A Deeper Well: The Music Of The Carolinas

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Illustration of Blind Boy Fuller by Jeremy Okai Davis.

Can’t Stand Pat: Piedmont Blues

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A wily guitar opens the song, plucking a theme that ascends and descends mischievously. After just a few notes, washboard scratches out a jittery rhythm track. Then the vocals come in, rough yet clear. The singer announces his romantic woes with wry humor, chagrined more than hurt by the antics of his woman: “Got a little girl, she stays upstairs,” he laments. “Make a livin’ by puttin’ on airs.” As the song continues, his troubles only grow more and more exaggerated, and he punctuates the verses with lively shouts and calls. The groove becomes spryer, fidgetier, more rambunctious with every measure, as though the singer and the washboard player are looking for trouble on a Saturday night. And surely they find it right before the song ends:

Well, I’ll sing this verse, ain’t gonna sing no more
Hear my gal call me and I got to go
Step it up and go – yeah, man!
Can’t stand pat, swear you gotta step it up and go

After all his protestations, all his woman has to do is call and he’ll stop singing, throw down his guitar, and run after her.

The song is called “Step It Up And Go,” and it was recorded in March 1940 by a Durham musician named Fulton Allen, a.k.a. Blind Boy Fuller. He sings and plays a steel-bodied National guitar, which would become his trademark; on washboard is another blind man history knows only as Red. Together, they created one of the most influential blues tracks from the Carolinas: “Step It Up And Go” is a perfect example of the regional Piedmont style that developed along the East Coast but flourished especially in North Carolina. Named for that stretch of land bounded by the islands on the coast and the mountains to the north and west, Piedmont blues is defined by its buoyant, danceable rhythms, which are created by a player using his thumb to pluck out a bass line.

Piedmont blues is a regional equivalent of Mississippi Delta blues, although it developed somewhat later – specifically in the years following World War I, when blacks began migrating away from rural areas in the South and finding new professional and social opportunities in urban centers like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and even Atlanta (which had its own vibrant blues scene, more akin to Piedmont than Delta). Because the Carolinas lay along the route to Washington, D.C., and points even farther north, many itinerant workers settled in Charleston, Durham, and Raleigh.

For a time there might be a bluesman on every sidewalk or at every social event, strumming out riffs and songs for whoever might pass by. Most of them – or, at least, most of the ones who are remembered so many decades later – were blind, either from birth or from ill health. Fuller had lost his sight in his late teens, which seriously constrained his professional opportunities. Music was one of few professional outlets for blind black men at the time, at least the ones who didn’t want to make brooms. They were entertainers first and foremost, and Piedmont was dance music: public, social, therefore dexterous, ostentatious, sometimes humorous. At times it could play like a parody of the more recent conception of the blues as strictly grave and lowdown.

Blind Boy Fuller was one of Piedmont’s top practitioners; not only was he in demand as a performer, but he kept a busy schedule as a recording artist. “Step It Up And Go” is one of 130 sides he cut in the late 1930s and early 1940s for a variety of labels, including Vocalion, Columbia, OKeh, and Decca. He was, at least until his untimely death in February 1941 (he was only 33 years old), the center of the Piedmont blues scene, playing with musicians who would enjoy longer lives and more successful careers. Early collaborators include Pink Anderson and Gary Davis, later known as Rev. Gary Davis, a nimble guitar player who specialized in spiritual material but still became a hero of the 1960s blues revival. Fuller also recorded with a talented harmonica player named Saunders Terrell, who would change his name to Sonny Terry and launch an incredibly popular act with Brownie McGhee. (Terry, McGhee, Davis, and Anderson are all featured on Smithsonian Folkways’ excellent new compilation, Classic African American Songsters.)

Most bluesmen were itinerants, which facilitated the spread of ideas across counties and states. Ideas and techniques fermented and spread as players like Blind Blake and Blind Willie McTell wandered through the Carolinas, inspiring local players like Julius Daniels, who was born in Denmark, South Carolina, but lived most of his life in North Carolina. His most popular tune, “99 Year Blues,” was included on Harry Smith’s incredibly influential Anthology Of American Folk Music. As a child, Joshua Daniel White worked as an apprentice and lead boy for blind blues performers in Greeneville, South Carolina, which exposed him to a range of techniques and styles. As an adult, he specialized in songs about the tough lives of cotton pickers and coal miners, such as “Low Cotton” and “Silicosis Is Killin’ Me.” Eventually he moved north to New York, where he found a home among the city’s leftists and beatniks.

Fuller’s death didn’t mark the end of the Piedmont blues era, but the scene did fade over time. World War II disrupted many lives, as did rock and roll. In the 1950s, the blues shifted once and for all away from the country and into the city – namely Chicago, where Chess Records artists Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf were electrifying the form both literally and figuratively. Still, even into the 1970s, Piedmont blues remained a lively form even as its practitioners aged.

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