THE GREAT DEPRESSION MUSIC

[Admin]

The Great Depression: American Music in the '30s (CD & cassette)

The music contained in this collection can also be heard in Blackside Inc.'s seven-part documentary, THE GREAT DEPRESSION.

THE GREAT DEPRESSION
music from the era


Extraordinary crises which challenge the human spirit also inspire many of its most enduring monuments. Each day millions of Americans use public buildings, parks and roads built some 60 years ago in public works projects of a scope unsurpassed in our nation's history. We still enjoy the fiction of John Steinbeck, films of Frank Capra, and populist-themed symphonic works of Aaron Copeland and Roy Harris. All these works -- the art no less than the public buildings -- came to life in response to the Great Depression. It was a time of both agony and exuberance, an era when creative enthusiasm seemed to outweigh the burdens of poverty and the specter of impending war. Of all America's periods of crisis, the Depression is the one we look to with greatest pride and with the fondest hope of inspiring us to vanquish similar challenges today.

Collected here is representative music of the Great Depression. In it you'll hear echoes of emotions ranging from despair to exuberance from a very different America still living in memory for many of us.

We are lucky to have much of it, given the economic devastation visited on the recording industry by the Depression. The sale of an estimated 104 million records in 1927 plummeted to a mere 6 million in 1932.

Recording activity surged again when 'swing' became the craze of mid-1930s youth culture, and this collection evidences notable recordings waxed even in the torpid lull of 1931-1934. The range of material reflects an America which was scarcely homogeneous, and whose diversity was targeted by record companies with everything from Delta blues to sophisticated swing. Lyrics, as much as styles, paint the era's portrait: along with song celebrations of heroes like Joe Louis and employment offered by the National Recovery Administration, there are hopeful fantasies of love and prosperity offered by Tin Pan Alley craftsmen. Their songs were popularized by both radio crooners and spectacular movie musicals. "A nation in crisis had become the songwriter's golden opportunity," wrote Patricia Dubin McGuire in her biography of her father, Lullaby Of Broadway: Life And Times of Al Dubin (Citadel Press, 1983, Secaucus, NJ). Along with composer Harry Warren, Dublin supplied songs to many of the Depression-era Busby Berkeley musicals which, his daughter recalled, "helped many people forget about the grimness of unemployment, overdue bills and unpaid rent, if only for an hour." The problems plague us still, but perhaps the vitality of these Depression-era songs will encourage us to persevere, as it did the Americans of that time.

The Songs

"Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?"
Rudy Vallee, 10/27/32

Only days after the debut of the short-lived 1932 musical, Americana, Bing Crosby was in a New York studio to record the show's outstanding song, "Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?" Two days later, rival crooner Rudy Vallee waxed this version, and both 1932 recordings enjoyed considerable popularity in a year when few Americans were buying records.

This downbeat song reflected the plight of unemployed World War I veterans, thousands of whom encamped in Washington, D.C. in the summer of 1932 to lobby for payment of the 'bonus' Congress had pledged they would get in 1945. The brutal routing via tank, saber, and tear gas of the so-called 'Bonus Army' on the night of July 28, 1932, by forces commanded by Army Chief-of-Staff Douglas MacArthur roused public sympathy and inspired Yip Harburg's bitter lyric about bread lines and a once-proud soldier reduced to begging.


"All Of Me"
Louis Armstrong and His Orchestra, 1/27/32

Armstrong's romantically bittersweet "All Of Me" scarcely suggests the desperation of many Americans as he recorded this then-new standard during the Depression's bleakest winter. National income had declined by 50 percent since 1929, and 14 million Americans were unemployed at the outset of 1932. Americans were giving their all that winter just to survive. Legions of homeless scavenged for scraps and huddled in shanty towns dubbed 'Hoovervilles' after the President who said, "What the country needs is a good, big laugh." Secretly, Hoover urged Congress not to cut Army and Navy pay, as well-fed troops might soon be needed to quell a revolution.


"It Don't Mean A Thing (If It Ain't Got That Swing)"
Duke Ellington and His Orchestra, 2/2/32

Duke Ellington had a gift for transcending shifting tastes and making music both trendsetting and timeless. The deep freeze of 1932's winter is belied by the hot vitality of this classic performance, featuring Ivie Anderson's vocals. Years later, Duke would observe: "We did not foresee then that the world would take it ['It Don't Mean A Thing'] to its own as a theme of an era." The swing era waited for Benny Goodman, but Ellington heard it coming.


"Hungarian Varsovienne"
Henry Ford's Old Fashioned Dance Orchestra, 1/14/27

This pre-Depression recording exists thanks to Henry Ford's ironic role as patron of the folk arts. The automotive mogul had a 19th-century rural sensibility, even as his assembly lines and Model-Ts inexorably pushed America into the 20th century. He sponsored fiddling contests and a dancing school, their uplifting value lost on the worker who told Edmund Wilson: "A man checks 'is brains and 'is freedom at the door when he goes to work at Ford's." In this case, the "Hungarian Varsovienne" (a relative of the mazurka) reflects the magnet the automobile industry was for immigrants of varied backgrounds. To Ford, a lover of American dance music, the irony of his own recording may have been lost.


"Detroit Moan"
Victoria Spivey and the Chicago Four, 10/15/36

Detroit factories had begun advertising in Southern cities for black workers as early as 1917. Paid less than their white counterparts, they were offered the hardest, hottest work in the auto foundries, called "the black department." Michigan's black population of 17,000 in 1910 soared to over 117,000 in the 1920s. Borrowing from the practices of Southern plantation patriarchs, Henry Ford paid black workers $1 a day in 1931 and invested the other $3 owed them into 'communal enterprises' in the subdivision called Inkster. Blues songwriter and performer Victoria Spivey vented some of the angst of black Detroit in her "Detroit Moan." (The song was originally issued as the B-side of the happier "Hollywood Stomp.")


"We Sure Got Hard Times Now"
Barbecue Bob, 4/18/30

Employed at Tidwell's Barbecue Place in Atlanta, Robert Hicks recorded extensively as Barbecue Bob and with the Georgia Cotton Pickers. He was among the most distinctive exponents of the 'Atlanta 12-string' school of guitarists, until his untimely death from pneumonia at age 29 in 1931. "Hard Times" were on the minds of many black Atlantans: Bob's friend, Buddy Moss, waxed a "Hard Times Blues" in 1933, and the popular preacher Rev. J.M. Gates cut "These Hard Times" as a sermon in 1930.


"Dark Was The Night (Cold Was The Ground)"
Blind Willie Johnson, 12/3/27

This haunting impression of the 'lining out' of a hymn and church 'moaners' in prayer is the distillation, filtered through generations of African-American experience, of a hymn penned in 1792 by English cleric Thomas Haweis as "Gethsemane." Johnson was the greatest of the 'guitar evangelists' who enjoyed a brief vogue on record before the Depression. His work was widely influential and enduring: Roebuck "Pops" Staples still performs Johnson's "Nobody's Fault But Mine." (For more of Johnson's music, see The Complete Recordings of Blind Willie Johnson, Columbia/Legacy C2K 52835.)


"I'm Slappin' Seventh Avenue"
Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, 4/11/38

New York's famous frenetic energy was unstilled by the Depression. Seventh Avenue was one of the city's major thoroughfares, and Ellington one of its brightest stars. For Depression-era listeners seeking escape to more exotic climes, the flip of the original 78 offered Ivie Anderson singing "Swinging in Honolulu."


"Mean Low Blues"
Blues Birdhead (James Simons), 10/13/29

Evoking the rural South and the dislocation felt by many who left it for Northern cities, Blues Birdhead waxed "Mean Low Blues" in Richmond, Virginia, before the Depression. Whether the obscure harp player's fortunes would have improved had he joined the 1930's flood of New York-bound migrants is another matter. "One of every 20 residents of New York is a Negro," wrote Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. in 1935. "There are about 300,000 black, brown and yellow folk. One-half are not working, the other half is existing on the crumbs from the table."


"Happy Days Are Here Again"
Casa Loma Orchestra, conducted by Glen Gray, 10/29/29

The date on which the Casa Loma Orchestra waxed this cheery tune is better remembered as Black Tuesday, the day of the stock market crash. Variety's October 30, 1929 headline read "WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG." How big an egg? An average 40 percent loss in stock values by mid-November, representing nearly 30 billion dollars! This song (sans vocals here) expressed pre-crash exuberance in the film Chasing Rainbows (a young Jack Benny appeared in it), and it became a 'wishful thinking' anthem as the Depression darkened.


"There's A New Day Comin' "
Ted Lewis and His Band, 1/31/33

Released six days after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's inauguration on March 4, 1933, this peppy ode to full employment put on a bright face even as the banking system was collapsing. No matter: Ted Lewis, 'the top-hatted tragedian of jazz,' foresaw full employment for the brewer, and on March 13th the new President asked Congress to legalize beer. The repeal of Prohibition became official on December 5, 1933. Born Theodore Friedman in 1892, Ted Lewis blew a corny clarinet and billed himself "The Medicine Man of the Blues." His career spanned vaudeville to Vegas, and his slogan, "Is everybody happy?," never changed. Lewis aimed to please.


"I Surrender, Dear"
Red Norvo and His Swing Septet, 9/26/34

This is the sole performance in this collection from 1934, a year bitterly remembered by Malcolm X, who wrote in his Autobiography: " . . . by 1934, we really began to suffer. This was about the worst depression year, and no one we knew had enough to eat or live on." The 1934 dollar was still only worth about 60 percent of its 1929 value. But five million previously unemployed Americans were back at work.

The tumult of the times is countered by the elegance of xylophonist Norvo's performance with a stellar group including Artie Shaw on clarinet and Teddy Wilson at the piano. The song helped bring stardom to Bing Crosby back in 1931, and would become the vehicle for a 1948 film, I Surrender, Dear.


"Creole Love Call"
Duke Ellington and His Famous Orchestra, 2/11/32

The third and final piece of Ellingtonia in this collection reprises a piece Duke first recorded in 1927. This later "Creole Love Call" was released on a 12" 78, allowing more leisurely development of solos. (The flip side offered Crosby singing "St. Louis Blues" with Ellington's Orchestra.) It was recorded in 1932, a year aptly summarized by French socialist Leon Blum: "Looking at the world, one has the impression of an audience. . .waiting restlessly for the end of one act and at the same time listening to the stage hands behind the scenes arranging the scenery for the act that is to follow."


"Gloomy Sunday"
Billie Holiday, 8/7/41

Popular folklore of the Depression has Wall Street pedestrians dodging a hailstorm of failed financiers jumping from skyscrapers. Nothing like that ever happened, but America's suicide rate increased (and its birth rate declined) during the Depression. Edmund Wilson wrote movingly in The American Earthquake of the unemployed man whose last desperate act was rationalized in a coroner's report as due to "ill health, family troubles and no work." Given that background, it may be understandable that Holiday's recording of "Gloomy Sunday" was reportedly banned from radio. This suicidal reverie was written in Hungary in 1933 and first recorded in English by Paul Robeson in 1940. Legend has it that "Gloomy Sunday" (or "Szomoru Vasarnap," as it was known in Hungary) inspired suicides wherever it was heard, hence its nickname, 'the suicide song.'


"Headin' For Better Times"
Ted Lewis and His Band, 1/12/31

Lewis is so relentlessly upbeat that one might have easily overlooked the desperation behind many smiles seen when "Headin' for Better Times" was recorded in January 1931. It was the winter of street corner apple sellers, of whom Hoover observed: "Many persons left their jobs for the more profitable one of selling apples." America's plight so moved citizens of the Cameroons in Africa that a collection of $3.77 was raised and mailed to New York City with instructions that it be used for "the relief of the starving." For his part, Ted Lewis provided square meals and steady work to first-rate jazzmen on their way up, notably cornetist Mugsy Spanier and clarinetist Benny Goodman, on this performance.


"NRA Blues"
Bill Cox, 8/30/33

"History will probably record the National Industrial Recovery Act as the most important and far-reaching legislation ever enacted by Congress," said FDR as the centerpiece of his New Deal was signed into law on June 16, 1933. Two months later, Bill Cox was celebrating the three R's promised by the NRA -- relief, reform, and recovery -- in his jaunty "NRA Blues." Roosevelt's NRA met with stiff resistance and would not realize all its hopes, but Cox's never wavered.


"Are You Makin' Any Money?"
Chick Bullock and His Levee Loungers, 9/16/33

This pervasive question of the era was first sung in the film, Moonlight And Pretzels. The clever Herman Hupfeld wrote the tune two years after 1931's "As Time Goes By." Vocalist Chick Bullock was featured on over 500 titles in the 1930s, often accompanied by New York's finest jazzmen. Worthy of note in this performance are trumpeter Manny Weinstock and Jimmy Dorsey on clarinet.


"He's In The Ring (Doin' The Same Old Thing)"
Memphis Minnie (McCoy), 8/23/35

On June 22, 1935, one-time Ford motor plant employee Joe Louis laid out Italy's Primo Carnera in the sixth round before a crowd of 60,000 in New York's Yankee Stadium. "Whether it was the South Side of Chicago, St. Antoine Street of Detroit, or the Hill District of Pittsburgh, Negro communities throughout the nation went crazy with joy,"reported the New York Amsterdam Star-News. A folk hero had been born.

One of the great women of the blues, Memphis Minnie reflected that joy in a recording session two months after the Louis-Carnera bout. (She also waxed a "Joe Louis Strut.")


"With Plenty Of Money And You"
Hal Kemp and His Orchestra, 10/26/36

This song expressed the fantasy of many young men during the Depression. Unemployment meant the deferral of family life, and the marriage rate plummeted along with job opportunities. (Couples already married tended to stay so; divorce cost money.) The song debuted in Gold Diggers Of 1937 (Dick Powell sang it), and was one of the memorable collaborations of lyricist Al Dubin and composer Harry Warren for Busby Berkeley's musicals. Band leader Hal Kemp led a popular 'sweet band,' noted for its muted staccato brass and the pallid vocals of drummer Edgar C. "Skinnay" Ennis.


"Dawn Of A New Day"
(Official Song of the New York World's Fair) Horace Heidt and His Musical Knights, 1/26/39

The New York World's Fair opened on April 30, 1939. Boldly futuristic, its theme was "The World of Tomorrow." Like the Fair, the 'official song' offered by the Gershwins was an affirmation that the Depression was over, though songs had promised that since it began! Joan Peyser, author of The Memory Of All That: The Life Of George Gershwin, believes "Dawn of A New Day" was pieced together by Ira and Kay Swift from George's posthumous notebooks. Horace Heidt's band is remembered by one veteran of the era as "a very controlled Mickey Mouse band with good musicianship."


"Whistle While You Work"
Artie Shaw and His New Music, 12/30/37

Shaw's swinging 'cover' of this 'think positive' anthem was waxed just nine days after the world premiere of the film which introduced it, Disney's first animated feature, Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. Dire predictions for 'Walt's folly' were disproved by the popularity of the film, bolstered by the memorable songs provided by lyricist Larry Morey and composer Frank Churchill. Artie Shaw's talent as arranger, player, and band leader earned him the 'New King of Swing' tag in the wake of his hit rendition of Cole Porter's "Begin the Beguine" in 1938. Ironically, Americans were savoring the optimism of "Whistle While You Work" as the recession of 1937-38 was hurling two million of them back into unemployment. The whistling only became earnest when America turned its energies to defeating the Axis. At a terrible price, World War II ended the Great Depression.

- Mark Humphrey

[Admin]

Woody Guthrie

Journalist, Musician (1912-1967)


Woody Guthrie playing the guitar
Woody Guthrie. March 1943. Credit: Al Aumuller, The Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division

Woodrow Wilson “Woody” Guthrie is arguably the most influential American folk musician of the first half of the 20th century. He is best known for his folk ballads, traditional and children’s songs, and improvised works, often incorporating political commentary. Woody Guthrie is closely identified with the Dust Bowl and Great Depression of the 1930s. His songs from that time period earned him the nickname “Dust Bowl Troubadour.”

Born in 1912 in Okema, Oklahoma, Guthrie moved at age 18 to Pampa, Texas, a small town in the hardest-hit area of the Dust Bowl. It was in Pampa that he experienced the fury of Black Sunday—a severe dust storm that swept across the Midwestern states on April 14, 1935, and inspired Guthrie to write the song, “So Long, It’s Been Good to Know You.” After Black Sunday, Guthrie joined the ranks of Okies migrating to California in search of work. Many of his works—“Do Re Mi,” “I Ain’t Got No Home,” “Talking Dust Bowl,” and others—chronicle the difficult conditions faced by the working class Okies in their new home. At the close of the 1930s, Guthrie left California for New York City. It was there that he wrote his best-known song, “This Land Is Your Land.” In the often-omitted fourth and sixth verses of the song, Guthrie rails against class inequality.


As I went walking, I saw a sign there,
And on the sign there, it said “Private Property.”
But on the other side, it didn't say nothing!
That side was made for you and me.
In the squares of the city, in the shadow of a steeple,
By the relief office, I'd seen my people.
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking,
Is this land made for you and me?

Guthrie died from complications of Huntington’s disease in 1967. Despite his decline, he had a major impact on American popular music in the second half of the 20th century and the rise of the folk movement, influencing such artists as Joan Baez, Johnny Cash, Bruce Springsteen, the Byrds, and Bob Dylan (for whom Guthrie was a mentor). Many of Guthrie’s recordings have been archived in the Library of Congress.

[Deleted]

It seems  the music of this era was either early FOLK, Blues or an attempt to raise people's spirits with the SWING ERA.

It was also soon that the fight against Liquor ended which is almost coming full circle.. now with the Government going to hell...son to raise money and the spirits of people MARIJUANA will be legalized.

WIth My dad born on 1930 he grew up during the comeback era and the things people did to survive went from doing anything to joining the MOB to stealing......

AS they say MUSIC (liquor and drugs) calm the savage beast...... the government knew they were about to have a revolution on their hands and always seem to be able to fix and set aside their petty differences when the crap is about to hit the fan.

SJ

[Admin]

May 16, 2013 12:46:14 GMT -5 @stjames said:

It seems  the music of this era was either early FOLK, Blues or an attempt to raise people's spirits with the SWING ERA.

It was also soon that the fight against Liquor ended which is almost coming full circle.. now with the Government going to hell...son to raise money and the spirits of people MARIJUANA will be legalized.

WIth My dad born on 1930 he grew up during the comeback era and the things people did to survive went from doing anything to joining the MOB to stealing......

AS they say MUSIC (liquor and drugs) calm the savage beast...... the government knew they were about to have a revolution on their hands and always seem to be able to fix and set aside their petty differences when the crap is about to hit the fan.

SJ

Prohibition also had a large effect on the music industry in the United States, specifically with jazz. Speakeasies became far more popular during that time, and the effects of the Great Depression caused a migration that led to a greater dispersal of jazz music. Movement began from New Orleans and went north through Chicago and to New York. This led to the development of different styles in different cities. Because of its popularity in speakeasies and the development of more advanced recording devices, jazz became very popular very quickly. It was also at the forefront of the minimal integration efforts going on at the time, as it united mostly black musicians with mostly white audiences.

[Admin]

How the Great Depression Gave America the Blues, by Heath Lowrance





This article originally appeared in the September, 2008 issue of History Magazine.



With the stock market crash of 1929, America’s musical trends went from “Happy Days are Here Again” to “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” as rapidly as one of Gene Krupa’s syncopated percussion beats. Popular music, which had been overwhelmingly positive and free-spirited throughout the Jazz Age, with catchy ditties like “Ain’t We Got Fun” and “Makin’ Whoopee” topping the charts, gave way to earthier expressions of heartache and desperation. Regional folk and blues, and what was known at the time as “race records”, reached a new level of maturity.

Complex and invigorated forms of early jazz still thrived throughout the economic depression, championed by such seminal musicians as Duke Ellington, Fletcher Henderson, and Count Basie. But the period between 1930 and 1935 swept in a wave of somber blues and confessional ballads, a counterpoint that hadn’t existed in the popular consciousness before, forever changing the timbre of popular American music.

Folk and blues existed long before the Depression, and a handful of entrepreneuring producers had recorded regional artists throughout the first two decades of the century. The Okeh record label, which invented the term “race records”, had pioneered early field recording work in Atlanta, rural Texas, Kansas City and New Orleans, discovering such “hot jazz” performers as Memphis Slim and Lonnie Johnson. In August of 1920, they released the very first commercial recording of a black blues singer, with Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues”.

Other record labels sought similar success with records aimed exclusively at black audiences. Through the ‘20’s, Brunswick, Victor and Columbia all hit the road with mobile units to record blues performers in hotel rooms and public halls throughout the Southern states. Columbia had actually been releasing “hot jazz” records as far back as 1900, and by the mid-‘20’s were selling over two million a month. Clearly there was a market for “race records”.

The term “blues” was a fairly recent one in the burgeoning record industry. In 1912, the great black composer W.C. Handy wrote “Memphis Blues”, a tune that became hugely popular and influential, and “jazz” and “blues” became virtual synonyms for the same thing—black music for black people.

At the same time, other producers were scouring the Appalachians and other rural areas recording the simple, raw music of poor whites. If black folk music had its roots in African rhythms and the slave experience, white folk music was born of the ballads and story songs brought over by immigrants from Ireland, England, and northern Europe.

Using simple arrangements—and often homemade instruments—the poor farmers, sharecroppers and laborers of the American South kept their own musical traditions alive and gradually expanded upon them by virtue of their own personal experiences. The music was stripped down and heartfelt, generally using only a fiddle and a plucked instrument like guitar or banjo, and often used tight vocal harmonies. As with “race recordings”, the Okeh record label proved innovative, being among the first to record this music commercially in the ‘20’s with Fiddlin’ John Carson.

The Victor label, however, would have the credit for “discovering” Jimmie Rodgers, perhaps the most influential of the “hill-billy blues” or “old-timey” recording artists. As a wanderer through the American South, Rodgers, “The Singing Brakeman”, sang with poetry and dark humor of hardship on the road and bitter disillusionment, and popularized yodeling in folk music—something that would become a bluegrass staple.

The arc of Jimmie Rodgers recording career coincided with the economic depression. His first recording for Victor was in 1927, “Soldier’s Sweetheart”, and his final tracks were completed in New York City only six years later. He died in 1933, just hours after recording those last tracks.

His label mates, The Carter Family, enjoyed a much longer career. Like Rodgers, they began with Victor in 1927, with the double-sided 78 “Wandering Boy” and “Poor Orphan Child”, and through the turbulent 1930’s they toured extensively. The Carter Family sang of lost love, betrayal, and the ultimate comfort of simple faith. Their tight vocal harmonies and Maybelle Carter’s innovative style of guitar picking represented something completely new to most listeners outside the Appalachians, and “hill-billy” music found many new converts in their wake. The Carters are referred to now as the “First Family of Country Music”, and for good reason. Without their seminal recordings, the entire course of country music would have been altered.

But black or white, folk recordings went largely ignored by mainstream audiences throughout the first twenty years of the century. They were, in today’s terminology, ‘fringe markets’.

The Depression did very little to change this. In the short term, it nearly killed those markets: the recording industry as a whole was hit hard. In 1927, record sales across the board topped 104 million; by 1932 that number had plummeted to six million. Field recordings, the life blood of folk and blues, dried up almost entirely and the “race” market came very close to being wiped out.

But in falling back into the darkness they had emerged from, folk and blues grew stronger and more self-assured. The Great Depression forced rural music to sustain itself without outside influence and without the burden of having to sell to a wider audience.



From Country Blues to the Chicago Sound

Country blues emerged—again, out of the American South—in the 1920’s. A rougher, often raunchier musical form than its “hot jazz” contemporary, country blues musicians were primarily itinerant road men, hobo-ing from town to town with little more than a guitar and a suitcase, playing at random dances, barrelhouses, logging camps, and, if all else failed, on street corners. White audiences of the time turned away from country blues as being too harsh and primitive, and even during the great glut of “race records” in the Jazz Age, country bluesmen were rarely recorded.

And yet country blues, in the early ‘30’s, became the unofficial bard for the experience of poor blacks, the rude and brutally honest chronicler of life at the bottom of society, when society itself had bottomed out.

This was the dark musical underbelly of American experience that spawned the genius of Robert Johnson, perhaps the most infamous bluesman of the time. Many legends have been built around the mysterious Johnson, most notably the oft-told tale of how he sold his soul to the Devil at the crossroads for the privilege of becoming the greatest blues guitar player in the world.

Folk tales aside, Johnson’s influence was enormous. As one of the few country bluesmen recorded in his prime, his style of rough playing and gut-wrenching, howling vocals became a standard that many who followed would build upon.

But as influential as he was, Robert Johnson’s recordings barely caused a ripple on the stagnant waters of the record industry at the time. More successful initially was the great but now largely-ignored Charley Patton, whose record “34 Blues” sold well by the standards of the time. Patton died shortly afterward.

“Depression Blues”, recorded in 1931 by Tampa Red, is in many ways the ultimate example of Depression-era blues, and a lasting testament to the inspiring capacity many rural black musicians had for expressing their anguish with simple, brutal poetry:



“If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease

If I could tell my troubles, it may would give my poor heart ease

But depression’s got me, somebody help me please”



The Repeal of Prohibition

Two events helped keep blues music alive during this turbulent period—the first and most significant was the repeal, at long last, of Prohibition.

During the ‘20’s, the liquor laws did little to dissuade Americans from indulging in alcohol, but it did force taverns and clubs underground and made criminals out of ordinary people. Speakeasies abounded, and one odd side-effect of Prohibition was that anyone looking for a drink now had more choices than ever before of where to find one.

But for traveling musicians, especially blacks, Prohibition meant that venues were disappearing everywhere.

When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, a fresh wave of taverns and clubs opened up, many of them catering to black audiences, and suddenly black musicians had a place to play. The benefit of having a steady gig and an ever-expanding audience helped spur blues music along to even greater maturity.

The other event that helped save the development of blues came about out of necessity. The same year that Prohibition finally threw up its hands and surrendered, the Victor record label launched its Bluebird line. This was a series of budget recordings, sold at a lower price than their regular mainstream recordings, and aimed again at a black audience. The Bluebird records sold well for the time, kept fans happy, and fed more than a few otherwise starving musicians.

But unlike the old days, the producers and engineers remained in their studios and the musicians had to come to them. Victor/Bluebird was based in Chicago, and even though the performers who walked through the studio doors were as varied and different from each other as could be, a certain feel developed in all their recordings, a more sophisticated and urban feel that would come to be known as the “Chicago Sound”.

Because the performers rarely recorded in their own environment anymore, urbanization was becoming more and more apparent in blues music. St. Louis and New York, like Chicago, became centers of blues recording, and each city eventually spawned a “sound” that would come to be associated with it.

The common denominator always remained the same, however: blues music told the truth of its own experience, whether the truth was brutal and ugly, or joyous and hopeful.



Hollywood

Hollywood responded to the Great Depression with an explosion of good cheer that seems almost strained by today’s standards, but at the time proved to be an amazing tonic for keeping up morale in the bleakest of times. Musicals, comedies, and lavish productions featuring regular Joes making good in high society and getting the girl kept box office receipts high, even when saving enough money to buy food was a challenge for many Americans.

Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers made countless films during the ‘30’s, none of them with particularly memorable stories, but all with beautiful or exotic settings, spectacular dance numbers, and toe-tapping, feel-good music designed to take the film-goer away from his worries—at least for an hour and fifteen minutes or so.

The Marx Brothers had a different approach—direct attack on the institutions that many Americans already resented. High class society, universities, and politicians all came under satirical fire in the Marx Brothers comedies, much to the delight of audiences unsure of who to blame for their current predicament.

What these comedies, musicals and spectacles had in common was music—tender romantic ballads and upbeat, finger-snapping tunes with catchy lyrics and sassy instrumentation. The Depression rarely showed its face in America’s cinemas, and then only fleetingly.







The Golden Era of Swing

Chasing the Depression blues away with music was far more common than celebrating its woes. By 1935, a new form of jazz had assimilated itself into the popular culture, and as “race” and blues recordings declined, this new jazz prospered. It came from the same roots that blues and folk came from, “hot jazz”, but evolved along different lines.

In the 1920’s, “hot jazz” stretched the boundaries of what was musically possible. King Oliver, Jelly Roll Morton, Bix Beiderbecke and the phenomenon known as Louis Armstrong made music that fit the joyful, exuberant mood of the time. It was the music of bravado and unlimited human potential. Most importantly, it was music that had swing.

The musicians that followed in those giant footsteps continued to push the form forward, with bigger bands and more sophisticated arrangements. Louis Armstrong was the innovator of the solo instrumentalist, but musicians like Fletcher Henderson helped refine the concept, and the big bands of Benny Goodman and Count Basie soared to even greater heights. The emergence of Duke Ellington signaled a major turning point; more than any other band leader before him, he brought a new level of style, substance and musical insight to American music, an insight that may never have happened if it hadn’t been formed against the backdrop of the Great Depression.



Who would have thought that, in the end, a song by Bing Crosby would have summed it all up? “Brother Can You Spare a Dime?” was written in 1931 by E.Y. Harburg and Jay Gorney, initially for a Broadway musical called “New Americana”. It’s not a blues song or a “hot jazz” number or even a feel-good Hollywood musical tune, despite its origins on Broadway. But this song performed by an icon of popular music spoke every bit as poignantly and honestly about the Great Depression, and the disillusionment that followed in the hearts of Americans, as anything by Tampa Red or Charley Patton.



“They used to tell me I was building a dream, and so I followed the mob

When there was earth to plow or guns to bear, I was always there right on the job

They used to tell me I was building a dream, with peace and glory ahead

Why should I be standing in line, just waiting for bread?”



By the time the country had begun dragging itself laboriously out of the economic crisis, the musical landscape was unrecognizable from what it had been on October 24, 1929. An enormous shift had occurred, a seismic rumble with after-tremors that are still felt, even today. Different forms had found creative nourishment, and even though they had all drank from the same well, what each grew into couldn’t have been more diverse. There’s a huge aesthetic difference between the music of someone like Duke Ellington and someone like Robert Johnson—even more so, someone like Fred Astaire—but they all have a common trait, and taken together, they form one clear sound: the sound of a country that refused to let go of hope in the face of adversity.

HL



You can contact Heath Lowrance at [e-mail], or visit www.psychonoir.blogspot.com.