Saturday, September 8, 2007
When I started to write about black music in North Louisiana, I decided to begin with a chapter on Huddie Ledbetter. He is certainly the best known folk musician from the region and is thus a logical departure point. I assumed that there was a great deal of easily accessible information which could be compressed into a few pages so that I could move on to the more obscure players, Jesse "Babyface" Thomas, Willard "Ramblin'" Thomas, and Oscar Woods, who would comprise the meat of my thesis.
Huddie Ledbetter's name appears in dictionaries: look in the Random House Dictionary of the English Language (1971) and you will find him; in the American Heritage Dictionary (1973) there is even a photograph
accompanying the entry. Folk song anthologies tend to mention his name — he is usually called Leadbelly — with reverence: he is "the great negro folk singer" or "the great bluesman," or he is simply mentioned in the same breath as Woody Guthrie or Josh White.
I became acquainted with his music when I was an undergraduate at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver during the early 1960's. I spent many evenings listening to his songs, drinking beer, and discussing philosophy with my friends. I didn't know exactly where he came from, but I knew that it was the South, that he had spent some time in prison camps, and that he was a potent symbol of the strength and perseverance of an oppressed people. He was also a lot of fun.
When I moved to North Louisiana in 1980, I was intrigued to discover that this was Huddie Ledbetter's birthplace. Most people in the area didn't know or care but a few were aware and even proud of the fact. The Red River Revel Arts Festival, an annual event in Shreveport, produced a tribute to the man in 1984 that featured Pete Seeger, Brownie McGee, Sonny Terry and several other singers or folklorists who were associated with Ledbetter during his lifetime. At about the same time, the Shreveport city fathers changed the name of one of the oldest and poorest districts of town, reputedly an old stamping ground of Huddie's, from St. Paul's Bottoms to Ledbetter Heights. The topography remained the same in spite of the aspiration of the new name.
Most people who heard that I was writing about Ledbetter assumed, as I had, that his life was already well documented. It is not unusual, for instance, to run across such remarks as, "A number of books have been written about Leadbelly over the years" (Prime 13F). The truth is that only one book, "Negro Folk Songs As Sung by Lead Belly", has been written about him; that book, by John A. Lomax, was published in 1936. One quarter of its 242 pages is devoted to biography and the rest contains transcriptions of songs. About one half of the biographical material comes from Ledbetter himself and concerns his life until his mid-forties; the other half deals with the six-and-a-half months that Lomax and Ledbetter spent together in 1934 and 1935.
After he parted company with John Lomax, Ledbetter lived for fifteen more years, years in which he gained his place in the dictionaries, folk song anthologies, and hearts and minds of college undergraduates. Various writers took an interest in Ledbetter and thus several excellent articles have appeared over the years since his death in 1949. There have been a novel and a Hollywood movie based on his life, but there is no biography. Most of the writers, too, have had a tendency to accept the information contained in the Lomax book uncritically, so there has been no re-examination of Ledbetter's early life. Strangely, there are certain basics upon which there is no agreement, even among the people who knew the man: these include the date and place of his birth, the pronounciation of his name, and even his height. Little wonder he is often thought of as a legendary figure.
According to John Lomax, Huddie Ledbetter said he was born in 1885 (J. Lomax, Negroï xi). Ross Russell, who interviewed Huddie in Los Angeles, puts the date at 20 January 1889, "not 1885 or 1886, as has appeared elsewhere" (Russell 12). Frederic Ramsey, Jr., who recorded îLeadbelly's Last Sessionsï in New York, seems totally confused: in a magazine obituary, Ramsey mentions Huddie's death "at sixty years," in 1949, yet states four paragraphs later that he was born circa 1882 ("Legacy" 60). One jazz historian quotes two different birth dates, 1885 and 1888, on the same page (Tirro 127).
The tombstone in Shiloh Baptist Church's graveyard places Huddie's birthdate in 1889, but two census reports - 1900 and 1910 - both claim 1888 as the year of his birth. He was listed as twelve years old in 1900 and twenty-two in 1910. The most accurate date would have been provided by the 1890 census, which has been lost to posterity, but Huddie had clearly settled on the 1889 date by the time he spoke to Ross Russell.
The place of his birth, which his cousins clearly put between Mooringsport and Longwood in Caddo Parish, Louisiana, is generally accepted. As late as 1974, a group of Harrison County, Texas, residents planned to have Ledbetter's remains disinterred and moved to Karnack, where they would then erect an historical marker (Wilson 5). Texans have a good claim: the Ledbetters moved to Harrison County when Huddie was a boy. However, if he belongs to any region, that region is the Caddo Lake country, which has no regard for state borders. His Louisiana relatives, the Bob Ledbetters, lived only two or three miles away from the Wes Ledbetters who moved over the Texas line and bought land from Doc Wascom. The Texans apparently spurred the Louisianians into action - an historical marker was erected near Oil City, Louisiana, in the late 1970's.
There has been a certain amount of controversy over the pronounciation of the name Huddie. Blanche Love pointed out that her cousin's name was pronounced "Hew-die," not "Huddie" as some people say (Windham 97). At the Red River Revel tribute I heard Pete Seeger very carefully pronounce the name Hew-die. On the other hand, I have heard Ledbetter himself pronounce it both ways in different recordings. The census records him as "Hudy," which is the way the census-taker heard the name, and everyone who knew him in Louisiana uses the long "U."
There are also two different ways of writing his nickname, Lead Belly and Leadbelly. John Lomax, the man who probably invented the nickname, used two words but many people, myself included, have since contracted it to a single word. I will use Lead Belly only in direct quotations. As far as I can tell, the singer always referred to himself as "Huddie Ledbetter," and his cousin Blanche Love stated quite adamantly that his name was not Leadbelly, "it was Ledbetter" (Windham 97).
The question of Ledbetter's height is an interesting one: the legendary character is a "big powerful Negro" (Price 20), "one mean mountain of a man" ("Cinema" 76). The fictional accounts, both the novel and the movie, emphasize great size, and the most common perception is that Ledbetter was tall and husky. However, Ross Russell said that he "was not exceptionally big — in the 6-foot, 180-pound category" (Russell 12). Hector Lee, who met the singer in Salt Lake City in 1946, wrote that he was surprised to find Huddie was shorter than average (Lee, "Lead Belly" 135), and Pete Seeger, a fellow folksinger, wrote, "He was not tall — perhaps five feet seven or eight" (Asch & Lomax 7). His neighbor, Preston Brown, agrees with Pete Seeger. "He wasn't any taller than me," said Preston, which would place him at about five foot, seven inches. All agreed, however, that he radiated power and athletic grace. Journalist Ralph J. Gleason, who met Ledbetter several times in New York, put it this way: "He was not a tall man at all, but he was broad and chunky and gave an impression of terrific strength."
Posted by Monty Brown at 7:10 PM
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September 26, 2007
Chapter 1: King Cotton
Chapter 1: King Cotton: Pre-1889
The cotton business received a tremendous lift from the invention of the cotton gin, a simple, yet efficient machine which separated the seeds from the fluffy white part. The gin was invented in 1793 by an American named Eli Whitney. The invention led to the clearing of millions of acres of forest lands, lands which were turned over to the growing of cotton. The Cotton Kingdom was thus established in the states bordering on the Gulf Coast, and the institution of slavery was revived during the first half of the Nineteenth century. As late as 1808, when slave importation into the United States was outlawed, popular wisdom said there was no need for any more slaves. It is estimated that 250,000 slaves were imported between 1808 and 1860, and had the practice not been illegal, there may have been many more. Slave labor made the Cotton Kingdom possible.
Caddo Parish, Louisiana, became a leader in cotton production in the years leading up to the Civil War. The population of the parish in the latter part of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly black, particularly in rural areas like Mooringsport on the southern shore of Caddo Lake. The reason for this is simple: many of the white settlers who arrived from the Southeastern states prior to the Civil War came with their slaves. Thus a family made up of four or five white members might typically be accompanied by four or five times that many black people. Not all the white settlers were slave owners, of course, but there were enough to account for the population ratio. "The early settlers were nearly all rich men with many slaves and some fine cattle." (O'Pry 141). “A man named Erwin, founder of Erwin's Bluff in Shreveport (circa 1836), brought 100 negroes with him and a quantity of fine Kentucky stock.” (O'Pry 144) The 1870 census, the first to enumerate blacks as people rather than slaves, shows 15,799 blacks and 5,913 whites in Caddo. The 1880 census shows 19,283 blacks out of a total parish population of 26,303. That's a ratio of roughly three blacks to each white in the years following emancipation. The ratio actually widened during the 1860's, possibly reflecting the westward exodus of slave owners, and their possessions, to safer environs. [The decade of the Civil War.] It was 1920 before the census showed a majority of white residents in Caddo parish, and in the late Twentieth century, the pendulum is swinging back the other way.
There were two ways of getting to northwest Louisiana from the Atlantic states. Some families traveled overland in wagons, while their slaves were linked together in "coffles," like chain gangs, and made to walk the thousand miles to their new homes. Other families went by ship to New Orleans; there they transferred to riverboats which, after the clearing of the Great Raft, went all the way to Shreveport and beyond, to the town of Jefferson, Texas, on Caddo Lake.
The city of Shreveport, Louisiana, was founded on the Red River; it lies about twenty miles east of the Texas border, and thirty-five miles south of Arkansas. Shreveport calls itself the hub of a region known as the Ark-La-Tex. To the north and west of Shreveport lies Caddo Lake, half of which is in Texas, and half in Louisiana. The Texas half features cypress trees, cypress knees, and Spanish moss, peculiarities more often associated with Louisiana. The northeast part of Louisiana, with its non-Catholic and non-French population, has always felt an affinity for East Texas.
Shreveport is named for Captain Henry Miller Shreve of the U.S. Army engineers. He arrived in 1833 to survey the Red River and see what could be done about the massive logjam which blocked navigation for two hundred miles upstream. He and his men set about clearing the jam, known as the Great Raft, and by the middle 1830's the Red was navigable to the Mississippi. Settlers started to pour in. The Caddo Indians, guardians of the land since time immemorial, were overwhelmed by the flood of immigrants. They "sold out" in 1835 and moved to the temporary safety of Oklahoma.
Among the antebellum white settlers in the region were two Jeter brothers from Virginia, William and James. They came as part of that historical western migration which opened up millions of acres of land to the cultivation of cotton in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas; they came to help establish the Cotton Kingdom. The Jeters were from an affluent family; they brought money and possessions, including some slaves, and bought land in northwestern Louisiana. Their slaves cleared the land, planted cotton, built a large house for the owners and small houses for themselves.
William Nathaniel Jeter, born in 1824, first purchased property in Caddo Parish in 1849. This was a tract of three hundred and twenty acres of wooded land northeast of Caddo Lake; the seller was Richard T. Noel. During the next three years, William got himself situated and then returned to Virginia in 1852 to marry Lucinda Ford. Later that year, William came back to Louisiana with his new bride and his younger brother, James, who had just turned twenty-one. For the sum of $1,500, James bought four hundred and eighty acres from one Randolph Martin. This land was to the west of the village of Blanchard, which is halfway between Shreveport and Mooringsport. "James Addison Jeter was a surveyor and many maps of this area are based on Jeter's Country Plat." (A. Moore 32)
In May, 1860, William bought 160 acres to the south of Caddo Lake. This appears to be the beginning of what was to become the Jeter Plantation, or the Jeter Place. A near neighbor of the Jeters, at the time, was seventy-five year old John Lowe, also a native Virginian. Lowe possessed fifty slaves and eleven slave dwellings; his real estate was valued at $50,000. By this time, a mere twenty-five years since the clearing of the Red River, Caddo parish was shipping record quantities of cotton to the international market in New Orleans.
When the Civil War began, both Jeter brothers went off to defend the Confederacy. James was Captain of an outfit known as the Caddo Lake Boys, who marched a hundred miles east to Monroe, Louisiana, in 1861. Both brothers were captured and then later sent back home in an exchange of prisoners. (A. Moore 32)
Shreveport had not been ravaged by the Civil War and for that reason, it became the capital of wartime Louisiana. By early 1865, the town was home to a substantial Confederate force and surrounded by forts, barricades, trenchs and earthworks, in readiness for a state of seige. The most famous remaining Civil War landmark is known as Fort Humbug, where, for lack of the real thing, wooden cannons were placed in hope of fooling the Yankees. The Rebel commander at Shreveport was General E. Kirby Smith. He described it as "a miserable place with a miserable population - swarming with refugees, slave coffles, state legislators, and surplus colonels." (Stuck 4)
The southern part of the state, particularly strategic New Orleans with its command of the Mississippi River mouth, was secured by Union forces early in the war. Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Louisiana's eastern border, eventually toppled to General Grant's forces after being under seige for more than a year. Alexandria, in the center of the state, had been torched during a battle with Union forces. The nearest actual battleground to Shreveport was twenty-five miles away. In the spring of 1864, Union forces under the command of General Nathaniel P. Banks forged northward from Alexandria to mount an assault on the city, now a busy depot for men and supplies.
Banks was a former governor of Massachussetts, a Republican political appointee who was not highly rated as a military commander. In retrospect, his Red River Campaign might have been more successful had it been waged by a soldier, but in fact it made little difference to the eventual outcome of the Civil War, and Banks's technique may have spared a few lives.
The Union forces were met and driven back by a smaller, more mobile Rebel force at the Battle of Mansfield under the command of General Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor. At the Battle of Pleasant Hill, a day or two later, the Union forces staged a comeback, but General Banks failed to follow up his advantage. He retreated to the south and Shreveport was left unscathed.
During the postwar Reconstruction era, racial tensions were extremely high. Black troops were included in the garrison of Federal troops which arrived in Shreveport, in 1865, to begin a ten-and-a-half year occupation. When the troops first arrived they restored order where there had been anarchy, looting, and random violence; they were welcomed by law abiding citizens. But once order was restored, stories of black demons lording it over white men and raping and insulting white women became part of the popular mythology. There is little evidence of such behaviour in reality. In fact, blacks seem to have behaved with restraint; they had, after all, been subjected to considerable violence and humiliation during slavery.
Most of the documented postwar violence continued to be commited by whites against blacks. John Johnson, the son of a white plantation owner, apparently murdered a black woman in August, 1865. He escaped arrest and was never brought to trial. Two white men in Shreveport were found guilty of the murder of a freedman and sentenced to ninety-nine years each. However, after sentencing the two simply rose from the prisoners' dock and strolled out of the courtroom unhindered. They were simply allowed to go free. In October, 1868, two whites were killed in a dispute with freedmen, which is what former slaves were called, and Shreveport's white citizenry retaliated by going on a rampage, killing nineteen blacks.
Blacks were not only saddled with the reputation of being violent and insolent; they were also thought of as too ignorant to vote intelligently. And as for taking over the reigns of government? To a loyal white Southerner, nothing could be more ludicrous!
As members of Republican administrations, blacks generally attempted to enact progressive legislation such as unsegregated public education, and distribution of land to former slaves. The Republican party in Louisiana, the party of Lincoln, was a coalition of blacks, a handful of white progressives, and white Northerners who came to carry out the policies of the Federal government. Supporters of the Confederacy referred to this latter group as "carpetbaggers." The name derived from their luggage, a large bag made from carpet material. The white progressives were called "scalawags." The blacks were simply "niggers." In fact, most Louisiana black legislators, men like Caesar C. Antoine, were from an educated class of free men or creoles of color. Antoine, a Shreveporter, was elected lieutenant governor in 1872.
The newly enfranchised black male population was large, and this caused the whites to resort to violence and intimidation to maintain the pre-war power structure. Any white male citizen of Louisiana could regain the right to vote by recanting his support for the Confederate cause, but those who did so were socially ostracized and classified as scalawags, no better than niggers and carpetbaggers. Racist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellias and the Ku Klux Klan broke up mass political meetings of blacks and used intimidation at polling booths (McLure & Howe 60).
The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans, 1874. By Edgar Degas.
The Camellias were formed in New Orleans in the 1860's. They were avowedly white supremacist but not as openly violent as the Klan. The Camellias were opposed to the aims of Reconstruction, and they represented the views of the majority of white Louisianians. They obstructed all attempts to accomodate the blacks as full and equal citizens of the state, and thus laid the groundwork for the racial disharmony and bitterness which continues to the end of the Twentieth Century. There was no acceptance of defeat by the whites of Louisiana, and the only way for Northern liberals to impose their progressive views was by continued use of force. Time was on the side of the whites in Louisiana, and the rest of the South.
In 1873 Caddo, along with the neighboring parishes of Bossier to the east, and DeSoto to the south, and with the approval of the state Democratic convention, applied for annexation to Texas. One Shreveport historian explains the attempt: "Doubtless these parishes sought to alleviate their sufferings under the Republican rule and negro troubles caused by the carpetbaggers in this manner" (O'Pry 145). Which only shows that even in the 1920's, "historians" were following the white racist line. If the whites in these parishes were suffering, it was through their stubborn resistance to Republican rule; and if there were "negro troubles," the whites had themselves to blame. The Republican government of Louisiana naturally rejected the white parishioners' plan to join the state of Texas (McLure & Howe 60).
On 1 May, 1875 the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which gave equal rights to blacks in public accomodations and extended the right to jury duty. For the time, this was a progressive piece of legislation; too progressive for the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated the Act in 1883.
After then election of 1876 a national political compromise led to the selection of a Republican president in return for the installation of a Democratic governor in Louisiana. Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate for president, received a majority of the popular vote, but a dispute developed over twenty-two electoral votes, Louisiana's amongst them. After much wrangling in Congress, the election was awarded to Republican Rutherford Hayes when his party agreed to end Reconstruction. Occupation forces were withdrawn, and with their withdrawal came an increase in terrorism against blacks. Louisiana's government, right down to the parish and municipal levels, returned to the control of the tired old racial plutocracy which is still, as of this writing, largely intact. In order to maintain their power, whites created a virtual police state, and any black who wished to remain healthy stayed "in his place." African Americans in Louisiana and the other southern states were effectively barred from holding political office and, as far as possible, denied the right to vote. It wasn't until the late 1890's that laws prohibiting most blacks from voting were actually put on the books in Louisiana, but the terror had been in effect long before that. The country blacks, in particular, generally retreated to a position of passive acceptance of white hegemony.
The Jeters were farmers and businessmen, and they were among the white leaders in their isolated part of the country. They may have been members of the White Camellias. After the defeat in 1865, they returned to raising cotton and dealing land. William and Lucinda Jeter gave birth to nine children, though only four survived to maturity. The eldest was Alice, who was born in 1853; one of her sons, Sam Caldwell, was to serve twelve years as mayor of Shreveport. Virgil Jeter would become a physician and move to Atlanta, Texas, and the second son, Frank, was to take over and operate the Plantation. The youngest of the four Jeter children was Hulda who married locally and stayed in the area all her life.
Like most planters in the region, the Jeter's livliehood had been barely affected by the war. Their slaves were "freed," but most of them "knew their place" and continued to live on the land and work for the Jeter family. Those freedmen who preferred to leave the plantation but couldn't afford to buy land "farmed for halves." Landowners supplied land, seed, and perhaps mules, housing and tools; in return they took half of the crop in lieu of rent. The Jeter holdings grew considerably during the twenty-five years which followed the Civil War. The number of workers increased until the area occupied by blacks on their plantation became known as "the quarter." In the 1880's, the residents of the quarter included Wes and Annie Ledbetter and at least two of their married sons, Wes, Jr., and Bob.
Wes and Annie came to Louisiana as slaves just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The name "Ledbetter" was taken on after emancipation; perhaps it came from a white Ledbetter who had been their owner. They were born and wed in North Carolina and their eldest son, Wes, Jr., was born in 1857, also in North Carolina. Wes and Annie were moved west between 1857 and 1860; from that time on, all their children were born in Louisiana: Robert (Bob) in 1860, William Tell (Terril) in 1864, and Mary in 1869. These four are the only ones recognized by family members. There is also an older child, Julia, who lived to a ripe old age as Julia Miller, but for some reason was never considered one of the Ledbetters.
The 1870 census, the first after the War and the first to include blacks by name as individuals, reports quite a large household for Wes and Annie; it could be that two of the children, Delia and John, simply didn't survive to adulthood. There are two adult black men listed in the household: Frank Kelly, aged 22, and Boston Powell, 20. Powell may have been the "Bud" Powell who figures as a musical influence on Huddie Ledbetter. Oddly, there is also a white family listed in the Ledbetter household, a family consisting of Ann Fly and her three children.
One can only surmise that the turmoil caused by the Civil War may have led to a variety of living arrangements amongst the poorer classes. Also, census takers obviously weren't infallible.
Though Wes and Annie never learned to read and write, their children got some kind of rudimentary schooling. Wes, Jr., was an avid reader of newspapers and magazines. According to one of his granddaughters,
“Whenever he'd go into the store in Leigh, they'd have all the papers saved for him to read. Daily or weekly or however it came. They'd have a stack of them when he'd come in and he'd read every one of them. He remembered, too; remembered everything he read. Couldn't read fluently, but what he read, he understood it. Self-educated, that's my grandfather; he didn't have no school. Now if he went to school, I don't remember him saying where. But if he did, it wasn't like it was in our day, when we came along. But he could read.” (Irene)
Wes Ledbetter, Jr., got married in 1880 to Sallie Brown; it was his first marriage and her second. She had given birth to a son, Alonzo Batts, about 1875. After the wedding, Wes and Sallie took up residence in "the quarter" on the Jeter Plantation and they became members of the Shiloh Baptist Church, which was just down the road.
The other three Ledbetter children got married in the later 1880's. Bob, the second son, also settled down near the Shiloh Church with his wife, Ada. By 1900, Terril and his wife Mattie were living near Terrell, Texas, twenty miles east of Dallas. The rest of the family stayed pretty close to home. Mary, the youngest, married a neighbor named Ken Pugh, son of Allen and Barbary Pugh who were also brought from North Carolina. There was a strong North Carolina connection among the ex-slaves of the area, though we have seen that the Jeters, and several other local planters, were from Virginia.
All of the Ledbetters were musically-inclined. Young Wes, Bob and Tell all played the guitar, though it became clear quite early on that Wes was going to channel his music towards the church. Like many church-going blacks, he recognized a spiritual chasm between sacred music and secular music. There was no mixing of the two in his way of thinking. His sister Mary seems to have been of the same mind, while Bob and Tell were more middle of the road; they were able to go out dancing to the devil's music on Saturday night and shouting to the Lord's music on Sunday morning. Both the Lord's music and the devil's music showed the influences of Africa, influences which tended to reassert themselves as blacks and whites increasingly kept out of each others' way.
When blacks were shipped to America as slaves they were stripped of their language and culture. They were mixed in different language groups and crammed into slave ships with little more than some minimal clothing. They had to learn pidgin English just to have a common language, and their music became a hybrid as well, combining bits of the European with elements of various West African cultures.
In their new surroundings there were two possibilities available to the musically-inclined: they could make use of instruments provided by their white masters, or they could construct their own instruments. Of European origin were the band instruments: trumpets, tubas, trombones, clarinets, cymbals, snares and big bass drums; also the strings like violins and cellos, and the piano. Their own instruments were reed flutes, kazoos, gourd banjos and an amazing range of percussive rattles, sticks, drums and tambourines. In antebellum New Orleans, the slave population gathered in Congo Square, on their Sunday afternoons off, and had a good old-fashioned West African hoedown.
“Going up St. Peters Street & approaching the common I heard a most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse mill, the horses trampling on a wooden floor. I found . . . that it proceeded from a crowd of 5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square. I went to the spot & crowded near enough to see the performance. All those who were engaged in the business seemed to be ‘blacks.’ I did not observe a dozen yellow faces. They were formed into circular groupes . . . the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and fingers. The other drum was an open staved thing held between the knees and beaten in the same manner. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the fingerboard was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.” (Latrobe 49)
The above description of an afternoon in Congo Square comes from Benjamin Latrobe of Philadelphia who kept a journal of his travels in the 1820's. He has "no doubt" that the stringed instrument was "imported from Africa," which is to say that it was of African origin. Whether it physically made its way across the ocean is another matter. Latrobe also made not of three other musical instruments, and happily for us, made sketches of all six.
“One, which from the color of the wood seemed new, consisted of a block cut into something of the form of a cricket bat with a long and deep mortice down the center. This thing made a considerable noise, being beaten lustily on the side by a short stick. In the same orchestra was a square drum, looking like a stool, which made an abominably loud noise; also a calabash with a round hole in it, the hole studded with brass nails, which was beaten by a woman with two short sticks.” (50)
The banjo was a popular instrument in the Nineteenth Century minstrel shows and is often remembered in conjunction with plantation Negroes and Stephen Foster songs. Most literature on the banjo tends to describe a stringed instrument with a gourd resonator, like the one describe by Latrobe. However,
Between 1746 snd 1757 a slave dealer named Nicholas Owen reported an instrument played by the blacks "up Sharbro" in Sierra Leone, and instrument made of wood that sounded to him " like a bad fidle." It was called a Banjelo. (Epstein 213)
An even earlier reference is from Jamaica in 1740 by one Charles Leslie. He mentions a slave instrument called a "bangil" which was "not unlike our Lute in any Thing but the Musick." (Abrahams 282) In other words, the instrument itself was like a lute, but what the musicians were doing with it was something else. In 1793 Bryan Edwards reported from the West Indies, "they have the Banjo or Merriwong . . . [which] is an imperfect kind of violin cello (292), and in 1806 George Pinckard, also from the West Indies, mentioned the "banjar" as being "a coarse and rough kind of guitar." (294) In an article published in 1810, Fr. Richard de Tussac gives a detailed description of the making of a "banza" by French colonial blacks.
“They cut lengthwise through the middle of a calabash. This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. They stretch upon it the skin of a goat which they adjust round the edges with little nails; then a piece of lath or flat wood makes the handle of the guitar; then they stretch three cords of pitre (a kind of hemp taken from the agave plant), and the instrument is finished. (Epstein 217)
Clearly, then, while the name "banjo" is of African derivation, Africans seem to have had a wide variety of instuments similar to European guitars, lutes and violins which used gourds or calabashes instead of wooden resonators, and went under a variety of names including banza, banjar, bangil or bonja.
Though the banjo was clearly an African invention, and through Minstrelsy and the image of the contented plantation Negro used to be associated with African-Americans, the banjo as we now know it is a white man's instrument. The last of the serious black banjo players were in the early Dixieland jazz bands; it was the only stringed instruments that could compete with the sound of the horns in the days before amplification. The only solo blues banjoist of repute was Papa Charlie Jackson in the mid-1920's. The fiddle, and most particularly the guitar, are much closer to the African musical style. As a percussive member of jazz bands,the banjo was four-stringed; now as a bluegrass and olde tyme country music instrument, it has acquired a fifth string.
The accordion, which was developed in Central Europe early in the nineteenth century, was introduced to south Louisiana Cajuns by German immigrants in the 1880's (Ancelet 22) and was simultaneosly brought to north Louisiana and Texas by German settlers. Although the accordion continues to be enormously popular amongst the Cajuns and Mexican Americans, it is now an uncommon instrument in the north of Louisiana. It has become virtually extinct since the early 1950's, when some white country dance bands used piano accordions.
There is a windjammer in the Caddo-Pine Island Museum in Oil City, on Caddo Lake, and there is one at the Pioneer Heritage Center at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. The latter can be traced directly to German origins. A lonely written reference to the accordion in regional black folk traditions occurs in a 1950 article by a local artist named Don Brown. Brown, who taught at Centenary College in Shreveport, and had a camp on Caddo Lake, told of a black "concertina" player named Albert Vaughn. Marshall, Texas, attorney Franklin Jones, Sr., also remembers Vaughn and a group of black musicians who jammed together at his place on Caddo Lake. Don Brown also wrote that guitars and banjos could be found in most (black) homes in the region.
The accordion can be a very loud instrument, and in the era before amplification, it was well-suited to playing for dances. There is no doubt that electrification has in some part accounted for the increased popularity of the guitar in dance bands, and the decreased popularity of the banjo, the fiddle and the accordion. In the late nineteenth century, the instruments of choice amongst black musicians in North Louisiana were guitar, piano, harmonica, fiddle, and mandolin, but the latter two instruments have, since the early part of this century, joined the banjo in the domain of white musicians. It still seems odd that the accordion can have disappeared so totally from the traditional music of the area, while it has maintained its popularity and currency in the Cajun culture of South Louisiana and the Norteno culture of South and Central Texas. But that is what has happened.
The Caddo Lake region was slightly isolated from the mainstream; Franklin Jones calls it the outlaw country. Ledbetter's mastery of the accordion, mandolin, guitar, and twelve-string guitar, along with his dexterity on the harmonica, piano, and string-bass, attest to his considerable, though unusual, musical talent. He was quite at home around Caddo Lake, however.
It is worth noting that the twelve-string guitar is an uncommon instrument, so that claiming to be "King" is bravado mixed with a large dash of humor. There is only one other old-time blues player, Blind Willie McTell of Augusta, Georgia, who ever achieved fame on the instrument, which has not taken well to electrification. There are too many harmonic and, thus, discordant possibilities. However, the twelve-string is useful to a street musician because it can be louder than a regular, six-string guitar and can withstand a few broken strings before becoming unplayable.
The twelve-string guitar became established in Spain some time before 1780. It has much in common with the mandolin: in archaic terms, the twelve-string is a "six-course" instrument, really a six-string with two strings for each "course" instead of one (Turnbull 63). The mandolin, similarly, is a four-course instrument. There must have been something about the string arrangement that appealed to Huddie. It seems possible that he actually took up the twelve-string between 1925 and 1930 and not during an earlier sojourn in Dallas. The Stella guitar company produced most of its twelve-string models between the 1920's and the 1940's (Evans 258) and Huddie had one of them - painted green - when the Lomaxes found him in the Angola Prison Farm in 1933. But this idea is contrary to Huddie's own statements.
Guitars and fiddles supplied the music for the house dances, or "sukey jumps," that developed in the black community after the Civil War.
Where German settlers trod, in Louisiana and Texas for instance, accordions and harmonicas were introduced. In the white communities the square dance tunes were "Turkey in the Straw," "Bear Creek," "Nigger in the Woodpile," and "Arkansas Traveler." These same tunes were played in a more percussive style by blacks, though they might have inserted "Rats in the Meal Barrel" for "Nigger in the Woodpile."
While whites were "knocking the back-step," "cutting the pigeon wing," and dancing jigs, reels, hornpipes and Highland flings, blacks were doing the "cakewalk," the "grapevine twist," the "Delphi twirl," the "Eagle rock" and the stomp. These and other distinctive African American dances did not reach the ballrooms of polite white society until well after the turn of the century. Blacks were able to observe the goings-on in white society because they were often employed as musicians or domestics, but whites were generally ignorant of what was going on at the sukey jumps. Thus jazz took whites by surprise, and the blues was a revelation even to W.C. Handy, a black man with a formal musical training.
“Then one night at Tutwiler [Mississippi], as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.
“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.
“The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind.” (Handy 78)
For Handy it was the birth of the blues. He'd spent his young life to that point playing sheet music for society dances, both black and white, and had little contact with the working class blacks. He was able to transfer the blues to sheet music, too, and come up with hit tunes like the "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues." But Huddie Ledbetter had heard that music all his life.
“We used to do the "St. Louis Blues," and that was before W.C. Handy, when I was just a boy. We used to do the St. Louis song, you know, way down in Louisiana, and that was when I was a boy. And it wasn't written, it was just a real song, just made up. But anyhow, when I come to New York, we find out that W.C. Handy was the man that writ the music, and the words - "made it up." But that was when I was a boy, we used to sing that song.” (Last Sessions)
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The cotton business received a tremendous lift from the invention of the cotton gin, a simple, yet efficient machine which separated the seeds from the fluffy white part. The gin was invented in 1793 by an American named Eli Whitney. The invention led to the clearing of millions of acres of forest lands, lands which were turned over to the growing of cotton. The Cotton Kingdom was thus established in the states bordering on the Gulf Coast, and the institution of slavery was revived during the first half of the Nineteenth century. As late as 1808, when slave importation into the United States was outlawed, popular wisdom said there was no need for any more slaves. It is estimated that 250,000 slaves were imported between 1808 and 1860, and had the practice not been illegal, there may have been many more. Slave labor made the Cotton Kingdom possible.
Caddo Parish, Louisiana, became a leader in cotton production in the years leading up to the Civil War. The population of the parish in the latter part of the nineteenth century was overwhelmingly black, particularly in rural areas like Mooringsport on the southern shore of Caddo Lake. The reason for this is simple: many of the white settlers who arrived from the Southeastern states prior to the Civil War came with their slaves. Thus a family made up of four or five white members might typically be accompanied by four or five times that many black people. Not all the white settlers were slave owners, of course, but there were enough to account for the population ratio. "The early settlers were nearly all rich men with many slaves and some fine cattle." (O'Pry 141). “A man named Erwin, founder of Erwin's Bluff in Shreveport (circa 1836), brought 100 negroes with him and a quantity of fine Kentucky stock.” (O'Pry 144) The 1870 census, the first to enumerate blacks as people rather than slaves, shows 15,799 blacks and 5,913 whites in Caddo. The 1880 census shows 19,283 blacks out of a total parish population of 26,303. That's a ratio of roughly three blacks to each white in the years following emancipation. The ratio actually widened during the 1860's, possibly reflecting the westward exodus of slave owners, and their possessions, to safer environs. [The decade of the Civil War.] It was 1920 before the census showed a majority of white residents in Caddo parish, and in the late Twentieth century, the pendulum is swinging back the other way.
There were two ways of getting to northwest Louisiana from the Atlantic states. Some families traveled overland in wagons, while their slaves were linked together in "coffles," like chain gangs, and made to walk the thousand miles to their new homes. Other families went by ship to New Orleans; there they transferred to riverboats which, after the clearing of the Great Raft, went all the way to Shreveport and beyond, to the town of Jefferson, Texas, on Caddo Lake.
The city of Shreveport, Louisiana, was founded on the Red River; it lies about twenty miles east of the Texas border, and thirty-five miles south of Arkansas. Shreveport calls itself the hub of a region known as the Ark-La-Tex. To the north and west of Shreveport lies Caddo Lake, half of which is in Texas, and half in Louisiana. The Texas half features cypress trees, cypress knees, and Spanish moss, peculiarities more often associated with Louisiana. The northeast part of Louisiana, with its non-Catholic and non-French population, has always felt an affinity for East Texas.
Shreveport is named for Captain Henry Miller Shreve of the U.S. Army engineers. He arrived in 1833 to survey the Red River and see what could be done about the massive logjam which blocked navigation for two hundred miles upstream. He and his men set about clearing the jam, known as the Great Raft, and by the middle 1830's the Red was navigable to the Mississippi. Settlers started to pour in. The Caddo Indians, guardians of the land since time immemorial, were overwhelmed by the flood of immigrants. They "sold out" in 1835 and moved to the temporary safety of Oklahoma.
Among the antebellum white settlers in the region were two Jeter brothers from Virginia, William and James. They came as part of that historical western migration which opened up millions of acres of land to the cultivation of cotton in Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, and, finally, Texas; they came to help establish the Cotton Kingdom. The Jeters were from an affluent family; they brought money and possessions, including some slaves, and bought land in northwestern Louisiana. Their slaves cleared the land, planted cotton, built a large house for the owners and small houses for themselves.
William Nathaniel Jeter, born in 1824, first purchased property in Caddo Parish in 1849. This was a tract of three hundred and twenty acres of wooded land northeast of Caddo Lake; the seller was Richard T. Noel. During the next three years, William got himself situated and then returned to Virginia in 1852 to marry Lucinda Ford. Later that year, William came back to Louisiana with his new bride and his younger brother, James, who had just turned twenty-one. For the sum of $1,500, James bought four hundred and eighty acres from one Randolph Martin. This land was to the west of the village of Blanchard, which is halfway between Shreveport and Mooringsport. "James Addison Jeter was a surveyor and many maps of this area are based on Jeter's Country Plat." (A. Moore 32)
In May, 1860, William bought 160 acres to the south of Caddo Lake. This appears to be the beginning of what was to become the Jeter Plantation, or the Jeter Place. A near neighbor of the Jeters, at the time, was seventy-five year old John Lowe, also a native Virginian. Lowe possessed fifty slaves and eleven slave dwellings; his real estate was valued at $50,000. By this time, a mere twenty-five years since the clearing of the Red River, Caddo parish was shipping record quantities of cotton to the international market in New Orleans.
When the Civil War began, both Jeter brothers went off to defend the Confederacy. James was Captain of an outfit known as the Caddo Lake Boys, who marched a hundred miles east to Monroe, Louisiana, in 1861. Both brothers were captured and then later sent back home in an exchange of prisoners. (A. Moore 32)
Shreveport had not been ravaged by the Civil War and for that reason, it became the capital of wartime Louisiana. By early 1865, the town was home to a substantial Confederate force and surrounded by forts, barricades, trenchs and earthworks, in readiness for a state of seige. The most famous remaining Civil War landmark is known as Fort Humbug, where, for lack of the real thing, wooden cannons were placed in hope of fooling the Yankees. The Rebel commander at Shreveport was General E. Kirby Smith. He described it as "a miserable place with a miserable population - swarming with refugees, slave coffles, state legislators, and surplus colonels." (Stuck 4)
The southern part of the state, particularly strategic New Orleans with its command of the Mississippi River mouth, was secured by Union forces early in the war. Vicksburg, Mississippi, on Louisiana's eastern border, eventually toppled to General Grant's forces after being under seige for more than a year. Alexandria, in the center of the state, had been torched during a battle with Union forces. The nearest actual battleground to Shreveport was twenty-five miles away. In the spring of 1864, Union forces under the command of General Nathaniel P. Banks forged northward from Alexandria to mount an assault on the city, now a busy depot for men and supplies.
Banks was a former governor of Massachussetts, a Republican political appointee who was not highly rated as a military commander. In retrospect, his Red River Campaign might have been more successful had it been waged by a soldier, but in fact it made little difference to the eventual outcome of the Civil War, and Banks's technique may have spared a few lives.
The Union forces were met and driven back by a smaller, more mobile Rebel force at the Battle of Mansfield under the command of General Richard Taylor, son of Zachary Taylor. At the Battle of Pleasant Hill, a day or two later, the Union forces staged a comeback, but General Banks failed to follow up his advantage. He retreated to the south and Shreveport was left unscathed.
During the postwar Reconstruction era, racial tensions were extremely high. Black troops were included in the garrison of Federal troops which arrived in Shreveport, in 1865, to begin a ten-and-a-half year occupation. When the troops first arrived they restored order where there had been anarchy, looting, and random violence; they were welcomed by law abiding citizens. But once order was restored, stories of black demons lording it over white men and raping and insulting white women became part of the popular mythology. There is little evidence of such behaviour in reality. In fact, blacks seem to have behaved with restraint; they had, after all, been subjected to considerable violence and humiliation during slavery.
Most of the documented postwar violence continued to be commited by whites against blacks. John Johnson, the son of a white plantation owner, apparently murdered a black woman in August, 1865. He escaped arrest and was never brought to trial. Two white men in Shreveport were found guilty of the murder of a freedman and sentenced to ninety-nine years each. However, after sentencing the two simply rose from the prisoners' dock and strolled out of the courtroom unhindered. They were simply allowed to go free. In October, 1868, two whites were killed in a dispute with freedmen, which is what former slaves were called, and Shreveport's white citizenry retaliated by going on a rampage, killing nineteen blacks.
Blacks were not only saddled with the reputation of being violent and insolent; they were also thought of as too ignorant to vote intelligently. And as for taking over the reigns of government? To a loyal white Southerner, nothing could be more ludicrous!
As members of Republican administrations, blacks generally attempted to enact progressive legislation such as unsegregated public education, and distribution of land to former slaves. The Republican party in Louisiana, the party of Lincoln, was a coalition of blacks, a handful of white progressives, and white Northerners who came to carry out the policies of the Federal government. Supporters of the Confederacy referred to this latter group as "carpetbaggers." The name derived from their luggage, a large bag made from carpet material. The white progressives were called "scalawags." The blacks were simply "niggers." In fact, most Louisiana black legislators, men like Caesar C. Antoine, were from an educated class of free men or creoles of color. Antoine, a Shreveporter, was elected lieutenant governor in 1872.
The newly enfranchised black male population was large, and this caused the whites to resort to violence and intimidation to maintain the pre-war power structure. Any white male citizen of Louisiana could regain the right to vote by recanting his support for the Confederate cause, but those who did so were socially ostracized and classified as scalawags, no better than niggers and carpetbaggers. Racist organizations such as the Knights of the White Camellias and the Ku Klux Klan broke up mass political meetings of blacks and used intimidation at polling booths (McLure & Howe 60).
The Cotton Exchange in New Orleans, 1874. By Edgar Degas.
The Camellias were formed in New Orleans in the 1860's. They were avowedly white supremacist but not as openly violent as the Klan. The Camellias were opposed to the aims of Reconstruction, and they represented the views of the majority of white Louisianians. They obstructed all attempts to accomodate the blacks as full and equal citizens of the state, and thus laid the groundwork for the racial disharmony and bitterness which continues to the end of the Twentieth Century. There was no acceptance of defeat by the whites of Louisiana, and the only way for Northern liberals to impose their progressive views was by continued use of force. Time was on the side of the whites in Louisiana, and the rest of the South.
In 1873 Caddo, along with the neighboring parishes of Bossier to the east, and DeSoto to the south, and with the approval of the state Democratic convention, applied for annexation to Texas. One Shreveport historian explains the attempt: "Doubtless these parishes sought to alleviate their sufferings under the Republican rule and negro troubles caused by the carpetbaggers in this manner" (O'Pry 145). Which only shows that even in the 1920's, "historians" were following the white racist line. If the whites in these parishes were suffering, it was through their stubborn resistance to Republican rule; and if there were "negro troubles," the whites had themselves to blame. The Republican government of Louisiana naturally rejected the white parishioners' plan to join the state of Texas (McLure & Howe 60).
On 1 May, 1875 the United States Congress passed the Civil Rights Act which gave equal rights to blacks in public accomodations and extended the right to jury duty. For the time, this was a progressive piece of legislation; too progressive for the U.S. Supreme Court, which invalidated the Act in 1883.
After then election of 1876 a national political compromise led to the selection of a Republican president in return for the installation of a Democratic governor in Louisiana. Samuel Tilden, the Democratic candidate for president, received a majority of the popular vote, but a dispute developed over twenty-two electoral votes, Louisiana's amongst them. After much wrangling in Congress, the election was awarded to Republican Rutherford Hayes when his party agreed to end Reconstruction. Occupation forces were withdrawn, and with their withdrawal came an increase in terrorism against blacks. Louisiana's government, right down to the parish and municipal levels, returned to the control of the tired old racial plutocracy which is still, as of this writing, largely intact. In order to maintain their power, whites created a virtual police state, and any black who wished to remain healthy stayed "in his place." African Americans in Louisiana and the other southern states were effectively barred from holding political office and, as far as possible, denied the right to vote. It wasn't until the late 1890's that laws prohibiting most blacks from voting were actually put on the books in Louisiana, but the terror had been in effect long before that. The country blacks, in particular, generally retreated to a position of passive acceptance of white hegemony.
The Jeters were farmers and businessmen, and they were among the white leaders in their isolated part of the country. They may have been members of the White Camellias. After the defeat in 1865, they returned to raising cotton and dealing land. William and Lucinda Jeter gave birth to nine children, though only four survived to maturity. The eldest was Alice, who was born in 1853; one of her sons, Sam Caldwell, was to serve twelve years as mayor of Shreveport. Virgil Jeter would become a physician and move to Atlanta, Texas, and the second son, Frank, was to take over and operate the Plantation. The youngest of the four Jeter children was Hulda who married locally and stayed in the area all her life.
Like most planters in the region, the Jeter's livliehood had been barely affected by the war. Their slaves were "freed," but most of them "knew their place" and continued to live on the land and work for the Jeter family. Those freedmen who preferred to leave the plantation but couldn't afford to buy land "farmed for halves." Landowners supplied land, seed, and perhaps mules, housing and tools; in return they took half of the crop in lieu of rent. The Jeter holdings grew considerably during the twenty-five years which followed the Civil War. The number of workers increased until the area occupied by blacks on their plantation became known as "the quarter." In the 1880's, the residents of the quarter included Wes and Annie Ledbetter and at least two of their married sons, Wes, Jr., and Bob.
Wes and Annie came to Louisiana as slaves just before the outbreak of the Civil War. The name "Ledbetter" was taken on after emancipation; perhaps it came from a white Ledbetter who had been their owner. They were born and wed in North Carolina and their eldest son, Wes, Jr., was born in 1857, also in North Carolina. Wes and Annie were moved west between 1857 and 1860; from that time on, all their children were born in Louisiana: Robert (Bob) in 1860, William Tell (Terril) in 1864, and Mary in 1869. These four are the only ones recognized by family members. There is also an older child, Julia, who lived to a ripe old age as Julia Miller, but for some reason was never considered one of the Ledbetters.
The 1870 census, the first after the War and the first to include blacks by name as individuals, reports quite a large household for Wes and Annie; it could be that two of the children, Delia and John, simply didn't survive to adulthood. There are two adult black men listed in the household: Frank Kelly, aged 22, and Boston Powell, 20. Powell may have been the "Bud" Powell who figures as a musical influence on Huddie Ledbetter. Oddly, there is also a white family listed in the Ledbetter household, a family consisting of Ann Fly and her three children.
One can only surmise that the turmoil caused by the Civil War may have led to a variety of living arrangements amongst the poorer classes. Also, census takers obviously weren't infallible.
Though Wes and Annie never learned to read and write, their children got some kind of rudimentary schooling. Wes, Jr., was an avid reader of newspapers and magazines. According to one of his granddaughters,
“Whenever he'd go into the store in Leigh, they'd have all the papers saved for him to read. Daily or weekly or however it came. They'd have a stack of them when he'd come in and he'd read every one of them. He remembered, too; remembered everything he read. Couldn't read fluently, but what he read, he understood it. Self-educated, that's my grandfather; he didn't have no school. Now if he went to school, I don't remember him saying where. But if he did, it wasn't like it was in our day, when we came along. But he could read.” (Irene)
Wes Ledbetter, Jr., got married in 1880 to Sallie Brown; it was his first marriage and her second. She had given birth to a son, Alonzo Batts, about 1875. After the wedding, Wes and Sallie took up residence in "the quarter" on the Jeter Plantation and they became members of the Shiloh Baptist Church, which was just down the road.
The other three Ledbetter children got married in the later 1880's. Bob, the second son, also settled down near the Shiloh Church with his wife, Ada. By 1900, Terril and his wife Mattie were living near Terrell, Texas, twenty miles east of Dallas. The rest of the family stayed pretty close to home. Mary, the youngest, married a neighbor named Ken Pugh, son of Allen and Barbary Pugh who were also brought from North Carolina. There was a strong North Carolina connection among the ex-slaves of the area, though we have seen that the Jeters, and several other local planters, were from Virginia.
All of the Ledbetters were musically-inclined. Young Wes, Bob and Tell all played the guitar, though it became clear quite early on that Wes was going to channel his music towards the church. Like many church-going blacks, he recognized a spiritual chasm between sacred music and secular music. There was no mixing of the two in his way of thinking. His sister Mary seems to have been of the same mind, while Bob and Tell were more middle of the road; they were able to go out dancing to the devil's music on Saturday night and shouting to the Lord's music on Sunday morning. Both the Lord's music and the devil's music showed the influences of Africa, influences which tended to reassert themselves as blacks and whites increasingly kept out of each others' way.
When blacks were shipped to America as slaves they were stripped of their language and culture. They were mixed in different language groups and crammed into slave ships with little more than some minimal clothing. They had to learn pidgin English just to have a common language, and their music became a hybrid as well, combining bits of the European with elements of various West African cultures.
In their new surroundings there were two possibilities available to the musically-inclined: they could make use of instruments provided by their white masters, or they could construct their own instruments. Of European origin were the band instruments: trumpets, tubas, trombones, clarinets, cymbals, snares and big bass drums; also the strings like violins and cellos, and the piano. Their own instruments were reed flutes, kazoos, gourd banjos and an amazing range of percussive rattles, sticks, drums and tambourines. In antebellum New Orleans, the slave population gathered in Congo Square, on their Sunday afternoons off, and had a good old-fashioned West African hoedown.
“Going up St. Peters Street & approaching the common I heard a most extraordinary noise, which I supposed to proceed from some horse mill, the horses trampling on a wooden floor. I found . . . that it proceeded from a crowd of 5 or 600 persons assembled in an open space or public square. I went to the spot & crowded near enough to see the performance. All those who were engaged in the business seemed to be ‘blacks.’ I did not observe a dozen yellow faces. They were formed into circular groupes . . . the largest not 10 feet in diameter. In the first were two women dancing. They held each a coarse handkerchief extended by the corners in their hands, & set to each other in a miserably dull & slow figure, hardly moving their feet or bodies. The music consisted of two drums and a stringed instrument. An old man sat astride of a cylindrical drum about a foot in diameter, & beat it with incredible quickness with the edge of his hand and fingers. The other drum was an open staved thing held between the knees and beaten in the same manner. The most curious instrument, however, was a stringed instrument which no doubt was imported from Africa. On the top of the fingerboard was the rude figure of a man in a sitting posture, & two pegs behind him to which the strings were fastened. The body was a calabash.” (Latrobe 49)
The above description of an afternoon in Congo Square comes from Benjamin Latrobe of Philadelphia who kept a journal of his travels in the 1820's. He has "no doubt" that the stringed instrument was "imported from Africa," which is to say that it was of African origin. Whether it physically made its way across the ocean is another matter. Latrobe also made not of three other musical instruments, and happily for us, made sketches of all six.
“One, which from the color of the wood seemed new, consisted of a block cut into something of the form of a cricket bat with a long and deep mortice down the center. This thing made a considerable noise, being beaten lustily on the side by a short stick. In the same orchestra was a square drum, looking like a stool, which made an abominably loud noise; also a calabash with a round hole in it, the hole studded with brass nails, which was beaten by a woman with two short sticks.” (50)
The banjo was a popular instrument in the Nineteenth Century minstrel shows and is often remembered in conjunction with plantation Negroes and Stephen Foster songs. Most literature on the banjo tends to describe a stringed instrument with a gourd resonator, like the one describe by Latrobe. However,
Between 1746 snd 1757 a slave dealer named Nicholas Owen reported an instrument played by the blacks "up Sharbro" in Sierra Leone, and instrument made of wood that sounded to him " like a bad fidle." It was called a Banjelo. (Epstein 213)
An even earlier reference is from Jamaica in 1740 by one Charles Leslie. He mentions a slave instrument called a "bangil" which was "not unlike our Lute in any Thing but the Musick." (Abrahams 282) In other words, the instrument itself was like a lute, but what the musicians were doing with it was something else. In 1793 Bryan Edwards reported from the West Indies, "they have the Banjo or Merriwong . . . [which] is an imperfect kind of violin cello (292), and in 1806 George Pinckard, also from the West Indies, mentioned the "banjar" as being "a coarse and rough kind of guitar." (294) In an article published in 1810, Fr. Richard de Tussac gives a detailed description of the making of a "banza" by French colonial blacks.
“They cut lengthwise through the middle of a calabash. This fruit is sometimes eight inches or more in diameter. They stretch upon it the skin of a goat which they adjust round the edges with little nails; then a piece of lath or flat wood makes the handle of the guitar; then they stretch three cords of pitre (a kind of hemp taken from the agave plant), and the instrument is finished. (Epstein 217)
Clearly, then, while the name "banjo" is of African derivation, Africans seem to have had a wide variety of instuments similar to European guitars, lutes and violins which used gourds or calabashes instead of wooden resonators, and went under a variety of names including banza, banjar, bangil or bonja.
Me envy not dhe white man dhen,
Me poor but me is gay;
Me glad at heart, me happy when
Me on my bonja play. (Abrahams 18)
Though the banjo was clearly an African invention, and through Minstrelsy and the image of the contented plantation Negro used to be associated with African-Americans, the banjo as we now know it is a white man's instrument. The last of the serious black banjo players were in the early Dixieland jazz bands; it was the only stringed instruments that could compete with the sound of the horns in the days before amplification. The only solo blues banjoist of repute was Papa Charlie Jackson in the mid-1920's. The fiddle, and most particularly the guitar, are much closer to the African musical style. As a percussive member of jazz bands,the banjo was four-stringed; now as a bluegrass and olde tyme country music instrument, it has acquired a fifth string.
The accordion, which was developed in Central Europe early in the nineteenth century, was introduced to south Louisiana Cajuns by German immigrants in the 1880's (Ancelet 22) and was simultaneosly brought to north Louisiana and Texas by German settlers. Although the accordion continues to be enormously popular amongst the Cajuns and Mexican Americans, it is now an uncommon instrument in the north of Louisiana. It has become virtually extinct since the early 1950's, when some white country dance bands used piano accordions.
There is a windjammer in the Caddo-Pine Island Museum in Oil City, on Caddo Lake, and there is one at the Pioneer Heritage Center at Louisiana State University in Shreveport. The latter can be traced directly to German origins. A lonely written reference to the accordion in regional black folk traditions occurs in a 1950 article by a local artist named Don Brown. Brown, who taught at Centenary College in Shreveport, and had a camp on Caddo Lake, told of a black "concertina" player named Albert Vaughn. Marshall, Texas, attorney Franklin Jones, Sr., also remembers Vaughn and a group of black musicians who jammed together at his place on Caddo Lake. Don Brown also wrote that guitars and banjos could be found in most (black) homes in the region.
The accordion can be a very loud instrument, and in the era before amplification, it was well-suited to playing for dances. There is no doubt that electrification has in some part accounted for the increased popularity of the guitar in dance bands, and the decreased popularity of the banjo, the fiddle and the accordion. In the late nineteenth century, the instruments of choice amongst black musicians in North Louisiana were guitar, piano, harmonica, fiddle, and mandolin, but the latter two instruments have, since the early part of this century, joined the banjo in the domain of white musicians. It still seems odd that the accordion can have disappeared so totally from the traditional music of the area, while it has maintained its popularity and currency in the Cajun culture of South Louisiana and the Norteno culture of South and Central Texas. But that is what has happened.
The Caddo Lake region was slightly isolated from the mainstream; Franklin Jones calls it the outlaw country. Ledbetter's mastery of the accordion, mandolin, guitar, and twelve-string guitar, along with his dexterity on the harmonica, piano, and string-bass, attest to his considerable, though unusual, musical talent. He was quite at home around Caddo Lake, however.
It is worth noting that the twelve-string guitar is an uncommon instrument, so that claiming to be "King" is bravado mixed with a large dash of humor. There is only one other old-time blues player, Blind Willie McTell of Augusta, Georgia, who ever achieved fame on the instrument, which has not taken well to electrification. There are too many harmonic and, thus, discordant possibilities. However, the twelve-string is useful to a street musician because it can be louder than a regular, six-string guitar and can withstand a few broken strings before becoming unplayable.
The twelve-string guitar became established in Spain some time before 1780. It has much in common with the mandolin: in archaic terms, the twelve-string is a "six-course" instrument, really a six-string with two strings for each "course" instead of one (Turnbull 63). The mandolin, similarly, is a four-course instrument. There must have been something about the string arrangement that appealed to Huddie. It seems possible that he actually took up the twelve-string between 1925 and 1930 and not during an earlier sojourn in Dallas. The Stella guitar company produced most of its twelve-string models between the 1920's and the 1940's (Evans 258) and Huddie had one of them - painted green - when the Lomaxes found him in the Angola Prison Farm in 1933. But this idea is contrary to Huddie's own statements.
Guitars and fiddles supplied the music for the house dances, or "sukey jumps," that developed in the black community after the Civil War.
Where German settlers trod, in Louisiana and Texas for instance, accordions and harmonicas were introduced. In the white communities the square dance tunes were "Turkey in the Straw," "Bear Creek," "Nigger in the Woodpile," and "Arkansas Traveler." These same tunes were played in a more percussive style by blacks, though they might have inserted "Rats in the Meal Barrel" for "Nigger in the Woodpile."
While whites were "knocking the back-step," "cutting the pigeon wing," and dancing jigs, reels, hornpipes and Highland flings, blacks were doing the "cakewalk," the "grapevine twist," the "Delphi twirl," the "Eagle rock" and the stomp. These and other distinctive African American dances did not reach the ballrooms of polite white society until well after the turn of the century. Blacks were able to observe the goings-on in white society because they were often employed as musicians or domestics, but whites were generally ignorant of what was going on at the sukey jumps. Thus jazz took whites by surprise, and the blues was a revelation even to W.C. Handy, a black man with a formal musical training.
“Then one night at Tutwiler [Mississippi], as I nodded in the railroad station while waiting for a train that had been delayed nine hours, life suddenly took me by the shoulder and wakened me with a start.
“A lean, loose-jointed Negro had commenced plunking a guitar beside me while I slept. His clothes were rags; his feet peeped out of his shoes. His face had on it some of the sadness of the ages. As he played, he pressed a knife on the strings of the guitar in a manner popularized by Hawaiian guitarists who used steel bars. The effect was unforgettable. His song, too, struck me instantly.
‘Goin' where the Southern cross' the Dog.’
“The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard. The tune stayed in my mind.” (Handy 78)
For Handy it was the birth of the blues. He'd spent his young life to that point playing sheet music for society dances, both black and white, and had little contact with the working class blacks. He was able to transfer the blues to sheet music, too, and come up with hit tunes like the "Memphis Blues" and "St. Louis Blues." But Huddie Ledbetter had heard that music all his life.
“We used to do the "St. Louis Blues," and that was before W.C. Handy, when I was just a boy. We used to do the St. Louis song, you know, way down in Louisiana, and that was when I was a boy. And it wasn't written, it was just a real song, just made up. But anyhow, when I come to New York, we find out that W.C. Handy was the man that writ the music, and the words - "made it up." But that was when I was a boy, we used to sing that song.” (Last Sessions)
Posted by Monty and Marsha at 9:25 PM
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