started in to pray.

The shack where we were living, she reeled and rocked but never fell, the shack where we were living, she reeled and rocked but never fell. Lord, Have mercy, how the cyclone spared us, nobody but the Lord can tell."

Four songs were released about the event including Reverend J. M. Gates' sermon titled “God’s Wrath In The St. Louis Cyclone,” Elzadie Robinson, who did a version of Lonnie’s “St. Louis Cyclone Blues” and St Louis' Luella Miller who described the plight of the survivors in her song, “Tornado Groan.”

“Lightning flashing, wind rambled round my door. Lightning flashing, wind rambled round my door.

Ever since that time, I haven’t seen my house no more.

It ruined my clothes, blowed my bed away. It ruined my clothes, blowed my bed away.

I ain’t got no place to lay my worried head.”

Thousands turned out for the Veiled Prophet parade in October of 1927 despite it being postponed because of the tragedy. One float was constructed to represent the city of St Louis rising from the ruins.

(Photo from usgennet.org)

Lonnie Johnson and the Confluence Blues continued.

Lonnie Johnson and Sylvester Weaver are the men who pioneered blues guitar in the earliest years and both were doing it beyond the Delta of the Mississippi river and the Gulf of Mexico. Their recordings demonstrated what the guitar could do and they were decades ahead of their time. Lonnie's music was the birth of the blues writer/singer/guitarist. His sensational guitar work rose out from a period when the piano blues and the great female voices were replacing ragtime and marching band music.

Lonnie developed his guitar and violin style and blues sensibility in St Louis, and eventually he got his opportunity to make records because of the St Louis audiences. It was in the Booker Washington theater in St Louis where Lonnie made his musical home and it was the audience of the city who discovered and appreciated his music and awarded him winner of the weekly blues contest for many months in a row - virtually forcing Okeh records to realize that there was a market for this new music. The St Louis environment and the St Louis audience appreciation and support are the important parts of this story. These elements are the crucial part of his meteoric rise to stardom. And the city was more important to him and his music than any other place he resided in. 

He made his first recordings in St Louis, he and his brother married and raised families in St Louis, the largest part of his career was in St Louis and all of the close-knit musicians of the community in St Louis were his friends and partners in recordings.

Both St Louis and Lonnie Johnson are generally under-recognized in the commonly known history of American blues music. Lonnie's story illustrates this best, but there are many more St Louis legends revealed for the first time in Devil At The Confluence.

This is a quick post repeating the three very important points in the last post.

1. The musicians in Devil At The Confluence are all St Louisans.  

Lonnie, his wife Mary, Edith Johnson, Moore, Wheatstraw, Williams, Davis, Sykes, Jordan, Gibson, Townsend and all of the rest were not migrating. They lived in St Louis.

Others like Kokomo Arnold, Yank Rachel or Leroy Carr were not migrating, but they visited often or lived in St Louis. And it could be argued that they were a part of the St Louis community of musicians, but to stay strictly to those that recorded in St Louis, they aren't profiled in Devil At The Confluence. After WWII there was a lot of travel and relocating and possibly that's where the idea of St Louis, located in the middle of the country on Route 66, was a place to visit or pass through. 

2. The Southern birth theory of blues music history is inaccurate. 

W C Handy and Rainey first heard the music they called blues in St Louis while ragtime was still big and Joplin had a new hit with The Entertainer. Easily before Son House was born and even before Mississippi John Hurt was born.

3. In Devil At The Confluence, the definition of what is "blues" is based on what the pre-war artist's themselves said and what they called blues. Not what record companies, authors, critics or fans decided. 

The next post will continue with the most asked questions and more on Lonnie Johnson.

The real St Louis' Blues.

It seems like there hasn't been a break since Devil At The Confluence hit the bookshelves. Nearly weekly events, exhibits, readings and discussions have been going on for many months now and it's been very exciting to see this wave of enthusiasm and interest in the subject of St Louis history. It's very interesting and encouraging because there is a real thirst and enthusiasm for the stories of the decades of lost St Louis musical history. I've kept notes of the questions that I get most often and I'm going to try to elaborate on them here at the blog.

The first point of the book and the biggest misperception about the city's blues music history is also the most often discussed. And that is the fact that the book contains biographies of only musicians who are St Louisans. 

They are not visitors to St Louis or migrating southerners. 

The idea that music was solely formed and developed in the Delta and carried by one man or maybe a few from the Delta to be played for and taught directly to others in northern areas is probably the biggest misconception of American music history. 

The artists depicted with their biographies in Devil At The Confluence lived in St Louis, had families in St Louis or nearby, first recorded from St Louis and there is no evidence of music before they recorded in St Louis. This seems like an odd point to repeat about a book subtitled "The Pre-war Blues Music Of St Louis, Missouri," but it is the most important because the mythology that developed about blues music and it's evolution is a very prevalent and commonly accepted theory. It's outdated and inaccurate and it has diminished St Louis' importance to American music history. It was the realization of St Louis' many many blues greats and musical contributions that revealed this error and compelled me to make the book.

St Louis Bluesman Lonnie Johnson is a perfect example to illustrate the misunderstanding of early blues history. His music was blues. 

"Blues" is the word that he used for his music. 

And the original audience and buyers of the music called it "blues." 

And his contemporaries, the original legendary innovators of the music, used the word "blues" to describe the music. 

And that is the definition of "blues" that I used in the book. You'll see why that's an important point when talking about St Louis and Lonnie Johnson.

The next blog post will be Lonnie Johnson's story and why he and his city were overlooked in blues history.

The research behind the book

  When I began researching the St Louis blues music I found that most of the city's pre-war musicians were not included in the many books and discussions of the music. I also found that the few St Louis artists who were mentioned in blues writings were often described as Mississippi or delta area musicians. This was often done to give the artist some "blues credibility" since the blues are often mistaken as a solely Southern type of music. But I was amazed when I found Henry Townsend described as a delta artist, (Last of the Great Mississippi Delta Bluesmen, Henry Townsend, and "Townsend is one of the few living pre-war acoustic delta blues artists." )

  Henry was born in Shelby, Mississippi and carried by his father as an infant to Cairo, Illinois. Living there with his family until his young teens, he ran away from home to St Louis, Missouri and remained in St Louis the rest of his life. It was in St Louis that Henry saw Lonnie Johnson performing the blues at the Booker Washington Theater. Johnson on stage in a nice suit and playing his smooth sophisticated blues on guitar was what made Henry want to be a musician. Henry learned guitar and picked up the music from other musicians in St Louis, eventually becoming one of the more popular accompanists in the city. But, other than spending a few months in Chicago in the 1930s, Henry lived in St Louis for  all of his life.

  Finding this kind of distortion in the biographies of St Louis musicians made me suspicious of the rest of the information available for the blues of St Louis. I decided to test all the available facts that I could find concerning the music and artists of the city against primary source information such as interviews, city records, census, etc..

  Nearly all of the information in Devil At The Confluence on the hundreds of names that I found who had recorded from St Louis in the pre-war blues period is new and unpublished information.

  Recently I received an email from a music library cataloger at a large University. He was entering the information from the Devil At The Confluence CD included with the book into the library catalog and found discrepancies with the information in the book on Mary Johnson and the official information for her in the Library of Congress records. He listed the birth and death dates and the maiden name of "Smith" and the brief biographical details that are on record for Mary Johnson (".. two 'authority records,' part of an electronic database maintained at the Library of Congress; catalogers use the database to store and retrieve standardized 'headings' for people, corporate bodies, and titles of works") and asked me about my sources that I used to assign my birth and death dates and maiden name since it differs from the database.

  I replied that, in researching the information on the blues musicians of St Louis, I used a variety of sources and compiled them as best that I could. The sources that are quoted in his email were considered by me along with information about those sources and new information that I discovered. 

  Generally, the "official" recorded details of Mary Johnson's life were gathered by Paul Oliver when he contacted Bob Koester and visited St Louis sometime prior to 1960. Oliver had, I believe, only one interview session with Mary and her mother Emma. Koester and the St Louis Jazz Club had a meeting where Mary performed in 1955 and she was interviewed by Charlie O'Brien and Koester and possibly other members of the Jazz Club - although no notes or recordings of those interviews could be found. I believe that the information gathered from O'Brien and club members was passed on to others including possibly Sheldon Harris and Guido Van Rijn. I assume this type of informal discussion is how the published Mary Johnson facts came to be recognized, because the details of Mary Johnson's life are not well footnoted and the authors of the published books had only Oliver, Koester or O'Brien's verbal accounts to go by. Later books and websites mostly only re-wrote the scant details that were published by Paul Oliver.

  After Koester moved to Chicago, O'Brien gathered information for Van Rijn and they corresponded by mail. Additionally, Sam Charters of Folkways Records recorded Mary and Henry Brown in St Louis in 1961 and Mr. Charters often interviewed his subjects.

  The liner notes to Agram Records' "Mary Johnson - I Can't Take It" (Guido Van Rijn, Amsterdam, c 1988) states that: "Mary told Paul Oliver in 1960 that her mother Emma, was born in Eden Station, MS." and "Emma married a man named Smith and they had a daughter, Mary in 1905 near Jackson MS." (sourced by Van Rijn to: Oliver, Paul; "Interview with Emma Williams", St Louis, Aug 25, 1960. Van Rijn claims access to Oliver's notes from 1960 containing information that Oliver had not used in his book, "Conversation With The Blues" although the interview notes are not published.)

  And the book, "Blues Who's Who," contains the following information: "...born Mary Smith, an only child." No death date given. (Harris, Sheldon; BLUES WHO'S WHO, p. 288, Arlington House, NY, 1979.)

  These details are published without verifiable sources and I know of no confirmation of this information. Also, I disregarded unsourced web posted information. 

  My new research includes the following:

  From the Gould's City Directories (Missouri History Museum Library & Research Center and St Louis County Library Headquarters branch, Special Collections Department):

In 1960, there is a listing for: JOHNSON, Mary, Mrs, (r) 1311A Biddle.

From 1961 to 1970 Mary and Emma lived on Carr Ave.

From 1971 to 1980 Mary lived alone on Carr, and the last listing for Mary was in 1983.

  I was not able to find a birth, death or marriage certificate for Mary Johnson because I was told that in order to acquire these documents that I needed to prove a relationship to the individual at the City of St Louis Recorder of Deeds, Vital Records department.

  In the Greenwood Cemetery records that I had discovered and deposited at Western Historical Manuscripts at UMSL, I found two burials but I could not verify that these were the Mary Johnson and Emma Williams in question:

MARY JOHNSON d. 7/20/1983

EMMA WILLIAMS d.11/17/69

  The web-based Social Security Death Index lists one St Louis Mary Johnson in 1983 and two in 1984:

MARY JOHNSON 29 Mar 1898 Jul 1983 63115 (Saint Louis, MO)

MARY JOHNSON 31 Oct 1901 Apr 1984 63133 (Saint Louis, MO)

MARY JOHNSON 21 Aug 1889 Dec 1984 63121 (Saint Louis, MO)

  And the only Emma Williams listed from 1968 - 1974 is:

EMMA WILLIAMS 18 May 1880 Dec 1969 63106 (Saint Louis, MO)

  These details seem to indicate that:

  Emma Williams and a man named Smith had a daughter named Mary. (Whether Emma had the surname Smith at any time is not clear. The instances of the surname Williams for Mary Johnson seem to be from writer's assumptions that Emma's last name must be Mary's maiden name.)

  The reported birthdates include; 1900, c 1900, and 1905. (The 1905 birth date is apparently sourced from Van Rijn via Oliver's unpublished notes.)

  The reported birth locations vary; "Yazoo City," "near Yazoo City," "Yazoo County," "Eden Station, MS.,"  and "near Jackson, MS."

  Emma and Mary were in St Louis.

  Recording artist Lonnie Johnson married Mary (likely Smith) and she became Mary Johnson (around 1925.)

  Koester and O'Brien found Mary Johnson, former wife of Lonnie Johnson, in St Louis in the mid 1950s.

  Mary Johnson and Emma Williams lived together in St Louis in the 1960s.

  Emma Williams is not listed in the Gould's City directories with Mary Johnson after 1970.

  Reported death dates for Mary Johnson are "alive in 1970" and "1970?".

  Mary Johnson is not listed in the Gould's City directories after 1983.

  The Gould's directories are certainly the listings for the Mary (ending in 1983) and Emma (ending in 1969) in question.

  The Social Security Index identifies a Mary Johnson in St Louis and in a probable Zip Code who died in 1983, and an Emma Williams who died in 1969.

  And the Greenwood Cemetery records both contain a Mary Johnson who died in 1983 and an Emma Williams who died in 1969.

  I strongly feel that these records are for Mary Johnson and her mother, but I have no concrete verification (Health Department birth or death documents,) so my conclusion was that an approximate and likely date of birth would be 1900 (1898 - 1905, accounting for the various reports even though I strongly believe that her birth was 1898) and a death date of 1983. 

  This is the type of research that went into the making of Devil At The Confluence. I hope to donate my research files to a number of universities so that this information can be available for researchers and writers. I believe that when the facts for the rest of the hundreds of St Louis Pre-war blues musicians are established and recorded in the Library of Congress database, that it will be obvious that the city of St. Louis was a dominant force in the creation of American popular music and culture. This new information of such a large number of Pre-war artists from St Louis, likely the most of any one area of the United States, compels us to rethink the traditional theory of the story of American music.

Lonnie Johnson

Lonnie Johnson can be seen as the epitome of the St. Louis blues. 

With so much creativity and skills so far advanced of his time, the brilliance of Lonnie Johnson stands alone and often uncategorized in typical blues history writings. The blues purist authors avoid Johnson's amazing guitar dexterity that makes nearly all other pre-war guitar work seem primitive, and the jazz music history writers cold-shoulder him because he was not working from arrangement sheets.

The prolific careers of so many musicians in the St. Louis area in the 1920s and 30s and the innovative art they created defined the blues as more than only rough rural guitar from the southern United States. And like Lonnie Johnson, they made their art and advanced the field of music by inspiring other blues artists to keep up with the avant-garde from the city of the confluence. They made their own category of blues from what came before it and defined what was to come after it, but the St Louis blues have not yet been recognized as its own category, primarily because of the progressive concepts and the variety of the music from the many artists from the city.