The Story of the Blues by Paul Oliver

Author:Paul Oliver
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473523418
Publisher: Random House

Big Bill was neither motherless nor sisterless, but he sang for those who were. When Leroy Carr died, he largely took his place in creating urban folk blues that yet appealed to a larger, and up to a point, unknown audience. But he had established himself as an individual artist long before, and when recording resumed after the worst days of the Depression, Big Bill and Leroy Carr were both among the first to be reinstated as artists.

The Great Depression marks a watershed in blues. Inevitably African Americans suffered worst when the stock market crash of 1929 brought the subsequent downhill tumble of the entire national economy. A quarter of the nation’s total labour force was out of work by the summer of 1932 – twelve million unemployed. Of these a substantial proportion were black. They stood in rows in the breadlines, drank in silence in the soup kitchens, put newspapers inside their jackets to keep out the bitter cold of the Chicago winter. In the south, cotton prices dropped to a few cents a pound and unemployment was widespread. But the weather was warmer and the south was home; thousands streamed slowly back. Those that remained lived in unheated rooms, or in the shanty-town ‘Hoovervilles’ that sprang up on the outskirts of the cities. One of the very few recordings made in 1933, in the heart of the Depression told in the words of ‘Joe Stone’ (probably J. D. Short) the feelings of an unemployed black man.

And it’s hard time here, hard time everywhere (3)

I went down to the factory where I worked years,

I went down to the factory where I worked for years ago,

And the boss man tol’ me ‘Man I ain’t hirin’ here no mo’.

And we have a little city that they call down in Hooverville (2)

Times have got so hard people, they ain’t got no place to live.

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