Popular Culture

Delta Dawn



Delta blues is as much legend as it is music. In the popular telling, blues articulated the hopelessness and poverty of an isolated, oppressed people through music that was disconnected from popular trends and technological advances. Delta blues giants like Robert Johnson were victims, buffeted by the winds of racism, singing out mostly for personal solace. The story is undoubtedly romantic, but it just isn't true. "It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy," B.B. King complained in his 1999 autobiography Blues All Around Me. "As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion." 




The music played by these 19th-century musicians was not blues, and their plucked string instrument was not the guitar; it was the banjo. In 1781 Thomas Jefferson wrote about the instrument slaves played at his plantation, the banjar, "which they brought with them from the hinterlands of Africa." These simple instruments usually had four strings and no frets. 

It may seem odd that an instrument with African roots, originally played by plantation slaves, would become popular among the white masses, but the banjo was portable, melodic, and relatively easy to play. Banjo proselytizers, seeking to overcome anxieties about embracing a product of slave culture, would go so far in trying to whitewash the instrument's ancestry as to claim that it had "reached its apogee through the contribution of whites" who had added frets and a fifth string to the original banjar.

A few early "classic blues" recordings featured the banjo, often fit with a guitar neck to provide a wider range. But these vaudevillian sides, cut by people like "Papa" Charlie Jackson, sound only distantly related to the Delta blues of Tommy Johnson or Skip James. The sound of the Delta is the sound of the steel-string guitar. The guitars of the 19th century used gut strings and were expensive and difficult to play. So despite having superior range and flexibility compared to banjos, guitars were still a rare sight in the black community. That all began to change in the 20th century.



Charlie Patton, long considered the godfather of the Delta blues, was an early beneficiary of these new opportunities. Sometime around 1900, Charlie's father, Bill, moved his family to Cleveland, Mississippi, to work on the farm of a man named Will Dockery. Dockery had arrived in Cleveland in 1888 fresh out of college and used a $1,000 gift from his grandmother to purchase a small plot of swampy timberland and open a mill. By the early 1900s, Dockery Farms had grown into a self-sufficient community, boasting a post office, general store, and a rail terminal. Dockery developed a reputation for paying good wages and treating his workers well. But wages weren't all that drew Bill Patton to Dockery's place. He also hoped to pry his adolescent son Charlie from the influence of the most prominent musical family in central Mississippi: the Chatmons. A God-fearing man, Bill Patton was determined not to let his son fall sway to the evils of secular music and the Chatmons' decadent lifestyle.

Henderson Chatmon had been a slave musician and was father to between 12 and 24 children, allegedly even Charlie Patton himself. His sons, along with Charlie, performed in an unending series of plantation-style string bands throughout the middle of the state. As Sam Chatmon recounted to folklorist Alan Lomax in 1978, "Every Saturday night we would divide up—let four or five go play at this place, and four or five go to the other, and four or five go to the other." While the Chatmons played for both white and black audiences, they made no apologies for preferring to play traditional social dance music for white patrons, who paid better and were less demanding. 



The bluesman traveled and performed alone or with a single companion. Audiences expected him to perform everything from traditional European social dances to blues and ragtime. He had to be able to provide enough rhythmic propulsion to move a dance floor one night and enough sensitivity to accompany storytelling ballads the next morning while busking on the street corner. A number of bluesmen even doubled as journeyman preachers, a topic pointedly addressed in Son House's "Preachin' Blues." To survive, a bluesman had to be versatile, mobile, and cheap. And so did his instrument.










Chris Kjorness teaches music at Longwood University in Farmville, Virginia.

NEXT: Will the Fight Over ObamaCare Live Even if the Law Dies?


    1. How odd… That’s the very same error I got from the comment filter when I tried to use a word that was more than six letters long.

  1. also 1rd

  2. Capitalism Midwifed the Birth of the Blues

    Of course it did, because it makes people sad.

    1. yes birthing can make the sads like mccain birthing palin.

      1. hummm…should i wait for the stupids or just note direct objects can take indirect pronoun forms? >nah, i’ll wait for the inevitable ignorance…

        1. just wait 03…”they” wont know the diff

            1. now that hurt
              i would never estalk john
              or live in ft worth
              or cause onerous reg requirments

  3. Sears Roebuck — Amazon.com 0.1

  4. I always thought it was the Rutles.

    1. Neil Innes nailed the sound of the Beatles in writing their songs. Good stuff.

    2. “Nasty, talking to a slightly deaf journalist, had claimed only that the Rutles were bigger than Rod. Rod Stewart would not be big for another eight years, and certainly at this stage hadn’t had a hit.”

      1. “Record sales shot up as people bought their albums just to burn them.”

  5. I like me some blues. And blues-derived rock.

    1. Most of rock and roll IS blues dervied.

      Everything from doo wap to Daryl Hall is da blues.

      1. I mean more directly derived.

        1. Pentatonic scales, I-IV-V. They’re everywhere.

          1. I, II, flat III, blues III, III, IV, V, VI, flat VII; Dorian mode

        2. More directly derived than Daryl Hall? I can’t believe such music exists.

  6. Although I love the blues, I must bridge to the following threadjack:

    Is Reason going to post anything regarding the 19th anniversary of the mass murder at Waco?

    I have been away for a few days so I might have missed something.

    It was good to visit Keaney Gym again. I have seen the likes of Claude English, Jack Kraft, Sly Williams and now RP perform there!

    1. prime number anniversaries are the most commonly celebrated.

      Or whatever you do for a tragedy. Commemorated, I guess.

  7. “That must be the oldest Barack Obama picture in existence.”


    Obviously nobody told that to Tesla.

  9. I wonder if you could dig around and find someone criticizing Sears Roebuck back in the day in the same way that WalMart gets it today.

    1. I wonder if you could dig around and find someone criticizing the US postal service for starting rural free delivery back in the day as they do today? BTW, it started right before the Sear mail order catalog started.

  10. Great article Chris! I really fine read. I’ve always said that the three greatest guitar innovators in the 1800s were CF Martin, Orville Gibson and Sears.

    I wish you had mentioned a bit about the technical designs that made the banjo the more desired instrument prior to the modern guitar. The banjo was (and still is) one of the only stringed instruments that can project across a room filled with people without amplification. The scenes you describe with fiddles, percussion and banjos all describe how important volume and projection was to these early blues musicians. Imagine playing a loud, crowded party with an unamplified guitar!

    The banjo was the electric guitar of pre-Civil War America. It’s the brilliance of the banjo design that lends itself to the incredible volume it produces. The guitar quietly stumbled along behind until Martin reshaped the body, and Gibson added steel strings. Only then could the guitar compete. Bluesmen persisted in trying to find ways to improve volume, creating the steel guitar, and using phonograph needles to produce crude amplification with gramophones. Years later, Les Paul would put his own stamp on guitar history, with the last word in amplification.

    1. The history of music is all about the problem of creating adequate volume. To sell to a big audience, composers required entire symphonies just to create enough volume to fill a concert hall. Dances such as the waltz are designed to keep the audience stepping lightly, so as not to overwhelm the music. Architects worked for centuries to design auditoriums that would allow a singer to project to the back seats. We are living in a golden age today, where any musician can make any sound they can imagine at any volume. All of this is due to American leadership in innovation of musical instruments, and all of that started with the banjo.

  11. I remember looking at the Sears catalog in the early 1950s (I was veerrrrry young, of course) and was amazed at what they sold: pets – dozens of dog breeds, parrots and even burros, and all sorts of guns – as I recall a Colt .38 special was about $35 back then, no questions asked. The Sears warehouse in Chicago must have been quite a place back then.

  12. The banjo had one major advantage over the guitar, it was loud and could easily play along with, or over other instruments like the piano or fiddle. Unlike an acoustic guitar, which without amplification is often lost in the mix (this also explains why guitars only became part of the big band scene once amplification arrived.)

    So why did the early blues men go with guitars? Price, a decent guitar can be made much more cheaply and easily than even a cut rate banjo.

  13. Yes, generating enough volume to compete with the other instruments was a problem with guitars in the days before electronic amplification. So let’s not forget the other great innovation that arose to meet this problem, the resophonic guitar. Invented by the Dopyera brothers in the 1920’s it was a pre-electric attempt to generate greater volume. Of course we know the Dopyeras best by the contraction of their name given to their instrument — the Dobro — the round-necked metal-bodied version of which is still favored today by many bluesmen who want that great twangy bottleneck slide sound. And yes, they’re LOUD.

  14. this is a very interesting article but why no props to the USPS Rural Free Delivery Service that started in the late 1800s and was a boon to the mail order business. Is that perhaps because it was a service provided by the big bad guvmint?

  15. Hi, very nice post, i certainly be keen on this website, keep on it

Please to post comments

Comments are closed.