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Our Singing Country |
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2 Go way, Eadie, quit worryin5 me, Wo, Eadie, go way.
3 Told you once and I told you twice, Wo, Eadie, go way.
4 Next time I tell you goin5 take your life, Wo, Eadie, go way.
"Now this here is a blues. You never heard a white man could sing the blues in your life, have you? You know the reason why? They donyt have them. Blues was composed up by the Negro people when they was under slavery. They was worried.
"When you lie down at night sometime, it ain't too hot and it ain't too cold, but you turning from side to side. What's the matter? Blues got you. When you get up in the morning, the blues is walkin' 'round your bed. You may have a mother and a father and a sister and a brother and maybe a girl friend, and none of them ain't done you no thin'. Anyhow you don't want no talk out of 'em. What's the matter with you? The blues got you."
—Lead Belly.
"The blues are made by working people, both Negroes and whites, when they have a lot of problems to solve about their work, when their wages are low and they don't have no way to exist hardly and they don't know which way to turn and what to do, whenever they're low in spirit and actually feeling blue.
"I used to hear a bunch of colored boys that belonged to an old colored preacher by the name of Steve Crews that lived right over from us. %They was next-door neighbors but they lived just across the track—the mining track, that is. Pd rather hear them sing that cLordy, Lordy Blues' than eat."
—Aunt Molly Jackson.
I BEEN A BAD, BAD GIRL
/, No. 692. Ozella Jones, State Penitentiary, Raiford, Fla., 1936.
If the Bessie Smith enthusiasts could hear Ozella Jones or some other clear-voiced Southern Negro girl sing the blues, they might, we feel, soon forget their idol with her brassbound, music-hall throat. The blues, sung
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