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  • How Blue Can You Get?"It's Tight Like That" and the Hokum Blues
  • Roberta Freund Schwartz (bio)

Thomas A. Dorsey, the "father of black gospel music," was interviewed numerous times in 1960 and 1970s, when gospel music became a subject of serious inquiry. While he was asked about his sacred works, interviewers frequently also inquired about a rather less devotional number: his influential hit record from 1928, a suggestive little ditty called "It's Tight Like That." The song, which influenced legions of imitations and dozens of cover versions, was the urtext of a new style of blues that reflected the new cultural landscape and urban black culture created by the Great Migration.

The urban blues, most commonly associated with artists like Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, and Elmore James, has received a fair amount of scholarly attention.1 However, comparably little has been devoted to its immediate and influential predecessor, the "city" style, which was forged during the Great Migration and Great Depression and comprised the largest market segment of recorded blues until after World War II.2 Many commentators, beginning in the 1940s, have argued that little of this earlier music is worth serious consideration and represents a degradation of the robust folk blues into "glossy, mechanistic self-parody and tasteless double-entendre" that was redeemed only by a new infusion of "down-home" talent in the late 1940s.3 [End Page 367]

One song, "It's Tight Like That," is often identified as the root cause of this "corruption." A seminal recording of the city style, the song has served as a trope for much that folk and blues scholars dislike about commercial blues recordings, especially the notion that, under pressure from producers and executives, artists were reduced to performing carbon copies of slick, double-entendre blues that harked back more to Tin Pan Alley than to "authentic" blues. Mike Rowe went so far as to quip that the song "might easily have been titled 'It's Trite Like That.'"4 While "It's Tight Like That" does, in fact, represent a new type of popular blues, a musical and contextual analysis of the song reveals that it is a fusion of deeply rooted folk traditions and various styles of African American popular music circulating in Chicago in the late 1920s.

The song originated with a seemingly improbable pair: Dorsey, under the pseudonym Georgia Tom, and a young guitarist, Tampa Red (Hudson Whittaker). Dorsey was by that point a veteran performer; he began his musical career in the 1910s in Atlanta as a barrelhouse pianist, then served for a time as Ma Rainey's bandleader and was a staff pianist, arranger, and vocal coach at Paramount Records. He had also composed several successful popular blues songs but had never cut a record himself.5 Tampa Red, born in Dorsey's native Georgia though raised, as per his "nom de blues," in Florida, was new to the record business; he played house parties and busked on the streets in Chicago for an undetermined number of years after his arrival in Bronzeville, the heart of the city's "Black Belt," sometime after 1920.6

Dorsey recalled that the pair had a "really rewarding association" for several years prior to 1928 but didn't remember exactly when he "got together" with Red; the city's established musicians and newly arrived artists from the South congregated on the Stroll, a thirteen-block-long section of South State Street that served as Bronzeville's entertainment district, and sized each other up: "Well, you know, musicians all hang around these places. Mighta been hangin' around some music store or some place. And you'd get acquainted, and you'd invite 'em over, and you'd kinda have a little session and see how they sound, and see if you can get together in the first place. . . . I think that was about 1926 or 1927."7 Tampa Red told Oscar Hunter of the Illinois Writers' Project in 1940 that upon learning that he needed original material to launch his recording career, he felt fortunate that he "had been workin' with a piano player name [sic] Georgia Tom, who knew somethin' about recording."8

Dorsey...

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