A M E R I C A N C O N S E R V AT O R Y T H E AT E R
Carey Perloff, Artistic Director
Heather Kitchen, Managing Director
PRESENTS
Lackawanna Blues
written and performed
by ruben santiago-hudson
directed by loretta greco
geary theater
october 27–december 1, 2002
WORDS ON PLAYS
prepared by
elizabeth brodersen
publications editor
jessica werner
associate publications editor
stephanie woo
literary and publications intern
paul walsh
resident dramaturg
© 2002 AMERICAN CONSERVATORY THEATER, A NONPROFIT ORGANIZATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
table of contents
.
Characters and Synopsis of Lackawanna Blues
.
Talkin’ the Blues: An Interview with Ruben Santiago-Hudson
by Maxine Kern
.
A Brief Biography of Ruben Santiago-Hudson
. African-American Northern Migration
by Maxine Kern
. African-American Migration and Urbanization by the Numbers
. Lackawanna, New York: A Mid-Century Portrait
. The Blues
by Michaela Goldhaber
. What Is the Blues?
. Reading the Blues
by Stephanie Woo
.
Poetry and the Blues
. A Brief Biography of Bill Sims, Jr.
. Broad Spectrum Blues: An Interview with Bill Sims, Jr.
by Adam Levy
. The Griot, Then and Now
. Lackawanna Tidbits: A Brief Guide to People, Places, and Things Mentioned in
Lackawanna Blues
by Stephanie Woo
. Questions to Consider
. For Further Reading…
characters and synopsis of LACKAWANNA BLUES
Lackawanna Blues was originally produced at the Joseph Papp Public Theater/New York
Shakespeare Festival in April 2001.
cast
Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Bill Sims, Jr.
characters
Narrator
Miss Rachel Crosby (“Nanny”)
Lady, Nanny’s former employer
Ol’ Po’ Carl, a former baseball player and one of Nanny’s boarders
Ricky, a woman who works at Nanny’s boarding house at 101 Ridge Road
Lottie, Nanny’s best friend and proprietor of the house at 101 Ridge Road
Ruben (“Junior”), the Narrator as a child
Mr. Lemuel Taylor, a boarder with one leg and a quick-darting tongue
Numb Finger Pete, a boarder who lost most of his fingers to frostbite
Small Paul, a boarder who was taken in by Nanny after being released from prison
Freddie Cobb, a former soldier who served in World War II
Melvin Earthman, a man who challenges Freddie
Norma, a white woman married to Gerald
Gerald, a black boxer
Norma’s Mom
Pauline, a big, broad-shouldered countrywoman
Jimmy Lee, Pauline’s fierce-tempered boyfriend, aka “James Hell”
Saul, a former beau of Nanny
Dick Johnson, Nanny’s first husband
Bill, Nanny’s second husband
Sweet Tooth Sam, a neighborhood character
Mr. Lucious, a friendly, one-armed man who occasionally visits Nanny
Tina
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the place
Lackawanna, New York, a town on the banks of Lake Erie
the time
Then and Now
synopsis
first beat
estify. Nanny is remembered as a kind, generous, and loving woman with “a heart of
gold.”
Nanny. Nanny explains that, before she opened her boarding houses, she worked cooking and cleaning for a white couple with two young boys, whom she loved dearly. Every
Saturday night, before leaving for her day off, Nanny would bake a cake or pie as a treat
for the boys. Touched by Nanny’s thoughtfulness, the boys’ mother tells Nanny that she
should make an additional cake to take home to her own family. Nanny protests, but the
woman insists. One Saturday as Nanny prepares to leave with her family’s cake, her
employer turns on her and orders her to put down the cake, saying she can’t afford to feed
Nanny’s whole family every week.
Nanny stormed off and never saw those boys again. Determined to be her own boss, she
bought a five-bedroom flat and began to rent out the bedrooms. She eventually came to
control two rooming houses, a taxi stand, and a restaurant.
1956. In 1956, life in Lackawanna is good. Jobs and money are plentiful thanks to flourishing steel plants, grain mills, railroads, and docks. Recognizing the opportunities available to industrious individuals, Nanny regularly returns to her hometown of Farmville,
Virginia, to bring families north to Lackawanna, where she houses, feeds, and clothes them
while finding them jobs.
Ol’ Po’ Carl. Carl, one of Nanny’s borders, used to play baseball in the Negro League.
Now he is an old man with a weakness for women and “roaches” (cirrhosis) of the liver.
While he no longer drinks, he continues to sell liquor from time to time, so he always has
a bit of money to give the pregnant young women who blame him for their condition.
Carl says he liked Junior’s mother, Alean, too, but she chose Junior’s father, a Puerto
Rican, instead. When his mother and father split up, Junior and Alean moved into the
deluxe room of Nanny’s house at 101 Ridge Road.
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2
Ricky Delivering and Discovering Me. One day, while delivering clean sheets to the
room, Ricky discovers Junior alone, sleeping in front of the television. The next day Nanny
tells Alean that from now on she should leave Junior with Nanny at 32 Wasson Avenue
(Nanny’s other boarding house) when she goes to work.
Ride with Me. The Narrator remembers the joy of riding in Nanny’s Lincoln
Continental through the countryside. On one of those lovely rides, Nanny tells Junior to
pull a letter out of her purse and read it.
Mr. Taylor’s Letter. The letter is from Lemuel Taylor, who is about to be released from
the Gowanda Psychiatric Hospital, but has nowhere to go. In the letter Mr. Taylor asks
Nanny to come fetch him and take him in. After laying down the house rules, Nanny
agrees to take a chance on him and agrees to rent Mr. Taylor a room.
As soon as Mr. Taylor moves into the boarding house, he is accosted by Numb Finger
Pete, who lost all but two of his fingers to frostbite one very cold night while trying to walk
home from South Buffalo. A “numb-fingered, one-legged fight” breaks out between the
two men. Later that winter, Mr. Taylor left the house. A couple of days later, Nanny and
Junior find Mr. Taylor sitting in a corner of a dilapidated building. Mr. Taylor refuses to
leave, so Nanny leaves him some warm food and promises to send Junior back with blankets and water. When they later returned, however, Mr. Taylor was dead.
Small Paul. Small Paul returned to Lackawanna—and Nanny’s care—after a 17-year
absence. He’d been away since 1956, apparently a memorable year. Paul recalls highlights
of 1956, including Nat King Cole’s performance before a frenzied all-white audience, the
Supreme Court’s decision mandating desegregation, Elvis’s recording of “Heartbreak
Hotel,” the Yankees’ victory in the World Series, and Paul’s own betrayal by a woman.
When he found his woman with another man, Paul stabbed them both and was sentenced
to 25 years for double homicide.
Freddie. Freddie Cobb served in the Army during World War II. He is incredibly proud
of his service, though because of his race he was never allowed to carry a gun. He remembers the horror of having to stack and bury fallen soldiers.
Goodness. The Narrator remembers Nanny’s boundless generosity to lost animals, as
well as humans. One of the many creatures Nanny took in and raised was an orphaned raccoon. She prepared him a breakfast of scrambled eggs with toast every day. Eventually, no
longer able to tolerate his screaming and aggravation, she tearfully sets out to release him
into the wild.
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beat two
he Dog. The Narrator remembers how the women at Nanny’s did “the dog” (a tightskirted dance) after the sun went down. He saw a lot he wasn’t supposed to see.
After Hours. For a while, Nanny ran an after-hours joint without trouble from the law,
because the police were always there eating, drinking, and gambling right alongside the
colorful characters of Nanny’s neighborhood. The first of every month, Nanny’s blackjack
game and fish-fry was the place to be.
3 a.m. There is a knock at the door. It is Norma, whose husband, Gerald, beats her. This
time he’s knocked out her two front teeth, and she wants to get away from him for good.
Nanny lets Norma and her children stay the night. The next day, Gerald, who is a Golden
Gloves boxing champion, arrives, demanding to know where his wife is. Nanny tells him that
if he hits Norma again, Nanny will retaliate. Nanny finds Norma and her children a home of
their own. Grateful for her help, Norma takes Nanny to meet her well-to-do white parents
in Toronto. Over an elegant lunch, Junior is amazed by the ease with which Nanny fits into
such gracious surroundings, although she lives most of her life amid liquor, blood, and chaos.
Jimmy Lee & Pauline. “James Hell” and his girlfriend, Pauline, get drunk and fight
every weekend. Typically, he hits her and she goes crying to Nanny, but the next day
Pauline invariably returns to Jimmy. One weekend, however, Pauline decides to fight back
and cuts Jimmy with a box cutter and runs down the street. Jimmy catches her and slashes
her throat. Four days and 64 stitches later, Nanny tells Pauline she needs to find another
man. Pauline says she can’t: “Jimmy is my ball and chain and I’m his.”
Nanny’s Men. Lottie remembers her high-stepping days going out on the town with
Nanny, as well as a few of Nanny’s men.
Nanny met Saul at Lackawanna’s Our Lady of Victory Hospital in 1948. She used to get
mad at him because he liked to drink every day. She kicked him out when he started cheating
on her with a woman named Inez: “Let the doorknob hit you where the good Lord split you.”
Nanny married her first husband, Dick Johnson, in Farmville in 1926. They fought all
the time; he was an evil, jealous man who continued to spy on her even after they divorced.
Eventually, Nanny married Bill, a ladies’ man 17 years her junior. They stayed together
until his death in 1981, despite his troublemaking. Bill fathered four children with other
women, including three while he was married to Nanny (one with her cousin), all of which
Nanny helped to raise. One day a young girl Nanny had taken in off the street comes to
tell Nanny that Bill has made her pregnant; Nanny responds by giving her a meal and helping her find a new place to live. After that, Nanny didn’t like to take in women at 32
Wasson Avenue, although she never failed to help them.
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Although Nanny became “Mama” to Junior, Bill was never “Dad.” Once on a fishing
trip with Bill, Junior went for a swim while Bill entertained a lady friend in his van. When
he returned from the swim, Junior found that his clothes and the fishing pole Bill had
given him had disappeared. Furious at the loss, Bill abandons Junior, leaving him to walk
home alone. Junior calls Nanny on a pay phone, and she sends somebody to fetch him.
When Bill comes home later, Nanny tells him that if he ever mistreats Junior again, she
will blow the back of his head off.
Sweet Tooth Sam. Sweet Tooth Sam, named for the yellow tooth that sticks out of his
mouth, was the crazy man in the neighborhood. He often talked to himself. One day, Sam’s
ranting about death and demand for his keys alarms others in Nanny’s restaurant and they
send for Bill. Nanny calms Sam with a set of keys and some cornbread. Just as peace settles in, Bill runs in and throws Sam to the ground. Nanny tells Bill that she is fine and he
leaves. Nanny asks Sam if he wants more cornbread.
Lucious. Lucious tells Junior why he has only one arm: When he was young, Lucious
courted a girl named Annie Mae, who also had another admirer, a white boy named Joe
Tinsley. One day, Joe hassled Lucious and Annie Mae while they were out walking.
Obeying Annie Mae’s request that he restrain himself, Lucious did nothing at first. But
later, Lucious went to Joe’s farm and beat Joe with a tree branch. Terrified, Lucious fled
and hid for days in a swamp, where a snake bit him on the arm. Although the arm had to
be amputated, he feels lucky to be alive.
Grease Scalp. Nanny never needs or wants much—and she is proud of that. She did,
however, love to have her scalp greased with Dixie Peach.
Death. Junior visits Nanny on her deathbed in the hospital. In tears, he thanks her for
being his best friend. She tells them there is plenty of time for thank yous.
Feeling Better. Nanny is feeling a mite better. But she wants whoever took her teeth to
bring them back.
Peace/Peas. Nanny dreams of trying to climb over the wall into a “beautiful garden of
peas.” She asks Junior to convince the doctors to let her go home, where she belongs.
Nanny. At home, despite her declining health, Nanny continues to fuss over everyone,
making sure they get enough to eat, take their baths, and go to their doctors’ appointments.
Junior reprimands her for wearing herself out, but she merely tells him she will be all right.
She sends him away to do his work. She’s so proud of him.
One night Junior gets a phone call. Nanny is gone.
This Is What I Do. A medley of memories confirms the immensity of Nanny’s contributions to the world. “She always gave us hope. And a hot meal. That’s just who she was.”
5
talkin’ the blues
An Interview with Ruben Santiago-Hudson
by maxine kern
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uben Santiago-Hudson, winner of the 1996 Tony Award for his portrayal of Canewell
in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars (seen at A.C.T. in 1995), returns to A.C.T. in
October with his own storytelling center stage in Lackawanna Blues. A solo performance tour de
force, Lackawanna Blues is a sweetly funny, glowing tribute to Miss Rachel “Nanny” Crosby, the
selfless and spirited surrogate mother who raised Santiago-Hudson in her upstate New York
boarding house.
Lackawanna Blues lovingly transports us back to Santiago-Hudson’s childhood in
Lackawanna, New York, a thriving steel town on the banks of Lake Erie that, along with other
northern cities, experienced waves of African-American urban migration in the 1950s and ’60s.
Jobs were plentiful, the ports were bustling, jazz streamed from the local nightclubs, and there was
plenty of trouble to be found by anyone who went looking for it. Nanny’s rooming house at 32
Wasson Avenue was a safe haven for anyone in need of a place to call home, and she welcomed
every stray man, woman, or child who crossed her path with an “open hand and warm heart.”
Santiago-Hudson embodies more than 20 of the eccentric and colorful characters who passed
through Nanny’s care, giving voice to the “strange lot” of criminals and prostitutes, drifters, ramblers, and would-be philosophers who lived and ate in Nanny’s boarding houses. SantiagoHudson is accompanied onstage by blues master Bill Sims, Jr. (subject of the PBS documentary “An
American Love Story” and winner of an OBIE Award for Lackawanna Blues), whose original
soulful riffs on acoustic guitar provide a delicate punctuation to Santiago-Hudson’s stirring
stories.
Commissioned by New York’s Public Theater, where the play premiered to rave reviews in the
spring of 2001 (and won a special citation OBIE Award), Lackawanna Blues has been touring
regional theaters across the country ever since. Santiago-Hudson spoke to dramaturg Maxine
Kern about the original production:
part of what i’d love to communicate to the audience is your
sense of yourself as a storyteller. where does that come from?
Well, in African-American culture, as in African culture, storytellers have kept our history.
We call then griots. Storytellers would gather people round and would tell people the history—who was who, what was what—and that was the way tradition was passed on. Even
though we were removed from Africa, a lot of our traditions stayed with us. There’s always
someone who keeps the history. In the black community, people like to spin tales; this goes
way back to when they were slaves and couldn’t write or say too much. Still, at the birth of
a new child they would say, “You didn’t just come up out of the dirt; my father was a prince
in my village and your grandfather was a king.” They would pass on their tradition and give
themselves a sense of pride.
In [Nanny’s] rooming house, everyone had his or her own story. Everyone came from a
different place to Lackawanna, and, as Nanny would say, “Everybody got scars—some you
could hide better than others, but eventually they all show. Whatever your past is, whatever your life is, eventually, it’s all gonna get out.”
Now, it was a very common thing for a black man to be on the run from something as
major as murder or something as minor as not showing up for court, often because they
had put him in jail for “loitering.” Three black men talking on the corner were considered
loiterers inciting a riot and would be put in jail. Everyone had a record in the twenties and
thirties and forties, because laws were made to make a black person feel inferior, and you
couldn’t vote or spend time with friends, or marry a person of another race. Having a
record, as the old blues man would say, doesn’t make someone a bad person, because everyone had some brushes with the law.
I loved listening to people telling their stories, and I would tell people’s stories because
they fascinated me. People would say, “Wow, I can’t believe that”—until I would take them
back to Lackawanna, and they would come into the rooming house, and there were all the
people I talked about. There was Small Paul and there was Freddie Cobbs and all the people I had told stories about and imitated. My college friends had thought I was making it
all up, but when they came home with me they just said, “Oh man, snap, man, this is gold.
You were raised up here, man. Man, I would trade anything to do this.”
I was like a little prince there. Everyone had his and her hopes on me. “Doc, you can
read and write, you have a chance, you can make it.” And then I had Nanny, and ultimately
she would not let me fall. To fall was like falling on a trampoline, because I would bounce
right back up. I would land right in her heart.
how much were people in the boarding house telling you the
stories and thinking that you were the future?
Sometimes they weren’t telling it to me, but I’d just be listening and sucking it up.
Someone would want to be one better than the next one. “You ain’t nothing. You can’t read
and write. And they don’t let you have no gun in that war.” “Yeah, but I was still in the war.
They don’t let me have no gun, but bullets were still zipping by my ears. They were shootin’
at me.”
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And I was listening to those stories and I thought, Wow, that was pretty deep, you in
the war and you don’t have a gun. And not until I got to be a man did I realize how devastating that could be. You’re good enough to be in a war, but you ain’t good enough to
have a gun. You’re not good enough to have a job and you don’t count here. You count there
because they need every able body. It really destroyed a lot of these guys and they’d be
drinking a lot, chasing those blues. They would find solace, and they would find happiness,
fraternizing and being there. They would be safe in this house.
in talking to people, have you found that there are other nannys?
Oh, everybody has someone like that. All I was familiar with was Lackawanna, New York,
Ward No. 1. I thought Nanny was just the one unique one. But every time I would give
readings and presentations, people would come up to me—little Jewish ladies and Korean
ladies—and they would say, “That’s my Aunt Ginny,” “That’s my Grandma,” “That’s Big
Mama,” and “That’s Aunt Louise.” It’s always a woman. The outward appearance of every
community, the muscle and the strength, the spirit is a man, but underneath it all, what’s
holding the whole fabric together is a woman.
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when did you realize that you had the ability to become these
people? when did you realize that you were an actor?
I never knew that I could really do justice to their stories. I’d be ego-tripping if I said that.
I know I loved to act. When I was in the second grade, the teacher put me in a play and I
loved it. I loved being up there and I loved the accolades and the attention that it got me.
Even though Nanny loved me, my real mother had abandoned me. I was looking for attention. And I could do it pretty well. And as I got bigger, I noticed I could do things others
couldn’t. Accents, memorize 16-, 17-page monologues. Inside me I would have instincts,
I’d know this is the way to do something, and people started noticing and saying, “You’re
special, you got a really special thing here.”
Every time, acting wouldn’t let me go. I’d go to do this, do that, and acting would go,
“No, no.” And then some professor, some teacher, some reverend would say, “That’s what
you’re gonna be, you’re gonna be an actor.”
Then Mama Overton, who Nanny brought into my life to help raise me, to help give
me a bit of spiritual guidance and a lot of discipline, always told me, “Whatever you wanna
be, you gonna be good at it.”
When I was going to school, guidance counselors told me to learn a skill. “You can’t get
a job, the reality in the world is one in a million black people makes it, and you’re not that
one.” But Nanny said, “No, go to college. You’ve got the opportunity to do that now. I went
to third grade. You go to college. Whatever you need, I’ll be there for you.”
If I told here I needed ten dollars she’d give me twenty and she’d say, “Put that other ten
away for a rainy day.” She gave me responsibility and trust, and that makes a man out of
you. It’s amazing; it takes a real good woman to teach you how to be a man.
did you find that the men who were telling you stories were like
surrogate fathers?
No, no, my real father was always around. He wanted us to live together, but I would never
leave Nanny. Nanny would bring us together when my mother wouldn’t allow him to see
me. He would hug me and talk to me in Spanish and cry like a baby telling Nanny after
I’d gone to bed how he wanted to be with me. But Nanny was my mother. She put bandaids on my knees when they were scuffed up, took me to church, and made my lunch every
day. Hugged me up when I was crying, made sure I had Christmas, my birthday, all my
vaccinations—it was Nanny.
hat would she think about LACKAWANNA BLUES?
She would think, You give me too much credit. Anyone would have done the same thing.
And she would laugh. She’d have a real good time.
is there any part of the script you think she wouldn’t like?
She wouldn’t be that happy that I tell the truth about some of the people who wronged
her. She would probably say, “They ain’t like that.” That’s one of the reasons I hesitated a
long time about telling this story and putting it up in front of people. Sometimes Nanny
was so good, it was to a fault. So good, people would say, “She’s crazy. She’s a fool.” But
she had her own agenda. All the things she did in life she was doing “to make her way in
the life to come.”
was there a time when the real world that knocks you around
came into sharp contrast with life with nanny in lackawanna?
There was this time when I was going everywhere: the Kennedy Center, the Edinburgh
Festival, all over Europe and the U.S., in theater and on TV, and getting all these awards.
Still I went home to the rooming house, and there was all these winos and alcoholics and
some of them with cataracts on their eyes and they could hardly see, and they’d hear my
voice and they’d say, “Doc, you a star now, I told you.” They would just light up. And even
Nanny would be just as proud. I mean, even on her deathbed I’d come in, and she’d just
9
smile. “I knew you were gonna come. I told them.” Then all of a sudden the door would
darken and there would be ten nurses. “Next time when you come, bring ’em all a picture.”
She knew that I’d be there, and that made me proud.
so that connection, no matter what you did . . .
I was never too big or too arrogant to forget where I come from, that’s why I’m writing
about Lackawanna. There was a pride to that little town. This little gem of a town was this
shiny little star in this universe, but it’s not now. It’s run down since the seventies and since
the steel industry died. In ten years’ time it can return to its previous status if they’ll just
hold on to this lakefront property, if they’ll just hold on.?
Maxine Kern is a freelance dramaturg in New York City. This article was written for the Public Theater’s study guide for the original production of Lackawanna Blues and is reprinted with permission.
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a brief biography of ruben santiago-hudson
uben Santiago-Hudson was born in Lackawanna, New York. His father was Puerto
Rican and his mother was African American. Because his mother was a drug addict,
however, Santiago-Hudson was actually raised by the person to whom he refers as
“Nanny,” the landlady of 32 Wasson Avenue, a boarding house where he lived. Nanny and
some 20-odd inhabitants of the boarding house are the characters in Lackawanna Blues.
Santiago-Hudson received his bachelor’s degree in theater from SUNY Binghamton
and an M.F.A. in acting from Wayne State University. He has lectured on theater at colleges and universities and served as a private acting coach.
An accomplished performer in theater, film, and television, Santiago-Hudson made his
Broadway debut playing opposite Gregory Hines in Jelly’s Last Jam. He also appeared on
Broadway (and at A.C.T.) in August Wilson’s Seven Guitars, for which he won Tony, Clarence
Derwent, Drama League, Outer Critics’ Circle, and FANY awards. Other New York credits
include Shakespeare’s Henry VIII and Measure for Measure, East Texas Hot Links, and Lackawanna
Blues (which received two OBIE Awards and a Drama Desk nomination) at The Public
Theater/New York Shakespeare Festival; Ceremonies in Dark Old Men and A Soldier’s Play at the
Negro Ensemble Company; and Deep Down at INTAR. His regional credits include A Raisin in
the Sun at the Williamstown Theatre Festival and Glengarry Glen Ross at the McCarter Theatre.
In film, Santiago-Hudson has appeared opposite Al Pacino in Devil’s Advocate and
costarred in Shaft with Samuel L. Jackson. Other feature film credits include Winning Girls
through Psychic Mind Control (world premiere, Seattle International Film Festival, 2002);
Bleeding Hearts, directed by Gregory Hines; Blown Away with Jeff Bridges; Paramount’s
Coming to America; a costarring role with John Travolta in Domestic Disturbance; Solomon
and Sheba; and Which Way Home.
Television audiences have seen Santiago-Hudson in the CBS miniseries “American
Tragedy,” which also starred Christopher Plummer. He also costarred with David Caruso
on CBS’s “Michael Hayes.” He appeared in NBC’s The Hunt for the Unicorn Killer and can
be heard as the voice of the villain Jess Chapel in the HBO animated series “Spawn.” He
has also played regular roles on “Another World” and NBC’s “Dear John” and has appeared
in Little John (Hallmark Hall of Hame), “All My Children” (Dr. Zeke McMillan), “The
Red Sneakers,” “Law & Order,” “Third Watch,” “Touched by an Angel,” “West Wing,”
“Early Edition” (recurring), Rear Window, “NYPD Blue,” “New York Undercover,” “The
Return of Hunter,” Daddy’s Girl, “The Cosby Mysteries,” “Murphy Brown,” “Life Goes
On,” and “Amen,” among many others.
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african-american northern migration
by maxine kern
hen the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, less than eight percent of the African-American population lived in the Northeast or Midwest.
Even in 1900, approximately 90 percent of all African Americans still resided in the
South. However, migration from the South has long been a significant feature of
black history. An early exodus from the South occurred between 1879 and 1881 as
60,000 African Americans moved north in search of social and economic freedom. In
the early decades of the 20th century, this movement to the North increased tremendously. The reasons for this “Great Migration” are complex. On the one hand, an
infestation of southern cotton crops by boll weevils diminished production and curtailed the need for farm labor in the South. Also, growing unemployment and
increasing racial violence encouraged blacks to leave the South. World War I required
greater labor for the factories that supplied the combatants, and northern manufacturers recruited southern black workers to fill factory jobs.
As black communities in northern cities grew, black working people became clientele for an expanding black professional and business class. A new black leadership
was freer to express a sense of racial pride and solidarity with working-class African
Americans. While Jim Crow laws and political terrorism continued to discourage
blacks from voting in the South, African Americans in northern cities became an
important political force.
African Americans also went to war. Approximately 400,000 black soldiers served
in the armed forces. Despite their demonstrated military proficiency and bravery,
black soldiers were insulted and harassed by white soldiers. As African-American
veterans returned home, white opposition to wartime gains intensified. College-educated blacks were still few in number, but they generally provided articulate political
and cultural leadership. Black leaders were united in believing that blacks’ wartime
sacrifices entitled them to first-class citizenship. A subsequent increase in racial pride
and awareness in the 1920s during an era called the Harlem Renaissance grew from
a black cultural community of intellectuals, poets, novelists, actors, musicians, and
painters. Black communities in the North supported black leaders who were elected
to many state and local offices. An emerging middle class was growing rapidly.
The African-American cultural and political renaissance lost momentum in the
1930s during the Great Depression. While 17 percent of whites could not support
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themselves by 1934, the devastation was much worse for African Americans. In some
black communities 80 percent of the people were on welfare.
A cycle of increased employment and migration arose again by the 1940s with U.S.
involvement in the World War II effort. American factories were hiring new workers
for war production, finally relieving the Depression’s stubborn unemployment. Still,
blacks benefited less than white workers from rising employment and increased
wages. Discrimination in employment and wage policies continued to create disadvantages for black workers.
Early in 1941, A. Philip Randolph met with Roosevelt administration officials to
demand equal employment for blacks in industries working under federal government
defense contracts. He threatened to lead 100,000 African Americans in a march on
Washington, D.C., to protest job discrimination. Negotiations were heated, but
finally Roosevelt issued Executive Order 8802 forbidding discrimination based on
race, creed, color, or national origin in the employment of workers for defense industries with federal contracts. The order also established a Fair Employment Practices
Committee (FEPC) to oversee the implementation of the order. Roosevelt’s actions
immediately opened thousands of steady well-paying jobs to black workers and
encouraged a new surge of migration from southern to northern cities.
The need for labor opened factory work to women and drew large numbers from
the domestic jobs many had taken during the worst days of the Depression. Working
in war industries, black women found that the pay was better and the work was generally less physically demanding than domestic work. Also, many black women who
had lost domestic jobs to white women during the 1930s now returned to reclaim
those jobs as whites left them. African-American men and women fully engaged in
the war effort were determined to pursue a “Double V Campaign”: victory over fascism abroad and victory over racism at home. Consequently, the pace of civil rights
protest quickened during the mid 1940s. Drawing on increasingly liberal racial attitudes, the interracial Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), formed in 1942, conducted nonviolent sit-ins and demonstrations in Chicago, New York, and other
northern cities throughout the 1940s. These sit-ins challenged racial segregation and
had some success at integrating public accommodations such as restaurants. Supreme
Court rulings in the 1940s struck down many methods of segregation. In 1944 the
court outlawed southern Democrats’ whites-only primaries, striking down their argument that the party was a private club and primary elections were open to club members only. In 1946, the court ruled that segregation in interstate bus travel was unconstitutional, and in 1947 it disallowed racial discrimination in the federal civil service.
13
14
The late 1940s also saw the color barrier fall in many areas of society that had been
all white. One of the most dramatic instances occurred in 1947, when Jackie
Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers, becoming the first black to play Major
League baseball. In 1949, Wesley A. Brown became the first African American to
graduate from the U.S. Naval Academy.
Following the war, the G.I. Bill, funded by the federal government, gave new educational opportunities to veterans and promised greater economic prosperity.
Thousands of black veterans enrolled in technical training or colleges and universities, financed by government benefits. These black veterans paved the way for ongoing increases in African-American college enrollment. The number of AfricanAmerican college students increased from 124,000 in 1947 to 233,000 in 1961.
African Americans continued to migrate from the rural South to the urban North
to improve their economic status. From 1948 to 1961, the proportion of blacks with
low incomes (earning below $3,000 a year) declined from 78 percent to 47 percent;
at the same time, the proportion earning over $10,000 a year increased from under 1
percent to 17 percent. Although black income improved, it remained far below that
of whites. Black median income in 1961 was still lower than white median income
had been in 1948.
Whites reacted violently to the wartime movement of blacks to urban areas in the
North and the West. By the late 1940s, as the black percentage of city populations
increased, more and more whites moved to the new suburbs that often restricted
black residence. During the late 1960s and ’70s, civil rights activists began to concentrate on eliminating the remaining barriers to black freedom and opportunity.
Although segregation by law (de jure segregation) in the South had been defeated,
segregation by custom (de facto segregation) still remained. In the South, legal segregation had been supplemented by customary racial segregation, but even in the
North, where there generally were no segregation laws, custom enforced racial segregation.
African Americans had been barred from many restaurants, movie theaters, nightclubs, and other public accommodations by customary practice. Generally, landlords
in white neighborhoods would not rent to black tenants, forcing them to pay higher
rents in the only housing available to them in black neighborhoods. Banks denied
financing, and real estate agents refused to show houses in traditionally white areas
to blacks even if they could afford them.
Discriminatory hiring practices confined most black workers to the least-secure,
lowest-paying jobs regardless of their qualifications. Those few opportunities open to
black professionals like doctors, lawyers, and teachers were in positions and institutions serving the black community. As a result of limited opportunities, by the beginning of the 1960s, more than half of African Americans had incomes below the
poverty line.
By 1950, the black population comprised approximately 11 percent of the population of
the United States, while black migrants comprised 40 percent of the population in several
major U.S. cities. By the time Ruben Santiago-Hudson was growing up in Lackawanna,
New York, where industrial jobs and related employment in black urban communities were
once again on the rise, a continuing migration had transformed the African-American
population from a predominantly southern, rural group to a northern, urban one. Racial
conflicts and tension were far from eliminated, but opportunity and leadership were also
on the rise.
Reprinted with permission from the Public Theater’s study guide for the original production of Lackawanna Blues.
15
african-american migration and
urbanization by the numbers
[E]ven in the mid-fifties America was a changed place from what it had been
only a decade and a half before. Two hot wars wedged between them and coming after them, a cold one, plus the growing significance of the atomic bomb as
a force that had suddenly transformed the world into a place that was no long
a series of frontiers, [but] a community which would survive or perish by its
own hand were only the impersonal parts of an American’s experience of the
contemporary world that had changed him and his society perhaps radically in
the fifteen or so short years since 1940.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America,
by LeRoi Jones
1865
Ninety-one percent of the United States’ five million African Americans
live in the South, roughly the same percentage as in 1790. Blacks
comprise 36% of the total population in the southern states while they
represent just 3% of the total northern population.
1890
Sixty-two percent of northern blacks are urban. In 1960, this figure
jumps to 95%.
1910
Chicago’s black population is 40,000; by 1930, it will be 240,000. New
York’s black population will grow from 100,000 to 330,000 by 1930. Los
Angeles will be the home of 40,000 blacks in 1930, up from 8,000 in
1910. Eighty-nine percent of America’s blacks live in the South, and 80%
of those live in rural areas.
1915–20
Five hundred thousand to one million African Americans leave the rural
South for new opportunities in the urban North. Thousands more move
West, while many of those who stay in the South still migrate—
from the country to the city.
1917
Wages in the South range from $.50 to $2 a day, while in the North they
range from $2 to $5 a day. Before World War I, Detroit’s estimated black
population is less than 6,000. By the end of the 1920s, it will be 120,000.
16
1920
In the 11 southern states that formed the Confederacy, there are
8,055,000 blacks, and in 11 northern states, there are 1,086,000.
1920s
Blacks comprise, at most, 10% of a northern city’s population, compared
to 25% to 50% of a southern city. Seven hundred thousand to one million
blacks leave the southern United States for the North and the West.
1940
The black majorities that Louisiana, South Carolina, and Mississippi
housed have diminished; 23% of African Americans live in the
northern and western United States.
1950
The black population in the 11 southern states that had formed the
Confederacy has risen to 9,052,000, a 13% increase since 1920, while in
11 northern states the count is now 4,258,000, a 400% increase.
1960
Forty percent of the nation’s blacks live in the North and the West, and
nearly 75% of all blacks live in cities—the same percentage that lived in
rural areas at the beginning of the century.
1940–90
Chicago’s black population rises from 282,000 to 1,197,000; New York’s
from 477,000 to 1,784,000; Detroit’s from 151,000 to 759,000; and Los
Angeles’ from 98,000 to 505,000.
Sources: “Great Migration,” www.africana.com; “Segregation in the United States,” encarta.msn.com.
17
lackawanna, new york
A Mid-Century Portrait
A
pamphlet written in the 1940s (still available from the Lackawanna Public Library),
offers an overview of mid-20th-century life in Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s hometown.
city at a glance
Lackawanna, first known as West Seneca, settled about 1890, given city charter in 1909.
Area of city 5.96 square miles.
Population 1940 census 24,058.
Center of a 50-mile area having a total population of upwards of a million people.
Steel city.
On highway routes 5 and 20.
Two high schools and twelve grade schools, public and parochial, evening classes.
Public Library with 26,000 books.
Municipal athletic field.
Niagara Falls electric power and also natural gas—at reasonable rates.
Railroads: Erie, Lehigh Valley, New York Central, Delaware, Lackawanna, and Western,
etc. from Buffalo.
Our Lady of Victory hospital and Moses Taylor hospital.
Our Lady of Victory National Shrine.
18
general information
Lackawanna, or the Steel City, as it is often called because of the location here of the
Lackawanna plant of the Bethlehem Steel Company, is a city of 24,058 population, bounded
on the west by Lake Erie and on the north by the city of Buffalo. Many advantages are gained
from such a situation. As it is five miles southwest of the downtown section of Buffalo,
Lackawanna has the shopping conveniences of the larger city. Two transportation companies
serve the area; several routes of the International Railway Company of Buffalo touch the city
line and the Buffalo Transit Company gives in-city and Buffalo service. These lines connect
with others to bus and railroad terminals, and with docks and the Buffalo airport.
The nearness of the two cities also serves the cultural interests of Lackawannians as
Buffalo has large libraries, Kleinhans Music Hall with concerts by many outstanding musicians and musical groups, the Albright Art Gallery, two large museums, etc.
Two advantages are gained by the city’s location on the lake: cheap transportation for
raw materials and finished products is furnished for industries, and the large body of water
tends to keep the climate temperate.
Lackawanna is a one-industry town—steel. It is served by a good hotel, two banks,
many small shops and stores, restaurants and taverns. Railroad yards, ⁄-mile wide, divide
the town with a wide overhead viaduct as the connecting link.
Lackawanna is a city of diverse nationalities and cultures. Over 22% of the population
comes directly from Poland, Yugoslavia, Italy, Hungary, and Austria. Many others are children or grandchildren of these people. Over 7% of the population are Negroes. This mixture of nationalities and races has been an important factor in the development of a fine
community spirit and abundance of life for those who live and work here. . . .
religion
Because of the many nationalities in Lackawanna, many language groups are represented
in its churches. There are eight Roman Catholic churches of which three are Polish, and
one each of Italian, Magyar, and Croatian. Our Lady of Victory Basilica is famous the
country over for its beautiful architecture.
There are three Orthodox churches: one Polish, one Russian, and one Serbian.
Six of the ten Protestant churches are Negro and one Magyar Hungarian. . . .
historical
The ground on which the city of Lackawanna now stands was formerly occupied by the
Seneca Indians. Ridge Road, now the Main Street, began as an Indian trail to Lake Erie. . . .
Two developments vitally affected the growing district of West Seneca. It became a
freight terminal for railroads leading to the West. It became a freight terminal for railroads
leading to the West and the Federal government erected a long breakwall at the eastern
end of Lake Erie. . . .
Attracted by these facilities, the Lackawanna Steel Plant came to West Seneca in 1900
and erected a large plant on the shore of Lake Erie.
Due to a controversy over improvements, the Township of West Seneca split into eastern and
western parts. The Western changed its name to Lackawanna because of the Steel Company.
When the company changed its name to the Bethlehem Steel Corporation, the Town retained
the name of Lackawanna. In 1909, Lackawanna was granted a charter and became a city.
Excerpted from Lackawanna: Steel City of the Great Lakes, published by the Lackawanna Chamber of Commerce (c. 1947).
19
During Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s childhood in the 1940s and ’50s, the population of
Lackawanna, New York, represented a lively microcosm of ethnic diversity, drawn to the
town largely by the availability of jobs at the steel plant and other industries. More than
22% of the town’s residents hailed from Poland, Yugoslavia, Italy, Hungary, and Austria,
while more than 7% were African American. A survey of mid-1950s headlines from the
local paper, the Lackawanna Leader, reveals coverage of a wide variety of issues, from
Croatian rallies in support of the fight against Communism to a voter registration appeal
issued to African Americans by the Civic Liberties League. On August 13, 1953, the
Leader acknowledged the town’s Suburban Jr. Olympics winners: seven of the eleven victors were African American. A month later, the Leader reported the defeat (6 to 2) of the
Rochester Ukrainians by the Lackawanna Hispanos in the opening game of the Intercity
Soccer League of Upper New York State, while Funeral H. Buchheit topped the Knights
of Columbus bowling scores. And in 1955, two young African Americans, Charles Hill
(first place) and Bill Bilowus (second place), represented Lackawanna in the county-wide
horseshoe finals at the Hamburg Fair.
■
The Bethlehem Steel Company remained an active presence in the Lackawanna community in 1953, as suggested by this job advertisement that appeared weekly in the
Lackawanna Leader:
20
Wouldn’t you like to get a job where you can earn good money right from
the start, even with no previous experience?
Where you have opportunities to advance as far as your abilities will take
you?
Where your work is steady, interesting, and your fellow workers friendly?
Hundreds of jobs like that are waiting for the right men to fill them at
Bethlehem Steel’s Lackawanna plant. In an hour or less, our employment people can tell you about the work, and the many benefits available, such as life
insurance, sickness and accident insurance, Blue Cross hospitalization, Blue
Shield surgical benefits, paid vacations, liberal pension plan.
Come in and talk it over with us. Bring your Social Security card and, if
you’re a veteran, your discharge papers.
The employment office is in the main office building, on Hamburg
Turnpike, just over the Buffalo city line. You can park your car free, right across
the road. Look for the big sign.
the blues
by michaela goldhaber
t takes a man that’s had the blues to sing the blues,” many musicians would say. The
blues grew up in the Mississippi Delta, out in the cotton fields, along the railroads,
on the mule trails, and in the levee camps. The bitter poetry and powerful music of the
blues were often necessary to give African Americans the necessary “pep” to work sun-upto-sun-down jobs.
Black “mule skinners” used songs to keep moving for long, hard hours with heavy loads,
and the mules would holler along as they were worked to death building levees to keep the
Mississippi River from flooding. “Roustabouts” loading and unloading cargo along the
Mississippi would sing to keep their muscles going, load after back-breaking load. And the
blues has always been dance music. When the work was done, people would gather
together in a ramshackle club or a tool shed, dancing and grinding to the sweet sad sounds
of the blues.
What is the blues about? Mostly human relationships. Women who done men wrong,
men who done women wrong, an appeal for love and warmth in a cold, hard world. Many
blues singers say they simply think about a bad experience with a loved one, and out comes
a song. “The blues is about a woman,” said the legendary bluesman Sam Chatmon. “If your
wife or someone misuses you, you make up a song to sing. Instead of tellin’ her in words,
you’ll sing that song.” Another blues great, Memphis Slim, said, “Blues is a kind of
revenge. . . . We all have had a hard time in life, and things we couldn’t say or do, so we
sing it.”
The sound and inspiration of the blues are similar to those of gospel, the music of the
African-American church. Though a churchgoer might call a blues musician a “guitarpicking child of the devil,” blues music had its roots in church music. The blues was considered sinful because of the intimate physical dancing that usually accompanied them, as
well as the sexual imagery of their lyrics, as in this Chatmon song:
“I
Says I told you to your face
I had another good girl to shake it in your place.
Babe, it’s your last time
Shaking it in the bed with me.
Where gospel offers the problems of the world up to God for a solution, blues songs are
laments, moaning the troubles of this world without hope of solution.
21
Any good blues musician is constantly changing his songs, so no two performances are
alike. The blues are intimate music, a conversation between the bluesman and his guitar.
Great blues musicians like Muddy Waters also admit their debts to earlier songsters. There
are only so many tunes and themes shared among a handful of singers, and blues scholars
enjoy following the lines of tradition, as clear to them as family trees, along which each
blues song or style of playing was passed.
Despite the rough life of the blues musician on the road, and the music’s sinful associations, there have also been great women who ventured into the blues. “Ma” Rainey, Bessie
Smith, Memphis Minnie: these powerful blueswomen gave as good as they got, demanding a place to tell their stories and wail their sorrows.
Beginning in 1914 a great exodus of African Americans began as people moved from
the rural South to the big cities of the North. Sharecropping in the South was still only a
step above slavery, and in the big cities there were jobs that paid more in a week than a
farmer could expect in a year. This song seems to capture the frustration of the time:
I ain’ gon raise no mo’ cotton,
I declare I ain’ gon try to raise no mo’ corn.
Gal, if a mule started to runnin’ away with the world,
Oh, lawd, I’m gon let him go ahead on.
22
Blues musicians could actually earn money for playing music at dance halls and bars and
could even record their own songs. Yet white record producers were ready to swindle
African-American performers, cheating them of royalties and paying them next to nothing. Even a successful musician still needed to hold down a day job to support himself.
The sound of the blues changed when it moved to the city. Country musicians played
by ear, with a free and improvisational style. City blues, in contrast, had to be written down
for recording sessions, and therefore became more formal. Also, the noise and crowds of
city clubs made amplification necessary. Muddy Waters was a pioneer in exploiting the
challenges of city playing, using electric guitars and adding instruments to create a new,
bigger sound for the blues.
The blues expresses the harshness of life, including its violence, as shown in this song
by Waters:
I’ll take my .32-20 and lay you in your grave,
And the day of resurrection you gonna rise again. . . .
Everybody keeps on hollerin’ about old Dangerous Doom.
When I, oohhh, get my .32-20, I’m gonna be dangerous, too.
Like rap today, the blues was frank about the dangers of life for African-American people, and the anger they felt. As Alan Lomax writes in The Land Where the Blues Began:
The world of the blues was no child’s garden of verses. It was frontier, it was
ghetto; it was also shaped by old African traditions, that had trained boys in
Africa to be the armed defenders of their village and their nation and now prepared American black youngsters to fight for their neighborhoods and to survive in the harsh worlds of slavery . . . and, often, prison.
23
what is the blues?
The weirdest music I had ever heard.
W. C. Handy, quoted in Big Road Blues:
Tradition & Creativity in the Folk Blues, by David Evans
24
To the detached musicologist, defining the blues is a simple task: a basic I-IV-V chord progression laid over a 12-bar framework. For the rest of us who identify with the music on a
more personal level, it’s a great deal more complicated than that.
Ever since the blues first developed from African-American field hollers, feeling has
been the most essential ingredient. Rough-hewn rural heavyweights Blind Lemon
Jefferson and Charlie Patton, vaudeville-trained belters Bessie Smith and “Ma” Rainey,
and Memphis bandleader W. C. Handy played incalculable roles in defining the idiom. In
Robert Johnson’s mesmerizing hands, the blues jumped out of the Delta stark and menacing; barrelhouse pianists Roosevelt Sykes and Big Maceo gave it thunderous power, and
ebullient alto saxist Louis Jordan injected a dose of happy jumping jive.
Whether drawing from the mighty postwar roar of Chicago giants Muddy Waters and
Howlin’ Wolf, the immaculate guitar excursions of B. B. King and his vast legion of
acolytes, the daunting harmonica exploits of Little Walter and the two Sonny Boy
Williamsons, or the soul-slanted, honey-voiced croons of Bobby “Blue” Bland and Little
Milton, the blues has grown, adapted, remained abreast of the times as the decades sailed
by. It remains a living, breathing entity as we cross the threshold into a new millennium,
its future assured as long as folks search for relief from their suffering or require a rollicking soundtrack for their Saturday night soirees.
The blues is as honest a musical form as it is uplifting. The blues is life—with all its ups
and downs intact.
“What Is the Blues,” by Bill Dahl, www.blues.org/history/index.html
The blues occurs when the Negro is sad, when he is far from his home, his mother, or his
sweetheart. Then he thinks of a motif or a preferred rhythm and takes his trombone, or his
violin, or his banjo, or his clarinet, or his drum, or else he sings, or simply dances. And on
the chosen motif, he plumbs the depths of his imagination. This makes his sadness pass
away—it is the Blues.
Ernest Anserment (1918), quoted in Blues People:
Negro Music in White America, by LeRoi Jones
The blues is seldom far away, though it may be lying dormant, half-forgotten like an inactive cancer. When times are good the blues disappears, but when trouble comes the blues
comes too, and the Negro realizes that it has never been far away.
The Meaning of the Blues, by Paul Oliver (1960)
The blues sound and text were transformed into a third component of African-American
cultural resistance and renewal in performance. Blues performance was an important manifestation of African-American “orature.” Molefi Kete Asante, in The Afrocentric Idea,
defines “orature” as “the comprehensive body of oral discourse on every subject and in every
genre of expression produced by people of African descent. It includes sermons, lectures,
raps, the dozens, poetry, and humor.” Blues performers meshed orature and music by engaging instrumental, voice, and visual styling. They affected certain mannerisms and sang their
songs in ways calculated to enhance their ability to communicate with their audience intimately and profoundly. Blues performers often played musical instruments and danced, but
it was in singing the blues lyrics that they evoked the spoken word, the nommo of traditional
African philosophy, in order to unleash its magical powers to heal and transform. They used
the word as a catalyst for claiming and shaping their own culture. Performance was the true
test of the blues artists; it was the medium through which they honed their skills and perfected their calling as communicators of black cultural resistance and renewal.
“Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture, by William Barlow
The rural blues were a vocal music used to articulate the personal and social concerns that
arose in the daily lives of African Americans. As black music scholar John W. Work, Jr.,
has put it, “The blues singer translated every happening into his own intimate inconvenience.” Blues lyrics were drawn from two major sources—the folk artists’ individual observations of the world around them and the black oral tradition. Thus, there was both an
immediate and a historical dimension to the content of the early folk blues. They were a
mix of personal sentiments and collective memory. They were focused on the present, but
they were framed in the folklore of the past. Many rural blues were “cautionary folktales”
designed to uphold traditional values and foster group cohesion; they were commonsense
lessons on how to survive in America as have-nots.”
“Looking Up at Down”
Textually speaking, blues can best be characterized as lyric songs, as distinct from narrative
songs. Their message is delivered from a first-person point of view, stressing the emotional
dimension. Blues do not normally tell stories in the sense of a series of events, although they
25
may portray an event or situation in such a way that its underlying story can be reconstructed
by the listener. The real emphasis of the blues is on feelings and perceptions. The question naturally arises whether these feelings and perceptions are products of his imagination. Much
misunderstanding has arisen over the question of whether or not blues texts are “autobiographical.” Obviously they are not, if by “autobiography” one means an actual life history (or
even episodes in a life history) told by the singer. Blues rarely give any kind of lengthy descriptive detail or balanced account of events. Yet there is much evidence that many blues are composed as the result of personal experiences and do reflect the feelings of the singer or composer
about these experiences. There is evidence too that blues can be an expression of the singer’s
feelings at the actual time of performance. Blues singers have claimed to have composed songs
inspired by the experiences of others as well. There is also much obvious exaggeration and
imaginative expression in the blues. Often the singer will create a dramatic persona who
speaks in the first person. The important thing is that the lyrics appeal emotionally to the
singer and to his audience, not that they reflect an actual event. The blues singer takes realistic, though not necessarily real, situations and treats them imaginatively. Although he appears
to sing for himself, most of his lyrics are meant just as much for those around him.
Big Road Blues
Although they call it the blues today, the original name given to this kind of music was
“reals.” And it was real because it made the truth available to the people in the songs—if
you wanted to tell the truth. Most good blues is about telling the truth about things. Just
as gospel music is songs about people in biblical times, the blues is songs about black folks
today—and these songs are dedicated to the truth. I’m telling stories that were told to me
or events that happened to me—just like all blues singers. The blues is one of the few
things that was born here in America by black people. It’s our music.
St. Louis bluesman Henry Townsend, quoted in The Meaning of the Blues
26
In singing about himself and for himself the blues singer may be considered egocentric,
selfish, and self-pitying, but though there are examples of such attitudes the blues has a
wider significance. The blues singer like the poet turns his eyes on the inner soul within
and records his impressions and reactions to the world without. His art is introverted and
only when the blues becomes a part of entertainment and of jazz does it become extrovert.
As if aware of the dangers implicit in these declarations of his inner self, the blues singer
is as brutally self-examining as the true philosopher, recounting his desires, acknowledging
his faults, stating his thoughts with almost frightening honesty.
The Meaning of the Blues
reading the blues
by stephanie woo
When lives are upset, families broken, love is lost, the blues comes falling
down. The blues dogs the footsteps of the migrant, walks in the shadow of the
destitute, sits at table with the hungry, shares the bed of the forsaken. It is the
comrade-in-arms of those whose work is strenuous, monotonous, and ill-paid;
it is the partner of the share-cropper, the section-hand and the road-sweeper.
The Meaning of the Blues
T
he archetypal artistic expression of the 20th-century African-American experience, the blues
is defined as much by its literary content as its musical notes. As Paul Oliver writes in The
Meaning of the Blues, blues tell the stories of “the everyday lives of the black masses—their
working conditions, living conditions, prison experiences, travels, and sexual relationships.”
While singing the blues may be a powerful means of unburdening the heart, the blues is not, however, simple sob stories, neither cries for help nor plaintive calls for an answer to the question,
“Why me?” More than a historical record, the lyrics of the classic blues form—like the individual
tales recounted in Lackawanna Blues—capture in their first-person stories the universality of
hardship and lost love.
Below are a few examples of the literary power of the classic blues lyric.
Between 1923 and 1928, blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey (1886–1939) recorded more
than 100 songs. Her “Black Dust Blues” is a good example of the traditional blues lyric
structure, which consists of two different lines, with the first repeated twice, forming an
a-a-b pattern. Some claim that the delay in resolution and explanation caused by withholding the concluding statement creates tension within a song, helping to communicate
the depth of emotion embodied by the blues. The format of some of the vignettes in
Lackawanna Blues (e.g., Small Paul’s initial statement that he has been away for 17 years,
followed by his later revelation that he spent those years in prison) in some respects mirrors this construction.
27
black dust blues
by Ma Rainey
It was way last year, when my trouble began
It was way last year, when my trouble began
I had done quarrelled with a woman, she said I took her man
She sent me a letter, said she’s gonna turn me round
She sent me a letter, said she’s gonna turn me round
She’s gonna fix me up so I won’t chase her man around
I began to feel bad, worse than I ever before
I began to feel bad, worse than I ever before
Lord, I was out one morning, found black dust all round my door
I began to get thin, had trouble with my feet
I began to get thin, had trouble with my feet
Throwing dust about the house whenever I tried to eat
Black dust in my window, black dust on my porch mat
Black dust in my window, black dust on my porch mat
Black dust’s got me walking on all fours like a cat
28
In February 1920, Mamie Smith (1883–1946) made the first blues recording, on the Okeh
label. Later that year, she recorded “Crazy Blues” (by Perry Bradford), which sold 75,000
copies in its first month of release and more than a million copies in less than a year. The
success of these recordings with both black and white audiences led Okeh to establish a
“race records” or “race music” division within the company, a practice quickly duplicated by
other record companies. Not only did Smith help to make the blues a mainstream musical
movement, the first to reach white audiences with music originally from the black community, she represented the entrance of African-American women into the field of professional entertainment. She also helped bridge the gap between the rural southern blues
styles that traveled north with the immigrants of the Great Migration and the more urban
tradition already in place in the cities of the North.
crazy blues
by Perry Bradford
I can’t sleep at night
I can’t eat a bite
’Cause the man I love
He didn’t treat me right.
Now, I got the crazy blues
Since my baby went away
I ain’t got no time to lose
I must find him today.
Chicago bluesman Big Bill Broonzy (1893–1958) recorded “The Sun Gonna Shine in My
Door Someday” in 1935, which could easily be the anthem of many of the personalities
who find their way to Nanny’s doorstep in Lackawanna Blues.
the sun gonna shine in my door someday
by Big Bill Broonzy
Just sittin’ here hungry and ain’t got a dime,
Lord, look like my friends would come to see poor me sometime;
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Mama, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
When I was in jail, expecting a fine,
When I went ’fore the judge, not a friend could I find,
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Woman, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
Lord, I lost my father and my brother, too,
That’s why you hear me singing; Lord, I’m lonesome and blue,
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Mama, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
29
Cried aloud, Lord, Lordy, Lord,
Now, I used to be your regular, woman, now I got to be your dog,
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Woman, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
Lord, I’m in trouble, no one to pay my fine;
Lord, when I get out of this county jail, I’m gonna leave this town of mine,
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Mama, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
Lord, I’ve been driven from door to door,
Now, it look like my friends don’t want me around no more,
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Woman, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
I was with my buddy through thick and thin,
Lord, my buddy got away, but I got in;
’Cause it doesn’t matter who, Lord of Heaven,
Mama, the sun gonna shine in my door someday.
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poetry and the blues
Blues as a verse form has as much social reference as any poetry, except for the
strict lyric, and that also is found in blues. Love, sex, tragedy in interpersonal
relationships, death, travel, loneliness, etc., are all social phenomena. And perhaps these are the things which actually create a poetry, as things, or ideas:
there can be no such thing as poetry (or blues) exclusive of the matter it proposes to be about.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America, by LeRoi Jones
T
he early development of the blues coincided with the blossoming of black American art and
literature known as the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920s, Harlem became a cultural
mecca to which black writers, painters, and musicians flocked from all over the country.
Writer Langston Hughes (1902–67), who claimed among his influences Paul Laurence
Dunbar, Carl Sandburg, and Walt Whitman, is particularly known for his insightful portrayals
of black life in America from the 1920s through the ’60s. The first black man to earn a living by
creative writing, Hughes was among the earliest African-American writers to recreate black
speech and music in literature. He wrote poetry, essays, songs, plays, short stories, and novels about
the defeats and triumphs of the people he loved. Unlike other notable black poets of the time,
Hughes refused to differentiate between his personal experience and the common experience of
black America.
The blues was a major influence on Hughes, and references to the “black and laughing, heartbreaking blues” (The Big Sea) abound throughout his work. In fact, Hughes supposedly was first
inspired to write poetry after hearing the blues on a Kansas City street corner at the age of nine.
Hughes viewed the blues as an expression of the “Negro soul,” a major theme of his work as well
as that of other Harlem Renaissance writers. In his blues poetry, Hughes undertook the difficult
task of communicating the poetry of the blues through the written word alone.
Source: Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum Lesson Plan: Langston Hughes and the Blues, www.
rockhall.com/programs/plans.asp; “Langston Hughes,” The Academy of American Poets, www.poets.org/
poets/poets.cfm?prmID=84.
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bound no’th blues
by Langston Hughes
Goin’ down de road, Lord,
Goin’ down de road.
Down de road, Lord,
Way, way down de road.
Got to find somebody
To help me carry this load.
Road’s in front o’ me,
Walk . . . and walk . . . and walk.
I’d like to meet a good friend
To come along an’ talk.
Road, road, road, O!
Road, road . . . road . . . road, road!
Road, road, road, O!
On de No’thern road.
These Mississippi towns ain’t
Fit for a hoppin’ toad.
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homesick blues
by Langston Hughes
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
De railroad bridge’s
A sad song in de air.
Ever time de trains pass
I wants to go somewhere.
I went down to de station.
Ma heart was in ma mouth.
Went down to de station.
Heart was in ma mouth.
Lookin’ for a box car
To roll me to de South.
Homesick blues, Lawd,
’s a terrible thing to have.
Homesick blues is
A terrible thing to have.
To keep from cryin’
I opens ma mouth an’ laughs.
Originally published in Measure, June
Reprinted in Fine Clothes to the Jew, 1927.
1926.
minstrel man
by Langston Hughes
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter
And my throat
Is deep with song,
You do not think
I suffer after
I have held my pain
So long?
Because my mouth
Is wide with laughter,
You do not hear
My inner cry?
Because my feet
Are gay with dancing,
You do not know
I die?
compensation
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)
untitled
by Langston Hughes
The mills
That grind and grind,
That grind out steel
And grind away the
Lives of men—
In the sunset their stacks
Are great black silhouettes
Against the sky.
In the dawn
They belch red fire.
The mills—
Grinding new steel,
Old men.
Excerpted from The Big Sea: An Auto-biography,
by Langston Hughes.
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Because I had loved so deeply,
Because I had loved so long,
God in His great compassion
Gave me the gift of song.
Because I have loved so vainly,
And sung with such faltering breath,
The Master in infinite mercy
Offers the boon of Death.
my sort o’ man
by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1896)
I don’t believe in ’ristercrats
An’ never did, you see;
The plain ol’ homelike sorter folks
Is good enough for me.
O’ course, I don’t desire a man
To be too tarnal rough,
But then, I think all folks should know
When they air nice enough.
Now there is folks in this here world,
From peasant up to king,
Who want to be so awful nice
They overdo the thing.
That’s jest the thing that makes me sick,
An’ quicker ’n a wink
I set it down that them same folks
Ain’t half so good’s you think.
34
I like to see a man dress nice,
In clothes becomin’ too;
I like to see a woman fix
As women orter to do;
An’ boys an’ gals I like to see
Look fresh an’ young an’ spry,—
We all must have our vanity
An’ pride before we die.
But I jedge no man by his clothers,—
Nor gentleman nor tramp;
The man that wears the finest suit
May be the biggest scamp,
An’ he whose limbs air clad in rags
That make a mournful sight,
In life’s great battle may have proved
A hero in the fight.
I don’t believe in ’ristercrats;
I like the honest tan
That lies upon the healthful cheek
An’ speaks the honest man;
I like to grasp the brawny hand
That labor’s lips have kissed,
For he who has not labored here
Life’s greatest pride has missed:
The pride to feel that yore own strength
Has cleaved fur you the way
To heights to which you were not born,
But struggled day by day.
What though the thousands sneer an’ scoff,
An’ scorn yore humble birth?
Kings are but puppets; you are king
But right o’ royal worth.
The man who simply sits an’ waits
Fur good to come along,
Ain’t worth the breath that one would take
To tell him he is wrong.
Fur good ain’t flowin’ round this world
Fur every fool to sup;
You’ve got to put your see-ers on,
An’ go an’ hunt it up.
Good goes with honesty, I say,
To honor an’ to bless;
To rich an’ poor alike it brings
A wealth o’ happiness.
The ’ristercrats ain’t got it all,
Fur much to their su’prise,
That’s one of earth’s most blessed things
They can’t monopolize.
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a brief biography of bill sims, jr.
he blues has many distinct origins and sounds. Delta blues, Chicago blues, West
Coast blues, East Coast blues, rhythm and blues, and on and on, each with its own
unique flavor. If you ask Bill Sims what type of blues he plays, his answer is simply, “I play
the Blues.”
In 1946, the Rev. William Sims moved his family from the hard life of sharecropping
in rural Georgia to Marion, Ohio, where Bill was raised. The Reverend brought with him
the rich musical traditions of his childhood: the blues and gospel. He passed it all on to his
son, who started playing piano at the age of four on the old piano in the living room. At
14, Bill, Jr., turned professional when he joined the Jacksonian Blues, a rhythm and blues
band considered the top in Ohio. He left the band to attend Ohio State University, where
he majored in music. He had the privilege to play with many great blues and R&B legends
that performed at the university. He learned his lessons well sitting in the piano chair of
Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Freddie King, the Ojays, Jerry Butler, and many more.
In 1971, Bill joined The Four Mints, a doo-wop rhythm and blues group. Some of their
songs made it to the charts, including “You’re My Desire” and “Row My Boat.” The group
traveled the country, opening for the mega-bands of the 1970s such as Gladys Knight and
Earth, Wind, and Fire. In 1976, Bill left The Four Mints to explore other musical venues.
Incorporating his vast musical expertise and love for world music, Bill founded The
Lamorians, an avant-garde jazz band that relied heavily on traditional African drumming.
In 1988, Bill came full circle and returned to the blues. He founded his own band, Bill
Sims and the Cold Blooded Blues Band, in which he is both lead guitarist and lead vocalist. He is currently considered one of the best musicians in the New York City blues scene.
Besides regularly performing at the best blues clubs in the city, Bill tours extensively both
domestic and internationally. His virtuoso musicianship can be heard in most homes across
America in the advertising spots of Coca-Cola, Reebok, Folgers, and ESPN. In 1992, Bill
released his first CD, Blues before Sunrise. In 1999 his much-awaited CD Bill Sims was
released on Warner Brothers records to coincide with “An American Love Story,” a tenhour PBS special on Bill.
When asked why he plays the blues, Bill simply replies, “Because my daddy played the
blues.” Luckily for music lovers everywhere, the tradition continues.
T
36
Reprinted with permission from Bill Sims, Jr.’s Web site, www.billsimsjr.com.
broad-spectrum blues
An Interview with Bill Sims, Jr.
by adam levy
’m happy to be talking about music for a change,” says Bill Sims, beaming over his
morning cup of coffee. The day before we spoke, People magazine had interviewed
him about “An American Love Story,” the recently aired PBS documentary on Sims and
his interracial family.
If you’ve seen the series, you’ve heard a taste of Sims’s music. A more comprehensive
sampling of Sims’s wide-angle approach to the blues—from the front-porch banjo strains
of “Nobody’s Fault but Mine” to the ’70s-style soul groove of “Smoky City” to the New
Orleans parade rhythms that drive his cover of Charlie Patton’s “Black Mare”—can be
found on his debut album, Bill Sims [Warner Bros.]. The record is dripping with authentic blues flavors and serves as a strong vehicle for Sims’s honey-mustard voice and his
snarling, Albert King–influenced guitar style.
“So much of blues today is about having a good time, dancing, and drinking beer,” says
Sims. “But I like to present a broader spectrum of the blues because I grew up hearing all
of it, and I think it’s important for people to be aware of the more complete history of the
music. ‘I’ve Got My Mojo Working’ and ‘Everyday I Have the Blues’ are great songs, but
they’re not the whole story. Many different artists were affected by the blues, and I like to
show the relationship between, say, Charlie Patton and Miles Davis, or between Lead Belly
and Bob Dylan.”
Sims is partial to slower tunes, such as Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Mr. Airplane Man” and Albert
King’s “As the Years Go Passing By”—both of which are featured on Bill Sims. “I like the
stuff with a lot of open space,” he confirms. “Today’s blues musicians seem to be scared of
space. The blues has become more guitar oriented, and guitar players tend to want to fill
up every bar with screaming licks. But that’s not where the blues comes from. It’s a vocal
tradition, and the guitar is there to support the vocal. The blues is about telling a story—
whether it’s sad or joyful—and when the story gets so emotional that you don’t want to say
any more, you can push the envelope a little farther with the guitar. For example, B. B.
King sings the song, and then plays a solo. The guitar is an extension of his voice—it’s not
the focus of the song.”
Sims’s support system is a 1956 Les Paul. It’s tempting to think that anyone would
sound great on such a primo ax, but Sims dismisses the notion that it’s all in the wood. “I’ll
tell you a story,” he says. “In 1969, I met Robert Lockwood, Jr., who had come to play in
“I
37
a little club I was running in Ohio. That afternoon, we were sitting around jamming, and
I had my Ventura acoustic that I bought when I was 15. I said, ‘Man, this guitar sucks.’
Robert said, ‘Here, let me see it.’ He played it, and all this incredible music came out of it.
So then he said, ‘The guitar’s fine. I guess you just can’t play’. Ooh, that hurt. But he was
right, and he taught me a valuable lesson: The guitar’s not the instrument, I’m the instrument. I’ve never complained about a guitar since.” . . .
“I feel like I’m putting the time I spend performing into my ‘retirement fund,’” says the
50-year-old bluesman. “With the blues, the older you get, the more valuable you become.
All I have to do is stay healthy and stay alive, and when everybody else is retiring at 65, I’ll
be just hitting my prime.”
Excerpted with permission from Guitar Player magazine (January 2000).
38
the griot, then and now
he legions of folk musicians and songsters who created and sustained the blues in
their infancy were African-American variations on the famous West African “griot”
tradition. The griots were talented musicians and folklorists designated to be the oral carriers of their people’s culture; in some regions, such as the western Sudan, they were a
hereditary caste. Griots preserved the history, traditions, and mores of their respective
tribes and kinship groups through songs and stories. They composed songs of praise for
tribal chieftains or powerful clans. But they were also known for their complaint songs,
which often got them branded as dissidents by their tribal leaders. Griots were both
admired and feared by their fellow tribe members since they were thought to consort with
trickster gods and even evil spirits. While many griots confined themselves to one village,
others roamed about their homelands entertaining and educating people in one village
after another. Since they lived in a culture organized around an oral tradition, the griots
functioned as the “libraries” of West African tribal societies by supporting among themselves successive generations of living books. A well-known West African proverb states:
“When an old man dies, a library burns to the ground.”
“Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture,
by William Barlow
T
griots, griottes go electric, yet preserve ancient
roles
The ancient West African profession of griots and griottes—individuals who orally pass
on history—can be traced back nearly 1,000 years, yet these esteemed historians-musicians
are thriving and expanding their audiences, with the help of modern technology such as
the Internet and communications satellites.
“Widely popularized by Alex Haley’s narrative Roots, griots are best known outside
Africa for genealogy and musical performances,” said Thomas Hale, professor of African,
French, and comparative literature [at Penn State University]. “But over the centuries, they
have performed a variety of important functions for African rulers and communities—providing advice, serving as a spokesperson, reporting news, and praise-singing—that served
as a social glue for African societies.
“No profession in any other part of the world is charged with such wide-ranging and
intimate involvement in the lives of the people,” he said. “What distinguishes griots from
poets in the western tradition is that the speech of these African wordsmiths combines
39
40
both poetic art and, in many cases, a much less clearly defined occult power that listeners
respect and sometimes fear. This verbal art ranges from short praise songs for people in
society today to long epics about heroes of the past.” . . .
In modern times, the griots’ expansion from the courtyards of West African nobility to
a global audience occurred slowly at first with the introduction of the railroad and the
automobile, according to Hale.
“Air travel in the 1950s greatly increased their performance opportunities and contexts,
followed by the benefits of radio and tape recorders in the 1960s and ’70s, allowing more
people to hear the griots’ work,” he said. “Television, the communications satellite and the
Internet are now helping to create a global audience for griots.”
Another example of technology’s impact: the evolution of [griots’] musical instruments
as newer materials become available and cost-effective. Griots are adding amplifiers to
their instruments so they can play before audiences in larger venues. Nylon fishing line,
which lasts longer and is easier to obtain, has replaced strips of antelope hide on the 21stringed kora, an instrument played by many griots.
Such shifts lead to concerns over the potential loss of traditional values and styles, but
perhaps they are inevitable in order for griots to reach their global audiences, Hale said.
They are in demand not only for performances before expatriate African communities in
the United States and Europe, but also before [western] audiences hungry for world culture and music.
“Griots may be vehicles for conveying the past to the present, but they are no more
locked into traditional technology than the blacksmith who discovers welding or the
weaver who adopts color-fast thread,” he said. “Where it suits their needs, many griots
have embraced modern technology without hesitation.
“The traditional nature of the profession masks an inherent adaptability that has
enabled griots to survive for so many centuries through the political phases of colonialism,
independence, and neocolonialism, as well as the many waves of Islamic and Western cultural influences that continue to sweep across the Sahel and Savanna regions today,” said
Hale.
“Griots, Griottes Go Electric, Yet Preserve Ancient Roles,” by Vicki Fong, excerpted with permission from Intercom, Penn State’s
faculty/staff newspaper (January 27, 2000).
griots and the blues
There seem to be many interesting parallels between the attitudes of the savannah communities to the griot and those of the black community to the blues singer which . . . bear
comparison. Blues singers are not necessarily socially acceptable in the black community,
but they are certainly known to most members of it. They, too, are the source of humor and
entertainment, of gossip and comment, and a singer like Lightnin’ Hopkins is very much
a griot in personality, with a similar flair for spontaneous and devastating comment on the
passing scene. . . . Like the griot, there are individual performers, duos, and small groups,
similarly depending on stringed instruments, the occasional horn, and rhythmic accompaniment. Those qualities of light rhythm, swing, and subtle syncopation which characterize
the music of many blues singers, those aptitudes for improvisation in music and in verse,
those repertoires of traditional song, stock-in-trade lines and phrases and sudden original
words and verse—all these are no less recognizably the hallmarks of the griots.
Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues, by Paul Oliver
The African songsters who synthesized the blues from earlier genres of black folk music
were descendants of the griots, carrying forward the historical and cultural legacy of their
people even while they were setting a new agenda for social discourse and action. Their
songs were the collective expression of the experiences of a new generation of African
Americans born after slavery but still living with its legacy, still caught up in a life-or-death
struggle for survival and freedom. As one folk historian put it, “The blues started when
black people began to discover that being free as they thought . . . well, being free wasn’t
as free as it was said to be.”
“Looking Up at Down”
41
LACKAWANNA tidbits
A Brief Guide to People, Places, and Things Mentioned in Lackawanna Blues
by stephanie woo
“still cool enough to slow drag in front of the juke box with miss
jerda or bop to reete-petite with miss jadie”
Sung by Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Jackie Wilson, “Reet-Petite” was a minor hit for the
R&B soul singer in the late 1950s. A high school dropout who got his break as a member
of The Dominoes, Wilson was perhaps best known for the song “(Your Love Keeps
Lifting Me) Higher and Higher.”
“and they were jumping: cleveland, buffalo, chicago, erie, toledo,
detroit, gary, lackawanna.”
Cleveland, Ohio; Buffalo, New York; Chicago, Illinois; Erie, Pennsylvania; Toledo, Ohio;
Detroit, Michigan; Gary, Indiana; and Lackawanna, New York all border Lake Erie, the
smallest (by volume) of the five Great Lakes. The basin of Lake Erie is very fertile and,
therefore, intensively farmed. As a result, it is the most densely populated of the five basins.
The industrial benefits of accessible transportation and power, combined with the draw of
rich soil, created a pocket of prosperity surrounding Lake Erie, especially during the postwar boom of the mid-20th century.
42
“i got to get to detroit, that ’s where joe louis is from.”
From 1937 to 1949, Joe Louis, the “Brown Bomber,” reigned as the heavyweight boxing
champion of the world. Over the course of his career, Louis successfully defended his title
more times than any heavyweight boxer in history. He won five world championships and 23
of his first 27 fights (all of which were victories) with knockouts. Louis lost his heavyweight
title to Ezzard Charles in 1950 and retired at the age of 37 to a life as a Las Vegas casino host.
“i was playing ball in the negro league traveling all over.”
Negro leagues were established in the late 19th and early 20th centuries for black baseball
players who were barred by racial discrimination from playing in the national major
leagues. While there were many different Negro leagues, organized primarily by geography, the first financially successful, and thus best-known, Negro National League was
founded in 1920 by baseball Hall of Famer Andrew “Rube” Foster.
“when i come here she had a little jitney, was picking up men and
taking them back and forth to work at the mills, buffalo brake
beam, and what have you.”
A jitney is a small motor vehicle, such as a bus or van, that transports passengers on a route
for a small fare. A rail industry manufacturer of brake beams and other rail accessories,
Buffalo Brake Beam has likely employed many inhabitants of the greater Buffalo area,
including residents of Lackawanna.
“maxie’s bar and grill where billy holiday, lionel hampton, and billy
eckstine performed and devoured the famous fish sandwiches with
wilted lettuce and that special sauce was right across the street.”
Billie Holiday (1915–59), “Lady Day,” is considered one of the greatest jazz and blues singers
of all time. Swing master Lionel Hampton (1913–2002), “King of the Vibraphone,” was the
first musician to record on that instrument. Leading his own big band from the 1940s through
the mid 1960s, he was known for the rhythmic vitality of his playing and superb showmanship as a performer. Singer and bandleader Billy Eckstine (1914–93) is remembered for fostering the careers of such artists as Sarah Vaughn, Dizzy Gillespie, and Miles Davis and as a
performer of popular songs, including “That Old Black Magic” and “You Go to My Head.”
“we passed the welcome sign in bold black letters ‘gowanda
psychiatric hospital.’”
In 1894, the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene claimed 500 acres of land in
Collins, New York (30 miles south of Buffalo) from a Quaker community.The first of more than
100 buildings that would comprise the Gowanda Psychiatric Hospital was completed in 1898.
At its peak, the Gowanda Hospital housed more than 4,000 of New York’s 100,000 mentally ill
patients. In the late 1950s (around the time Lackawanna’s Lemuel Taylor would have been
released), however, new antipsychotic drugs gave many patients a newfound ability to function
in society, and their release helped to reduce the population. In 1982, as the institution then
cared for just over 600 patients, part of the center was commandeered for use as a mediumsecurity prison. The Department of Corrections claimed the remaining space in 1994.
“nanny pulled into the visitor’s parking lot she handed me a
little brown bag with my liverwurst and onions on wonder bread, a
nickel bag of lay’s potato chips, and an rc cola wrapped in tin foil.”
All three of these major food products were first created in the United States in the early
20th century: Wonder bread was launched by the Taggart Baking Company in
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Indianapolis, Indiana, in 1921. H. W. Lay & Company (now Frito-Lay) introduced
LAY’S® brand potato chips, originally made by a small business in Atlanta, Georgia, and
the first potato chips sold nationally, in 1938. Founded in a basement in Columbus,
Georgia, in 1905, Royal Crown Company Inc., maker of RC Cola, eventually became the
third largest cola company in the United States.
44
“a lot of things was going on that year ya’ know in ’56 nat king
cole was performing in front of an all-white audience and a mob
attacked him. . . . talking about get your kicks on route 66, he got
his kicks the heck out of there that night.”
Hailed as one of the best and most influential pianists and small-group leaders of the
swing era, Nat King Cole (1917–65) attained his greatest commercial success as a vocalist
specializing in warm ballads and light swing. Cole’s popularity allowed him to become the
first African American to host a network variety program, “The Nat King Cole Show,”
which debuted on NBC in 1956. The show fell victim to the bigotry of the times, however, and despite good ratings was canceled after one season; few sponsors were willing to
be associated with a black entertainer.
Cole was sometimes criticized by other blacks for not taking a more aggressive stand
against unfair treatment of racial minorities. He did not refuse to perform before segregated audiences, believing that goodwill and an exhibition of his talent were more effective than formal protests in combating racism. In 1956, at the height of his fame, Cole was
attacked by a group of white men while performing in Birmingham, Alabama. He never
performed in the state again. In 1996, Alabama chose Cole’s song “Unforgettable” for use
in a state tourism campaign.
While born in Montgomery, Alabama, Cole grew up in Chicago and later lived in Los
Angeles, situating his life along the lines of U.S. Route 66, the famous highway that
stretched across the United States with Los Angeles and Chicago as its endpoints.
Conceived by Cyrus Stevens Avery of Tulsa, Oklahoma, as an effort by local boosters to
link the former Indian Territory with Illinois and California, Route 66 was completed in
1926 from a patchwork of hundreds of existing roads. Immortalized in fiction, photography, film, television, and song, the towns and truck stops along Route 66 came to represent the “real” America of the 1930s through ’60s, and traveling its 2,400-mile length
remains a rite of passage for young Americans. Cole released the song “Route 66” with its
famous refrain—”Get your kicks on Route 66”—in 1946.
“in that same year the supreme court ordered the mandatory
desegregation. everything is equal, no more colored this, no more
white that. you can go anywheres you want to go. at least they
let you think that.”
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, lawyers for the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) pressed a series of important cases before the
U.S. Supreme Court in which they argued that segregation meant inherently unequal (and
inadequate) educational and other public facilities for blacks. These cases culminated in the
court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas (May 17, 1954),
in which it declared unanimously that separate educational facilities were inherently unequal
and therefore unconstitutional. This historic decision was to stimulate a mass movement on
the part of blacks and white sympathizers to try to end the segregationist practices and racial
inequalities that were firmly entrenched across the nation and particularly in the South. The
movement was strongly resisted by many whites in the South and elsewhere.
After a black woman, Rosa Parks, was arrested for refusing to move to the Negro section at the back of a bus in Montgomery, Alabama (December 1, 1955), blacks staged a
one-day local boycott of the bus system to protest her arrest. Fusing these protest elements
with the historic force of the Negro churches, a local Baptist minister, Martin Luther King,
Jr., succeeded in transforming a spontaneous racial protest into a massive resistance movement. On November 13, 1956, following a protracted boycott of the Montgomery bus
company, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a federal court ruling declaring segregation on
buses unconstitutional. Blacks returned to the buses on December 21, more than a year
after the boycott began. But their troubles were not over. Snipers shot at buses, forcing the
city to suspend bus operations after 5 p.m. A group tried to start a whites-only bus service. There was also a wave of bombings.
During the period from 1955 to 1960, some progress was made toward integrating
schools and other public facilities in the upper South and the border states, but the Deep
South remained adamant in its opposition to most desegregation measures.
“ask john brown. history, son, look it up.”
John Brown (1800–59), whose body “lies a-mold-ring in the grave” in the well-known folk
song “John Brown’s Body,” was a militant white abolitionist active in the era preceding the
Civil War. Acquiring fame after murdering five slavery supporters in revenge for the killing
of abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas, Brown devoted much of his life to educating young
blacks and furthering the abolitionist cause. On October 18, 1859, seeking to end slavery
by force, Brown amassed a force of 18 men and commandeered the arsenal and armory at
45
Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia). After a battle with U.S. Marines led by
Colonel Robert E. Lee (future commander of the Confederate forces in the Civil War),
Brown’s defenses were overcome, and in December 1859, he was hanged for his multiple
crimes, of which murder and treason were just two.
“colored men been shakin’ their asses forever, hannibal shook his
ass all over europe, look how many people got killed behind that.”
Hannibal (247 b.c.e.–183? b.c.e.), one of the great military leaders of antiquity, commanded the Carthaginian forces against Rome in the Second Punic War. A native of
Carthage, an ancient empire centered near what is now the city of Tunis in northern
Africa, Hannibal is remembered for his great march across the Alps from Spain to Rome
in the winter of 218–17 b.c.e. The trek claimed the lives of 15,000 of his 40,000 troops.
Hannibal’s leadership claimed even more lives in battle, including 50,000 Romans who
perished at the Battle of Cannae in 216.
“1956, the yankees played the dodgers in the world series, yankees
won. jackie robinson.”
Originally a player in the Negro League, Jackie Robinson was the first black man to play
major league baseball in the United States. First appearing as first baseman on April 15,
1947, for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson was the MVP in 1949, helped the Dodgers win
the World Series in 1955, and became an inductee in the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962.
By 1959, all but one of the teams in the major leagues had at least one black teammate.
46
“corporal fred j. cobbs. honorable discharge. nuremberg, germany.
nineteen forty—”
Captured by U.S. troops in World War II, the city of Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945–46
was the site of a series of trials held by Allied forces to prosecute those accused of committing crimes against humanity during the war.
“they didn’t give me no gun to shoot at them but that ain’t stop
them from shooting at me.”
Reports declare that even American enemies received better treatment from the U.S. military than black American soldiers did during World War II. While allowed to enlist and
in some cases even to fight (the Tuskegee Airmen of the 332nd Fighter Group, for
example, had one of the best records in the war), blacks in the American military endured
prejudice and segregation, both at home and abroad. Even German prisoners of war were
allowed, under guard, into stores from which black soldiers were barred and, when transporting prisoners by bus, black troops often had to move to the back of the bus while the
prisoners could sit wherever they wished.
“dee, smalls, buffalo shorty would show out in their canaryyellow suits or their doo-doo brown double-breasted pinstripes
with burnt orange stacy adams shoes with white stitches, dobbs
or stetson hats and a healthy dose of old spice slapped on their
freshly magic-shaved faces.”
Founded in 1875 in Brockton, Massachusetts, the Stacy Adams Shoe Company produced
footwear for sophisticated gentlemen from Prohibition through the “roaring ’20s” and into
the jazz era (the shoes were reportedly especially popular with swing dancers). The company continues to manufacture men’s dress shoes and clothing. Dobbs is a venerable brand
of classic felt and straw hats still popular today (currently represented by NFL star Deion
Sanders). The John B. Stetson Hat Company, best known for its cowboy- and westernstyled toppers, has been doing business since 1865. Old Spice, the classic cologne in the
familiar cream-colored, cone-shaped bottle, is distributed by Procter & Gamble. Carson
Inc., today the leading global manufacturer of hair and skin products formulated specifically for people of color, was founded in 1901 with a single product: Magic Shave aftershave.
“as he bounced up the stoop wineheads and roomers separated like
the red sea to let this golden gloves champion make his
unannounced yet fully anticipated entrance into the arena.”
Started in Chicago in 1928 to challenge the city’s antiboxing law, the Golden Gloves are
a series of amateur boxing tournaments in which the contestants work their way up from
the local level to, if lucky, national competition. A valuable training ground for many of
today’s most distinguished boxers, past Golden Gloves champions include Muhammad
Ali, Joe Louis, Rocky Marciano, Mike Tyson, Evander Holyfield, and George Foreman.
“love is a lot of things, nanny. they say ‘love is a many blended
things.’”
The famous 1955 film Love Is a Many Splendored Thing follows the romance of an
American war correspondent (William Holden) and a Eurasian doctor ( Jennifer Jones) in
Hong Kong during the Korean War. Like that of Pauline and Gerald’s relationship in
Lackawanna Blues, however, the course of their love affair is far from smooth as friends and
47
family urge them to end their crosscultural relationship. The film won three Academy
Awards, including one for best song for the title track.
“he better go somewhere . . . punchin’ at me like he ezzie charles
or somebody.”
Purportedly lacking a powerful knockout punch, boxer Ezzard Charles was never a very
popular personality. Although he never weighed in at more than 200 pounds, he nevertheless managed to end Joe Louis’s long reign as heavyweight boxing champion of the
world in 1950. After three successful defenses, Charles lost his title to Rocky Marciano in
1951.
“boy, that ’s a zebco.”
The Zebco fishing rod was the brainchild of K. D. Hull, who sought to create a fishing
reel without backlash. He managed to convince the Zero Hour Bomb Company (hence
“Zebco”), which manufactured electric time bombs for oil well drilling, to take on his venture and the company offered the public the first Zebco fishing rod in 1945.
48
“ol’ sweet tooth, who was aptly named because of this prominent
yellowed tooth that stuck out of his mouth overlapping his dark
brown and red bottom lip perfectly tenderized by wild irish rose
and thunderbird”
Richards’ Wild Irish Rose (18% alcohol) and Gallo’s Thunderbird (20%) are still among
the most popular inexpensive fortified wines available. Originally, fortified wines were
made by adding brandy to still wines in order to raise the alcohol content, so the wines
would not spoil during shipping. Today, they are produced by combining flavors, sugar,
high-proof grape-based distilled spirits, and other unknown chemicals to a wine base to
produce beverages with 18 to 20 percent alcohol. These wines are sold in small screw-top
bottles for $1–$2 for a 375 ml bottle (about 12.5 ounces).
“take a big comb and part her hair, scratch that line of exposed
scalp then run a line of dixie peach right down the middle.”
Dixie Peach, a brand of heavy pomade used to soften the scalp and straighten thick, curly
hair, was particularly popular during the 1940s and ’50s and is still available today.
questions to consider
. Why do you think the play is titled Lackawanna Blues? What is the significance of music,
particularly the blues, in the play? How does it advance or comment on the events of the
story? What is the effect of the live music included in the performance? Do you think of
Bill Sims, Jr., as a character in the play? What does he represent?
. What is Nanny’s role in her community? Why is she important to the other characters?
How does she affect their lives? Most of the people depicted in the play are not members
of her actual family, and those who are (i.e., her husband Bill) are not the focus of her altruism. Why do you think Nanny “adopts” and helps these particular people?
. Do you have a person like Nanny in your life? If you were to write and perform a play
about people in your own life, whom would you choose to portray? How would you express
their life stories and their importance in your own life?
. How does Santiago-Hudson let the audience know when he is changing from one character to another? What physical and vocal gestures does he use to communicate the unique
qualities of each character? How would the play be different if it were performed by several actors instead of just one? Who is your favorite character in the play?
. What is the significance of the detailed historical context Small Paul provides for his
story? How does that significance apply to the stories of the other characters in the play
and to the play as a whole? Where else does the play refer to specific historical events and
movements? How are the characters in Lackawanna Blues affected by those events and
movements? How do the experiences of these particular characters represent the experiences of other Americans during the 1950s? Today?
. How are the issues of race and racial discrimination explored in the play? What kinds
of discrimination did the characters in Lackawanna Blues have to deal with during the
1950s? How did they deal with it?
. What is the effect of the opening and closing choruses spoken by multiple characters? What
mood does the opening chorus set and what expectations does it create? Are these expectations
met? Do the closing lines reinforce the same feelings? Do they introduce new ideas or affirm
what the audience has already seen? Why do you think the playwright framed the play this way?
8. How is Ruben Santiago-Hudson like a traditional African griot?
49
for further reading…
on the blues
Barlow, William. “Looking Up at Down”: The Emergence of Blues Culture. Philadelphia:
Temple University Press, 1989.
Charters, Samuel B. The Country Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1959.
Cohn, Lawrence, ed. Nothing But the Blues: The Music and the Musicians. New York:
Abbeville Press, 1993.
Davis, Francis. The History of the Blues. New York: Hyperion, 1995.
Evans, David. Big Road Blues: Tradition & Creativity in the Folk Blues. New York: Da Capo
Press, 1982.
Jones, LeRoi. Blues People: Negro Music in White America. New York: Quill, 1963.
Lomax, Alan. The Land Where the Blues Began. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993.
Murray, Albert. Stomping the Blues. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.
Oliver, Paul. The Meaning of the Blues. New York: Collier Books, 1960.
_____. Savannah Syncopators: African Retentions in the Blues. New York: Stein and Day,
1970.
on the great migration
Adero, Malaika, ed. Up South: Stories, Studies, and Letters of This Century’s Black
Migrations. New York: The New Press, 1993.
50
Bunch-Lyons, Beverly A. Contested Terrain: African-American Women Migrate from the
South to Cincinnati, Ohio, 1900-1950. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Harrison, Alferdteen. Black Exodus: The Great Migration from the American South. Jackson:
University Press of Mississippi, 1991.
Lemann, Nicholas. The Promised Land: The Great Black Migration and How It Changed
America. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.
Wolcott, Victoria W. Remaking Respectability: African-American Women in Interwar
Detroit. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
on african-american poetry and drama
Branch, William B., ed. Crosswinds: An Anthology of Black Dramatists in the Diaspora.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.
Dunbar, Paul Laurence. Selected Poems. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1997.
Hamalian, Leo and Hatch, James V., eds. The Roots of African-American Drama. Michigan:
Wayne State University Press, 1991.
Harrison, Paul C., ed. Totem Voices: Plays from the Black World Repertory. New York: Grove
Press, 1989.
Hughes, Langston. The Big Sea: An Autobiography. New York?: Hill and Wang Pub., 1993.
McKay, Claude. Selected Poems. Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 1999.
Rampersad, Arnold, ed. The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes. New York: Vintage Books,
1995.
Reed, Ishmael. Writin’ Is Fightin’. New York: Atheneum, 1988.
on lackawanna, new york
Grant, H. Roger. Erie Lackawanna: The Death of an American Railroad, 1938–1992. Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 1996.
Lackawanna Leader. Various articles. 1953–56.
Leary, Thomas. From Fire to Rust: Business Technology and Work at the Lackawanna Steel
Plant, 1899–1983. Buffalo & Erie County, 1987.
Lackawanna: Steel City of the Great Lakes. Lackawanna, NY: Lackawanna Chamber of
Commerce, c. 1947.
films
Lomax, Alan, director/writer. The Land Where the Blues Began. American Patchwork
Series, Public Broadcasting Services, 1990.
Sims, Bill and Cicily Wilson. An American Love Story. American Playhouse Series, Public
Broadcasting Services, 1998.
51
web sites of interest
“African
Griot.”
Gambian
Griot
home01.wxs.nl/~verka067/african_griot.html.
School
of
Music
and
Dance.
Bill Sims, Jr. www.billsimsjr.com.
The Blues Foundation. www.blues.org.
Blues Lyrics and Hoodoo. luckymojo.com/ blues.html.
“Great Migration.” Africana.com: The Gateway to the Black World. www.africana.com/
Utilities/Content.html?&../cgi-bin/banner.pl?%20banner=Blackworld&..Articles/
tt_348.htm.
Harlem Renaissance. www.nku.edu/~diesmanj/harlem_intro.html.
The Heptune Classical Jazz and Blues Lyrics Page. www.heptune.com/lyrics.html
“Langston Hughes.”
poets.cfm?prmID=84.
The Academy of American Poets. www.poets.org/poets/
The Once and Future Blues: Dedicated to the Past, Present, and Future of Blues Music.
www.oafb.net/onceblu1.html.
Our Lady of Victory National Shrine. www.ourladyofvictory.org; www.ca-catholics.net/
churches/buffalo-lackawanna/index.htm.
Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Museum Lesson Plan: Langston Hughes and the Blues.
www. rockhall.com/programs/plans.asp.
acknowledgments
Buffalo and Erie County Public Library
52
Michael Malyak, volunteer researcher, and Sal Bordonaro, Lackawanna Public Library
Lackawanna Chamber of Commerce