Pre-World War II blues and ragtime musicians who were blind

Pointless List No. 1

Blind Boone (c. 1908) via Wikimedia Commons

Playing the blues was “one of the very few means of self-support for blind African Americans” during the early 20th century, writes William Barlow in “Looking Up at Down: The Emergence of Blues Culture” (1989). “The labels knew they could sell more records by putting the word ‘blind’ before the artist’s name,” record collector John Tefteller told Goldmine in 2013. “… I don’t know if these singers really wanted to call themselves blind or not. Probably not.”

Most of the following musicians came from the Piedmont region except where noted. Send additions (with citations, please!) to zogernd [at] gmail [dot] com.

  • Blind Benny (Dallas.)
  • John William “Blind” Boone (Memphis, St. Louis; ragtime piano player. At 6 months old his eyes were surgically removed as a treatment for “brain fever.”)
  • Blind Ted aka Blind Pimp (Cincinnati pianist.)
  • John Henry “Big Boy” Arnold
  • Blind (Arthur) Blake (Born blind.)
  • Blind Bobby Bryant (Dallas.)
  • Blind Gary Davis (Blind since infancy because of glaucoma.)
  • Blind John Davis (Chicago pianist.)
  • Blind Willie Davis (Gospel blues performer originally from Mississippi.)
  • Simmie Dooley
  • Sleepy John Estes (Brownsville, Tennessee; lost sight in his right eye around age 11 after it was hit by a rock; went totally blind by 1950.)
  • Blind Boy Fuller (Went blind at 20 due to ulcers behind the eyes.)
  • Johnny Gatewood (Louisville pianist.)
  • Archie Jackson
  • Blind Lemon Jefferson (Born blind in Texas.)
  • Blind Willie Johnson aka Blind Texas Marlin (Blinded at 7 when his stepmother splashed lye water in his face.)
  • Blind Willie McTell (Born blind in one eye; lost his remaining vision by late childhood.)
  • Blind Joe Reynolds (Lost his eyes in his 20s after a shotgun blast to the face.)
  • Blind Joe Taggart (Wore one artificial eye but had partial vision in the other.)
  • Sonny Terry (Went blind in his teens after two separate accidents.)
  • Blind Joe Walker (Brother of Willie.)
  • Blind Willie Walker (Brother of Joe; blind from birth.)
  • Columbus Williams

Disqualified

  • Ben Curry aka Blind Ben Covington aka Bogus Ben Covington (Mississippi; only pretended to be blind.)

Honorable Mention

  • One-Arm Dave Miles (Was it just a nickname, or was he really a one-armed guitarist?)

Struggling with ugliness

Classical Music Diary No. 10

Barely any way into Johannes Brahms’ “Ein deutsches Requiem” (1869), an exceedingly beautiful piece, there are two bars of ugliness (starting at about 4:27 in this recording). Three diminished chords in a row that almost sound like a mistake. Then the chorus enters with a soothing major chord, and there is virtually no dissonance in the remaining 70 minutes of music.

Why put that ugliness up front?

I’m reminded of that aphorism about Persian rugmakers intentionally weaving imperfections because only Allah is perfect. (As some have pointed out, it’s pretty arrogant to believe your work would otherwise be perfect.)

Maybe the dissonance is the inciting incident. Death is ugly. It’s the loss that the rest of the piece works to console.

The purr of the crowd

It’s my first time as part of a live music audience in 18 months. The Quark Quartet makes fantastic selections and performs them well, but it’s impossible to concentrate on the music.

The venue is the lawn outside Forbes Library. Behind the unamplified musicians, the parking lot bustles and the library’s HVAC air handler drones. Motorcycles accelerate and semis jake-brake along to the left. A continuous stream of one- and two-propeller planes passes overhead.

One of the violinists opens the show saying how pleased the group is that there are children in the audience, and that they and everyone else should feel free to get up and move around. Something about validating human needs.

Kids climb a tree and hang off a scrawny branch I’m sure is going to break. A little girl tells her mom she needs to go pee pee. A late arrival plops his folding chair in front of a woman knitting, and a whispered argument ensues. The wind threatens to topple the tent shading the quartet. Cleverly they read their music off iPads instead of sheets of paper, but a gust still manages to snap the cellist’s cover shut, putting her device to sleep. She has to sit out for several measures until she can get the score back.

It’s sensory overload after a year and a half of solitary listening. But it sure is nice to have the opportunity to be distracted in this way again.

Vanishing Lion

Who owns a melody? It’s a question not only for intellectual property lawyers but also for listeners sensitive to similarity.

Case in point: The Dukes of Stratosphear’s “Vanishing Girl” (1987), which, intentionally or not, borrows a melody with an already fraught copyright history.

Disney’s original “The Lion King” (1994) rebooted for a new generation a 1961 single by the Tokens, “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” The song grafts simple lyrics onto an essentially wordless recording from the previous decade. And the building blocks of that song come from a 1939 recording by South Africa’s Solomon Linda — whose estate fought a long legal battle with Disney for royalties.

There are three key elements in the Linda version that inform future adaptations. For the sake of comparison, the following examples have been transposed to begin on the note C.

Exhbit A: “Uyimbube.”

First there’s the backing vocalists repeating “Uyimbube,” which means “You are a lion” in Zulu. Pete Seeger and the Weavers distorted this into “Wimoweh” circa 1955. Their sped-up chant has remained the foundation of other versions of the song up to the present day.

Exhibit B: Falsetto.

The next element is Linda’s high-pitched, improvised vocal line. Seeger imitates it, and it features as a wordless introduction or interlude in subsequent versions.

Exhibit C: The mighty jungle.

Finally, toward the end of the original recording (2:23), Linda’s improvisation finds approximately the melody that the Tokens later made the focus of their rendition. This is the element that interests us here, because it’s also the melody of “Vanishing Girl.”

Exhibit D: “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.”

The Tokens’ lyrics are confined to the first four notes of the major scale, and they are harmonized in the most obvious way, using the corresponding I, IV, and V chords. The wordless introduction uses the same melody, but reaches down at the end to a low fifth.

Exhibit E: “Vanishing Girl.”

The Dukes’ melody also reaches down at the end, but then climbs back up one semitone. This final note, a flat sixth, puts a twist on the Tokens’ melody, shifting it from the standard major scale to the harmonic major scale and requiring a different harmonization scheme. Instead of I-IV-I-V, it goes I-iv-I-iv. In other words, both chord progressions start in the same place, but where the Tokens proceed to a major subdominant chord, the Dukes’ subdominant is minor.

Some listeners have dismissed “Vanishing Girl” because of its similarity to “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” perhaps forgetting that the Dukes’ whole schtick is homage and liberal borrowing from their musical forebears. Granted, the early ’60s Tokens aren’t quite of the same ilk as the late ’60s psychedelic bands the Dukes are openly emulating.

The Dukes of Stratosphear are actually the alter egos of XTC, who borrowed at least one other melody before. Frontman Andy Partridge confided in Todd Bernhardt in a 2007 interview that “Meccanik Dancing” (1978) is a condensation of “Shortnin’ Bread” (see “Complicated Game: Inside the Songs of XTC,” page 55).

Bassist Colin Moulding (aka “The Red Curtain”) wrote “Vanishing Girl.” There appears to be no public acknowledgement from him of its similarity to “Lion.” He does remark in “XTC Song Stories” (page 220): “All I had was this very smooth-sounding melody. […] So we amped it up and got the tempo going and Hollies’d it up.” Chronicler Neville Farmer refers curious listeners to the Hollies’ “King Midas in Reverse” and “On a Carousel.”

Those influences are discernable, but not nearly as explicit as the borrowed melody. Regardless, the subtle alteration and reharmonization of that melody — and the unique direction the song takes from there — make “Vanishing Girl” worthy of another listen. Whatever the melody’s provenance, it’s clear the Dukes put a unique spin on it.

The Green Danube

It’s one of those classical melodies everyone is familiar with even if they can’t name it.

“An der schönen blauen Donau” (“On the Beautiful Blue Danube”) was written by Johann Strauss II in 1866. Its recognizability over a century later is thanks probably in large part to “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) and parodies on “The Simpsons” and elsewhere.

In 2013 I worked up an abbreviated rock instrumental arrangement of Danube for Daniel hales, and the frost heaves. We provided a live soundtrack for a theater production of “Alice in Wonderland.” The director wanted Danube to accompany a scene where the characters play flamingo croquet in slow motion.

Danube would appear to have nothing to do with Wonderland — which is why the Frost Heaves excluded it when we recorded our Lewis Carroll poem adaptations for an album called “Contrariwise.” But in fact we were not the first to make a connection between the two works.

Donovan kicks off his meandering treatment of “The Walrus and the Carpenter” (1971) with a not-quite-right excerpt on organ and calliope. And the music folks at Disney in 1947 demoed a version of “Beautiful Soup” set to the Danube melody. The Mock Turtle and his greenish broth never made it into the film, however, and we only know of his song today thanks to the DVD extras.

The version presented here sticks close to my 2013 adaptation, which covers just the first 76 bars of a 420-bar composition. Except now I’ve given the melody to the bass, in the tradition of the other fuzzy interpretations I’ve been recording lately. Daniel Hales returns as accompanist, but switches his guitar for a ukulele to counterbalance the low-end lead.

We’ve altered the title in tribute to the Frost Heaves’ home base, Greenfield, which got its name from a tributary of a certain tinge, and which was incorporated on this day in 1753.

‘Albums’ of the ‘year’: ‘2020’

Pardon all the scare quotes. These as just some song groupings I discovered and dug over the last 12 months, give or take.

Whack World – Tierra Whack (2018)

My big thing lately is getting away from repetition, and this piece does that of necessity — each song is only a minute long. Thematically, stylistically, it covers an incredible amount of ground in its total runtime of 15 minutes. Also, I’m not sure the music should be separated from its accompanying video, which accentuates its careful crafting and sense of humor.

General Dome – Buke and Gase (2013)

Between the relentless stomping and unconventional plucking it’s almost possible to lose track of the hugely expressive and sneakily high-ranging voice tying it all together.

A State of Wonder – Glenn Gould (1955, 1981)

I eventually developed a strong preference between these two recordings of Johann Sebastain Bach’s Goldberg Variations. But having the chance to contrast two such different interpretations of the same compositions by the same superhuman performer is a rare treat.

A Good Thing Lost – The Poppy Family (1968-1973)

A magnificent voice backed up by ingenious pop craftsmanship. These songs ought to be part of the groovy pantheon, but I’d never gotten a whiff of any of them until this year.

For Certain Because – The Hollies (1966)

Delightful Britpop with just enough psychedelic spice, and fantastic two- and three-part harmonies.

Splendor and Misery – Clipping (2016)

The story of the sole survivor of an uprising on an interstellar slave ship. Glitchy beats created by, among other things, a dot-matrix printer like my grandmother had circa 1992. The album title is a reference to an unfinished Samuel R. Delany novel, one song references Ursula K. LeGuinn. How can I resist?

Related

Post-Looney Toons

Classical Music Diary No. 9

How does one listen to Chopin’s “Funeral March” in a post-“Looney Toons” world? The doomy, plodding left hand and ominous melody feature prominently in 1948’s “Scaredy Cat” and plenty of other cartoon and comedy settings where death and defeat require a soundtrack. Keep listening to the piece, though, and it gets sentimental, almost sweet. Media reductions put an unwelcome slant on any listening to the complete piece (Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 35, 1839). On the other hand, when the music evolves beyond this popculture touchstone, the surprises are that much more surprising.

Murmuring in the fog

Classical Music Diary No. 8

As I’ve been reading classical music reviews I’ve been awed by critics who can contrast subtle stylistic differences in various recordings of the same piece. I notice superficial differences, but my ear is not that sophisticated.

There’s one case, however, where I thought I had identified one superior and one inferior recording. I returned to them this week to see if those earlier impressions held up and if I could put them into words.

I’ve owned many copies of Dawn Upshaw and the London Sinfonietta performing Henryk Gorecki’s “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” from 1992. I keep lending it to people who, quite understandably, never give it back. At some point I replaced it with a recording from a couple years later by Joanna Kozlowska and the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, which didn’t seem to live up to the one I was familiar with.

In my most recent listenings, I’ve identified a few reasons. It’s meant to be a slow, meditative piece. The London version, clocking in at 53:43, hits the sweet spot, whereas the Warsaw version is too slow, stretching to 59:06.

One has to wait more than two minutes longer for the real draw of the piece — the vocals — to enter (13:18 vs. 15:23). And how can anyone compete with Dawn Upshaw? She and the Sinfonietta lean into the drama of the piece, where Kozlowska’s reading feels a bit flat.

The difference between the two versions is most stark in the third movement. The London version is legato, producing a serene, rocking sensation. The Warsaw version, on the other hand, disconnects the two repeated notes of the movement’s foundation, lurching through the whole thing.

Where the Warsaw version is superior is in the recording itself. All the elements can be heard more clearly. The best example is at the very beginning. In the London version, the murmuring doublebasses get lost in a fog, whereas in the Warsaw version they stand out like whispers across a domed gallery.

There’s plenty of music that excites me mentally, but the “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” is a rare piece that also excites me dermally. At key moments it sends ripples of surface goosebumps and subsurface chills up and down my arms, my sides, my scalp.

But how do I reconcile my abiding love of this piece with my newfound dislike of repetition? I’ll evade the question and reply with an observation about intervals. Each note is rarely more than a major second away from the one that preceded it, sometimes a third in epiphanic moments.

This is a different kind of minimalism from the scrolling landscape of Adams’ “Harmonielehre.” Both tonally and structurally, “Sorrowful Songs” paces within a confined space, something like the prisoner in the Gestapo cell at Zakopane. But even within these strictures there is still the possibility of transcendence — so many higher octaves within reach.