The Beautiful Music All Around Us: Field Recordings and the American Experience

Chapter 11: Charlie Butler: Call Me to Home

[ 297 ] 11 Charlie Butler Call Me to Home P aul Oliver’s massive 1997 Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World surveys an estimated 800 million dwellings. Their occupants include nomads, urban dwellers, pastoralists, and peasants, living under pointed thatch in Indonesia, makeshift huts in the Scottish outlands, and wooden farmhouses across Pennsylvania’s countryside . They have constructed with palm date grasses in North Africa and sun-dried brick in Pakistan, finished shelters with mud plaster and ceramic tile, created hygiene systems that range from sweatlodges to bathhouses, channeled ventilation through courtyards or sometimes wind catchers, and funneled water via cisterns and wheels. “All forms of vernacular architecture,” Oliver observes, “are built to meet specific needs, accommodating the values, economies and ways of living of the cultures that produce them.”1 Oliver, an Oxford professor in architecture, is also a pioneering chronicler of the African American blues. Since 1952, he has written nearly a dozen books and hundreds of articles on the blues, exploring this vernacular genre as he has the other: by situating the music and its practitioners within their cultural settings.2 While his interests have centered on commercially released blues recordings, his knowledge extends to the Library of Congress field trips of the 1930s and 1940s. So it came as no surprise in early 1998 when I [ 298 ] sent him a copy of the Treasury that Paul Oliver was already familiar with “Diamond Joe” and its singer, Charlie Butler, just as he knew many of the CD’s other selections. Oliver wrote back a most encouraging note. He saw this book, then embryonic , as a way of learning about the artists included on the Treasury. Unlike a number of their counterparts in the blues, only a few of these performers had been extensively researched. Largely home musicians and lacking much renown beyond their families and communities, their anonymity paralleled so many of the vernacular builders whose work Oliver included in his Encyclopedia . If individually unknown to historians—despite their voices etched onto discs and their names entered in card catalogs—their songs represent collective products as well as personal achievements. Just as a dwelling can disclose the slope of a site, the demands of a climate, the resources available to its makers, the components of its construction, and the needs of its occupants , folksong bears a like set of traits. The words Oliver used to describe vernacular architecture, with its basis in local values, economies, and ways of living, apply here, too, as individuals craft the cultural vessels of song with the tools of their traditions and the capacities of their talents. Charlie Butler, convict number 10636, recorded “Diamond Joe” at the Mississippi State Penitentiary at Parchman, Mississippi, in the spring of 1937. Two years later, he sang it again into John Lomax’s disc machine. At the time, he left only the barest account of how he learned “Diamond Joe,” and none at all concerning how he came to sing. Vanished, too, are most details about his life. Though he appears in the 1920 state census that positively identifies him and his wife, later searches have proven less conclusive. For one thing, he took aliases. For another, he could not write, leaving only an “X” on the signature line of his commitment papers. This elusiveness reaches back to the Library’s files: a January 1943 letter from the Folk Archive seeking his permission to issue “Diamond Joe” was returned unopened. He had been pardoned six months earlier. The prison’s mailman wrote prophetic words on the envelope: “Gone free left no address.” Whatever course his life took from that point on, let alone so much of what came before his captivity in this hard place, I cannot say. Here at Parchman, where Charlie Butler sang “Diamond Joe” across its flat, rutted landscape whose turnrows he once walked, he left behind a work of art that speaks to a process of creation—a process, as Paul Oliver reminds us in the Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture, that goes on the world over. chapter 11 [ 299 ] On March 8, 1937, the day he recorded “Diamond Joe,” Charlie Butler, age forty, had nearly completed his first year of imprisonment for attempted murder. Apprehended after escaping from the county penal farm in Tunica, he was now serving a ten-year sentence, his second term, at the state penitentiary. He had been there before, imprisoned in 1918, under another name...