Great blues cities No. 6: Louisville.

Generally accepted as the world’s first published ragtime, Ben Harney’s, ‘You’ve Been a Good old Wagon (Daddy) But You Done Broke Down,’ was a metaphor about an older man past his use-by date. The song was immortalised as a blues song by Bessie Smith many years later. Harney said he developed his songs in broken rhythm or raggy time, once describing his singing as ‘vocal ragging’ or ‘scatting’. This is 1893, remember, 33 years before Louis Armstrong’s ‘Heebie Jeebies’, often cited as the first song to include scatting, was recorded in 1926.

His inspiration for raggy time, the red-headed Harney said, came in 1887 when he came across a mountain man playing syncopated music, on a long-necked fiddle with banjo tunings, in the Appalachian Mountains. Harney would then have been just 16.

It’s never been established whether the mountain man was black or white.

In an 1899 interview, Harney’s Louisville publisher Greenup explained
the complexity of getting the song down on paper.

“It was no trouble for Harney to play this piece according to ragtime principles, but the great difficulty which beset us when we started out to publish the song was to get the rag in print. Harney had no more idea than a monkey how to write rag time though he could play and sing it better, perhaps, than anyone has ever yet succeeded in doing. We called in numerous composers, more or less famous, and put them to work on the song, but after much vexatious labour they reported, one after the other, that the job was too muchfor them. Finally, we took the song to Mr. John Biller, then musical director for Maucauley’s Theatre (Louisville’s leading theatre of the 1890s). Harney played and sang it, and Biller worked on the notes. I guess we went over the thing 500 times. At last by great patience and perseverance, Biller succeeded in getting on paper the very first ‘rag’ that the world ever saw. This was in 1893.”

Harney and Biller had enormous difficulty writing a proper score for You’ve Been a Good old Wagon (Daddy) But You Done Broke Down, because music in ragged time had never been captured on paper before.

The first rag – published in Louisville, Kentucky.

The same type of breakthrough, as I’ve posted perhaps too often before, would take place in 1912, when blues was written down and published for the first time. When finally published in 1895, You’ve Been a Good old Wagon (Daddy) But You Done Broke Down hit America with as much impact as the Beatles created in 1964. You’ve Been a Good old Wagon wrote the American academic, William H. Tallmadge, in 1995, “is of such historical importance that it should be reprinted and made available to scholars and performers interested in early ragtime music literature. The ‘(stick) dance’ that concludes the selection can be played as a ragtime piano solo even in its simplified version and it is quite remarkable for its innovations.” Ben Harney’s stick dance, according to eye-witness accounts, was a tap dance with one or both feet coordinated with a cane, as he sat and played the piano. Wrote Professor Tallmadge:

“He undoubtedly amazed his audience with this kind of tour-de-force as a dancer, singer and pianist. Old-time banjo players have been known to sing, play, and tap dance simultaneously. I suspect that Harney got the idea for his stick dance from a black banjoist or a white minstrel banjoist whom he saw in Middlesboro (Kentucky) or Louisville. It is possible that Harney’s stop-time stick dance served as the prototype for the foot-stamping, stop-time section in Scott Joplin’s ‘Ragtime Dance’ in 1906.”

Harney in blackface with his famous cane.

Good Old Wagon said the professor, “Is the first known piece of piano ragtime to appear in print, and it contains the first published example of stop-time, a rhythmic and harmonic feature often employed by composers and performers of ragtime and jazz in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.”

In creating Good Old Wagon, wrote Professor Tallmadge, “Harney took an African-American folk blues that was common in the Appalachian Mountains and created a ragtime version of it.”

Good Old Wagon was a smash hit across the United States, and on the strength of it, Harney moved from Kentucky to New York in 1896. In New York, Ben Harney would inspire a generation of ragtime composers, becoming famous in America as The Father of Ragtime.

The New York Clipper, a weekly entertainment newspaper, described Harney’s performance at Keith’s Union Square Theatre, New York, on 17 February 1896. Ben Harney, it said, “jumped into immediate favour through the medium of his genuinely clever plantation Negro imitations and excellent piano playing.”

As a white performer, Harney was unusual in having an all-black band and, said the New York Times, “had a fine negro shouting voice”. One music publisher of the 1890s said, “Harney had the huskiest voice most people had ever heard in a human being and this quality made his voice just right for ragtime singing.”

The 1896 reprint cover of You’ve Been a Good Old Wagon described Harney as the “Original Introducer to the Stage of the Now Popular ‘Rag Time’ in Ethiopian Song”. This was almost certainly the first time the term ragtime appeared in print.

Some say this was the first ever blues song.

The birth of blues?

That same year, Ben Harney published an even bigger seller than Good Old Wagon. Called ‘Mr. Johnson, Turn me Loose’, the song was described on its sheet music as, “A coon novelty”. Some experts say Mr. Johnson, Turn me Loose features the first published hints of the blues that would come some 18 years later. (See Great Blues Cities No. 2: New York, in this blog’s archive of 6 February 2014.)

As well as ragtime, another musical genre that contributed directly to the development of blues also had its origins in Louisville. This was the jug band. Following the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865, with money universally tight, freed slaves, and former soldiers of all races, fashioned musical instruments from any old junk they could find: tin cans, wooden boxes, string, wire, broom handles and cigar boxes. Such homemade instruments joined fiddles, banjos and guitars in creating a new form of American folk music. During the 1860s and 1870s, this music became generally known, amongst other names, as jig music. By 1900, other homespun instruments like the washboard, tea-chest single-string bass, and big water jugs sounding like tubas when blown into, joined this improvised coterie.

Louisville jug band, Earl McDonald’s Dixieland Jug Blowers.

 

The birth of jug bands.

There was now any number of names for these jig style bands: spasm bands, washboard bands, gut bucket bands, novelty bands or, in Louisville, jugs band. These Louisville jug bands played a mixture of Appalachian mountain music, African-American folk and ragtime. One of them, Earl McDonald’s Original Louisville Jug Band, became the first jug band to be recorded, in 1924, when they backed local blues diva Sara Martin’s ‘Blue Devil Blues.’ Sarah Martin (nee Sara Dunn, 1884 – 1955), one of the first, most popular and most recorded of the  early female singers who put classic blues on the map in the 1920s, just happened to be a Louisville girl, too. Billed as ‘The Famous Moanin’ Mama’ and ‘The Colored Sophie Tucker’, Sara Martin also recorded under the names Margaret Johnson and Sally Roberts.

In October 1923, aged 38, Martin, made the first known recordings of country blues on ‘Longing for Daddy Blues’. Recorded in New York for Okeh, the record was a milestone in blues recording for many other important reasons.

Sara Martin, right, with her mother in 1920.

Here’s the link to Weaver’s Guitar Blues from 1923:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j00yl_EJUGQ&feature=kp

But it was Weaver’s other 1923
recording, Guitar Rag, played on a banjo guitar (a six-string banjo with a
guitar neck and tuning, that quickly became the first blues guitar classic. Blues and ragtime in those days, were almost one of the same thing. Here’s the link to Guitar Rag:

In 1936, Sylvester Weaver’s Guitar Rag was covered by the white western swing pioneers, Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys. Wills and the Playboys renamed the track, ‘Steel Guitar Rag’, crediting Leon McAuliffe on steel guitar as its composer. The Playboys’ cover version was so successful it put the steel guitar genre on the country music map. As the former editor of America’s Guitar Player magazine, Jas Obrecht, writes in his online music archive:

Sara Martin with Sylvester Weaver.

“The original 78 release, OKeh 8109, credited both Martin and Weaver as composers. Guitar Blues, a slow, simple instrumental, interspersed slide melodies with sparse, sliding chords. Weaver’s rollicking Guitar Rag proved to be a far more significant recording. Playing with gusto in Vastopol* tuning, Weaver conjured traces of ragtime and Hawaiian music in his memorable melodies. The song had wings. Weaver re-cut Guitar Rag in 1927 with stronger bass lines and a new middle section. It’s likely that Weaver, too, used the Hawaiian lap-style guitar technique for playing slide.”

*See ‘From Russia (and Ukraine) With Love’ post in my 14 March 2013 archive.

Jas Obrecht also writes that around 1924, “Weaver recorded four more guitar instrumentals – ‘Weaver’s Blues,’ ‘Smoketown Strut,’ ‘Mixing Them Up in C,’ and ‘I’m Busy and You Can’t Come In.’ Played without a slide on a slightly out-of-tune guitar, these rudimentary, ragtime-influenced tunes provide early examples of string-bending.”

Sylvester Weaver’s 1923 guitar work with Sara Martin meant other blues divas now also wanted guitar accompaniment. These included the 34-year-old mistress of saucy blues innuendo, Virginia Liston, another black vaudevillian whose raunchy songs often had titles like, ‘You’ve Got the Right Key, but the Wrong Keyhole’. So, in January
1924, Listen had a guitar backing to her New York recording of ‘Jail House Blues’. For many years the guitarist was thought to be unknown, until recent expert analysis judged it to be Sylvester Weaver.

Now, if I can get personal here, the thing that impresses me most about Louisville’s Sylvester Weaver is that he directly influenced the man whom I consider to be the most influential blues guitarist of all time, Lonnie Johnson. (See my 17 June 2013 archive.)

In 1925, wrote the celebrated English blues historian, Paul Oliver, Lonnie Johnson, first saw Sylvester Weaver backing Sara Martin on acoustic guitar.

Soon afterwards, Johnson won the blues contest in
St. Louis that led to his first recording contract.

Sadly, by 1927, Sylvester Weaver had reached the end of his all-too-short four year studio career. The impressive and innovative body of work this mainly unsung blues pioneer produced in America included laying down the first blues guitar solos, note bending, finger picking and singing. Right up until 1927, Weaver continued to tour and
record with his mentor, Sarah Martin. Indeed, he later formed an all African-American trio called, ‘Martin Weaver Withers’, with Sarah Martin and her husband, Hayes B. Withers, on second guitar.

At the end of his career, Sylvester Weaver also teamed up with another black Louisville guitarist, Walter Beasley, and worked part-time in Louisville as a talent scout for OKeh Records. In 1927, Weaver and Beasley cut a series of blues tracks, both together and with a precocious 14-year old black girl from Louisville called Helen Humes, who Weaver had discovered singing locally. Helen Humes later replaced Billie Holiday as Count Basie’s vocalist.

Finally, after cutting, ‘Cross-Eyed Blues’ and ‘Race Horse Blues’, with Helen Hughes and Walter Beasley on 27 November 1927, it appears Sylvester Weaver suddenly retired, headed home to Louisville and for the rest of his life worked contentedly as a chauffeur and butler.
Weaver became largely forgotten until 1992 when his complete works were
released on Document Records, a specialist blues label, now based in Scotland.