Tampa Red and the birth of resonator guitars

"Interesting, keep up the good stuff."
ResonatorGuitarGuide @ResonatorGuide, October 5, 2013. 

"The story of National/Dobro/Rickenbacher guitars would make a great movie. Roaring 20s, Great Depression, etc."
Al (@Resoguitar), October 5, 2013.

"Great post! Worth also exploring the hoops Dopyera had to jump through in launching the Dobro not to compete with HIS OWN patent."
ResonatorGuitarGuide @ResonatorGuide October 1, 2013.

"Awesome reading here Paul."
 DJ Bob @zczbob September 27, 2013.

BLUESMUSE38.  A kind tweet about last week’s blog from Al@resoguitar prompted this latest post. Al’s Twitter profile says he is a resonator guitar enthusiast, “National, Dobro, etc.” so I thought why not throw in a few facts about resonators gleaned while researching How Blues Evolved Volume Two?

Al probably knows much of this, but the problem with acoustic guitars in the pre-electric era was that they were always drowned out by the rest of the band. Only when Sylvester Weaver was recorded in

The first recorded blues guitar from 1923.

1923 playing individual acoustic slide guitar with a knife, and picking out individual notes, were the unbounded possibilities of the blues guitar unveiled to the world. See From Russia With Love (14 May archive).

One guitarist, in particular, who wanted a louder sound was a white 26-year-old lap-steel player, originally from Texas, called George Beauchamp. It was 1925 and George, now based in Los Angeles, wanted to stop his Hawaiian guitar-playing being overwhelmed by brass and reeds. A former vaudevillian (as were most musicians in those days), George Beauchamp approached a 32-year-old Slovakian inventor and instrument maker, who had moved to L.A., to help solve the problem.

   This was John Dopyera and his solution was to create his resophonic or resonator guitar, an instrument three or four times louder than conventional acoustic guitars. The extra sound was due to the three amplifying metal cones Dopyera put under the bridge. With George Beauchamp, John Dopyera and his brothers founded the National Stringed Instrument Corporation and, in 1927, they launched the National resonator.

This was a guitar perfect for playing blues, as part-African-American blues pioneer Tampa Red

Tampa red & resonator

discovered the following year, becoming the first black guitarist to buy one in 1928. Growing up in Tampa, Florida, as Hudson Woodbridge, Tampa Red acquired his nickname due to his light-coloured reddish skin. He had started off accompanying the formidable Ma Rainey, as one of her Blues Assassinators, and now specialised in hokum blues, a near-the-bone comic blues of the sort mentioned in Dirty Blues Lyrics and Filthy Rugby Songs (21 August archive).

Tampa Red’s first 78 rpm recording was the raunchy, ‘It’s Tight Like That’, recorded with Georgia Tom in 1928 and produced by Lester Melrose. (See The White Guy Who Gave use Chicago Blues in the 20 May archive.) Have a listen on the link below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=htFE1CTSBTw

It's Tight Like That sold in its millions, being one of the best-selling songs of the era. By definition of its recording date, it also has to be one of the first resonator guitars on record. The most prolific blues artist of his era, Red often played in the single-string bottleneck tradition forged by Sylvester Weaver, except louder (now that he had his resonator guitar). Tampa Red’s magnum opus surely has to be his 1940 blues classic, ‘When Things Go Wrong (It Hurts Me Too)’, covered by Elmore James amongst many others. Altogether, it’s been estimated Red made over 300 records.

John Dopyera

   But back to 1928. Almost as soon as they had released the National resonator, John Dopyera decided to split from George Beauchamp and leave the company. With his brothers, the resonator’s original inventor then founded a rival company, the Dobro Manufacturing Company. Dobro stood for Dopyera brothers, and also meant ‘good’ in Slovak. The brothers quickly launched the Dobra resonator guitar in competition to National's resonator. 

With neither company able to manufacture the vital aluminium resonators, however, both National and Dobro continued sourcing their metal bodies and other components from a Swiss-born engineer called Adolph Rickenbacher, based in Santa Ana, California.

George Beauchamp, meanwhile, still persevering with his idea of an electric Hawaiian guitar, then teamed up with Adolph Rickenbacher in 1931 the hope of producing a electric lap steel. This they did, and the electric guitar was born; but more about that later. 

For more information on the birth of the electric guitar, why not invest (going for a song) in How Blues Evolved Volume Two. Here are the links and here's a picture of the Ebook.

How Blues Evolved in the UK is on the following link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital- text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one

In the USA, please follow this link:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved

Postscript
Sunday, 29 September 2013. London. Down by the River Thames at Greenwich, by the restored tea clipper, Cutty Sark, a busker plays and sings some pretty decent blues on a shiny all-metal resonator guitar. Not a soul watches or listens. A couple of hundred yards away, a one-man band plays an MOR version of the Stones' Get Off Of My Cloud on a banjo, tambourines on his ankles, and draws a crowd. Was it just down to the location of their patches? I hope so. 



 

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White imitates black, black imitates white; and today's blues is initiated.

"Good Blues blog. I really enjoy the trivia and often obscure facts associated with this musical genre. Nice job." Al @Resoguitar, September 25, 2013.

BLUESMUSE36. Back in June, I wrote a post about Charles Matthews, the English comedian who basically kick-started today’s blues into life in 1822. (See 28 June archive.)

What Matthews did was imitate a black Shakespearean actor who suffered the indignity of having his multi-racial New York audience scream out for a pop song in 1822 while the actor was giving a soliloquy from Hamlet. Pictured below (left) is a poster advertising that actor, James Hewlett, in Richard 111, a year earlier. While some reports say that Hewlett was an African American, others claim he was a mixed-race West Indian.

James Hewlett was the principal actor of New York’s African Theatre and the popular dance tune he was forced to sing was ‘Possum Up A Gum Stump’, thought to have originated on America's southern slave plantations. The lyrics referred to opossums and racoons, which slaves often hunted to supplement the meagre food rationed out by their owners. The tune, played on the slaves’ favourite instrument, the fiddle, was probably taken from a sailor’s hornpipe. Here are the first and fourth verses:

“Possum up de gum stump

Dat racoon’s in de holler

Twis’ ‘im out and get ‘im down

An’ I’ll gin you half a dollar.

 

Possum up de gum stump

A good man’s hard to fine

You’d better love me pretty gal

You’ll git de udder kind.”

 You'll note the 'good man is hard to find' line. This would continue to be used in African-American style songs all the way into the twentieth century and the blues era.

 When James Hewlett performed in the required plantation vernacular, the audience went so wild that

The black Shakespearean actor, James Hewlett.

Charles Matthews promptly decided to include the black actor's impromptu song and dance routine in his own one-man stage act. This act Matthews took around North America for nine months, to enormous acclaim from the local audiences.

This was the exact moment, it seems, that black slave music started its 90-year evolutionary journey; a journey that culminated in blues being captured on paper and named, for the first time, in 1912. (More about that in a later post, if you don't know the story already.)

In a review of Matthews’ performances of 1822 and 1823, the Baltimore Patriot newspaper gushed, “If the experiment had not been fully tried, it would be considered incredible that any one man, by the variety of his tones, the flexibility of his countenance, and the rich humour of his style and manner, could satisfy raised expectations and keep his hearers either in a roar of applause, or in a state of tranquil pleasure.”

The late American academic and author, Dr. Francis Hodges, in his prize-winning 1964 book, ‘Yankee Theatre’, said Charles Matthews was, “The progenitor of all native American dialect comedy”.

This is because when Matthews took his one man show back to Britain in 1923, he spawned a host of American imitators who carried on with similar impersonations of slave song and dance. Back in London, Matthews' publishers advertised the song as a "South Carolina Negro Air as sung by Mr. Matthews", and the "only correct copy of this original Negro melody."

It is a giant stroke of irony that one of the first of Matthews’ American imitators was the same black Shakespearian actor, James Hewlett, who so inspired Charles Matthews in the first place.

The black American performed an almost identical one-man show to the Englishman for another decade, mainly to white audiences, said Professor Shane White, in his 2007 book, ‘Stories of Freedom in Black New York’

“In his early shows of 1923 and 1824, Hewlett had been virtually a Matthews clone,”writes Prof. White. According to theatre playbills, Hewlett's performances were completely dominated by material that originated with Matthews. The African American even followed Matthews to London in 1824, “to give entertainments after the fashion of Matthews”. 

Ira Aldridge

And here's another delicious slice of irony. With another great African-American actor of the 1820s, Ira Aldridge, who also had success on the British stage, James Hewlett is said to have been responsible to opening the door to white American actors onto the stages of their own country. Unbelievably, American theatres only employed British actors before the 1820s and the success of the two black actors in Britain during the 1820s helped change all that.

Later in his career, however, Hewlett becoming famous for his impersonations of white Shakespearean actors and, for a while, drew crowds of up to 600 people. But in the 1830s, Hewlett’s act went out of vogue. He was last heard of performing Othello in Trinidad in 1839.

Ira Aldridge remained in Britain for the rest of his life.

To read more about the birth of the blues, why not buy How Blues Evolved Volume One, a snip on the links below. Also available below is Volume Two, which brings us up to the birth of rock & roll.

How Blues Evolved in the UK is on the following link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital- text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one

In the USA, please follow this link:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved

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Hoochie coochie was in the water long before Muddy emerged.

"Fascinating!!! Where do you research this stuff???"
Richard Wall @writinblues, September 20, 2013.

"Awesome research."
nora j mckiddie @mckiddie_j, September 21, 2013.

BLUESMUSE35. Just like rock & roll, hoochie coochie was old-time African-American slang for sex. To most blues aficionados, the term is synonymous today with the blues great Muddy Waters and

The Hoochie Coochie man himself, Muddy Waters.

his 1954 recording of the iconic Willie Dixon song, Hoochie Coochie Man. Since this was a time before most whites were into blues, Hoochie Coochie Man was targeted purely at black audiences and is assumed, probably correctly, to be a tongue-in-cheek reference to a ladies’ man.

The term itself goes back to the pre-blues days of the early Ethiopian delineators. These mainly white entertainers of the 1820s and 1830s pre-dated the age of the now despised minstrelsy troupes by a generation. The genre was started by a visiting English comedian, Charles Matthews, in 1822 (see 28 June post in my archives) and imitated by hundreds of working class Americans who blacked-up their faces and performed songs and dances in the fashion of those heard on America’s southern slave plantations. Two of the most famous (or infamous) of these songs were Jim Crow and Zip Coon, caricatures at both ends of the African-American spectrum. Jim was dressed in rags, a slave and a cripple. Zip Coon was Jim Crow’s complete opposite, an ostentatious urban dandy in ruff, waistcoat and top hat who believed, mistakenly so far as the audience was concerned, that he was a fashionable city slicker.

Zip Coon sheet music from the 1830s.

While Zip put on airs and graces and imitated affluent white toffs with his cane, fob watch and pince-nez, the ragged Jim Crow knew his place at the bottom of the heap. While Jim Crow was a poor southern slave, happy with his lot, Zip Coon was a free northern black with money from unknown sources (nudge, nudge; wink, wink) to spare; and buckets of attitude.

You can take these characters at face value, or take the view of some academics who maintain pro-slavery undercurrents were at work. Were Jim Crow and Zip Coon simply coincidental comic caricatures designed purely to entertain the working man? Or were they subtly-contrived propaganda tools working against the abolition of slavery, campaigns for which were already gathering momentum in the northern states? The underlying political analogy, the academics say, can be interpreted thus: the uppity Zip Coon mocks the attempts of free-born black men in the north to assimilate into white society; while the submissive Jim Crow seems almost grateful to live contentedly as a slave on a romanticised southern plantation. In other words, the songs were designed to preserve slavery’s status quo.

The white entertainer and anti-establishment newspaper publisher/editor, George Washington Dixon, made Zip Coon popular and claimed to have written the song. But so, too, did two other white blackface delineators: Bob Farrell and George Nicholls, both of Purdy Brown’s Theatre and Circus. Farrell actually used Zip Coon as a stage name while Nicholls was advertised as singing Zip Coon in 1833, a good year before Dixon’s first use of the character. All three claimants, incidentally, had also been blackface circus clowns before upgrading to the main solo act of Ethiopian delineator.

All of this is a long-winded (but if we don’t go into the social and political context of the song, we may lay ourselves open to accusations of endorsing it) way of saying that the term hoochie coochie was used in the song Zip Coon as far back as 1833.

Over 120 years before Willie Dixon put Hoochie Coochie Man down on paper, Dixon, Farrell or Nicholls had included it in this verse of what was advertised in the 1830s as ‘A favourite comic song’ .

Did you ever go fishin’ on a warm summer day

When all the fish were swimmin’ in de bay

With their hands in their pockets and their pockets in their pants

Did you ever see a fishie do the Hootchy-Kootchy dance?

Chorus etc.”

 You’ll note the term is spelt Hootchie Kootchie and predates the widely-held assumption that the

hoochie coochie, as an erotic dance, was introduced to the USA at America’s Philadelphia Centennial Fair in 1876. Before the dance became universally known as a belly dance, it was called the hoochie coochie, or shimmy and shake.

  Zip Coon is sometimes described as the world’s first syncopated pop song. While many claim authorship of the lyrics, the tune is an old violin melody called, ‘Natchez Under The Hill’, named after the Mississippi’s wildest river port. Killings, knife fights and drunkenness were routine there until the 1820s. With the original melody believed to have come from Scotland, the tune is also the basis for another classic American popular song, ‘Turkey in the Straw’.

Pictured left: the hoochie coochie dancer Little Egypt or Ashea Wabe, born Catherine Devine in Montreal, in 1871.In 1896, her scandalous dancing in New York made all the front pages when a party she was dancing at was raided by the vice squad. Little Egypt was found dead in her New York apartment in 1908, aged 36. The cause was given as gas asphyxiation. She left an estate of $200,000.

To read more about the subjects above, why not buy How Blues Evolved Volume One, a snip on the links below.

How Blues Evolved in the UK is on the following link:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Ddigital- text&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved+volume+one

In the USA, please follow this link:http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=how+blues+evolved

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The despair of having your musical talent go unrecognized

"Paul, just bookmarked the page. It's extremely informative. Great read."
Pete, The Honest Mistake Band @fsrocko, California. 13 September 2013.

One of the reasons that working in the music business used to be so soul-destroying was seeing just how many unbelievably talented musicians and songwriters never made it, remaining unknown and falling by the wayside. I know it’s just the same today, probably even worse, with all this talent-contest garbage on TV.

A rare pic of Charlie Patton.
He made his name but his teacher didn't.

Sadly, this is how it has always been. So many great 

blues players, like Robert Johnson, only found 

recognition after their death. Others, like Henry 

Sloan, who taught Charlie Patton how to 

play the blues around the turn of the 19^th 

century, also remain totally unrecognized. Indeed, 

the delta blues pioneer, Tommy Johnson 

(himself mostly forgotten), once claimed that 

famous Charlie Patton songs like ‘Pony 

Blues’ were originally Henry Sloan 

compositions. Henry who? I bet you've forgotten 
his name already.

I’m sure this strikes a chord with so many individuals and bands out there today. You only have to hear the great stuff available at the click of a mouse on a twitter or blog post to appreciate all the talent that’s around. I’ve lost count of the great songs I’ve been asked to listen to.

For example, one talented electric guitarist contacted me the other day to rent his frustration at an industry that, these days, refuses to look past boy bands or middle-of-the-road TV-friendly balladeers. Since I have a soft spot for well-played electric blues and rock guitar, I ask you to give Will Ludford’s band, The Strats, a go.

Will Ludford.

Originally from Leighton Buzzard in England’s Midlands, Will Ludford must be around the same vintage as myself, having said he toured the USA with UK band Diamond Lil in the late 60s. Other credits, Will says, include working with such icons as reggae production duo, Sly & Robbie; godfather of rock-steady, Alton Ellis and those masters of musical parody, the Barron Knights. Incredibly, Will says he also worked with, and was encouraged by George Harrison, and jammed with Jimi Hendrix.

You’ve only to hear Will’s searing guitar work with his band, The Strats, to recognise the calibre of his playing. Why not take a listen here: 

You'd Better Stop. The Strats.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ae557c3daf&view=audio&msgs=140fdbff20165174&attid=0.1&zw 

Torpedo To Your Heart. The Strats.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ae557c3daf&view=audio&msgs=140fdbff20165174&attid=0.2&zw

You Blew Me Out Of My Mind. The Strats.

https://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&ik=ae557c3daf&view=audio&msgs=140fdbff20165174&attid=0.3&zw 

Will and The Strats have more songs to view on YouTube and a new CD out called, “Falling Off The Edge Of The World”. This, Will says, is based on his experiences taking LSD and purple hearts, an amphetamine favoured by the original mods in the 1960s. 

The Strats latest album reached number five in the AiiRadio Charts and topped the ReverbNation Independent Chart. Here's a link to their web site:

www.thestrats.com

Jason Wells Band
While we're on the subject of not getting the musical recognition you deserve, why not give the fine

Jason Wells

blues rock of  Indiana's Jason Wells and his band a listen, too. You'll find various tracks and videos on the link below.
http://jasonwellsmusic.com/ 

A Deep Purple passage
I was interested to hear Jason's influences include Deep Purple. When I was young, I worked for Tony Barrow, the one-time Beatles publicist. One of the unknown bands I was given to publicise was Deep Purple. The next thing I knew they were top of the UK charts with Black Night. I must say that Roger Glover the bass player and drummer Ian Paice were two of the nicest people you could wish to meet. I didn't meet the other guys, by the way, just in case you're thinking ...

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