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In the rural East Texas towns of Longview,
Tyler, Raywood, Liberty, and Sulphur Springs, the harmonica
has been played by African Americans in church and at house
parties for more than a century. John T. Samples, Sr., Virginia
Peoples, Robert Berry, Jack Wilson and Cleveland Walters,
Jr., exemplify the roots of this tradition. They play here
in a collection of rare recordings of hymns, spirituals, blues
and traditional tunes.
Featuring Slow Train Coming to Arkansas,
Beulah Land, West Texas Jump, Rocky Mountain Blues, At the
Cross, Yield Not to Temptation, Daddy Double Do Love You,
and 40 others.
Fortunately, for those who are enthusiasts
of African American music and who wish to learn more about
its forms during the first half of the twentieth century,
a great many songsters, blues singers, jug bands, gospel groups
and preachers were recorded by the major record companies
in the 1920s and 30s. Though many were brought to New York,
Chicago and locations in Wisconsin and Indiana to record,
with increasing frequency after 1924 a considerable number
were recorded by field units operating in the South. As a
result we are informed on the styles and kinds of music played
in west Tennessee and Mississippi, Texas and Louisiana, Alabama
and Georgia, and in the Carolinas. There were considerable
distances between locations, of course, and states like Florida
and Arkansas were not visited at all. But nevertheless, from
these recordings we have learned much about regional traditions,
the distribution of some aspects of the repertoires, the many
functions of these musical forms, and the styles and techniques
of guitar and piano playing.
Harmonica playing, too. Though it was less
frequently recorded, the abilities on the harmonica of Noah
Lewis, Jed Davenport, Will Shade and Buddy Doyle from Tennessee,
of Jaybird Coleman, Bullet Williams and Ollis Martin from
Alabama, or of Sonny Terry, Jordan Webb and Eddie Mapp from
the Carolinas, among many others, are known to us. But curiously,
remarkably few harmonica players from Texas were recorded.
It wasn’t because Texas musicians played solely conventional
instruments: jugs, washboards, kazoos, even the quills and
whistling, were put on wax by Texans, but only one identifiable
harmonica player, William McCoy, was recorded on location.
He made half a dozen titles in Dallas in December 1927 and
in the same month the following year. A very accomplished
player, his recordings included Train imitations and the Fox
Chase, child mimicry on Mama Blues, and an evocative Central
Tracks Blues. It is possible that another harmonica soloist,
Freeman Stowers, who recorded in Richmond, Indiana the following
year, may also have been from Texas, as is suggested by his
Texas Wild Cat Chase with its vivid imitations of the treed
wild cat and the hunting dogs. His Railroad Blues and Sunrise
on the Farm appear to confirm Freeman Stowers’s rural
origins. A harmonica player was recorded in a Texas prison
farm in 1934, who also performed a train imitation and fox
chase mimicry, but he remains unidentified.
Under what circumstances the harmonica was
played in Texas, whether there was a regional tradition, and
if so, how it may have come about has remained a matter of
pure speculation -until now. For more than a decade Alan Govenar
has been locating in east Texas a number of harmonica players,
many of them veterans and one or two even being contemporaries
of those who recorded in the 1920s. From this collection,
made available for the first time, it is possible to fill
in some of the gaps. But before discussing the players and
their work we should spare a few words on the harmonica. Though
credit is sometimes given to the British engineer Sir Charles
Wheatstone for the invention in 1829 of the ‘aeolina’,
which had a number of reeds mounted within a box so that they
vibrated when blown, it was Friedrich Hotz who, a score of
years later, devised the instrument we know. As early as 1857
M.Hohner of Trossingen in Germany developed the instrument
commercially in collaboration with Hotz, and was soon exporting
it. The instrument was reputedly even played in North America
during the last years of the Civil War, but it was the massive
migration of Germans to the United States in the late nieteenth
century that made the ‘harmonica’ widely known
and available. Many Germans settled in Texas, and doubtless
this contributed to the popularity of the instrument which,
somewhat incongruously, was frequently known as the “French
harp”.
Unlike other instruments, the harmonica
could be easily pocketed, was cheap, and could be played anywhere.
Even the fiddle and guitar players were encumbered to some
extent by their instruments when they were on the move, while
pianists had to seek a venue with a keyboard instrument before
they could play. But any field hand could have a ‘mouth-harp’
as it was termed, to play when a break in work allowed. He
could play in his cabin, for his own amusement, for friends
at spontaneous dances, and sometimes for the white folks.
It was ideal for the youngster who grew up on a farm - as
was the case with most of the performers on this collection.
John T. Samples, for instance, who was born near Kilgore on
January 10th, 1898. “I grew up on a farm. My daddy raised
cows, horses, hogs, chickens, cotton and corn”, he recalled.
His family roots went far back in time: “Both of my
grandmothers were born in slavery time. My mother’s
mother was a slave .... My daddy’s mother told me about
slavery, how they used to sell them for about fifteen hundred
dollar on up and how they had to pick cotton and chop cotton
from sun up to sun down.”
John Samples was still a child when he was
first attracted to music “I’ve been playing the
guitar ever since I was five years old. My daddy bought me
a a guitar when he saw I was going to play. A cousin of mine,
Nora Day, taught me some notes on the guitar but mostly I
taught myself. And not only that: “I play guitar, piano,
and French harp. My daddy was the best French harp player
in the country round here. I never heard anybody play just
like my daddy. He used to take a wide-mouth beer glass and
play his harp inside of the glass to give it a different tune.
And I learned it from him.” Essentially a songster,
John Samples played all kinds of music that he heard. “I
played a little blues when I was growing up. I just picked
it up, played wherever I could, and finally learned to play
pretty good.” He worked on his father’s farm until
he was 21, when he married and moved to Sweetwater, Texas,
where he secured a job delivering medicine for a local drugstore.
In 1927 he formed a small string band in Sweetwater, with
a bass violin, a ukelele player and himself on guitar: they
called themselves “Poison, Antidote and Prevention”.
“We had a bad band, I’m telling you. We played
for house parties, for the colored cafes in town, and for
dances on the ranch for white people.” Subsequently,
with the oil boom in Kilgore, he moved back there and farmed
the family land, marrying for a second time. He was widely
reputed for his guitar playing even though he was handicapped
later by arthritis in his fingers. John Samples died in January
1998, three days after his hundredth birthday.
Also from a rural background was Jack Wilson,
who was born in Dallas in April 1916 but was raised in “a
little place out from Piftsburg (Texas), seven miles, Leeburg.”
His father owned 218 acres of land where “we planted
peas and corn, cotton, sweet potatoes, Irish potatoes, cabbage,
collard preens, tomatoes, onions -’ everything that
could be planted on a farm, we planted that. Times were tough
back then, yeah. My daddy raised - we made 200 bales of cotton
a year. We’d pick two bales of cotton, go to the gin
at 4 o’clock, 10 of us, five girls and five boys, we
went to work, we picked cotton .... they’d sing in the
fields”. It was there that he learned to play harmonica;
“I started to playing on my daddy’s knee, when
I was a kid .... My daddy played harmonica and Jew’s
harp. My brother picked Jew’s harp, and my uncle played
the fiddle, and my sister played, and all the rest of my sisters
and brothers sang. We had our own group, the Wilson family.”
After visiting Longview he returned briefly to the family
farm before going back to Longview in 1941 and getting himself
a job “at a used-car lot. Chevrolet place, Goodman Chevrolet.”
Parental influence was clearly important
in shaping the interests of these musicians, though they gathered
their songs from others that they heard locally. Cleveland
Walters was likewise “raised in a farm, all around (us)
little songs like that.” His parents had come from Louisiana
to Texas: “my father came from Crowley, Louisiana, and
my mother was from around Abbeville, Louisiana.” His
father however, played violin. “Well, the reason why
I got hung up on harmonicas is because during Christmastime,
things was rough. You’d either get a little cap pistol
or a little ten-cents harmonica, so I would always take the
harmonica.” Cleveland grew up in a musical environment.
“Our home was big - we had a large house, and mostly
to give dances, country dances, and he’d play for them
and dance. That’s where I learned to dance.” In
the late 1930s he was “raised up on ranches and farming
and listening to old Tex Ritter movies, way back in there,
and Gene Autiy and them movies. We ain’t had nothing
else in those days.”
As “musicianers” of the songster
generation they acquired tunes from a variety of sources.
Items from a fiddler’s repertory seem to have been adopted
by most of them, and there is some evidence that the fiddle
was in part replaced by the harmonica. Such fiddle show-pieces
as “mocking the trains” or imitating the thrills
of the chase, were adopted by the harmonica players who, in
the process of mimicry, developed a greater command of their
instruments and exploited their potential. There are examples
of train imitations in this collection, like Cleveland Walters’
“Crawfish Boogie” or “Slow Train Coming
to Arkansas”, just as there are versions of cowboy songs,
such as “Riding Old Paint” and militant popular
songs like “John Brown’s Body” and “We
Shall Overcome Some Day.” There is even an instrumental
of the old English music-hall song “Pop Goes the Weasel”,
though how it got into circulation in East Texas remains a
mystery.
Members of the Walters family did not play
blues. “Not mostly, used to call it ‘la-la’,
and then Clifton Chenier learned it. He went into zydeco,
but it used to be just la-la dances, and mostly, just little
French songs and stuff like that.” Blues it appears,
was not a major influence on these country harp players, and
parental influence or their involvement in family string bands
was much more significant. Most of them played one or two
blues standards, like John T. Samples’ version of “Nobody’s
Bizness” with his own guitar accompaniment, and John
Wilson’s “Sittin’ on Top of the World”.
It is noticeable that they did not employ the “crossed
harp” blues technique in which, for instance, the key
of E is played on a A harmonica. Here, the veteran instrumentalists
played “straight”, using for example, a G harmonica
on which to play in the key of G. As Jack Wilson explained,
“you play better in G and perform better, yeah. Well,
I can play A, but G’s better for me.” Robert Berry
on the other hand, preferred to play in B on a B harmonica,
though he did own an E instrument on which he played “The
More We Work Together, How Happy We’ll Be.” Careful
listening to the instrumental techniques used on the harmonica
indicate that some are played in a manner suited to an accompaniment
to a solo vocal, or to a vocal group, and even, in one or
two cases where the notes played are separated and distinct,
perhaps to accompany speech.
This brings us to what is the most unexpected
aspect of this regional tradition. Among his many songs John
T. Samples included a number of religious ones. “I had
heard my grandmother sing. Oh, she’d sing different
songs, old songs back there. ‘Nearer My God to Thee’,
songs like that. ‘Glory Hallelujah.” he remembered.
“I play church songs; ‘Down at the Cross’,
‘Jesus Keep Me Rear the Cross’, ‘Jesus Is
On The Main Line’, ‘Tell Him What You Want’,
‘Someone Cares.’ I’m a member of the Mount
Pleasant C.V.E. Church and I sing there”. And in all
probability he played harmonica there, too, as did many of
his fellow players. To many who are accustomed to the piano
as accompaniment in church songs, the use of the harmonica
may seem unconventional, even inappropriate. In black communities
the harmonica has been known for at least a century as the
‘mouth-harp” and, it seems possible that as the
stringed harp may not have been known to a great many congregations,
the injunction “Little David, play on your harp”,
may have made the instrument welcome in church services and
functions. Certainly, the church played an important part
in the lives of many of these Texas musicians. Robert Berry,
who was born in Dallas in 1934 and raised in Tyler, served
in the U.S.Navy. He joined in 1952 and served for four years
including the Korean war, during which he was stationed on
board ship. “At that time, most of them boys got killed,
you know, and all like that during that time. It’s kinda
touching”, he recalled. He returned to Texas where his
father had farmed, and grew “cotton, corn and cane and
switches to whip me with.” His turbulent background
led to a major change in his life, when he felt himself called
upon to preach. “Well, how I become a preacher, that
was the Lord’s doing. He got tired of me getting my
head whupped, and whupping heads, so he decided that he’d
do something better with me. That happened in ‘60; well
the last part of ‘59. It really matured in ‘60.”
Nearly twenty years later, in 1979, he decided to build his
own church, literally constructing it with his own hands.
“Me and my son Robert Junior. I had to take the advantage,
that’s the onliest boy I had.”
As devoted to the church was Virginia Peeples,
who played piano and harmonica. She sang with a warm and undemonstrative
voice such a classic as ‘I’ve Got a Home in Heaven’
to her own gospel piano accompaniment, and the fine spiritual
‘Beulah Land’, which she followed with an instrumental
version on the harmonica. Born Virgie Patterson in a small
town called Gilmer in 1921, she was the eldest of seven children.
Her grandfather was a Choctaw Indian from an Oklahoma reservation,
who taught her father how to play the harmonica, and he in
turn passed it on to Virginia. She moved from home to do domestic
work and near Grand Prairie she met a piano paying soldier,
Luther Peoples, whom she married. Moving to Dallas they had
five children all of whom learning to play an instrument.
Singing together they sang in many churches as ‘The
Peoples Singers’. Their mother had first joined the
Greater El Bethel Baptist Church in Dallas: “Then I
got saved and started to go to the Lighthouse Church of God
in Christ. I’ve been there ever since” she declared.
Virginia played both harmonica and piano and composed gospel
songs. Completing her duties as a “church mother”
she became celebrated for singing and playing at public functions.
“Can you believe I’m 81 years old with no walking
cane, can see good, and get along where ever I’m trying
to go? Ain’t nothin’ but God..” she declared,
still playing in 2002.
In some cases, the church provided virtually
the only context in which the harmonica was played by these
instrumentalists. Jack Wilson, for instance. He was about
eighteen years old in the early 1930s when the Wilson Family
group was active, playing and singing mainly for the churches
and only rarely for dances. He continued to play in later
life, but solely for the churches. As he explained, “I’ve
been to every Baptist church in Longview, and been in some
of the white churches, been to Bethel. Been to Mount Gilead
- played at Mount Gilead yesterday evening. Been to Post Oak,
played at St. Mark, played at Red Oak. I’ve played at
every one in Longview. Every week, I get an invitation to
come play somewhere. And I play at Big Sandy Methodist Church
up there in Big Sandy, Texas. I play up there sometimes and
I play at the Creatins church down there.” Jack Wilson
was wholly committed to playing in the churches. “I
like what I’m doing. I love it. I love from right here,
in my heart. And I put all I got in it, when I go to play
my harmonica and sing, I put all I got in it, and I play sometimes,
I get happy.” He explained that he would “go as
a guest and I perform. I played at three churches yesterday
and played at four with mine last night, played my church
last night” (St. Mark Methodist Church, Longview). “I
played ‘Oh, I Want to See Him, Look Upon His face. And
I played ‘Have a Little Talk with Jesus’. I played
two at every church I went to yesterday, played a couple of
numbers. They just listen. They just listen to me.”
Still active at 79 he attributed his vigor to “the good
Lord. He keeps me going, he gives me energy. I get up, I feel
good, I sing a lot. And I like what I’m doing. I’m
proud of myself.” Like Jack, the other instrumentalists
in this collection had every reason to be proud of themselves
and of their playing. Their performances give us an indication
of how early black harmonica playing developed, offers us
a unique insight on its role in African American churches.
Paul Oliver
Oxford, England
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