[music]

Alison Stewart: This is All Of It. I'm Alison Stewart live from the WNYC studios in SoHo. Thank you for listening. I hope you're staying warm and dry on this big sweater and boots kind of day. Coming up on All Of It later this week, a topic near and dear to my heart as a Jersey girl. We're going to be talking diners. We'll talk about the best ones in our areas, and take your calls. Plus, WNYC reporter Nancy Solomon joins us to tell us what makes Jersey diner culture unique, especially when it comes to local politics. That will happen on Thursday's show. Now, let's get this hour started with another installment of our Public Song Project.

[music]

We're spending this week launching the second edition of the Public Song Project with some very special friends of the show. Yesterday we heard a song from pianist Arturo O'Farrill, and today we're excited to debut a song from another generous contributor, Low Cut Connie. Here is a refresher. We launched the Public Song Project last year, inviting anyone 18 or older to send us an original recording of a song based on work in the public domain.

Every year, new works, books, songs, movies enter the US public domain, meaning they can be freely shared, copied, adapted, and recorded by anyone. That freedom to adapt and create is something we want to celebrate with you. Last year, we gave you free rein of the public domain. This year, we're narrowing things down a little bit and asking you to focus on work from the 1920s. Why the '20s? Well, first, a century is a nice round number. It also just happens that 1924 was the year WNYC started broadcasting. As the station gears up to celebrate its centennial, we thought we'd invite you to celebrate the music and art that was in the air and on the air around that time.

Now, according to US copyright law, works from the '20s have been entering the public domain over the last several years, meaning their copyrights expired, and that includes music from the Gershwins, Irving Berlin, Bessie Smith, Ma Rainey, and works from authors like Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, and so many more. Just make sure you're drawing from work that is in the public domain from the 1920s. You do not have to be a professional to submit, but your work could be featured alongside some pros like Béla Fleck, Rhiannon Giddens, and many more artists. For more information on the project and your options, go to wnyc.org/public-song-project. That is wnyc.org/public-song-project. We're going to update the website as the week goes on with more songs from station friends, including my next guest, Adam Weiner, of the Philly rock and roll band, Low Cut Connie. Hi, Adam.

Adam Weiner: Hi, Alison, so happy to be here with you.

Alison Stewart: Really happy to have you, and thank you for participating in this project. It's great that you're coming aboard. What about this project interested you?

Adam Weiner: Well, I'm fascinated by songs from the 1920s. The record business started 100 years ago. We have 100 years of recorded music, really more than 100 years ago, but it was really the 1920s when songs became pervasive throughout the United States and the world. Victrola's record players spread to average homes. Radio was starting to explode and songs really became hits. The idea of a hit song really was created in the 1920s, and so I'm fascinated by the songs that resonated with people 100 years ago. That in some ways still resonate today.

Alison Stewart: The song you chose to perform, Shuckin' Sugar Blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson from 1927. Do you remember the first time you heard this song and in what context?

Adam Weiner: I do. I took a book from the library when I was 13 years old about the Blues, and I saw a photograph of Blind Lemon Jefferson. I was fascinated by this photograph. I went to Tower Records in New Jersey. I'm another Jersey guy like you, and I asked them to order a CD of Blind Lemon Jefferson for me. I was probably the only 13-year-old kid ordering Blind Lemon Jefferson CDs back then, and I got the CD. I heard the song Shuckin' Sugar, and it was so hypnotic. The way that the lyrics go back and forth between dark and light, you've got a verse that's really depressing, and then you've got a verse that's really funny, and then you've got a verse that's really hopeful, and then you've got a verse that's really pessimistic. He has this easy breezy delivery that I found so hypnotic.

There's something about Blues from the 1920s, and the way different emotions. Dark and light get put together in a song. That still fascinates me to this day.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie. We are talking about the Public Song Project. He decided to cover Shuckin' Sugar Blues from Blind Lemon Jefferson from 1927. He was a guitarist, Blind Lemon Jefferson. Your version is on the piano. How did you keep the essence of the original while adapting it for a different instrument?

Adam Weiner: Well, Blind Lemon Jefferson was really the first major, major Blues star that played guitar in America, and I still think he's one of the best Blues guitarists ever. I would never, ever try to imitate or try to touch what he did, but I tried to adapt it for piano, and I tried to give it a style that would have been concurrent with his time. I played the song in a 1920s piano style. I hope people dig it. I really loved recording the song for you guys.

Alison Stewart: Before we let you go, we're going to hear the song, but I do want to ask about any other Low Cut Connie projects, non-Public Song Project related. What's going on with you?

Adam Weiner: Well, for all of you New York City folks, I'm actually going to be at the 92nd Street Y on February 29th, doing an interview on stage and an acoustic performance. I hope to see some New Yorkers in the house.

Alison Stewart: [chuckles]

Adam Weiner: Alison, I have a film. I made a film called Art Dealers that's going to be coming out later this year, and it's a concert film and more. We won some awards on the festival circuit. I'm very excited for you guys and everybody to see this Art Dealers film.

Alison Stewart: All right, before we play your version of Shuckin' Sugar Blues, anything specific you'd like people to listen for?

Adam Weiner: I just hope people can get hypnotized by the song in the way that Blind Lemon Jefferson hypnotized me, and just notice the back-and-forth nature of the way we go from different emotions, right? You go from happy to sad with one line. There are many periods of recorded music where it becomes two-dimensional. Songs were written in a very like, this is just a party song. This is just a happy song. This is just a tragic song, but back in the 1920s, there were a lot of songs that could combine different emotional states in one song. I hope you'll notice that in this recording.

Alison Stewart: Adam Weiner of Low Cut Connie, thank you so much for being with us, and thanks for making this music.

Adam Weiner: Pleasure. Thanks for having me, Alison. I love the show.

Alison Stewart: Here's Low Cut Connie with Shuckin' Sugar Blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson.

[MUSIC - Low Cut Connie/Blind Lemon Jefferson: Shuckin' Sugar Blues]

I've got your picture, and I'm going to put it in a frame

I've got your picture, I'll put it in a frame, Shuckin' Sugar

So if you leave town, I can find you just the same

If you don't love me babe, please don't dog me around

If you don't love me, please don't dog me around, Shuckin' Sugar

'Cause when you dog me around, she'll likely know you'll put me down

[instrumental]

I know my baby, thinks she wanting all of me

I know my baby, thinks she wanting all of me, Shuckin' Sugar

When she smiles, you know, a light shines on me

Oh, my babe, baby don't you wanna go Oh, my babe, baby don't you wanna go, Shuckin' Sugar

I'll go across the water babe, where you know I just can't go

[instrumental]

I'm worried here, and I'm worried everywhere

I'm worried here, and I'm worried everywhere, Shuckin' Sugar

And when I get home I'll probably be worried there

I'm tired of being married, tired of all these settlin' down

I'm tired of being married, tired of all these settlin' down, Shuckin' Sugar

I just wanna be myself and skip from trying to (yeah, listen)

[instrumental]

Shuckin' Sugar, I just wanna be myself and slip from town to town

Alison Stewart: That was Adam Weiner of the Philly rock band Low Cut Connie, with a cover of Shuckin' Sugar Blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson, a bluesman and guitar player, sometimes called the Father of Texas Blues. Each day this week, we'll be premiering a new Public Song Project submission from a musician friend of WNYC and spinning the conversation out with some historical context. Today I'm joined by Ambre Dromgoole, a professor of Africana Studies in the Africana Studies Department at Cornell University. Ambre, nice to meet you.

Ambre Dromgoole: Hi, nice to meet you, Alison. It's great to be here.

Alison Stewart: We heard 1927 song, Shuckin' Sugar Blues by Blind Lemon Jefferson. Let's start there. Who was Blind Lemon Jefferson?

Ambre Dromgoole: Absolutely. I love that we started with a song about love, lost, memory and migration, which is typical for the period, but Blind Lemon Jefferson was actually born Lemon Henry Jefferson near Coutchman, Texas, which if anybody's like, "Where is that?" It's about an hour or so outside of the Dallas-Fort Worth area, or what we would call the Dallas-Fort Worth area. He was born around 1893, 1894 since his records get that mixed up. He's born into a family of sharecroppers, and starts playing the guitar in his teen years. He's going back and forth between his small town in Dallas and playing on the streets until he meets up with some other blues folk.

Fast forward to the 1920s, and he's one of the most prolific blues performers and guitarist of the time, recording and performing almost 100 songs between 1926 and 1929. Those include Black Snake Moan, Mean jumper Blues, Hangman's Blues, which was a favorite of mine to think about, which is about a man being sentenced to death by a judge. The list goes on and on. He is definitely one of the most significant figures in the history of blues. Absolutely.

Alison Stewart: Why is that one you like to think about being sentenced by a judge?

Ambre Dromgoole: Ooh, it's a lot, but it's a part of a larger tradition of thinking about police systems, thinking about imprisonment, incarceration at that time. There's actually a whole collection of songs that are around the same topic. I like to think about them together, and Hangman's Blues is one of his contributions to it.

Alison Stewart: He is sometimes called the Father of Texas Blues. When and why did blues start to be identified by category like the Texas blues or the Delta blues?

Ambre Dromgoole: The Identification of blues by category actually happens a little later. That's the codification. It's tied into certain types of styles, like some people have certain picking styles, some people have enter in a staccato style, and that'll be associated with a certain space or region. At the time, and I do oral history, so I like to talk a lot of blue progenitors, about that particular way of thinking.

At the time, that was just the music of the region. That was their functionality. I would say it wouldn't have necessarily been seen as typified by a region during the 1910s or 1920s, but definitely as we start to hear more recordings outside of the 1920s and into the 1930s, so on and so forth, you can start to pick up and listen to several different themes in the sounds that come and originate from different areas. You have the Texas blues, you have stuff that's associated with Mississippi, stuff that's as originated or associated with Georgia. Then we have big baskets like the Delta blues, which holds a lot of those different types of categories in them.

Alison Stewart: You specialize at the intersection of gospel music and the blues. Your dissertation, I believe it was at Yale Divinity School, is that right?

Ambre Dromgoole: It was at Yale University in their African American Studies and Religious Studies Departments.

Alison Stewart: It was called, There's a Heaven somewhere: Itinerancy, Intimacy and Performance in the Lives of Gospel Blues within 1915 to 1983. We began our show talking about the PBS docuseries about Gospel, the four-hour PBS series. What do you think is interesting about the intersection of the two, of Gospel and the blues?

Ambre Dromgoole: I love talking about this, not only because it's my topic, but I think a lot of people tend to associate Gospel and the blues as two distinct disparate categories. We have the sacred people over here who are in church and the juke joint blues folks over here who were in the club atmosphere and never the two shall meet. My work, which starts in the early 20th century, which starts in this 1910, 1920, 1930 area, really shows that there was a lot of cross-pollination going on. If you want to think about this, we can go back to Vaudeville and the Theater Owners Booking Association, which is a type of circuit that circulated around Black and white-owned theaters where Black people could perform and be a little bit safer. That didn't always happen, but it was meant to tap down on the exploitation that was happening at the time.

This was mapped out. At the same time, you have a lot of different church congregations that are coming up. I like to think a lot about sanctified churches, about the Church of God in Christ, and they're wanting different converts, different congregants. They're traveling along the same lines. On one side, you'll have a Vaudeville and Toba circuit and the Chitlin Circuit. On the other end, you'll have missionaries and revivals that are traveling and their sounds are overlapping and they're building off of each other and they're running into each other, and they're all sharing in somewhat of a spectrum of musical existence.

I like to think of that intersection as a space where it's not the chicken or the egg, which came first. It's more that they're developing alongside each other, and a lot of progenitors in both categories are learning from and talking to each other, and are each other at different points in their lives.

Alison Stewart: My guest is Ambre Dromgoole, Cornell assistant professor of Africana Studies. We are doing a little bit of blues history. Recording the blues started in the '20s, but obviously that's not where the blues start. When you think about the roots of a song like Shuckin' Sugar, where they come from, how do they meet in the blues in the '20s?

Ambre Dromgoole: Blues is so interesting because it comes from a variety of places. Depending on how you situated, the blues can be functional, political, entertaining, all of that at once. We can see these foundations in a couple of spaces. One, we can see post-antebellum, slavery histories of sharecropping, incarceration and convict leasing, where people are creating music in order to pass the time through some of their, unfortunately, free and exploitative labor that's happening. You have blues that were written by both imprisoned and non-imprisoned people at that time. I think of Bessie Smith's Jailhouse Blues, and Ma Rainey's Booz and Blues, where she's talking about waking up and the police being around her after somewhat of a wild night.

Of course, I had talked about the Theater Owners Booking Association in Vaudeville, another space where the blues is circulating. It's a really capacious form that's starting out in-- I wouldn't say starting out, but people associated with the late 19th and early 20th century. It's really forming in an organic way based on the experiences of the people of the time, and operating in a type of entertainment milieu that gives you a way out of maybe sharecropping or, for Black women in particular, domestic labor and work in the houses of some of the white people who would hire them or even exploit them.

Alison Stewart: We're going to hear Mamie Smith's Crazy Blues from 1920. It's often called the first blues recording. Let's hear it.

[MUSIC - Mamie Smith: Crazy Blues] I can't sleep at night

I can't eat a bite

'Cause the man I love

He don't treat me right

He makes me feel so blue

I don't know what to do

Sometime I sit and sigh

And then begin to cry

'Cause my best friend

Said his last goodbye

Alison Stewart: Ambre, what would you want people to know about Mamie Smith?

Ambre Dromgoole: I would want people to know that Mamie Smith is one of the foremost progenitors of the blues. This Crazy Blues is seen as one of the first blues recordings by a woman, but she really set the stage for what would become the race records industry and the music industry at large. I think we recently celebrated an anniversary, the centennial celebration of this recording. It was recorded in 1920, so in 2020, everybody was like, “Oh, 100 years, let's celebrate.”

It was also somewhat of an experiment. At the time, the record companies weren't really interested in putting the blues on wax, at least not as performed by Black people, and certainly not by Black women. Mamie Smith, by making this record, really showed both the want for Black recordings and Black blues recordings, but that a Black audience would economically support that type of output. I think it sold about 75,000 copies the day it was released. Again, when we think blues, a lot of times we think men, but we should really think a lot about these women and blues queens, like Manie Smith, who set the foundation for what would be the music industry to come.

Alison Stewart: Who are some other women that come to mind when you think of blues' greats from the 1920s?

Ambre Dromgoole: I think of Victoria Spivey, I think of Ethel Waters, Ma Rainey, of course, Mamie Smith. There's dozens of them who are, again, operating across these different circuits and really laid the foundation for the music that we love, and hear, and are recreating.

Alison Stewart: Let's listen to some Bessie Smith. Shall we?

Ambre Dromgoole: Yes.

Alison Stewart: Back Water Blues from 1927, which supposedly features stride piano player, James P. Johnson. Let's take a listen.

[MUSIC - Bessie Smith: Back Water Blues]

When it rained five days and the sky turned dark as night

When it rained five days and the sky turned dark as night

Then trouble's takin' place in the lowlands at night

I woke up this mornin', can't even get out of my door

I woke up this mornin', can't even get out of my door

There's enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she wanna go

Then they rowed a little boat about five miles--

Alison Stewart: Ambre, when we talk about stride piano associated with James P. Johnson, what do we mean when we say stride piano?

Ambre Dromgoole: When we say stride piano, we're talking about a certain type of style that leads into a more jazzier aesthetic. That would be my association with it. I'm actually not an expert on that particular-

Alison Stewart: Sorry for bringing it up for you.

Ambre Dromgoole: -type of piano playing. That's okay. It is jazzier and that also leads into, I hope, us talking about some of the intersections of jazz and the blues.

Alison Stewart: Absolutely. Go for it. Why is it worth highlighting that connection between jazz and blues?

Ambre Dromgoole: Because again, they build off of and cross-pollinate with each other. Again, if we go back and we think about what we just heard with Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith, you're hearing pianos. You're hearing the earlier iterations of jazz bands and trios in ways that don't necessarily lend themselves to a traditional narrative of the blues coming first and then jazz coming next, which is typically how people like to think about it.

All of these genres and styles are porous. They're moving in and out of each other. People that we talk about when we talk about like the Delta blues, which actually comes after the blues queens that comes after the type of music that Mamie Smith and Bessie Smith would've been making, we're thinking about the ways that genres and styles are formed and then later codified into the different styles that we like to think of today.

Again, I'm thinking about how the sounds of the juke joint blues cross-pollinate with Gospel revivals, and the down-home blues and how that leads into big bands and jazz orchestras that come into a jazz age. Again, the styles are continuously moving out of each other. Reviving the old, creating the new in the 1920s, to me, is an excellent way to think about that type of collaboration and really camaraderie.

Alison Stewart: You were kind enough to pick a song for us to play, Dinah by Ethel Waters published in 1925. What did you want to say about this before we play it?

Ambre Dromgoole: I actually wanted to think more about a voice than a sound. Ethel Waters, if we think about blues queens, like Mamie, Ma Rainey, we tend to think of heavier voices, voices that stagger between the blues and Gospel sound. I like to think of Ethel Water's voice as lighter and more lifted in the ways that Black women's voicings and sounds aren't just monolithic. Dinah, to me, is one of the perfect iterations of that type of style.

Alison Stewart: Ambre Dromgoole is an assistant professor of Africana Studies at Cornell. Thank you so much for walking us through some blues.

Ambre Dromgoole: Of course. It was wonderful.

Alison Stewart: Let's go out on Dinah by Ethel Waters.

[MUSIC - Ethel Waters: Dinah]

Carolina

Gave me Dinah;

I'm the proudest one

Beneath the Dixie sun.

News is spreadin'

'Bout our weddin';

I hear church bells ringin',

Here's the song my heart keeps singin':

Dinah,

Is there anyone finer

In the state of Carolina?

If there is and you know her,

Show her!

Alison Stewart: That's Dinah by Ethel Waters. There'll be plenty more Public Song Project content coming this week as we kick off the 2024 edition. If you're already inspired to get to work on a song, and you want some more information or want to listen back to the songs you've heard so far, head to wnyc.org/public-song-project. That's wnyc.org/public-song-project.

 

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