We know about the “Special Relationship” between the USA and the UK that Winston Churchill gave a name to and promoted, not to say exploited. But there was a more harmonious exchange between the two countries in the Second World War that has played on ever afterward. America soldiers arrived in the UK in 1942. Many of them were Black and they brought their music, notably the Blues, with them, often in the form of records that were unavailable in Britain. The US servicemen earned much more than their British equivalents and could afford to be generous to their new down-at-the-heel friends whose musical deprivations seemed extreme. The jazz age had not upped the pace greatly of British popular culture which still lumbered along with anachronisms like the big dance bands. They were organised in classic orchestra fashion with a tuxedoed conductor waving a baton over fenced-off sections of brass, strings and wind instruments. Singers did not figure large. An attempt to emulate US crooners produced ballads damp with tears and treacle. Looking back in 1968, one critic wrote that British music of the 1930’s was “soft, warm, sentimental…snug like a blanket”.
The gift of the Blues to Britain wasn’t “Lend-Lease” and would outlast the chewing gum, cigarettes, nylon, jukeboxes and Coca-Cola. The music created from “field hollers” in the eighteen hundreds in the slavery-defiled American south would before long grip the UK so tightly that every musical style that has dominated British pop culture since 1945 owes the Blues something. They can be heard in jazz, R&B, rock and roll, punk, prog, heavy metal, disco, techno, rave, right up to rap.
By 1900 in the USA regional styles of the Blues had developed. There were the West Texan, the Kansas City and Georgia Sea Islands varieties. But it was the Blues of the Mississippi Delta that would survive and conquer. Their rise was one with that of McKinley Morganfield, known as Muddy Waters. He worked as a sharecropper on a plantation, played guitar and sang the Blues of the near-mythical pioneers of previous generations. In 1941, Alan Lomax, roving correspondent for the Library of Congress, by chance recorded him on tape. When Muddy heard himself on the record player in the boot of Lomax’s car, his confidence began to grow. In 1943, he decided to leave home and seek his fortune Dick Whittington fashion.
Muddy would be part of the Great Migration, the movement of Black Americans from the rural south to the industrial north. It had been going on since the First World War and accelerated in the Second. The shortage, of manpower made Blacks acceptable in northern cities to do rough work provided they kept to their ghettos and aimed at invisibility. Chicago was the goal for Mississippians like Muddy, an overnight trip that cost $17 on the Illinois Central Railway that like trains in general would flavour many Blues lyrics. Muddy joined the sizeable Black migrant community in Chicago, went to work in a factory and played and sang here and there in his spare time. He had trouble adapting his style to the big city rhythm. The couple of records he managed to make had no success. Discouraged, he gave up trying to fit in. He went back to playing pure Delta Blues and made a record with two songs he had done for Alan Lomax.
The chorus of one side, “I Can’t be Satisfied”, goes:
“Woman, I'm troubled
I be all worried in mind
Well babe, I can't never be satisfied
And I just can't keep from crying”
The singer’s trouble is he’s far from home. He imagines a return:
“Well, I know my little old baby
She gon' jump and shout
That old train be late, man
Lord, and I come walking out”
“Feel Like Going Home”, the other side, reiterates:
“Well, now it gettin' late on into the evenin' and I feel like
Like blowin' my home
When I woke up this mornin' all I, I had was gone
Now it gettin', late on into the evenin', man now, I feel like
Like blowin' my home
Well now, woke up this mornin', all I had was gone”
It was 1948 and there were a hundred thousand transplanted Black Mississippians in Chicago as sick for home as Muddy. The record sold out the first day. Local fame came suddenly and Muddy set about imposing the impact of the big city on the Delta Blues. As Rich Cohen wrote, the new mix was the Chicago Blues:
“The sound of the dives—a sound, that evolved from the Delta Blues that picked up the steely the Chjump of the city as it moved north, the rattle of street corners and stoops, the slaughter yards, the loading docks, the assembly lines. […] As their life grew noisier, so did their songs, until the noise itself became the point, the industrial wail of the city refashioned as music.”
Muddy wasn’t troubled by leaving the acoustic guitar for an electric one. “Why fight it, why not just play it?” Anyway, how else could he be heard above the din of the Chicago clubs?
His “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man” of 1954 was one of the results. It led directly from the Electric Blues to Rock & Roll:
“The gypsy woman told my mother
Before I was born
‘You got a boy child’s comin’
Gon’ be a son of a gun
He gonna make pretty womens
Jump and shout
Then the world wanna know
What this all about’
I got a black cat bone
I got a mojo too
I got the John the Conqueror root
I’m gonna mess with you”
Chuck Berry from St.Louis marked the pivot. It was a new America. Not without reason, he’s considered the inventor of Rock & Roll. He came from the Black middle class that emerged after WWII. It was the world in which the teenager loomed up like a giant consumer. Berry would remain underaged for a lifetime devoted to velocity. His influence was enormous:
“New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours
Was rollin’ slow because of drizzlin’ showers
Here come old flat-top, he was movin’ up with me
Then come wavin’ goodbye a little old souped-up jitney
I put my foot in my tank and I began to roll
Moanin’ siren, ’twas a state patrol”
Charlie Watts, the Rolling Stones drummer said:
“You know, it’s crazy, we get so much acclaim, and all we’ve done for the last forty years is imitate Chuck Berry”.
Because of segregation, there was a rush among the majors, the big corporate record companies, to find White singers who could do Black music with the same laid-back power of its creators. Plenty of duds turned up, but Elvis Presley was one Mississippian whose background equipped him to achieve a perfect imitation. He even exuded the right sexual aura. Blacks had lost jazz to Whites, now Rock & Roll would be co-opted and sold to White teenagers as their own voice.
A more respectful theft came from the Brits. Muddy Waters records had provoked a musical breakthrough in Britain. Eric Clapton said:
“It changed everything. Muddy was the first person who got to me and his is still the most important music in my life.”
The Stones came to Chicago like pilgrims in 1964 to meet Muddy and the Black musicians at Chess Records. They were open-mouthed when Muddy himself came out to the taxi to help carry in their bags. They would cut several disks at Chess, including a take on ‘I Can’t be Satisfied’, the number that Muddy had done in 1948. They also made a version of a Little Walter item. He played the harmonica, also electrified, as no one had ever done before him. They called it, ‘2120 South Michigan Ave.’, the address of the Chess Studio. When, in the same year, the Beatles made their first trip to the USA, a reporter asked Paul McCartney what he wished to see. He didn’t say Las Vegas. He answered, “Muddy Waters”.
Muddy had the talent, but Chess Records had been the door to his success. Leonard Chess (Lejzor Czyz) had arrived in Chicago before his sixth birthday from Poland. His family was dirt poor. That meant they suffered from the city’s twofold de facto segregation policy. It not only kept the Blacks in a ghetto but very poor Whites who happened to be Jewish in an adjoining slum. Leonard’s father dealt in junk. He was what the locals called a rag-picker. Leonard too started in the trade of gathering and selling trash. But his immigrant’s entrepreneurial drive soon led him to a series of business ventures and finally to opening a bar for Black drinkers. It became a poor man’s nightclub. Unlike White Chicagoans who kept Blacks quarantined, Leonard had grown up with them as next-door neighbours. He was familiar with their ways. He talked their talk. His insight was to see the Black community, at the bottom of the social pile, as a possible lucrative market.
Between drinks customers tended to break out in song. Leonard as a manager was ultra attentive and hands on, often having to use his feet as well to kick out a too-rowdy roisterer. He soon brought in musicians that satisfied the transplanted southerners. He began to have an ear for the Blues they played. It was not so much musical judgment as a sense for what pleased, for what would sell. He noted that some of his drinkers brought in disks. There was a minor industry going in the US making Black recordings, called “race records”, for Black buyers. Segregation, northern style, was as absolute in pressing records as it was in everyday life.
Leonard, with borrowed money and the help of his brother Phil, set up Chess Records. Hands on again—and feet more than ever, kicking his rough musicians into order before cajoling them into one-sided contracts that left him on top, Leonard dug in. He had a feeling for money that only having been without any can give. By 1955, Chess had two hundred employees and was releasing a couple of hundred records a year. Leonard himself would scout for talent in the southern states perturbed by the civil rights struggle. He was a sympathiser, but stood apart as a businessman for whom it was profit and loss not principles that mattered most. He often travelled with a Black informant. Once a policeman grabbed him and called him “a nigger-loving Jew”. One can imagine Leonard thinking, “Have it your way, Bubba, just show me the way to the bank”.
Civil Rights for Blacks had given his business enough oxygen for him to take his contracted Black artists over the line of racial division. They had “crossed over” and their product—the records of Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Eta James, and Chuck Berry—were bought by Whites. Leonard had penetrated the White market and was no longer limited to “race records”. The difference amounted to millions of dollars profit. But there was a hitch. The partial success of the Civic Rights movement—irony of ironies—would end his rise as a businessman. It was his good luck and usual shrewdness that he saw the end coming and sold Chess Records and other holdings, which included Black radio stations, in good time. Because as result of the 1960s’ militancy questions like this one were asked:
“Why is the biggest Negro station in the city owned by a Polish Jew?”
Black artists reacted to their past exploitation by White entrepreneurs like Leonard who had signed them on dodgy contracts. “Leonard screwed them honest”, as one colleague explained. He then patronised them with handouts and gifts like Cadillacs while giving them only two or three cents on every record sold. In fact, a movie about Chess Records in 2008 was called “Cadillac Records”.*
Leonard’s step-brother connection with the Schvartzas, the Yiddish term for Blacks, was a business arrangement, but it did bring the Blues from the Mississippi Delta to Chicago where the Extra-Special Relationship helped take it to the world at large. It’s why a rapper like Ice Cube can sing today:
“When I was a slave, where the fuck did I ran?
California, man, it was full of Mexicans
This is they shit, nigga, can't say shit
Just, kick back and enjoy the sunshine
Live your life, stay away from one-time
Get your money, mayne, find the lunch line
This ain't a joke, nigga, where's the punchline?
The ghetto is a trap homie, take the cheese
Soon as you do it, here come the police
Invented and designed for us to fail
Homie, don't you end up dead or in jail”
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*”Cadillac Records”, 2008, Sony Pictures, written and directed by Ms Darnell Martin. Less concerned with the historical record than with the passions of the Chess artists, the movie has an impressive soundtrack. Beyoncé Knowles, playing Etta James, performs “At Last” as she did at the inauguration ball of Barack Obama.
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