In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

c h a p t e r 1 The Classic Badman and the Ballad While “bad niggers” doubtless prowled the paths of the slave quarters and picked¤ghts in free black taverns in southern cities, the full lineaments of the classic badman were not drawn until after the Civil War, when the slave society was recon ¤gured as a quasi-free one. De facto slavery replaced the “peculiar institution” in the form of Jim Crow, sharecropping, and a carefully controlled labor market that forced black men and women into the worst and lowest-paid jobs. But options opened that had been closed in slavery, options that replaced such sources of slave folk expression as the spiritual, the animal tale, and the stories about the witty trickster-slave High John the Conqueror. Former slaves and their children could migrate north or go west, and did so in increasing numbers. Escape, though dif¤cult for the impoverished freedperson, became accessible in more than dreams, fantasies, and the words and music of the spirituals. Working conditions did resemble those of slavery, but the slyness and cunning of Brer Rabbit and High John, which had provided psychological satisfaction under slave conditions, ceased to be quite as relevant with the disappearance of Ol’ Massa and the growing importance of money and fairness rather than legal bondage. As the black slave community disappeared, the new freedom, even though constrained, saw change in communal structures. Old slave quarters became the homes of laborers who could come and go much as they pleased—restricted, perhaps, by the ubiquitous “paterollers,” but far less so than in slave conditions. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, self-contained black enclaves grew 10 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” up: neighborhoods in small towns and scattered districts in the growing cities of the North and South. The new African Americans sought entertainment with greater freedom in the vice districts of the cities, at crossroads barrelhouses, village honky-tonks, backyard picnics. New artistic forms emerged re¶ecting the new sensibilities that accompanied these changed arrangements, exploring new feelings and new types of people. From an elaboration of old ¤eld hollers and risqu é party songs to nonsense verses, material intended for performance, rather than group participation as the spirituals had been, provided a more individualistic vehicle and a transition from folk to more professional and commercial art. The blues turned attention from Christian soldiers ¤ghting sin and John tricking Ol’ Massa to the inner experience of individual black men and women in laments over an unfaithful mate, rehearsals of the universal pain of loss, and a general sense of melancholy, all leavened with a rich irony and humor. The ballad became one of the vehicles of the folk imagination exploring these new conditions, and the violent badman became the ballad’s central actor. He pumped “rockets” into a gambling adversary who annoyed him, or “blew away” the woman who cheated on him, or gunned down a white sheriff who had broken the rules of engagement in the black quarter. He became a familiar¤gure in the turpentine and logging camps, among the river levee roustabouts, in gambling dens, brothels, pool halls. He represented all that the educated elite and the church-going classes sought to leave behind them. Yet in this period he became emblematic for large segments of the African American community, in both the North and South. THE BADMAN BOASTER Over the forty or ¤fty years in which the ballad badman took shape, from about 1880 to 1930, some thirty separate characters appear in as many prototype songs.1 Some of these prototypes occur in dozens, even scores, of different variants that amateur and professional folklorists have collected and edited over the years.2 Except for one or two women murderers, their protagonists are all men of violence, and the ballads and songs about them recount a particular exploit or set ofqualities that, for one reason or another, had special signi¤cance for composers, singers, and audiences. As song collector John Wesley Work says, “The life and death of notorious characters ¤red the imagination of many song-makers. The individual ¶aunting [sic] the law served to appeal much more to the creators than did those of better social status.”3 The protagonist of these pieces was the imaginative embodiment of the reallife “bully” and “bad nigger,” the id to the more genteel black superego, a man who lived on the margins, who was familiar with violence and death, and who...

Share