Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The Blues

Episode Date: January 17, 2023

So much of today’s music takes inspiration from the Blues, but where did Blues music itself come from?Kate is joined by Lamont Jack Pearley - applied folklorist, ethnographer and historian of African American traditional music - who takes us through the history of Blues music, from influence to appropriation. *WARNING there are adult words and discussions of racism in this episode* Produced by Charlotte Long and Sophie Gee. Mixed by Joseph Knight. Betwixt the Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society. A podcast by History Hit. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Do you want even more shocking and scandalous history? Like why the ancient Greek statues had such small manhoods? Or what went on behind closed doors in the Georgian era? We'll sign up to History Hit, where you can see me discover the scandalous side of history, as well as hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, covering everything from prehistoric Scotland to the Treaty of Versailles.

Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am here again to issue your fair do's warning. Fair do's. This is a podcast that deals with adult themes in an adult way, with content of an adult nature,

two adults will be speaking, I'll be swearing. We will be talking about sex, and just general, naughtiness, mayhem and chaos will ensue. And you just might not want to listen to that, in which case, leave now. BB King, Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Etta James, Aretha Franklin, Who else comes to mind when you think the Blues?

It's a genre rightly celebrated around the world. But what are its roots? And why is it called the Blues? Well, today, betwixt the sheets, we are going to damn well find out. What do you look for a man? Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you.

I make perfect copies of whatever my boss needs. by just turning enough and pushing the butt. Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, I feel for them. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Jerry. Hello, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, with me, Kate Lister. Blues music has had a profound influence

on almost every single music style that we hear today, especially hip-hop, grime and R&B. But to find out where it comes from and how it grew, I spoke to Lamont Pearlie, blues expert. From sharecroppers to the first professional bands to popularity and appropriation. Today we are going to hear the story of this phenomenal music. So hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets, Lamont Pearlie. How are you?

I'm well. And I'm saying hello from Kentucky and the USA. We are here today to talk about the blues. Oh yeah. Yeah, very? I'm so excited to hear. listen to talk about this because my mom and dad are huge blues fans and they raised us on a diet of Muddy Waters and B.B. King and Aretha Franklin and it just always seemed so magical to me.

And I suppose what I've kind of seen is sort of like the blues from the blues brothers and kind of a very Hollywood interpretation of it. And so I really want to know what is the history of this particular art form? Well, it's a great question. And just to give it context, this Hollywood, thing. It's okay because a lot of people have been introduced to the real thing through Hollywood, through the British invasion even. So the history of the blues has many turning points. What I would like to establish first and foremost for your audience, my audience and everyone in between, because a lot of people don't know this. Blues is a freed black American music from inception.

Enslaved culture, plantation, sharecropping, yes, that was involved, but there's something called slave secular's which predates the blues or a particular version of the blues. Then we have black spirituals which have two moving parts, which is the educated, progressive black American and the

enslaved black American. But The blues in all of its movements starts with free blacks. Oh, I didn't know that. I'd always been told that it came from enslaved people. What are the sources for that? Do we have any kind of records of what kind of music was being sung? Absolutely. The sources from that would be Amiri Baraka's blues people.

My only thing with that is he gives the inception to Africa when a lot of it was our creator here on the Americas. Then you have, oh, my God. goodness, you have a slew of sources that tell you. Chris Thomas King recently put out a book. He's from Norlands, Louisiana, and he breaks down the inception of the Blues in Norlands, Louisiana. I can tell you of my studies and readings, places like Storyville in Norlands is a big space of originality for the blues, Congo Square, which is also Louisiana. The blues has always been here. It moved. It moved with the people. I think what happens is to tell a story that is so complex and wide as

the blues of the blues people. To break it down into five minutes or even a two-hour lecture, you have to combine many pieces which kind of omits some of the other things, right? So people think blues starts in Mississippi, but Mississippi wasn't even an established state. And, you know, when the blues were still being played around the Americas, around Indian territory, even if you will. Yeah, and what kind of date is that? Is that 19th century? I mean, we're talking 14, 15, 16, 100, 17, 100s, 1,700s, 18, hundreds.

I would say the blues, as we know it, as we really discuss it, we may want to talk about post-mancipation, but we also have to remember something. You have guys like Minsk Lanscom, you have guys like Elijah Kau, these guys were playing songs that was one, two, three hundred years old, that they were learning from people passing down to them that they learned, that they learned. So a lot of your references is in the music itself, right? Right, of course. I'm going to jump a little bit ahead of myself down, but this is something that I really want to know.

So I'm primarily a historian of sex work, and I've looked at the New Orleans Storyville District. And one story that comes out of there a lot is that that's where sort of blues and jazz were formulated because those musicians were only allowed to play in the brothels. And I've heard a few people go like, well, I'm not quite sure if that's completely right yet. But do you know about that?

Is that right? Or is that like a myth? I know. I'm really happy you brought that up because Storyville is really important to the story. New Orleans is extremely important to the story because everyone had to go there before going other places, whether they were here on this land, whether they was taken from

here somewhere else and brought back or what have you. Now, to get back to your question, so you have like Bolton, you have Jelly Roll Morton, right? You have lead belly. You have so many people go through this area and that's where they actually learned the blues. It was the blues. It wasn't jazz. Jazz comes out of that. But it was the blues. They were playing. They were playing there. It was the blues they were learning. Led Belly was an old-time musician. He played string music, hold-downs, if you will. He learns the blues in Storyville. Jellyroll Martin reaches out to some publication talking about WC. Handy is not the founder of the blues I am. He's saying that because he was in Storyville. W.C. Handy wasn't. So this is a place where it formulated as we know it into a viable,

if you will, commercial entity. Because now when we speak about sexually explicit music, you know, that predates the Cardi B's, that predates the Little Kims, or even the Millie Jackson's of the world that people don't give enough credit to. We have to talk about the Lucille Bogans. We have to talk about the vaudeville and the menstrual. Menstrucy has a bad reputation. We all understand why.

However, these were big to do. Jews, vaudeville and menstruacy and these black troops, they were singing sexually explicit songs in person, you know what I mean? And Storyville, being a red light district where black folk can perform because they weren't able to maneuver in certain places at a particular time. All of this happens here. And you know, somebody that tries to research the history of sex route, one of the things that you lose a lot is very, very, very, you know, very, you know, voices of the people themselves, because you're talking about a marginalized group of people. People often use aliases.

But there are some early blues songs where women are named in Storyville. Like, Amy Williams or something in one of the songs. And it's just this tiny little flash that there was a woman working in one of the brothels who would also sing. And she'd sing with the blues singers. And it's like just this tiny little piece of a record. But it sort puts things into focus of what was going on at the time. Right.

Well, you know, and this could be consistent. a more broader statement in the context of the music business as a whole, I think what a lot of people miss is the music business starts in places that are unsavory. You have two versions, or three versions, if you will, of musicians. You have the church musician, which crosses ethnicity. You have the trained musicians that go to these specialized schools, which somewhat crosses ethnicity. At one time, you have the Creole and the white musicians being sent there. And then you have the local musicians. And all three end up playing in these local places where things happen. Right. It's kind of like when you speak to a lawyer and the lawyer's like, well, why did you get a

prostitute or why did you get a drug user to testify? And they're like, well, who else is on the street at this time? So you would have a prostitute being a singer. You'd have a pimp being a singer. You know, you go down the line of the different people in these places with these gifts, but this is the place, this is where they can share their gift, if you will. And then to your statement about marginalized people, if you look at the church, so one of the biggest running ironies of blues and black spirituals is the blues man would be in a juke joint from Saturday night to Sunday morning and go across the street and sometimes go upstairs to the church. and play for the choir from Sunday morning to Sunday evening and then repeat. You've just said that and I've just thought, yeah, I've always thought there was a big influence from the church on the development of blues. Absolutely.

I mean, what's that relationship? On one hand, you've got this kind of real, and we'll get to the dirty blues, but this kind of like association with the red light districts, the sort of very seedy stuff. But then also there is like gospel element and church elements. How did they come together? Well, I mean, it comes together by culture. So just to start as a marginalized group, there's not many places to go to frolic. So your one space becomes the space for everything.

But as for music, there's blue notes, right, and blue scales. And black spirituals is called black spirituals because it was played on the black keys. These things are intertwined because it comes from the same place. Both were sacred music. It's just that one speaks of or two God. and the other one speaks about worldly secular issues. Now there's something like I was telling you about slave seculars. Slave seculares were popularized, if you will, by those who did not feed into the

Euro missionaries coming in and trying to give them their religion. So what they did was they took those songs that the missionaries brought with them, and they parodied those songs. And some of these songs were sexually explicit. Like, I don't know how familiar you are with NWA. Mm-hmm. Yep. So do you remember how Ice Cube used to take songs that were known and change them, but he would make them more sexually explicit?

Like, forgive me, but he did a song with NWA before they were signed, and he took my Adidas, and he changed the song to my penis. That's not a new concept. This was happening in black music since, before the turn of the century. What does secular slaves mean? Who was that group of people? So it was enslaved.

People who did not buy in or feed into a religious sect. They were not Christian. They were not Muslim. They were secular. People, right? And their music was secular. Some believe the blues is more the child of slave seculars and black spirituals, but more direct to the slave secular because it's more of a worldly music.

Right. Okay, yeah, that makes perfect sense. And you've got this huge melting pot of different experiences and outlooks all kind of coming together. I've got to ask you about the dirty blues because I'm fascinated by this. Sure. I mean, you mentioned Lucille Bogan there. And sometimes I tell my students about the dirty blues.

And I sort of, and if we'll talk about Cardi B and Wap and all those things, and I say, look, go and look at Lucille Bogan, shave them dry. Exactly. And just go and have a look at it. And they come back and they're like, oh, my God. Like I tried to put a TikTok thing up about Liseil Bogan, shave and dry, and they took it down in two minutes. Nope, can't have that. Right.

And we're talking about the 1920s. Now, this is one of the amazing things because I guess you could say the government and the way it controlled media, it would have us believing at one time these things did not exist. Right. We have to really credit the classic women of the blues. We have to credit them for the music business, number one. Right. We have to credit them for the explosion of blues and record sales, right? Because the first platinum record comes from a black woman,

Mamie Smith, crazy blues. What we have to also add into that, quantify and qualify, if you want to speak scholarly, is these songs that they were recording in the 20s comes from the vaudeville era. And in the vaudeville era, what people don't understand, is when they think about the blues, they think the blues to be downtrodden because that's how it was perpetuated by white male academics. But the term blue comes from the term risque. I didn't know that. I thought it was like blue like sad. Well, it covers the gambit. So when I say it's not downtrodden, that's just a part of it.

But a big part of it is the relationship between man and woman, right? Yeah. So then when you think about it being risque as in blue and then connecting it back to Storyville, which is not the first place it was at, but let's just use that as a good example. Blue, risque, sexual parlors, this is what they're singing about. And then they take these songs from these small local locations and then they bring it on a big stage like in Vaughville. It just becomes a traveling show. Fast forward to the 20s, these things are being recorded. So Tampa Red, Blind Blake, men were recording this as well. Ma Rainey, right, Bessie Smith.

And if we're talking about Lucille Bogan, I suppose, if this stuff isn't recorded and written down, we kind of, we lose it. So we don't know who else was singing it. But just the first lyrics of Shave and Dry, I got nipples on my titty, big as the end of my thumb. I got something between my legs and make a dead man come. And it goes on.

How was she allowed to record that? Like, how has that survived? because I thought like that would have been repressed quite severely. Well, what I'm thinking, it could be where it was recorded. It could be, right? Because if I'm not mistaken, Lucille was the first person to record outside of the two major recording spaces. And then again, we have to keep in mind about the commercialization.

So the Netflix movie Black Bottoms, I talk to people about that. And my take on that is kind of. how I feel about the scholarship of Blue. You have those that are so nostalgic about this culture. They're not truly understanding. So just one quick example, so I don't forget my thought, the way they're nostalgic about juke joints. When this is a place where people got killed,

this is a place where families were broken up. But, you know, somebody says to me, don't you wish you were sitting on a plantation, porch picking your guitar with Charlie Patton? I said, no. No the hell I don't. What black man in his right mind would want to do that, knowing now what we didn't know then?

So to get back to my point, this nostalgia, this puritism of blues, of not understanding the evolution of the sound. And this is very important. So when we look at Black Bottoms, that movie, we're looking at Maureen and the young man that's part of her band, And their conflict is he's trying to take the music forward and they're still playing what they've been playing for the last 30, 40 years

because by the time the masses heard her on record, she's been doing that for God knows how many years. So the commercialization of this music as it changes constitutes how they're able and when they're able to put this on record. Does that make sense? That makes perfect sense. I'll be back with Lamont and the blues. this short break. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb,

and on my podcast, not just the Tudors, from history hit, we talk about everything, from what Queen Consort Camilla could learn from the Renaissance. Really, when we begin to look at Queen Consorts,

we notice that there's a lot of ways that women could have authority through their relationship with the King. To how you should never upstage Henry VIII. You'd have been a very unwise individual turning up to court, probably with a larger codpiece

than the King, I suspect. From the real matter Waka, better known as Pocahontas, she's brought and presented to the King and Queen as this shining example of what we could achieve, to how to tell someone to get lost. You could say, turd in your teeth. In other words, not just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors, twice a week every week. Subscribe now to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts.

I think one of the things that I'm fascinated as well, maybe you could speak to a little bit, is there's a sort of a lesbianism that was flowing through the music of Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey. And they're not even that subtle about it a lot of the times when they have female lovers and they're talking about getting with women and all of these things. And when you read that and you were like, but this was produced in like the 1920s. I've always just been quite surprised by how free and open they are with their sexuality in these songs. We could even talk about Josephine Baker in that sense. Please, yes.

And just thinking of a couple of songs by Charlie Patton, Rob, Robert Johnson and Sun House, where they talk about going to Paris or Europe, because there, as a black man, they're respected. So you know the black woman is respected there as well, right? Lyrics at that time, though some were in your face like now, it was, if you know, you know what they're saying. If you don't know, it's going over your head and you're thinking it's something else. Bo Jackson, if I'm not mistaken, he has a song.

about squeezing the juice out of a lemon or something, but he's talking about a sexual encounter with a woman. That world, Bessie Smith and them were in. The people of that world knew what they were talking about. People who partied with them knew what they were talking about. Yes, but if you didn't know, you didn't know. It's very easy to go over your head. Right.

And we're also talking about the women at this time, right? Because one of the women that does not get the property she deserves is Memphis mini, right? Yes. Because she wasn't a classic blues singer. She's slaying a guitar. All of these women who spoke about their sexual encounters had gold teeth and guns.

The reason why that's important is because they understood the terrain they were in just as a black person. They understood the terrain they were in just as a woman. They understood the terrain they were in as a black woman. Then to add on top, their sexual preferences and having agency over their body. So these women were ready to defend their agency. Because men were getting killed at that time if they were considered sexually deviant.

I mean, they still are, but these were not soft people. One of the stories that I really like about the history of the blues, and it's going to kind of lead me on to white people appropriating it, was that Bessie Smith died in a car accident and her arm was severed and she couldn't get treated at hospitals because they were white only. And she was effectively buried in an unmarked grave, which is hideous in a tragedy, and it makes me so angry. But years later, it was Janice Joplin, who was a huge fan of Bessie Smith,

and a greatly influenced by her. She was the one that found her grave and put headstone on it. And Janice Joplin's probably my absolute idol, but that does bring me on to the fact that these black singers had to have guns and be ready to defend themselves and were being buried in a marked graves. and then white singers like Janice Joplin, like Elvis, like the Beatles, were influenced if we're being generous or took the music and then had huge successes with it.

So what has that done, the kind of the British invasion of the blues or white people appropriating the blues? Now, that's a big question. I don't know if we have enough time. So first, I just want to say every non-Black American person that partakes in our Black American traditional musical expression is not appropriating. I don't think Janice Joplin appropriated.

I don't think Elvis Presley appropriate. I'm a fan of Janice Joplin. Oh, thank God. I've got a Janice Chaplin tattoo. I'd be so upset if he said that she... Elvis Presley grew up with a black family and he worshipped in a black church with black folk. I think for him specifically,

and that doesn't mean that he didn't have a way about him business-wise, but I would say he was placed in a very unsavory or unscrupulous situation. Right? You have the owner of Sun Records who understood white folk is not going to buy this music from black people. So he went and he actively sought out white acts who can either play it or come close to playing it or he can train them into playing it. But we also have to remember who he hired to help him. Ike Turner, right? Because Ike Turner was a producer.

Ike Turner actually, who does not get the respect that he deserves as a musician and the art. was the very first artist to have a number one rock song on the pop charts, Ike Turner. So now I set it up that way because I have to make sure is noted. Every white person is not malicious, right? And there are black people that helped these white people willingly. And there are black people who helped them unwillingly who got no payment, no nothing. Okay.

Was it them personally or was it their business? Who knows? What I do know is the Rolling Stones made sure that the people that they were influenced by were respected and received. Now, though they did that, that does not mean Howland Wolf needed them because Howland Wolf predates Ray Charles, if I'm not mistaken, in owning his own stuff and running his band like a business. So I think the British invasion was a big slap in the face to black musicians because the white American industry partnered with the white European industry

and sold back to America something that was American, but they sold it back to white Americans as if it was something that was created over there. So then the entire white American populace is fainting over these young ghetto Europeans and they've fallen out over them, not knowing,

that they're being just as hoodwinked as we are, the only difference is, their money's going to them. The black artists who created this were dying in unmarked grays. So that's what I feel about it. We cannot blame all of the artists is one of my main points, because those are business decisions. So the Roller Stones are not super duper innocent, but they are more innocent than the average white band,

which was a band, who I grew up listening to. But the Rolling Stones let it be known who their influences was and every opportunity they got, they tried to bring their influences out. But at the same token, you know, Mick tried to move like he was black. You try to move like he was James Brown. You know, they're winning traditional blues albums of the year. They shouldn't be winning that. Yeah, I can see that.

This is a ridiculously big question as well. But like, what do you think is the influence of the blues on today's music? When we've got something like Cardi B's Wap and things like that, Like, what do you think about that? Well, let's start with one of my favorite vocalists of the last 10 years who gets a lot of shit because she's white. Adele. Yeah. You know, she gets a lot of shit because she's white because they're all black vocalists that could have been in her position in regards to the awards here.

But America is a different monster. But the reason why I bring her up is because her biggest song here featured a Texas 12 bar blues riff. You could have had it all. If you go back and listen to you could have had all. That's a 12-bar blues riff, Texas specifically. Wow. Can you just listen to any song now and just identify it? That's a riff from Texas.

Yes. Wow. Because, so to answer your question, the blues has not just influenced all music, but you hear it in everything. And it's really kind of amazing to me because it's rarely talked about or discussed or given credit. because when you talk about the blues, I think people are afraid that out of all quote-unquote musical genres,

when you speak about blues, you have to speak about racial treatment. Like when you speak about church and black spirituals, you know, okay, so because of civil rights, they can receive that because they pit black spirituals with Martin Luther King, and that's in their mind safe, even though they don't understand that he was a revolutionary, right?

And they don't understand that it was Bessie Jones who brought the music to the civil rights movement. But either way, because they're synonymous, you could talk about that music without people having a feel away about it. But when it comes to talking about the blues, if you talk about anything other than the one four, five or something like this, they don't know how to act because you're going to have to talk about what really happened in America with a group of people. And that's scary. And then we also got to remember, as white people was finally able to infiltrate the blues, blacks who assimilated was trying to get away from it. Why was there a movement away from it? Educated blacks were trying to disassociate themselves with what they considered the backward southern Negro.

Oh. And everything that had to do with Jim Crow lynching all this stuff. They wanted to forget everything that had to do with their experience in the South. And I really think that efforts, what it did was it removed the indigenous people from their land. When these migrations happened, it was a reverse. So immigrant white folk went to the south and got the land of these people, and these folk went to the urban areas and lived in buildings. They reversed places.

It was multiple millions of acres of land owned by black folk at one time. And now we've switched places and the wealth has switched. And this is part of the blues. I think the blues, at least for me at least, it has a kind of, it feels really deep and it feels sort of old and like you're connected to something. And it's got something that's sort of slightly dangerous about it. And I can't quite put my finger on what that is. But would you ever want it to be completely mainstream?

And would you like it to always kind of have that sort of dangerous quality to it, that's like subversive quality? Maybe it couldn't be the blues if it didn't. Right. So it's like it has to live in both places. It has to live in a place where everyone has access, right? Because that's what allows those in that private space to continue, right? Because if it didn't live in a mainstream place, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

People really would have forgotten about it. So it has to live in both places. It has to. And I feel the same thing about Celtic, the same thing. The same thing about mariachi, if I said it right. So I'm not just saying this because this comes from my heritage. I feel this way about everyone's. I'm going to have to let you go because honestly, I could listen to you talking about it for forever.

You've been utterly, utterly fascinating. But my last and final question is, what does shave them dry mean? Do you know what it means? Because I don't know what that. What's being shaved dry? What does it mean? You know what? I really should look into that.

So I'm trying to make this as brief as possible. possible. We have to keep something in mind. And it's kind of like parables, right? There's a black scholar here that wrote about parables. Pranad is his name. And what he was saying was we do a disservice trying to give a definition to proverbs because we don't know how it's meant in these spaces. So to bring that to this, we spoke about multiple things in this short conversation about these women of this time. We don't know if it's physical about what's between her legs. We don't know she's talking about how to con men out of their money, shave them dry, right? Which is an ongoing concept to Little Kim. Women who speak to how Little Kim and Cardi B speak, their goal is, well, I'm going to get

everything and take everything I can from him and I'm going to use my body to do that. So it could be that. I like the idea that maybe we're just not supposed to know. I mean, you know, now, can build a time machine and hang out with them for about a year. I'm sure we know what they're talking about. Wouldn't you just love to? I don't know if I would though. No. Don't be heroes. But you've been amazing to talk to. And if people want to know more about you and your work and about the history of blues, where can they find you? Jack Dapper Blues. Look up Jack Dapper Blues. Look up the African American Folklore and pretty much everything I've done would be there. Thank you so much for talking to me today.

You've just been incredible. Thank you. You're so welcome. Thank you. Thank you for listening. I thank you so much to Lamont for joining me. And if you like what you've heard, please don't forget to like, review and subscribe

wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Join me again Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit.