Five exceedingly rare nineteenth century “blues” guitarists

"Always fun reading, Paul. Thanks." 
Jason Vivone  (@JVivone), leader of the Billy Bats, Kansas City, December 3, 2013.

Charlie Patton: taught by Henry Sloan

BLUESMUSE44. We ended last week’s post around 1910 on the streets of Dallas, Texas. It was five years beforeHuddie Ledbetter, also known as Lead Belly, began the first of his prison sentences. His initial 1915 stretch, incidentally, was for carrying a pistol (probably with intent).  In 1918, Lead Belly would be banged up again, this time for killing a man in a fight over a woman. And he wasn’t just any man. He was Lead Belly’s relative. Bet you’re glad you weren’t in Lead Belly’s family.

Around 1910, however, Lead Belly, then aged 32, was playing guitar duets with a 17-year-old blind kid called Lemon Jefferson on the streets of Dallas, Texas. It’s said Lead Belly taught Blind Lemon how to play boogie guitar and, also, that Lead Belly was the first guitar player ever known to play barrelhouse-piano style boogie on a guitar.  This was in Shreveport, Louisiana, sometime around 1899.

Now, we’re stretching way back into the very earliest days of blues as we know it today. Blues as a genre didn’t even have an official name until 1912; and very few African-American guitarists playing styles preceding blues were operating before the turn of the twentieth century. I know of five off the top of my head; but if you know of others, I’d be grateful if you could let me know. Here they are:

Henry Sloan born 1870

One of the most influential was delta blues guitarist, Henry Sloan, born in 1870 in Mississippi, who taught guitar to the young Charlie Patton, himself later dubbed Father of the Delta Blues. Henry Sloan may even have written songs thought to have been composed by Patton, such as ‘Pony Blues’. That’s what blues pioneer Tommy Johnson once claimed, anyway. Henry Sloan was also the first musician to set field hollers to guitar accompaniment, according to the acclaimed American music historian, Dr. David Evans.

Buddy Bolden band with Jefferson Mumford on guitar

Charlie Galloway, born 1863, and Jefferson Mumford, born in 1873

Black guitarists like Henry Sloan, Charlie Galloway and Jefferson Mumford were the exception in the late nineteenth century, rather than the rule. In the 1880s, the guitar was a middle class instrument for middle class people. Most black musicians were unable to afford such luxury items until mail-order catalogues made them both affordable and attainable later in the 1890s. Charlie Galloway and Jefferson Mumford were a pair of barbers (like so many pioneer blues musicians), both known to be playing on the streets of New Orleans, where they were born, as far back as 1885. Both guitarists were there at the evolution of minstrel songs to ragtime and ragtime to blues; and both had stints playing in New Orleans’ famous Buddy Bolden band.

Joseph Kekuku, born about 1870

The 1880s also saw another guitar style born that would strongly influence blues. In the Hawaiian

Joseph Kekuku invented slide guitar

Islands around 1885,a schoolboy called Joseph Kekuku, from the island of Oahu, picked up a metal bolt on a railway track near Honolulu. He then made music by sliding the bolt over the gut strings of his Portuguese guitar and Hawaiian guitar playing was born.

It is thought Hawaiian guitarists, demonstrating the new style at the Chicago World’s Fair, introduced the idea of slide and bottleneck guitar to the USA, in 1893.

Daddy Stovepipe

Daddy Stovepipe, born 1867

From Mobile, Alabama, Daddy Stovepipe was known to have played in a mariachi band in Mexico in the late 1890s. He could well be the earliest known blues guitarist, if only we could authenticate the music he was playing in the USA before going down to Mexico. Called Daddy Stovepipe due to his stovepipe hat, Daddy’s real name was Johnny Watson. He also recorded under the names of Jimmy Watson, Sunny Jim and the Reverend Alfred Pitts.

Henry ‘Ragtime Texas’ Thomas, born 1874

But back to Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, where this post started and the last post ended.It’s extremely likely that both Blind Lemon and Lead Belly were both influenced by the music of Henry ‘Ragtime Texas’ Thomas while on the road around Texas. Born to freed slaves

Henry 'Ragtime Texas' Thomas: the album

in 1874 in north-west Texas, Thomas was well over 50 when he recorded his seminal collection of early African-American ‘reels, gospels, minstrel pieces, ragtime numbers and blues’ in Chicago between 1927 and 1929. The songs of Ragtime Texas Thomas, probably now considered country blues, have since been covered by bands like Canned Heat, the Grateful Dead and Lovin’ Spoonful.

Some final words from three eminent American blues historians:wrote David Evans, “For blacks in particular the guitar lacked any residual associations with slavery, minstrel music and its demeaning stereotypes, or even with the South.” Guitars were the most popular instruments, Dr. Evans said, because they were not rural and traditional; and they carried an aura of urbanity and upward mobility. As well as social reasons and its cheaper price, the guitar’s greater sound range also helped it usurp the banjo. You could emulate the chugging of a train on a guitar and use a bottle or knife as a bottleneck or slide.

As the redoubtable Alex Lomas once noted, the guitar was capable of sounding like several parts at one. “The lone bluesman could pocket the fee for a whole orchestra.”

David K. Bradford quotes the African-American ballad singer, songwriter and street evangelist, Charles Haffer, who once linked the emergence of blues to the guitar’s new popularity among black musicians in the 1890s. Born in the 1870s, Haffer, from Mississippi, said, “I used to sing all the old jump up songs. The blues weren’t in style then – we called them reels