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.

Devil At The Confluence reviewed by Bob Koester.

Devil At The Confluence reviewed by Bob Koester in the latest issue of Jazz Record Mart's newsletter, Rhythm And News.

GREAT BOOK COVERS HISTORY OF BLUES IN ST. LOUIS

Devil At The Confluence by Kevin Belford.

We all know the story of W.C. Handy picking up at least some of his most successful song from a guy on the levee. St. Louis artist Kevin Belford just authored and published the definitive book on blues in St. Louis prior to World War II.

After an enlightening forward by Paul Garon (author of the book on Peetie Wheatstraw), Kevin begins with a view of St. Louis before the turn of the old century, including the ragtime era, Frankie & Johnny, Staggerlee, etc. and carries his history forward to include Little Milton.

It’s loaded with original art by Belford and extensive research from the surviving artists and a gleaning of blues magazine articles and books. It shows that St. Louis had infinitely more importance in blues history than one W.C. Handy song.

But of course you want to know the contents. I could not think of any St. Louis blues artists of that era that are not covered in this book.

In fact, I learned that many singers I had listened to were, in fact St. Louisans. Some very talented but unrecorded people such as the late Bennie Smith and (still living) Silver Cloud were also from St. Louis.

I like Belford’s approach - he doesn’t try to build a wall between blues and jazz. There are lots of references to St. Louis jazzmen such as Charles Creath, Dewey Jackson, Singleton Palmer and both Miles Davis’s (one a 20’s pianist).

Amid Belford’s splendid art, are photos of record labels and memorabilia providing richness to the St. Louis’ blues story. Kevin’s art has graced several Delmark albums: Biddle Street Barrelhousin’ (#739), the entire 50th Aniversary box set and it’s jazz and blues components, Cowboy Roy Brown (#790), and Barrelhouse Buck McFarland (#788) the last two which he also wrote the liner notes. Get this book. $39.95

- Bob Koester

Visit the store on the web:

http://jazzmart.com/

Peetie Wheatstraw

There is nothing known about the early life of William Bunch, the man known as Peetie Wheatstraw on records from the 1930s, yet there are many biographies of Peetie Wheatstraw that state that Bunch left Arkansas and wandered the South developing his musical style. It is more likely that he came to St. Louis and decided to become a musician when he heard the many other talents in the city. This would seem more accurate since Wheatstraw was both a piano and guitar player, a very common ambidexterity in pre-war St. Louis musicians.

"Big Joe knew everybody. You know he lived in St. Louis for a long time. He knowed Blind Darby, he knowed JD Short, Jelly Jaw. At the time when I was there Yank Rachell was there working in a chicken house. And Yank would play on the weekends. And that's where I met Peetie Wheatstraw. We used to go into East St. Louis and he lived in East St. Louis in the red-light district."

  Honeyboy Edwards, recorded for the Library of Congress by Alan Lomax, 1942.

(David "Honey Boy" Edwards: Delta Bluesman, 1994, Available from Earwig Records, CD 4922.)

Wheatstraw was one of the biggest stars in the early blues. His popularity is hard to calculate, but he was one of few musicians in the pre-war period to record through the depression. He is the only bluesman to use the association with the devil as his professional persona, even though the deal-with-the-devil myth is most often associated with Tommy Johnson and Robert Johnson. The two unrelated Johnson's did not make any such claims. In both cases, someone else said that they had sold their soul to the devil, and in both cases the rumor began after their deaths – and many years after Peetie Wheatstraw had created the legend in St. Louis.

Paul Garon

"Paul Garon is an author, writer and editor noted for his meditations on surrealist works and also a noted scholar on blues as a musical and cultural movement," so says Wikipedia about the writer of the foreword in DEVIL AT THE CONFLUENCE. 

So how cool is that? Paul Garon, respected authority on the blues AND surrealism was considerate enough to read through my rough manuscript and offer much helpful advice and then write a very smart intro for the book. I am grateful. And I am embarrassed because I waited almost too long to get up the courage to ask him. Then he came down with the flu the week we were going to press but still made the deadline, so add "unselfish" and "gracious" to the list of exceptional qualities for Mr. Garon.

At the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America website, (http://www.abaa.org/books/abaa/news_fly?code=47) he describes his introduction to the blues and searching for books about the blues:

"There were two I could find: Samuel Charters' The Country Blues (Rinehart, 1959) and Paul Oliver's Blues Fell This Morning (Cassell/Horizon, 1960/1961). I was already accumulating books by Kerouac, Burroughs, Corso and other writers of the Beat era, and gathering books on blues seemed only natural."

He soon became a contributing writer to English blues magazines and in 1970 he helped start Living Blues, the United States' first blues magazine. In 1971 his first book, The Devil's Son-in-Law; The Story of Peetie Wheatstraw and his Songs, was published and, in 1975, his book, Blues and the Poetic Spirit was published. 

In Blues and the Poetic Spirit, Garon discusses the attitude of earlier generations which had only slight curiosity concerning works of primitive art, "It was the Cubist painters – above all, Picasso and Braque – who were the first in Western civilization to recognize the imaginative power of many of these works..." and so: "It is thus only appropriate that the surrealists should also be among the first to champion the singularly exalting imaginative qualities of another realm of primitivism – the blues."

Paul Garon is one of few authors who understands that music and art are both creative expressions of man and thus very similar in their developments. Many blues music scholars and writers regard the music as a separate process and product, independent and isolated from the cultural factors that affected and helped shape all of the arts like painting, sculpture, dance and literature. And that is the flaw of most blues histories. Garon's writings benefit from his contextual understanding of art and 20th century popular culture at the time when the blues came about. That perspective was the catalyst for my approach to St. Louis' blues history – the traditional story of American blues music is inaccurate without context.

 

Paul and Beth Garon own and operate Beasley Books (http://www.beasleybooks.com) in Chicago, a bookstore of rare first editions and collectible books on subjects such as African American studies, labor history, psychiatry / psychoanalysis and one of the largest stocks in the US of scarce and out of print books on jazz and blues. Some of the store's best books are on display at Chicago Rare Book Center, in Evanston, Illinois.

And other books by Garon include:

What's the Use of Walking if There's A Freight Train Going Your Way? Black Hoboes and Their songs, with Gene Tomko;

The Forecast Is Hot: Tracts & Other Collective Declarations of the Surrealist Movement in the United States 1966-1976, with Franklin Rosemont and Penelope Rosemont;

Rana Mozelle: Surrealist Texts and

The Charles H. Kerr Company Archives 1885-1985: A Century of Socialist and Labor Publishing.