Ku Klux Kulture by Felix Harcourt

Author:Felix Harcourt [Harcourt, Felix]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-37629-5
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-11T04:00:00+00:00

Figure 7.2. Cover illustration for Helen Marcell’s “Daddy Swiped Our Last Clean Sheet and Joined the Ku Klux Klan” (Ottawa, KS: R.C. Marcell, 1924).

The majority of these novelty songs took a similar tack. The organization’s violence and vigilantism were condemned even as the lyrics implicitly reinforced the idea that the Klan stood for law and order, and its victims somehow warranted their fate. This tendency was particularly apparent in the proliferation of Klan “blues” songs. Illustrative of the often-ironic tensions of the cultural 1920s, these popular songs fused the racial stereotypes of nineteenth-century “coon” songs with contemporary rhythms appropriated from black musicians.

The “coon song” fad, from the mid-1880s until the early 1910s, had seen hundreds of songs published that combined earlier tropes of blackface minstrelsy with a Jim Crow desire to enforce racial hierarchies. African Americans, these songs proclaimed, were marked by ignorance and indolence, lust, dishonesty, and irresponsibility. Worse, the “coon” represented an active threat to white Americans. Prone to drinking and gambling, he was also inextricably associated with the physical threat of black violence. In song after song, the straight razor became the signifier of an uninhibited savagery.45

These stereotypes continued well into the 1920s and 1930s in songs like “Pickanninies’ Heaven” and “Georgia Gigolo”—and in songs about the Klan. Most often, these songs took the point of view of an African American in the South. Mingling cartoonishly exaggerated Negro dialect with classic blues chord progressions, these songs explained exactly why their subjects actually deserved to be punished by the Invisible Empire. In “Those Dog-Gone Ku Klux Blues” by John Douglas Lewis, for one, the song’s narrator is threatened by the Klan after “loafing around” and brewing alcohol, and flees, leaving “my woman and my booze.” Warren D. Ownby’s “De Ku Klux Klan Gwine to Git You Ef You Don’t Watch Out” told the story of a black preacher in Alabama who used the threat of the Klan to scare his parishioners into good behavior. While containing elements of criticism, these songs were recognizably favorable to Klannish aims and to the law-enforcing image that members of the organization were keen to promote. This became particularly apparent when Klan songwriters began to adopt a similar narrative and melodic device in their own work, including Billy Newton’s “Ku Klux Steppin’ Blues” and Charles A. Arthur’s “Those Good Old Ku Klux Blues.”46

The earliest, and most successful, of these novelty blues songs was “The Ku Klux Blues” by popular Southern songwriters Al Mars and Clarence Krause, published in 1921. Mars and Krause told the overfamiliar “coon” story of Sambo Rastus, who liked to “roam around, with a razor in my hand,” “loved to fight both night and day,” and enjoyed shooting craps. After a visit from the Klan, though, Rastus reformed and vowed to be “as good as Abraham.” Several well-regarded African American bands actually adopted the song as a regular number, while Gus Creagh’s Orchestra recorded it for See-Bee Records.47

The Invisible Empire’s most influential and lasting interaction with American musical culture was not, however, as the subject of novelty songs.

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