Music and more with claudecat17 (aka Chris Davlin)!

I haven’t mentioned it yet but this is not my first blog. Back in the teens I had one on tumblr, not the greatest choice as it turned out but I made it work. Right after that started I began working for the local ball team, the Orioles, and that became the focus most days during the season. I’d gathered a small core group of disgruntled MASN baseball blog participants willing to try something new, willing to endure even the weird music crap I didn’t stop writing about. It was less frequent but just as important to me as the other subject matter, which was basically anything I wanted to talk about, be it corn dogs or Charley Patton, The Phoenix roller coaster at Knoebel’s Grove or a hilarious helping of embarrassing LP covers. I did a whole long, carefully researched post on the history of the donut as I recall. Not my only donut-related post. Lots of individual Daffy Duck cartoon breakdowns too, if you’re into that kinda thing. That became a way of meeting folks halfway, between weird music and baseball analysis. I’d do comedy pieces based on LP covers, weird products, old ads, movies and TV shows I was liking, etc. You get the idea.

I went back and read a few of those ancient posts recently and there are several I really like which I’ll begin foisting here soon, mostly music but likely a few others. Depending on response this place could evolve into anything. I’ll be interested to see what resonates. Will it be music, cartoons, foods often seen at 11 year old birthday parties, marijuana history (I was a dealer in the 70s-80s – have some insane stories there!), cats, Old Time Radio (OTR)? It’ll be a while before the answer becomes clear, if ever. I’ll most likely continue to write whatever I want. Not having to skew things to sports fans will be a relief!

I used to be a much bigger sports fan, baseball mainly but football (not soccer) too. I refuse to watch football at all now, and I pay attention to baseball mainly by scoreboard watching, not game watching or even listening. If the O’s get good again that’ll change and I may write about it, but that’s not likely any time soon…

This particular post is an example of the music stuff I loved writing so much and still do. This one was also my very first blog post, anywhere, on any platform. In other words, it was very very important to me 12 years ago to educate the world about Josh White, mostly remembered now, if at all, as a minor figure in blues history. Those that know a little more might know that he was essentially blacklisted, that he had huge hits that weren’t blues at all, that he performed in Europe after being ostracized here in the good ol’ US of A. Maybe they know some of that, but I have yet to meet anyone familiar with the whole story, though I’ve been out of touch with humans in general for a very long time. Not meeting a lot of people, y’know?

Not that I know the whole story myself really. Just what I’ve read over the years. I’d be hard pressed to even remember the original sources, likely various obscure interviews scattered here and there. Jas Obrecht, a one time writer for Guitar Player magazine (I subscribed for almost 30 years!), had some especially thoughtful and informative interviews and other writing, but there have been plenty of others as well. Lots of book learnin’ too. I’ve read dozens of books on blues/jazz/r&b/ragtime/country, hundreds on music overall. There are a few so good I read them every year or even more often. I’ll do posts on those I’m sure.

So here it is, lightly edited for stupidity, waiting to amaze and elucidate. That means you might learn something, but this isn’t Ebay so you knew that. Let’s get in the wayback machine and travel to March of 2014, a very good year for the Orioles. I almost knocked Justin Verlander down while exiting a bathroom on the upper deck before a playoff game that fall. He was running and wasn’t looking. I popped out and he barely stopped in time, though I was mildly jostled. Coulda been rich had I been smart enough to fake a terrible injury! Those weird eyes of his were not happy…

Oh well. The O’s beat 3 consecutive Cy Young pitchers, Verlander included, to win the ALDS! Pretty exciting stuff, though the presence of national media circus performers and their fleet of trucks and buses made everything sadly surreal. I generally love surreal but this was the wrong kind. They interfered with parking, routes out of the lots, they were mean and demanding to my fellow workers, etc. We fucking hated those clowns.

That may have been ARod’s first year as an analyst, and I think David Ortiz was there too, possibly Pete Rose. I hated all those guys real hard at the time. I like Big Papi now, but back then he went crazy and smashed the dugout phone during a tantrum in our beloved yard, causing O’s fans to despise him with a special vehemence forvermore. Only Jose Bautista was in the same stratosphere of O’s fan hatred. That painted on GI Joe beard motherfucker…

But enough blather! On with the show, eh? Here’s the piece:

Most people with a cursory knowledge of blues or “folk” music have at least heard of Leadbelly, but I’d wager that a very small percentage of those people would be familiar with Josh White, beyond perhaps the name sounding somehow familiar. That’s a shame, as his was a fascinating story.

Like the aforementioned Mr. Belly, White became the darling of high society and the “folk” music cognoscenti, even befriending the Roosevelts (they were White’s kids’ godparents!) and hobnobbing with royalty, all while exhibiting a polished and easy on the ears fluency as both a singer and guitarist. However, unlike Leadbelly, he did it on his own terms. You won’t find photos of White dressed as a laborer or in prison garb, and you won’t hear him performing songs at the behest of Alan Lomax or others wishing to portray or preserve a certain “authenticity” in their artist/mascots. Josh did things his own way, and with the smarts to know how to sell records.

Let’s backtrack a bit here… White started his musical journey as the “lead boy” for various blind blues performers of varying levels of fame, including Blind Blake and Blind Joe Taggart, learning musical technique and the less obvious rules of the entertainment game along the way. He did this while enduring awful conditions, having to sleep in fields or stables, often without decent clothing or shoes, most of what he earned being sent home to his parents. He was eventually noticed as a performer and by the early ’30s was making records that would most often be classified as “country” blues (singing with his own acoustic guitar as accompaniment).

Without going into excruciating detail, White’s career progressed rather quickly, and by the early 40’s he was entertaining in the White House and becoming something of a sex symbol, not unlike what Sam Cooke would be years later. He may have had the first million selling record by a black artist in 1944 with “One Meatball”, he was in films, on Broadway, etc etc. The man was a force to be reckoned with at a time when a black man wasn’t necessarily a welcome force. I don’t recall Leadbelly doing most of these things.

So why is Josh White less well known Than Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter? Well, he was outspoken. He did “protest” songs, toured as a duo with a white woman (Libby Holman), and just generally made himself a target for backlash, despite the Roosevelts being his childrens’ godparents. When the red scare and 50’s paranoia took hold, he was basically banished overseas never to be the star he could have been here. Which isn’t to say his career died. He still made records and live appearances and was quite successful as kind of a cabaret artist.

So why isn’t he as well known as Leadbelly even today, when we oughta know better? It has to do mostly with how we perceive and classify music. Because White’s style evolved with time and the whims of the larger audiences he coveted, he quickly grew away from the narrow blues or folk categories, unlike Lead Belly, who not only was far more limited musically, but was willing to be whatever his keepers wanted him to be. “We want you to play the songs you heard when you were a child, because that MUST be folk music and therefore good!”. And so he did, under the close supervision of Lomax and others.

I guess what prompted me to write this was just this dichotomy. The way white audiences have approached black music and musicians over the years is fraught with such bizarre realities as conveyed here. We want black music to sound a certain way, fit in a certain box, and if it doesn’t, it’s just pop music and nobody wants that a few years after it expires. We love soul, we love blues, we love that early rock and roll, but if it strays too far from the rigid genre requirements we’ve all absorbed over time, it’s drivel and deserves to be forgotten.

To sum up, Josh White is someone that should be more famous but isn’t, and again, that’s a shame.