When I agreed to review this book, I thought I’d be reviewing a tome on Jimmie Rodgers, “the father of country music.” Instead, I would learn about Jimmy Rogers, also from Mississippi. Jimmy was a Chicago bluesman who pioneered a guitar style that came to embody the Muddy Waters sound, and which made him one of the greatest sidemen of all time. In his solo career, he garnered an international reputation and associated with the likes of Leon Russell and the Rolling Stones. His compositions, “That’s All Right,” “Walkin’ By Myself,” and “Gold-tailed Bird” showed his ability to take previously crafted material and make it his own (3).
Wayne Everett Goins, the book’s author, had been introduced to Chicago blues, and the music of Jimmy Rogers, by his father, and he was delighted to learn that Jimmy’s son was residing near him in Kansas. Thus, the book project was born. Material was gleaned from some seventy-five hours of interviews with Rogers’s family and associates, and from written sources, including blues magazines and newspapers.
The work is divided into three parts, and each part, in turn, consists of cleverly named chapters which take their names from one of his songs, or from salient life events. For example, “Chess Moves” refers to Phil and Leonard Chess, founders of Chess Records and their shrewd, and sometimes ruthless, business practices. The chapter “Headhunters and Wolfmen” is named after bands that included Jimmy Rogers and Howlin’ Wolf respectively, and the competitive club scene.
It seems to me that there are three fundamental tensions or questions that present themselves in the book, and in Jimmy Rogers’s life, and they are interrelated. The first is the tensions between the oral/aural, informal networks and modes of learning, and the sometimes ruthless demands and strictures of the music industry. The second has to do with the shifting audiences for Chicago blues, and the third is the question, “Whose music is it anyway?”
Not surprisingly, Jimmy began to learn his craft, largely orally, through a network of friends. There had been no music in his family, but, in traveling with his grandmother whose husband was a railroad porter, he met any number of friends, who were passionate blues devotees and budding musicians. Among these friends were Snooky Pryor, Moody Jones, and John Lee Hooker. They listened to recordings of Big Bill Broonzy, Roosevelt Sykes, and Memphis Minnie, and his friends, who were older than he were willing to teach him. At age fourteen, he began to master the harmonica, and played in a quartet with three of his friends. At sixteen, he took up the guitar, his first instrument being a diddley bow, a crude wire strung to an outside house wall. He and his friends—including “Little Walter” Jacobs who became a stellar harmonica player and who would become intimately connected with Jimmy and his music—would sneak off to juke joints. Jimmy got his chance to play on stage when the star[s] of the show would go off to the backroom to gamble.
He began to make road trips, and established himself in Chicago, where he found a thriving blues scene, in 1945. His previously formed networks served him well: he renewed his acquaintance with harmonica player “Little Walter” Jacobs, whom he had first met in Mississippi. He met Muddy Waters through Muddy’s cousin, Jesse Jones, whom he had also known previously. Jimmy and Muddy formed a very close bond, both in practical and musical terms. Regarding the latter, Jimmy helped Muddy to upgrade his guitar.
Informal bonds of cooperation were also evident as musicians converged on Maxwell Street to play on Saturdays, from about seven a.m. until dark. A musician might give someone a few dollars to stick an electric cord out of a window for some “juice” (30). Once set up with a crate or a chair, each musician or group would have their own territory which would be respected for three or four hours.
No musician, at this juncture, seemed overly concerned with whose material strictly belonged to whom, but informal networking soon began to be in tension with a more formal music industry structure. Sometimes, union representative tried to interfere with musicians on the street, who were performing outside of union strictures. And, as Jimmy and his colleagues began to perform in clubs or sign with recording companies, constraints and strictures became more apparent. These strictures were especially onerous for Jimmy and his fellow blues musicians in their dealings with Chess Records. For example, Chess would sometimes buy smaller labels such as Parkway, for whom Jimmy had recorded, and then shelve the material. Likewise, the Chess brothers would buy up bars and dictate what could be played on jukeboxes.
The strictures and operations of the music industry also had implications with regard to song ownership. A case in point is the episode of the song “Juke.” “At the time of the song’s conception,” writes Goins, “it was no big deal among musicians to pass a tune around like a community faucet to drink from. Practically any band could have used what eventually became ‘Juke’ to quench their thirst when things got musically dry on the bandstand” (104), and Jimmy and his friends were not overly concerned about copyright infringement, but when Little Walter Jacobs suddenly disappeared, and, without the band’s knowledge formed a new group called the Four Aces, who recorded “Juke”, which became a huge cash cow for Chess Records. And Jimmy, as it were, was “left out in the cold.”
If the recording industry had profound effects on copyright, ownership, and performer obligations and loyalties, it also had a huge effect on shaping the loyalties and tastes of audiences. By dictating what audiences heard in clubs, on jukeboxes, on the air, and on their own personal discs, their tastes were manipulated as well. This was certainly true with regard to the introduction of rock ‘n’ roll in 1955. Chuck Berry’s “Maybeline” issued on Chess records, took the country by storm, and, Jimmy’s slow blues was, for a time, out of fashion.
What gradually happened was a change in the audience for Chicago blues and Jimmy’s music.
Whereas, prior to the introduction of rock ‘n’ roll, Jimmy and his fellow bluesmen
performed primarily to black audiences in urban areas and in the South, now white
enthusiasts were coming to appreciate the genre. Several factors contributed to this
change—among which were the Civil Rights Movement, the Folksong Revival, and the
so-called “British Invasion” with regard to rock music. They began to come to Chicago to
meet, in person, folk whom they had only heard on sound recordings, and to become
proficient as musicians and performers. Then, in 1970, Chess Records released a
compilation album, “Chicago Bound,” which introduced Jimmy and his music to a whole new
generation of white audiences. The recording received glowing reviews from the newly
established
Now comes the question, “Whose music is it anyway? Who has the right to sing or play the blues?” Although Jimmy had had bitter experience with racism, he came to the conclusion that musicianship transcends color. “Color doesn’t mean nothin’,” said Jimmy. “If I was to walk up outside, if you hear a sound comin’ through the wall, you don’t know what color it is. You can’t see it, you just hear it.” (185)
My main problem with the book is that the presentation, at times, could have been tighter. Sometimes, when Goins discusses Rogers’s later life, he refers to interviews in which Rogers recounts incidents from his earlier life or from his childhood, which makes for a meandering presentation. Some passages seem redundant. Furthermore, the book gets bogged down in lugubrious day-by-day accounts of tours, record contracts, and the like, which makes for occasionally tedious reading for all but the most erudite aficionados.
All in all, I would highly recommend this book for those interested in blues and in American popular music.
--------
[Review length: 1527 words • Review posted on March 28, 2019]