Texas Blues: The Rise of a Contemporary Sound

EAST TEXAS

E A ST T E X A S 27 EAST TEXAS “plowing in the cut-over land,” near marshall, texas, 1939. photograph by russell lee. courtesy library of congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 east texas.indd 27 7/8/08 10:27:42 AM osceola mays December 13, 1909–April 20, 2004; interview, 1981 “family with supplies in a wagon, ready to leave for the farm,” san augustine, 1939. photograph by russell lee. courtesy library of congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Osceola Mays was born Nell Douglas in Waskom, Texas, east of Marshall. She adopted the name Osceola after an American Indian visited her family home and she asked to be named for him. Her parents were sharecropper farmers, like many other African Americans in East Texas, who eked out a living cultivating and selling cotton. In 1936 she married Clarence Mays, who was also a sharecropper, but when the crops failed in 1945, the family moved to Dallas. Clarence took a job in a drycleaning business, and Osceola worked as a nanny and domestic. Over the years, she preserved the oral traditions of her childhood, singing a cappella spirituals and reciting poems that she composed, in addition to recalling those that her grandmother, Laura Walker, and her mother, Azalean Douglas, had taught. Blues was a music Osceola remembered hearing at an early age. “When I was a girl on the farm,” she said, “I could hear them men in the fields, going through the woods singing blues. ‘You never miss your water until your well is gone dry./You never miss your baby till she says good-bye.’” Some of her most vivid memories were of Blind Lemon Jefferson, whose recordings she first heard at the height of his career in the late 1920s. As she was growing up, Osceola’s feelings toward blues were shaped by her mother and by her grandmother , who was ten years old when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed to end slavery. “My grandmother and mother told me, ‘Don’t sing the blues,’ and I never sang any around them. Tradition, I guess, old people thought it was wrong to sing songs that wasn’t allowed in the church. And they call them blues, and you don’t call the church songs blues. Old people in the old days thought theblues was just terrible,terrible, but some truth was in those songs. They said, ‘That’s the devil’s work. Just leave it alone. That’s the devil’s work. I don’t want to hear you sing those songs.’ And I couldn’t sing them. I grew out where I just didn’t. I believed it was the devil’s work.” As she got older, Osceola continued to listen to blues, but also remained active in the Baptist church. “I “people on the main street on saturday morning,” san augustine, 1943. photograph by john vachon. courtesy library of congress. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 28 t e x a s b l u e s 03 east texas.indd 28 7/8/08 10:27:44 AM E A ST T E X A S 29 haven’t stopped listening to the blues,” she said. “I still hear them on these programs on television. Well, some of those blues tell things real true.” In many ways, Osceola’s memories of early blues are representative of the attitudes of three generations of African Americans, who migrated away from the cotton fields of East Texas to the cities of Dallas and Houston. Blues was a music that was born during her grandmother ’s generation and flourished during her own and her mother’s lifetimes on the periphery of African Ameriosceola mays, dallas, 1983. photograph by alan govenar. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 03 east texas.indd 29 7/8/08 10:27:48 AM 30 t e x a s b l u e s can community life. Blues expressed the sorrows and joys of three generations of African Americans in East Texas and demonstrated the enduring strength of the oral tradition. I was fourteen or fifteen when I heard those blues records, heard them on my cousin’s record player. Ben William had one. They played them and I’d hear them. Blind Lemon Jefferson, Bessie Smith. She was a woman ’s blues singer. She sang “Back water risin,’ comin’ in my windows and doors, and my house fell down, I can’t live there no more.” I loved to hear Blind Lemon Jefferson. One song he sang I...