Natural Born Ease Man?: Masculinity, Vagrancy Law, and Furry Lewis’s “Kassie Jones”

Long after the release of his last pre-war recordings Furry Lewis’s creative voice continued to reverberate through American music, inspired and inspiring, humorous, poignant, and often more recognized for his influence on later musicians than for the recordings of his own artistic peak. An image of him, aged and cantankerous, alternately performing and sweeping the streets of Memphis, has blurred indistinctly into a caricatured vision of a whole period of black life, labor, and artistic expression. As Lewis’s recordings worked their way into white circles—appearing on Harry Smith’s iconic 1952 Anthology of American Folk Music, influencing rock musicians like Keith Richards, and becoming the coveted prizes of record collectors—listeners increasingly romanticized his music through an aesthetic which, George Lipsitz has argued, privileged “individual emotions over collective conditions” (120). For these new audiences, the value of blues and related styles lay in the music’s perceived distance from the economic realities of the marketplace. Thus, seldom has Lewis’s occupation as both sanitation worker and musician informed understandings of his music. Yet, when Lewis recorded “Kassie Jones”—perhaps his most legendary performance—he gave personal voice to a collective black masculine experience at the hands of the white economy. Bringing an appreciation of what it means to survive by wielding a broom to his manipulation of the guitar, Lewis transformed a traditional folk song into a subtle political expression of black laborers’ struggles to maintain their identities as workers and men.

In 1928, Furry Lewis recorded “Kassie Jones” for the Victor record label. A unique interpretation of the traditional railroad ballad “Casey Jones”—generally recounted by the black fireman who leaped from the train before the wreck—Lewis’s recording re-imagined the narrator as an independent character rather than a conduit for the valorization of white subjectivity. Although “Kassie Jones” did not sell many copies (Cohen, Long Steel Rail 148), it addressed a context in which racism and exploitative vagrancy laws excluded black workers from skilled union jobs and funneled them toward unpaid or poorly paid physical labor. Lewis’s transformation of the voice of the fireman from mere narrator to leading role was both an aesthetic choice and a political one, and afforded him the opportunity to insert an African-American perspective on work, race, and public space into a narrative of heroic and hard-working white manhood. Incorporation of this point of view allowed Lewis to engage in a comparison of two disparate conceptions of work and masculinity in order to critique the ideologies that governed vagrancy law, access to employment, and status as a working male citizen. In effect, “Kassie Jones” offered an alternative vision of masculine gender identity by asserting that illegal work was merely work.

Despite voluminous writings on pre-World-War-II black music, exploration of its use as a medium for black working-class protest has remained persistently underdeveloped. In his excellent study of the history of plantation power in the Mississippi Delta, Clyde Woods described a “blues epistemology,” an oppositional theory of explanation and development which has informed the political goals and class-conscious activism of generations of African Americans (16). Yet, despite insightful studies into the protest power of black music by Jon Michael Spencer, Angela Davis, Adam Gussow, and others, examinations of specific instances of its use to address labor exploitation and workplace injustice remain scarce, a phenomenon which Steven Garabedian has attributed to the willful blindness of decades of self-serving white scholarship.¹ The text of Furry Lewis’s “Kassie Jones” offers not only an example of black working-class music’s ability to challenge hegemonic ideologies of work, but also a vision of the black musician’s transformation of the American folksong itself into a contested site on which to elaborate alternative visions of work and masculinity.

Born in Greenwood, Mississippi around the turn of the century, Walter “Furry” Lewis began performing on the streets and in medicine shows as a child. He traveled widely, but ultimately settled in Memphis, Tennessee where he performed with a wide range of prominent black musicians...