VI
The Legacy: Art out of Adversity
The quickly
evolving “Race” music swept the cotton blackland like a prairie fire, and
became the favorite pastime, an acceptable if not secret form of rebellion. It
was an instance in human history of a nearly pure art movement. Not only
because it was a genuine release, funneled into rhyme and melody, but because
there was almost pure freedom within it.
Soon there were songs passed down the valley about fights, lovers and
sexual exploits. After Emancipation, the songs were able to be transmitted from
county to county and from river to river at a much faster rate, and the music
grew exponentially.
If the
rivers were the communication lines of this new art form, the railroads were
the paths of distribution. It was an underground movement, fed by natural
corridors, and yet hidden by segregation. Field workers would work all week and
then head to town on Saturday to shop and hear the latest tunes offered by
buskers on the street corners. Blind Lemon Jefferson, perhaps the earliest
known blues recording artist from Texas, served as an early messenger of the
movement, as he travelled up and down Blues Valley, wherever the pickers were
getting paid, singing for nickels and dimes. He ranged from Dallas and Ft Worth
down to Hearne and over to Centerville, and even down in the southern Brazos Valley. His songs like “Jack O’ Diamonds” and
“Please Keep My Grave Clean” became blues classics.
Because of
numerous social and cultural paradigms enforced by the dominant White culture,
many unfortunate psychological forces were at work, and there were few positive
conclusions to inspire and provide self respect. Many Blacks were the literal
offspring of their masters, and were obviously half-blooded. They were soon
recognized as physically attractive, even superior physically, and these “High
Yellows” or “Mulattos” were considered the most serious threat to White
supremacy. Because of their White characteristics, Mulatto women were most
likely to be accepted outside of the Black community, and just as likely
Mulatto men were apt to be killed out of jealousy or fear. Many former slave
owners wished to erase the indiscretions of their youth, and reasoned that
half-White children were inconsistent with the Southern caste ideal and should
be eliminated. Handsome, fair skinned, slightly curly haired young mulatto men
were a favorite target of sexual accusations and KKK lynchings. In fact the executions only cemented the idea
that these light-skinned types were something powerful and special. During this
era, a racial hierarchy was born based on lightness of skin, which still haunts
Blacks today. Many themes of blues songs
were based on this monumental issue.
Perhaps not
coincidentally, “blueing” was a liquid used during the clothes washing process
to make off-colored cloth look whiter; a popular chemical whitener used by an
overpowering White culture, where whiteness and purity and desirability were
considered synonymous. If blue could wash stained linens and make them
acceptable, surely “blues” could wash their troubles and make a dark existence
tolerable. It was an enigma they were born
into…
“All
Negroes like the blues. Why? Because they were born with the blues. And now,
everybody have the blues. Sometimes they don’t know what it is. But when you
lay down at night. Turn from side of the bed to the other. And can’t sleep,
what’s the matter? Blues got you.” Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter
State Senator James H. Washington was elected during Reconstruction times.
So Blues may
not only have meant sorrow, but paradoxically a sort of daily cleansing as
well. Blues were a tangle of repressed emotions, and the therapeutic unleashing
of them. Blues were a catharsis for African Americans, a washing of
their souls with tears and tunes and lyrics from the depths of their broken but
resilient hearts. Blues music provided an outlet to spill their guts, and a place
to find them. A forum for resistance, and yet a source for courage to endure
another day in the endless cycle of the Texas cotton farm.
Blues came
of age during the early 1900’s, when unschooled Black children still languished
in the turn-rows until they were old enough to carry a hoe. Born in 1895 near
Navasota, Mance (Emancipation) Lipscomb, was one such child, who
performed his first songs with his father, a popular Brazos bottom fiddler, by
the age of fourteen. Mance bassed behind his father with the old guitar his
mother had acquired from a wandering gambler when he was eleven. This was a
life changing gift, his most prized possession, and the beginning of a Texas
legacy. But Mance would spend years learning songs and playing for dances in
and around Washington, Brazos and Grimes Counties, and his talents would never
be known outside of Blues Valley until he was old. It was the flamboyant if not meteoric career
of a famed Grimes County neighbor, Texas Alexander, that would soon mark the
beginning for local blues history.
Texas Alexander was born in Jewett, Texas but was raised by his
grandmother Sally Beavers in Richards, in Grimes County Texas along with his
brother Edell and their cousin Willie Mae Proctor. He spent much of his latter
life in Grimes County as well, calling Richards home until his death. Born Alger Alexander on September 12, 1900,
by 1923 he began to sing at local gatherings and was discovered by pianist
Sammy Price. Soon Alger became one of the first bluesmen to make it as a
vocalist, cutting records as early as 1927 for Okeh Records in New York. Texas Alexander had such talent and promise
as an entertainer that the record company provided the country’s best musicians
as accompanists, and put him in the finest transportation of the day… his very
own car.
Okeh Records
had high expectations for Alger, and hired the legendary Lonnie Johnson to back
him up on guitar. Later he was teamed up with Eddie Lang. He belted out his
lyrics in the style of the old southern field hands, and helped to preserve the
slave traditions of work songs and field hollers. He was also recorded in San Antonio and
Dallas studios, backed instrumentally by Dennis “Little Hat” Jones, Carl Davis,
and later the Mississippi Sheiks and other “who’s who” Blues musicians at the
time. In fact nearly all of the people who played with Texas became blues
greats. When travelling by himself, he was known as a peer of Blind Lemon
Jefferson’s, who was from the northern end of the Navasota Valley near Wortham,
and he performed with him often in the legendary Dallas “Deep Ellum”
district. Texas Alexander was a true
“Star” all during the Great Depression, while most of his race lived in
relative poverty.
Yet in
between gigs, he still worked as a railroad section hand, and was considered a
powerfully muscled he-man by anyone who met him. Local people around Leon and
Grimes Counties remembered him as a short, very dark little man, with a very
tender voice and an open smile. He was married but his first wife died. Living
and working on the railroad track in Richards, Alexander could hop a train and
make a gig in Dallas in just half a day. This was the accepted if not only
feasible mode of travel for early bluesmen.
Texas
travelled all over Texas on the blues circuit until appearing one day in the
autumn of 1927, at a picnic in Normangee. His cousin Sam “Lightnin’ Hopkins,
then just a boy, remembered that he stood up in the bed of a pick-up truck
during a sandlot baseball game between the boys of Normangee and Leona. As he began to bellow and sing from the
bowels of the earth, everyone’s attention was drawn to the parking lot. Soon
the ball and the bat were dropped, and the crowd gathered around the local
vocal sensation. Hopkins remembered his stunning wheels for a Black man in
those days, “the longest, old ugly car,” a new Cadillac, which they rode around
to gigs in, when he got old enough.
Lightnin’ Hopkins got his first pay for playing the guitar as a teen-ager
while backing up Texas Alexander in little Texas towns like Crockett,
Grapeland, Buffalo, and Centerville.
This
scenario was repeated many times during Alexander’s career. Thomas Shaw, Ruby
Doke, Dan Lewis, his cousin’s Joel Hopkins and Frankie Lee Sims, and Alger’s
brother Edell all did a stint as Texas Alexander’s guitar man. By 1934, they
thought they were ready for the big time, and Texas, nineteen year old
Lightnin’ and a harmonica player named Billy Bizor set out for Houston to light
up the blues scene. But they broke up when Texas was recruited to record again,
this time in Ft. Worth with the Sax Black Tams. The dynamic string duo of
Willie Reed and Carl Davis also recorded with him, helping to create perhaps
his best releases ever.
Now in his
prime, in 1935 Texas Alexander teamed up with another Texas prison blues
legend, J. T. “Funny Papa” Smith, known then as “Howlin’Wolf,” (the original
one) and they toured together for several years. Smith had done time in
Huntsville, for murder, and this may
have been the most explosive and dangerous couple of entertainers to ever take
the stage at once. The music had to be primo in such circumstances. And audiences dare not express any negativity
either. Mysteriously, Smith fell off the blues radar after that, and was never
seen again. It has always been assumed
he was thrown back into prison.
In 1939,
Alger Alexander recruited a young sideshow guitarist while singing his way
across Oklahoma. Only twenty years old, Lowell Fulson said good-bye to his
family and struck out for the adventure of a lifetime,that ended up being the
beginning of his own blues odyssey. Fifty years later he told a British blues
magazine his story, which had long since been lost to the winds of west
Texas. Lowell candidly spoke of his
mentor, of the path they shared for a very formative year of his life, and the
nature of his partnership with one of the fathers of Texas blues.
Fulson may
have left us with the most informative first hand memories of the most elusive
legend of Grimes County; Little, seemingly insignificant facts and observations
that finally help make Texas Alexander more than a blur in our past. Even though they are the faint recollections
of a big-eyed kid as he accompanied a blues superstar, they may teach us
valuable insights to the enigmatic bluesman who left us little else to go on.
Alexander
had been married, to a second wife and was living in Leon County, in Normangee,
Texas. Word on the street in Ada, Oklahoma was that the husky Texas blues star
was a wanted man. But he was deliberate and polite, and acted like a man with a
mission. Fulson had just picked up the guitar, in fact his uncle’s, and had earned
a chair at the local sideshow in Ada, when Texas Alexander swaggered in one day
and offered him a substantial raise to follow him to west Texas. The young
guitarist must have had a promising sound, but the veteran vocalist was never
picky about his musicians, having been known to carry a guitar wherever he went
in hopes of finding a decent musician who could accompany him at the next
gig. “You can make at least ten dollars
a night going with me,” he bragged in a commandingly deep voice. That was good
money in those days.
Fulson was
smitten and soon they were in west Texas, cruising in Alexander’s big new car,
on tour with a lady blues singer known only as “Bessie.” She was passed off
facetiously as “Bessie Smith,” but Fulson’s faint description of her seems to
fit the ghost of another Texas blues phantom, Bessie Tucker, who was as free a
spirit as ever haunted the dives and juke joints of Texas. The young musician
never asked questions, and did not even suspect any kind of relationship other
than music business, and soon the mysterious woman named Bessie was gone, and
the two were soaring the landscape in search of an audience and another day’s
meal. According to Fulson, they never
had trouble finding either.
Fulson
remembered Alexander as a solitary man, brooding and almost non-communicative,
except when it was time to sing. Then the stocky singer came to life, and he
became a different person, glib and confident, and took command of the room. He
was fair with the young musician, but never indulgent, and doled out cash as it
was necessary. He seemed to think he was protecting Fulson from wasting his
share. But there was little for a young Oklahoma Negro to do in the Texas
desert anyway, and plenty of pitfalls in an unpredictable landscape of hardship
and racism. “He was like a father, a bodyguard,” explained Fulson. Alexander always warned him to mind his own
business and stay in his room. Hopping from one strange place to another,
Alexander seemed to be preoccupied and detached, and Fulson began to long for
home cooking. Finally he was picked up by police for loitering, and put in
jail, and Texas came after him like the wrath of God… “You’ve got my boy in
there… my boy. I’ve come to get him out!” The Police were glad to oblige. Only later would Fulson figure out that Texas
had risked arrest himself to free him.
But too soon
the ride of a lifetime was over, and authorities took Texas Alexander to jail. In 1939 Alger was convicted for murdering his second wife and sent to
prison. Little could young Lowell have known that Alexander was on one last
tour while he evaded arrest. The history
is very fuzzy here, but Fulson explained that Texas had found his wife with another
lover and killed them both with a hatchet. He never saw Alexander again, but
Lowell Fulson became a Texas blues guitar legend in his own right.
Texas
Alexander went to prison and served around three years for murder at the Ramsey
Unit. Like Huddie Leadbetter, aka “Leadbelly,”
Texas used his music talent to gain favor with the Warden and ultimately
obtained a parole by the Governor. Getting out for good behavior had drawbacks,
especially if you had a hard time behaving. By 1942 Texas was back in prison,
probably for violating the terms of his parole. Here again, the records are a
bit fuzzy, but Lightnin’ Hopkins explained that Texas had released a vulgar
song which embarrassed those who had arranged his release, and he was put in
jail for a song called the “Boar Hog Blues.”
If this is
true, then it may be the only recorded incident when a man was sent to prison
for singing a song. This is especially intriguing since Alexander’s life reads
like a missing persons bulletin, laced with murders and suspicious
disappearances. Yet it took the White authorities an allegoric song about a
boar hog to get them really mad.
The song was
full of supposedly erotic and suggestive phrases, and was banned from radio
play. But Texas continued to perform the song, especially when pressured for
it. In a strange tangle of small town intrigue, some old home town enemies from
Jewett were in Dallas and successfully conspired to get Texas arrested, perhaps
for public lewdness. He is believed to have served another year, and perhaps
more in prison, as his cousin Lightnin’ Hopkins explained, for “singin’ them
bad songs,” and then beaten severely and released. When he arrived at Hopkins’
home, “…He couldn’t get in without crawlin’ in.”
Still, Texas
Alexander remained stoic, fearless, devotedly loyal and driven to perform. Most
of the next nine years were spent on the streets in Houston sealing his fame,
performing with cousin Lightnin’ Hopkins, who by then was claiming the
undisputed title of “King of Texas Blues.” They were known to spontaneously
begin performances on street corners or while riding in buses, singing for tips
just like the good old days. Houston legends say sometimes they would board a
bus and start playing, and the passengers would quit getting off of the bus,
and the bus would just cruise around… except to stop for beverages. In 1950
Texas made one last record in Houston, under the Freedom label, accompanied by
Benton’s Busy Bees.
Long since
attributed to Robert Johnson, who also recorded in Texas and had known him, one
of his recordings, called Crossroads, may have been written by him, as he grew
up in and near Leon County, where there actually was a community named
Crossroads. Made famous by Robert Johnson, his song is considered the essential
blues song of all time. Texas Alexander also recorded a song in 1928 about the House of the
rising Sun, an establishment in New Orleans that made the Animals famous in
1964. It had been reasoned by some music critics that they found inspiration
for their rock classic in his crude recording done thirty years before, and
perhaps drew from others as well as they combined it with Matty Groves, an
English folk song. Whether or not he wrote or just recorded it, Texas joins an
impressive list of American musicians that have some claim in the song,
including Bob Dylan, Roy Acuff, Glen Yarborough, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and a
host of Kentucky folk singers. But to his credit, he was the first, and most
likely, his was the most authoritative.
His cousin
Lightnin’ had hit the big time without him, in a move that he never got
over. Texas began to tour with Melvin
‘Lil Son” Jackson. Albert Collins,
another Leon County blues legend and distant cousin, met him right before his
death at a family reunion picnic in Leon County. He would be the last of this
remarkable family blues dynasty to make music history. Another distant cousin,
Milton Hopkins plays guitar for Texas Johnny Boy, a blues band in Houston,
making this family the truest “First Family” of Texas Blues.
But the good
old days had gotten up and went, and Alger found himself suffering from a
terminal case of Syphilis. He went home to Grimes County to wait out his
painful demise.
Texas
Alexander died in obscurity in Richards in 1954. The newspaper never even mentioned his
passing. He was buried in an unmarked grave in the Longstreet Cemetery just
across the county line, in Montgomery County. Today, there is almost no trace
of this man, his life or his music, other than some obscure Internet websites.
There is only one known photograph of him in existence, and it is a very poor
one. Because of his tragic mistakes and crimes, his groundbreaking career in
American blues was almost buried with him. Few people in Richards, Texas have
ever heard his name, and even fewer around Blues Valley where he lived and
sang. Yet in spite of his flaws and local obscurity, several albums of his music
have been released in Europe. Blues collectors in England are quite familiar
with Texas blues, and one of its first Texas bluesmen, and recognize his name
thousands of miles from where he learned and plied his trade.
The old 78
records that he released in the 20’s and 30’s bring impressive prices on
Internet auctions, and his works have been rereleased as CD’s. Regardless of his
tragic life, his songs have afforded him lasting fame and immortality.
Somewhere in the world, right now, someone is listening to him sing the blues.
Perhaps across the ocean, and decades later, in a foreign land, the memory of
Alger Alexander has found a measure of grace.
Even more
discomforting than the background of blues is the relationship between Blues
and men and prison. Mance Lipscomb always stayed on the right side of the law,
but readily admitted “The best ball players, best dancers, best songsters- best
anything went to penitentiaries.” So many bluesmen had done time in prison that
it appears to have almost been a rite of passage. The most famous inmate was
“Leadbelly,” who did time in several prisons in Louisiana and Texas. 
Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter in Angola
Prison.
Huddie“Leadbelly”Ledbetter
was born in
Louisiana, but soon found himself working in the northeast Texas cottonfields
after his first stint in Louisiana’s Angola Prison. He became well known in
Texas as a “busker” or street musician and a bronc buster, as he got married
and settled down, occasionally working the Dallas “Deep Ellum” Blues scene with
young “Blind Lemon” Jefferson.
But
“Leadbelly” had lots of trouble with women and his temper and thus the law.
Although he never had trouble charming prison wardens with his songs, it would
be his deadly assaults that would lead one Northern Black newspaper to headline
his story with “Two Time Dixie Murderer Sings Way To Freedom.” This
accomplishment was due in no small part to the efforts of Professor John
Lomax of the University of Texas, a dedicated music historian who
relentlessly searched out original sources of Folk music, and who ultimately
discovered a Gospel and Blues goldmine in Southern prisons. Lomax spent
countless months tracking and recording “Leadbelly” and his contemporaries,
capturing such prison nuggets as “Irene” and “Midnight Special,” later covered
by John Fogerty of Credence Clearwater Revival. “Leadbelly” was his star
performer, and was hired after his release to drive him around and assist in
extracting the ore from inmates in several states, who eagerly unleashed their
riches.
The
Trans-Brazos Valley prison culture was a perfect network for a music movement,
and “Leadbelly” is believed to have influenced many aspiring musicians in the
various prisons where he did time, and probably taught many of them what he
knew about playing the accordion and guitar. Inmates like Moses “Clear Rock”
Platt, James “Iron Head”Baker, Smith Casey and Pete Harris sang
about “Black Betty,” the prison patty wagon, and “Uncle Bud” Russell,
the man who drove it, delivering an estimated 115,000 men to their just reward.
Alger
“Texas” Alexander
killed his wife in 1939 and spent five years in prison in Paris, Texas. He too was able to get sympathy through his
music and got released early.
Like his
older cousin, “Lightin’ Hopkins” also did time, and wrote songs about
prison life, with tributes to the prison personnel there. Hopkins’ “Bud Russell Blues” helped to make
the Huntsville Prison driver a living legend. In the 60's J. B. Smith, a
noted bluesman and lifer in the TDC, also sang about doing time and Bud
Russell while incarcerated at the Ramsey Unit in Sugarland, Texas. At least four Blues songs mention him by
name. Many more prison jewels made it
into the mainstream. In 1950 the Weavers recorded “Good Night Irene” and it
became a hit single. In 1956 Lonnie Donegan made the Top Ten in Great Britain
with “Rock Island Line.” That was just the beginning, as Texas Country Blues
began to shape the hope of American Civil Rights as well as American music
history.
A Texas
humorist of the time noted, “Blind Tom plays 7000 pieces on the piano. He is
accompanied by a kind-hearted man who sees that nobody else takes advantage of
Tom…”
Such an
impression was made by Tom that in 1954 Maureen Chinski felt compelled to
include a few paragraphs about Blind Tom in her history of Navasota, called the
Bluebonnet Book. This is quite a feat, since she never found space to mention
any of Navasota’s lawmen, the White Man’s Union, The assassination attempt of
Sheriff Scott, the race battle in Millican, or Navasota’s blues history, or in
fact any other Black people. It is true
that she died suddenly in the middle of the manuscript. Perhaps she was saving
the best for last.
The first
and most famous blind Blues man was Blind Lemon Jefferson of Couchman,
near Wortham, who raised the bar for proficiency among the blind performers. He
would stand somewhere on the railroad tracks in Hearne or Fort Worth or Dallas
and crowds would materialize out of thin air. They would put nickels in his cup
and encourage him to play for hours.
Blind Lemon became a household word in the
Texas cotton bottoms, and an inspiration to others like himself. His popularity
led to a musical trend, and suddenly every blind Black child had hope of
usefulness and even fame. This led to a whole generation of blind musicians
throughout the South, who found the blues a perfect genre to share their
stories of struggle and visions of deliverance. And being blind, they were
afforded a certain mercy , like that shown to Blind Tom, that made them
untouchable.
Gospel-Blues
man Blind Willie Johnson was born in the Brazos Valley near Pendleton
but spent most of his life in Marlin and Temple, humble cotton towns that would
be surprised that they were once home to a world famous guitarist that today
has almost cult status, with admirers like Eric Clapton and Duane Allman.
A bungled
robbery attempt left Walter Dixon of Somerville with few options. A shotgun blast during the ill-fated
hold-up ended his sight and ability to work, and began his period of
redirection in the penal system. Known
in Chicago as Blind Arvella Gray he was “discovered” playing for
quarters on street corners. With the help of locals he cut his own record and a
place in blind Blues history.
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