The Black Fiddler’s Unlikely Home in Blues
In the 19th century, the most popular instruments played by black musicians in America were the banjo and the fiddle, and black and white string bands had virtually indistinguishable sounds. By the early days of the recording industry, though, both were on the way out. Yet the fiddle in particular was still prevalent enough that a fair number of black players were recorded, particularly in blues and jazz, and that’s a good thing. With its vibrato and flattened, bent and sliding notes, the fiddle could scream, cry, moan and sigh – could parallel the nuances of the human voice – in a way that was right at home in blues.
Indeed, bluesmen like Lonnie Johnson, Big Joe Williams and Big Bill Broonzy began their careers as fiddlers, though at the behest of record companies and popular tastes, they switched to primarily guitar soon after they began recording regularly. Johnson’s first sessions, in 1925, featured him bowing impressively on such melancholy songs as “Won’t Don’t Blues” and “Falling Rain Blues,” and a year later he played twin fiddles with his brother James on “Very Lonesome Blues.” In 1928, Johnson cut the slinky, “Violin Blues.” The fluid Johnson guitar style is clearly based on his violin playing, not vice-versa. As for Williams, he first recorded “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” his calling-card song that became a blues and rock standard, in 1933, as a duet with “Dad” Tracy, who pulled some eerie sounds out of his homemade, one-string fiddle. Even late in their careers, both Johnson and Williams would surprise and delight audiences by occasionally pulling the fiddle out for a few tunes during a live show.
As adept as black fiddlers were at country music, they brought incredible variety to the instrument. Among the jug bands, Clifford Hayes’s swung like crazy on tracks like “Try and Treat Her Right” with the Dixieland Jug Blowers, while fiddler Will Batt helped Jack Kelly’s Jug Busters find the common ground between blues and jug bands on “Highway No. 61 Blues.” The Memphis Jug Band turned out all manner of raucous violin music with Charlie Pierce on the likes of “Memphis Shakedown” and “Rukus Juice and Chittlin.” The Mississippi Sheiks, featuring Lonnie Chatmon on fiddle, forged an effortless blues-country fusion (“Sittin ‘on Top of the World”) that made them among the South’s most popular acts of the ’30s.
Chatmon’s brother Bo Carter was also a fiddler, though he’s regarded as a much better guitarist; still, his debut single, the tremulous “East Jackson Blues,” makes a good case for him on the former instrument. And the list goes on and on: slick, jazzy Leroy Pickett weaving his spell through “Stealin ‘Blues” in duet with boogie woogie founder Cow Cow Davenport on piano, “Blue Coat” Tom Nelson’s plaintive “Blue Coat Blues,” Henry “Son” Simms’s raw, hard-hitting work as a sideman to Charlie Patton and under his own name (“Tell Me Man Blues”). Finally, consider the case of Howard Armstrong.
Joined by Roland Martin on guitar and Carl Martin on bass, Armstrong played the driving, sing-songy fiddle in the Tennessee Chocolate Drops as they cut the 1930 “Vine Street Drag” and “Knox County Stomp.” In 1934, backing Ted Bogan on guitar, Armstrong helped create the dazzling blues and breakdown “Ted’s Stomp” under the name Louie Bluie. Armstrong soon left music until the ’70s, when the ’30s string band Martin, Bogan and Armstrong was revived with him and his old compadres; the group cut a little bit of everything, with Armstrong’s bop leanings making gems like “Sheik of Araby” stand out. Finally, in 1986, Terry Zwigoff made a documentary film about Armstrong called Louie Bluie. Though by now he limited himself primarily to fiddle and mandolin, the star was said to play some 22 instruments, and in the movie he sang in German and Polish (Spanish and Italian also color his repertoire). The soundtrack album Louie Bluie is an absolute tour de force, as Armstrong brings back home the old black and white string band traditions and stomps a variety of blues. His 1995 solo album Louie Bluie won a W.C. Handy Award. In 2003 he died at age 94.
With his most daring later work, Armstrong bridged the gap between the original black blues and string band fiddlers and the few who hung in there in the second half of the 20th century. Among the modernists, three of the most prominent were Donald “Sugarcane” Harris, Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown and Papa John Creach. Harris began his career as one-half of the streetwise L.A. vocal group Don and Dewey, which scored no hits but was hugely influential and saw its songs (“Justine,” “Farmer John,” “Big Boy Pete”) become hits for countless others. A handful of compilation sides on eMusic represent Harris’s later R&B violin work, and in the ’70s he shined as a sideman for both Frank Zappa and John Mayall in addition to releasing some rough and tough work under his own name. Brown was an electric guitarist in the T-Bone Walker mold who made some great boogie woogie and big band blues in the ’50s, and even got to play violin on a few such sides, before dropping out for about 15 years. When he returned in the mid-’70s, he played his own singular brand of Cajun, country, bluegrass and blues, featuring himself on fiddle as well as guitar; “Song for Renee,” a swaggering blues from One More Mile on which he plays jazzy fiddle in unison with the horns before scratching out a burry solo, represents his style at its most extravagant. Creach kicked around L.A. for years before somehow hooking up with San Francisco acid-rockers Jefferson Airplane in the ’70s; his solo work on eMusic is hardly representative of what he can do, but he’s all over First Pull Up, Then Pull Down by Hot Tuna, the bluesy Airplane spinoff fronted by Jorma Kaukonen and Jack Casady – injecting tense fills and an emphatic solo into “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning,” haunting the melody to “Candy Man” and proving that stereotypes be damned, blues can come from some pretty unlikely instruments.
