The most successful busker you've never heard of

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 we'll earn a small percentage of the book's sale.

Here's a story about one of the most influential and barrier-breaking street performers who ever lived.

The year was 1919. Dennis and Lizzie White were a respectable couple. Dennis was a tailor and methodist minister, Lizzie was a homemaker, and the two always referred to each other as 'Mr. White' and 'Mrs. White'. They expected visitors to take off their hats inside the house, prayed for ten or 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 miscegenation (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, four policemen returned, took Dennis to jail, beat the hell out of him and committed him to an insane asylum.

That left Lizzie to look after her seven children. She moved the family in with her parents and did laundry to make ends meet, but it was barely enough.

A couple of years after Dennis was taken away, Lizzie's eight year old, Joshua Daniel White, helped a blind street musician to cross the road. In return John Henry “Big Man” Arnold sang him a song. He then went to Josh’s home to ask his mother if he could hired the young boy to lead him around from pitch to pitch.

It took two days for Lizzie to consider the offer, but eventually she gave her consent. Helping the blind was God's work, plus Arnold 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.

The pair would set up on street corners. Arnold was on guitar and vocals, and Josh accompanyed him on the tambourine. Already the entertainer, Josh would beat the tambourine on his head, elbow and knees. He also walked around the crowd collecting coins in a tin cup at the end of shows, with Arnold carefully counting the sounds made by coins hitting the metal vessel to make sure Josh wasn't pocketing any for himself.

That winter they travelled south to Florida, thus starting a life on the road that would take them through the Carolinas, Mississippi, Kentucky, Tennessee and Illinois. But on that very first trip, sleeping on a roadside, Josh witnessed a brutal scene that he'd recite many times in later years:

"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."

Josh got so good as his job that soon Arnold was leasing his talents as a performer, hatter and navigator out to other street singers. Josh claimed to have escorted dozens of blind bluesmen over the years, including names such as Blind Lemon Jefferson (considered by many to be the most influential folk musician of all time), Blind Blake (one of the originators of "finger-style" ragtime on the guitar) and Blind Willie Walker (the greatest guitarist Josh said he’d ever seen).

All the while, Josh was picking up what he could on the guitar, memorising what he saw the musicians playing during the day, and sneaking away at night to try and repeat what he'd heard.

By age fourteen, he was skilled enough a guitarist that Blind Joe Taggart (one of the early pioneers of gospel music) invited Josh to join him recording in Paramount's Chicago studios. There, Josh even performed solo on one song, making him the youngest recorded soloist musician in pre-WWII race music.

Not only was Josh unpaid for his recording work, but his blind bosses kept him in rags—even in Chicago’s frosty chill—in order to elicit sympathy from passersby:

A Paramount producer was horrified to discover that a boy of Josh's talent and potential was still in rags, and even worse that he'd never been to school. So, he helped extricate the teen from his indentured servitude, beginning the next part of Josh's career.

From then on, Josh was a regular session musician, earning enough to keep sending money home to his mother, and buying himself a new set of clothes. He was signed by ARC (the American Record Corporation), and they paid his mother, Lizzie, $100 (about $2,200 today) for his first twenty songs, published in 1932.

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 as a regular on the folk scene, sharing stages with legends such as Leadbelly, Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger, all of whom had also started their careers by busking.

Josh 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. It was there that, in 1941, Eleanor Roosevelt saw him on her first time setting foot in a nightclub.

The Roosevelts invited him to perform at Franklin's third inaugural gala with two other ex-buskers: Irving Berlin and Charlie Chaplin. Then Josh partnered up (musically, and possibly romantically) with a white singer named Libby Holman, making them the first mixed-race male/female duet to tour the USA.

He was a man of many firsts, most notably the first black male artist to produce a million-selling record with his hit song, One Meat Ball. He was also 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 who’d dared to openly court white women in America.

Inspired by the cruelty he’d witnessed while busking his way through the Jim Crow South, Josh also became one of the most prominent civil rights advocates of his time. However, his protest songs, his affiliation with other leftwing folk musicians and his frequent appearances at benefit concerts supported by the American Communist Party lead to him being blacklisted in 1950 during the McCarthy era.

Unable to get work in his homeland, Josh jumped on a plane to tour Scandinavia, France and Britain. In doing so, he became 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, long before the BBC had any competition from commercial television networks.

We’ll take a quick detour to talk about a young Brit named Anthony Donegan. In 1945, Donegan was inspired to take up the guitar after hearing a Josh White record. No doubt he’d have been an avid watcher of Josh’s TV appearances, if he didn’t manage to attend his live appearances. Two years later, Donegan began calling himself ‘Lonnie’, after another legendary American blues guitarist, Lonnie Johnson, who’d also been a busker at the start of his career, first performing alongside his father on the streets of New Orleans.

Donegan’s 1954 cover of a Leadbelly song, Rock Island Line, propelled him to the top of the UK music charts. He was accompanied by bandmates playing a tea-chest bass and a washboard, a style of music they called "skiffle". Skiffle was an energetic but decidedly amateur play style, influenced by (but distinct from) American blues, jazz and country music, evolving at the same time as American rock and roll.

The success of Rock Island Line and the low barrier to entry into playing skiffle music 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.

The skiffle craze could not have had a bigger impact on the British music scene. 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.

We can draw a straight line from the music of Josh White and Lonnie Donegan to The Beatles. 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, a first-of-its-kind book that was hugely influential for the British folk and blues scene.

Getting back to Josh's story, 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.

One final first: almost thirty years after his death, in 1998, Josh White, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie were the first folk musicians to be honoured with a US postage stamp.* And yet, none of the twenty-odd people I've asked so far have ever heard his name. For some reason, he is often left out of books on black entertainers, and his achievements in breaking racial barriers are overlooked or forgotten.

The above story isn't just worthy of a Hollywood adaptation, it also illustrates a larger point about...busking policy (sorry).

I feel ashamed that in past discussions about anti-busking laws I’ve warned that such policies would lead the "best" artists to perform elsewhere, leaving "only" the homeless and disabled performers behind. In my head, I was using arguments I believed that lawmakers could connect with.

But the statements I was making were just as classist and ableist as the policies I was fighting against. The fact is that arts transformation has always been lead by the efforts of people from outside the cultural establishment, often from those whose hardships have provoked their artistic innovation. That's as true today as it ever was—just think of the invention of hiphop in the parks and on the streets of Harlem and the Bronx in the 1980s.

Think about 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 or public liability insurance in order to busk. Would Josh White or Lonnie Donegan or, indeed, any of the early blues musicians have taken up playing music in the first place if they hadn’t been able to busk? Without those musicians, we wouldn’t get the birth of rock music on either side of the Atlantic.

Which leaves us with an important question: How much of the music we love today is a result of relaxed busking 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 a surprising source for a class-based defence of open street performance policy.

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:

Perhaps all busking policy is classist by its very nature: elevating the needs of those of us who want to work in peace and quiet (authors spring to mind) over those who need to make a noise.

Anyone have a recommendation for a book about how gentrification impacts public space laws?

Thanks,

Nick