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178 Jerry’s Saloon Blues  Field Recordings from Louisiana —Paul Oliver Oscar “Buddy” Woods figures prominently in this article drawn mostly from the recordings, field notes, and letters of John Lomax and Ruby Terril Lomax in Shreveport in . Author Paul Oliver describes the adept slide guitar playing of Woods, a style of playing with the instrument flat on the lap shared at times by Lead Belly, among other local musicians.“Jerry’s Saloon Blues,” which initially appeared as the liner notes for Flyright Album  (), focuses on this  encounter with Woods, two other local black musicians named Kid West and Joe Harris, as well as members of Lead Belly’s extended family. As Oliver describes, West and Harris demonstrated their lively and varied repertoire for Lomax, who recorded older ballad and country dance material like “Railroad Rag,”“Bully of the Town,” and “Old Hen Cackled and Rooster Laid an Egg.” Blues material, like that favored by Buddy Woods, is there, too, but drew Lomax’s interest less than the older songster repertoire. Oliver himself took a trip to Shreveport two decades after Lomax, in . There he tracked down pianist “Snooks” Jones, who played with the musicians Lomax had recorded. By that year, Buddy Woods, Kid West, and Joe Harris had died or simply faded into obscurity. Shreveport, Louisiana, lies in the “Tri-state” region where Louisiana, Texas, and Arkansas meet. It’s the capitol of Caddo Parish, the most northwesterly parish in the state and one which has along its western border the mounds that marked the boundary between the United States and the Republic of Texas. Like the parish, Shreveport has a large non-white population, a third of its people being JERRY’S SALOON BLUES:  FIELD RECORDINGS 179 black or Indian in origin, and the booming, hustling city has always attracted blacks from the Tri-State region who have sought to get some spinoff from its continually expanding economy. Growth is a characteristic of Shreveport. It was the clearing of the Red River by Captain Henry Shreve in the mid-s that made the town possible, and it was incorporated in  with a name that honored his Shreve Town Company that laid out the site. It flourished with the trade that its situation on the Texas-bound route encouraged and by the cotton produced on the big plantations along the Red River. They depended on slave labor before the War between the States. Not only was the city on the Confederate side; it was the last bastion of the Confederacy even though it was never devastated by the war. All this has a bearing on its culture and, incidentally, on the music of its black population. For there was money in Shreveport and when the railroad link with Dallas was established, soon after the war, it continued to thrive even as the river traffic died. Relatively speaking, blacks in Shreveport were well off, sharing a little in the general prosperity and circulating their cash in the bars, saloons, and red-light districts of the city. In  there were still only eight thousand people in Shreveport; nevertheless, this number had doubled by the time Huddie Ledbetter, the celebrated Leadbelly, made his first visit to the brothels of Fannin Street at the turn of the century. Still a small town, even if, to the young rebel in knee-pants from Mooringsport and the Caddo Lake region, it had the temptations of a big city. It was the oil-strike at Caddo Lake in  which made a boom city of Shreveport. Oil, like cotton, required cheap labor, at least in pre-mechanized years. Blacks were seldom employed at the rig, but there was still plenty of heavy work and, with the discovery of oil, the expanding economy of the city brought many opportunities for domestic, menial, and semi-skilled work. When the strike seemed to have burned itself out by the end of the twenties, the opening of the East Texas field in  and the Rodessa Field five years later gave the city the boost it needed. The Depression years had been tough for Shreveport as for every other urban district but it recovered quickly and avoided the malaise that affected many Southern cities. But then it had none of the aspects of a Southern city; it was pragmatic, hard-nosed, commercial, unromantic, go-getting. When John Avery Lomax and Ruby Terril Lomax came there in  the population had hit the seventy-five thousand mark and blacks had tipped  percent. If...

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