The original soul man

When Elijah Wald first mentioned Josh White to his parents, their memories clashed. His father recalled an earthy laborer, sweating soulfully; his mother, a sleek entertainer who changed his silk shirt twice during a performance. The greatest strength of Wald’s “Josh White: Society Blues” is its recognition that this division was intrinsic to White’s career and that its balance of folk art and show business was singular, inspired and even heroic.

White was a cusp artist who consolidated his style as country blues was winding down and gospel music was revving up. He was born Feb. 11, 1914, in Greenville, S.C., the son of a laundress and a tailor who served as a part-time preacher in a Methodist church. Much of his childhood was ill-starred. His father was beaten so badly by the police that he ended his days in a mental institution, and his mother could barely support White and his six siblings. He went on the road at the age of 8, guiding blind itinerant singer-guitarists, banging the tambourine, witnessing two lynchings, shivering and starving but sending home good money.

But his precocious talent made a way for him. He was handsome and popular, and the beneficiary of a childhood as artistically fruitful as it was otherwise barren. The main reason was his mother’s participation in a sanctified church, one of the small Pentecostal congregations where song and dance comprised most of the service. The harmonic and melodic demands of religious music were far more expansive than blues, and mastering them enabled White to much later “adapt his style to jazz, pop, and European folk melodies.” (A similar education led a classical vocalists like Marian Anderson to progress from spirituals to lieder).

Blue notes came originally out of church moans and slurs, and a gospel singer could apply them whenever, wherever. Blues itself might not even be the best vehicle, but White knew that blue tonality was his ace. In 1950, while allowing that white men could play jazz and blues, he added, “Negro musicians manage to get those in-between tones, that sort of strained intonation, better than any white musician can.” It was the closest he ever came to a racial challenge.

His recording career began at 18. Wald allows that these early blues exhibit a callow facility but insists that the great work lay years ahead. I disagree. From the beginning, White’s style was fully achieved and strikingly new, at least for blues. Greenville was the home of the Dixie Hummingbirds, later to become a world-famous gospel quartet, and White is more properly measured not against Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson but against the Hummingbirds and its lead singer, Ira Tucker, or the group’s bass singer in 1939, Claude Jeter, who later cultivated a slinky falsetto that would be shamelessly echoed by Al Green. Within a few measures of his first record, “Black and Evil Blues,” White leaps into falsetto. A few takes later, his voice drops an octave into a growling bass, part Louis Armstrong, part storefront preacher. Within the first session, he covers almost three octaves. His first instrument had been the tambourine, and he clearly loved percussive, rapid-fire syllables, occasionally singing such lines a cappella because his fingers weren’t quick enough.

In 1927, Blind Willie Johnson had recorded the first gospel blues (a minor-key version of the 16-bar form), “Motherless Children,” in which his guitar, standing in for the congregation, frequently completed his thoughts in sustained non-vocalized moans. Similarly, White’s use of “passing chords” to bind the melodic units derived from melisma, the extravagantly configured runs of a lined-out hymn. Having learned from quartets to sing different vocal parts, White played his guitar high and low, indeed several keys lower than Blind Willie, as if voice and guitar obeyed the same impulse. He seldom belted, preferring a dry, laconic style (not the obvious choice of a young virtuoso) and his reading of songs like “Things About Coming My Way” exhibited an introspective authority that could not be faked unless he was a better actor at 18 than he would be in his 50s.

Perhaps better than his blues, which he recorded under the names Joshua White and Pinewood Tom, were the gospel recordings attributed to “Joshua White (The Singing Christian).” In his early masterpiece, “There’s a Man Goin’ Around Taking Names,” a song he recorded many times but never with the same intensity as the first version, an ad lib spirit allows him all kinds of sanctified freedom (“lord, lord, lord, takin’ names”) and a blood-curdling conclusion (“he’s writing left and right, among the colored and the white”).

Pace Wald, the young White was a trailblazer in blues and gospel: His “In the Evening” anticipated Robert Johnson’s phrasing by two years, and in August 1935, he became only the third artist to record one of the new songs known as “gospel,” composed by the man who named the genre, Thomas A. Dorsey. In “How About You,” White sings out as if in church, his guitar deliriously breaking time, grabbed by the Holy Ghost.

Most remarkable about White’s early records is their juxtaposition of secular, sacred and (latently) political. On one session, supported by Walter Roland’s churchily florid piano, he veered from “Sissy Man Blues” and “Homeless and Hungry Blues” to biblically derived gospel songs, all of them brilliant performances. Another recording, “Prodigal Son,” a deathbed confession to a brokenhearted mother, was released under Pinewood Tom’s name but would have wrecked any church with its terrifying vision of the wages of sin. In later years, White’s repertory would encompass more sophisticated lyrics but none richer in thematic terms.

By the mid-1930s, he had moved to New York, where, at 19, he married Carol Carr, an unglamorous, practical woman, the well-chosen wife of a sensationally handsome man, cocksure and gregarious to a fault. A crippling hand injury nearly ended his career, and he spent the next years doing manual labor to support Carol and their kids. But by 1939, through a series of fortuitous connections well traced by Wald, he had entered a whole new world, that of folk music. Though his chops had been compromised (his high notes shot along with his speedy arpeggios), he adopted a style that retained his best qualities: When he sang “Strange Fruit,” his version was far more churchy than Billie Holiday’s, stressing words like “blood” in a way that interrupted the legato flow to great expressive purpose and adding moaned vocals that duplicated his passing chords. He was also singing lyrics that were defiantly political.

White was embraced by the musical left, black and white. Black progressives had argued throughout the 1930s about the political implications of folklore. Richard Wright declared that blues were the new spirituals, their visionary leaps more than compensating for the forays into violence and mindless sex (similar apologies have been mounted for rap). As White replaced his more evangelical spirituals with freedom songs, he sounded like a working-class radical, a figure black progressives had despaired of finding. The white left was even more gratified to claim White. He may have briefly joined the Communist Party, perhaps because its civil rights positions were unimpeachable, at least before World War II, when the party opposed labor strikes and civil rights protests as diversions from the effort to defeat Hitler and save Stalin.

On the strength of albums produced by John Hammond, he made new fans in the Roosevelts. Two years after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Anderson perform in Constitution Hall, an act that prompted a mass protest led by Eleanor Roosevelt, FDR’s 1941 inaugural gala, held at Constitution Hall, would include White and the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet, along with Charlie Chaplin, Ethel Barrymore and Mickey Rooney, and the Daughters didn’t say a mumbling word.

But despite his new public, the former star of “race records” -- the term used at the time for rhythm and blues -- had lost his own. He griped that black bobby-soxers only wanted to hear double-entendre blues like “Jelly Jelly” and lacked the patience for deeper, more political anthems. But you can’t blame them. In 1940 White’s vocal support had come from quartets such as the Golden Gates and the Carolinians (whose tenor, Bayard Rustin, would undergo a political journey more amazing even than White’s, rising to his creation of the 1963 March on Washington, after which he would be hounded out of the movement because of his sexual nature, and die, the rare black -- and probably the only openly gay man -- to be lamented in Commentary).

With the Carolinians, White had romped through “King Jesus Knows That I’m Coming,” a rearrangement of a song Mahalia Jackson had recorded three years earlier. But by 1944, his vocal accompaniment came from the dreary Almanac Singers in a lumbering Popular Front rewrite of the spiritual “Hold On,” which offered Godspeed to FDR, Churchill, Chiang Kai-Shek and Stalin (what a quartet -- and who sang lead?). How could such music inspire black audiences when they could fly with the Dixie Hummingbirds?

Moreover, “Jelly Jelly” was his signature. For, as Wald stresses, White was a surpassingly sexual performer. Traces of his multi-octave range now informed a variety of liquid gobbles and ecstatic squeaks that left nothing to a woman’s imagination. As he had introduced blue notes to polite society, he now became the first soul man, a muscular athlete, supremely comfortable in his gleaming skin. No black man had displayed himself so confidently before a white audience (the light-skinned, wavy-haired Cab Calloway represented something more stylized and frenetic). Josh White Jr., a star in his own right, marvels at his father’s audacity: “It’s lucky he didn’t get killed for it.” You get a sense of White’s magnetism from a video, “Free and Equal Blues” (available from Vestapol), which includes performances made almost 20 years after his prime. As women always noted, when he tunes his guitar, he’s actually flexing his muscles. His carriage is, at once, dignified and tantalizing. During “Jelly, Jelly,” his shoulders rock sinuously while he strokes and pounds his guitar, more love object than musical tool. At 48, he makes rockers such as Elvis and Mick Jagger seem gauche and unseasoned.

White’s persona seduced his listeners, female and male alike. He despised anything that smacked of the stereotype: In 1939, he deplored the use of “nigger” in Broadway lyrics. In 1951, he demanded the excision of black-face Al Jolson routines in a London musical. All showman, he reckoned himself an “actor,” not a “clown,” his brutally dismissive term for older artists such as Leadbelly. It signifies that his pupils included women like the singers Libby Holman and Eartha Kitt (both may have been his lovers; the army was very large). He showed them how to flirt and not pander, and they showed him that one could be provocative and enigmatic, tease and give nothing away.

The 1940s were White’s glory days. He had a near-pop hit, “One Meat Ball,” packed the best clubs and appeared in a movie with Randolph Scott. He popularized what he considered the anti-”Strange Fruit,” “The House I Live In,” an inspirational anthem that he sang without any blue notes, as if to extend its democratic embrace. (Frank Sinatra was equally known for the song; comparing the two versions reveals Sinatra to be more formal and derivatively bel canto: White’s later version of “One for My Baby” also benefits by comparison.)

But the good times ended with the McCarthy era. In an attempt to win the support of the publication Red Channels and thereby escape its black list that might -- and would eventually -- stymie his career, he met with right-wing journalists and even volunteered to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s House Un-American Activities Committee. He named no names, distancing himself only from Paul Robeson’s putative declaration that no Negro would fight against the Soviet Union (Robeson had in fact been misquoted). Instead he deplored communism itself while asserting that whatever elements he admired in the movement dovetailed exactly with “Christianity,” boasting that he had raised his children to be devout patriots. He was proud that so few Negroes had joined the party, thereby displaying their “common sense,” and told Negro Digest that the Reds had played him for a chump. Naturally White’s old lefty friends were appalled. But when Pete Seeger composed an angry letter, his fellow Weavers proved less judgmental. They understood that White was terrified of jeopardizing the security of his wife and children and that the government might have blackmailed him with revealing photographs.

But Jackie Washington, a folk singer greatly inspired by White, offers the most convincing, if disheartening, analysis. White simply didn’t have a dog in the hunt. He hadn’t been a committed radical, and, finally, he was a black man trying to get over, “taking care of business.” If the lefties could say they made him by supplying his first white audience, he could reply that he gave them authenticity and proved that they were more than bourgeois academics.

From cynosure to pariah, White became a despised figure in vanguard circles. Though his career survived, particularly in Europe, American folkies increasingly saw him as a burned-out case. They had loved him singing protest songs, but they blasted his more recent performances of English and Irish ballads. Yet these performances were very fine. In “Molly Malone,” he characteristically emphasized the word “crying” and with each reading supplied more inspired blue notes. He took “Barbara Allen” and, with bluesy glissandi, immediately split the difference between Childe Ballad and Grand Ole Opry. Two highlights of the 1960s video are “Danny Boy,” exactly the kind of ditty that his family would have sung around the piano, and “You’d Be So Nice to Come Home To,” wherein he moans whole phrases, perhaps because he has forgotten the words and, as the spiritual advises, was looking to the hills.

The contemporaries he now considered rivals were Harry Belafonte, who had capitalized on his most commercial traits; and Ray Charles, whom he would mimic in the car and, supposedly, out-holler. Why not? Both Charles and White had uncovered the soulful elements in country music.

With suave tact, Wald considers some very intimate matters. We learn that White was a father engaged enough to comfort one daughter during her first period and to introduce his son to a sexual partner when the boy was 11. The children led middle-class lives, attended private school, never heard him speak ungrammatically and were stunned by the colloquial slang of his first records. Wald also interviewed two of White’s lovers, one of whom reveals that he occasionally sold his favors to rich women. Nor did she blame him: He had a family to support. Most amazing are the interviews with his wife. She knew everything and accepted it, having decided that, in this case, she had to be the greater lover, confident that he would always return home.

To the last, White remained a trouper. In his last popular incarnation, he became the college boy’s Johnny Mathis with recordings of love songs that provided all the soundtrack a folkie needed. He played smaller clubs to sparser crowds, traveled circuits in the South that were still largely segregated, was obliged to hock his guitar more than once, was shamed to see his wife go out and get a job. Judging by a photo of his mother, psoriasis ran in the family, and he was tormented by the ailment in, of all places, his fingers. He suffered from ulcers and heart problems, drank and smoked too much, worried always about his position as both a black man and an artist who was dismissed by ignorant latecomers, in Wald’s fine phrase, after having “nurtured the aesthetic that now condemned him.”

He died at 55 in 1969, a victim of “all this hard traveling.” Wald lets Carol White have the last words. Despite the infidelities, which extended to feeble attempts on his deathbed, White remained her man. After he died, she tried to hold up and be brave, but once she neared the house he had killed himself to buy, “it was over. It was over.” He had wished to be cremated, but she buried him in an open coffin, dressed so that he might be “as handsome in death as he was on the stage.” She never failed him.

The wisest remark about popular culture comes from Marcel Proust. He wrote, “The people always have the same messengers”: their songwriters. “And a book of old songs should move us like a town or a tomb.” It’s so, whether the song is “Lili Marlene” or “Molly Malone,” “Yesterday” or “Tomorrow,” “Beer Barrel Polka” or “Get Ur Freak On.” A book about popular music should evoke that spirit. Wald’s book does that and more while reminding us of the naysayers who would still give White a hard time. Rock is anything but pure, yet in their most triumphal moments, rock critics remain as convinced of their ability to detect inauthenticity as the folkies who turned White into an invisible man: the credo having survived the aesthetic and the politics.

Meanwhile the interplay of hot sex and hot gospel remains as potent as in the days of Pinewood Tom a.k.a. the Singing Christian. Witness Destiny’s Child’s inclusion on the same album as “Bootylicious” the hymn “Jesus Loves Me.” Oh, Josh, you should be alive today.