Dark was the night, cold was the ground. When Blind Willie Johnson turned up in Atlanta, McTell almost immediately hooked up with him. Johnson was a slide-guitar player of great technical proficiency, and he was also a Baptist minister, and between them they covered the field, both the secular and the washed in the blood.
Riley Puckett was there. He was a white guitarist (blind too, of course, and also working the streetcorners) who within a couple of years would play lead guitar with the Skillet Lickers, his innovative picking and odd bass runs helping the Skillet Lickers to sell a lot of records and making this white string band the Rolling Stones of their day. (Bootleggers rejoiced and laid on an extra shift when the Skillet Lickers came to Atlanta to record.)
A lot of things will remain mysterious about Blind Willie McTell, and not the least of them is whether or not he ever played with Puckett. But the odds are that they met. Some of the Skillet Lickers’ recordings, like Georgia Rag and Razor Ball, have the ragtimey feel of McTell songs, and there was at this time an enormous amount of cross-pollination going on in music. You are what you hear, perhaps. McTell’s own music is more Piedmont than Mississippi Delta blues. His voice is higher and more nasal than the conventional blues singer’s voice, and the music is more accessible than, say, Son House or Charley Patton. (Having recorded McTell, the archivist John Lomax initially declined to release the sessions. He had recorded McKinley Morganfield and Son House, and being more familiar with the traditional country blues sound, he complained that McTell did not sound enough like a blues singer.)
Of course, if you’re playing for an audience and you expect to get paid, the idea is to play something the audience wants to hear. A background of performing in carnivals and tent shows and the picnics that at the time were part of the African-American social scene had given McTell’s repertoire a broader sweep than most Bluesmen. Listening to his catalogue, you hear music that ranges from traditional twelve-bar blues to ragtime to sly, ribald songs that must have made him the life of the party, to songs that existed for no other reason than to allow him to do some virtuoso guitar-picking, and that hat must have come back heavy then. The conclusion that he knew what he was doing is incontestable.
McTell and Blind Willie Johnson traveled what was known as the Georgia circuit: Atlanta and Augusta, Savannah and Macon. Had they wandered south and stumbled across the fabled crossroads where a decade later Robert Johnson would deal with Satan, McTell might have bargained for his vision: He had been blind all his life and he could already play the guitar.
Still, he was luckier than most. He’d learned at the blind school in Macon not only to read words but to read music by feeling out the shape of the notes with his fingertips, in a time when even most sighted musicians learned and performed by ear. And he could take care of himself. He’d been a hard worker since his early teens, working with carnivals and traveling medicine shows and minstrel shows.
He was born in Thomson, Georgia, either in 1898 or 1901, depending on which source you want to believe. By the time the McTells (or McTears: there’s another story that someone on the father’s side of the family had changed the name from McTell because of trouble with whiskey stills and government revenuers) had moved to Statesboro, Willie had been shown the rudiments of guitar playing by his mother, and he gathered more skill from neighbors and visiting pickers and whomever he met, soaking it all up. Already he was writing songs in his head and changing other tunes to his liking and already he was developing an affinity for wandering, a habit that would stay with him all his days.
By the time he arrived in Atlanta, he’d also taken up the twelve-string guitar. He’d learned on the six-string, but had seen that for his purposes the twelve was infinitely better. With its complementary strings tuned an octave higher than the regular strings, not only was there more volume, but whether fingerpicking or using a bottleneck, the higher strings enriched the melody and elaborated on it. It also set him apart from other street musicians.
All these street pickers were living too close to the ground to know that they were part of the dawning of the richest, most complex period of American music. This period began around 1926 and would last only until the beginning of the Depression, and it would not come again.
Though McTell couldn’t have known it, by 1926 the record business was turning toward him. The sales of phonograph records had grown exponentially, and things were to a point where there was a lot of money to be made. To the surprise of executives in New York, people in the rural South bought a lot of music. A record by a fiddle player named John Carson sold faster than Atlanta record stores could restock it. This was the sort of news that got noticed in New York. People so poor they sometimes had to choose between a phonograph record or a new pair of shoes were opting for the music, choosing the magic over the practical, the mystery and wonder of their lives encoded into spiraling grooves of shellac.
McTell sings in Let Me Play with Yo’ Yo-Yo:
I’ll take all my money
put up against the wall
I’ll take what sticks
and you can have what fall.
Record-company owners were doing essentially this very thing. They were in the process of figuring out what sold best; they had not yet learned how to homogenize and move it toward a one-size-fits-all center, so they were throwing everything at the wall.
A lot of weird music was sticking; like Frank Hutchison’s bizarre take on the sinking of the Titanic, with do-si-do square dances being held on the lower decks and the captain inquiring, How’s your machinery? Or Dick Justice’s Cocaine, its imagery and cast of characters, furniture repo men, whipped babies, and women in alleys, the narrator simply wild about his good cocaine making a sort of jagged, surreal poetry that would soon vanish from popular music and not come around again until Bob Dylan surfaced in the early 60’s. The Okeh label was recording Dock Boggs, a Virginia coal miner whose dark music and eerie hollow banjo sounded like what you’d hear if you leaned your head against the door to hell to eavesdrop.
These three performers had in common not only that they were white, but the fact that they didn’t much sound like it. All three were steeped in the blues, a variant of it that would come to be thought of as white or mountain blues. The record companies were also recording a Texan named Blind Lemon Jefferson and a street singer named Blind Blake, and in 1927 Victor got around to Blind Willie McTell.
For a blind man, McTell possessed an amazing degree of self-sufficiency. He figured out the intricacies of the New York subway system and got wherever he needed to be.
He recorded again in 1928, this time for Columbia, and these two sessions produced classic songs like “Broke Down Engine” and “Mama, Tain’t Long Fo’ Day” and “Statesboro Blues” that would roll down the years and resonate with musicians like the Allman Brothers and the White Stripes long after McTell was gone.
His song Delia, a stoic, dark-humored account (took Delia to the graveyard, never brought her back) of a woman murdered by her lover (say you love them rounders, and don’t love me), reads like an O’Connor story or E.A. Robinson poem. Dylan covered it in the early 90s. Johnny Cash rewrote it as Delia’s Gone, but he kept the son’s air of detached, matter-of-fact violence.
Almost before it had begun, the boom was over. Something had fallen on Wall Street, folks said. Whatever had fallen, its echoes rippled on and on. The record business was hit hard, nowhere harder than in the rural South, sharecropper or millhand, black or white. First Reconstruction and now this Wall Street debacle. A choice between a new record and a little flour and lard is not really a choice.