It's a lengthy but intelligently considered review so stick with it.
JOSH WHITE: SOCIETY BLUES
Elijah Wald
Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55849-269-0,
$29.95. Hb, xvii + 336 pp, biblio, index, illus.
This biography is the product of five years of assiduous research, to the point that even I got an email from the author, but could only reply that I had no uncommon research material, and, like him, was too young to have seen Josh White perform. I could have added, (but it would have added nothing to Elijah Wald's research) that I'm none too keen on White's material for white audiences, although I like his blues singing in that milieu better than his pop and folk (or rather, folk-like) material. That's pretty much the accepted reading of Josh White's career and art these days, along with regret that his race recordings were long neglected and under-valued as a result of the general dislike of his latter day incarnation. Elijah Wald dissents vigorously from this view, writing in the preface that he finds it 'ridiculous Josh reached his peak in the 1940s, exactly the time when he was at the height of his career as a cabaret star. This music has a variety, a depth and a uniqueness that were missing in his earlier work. It shows an artist with a mature style, whereas the Josh of the race records had been a callow, though engaging youngster.' Wald makes a vigorous case for his revisionism, pointing out that White was 'a nightclub singer, not a folk artist.' I dutifully went back to the relevant recordings, to see if they supported Wald's view, but unfortunately, I still think that the cocky, confident Josh of the Pinewood Tom/Singing Christian days was singing songs that were both original and culturally grounded, and backing them with polished, sometimes brilliant guitar work. I also still think that a good deal of the later work, although still polished and impressively accompanied, is mannered, shallow and rootless. Even Wald admits that he was 'nothing if not stylized,' and 'chose to polish rather than explore his material.'
But, of course, Josh White had a wife and children to support, and had to make a living in a racist society. He found a way to market himself that succeeded brilliantly, and no dissent of mine about the musical value of that self-presentation alters either his achievement, or the fact that this is an interesting, important, and well written biography, which does a consistently excellent job, both of digging out the facts of Josh White's life, and of placing them in their social and historical context. It's apparent, from the repeated testimony of eye witnesses, that in live performance, White projected an absolutely blazing charisma, and nothing else can explain his ability to succeed with the likes of 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'Apples, Peaches And Cherries.' As I've said, such material doesn't wear well on record, but some idea of his ability to put over unpromising songs can be gleaned from 'The Man Who Couldn't Walk Around.' This tribute to FDR can generously be described as mawkish, but Josh's rendition of it is so beautiful and authoritative that you almost don't notice. That he was able to dress such a dreadful song in a little brief authority gives an inkling of why audiences were so overwhelmed by his performances, irrespective of the quality of his material.
Before his days as a cabaret star in New York, though, there was Joshua White, lead boy for blind singers, and later race record artist. Elijah Wald does probably as good a job of delineating White's early life as can be done at this remove. Here, in particular, but elsewhere too, he is also surefooted when negotiating the exaggerations and confusions of Josh's own accounts of himself, like the question of whether he ever met Blind Lemon Jefferson. By page 45, though, we are done with both Josh White's youth, and his career as a race recording artist. This does seem rather too brief a consideration, and seems to be so, in part, because of Wald's lack of enthusiasm for the early records. There's also a failure to consider what Josh's religious recordings meant to him; was he doing them for the money (and one could understand a boy who was badly mistreated by Blind Joe Taggart being put off religion), or were they sincerely meant? And how important was religion to Josh in later life, when he continued to record and perform the occasional gospel song? (Wald rightly points out, by the way, that the story that the blues records came out credited to Pinewood Tom so that his mother wouldn't know he was singing sinful music is nonsense; there had been seven blues releases credited to Joshua White before the first religious one. The motive was to ensure that religious purchasers wouldn't ask for 'the new Joshua White record,' and go home with the likes of 'Sissy Man.')
After Josh arrives in New York and makes his breakthrough onto the nightclub scene, there's a lot more material available to the biographer, both because he was being noticed in print, and because there are more witnesses to give their testimony, crucially including his family. Mrs Carol White, who sadly died not long before the book was finished, was remarkably frank and honest about a marriage that was sometimes made difficult by Josh's absences, and by his flamboyant womanising; of the children, Josh, Jr. and Beverly, who followed their father into show business, shared a great many memories, as did Bunny and, to a lesser extent, Fern and Judith. I don't have room here to go into the day-to-day details of Josh's performing and recording careers, fascinating though such things as his movie appearances, and his collaboration with the white torch singer Libby Holman, are. The wider importance of his work, as Wald and those he has interviewed establish, was that Josh White blazed a trail for black performers like Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Sam Cooke, on down to Will Smith. (As Wald notes, though, white society only seems to have a market niche for one such performer at any given time.) Josh was perhaps not such a trailblazer in Europe, where there were precedents for African American musicians to find success, Even so, while he was following in the footsteps of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Sidney Bechet and other African American artists, Josh White was still a pioneer in terms of bringing the blues (along with the other stuff, of course) to European audiences. He was tremendously popular on this side of the Atlantic, and indeed Europe was the mainstay of his career for much of the fifties. Along the way, Josh also managed to have a vast number of women on both continents, and he seems (within the circumstances) to have behaved well towards most of them, most of the time, an assertion which is supported by the recollections of Devon McGovern, by whom he fathered a son, and particularly by his English girlfriend, Rene Dannen, to whom he wrote long, tender and rather well-crafted love letters. White does seem to have pursued women for the reason a dog licks its balls, though, and there appear to have been darker psychological currents, as well; it's disturbing to learn that he was setting Josh, Jr. up with women from the age of eleven. I've mentioned that White had largely to rely on his popularity in Europe during the fifties. This was because he'd had the misfortune to be listed as a subversive by 'Red Channels', a newsletter which reported that people had been reported to be associating with Communist front groups. (This elaborate formulation was necessary for legal reasons.) Josh, while not deeply interested in politics, was equally committed to the improvement of race relations and to love of his country, as can be seen in his singing of 'Strange Fruit', and in his refusal, for a long time, to sing it when overseas. As a result of his position on race, he inevitably associated with Communists and their stooges from time to time, since the Communists were about the only people then making a fuss about racial issues, albeit in many cases from not exactly disinterested motives. Contrariwise, Josh wasn't particularly interested in left wing ideas on other issues, nor in the whirling gyrations that 'progressives' undertook in order to follow the party line on the Second World War. (White sang on the Union Boys' infamous isolationist 'Songs for John Doe' session, but seemingly more as a favour to Pete Seeger than out of conviction; Langston Hughes' 'Freedom Road', both patriotic and anti-racist, and which he featured in concerts long after the war, was much closer to his instinctive notions.) When accused of Communist sympathies, he was outraged, felt he had been suckered by the Party, and testified accordingly, both in 'Negro Digest' and to HUAC. (He wasn't asked to 'name names,' incidentally; African Americans were usually required only to distance themselves from Paul Robeson.) The consequence, alas, was that, already tagged as unsafe by conservatives in the entertainment industry (most crucially, network TV), Josh White also became persona non grata to the left. He was literally an unperson at 'Sing Out!', where his name was mentioned only in paid advertising until after his death. Quite apart from the ending of some friendships, bookings became considerably harder to come by, and although his fortunes revived in the sixties, he was never again a star outside the narrow confines of the folk world.
Elijah Wald deals with all this in a generally fair manner, and is sensitive to the complexities of the issues involved, and to the context of events; while broadly sympathetic to the left and their sufferings at this time, he is aware of which side the American Communist Party and its associates took in the Cold War, and in the hot one then going on in Korea. He notes, too, that although the attack on White by the 'Daily Worker' after his testimony was unpleasantly condescending, the paper was right to point out that the Left had fostered much of the early enthusiasm for him. Just occasionally, I feel that Wald is being disingenuous; he seems to imply that 'the Roosevelt centre' lay halfway between HUAC and the KGB, and that accordingly there is a moral equivalence between the unjustifiable excesses of McCarthyism and the murderous tyranny of Stalinism. This was a bad time in America, and innocent people like Josh White got trapped in the gears of history. The impact on him and other individuals was not trivial, but there's no doubt in my mind which way the scales of judgement tip.
I seem to have written more about politics than I intended. It's time to sum up. Josh White's achievement of modest stardom, by bringing black music to white audiences, while at the same time managing to speak out on social and racial issues, was virtually unique in its day, and he was, as Wald observes, probably the only 'nightclub blues singer' ever. In that sense, his story is as much about the discovery of black music by white audiences as it is about black music per se. This can perhaps be seen in Wald's comparative lack of interest in his race recordings, and in my comparative lack of interest in what came after. However, the history of white interest in, and interaction with, black music is an important subject; if white enthusiasts don't consider that history, and its paradoxes and ironies, there's a danger of awarding ourselves honorary insider status, claiming some sort of privileged understanding, and forgetting about the distance that in reality separates us from both the stresses and the joys of African American life. Elijah Wald's fascinating account of how Josh White walked the line between two worlds is a remarkable and compelling achievement. Chris Smith
JOSH WHITE: SOCIETY BLUES
Elijah Wald
Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 2000. ISBN 1-55849-269-0,
$29.95. Hb, xvii + 336 pp, biblio, index, illus.
This biography is the product of five years of assiduous research, to the point that even I got an email from the author, but could only reply that I had no uncommon research material, and, like him, was too young to have seen Josh White perform. I could have added, (but it would have added nothing to Elijah Wald's research) that I'm none too keen on White's material for white audiences, although I like his blues singing in that milieu better than his pop and folk (or rather, folk-like) material. That's pretty much the accepted reading of Josh White's career and art these days, along with regret that his race recordings were long neglected and under-valued as a result of the general dislike of his latter day incarnation. Elijah Wald dissents vigorously from this view, writing in the preface that he finds it 'ridiculous Josh reached his peak in the 1940s, exactly the time when he was at the height of his career as a cabaret star. This music has a variety, a depth and a uniqueness that were missing in his earlier work. It shows an artist with a mature style, whereas the Josh of the race records had been a callow, though engaging youngster.' Wald makes a vigorous case for his revisionism, pointing out that White was 'a nightclub singer, not a folk artist.' I dutifully went back to the relevant recordings, to see if they supported Wald's view, but unfortunately, I still think that the cocky, confident Josh of the Pinewood Tom/Singing Christian days was singing songs that were both original and culturally grounded, and backing them with polished, sometimes brilliant guitar work. I also still think that a good deal of the later work, although still polished and impressively accompanied, is mannered, shallow and rootless. Even Wald admits that he was 'nothing if not stylized,' and 'chose to polish rather than explore his material.'
But, of course, Josh White had a wife and children to support, and had to make a living in a racist society. He found a way to market himself that succeeded brilliantly, and no dissent of mine about the musical value of that self-presentation alters either his achievement, or the fact that this is an interesting, important, and well written biography, which does a consistently excellent job, both of digging out the facts of Josh White's life, and of placing them in their social and historical context. It's apparent, from the repeated testimony of eye witnesses, that in live performance, White projected an absolutely blazing charisma, and nothing else can explain his ability to succeed with the likes of 'Waltzing Matilda' and 'Apples, Peaches And Cherries.' As I've said, such material doesn't wear well on record, but some idea of his ability to put over unpromising songs can be gleaned from 'The Man Who Couldn't Walk Around.' This tribute to FDR can generously be described as mawkish, but Josh's rendition of it is so beautiful and authoritative that you almost don't notice. That he was able to dress such a dreadful song in a little brief authority gives an inkling of why audiences were so overwhelmed by his performances, irrespective of the quality of his material.
Before his days as a cabaret star in New York, though, there was Joshua White, lead boy for blind singers, and later race record artist. Elijah Wald does probably as good a job of delineating White's early life as can be done at this remove. Here, in particular, but elsewhere too, he is also surefooted when negotiating the exaggerations and confusions of Josh's own accounts of himself, like the question of whether he ever met Blind Lemon Jefferson. By page 45, though, we are done with both Josh White's youth, and his career as a race recording artist. This does seem rather too brief a consideration, and seems to be so, in part, because of Wald's lack of enthusiasm for the early records. There's also a failure to consider what Josh's religious recordings meant to him; was he doing them for the money (and one could understand a boy who was badly mistreated by Blind Joe Taggart being put off religion), or were they sincerely meant? And how important was religion to Josh in later life, when he continued to record and perform the occasional gospel song? (Wald rightly points out, by the way, that the story that the blues records came out credited to Pinewood Tom so that his mother wouldn't know he was singing sinful music is nonsense; there had been seven blues releases credited to Joshua White before the first religious one. The motive was to ensure that religious purchasers wouldn't ask for 'the new Joshua White record,' and go home with the likes of 'Sissy Man.')
After Josh arrives in New York and makes his breakthrough onto the nightclub scene, there's a lot more material available to the biographer, both because he was being noticed in print, and because there are more witnesses to give their testimony, crucially including his family. Mrs Carol White, who sadly died not long before the book was finished, was remarkably frank and honest about a marriage that was sometimes made difficult by Josh's absences, and by his flamboyant womanising; of the children, Josh, Jr. and Beverly, who followed their father into show business, shared a great many memories, as did Bunny and, to a lesser extent, Fern and Judith. I don't have room here to go into the day-to-day details of Josh's performing and recording careers, fascinating though such things as his movie appearances, and his collaboration with the white torch singer Libby Holman, are. The wider importance of his work, as Wald and those he has interviewed establish, was that Josh White blazed a trail for black performers like Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier and Sam Cooke, on down to Will Smith. (As Wald notes, though, white society only seems to have a market niche for one such performer at any given time.) Josh was perhaps not such a trailblazer in Europe, where there were precedents for African American musicians to find success, Even so, while he was following in the footsteps of Josephine Baker, Paul Robeson, Sidney Bechet and other African American artists, Josh White was still a pioneer in terms of bringing the blues (along with the other stuff, of course) to European audiences. He was tremendously popular on this side of the Atlantic, and indeed Europe was the mainstay of his career for much of the fifties. Along the way, Josh also managed to have a vast number of women on both continents, and he seems (within the circumstances) to have behaved well towards most of them, most of the time, an assertion which is supported by the recollections of Devon McGovern, by whom he fathered a son, and particularly by his English girlfriend, Rene Dannen, to whom he wrote long, tender and rather well-crafted love letters. White does seem to have pursued women for the reason a dog licks its balls, though, and there appear to have been darker psychological currents, as well; it's disturbing to learn that he was setting Josh, Jr. up with women from the age of eleven. I've mentioned that White had largely to rely on his popularity in Europe during the fifties. This was because he'd had the misfortune to be listed as a subversive by 'Red Channels', a newsletter which reported that people had been reported to be associating with Communist front groups. (This elaborate formulation was necessary for legal reasons.) Josh, while not deeply interested in politics, was equally committed to the improvement of race relations and to love of his country, as can be seen in his singing of 'Strange Fruit', and in his refusal, for a long time, to sing it when overseas. As a result of his position on race, he inevitably associated with Communists and their stooges from time to time, since the Communists were about the only people then making a fuss about racial issues, albeit in many cases from not exactly disinterested motives. Contrariwise, Josh wasn't particularly interested in left wing ideas on other issues, nor in the whirling gyrations that 'progressives' undertook in order to follow the party line on the Second World War. (White sang on the Union Boys' infamous isolationist 'Songs for John Doe' session, but seemingly more as a favour to Pete Seeger than out of conviction; Langston Hughes' 'Freedom Road', both patriotic and anti-racist, and which he featured in concerts long after the war, was much closer to his instinctive notions.) When accused of Communist sympathies, he was outraged, felt he had been suckered by the Party, and testified accordingly, both in 'Negro Digest' and to HUAC. (He wasn't asked to 'name names,' incidentally; African Americans were usually required only to distance themselves from Paul Robeson.) The consequence, alas, was that, already tagged as unsafe by conservatives in the entertainment industry (most crucially, network TV), Josh White also became persona non grata to the left. He was literally an unperson at 'Sing Out!', where his name was mentioned only in paid advertising until after his death. Quite apart from the ending of some friendships, bookings became considerably harder to come by, and although his fortunes revived in the sixties, he was never again a star outside the narrow confines of the folk world.
Elijah Wald deals with all this in a generally fair manner, and is sensitive to the complexities of the issues involved, and to the context of events; while broadly sympathetic to the left and their sufferings at this time, he is aware of which side the American Communist Party and its associates took in the Cold War, and in the hot one then going on in Korea. He notes, too, that although the attack on White by the 'Daily Worker' after his testimony was unpleasantly condescending, the paper was right to point out that the Left had fostered much of the early enthusiasm for him. Just occasionally, I feel that Wald is being disingenuous; he seems to imply that 'the Roosevelt centre' lay halfway between HUAC and the KGB, and that accordingly there is a moral equivalence between the unjustifiable excesses of McCarthyism and the murderous tyranny of Stalinism. This was a bad time in America, and innocent people like Josh White got trapped in the gears of history. The impact on him and other individuals was not trivial, but there's no doubt in my mind which way the scales of judgement tip.
I seem to have written more about politics than I intended. It's time to sum up. Josh White's achievement of modest stardom, by bringing black music to white audiences, while at the same time managing to speak out on social and racial issues, was virtually unique in its day, and he was, as Wald observes, probably the only 'nightclub blues singer' ever. In that sense, his story is as much about the discovery of black music by white audiences as it is about black music per se. This can perhaps be seen in Wald's comparative lack of interest in his race recordings, and in my comparative lack of interest in what came after. However, the history of white interest in, and interaction with, black music is an important subject; if white enthusiasts don't consider that history, and its paradoxes and ironies, there's a danger of awarding ourselves honorary insider status, claiming some sort of privileged understanding, and forgetting about the distance that in reality separates us from both the stresses and the joys of African American life. Elijah Wald's fascinating account of how Josh White walked the line between two worlds is a remarkable and compelling achievement. Chris Smith