Content warning: there’s a graphic description of violence, torture and murder in the grey box below. You can skip it, if that’s not something you feel like reading today.
Josh White’s story arch, as detailed in Elijah Wald’s biography, Josh White: Society Blues, is proof that busking’s proximity to deprivation and adversity is one of the art form’s biggest strengths.
In 1919, Dennis and Lizzie White were a respectable couple. He was a tailor and methodist minister, she was a homemaker, and the two were always formal, even referring to each other as ‘Mr. White’ and ‘Mrs. White’ around the house. They expected visitors to take off their hats off inside, prayed for fifteen minutes before every meal, and Dennis never came to the table without a collar and tie.
It was a dangerous year to be black in Greenville, South Carolina. At the time, the State governor was defending lynching as “the divine right of the Caucasian race”, and fought to make interracial marriage a federal crime.
So, when Dennis threw a white bill collector out of his house by the scruff of his neck—for refusing to take off his hat and spitting tobacco on the floor—the white establishment reacted swiftly and with vengeance. Four officers came and took Dennis to jail, beat the hell out of him and committed him to an insane asylum.
Lizzie was left to care for her seven children alone. She moved the family in with her parents and did laundry, barely managing to make ends meet.
A couple of years later her eight year old, Joshua Daniel White, saw a blind musician with a guitar on his back trying to cross the street, and took him by the arm. The man introduced himself as John Henry “Big Man” Arnold, sang Josh a song by way of thanks, and then asked the young boy if he would like to make a habit out of leading a blind street singer around.
It took two days for Lizzie to consider the offer. This sounded dangerous to her, and there was no mention of school. However, helping the blind was God’s work, and it didn’t hurt that John had offered to pay her $4 a week (roughly $63 today) in return for Josh’s services, more than many farm labourers were making at the time.
Soon the two were setting up on street corners around town. John played his guitar and sang while Josh accompanied on the tambourine, artfully beating it on his head, elbow and knees for effect. It was Josh’s job to ‘hat’ the audience, the verb buskers use to describe the act of asking for tips, usually collected in the busker’s hat. However, John had given Josh a tin cup to use. That way the blind man could count the coins hitting the metal vessel, in order to make sure that Josh wasn’t pocketing any unreported tips for himself.
That winter they travelled south to Florida, starting a life on the road that would eventually take them through the Carolinas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois. But on that very first trip, sleeping by the roadside, they witnessed a brutal scene that Josh would recite many times in later years:
Content warning: a gruesome quote from Josh White about a lynching.
“There were kids and adults. Drinking, a lot of drinking. Cider and white lightning. Then I saw this—there were two figures. They were stripped other than their shirts. Like on tiptoe. I don’t think I could see them dangling, but what I could see and what I can’t get out of my eyes: I saw kids, ten, twelve years old, girls and boys my age, mothers, fathers, aunts, adults. The kids had pokers and they’d get them red hot and jab them into the bodies’ testicles…it was a hell of a thing to see. I came close to screaming but Mr. Arnold could sense, as I was telling him what was happening, when I might scream and he would put his hand over my mouth. It wasn’t torture, it was just mutilation; they must have been dead. The people were laughing….
“We were afraid to leave until they left. It was not quite dawn. They wouldn’t wait till it got light for anyone to see what was happening. They vanished. It was a few miles from Waycross, Georgia. We were going there, but we turned back in the direction from which we came.”
That kind of experience might have put off other people from life on the road, but these two didn’t have many options. It would be more than half a century until the USA would pass legislation preventing discrimination on the basis of disability, and regardless, John didn’t have any other skills other than his guitar. As for Josh, he didn’t have a formal education and nor could his mother afford to pay for one. So, they were stuck with busking—and the world was better for it.
Josh soon got so proficient at his job that soon Blind Man Arnold was leasing him out to other blind bluesmen. Josh claimed to have escorted dozens, including Blind Willie Walker (the greatest guitarist Josh said he’d ever seen), Blind Blake (one of the originators of “finger-style” ragtime on the guitar), and Blind Lemon Jefferson (considered by many to be the most influential folk musician of all time).
All the while, Josh would try to memorise what he saw the musicians play during the day, then sneak away at night to try and repeat what he’d heard on a quietly borrowed guitar. By age fourteen, after six years of life spent on the road, he was a skilled enough guitarist that Blind Joe Taggart (one of the early pioneers of gospel music) invited him to join in on a recording session at Paramount’s Chicago studios. On one song Josh even performed solo, making him the youngest recorded soloist in pre-WWII race music.
Not only was Josh unpaid for this work, but his blind bosses kept him in rags to elicit sympathy from passersby, even in Chicago’s harsh winter climate:
“It was so cold. I’m beating the tambourine, knuckles were twice the size and they would crack and not bleed. The men wouldn’t buy you stockings. I had to wrap my feet in newspapers, [inside] fireman’s boots, hip boots. I couldn’t wear gloves beating the tambourine….
“It was a life that no child should know. Roaming the roads, never certain where I’d sleep, and almost always hungry. I heard plenty of bad talk, too, and at first was too young to understand it. But the music—the songs and the guitar, somehow they made up for everything.”
A Paramount producer, J. Mayo “Ink” Williams, was horrified to discover that that a musician of Josh’s talent was being forced to live in such conditions, and even worse that the teenager had never gotten a real education. So, he helped extricate Josh from his indentured servitude, threatening his blind masters with being reported to the police, if they didn’t release Josh from his bond to them. They relented, and soon the sixteen-year-old Josh was enrolled in the Tilden High School in Chicago.
At this point in the story, Josh’s career is about to take off. But, I want to focus for a little while on what we’ve heard so far, and what it says about the benefits busking provides society. Street performance: was inclusive enough to afford a blind man the ability to survive on his own dime, at a time when people with disabilities were routinely institutionalised in asylums and almshouses; was lucrative enough that he could afford to hire a ‘lead boy’ to take him around, and send money to that boy’s mother; and was nurturing enough that the boy would flourish not just into an avid entertainer, but into arguably the most successful black entertainer of his time.
Okay, back to the story.
As a session musician at Paramount, Josh earned enough to keep sending money home to his mother. At sixteen he also got his first ever new set of clothes. In 1932, when Josh was 18 years old, he was signed by ARC (the American Record Corporation), who reportedly paid Lizzie $100 (about $2,200 today) for his first twenty songs, published that year.
Josh got married, moved to Harlem and started doing regular appearances on an all-black radio show called Harlem Fantasy. In 1936 he became one of the first black actors to perform on Broadway, playing the part of Blind Lemon Jefferson. By 1940 he was appearing on the folk scene, sharing stages with Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger (all of whom had also started their careers as street performers). He became a regular on a CBS radio show, performed for the Library of Congress at an event celebrating the 75th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and was the headliner at Cafe Society in Greenwich Village, the first integrated nightclub in America.
In January 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt walked into Cafe Society, the first time the First Lady had ever been inside a nightclub. She loved what she heard, and booked White to perform at her husband’s third inaugural gala, alongside two other famous ex-buskers, Irving Berlin and Charlie Chaplin. Then Josh partnered up (musically, and depending on which rumours you believe, romantically as well) with a white singer named Libby Holman, making them the first mixed-race male/female duet to tour the USA.
Josh was a man of many firsts: the first black male artist to produce a million-selling record (with his hit song, One Meat Ball); the first black artist to perform at many previously-segregated hotels; the first bluesman to attract a large white audience; and, according to his son, Josh White Jr., he was the first black sex symbol to openly court white women in America.
He was also an increasingly political figure, using the cruelty he’d witnessed busking his way through the Jim Crow south as inspiration for his later years as one of the most prominent civil rights advocates of his time. His protest songs, his affiliation with other leftwing folk musicians and his frequent appearances at benefit concerts, which were often supported by the American Communist Party, made him a big target. Despite the Roosevelt’s backing (he was nicknamed the “Presidential Minstrel” in the press), or maybe because of it, Josh was one of the first of many artists blacklisted during the McCarthy era.
He lost his record contract, his radio show and was banned from being performed on the radio elsewhere. So, he made the trailblazing decision to jump on a plane to begin a tour of Scandinavia, France and Britain in 1950. He was the first American bluesman to perform in the UK, doing dozens of concerts up and down the country, and appearing regularly on hugely popular BBC shows.
It wasn’t until 1963 that his blacklisting on American television came to an end, when he performed on a civil rights special on CBS titled “Dinner with the President”. The program was a folk showcase hosted by President John F. Kennedy, who said he’d been listening to Josh’s music since his late teens. Later that year Josh performed at the Capitol Mall for the ‘March on Washington’, where Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech.
He also had a posthumous first: in 1998, almost thirty years after his death, Josh White, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie were the first folk musicians to be honoured with a US postage stamp.
I’ve asked about twenty Americans in my orbit, including several musicians, if they’d ever heard of Josh White, and none of them had. Considering his impact, and the people he’s so frequently mentioned alongside, that’s already surprising. But, I’d argue that his musical influence was even more significant than his political one, although you won’t hear this written about in the history books either.
To explain, we have to go back to his European tours. Josh’s appearance in the UK in 1950 was a big deal. This was before the BBC had any competition from commercial television networks, so he would have been the main entertainment whenever he was live. Also, his concerts were sold out wherever he went, as this was the UK’s first opportunity to see a real live black blues musician in the flesh.
Anthony “Lonnie” Donegan would claim in interviews that he was inspired by Josh White records to pick up the guitar in 1945, so I have no doubt that he would have been watching Josh on TV, if not going to a concert in person. In 1954, it was Donegan’s cover of a Leadbelly song, Rock Island Line, that propelled him to the top of the charts in the UK. He was accompanied by bandmates on the washboard and tea-chest bass, a style of music they mis-named “skiffle”, an energetic but decidedly amateur play style, influenced by (but distinct from) American blues, jazz and country music, and evolving at the same time as American rock (Donegan recorded Rock Island Line in July, three months before Elvis’ first hit, That’s All Right, reached the UK).
Donegan’s chart success launched the “skiffle craze”, where thirty to fifty thousand mostly-working class amateur bands popped up all over the country, playing in coffeehouses (another new phenomenon in tea-drinking Britain), pubs, and—of course—on street corners. Artists who began their careers performing in skiffle groups included Ronnie Wood and Mick Jagger from the Rolling Stones; Roger Daltry from the Who; Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin; Ritchie Blackmore of Deep Purple; David Gilmour of Pink Floyd; Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills & Nash; Barry Gibbs from the BeeGees; and the members of a little-known skiffle group from Liverpool called the Quarrymen, whose members included John Lennon, George Harrison and Paul McCartney.
It would be a stretch to draw a straight line from Josh White via Lonnie Donegan to The Beatles. However, it’s undeniable that Josh had an outsized influence not just on Donegan (who released his own version of One Meat Ball in 1957), but on the British guitar scene as a whole throughout that period. Ironically for a man who couldn’t read or write music, on his 1956 tour of the UK, Josh published (with help) the first ever blues guitar instruction book, titled The Josh White Method. This first-of-its-kind book was hugely influential for the British folk and blues scene.
And yet, none of the twenty-odd people I’ve asked so far—on both sides of the Atlantic, including several musicians and my English/American parents who were rock-loving hippies in the 1960s—remember ever hearing his name. Nor, apparently, has Hollywood. It’s incredible that Josh’s story has managed to stay off the big screen, considering just how complicated and intriguing a character he was.
In reading Wald’s biography, I made a shameful realisation. After years of being a campaigner over busking policy, I’d been ignoring, instead of embracing, one of busking’s biggest assets.
I’m mortified to admit it now, but in past debates I’ve warned lawmakers that strict, anti-busking policies intended to ensure only ‘quality’ performers take to the streets will have the opposite effect. The “best” artists will simply go and perform where they’re made to feel welcome, leaving “only” the homeless and disabled performers behind. In my head, I was using arguments I believed that local authorities would be most interested in.
I see now that instead of helping, my statements were just as classist and ableist as the policies I was fighting against. The fact that free and open streets enable artists of all backgrounds, not just those with years of training, to make a living on the street is one of its biggest strengths. I was using the language of the oppressor, confirming their biases, instead of promoting perhaps the most important argument in defence of street performance: that arts transformation has always been lead by the efforts of people from impoverished backgrounds (just think of the invention of hiphop in the parks and on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx in the 1980s).
What the world would sound like today if the aforementioned performers had been faced, on day one, with policies mandating that they must have licenses, a home address, formal training, the ability to pay an upfront fee and ten million pound public liability insurance in order to busk. Or, to put it another way: how much of the music we love today is a result of relaxed busking and amplification laws?
I’ll leave you with the words of MP Thomson Hankey. Hankey’s involvement in the slave trade, position as the director of the Bank of England and high social standing (his wife was half-sister to a Baronet) makes him the surprising source of a class-based defence of open street performance policy. But, when parliament was debating in 1864 whether to pass a law that would give London’s residents the power to have buskers arrested, he called it:
“…a tyrannical measure, providing for the comfort of the higher classes at the expense of the labouring poor.”
Perhaps all busking policy is classist by its very nature: elevating the needs of those of us who need quiet (authors spring to mind) over those who need to make a noise.
NOTE: Almost all of the above was essentially a book review of Elijah Wald’s incredible and fascinating biography, Josh White: Society Blues. Buy a copy at that link and my company, busk.co, will earn a small percentage of the book’s sale.