The discussion elswhere of unaccompanied blues singing prompted me to find the Mabel Hillery LP cited there. The sleeve note consists of a portion of her lengthy 1967 rememberance of times past and thought it might find marginal interest here. She was born 22 July 1929 and died 26 April 1976. Being a "well thumbed" sleeve it was somewhat of a trial to OCR successfully but think I've caught all the misreads:
'My parents was share croppers.
I was born in a little town called La Grange in South Georgia, and when I was six months old, they took me to Kieta County, 60 miles below Atlanta, Georgia.
It was Otto Hutchison owned the place where I grew up. He had about 7 or 8 thousand acres of land, and probably more than 500 people working for him and living on his plantation. They worked cotton and corn, and wheat and oats and peaches. There was one store, and it belonged to the man that owned the plantation. He was the grocery man, the clothes man, the shoe man, and everything. When you made them pennies, if you carry anything besides the receipt where you had went to the store and took up grocery all that week, you spent it right back in that same store. The money never did leave the man's hand. It continued to turn right back. I have relatives there now who is making 18 dollars a week which they never sees on Friday. They probably get about thirteen cent in the pay envelope. I used to tote water, before I got big enough to pick and thin out, and they used to pay me about 5 cent a day. I never did see it. My grandmother collected it.
Whenever I did get a nickel, I didn't keep a plain old nickel. I had it changed to five pennies, because that was more money. By the time I was 8 I was putting in a full day's work. I've plowed and planted, and fertilized, and thinned, and harvested, and helped put it in the barns.
My uncle got an idea if he'd leave the country and go to Atlanta he'd fare better. He was in Atlanta maybe something like two weeks, and my grandmother got this letter from him. He was in jail. So she went around and sold chickens and eggs and butter until she got enough money till she got him out of jail. After he come back home, I went to take him water in the field one day, and he was singing:
'Ain't it hard to be a nigger in Atlanta?
The police ride from door to door
They pick up the niggers and let the white man go.
That's why it's hard to be a nigger anywhere in Georgia'.
I heard a lot of songs sung across the fields. People was working and singing. I liked these songs, and in my mind they began to do something to me.
I wasn't old enough to realise the peoples was singing to relieve their anger, or on account of being frustrated, and sometimes from being happy. Singing a song would mean the world to them, because that was the only way they could talk back to the man was in the song. They would sing to the mule or to themselves, and they would beat the man by singing a song. I used to see my grandmother singing and crying.
I asked her why she was crying. She said: 'If you live in this world, you got to give up your rights to get along, and you got to cry sometime to get along. There's so many things you got to do to get along. You got to sing to get along, and moan to get along in this world.'
The people were preached and told so many times by the white man that
'God put you here to serve us,
And that's the only reason why you're here.
And, if you'll be kind, good and submissive to me and obey
me, when you die, you will be rewarded.
I'll see to that.'
And they believed it. The only wise men there was the white man and the minister. The open-eye man was the white man, the minister had his eye half open. It would always come back to my grandmother that the white man was evil, and he would be the one to go to hell. She used to sit down and tell me about the different things that happened in her family. Her father was almost as white as any man you ever want to see.
She told me: 'You don't hate the kids that you play with, because they is not responsible for you being in the position that you is in. The thing for you to do is to make peace, and see that the ones coming under you don't get caught in the trap that you got caught in.'
And the trap she got caught in.
I always figured that if you wanted to, and if you fought hard enough, there was a way out. But somewhere down the line, I think my grandparents kindly give up, and said: 'Well, I'm just gona make the best of what life I have here. I'm just gona take it and go on, because there is no hope.' Things was rough for us, but they was much tougher with my grandmother.
My grandparents didn't sing the blues, they knew them, And I think they sung them when they was young. But they always told me that the blues was the devil's songs, and that they were bad songs, and that if you sung the blues you would die and go to hell, and there would burn for ever and ever.
It was a funny thing. When I was a kid growing up, there was all kinds of religious records in my home there. And they had one of these big wind up things they call a 'Victora', made by RCA with one of the big dogs sitting on the side of it. Well, you could play any record in there except the blues. They would always take them and hid them when the older ones got through hearing them.
But our house was high off the ground. So we would go underneath the house. There was a knot in the floor board. We took a stick and pushed it up, and we'd listen to the record playing, and to them dancing.
And whenever my grandmama would leave the house, we would play the record of Arthur Big Boy Crudup singing 'Big Legged Woman', and everything else we could find, and boy we'd have a party in that house dancing. But one of us always stood on the porch and looked down the road to see if anyone was coming. Because you would really get lashed if you played those records.
They used to take us along to the Saturday night fish fry. Everybody would bring a quilt for a pallet. They'd put all the kids into one room to sleep, and they'd go into another room. Maybe there was an old guy with a guitar, and somebody with a harmonica. They'd start drinking moonshine, and playing the guitar, and dancing all night long. We'd crack the door open, and we'd look at them doing the shoe-shine, the black bottom, the snake hip, the hen peck, the shimmy and everything right down. Maybe one of them would come through the room and see you with door open. It didn't have to be your parents. Anybody would whip you then. They'd tell you, 'Lay down and go to sleep.' But you wouldn't always go to sleep. You'd lay down and say to yourself: 'One day when I get big, I'm gonna buy me a guitar and sing any kind of songs I want to sing, and I'm gonna dance any kind of a dance I want to dance.' They'd stay there until sun-up Sunday morning, and then they'd leave and go to church. The same man that got up there in the pulpit Sunday morning and preached the gospel to you, you saw him Saturday night at the same place you was at. There was always a minister preaching and saying 'Hallelujah', and there was always peoples on the outside that still didn't believe in what he was doing. He was always telling them: 'Aww, come on to church, and we can sing, and praise the Lord, and you can see what a feeling you get.'
And they said, 'Well, we can get just as good a feeling by singing, and we don't have to go to church to get this feeling.' So, they used various verses of the song he was singing inside the church, and they made blues songs out of them. They sped the tempo up there a little bit, and they had it. That's why they was called the devil's songs, because the people on the inside was singing them and praising the Lord, and the ones on the outside were singing them and praising for the devil. And there was people like myself that had two kind of feelings for the songs. You got so much out of the songs you heard in church, and then you got a different feeling when you got on the outside and heard these songs. And those religious songs did a lot for me when I really didn't know.
The blues were special to me, and even now the blues put me in mind of some of the things I've went through and the way I've lived. I've lived some years a happy life, and some years sort of a sad life. And that's the way it is with the blues. I wake up sometimes at three o'clock in the morning feeling down in the dumps, and I can get up and sit on the side of my bed, and just kind of hum a few verses to myself and I feel better. And I find I can lay down and go to bed and don't spend another restless minute.
So I don't know if they are the devil's songs or not, but in my mind they are not. I continue to sing them, because I don't think no song is bad. And I continue to dance. It is part of me, and I have never forgot it. Kids now is sometimes ashamed of thing connected with the past, because they want to get away from the past. It was wrong for such a thing as slavery to be, but it's nothing nobody can or should forget. I think if I should try and forget the songs that I sung, and the dances that I learned as a child coming up, I wouldn't know who I was, and I wouldn't know which way I was going, and I don't want that to happen to me. The people in the South have always brought their old music up to the North and polished it up too much in order to get anywhere and to be able to sing, and to be able to record it on a record. You gotta fix it, and do it the way they want you to do it, take some of your verses and add some of their verses in it. Before I started singing I was working as a short-order cook, and then I was selling ice-cream on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. Alan Lomax came down there to make a film on the island for CBS. The people come thinking they were going to a modern kind of rock and roll film session. When they got there, they found he wanted traditional music. They were singing some of the songs I hadn't heard for years in public, and me singing them to myself. So I sung along too.'
[I have excerpted the preceding notes from a tape interview I made with Mable in Philadelphia in the summer of 1967. Hedy West, London 1968]
'My parents was share croppers.
I was born in a little town called La Grange in South Georgia, and when I was six months old, they took me to Kieta County, 60 miles below Atlanta, Georgia.
It was Otto Hutchison owned the place where I grew up. He had about 7 or 8 thousand acres of land, and probably more than 500 people working for him and living on his plantation. They worked cotton and corn, and wheat and oats and peaches. There was one store, and it belonged to the man that owned the plantation. He was the grocery man, the clothes man, the shoe man, and everything. When you made them pennies, if you carry anything besides the receipt where you had went to the store and took up grocery all that week, you spent it right back in that same store. The money never did leave the man's hand. It continued to turn right back. I have relatives there now who is making 18 dollars a week which they never sees on Friday. They probably get about thirteen cent in the pay envelope. I used to tote water, before I got big enough to pick and thin out, and they used to pay me about 5 cent a day. I never did see it. My grandmother collected it.
Whenever I did get a nickel, I didn't keep a plain old nickel. I had it changed to five pennies, because that was more money. By the time I was 8 I was putting in a full day's work. I've plowed and planted, and fertilized, and thinned, and harvested, and helped put it in the barns.
My uncle got an idea if he'd leave the country and go to Atlanta he'd fare better. He was in Atlanta maybe something like two weeks, and my grandmother got this letter from him. He was in jail. So she went around and sold chickens and eggs and butter until she got enough money till she got him out of jail. After he come back home, I went to take him water in the field one day, and he was singing:
'Ain't it hard to be a nigger in Atlanta?
The police ride from door to door
They pick up the niggers and let the white man go.
That's why it's hard to be a nigger anywhere in Georgia'.
I heard a lot of songs sung across the fields. People was working and singing. I liked these songs, and in my mind they began to do something to me.
I wasn't old enough to realise the peoples was singing to relieve their anger, or on account of being frustrated, and sometimes from being happy. Singing a song would mean the world to them, because that was the only way they could talk back to the man was in the song. They would sing to the mule or to themselves, and they would beat the man by singing a song. I used to see my grandmother singing and crying.
I asked her why she was crying. She said: 'If you live in this world, you got to give up your rights to get along, and you got to cry sometime to get along. There's so many things you got to do to get along. You got to sing to get along, and moan to get along in this world.'
The people were preached and told so many times by the white man that
'God put you here to serve us,
And that's the only reason why you're here.
And, if you'll be kind, good and submissive to me and obey
me, when you die, you will be rewarded.
I'll see to that.'
And they believed it. The only wise men there was the white man and the minister. The open-eye man was the white man, the minister had his eye half open. It would always come back to my grandmother that the white man was evil, and he would be the one to go to hell. She used to sit down and tell me about the different things that happened in her family. Her father was almost as white as any man you ever want to see.
She told me: 'You don't hate the kids that you play with, because they is not responsible for you being in the position that you is in. The thing for you to do is to make peace, and see that the ones coming under you don't get caught in the trap that you got caught in.'
And the trap she got caught in.
I always figured that if you wanted to, and if you fought hard enough, there was a way out. But somewhere down the line, I think my grandparents kindly give up, and said: 'Well, I'm just gona make the best of what life I have here. I'm just gona take it and go on, because there is no hope.' Things was rough for us, but they was much tougher with my grandmother.
My grandparents didn't sing the blues, they knew them, And I think they sung them when they was young. But they always told me that the blues was the devil's songs, and that they were bad songs, and that if you sung the blues you would die and go to hell, and there would burn for ever and ever.
It was a funny thing. When I was a kid growing up, there was all kinds of religious records in my home there. And they had one of these big wind up things they call a 'Victora', made by RCA with one of the big dogs sitting on the side of it. Well, you could play any record in there except the blues. They would always take them and hid them when the older ones got through hearing them.
But our house was high off the ground. So we would go underneath the house. There was a knot in the floor board. We took a stick and pushed it up, and we'd listen to the record playing, and to them dancing.
And whenever my grandmama would leave the house, we would play the record of Arthur Big Boy Crudup singing 'Big Legged Woman', and everything else we could find, and boy we'd have a party in that house dancing. But one of us always stood on the porch and looked down the road to see if anyone was coming. Because you would really get lashed if you played those records.
They used to take us along to the Saturday night fish fry. Everybody would bring a quilt for a pallet. They'd put all the kids into one room to sleep, and they'd go into another room. Maybe there was an old guy with a guitar, and somebody with a harmonica. They'd start drinking moonshine, and playing the guitar, and dancing all night long. We'd crack the door open, and we'd look at them doing the shoe-shine, the black bottom, the snake hip, the hen peck, the shimmy and everything right down. Maybe one of them would come through the room and see you with door open. It didn't have to be your parents. Anybody would whip you then. They'd tell you, 'Lay down and go to sleep.' But you wouldn't always go to sleep. You'd lay down and say to yourself: 'One day when I get big, I'm gonna buy me a guitar and sing any kind of songs I want to sing, and I'm gonna dance any kind of a dance I want to dance.' They'd stay there until sun-up Sunday morning, and then they'd leave and go to church. The same man that got up there in the pulpit Sunday morning and preached the gospel to you, you saw him Saturday night at the same place you was at. There was always a minister preaching and saying 'Hallelujah', and there was always peoples on the outside that still didn't believe in what he was doing. He was always telling them: 'Aww, come on to church, and we can sing, and praise the Lord, and you can see what a feeling you get.'
And they said, 'Well, we can get just as good a feeling by singing, and we don't have to go to church to get this feeling.' So, they used various verses of the song he was singing inside the church, and they made blues songs out of them. They sped the tempo up there a little bit, and they had it. That's why they was called the devil's songs, because the people on the inside was singing them and praising the Lord, and the ones on the outside were singing them and praising for the devil. And there was people like myself that had two kind of feelings for the songs. You got so much out of the songs you heard in church, and then you got a different feeling when you got on the outside and heard these songs. And those religious songs did a lot for me when I really didn't know.
The blues were special to me, and even now the blues put me in mind of some of the things I've went through and the way I've lived. I've lived some years a happy life, and some years sort of a sad life. And that's the way it is with the blues. I wake up sometimes at three o'clock in the morning feeling down in the dumps, and I can get up and sit on the side of my bed, and just kind of hum a few verses to myself and I feel better. And I find I can lay down and go to bed and don't spend another restless minute.
So I don't know if they are the devil's songs or not, but in my mind they are not. I continue to sing them, because I don't think no song is bad. And I continue to dance. It is part of me, and I have never forgot it. Kids now is sometimes ashamed of thing connected with the past, because they want to get away from the past. It was wrong for such a thing as slavery to be, but it's nothing nobody can or should forget. I think if I should try and forget the songs that I sung, and the dances that I learned as a child coming up, I wouldn't know who I was, and I wouldn't know which way I was going, and I don't want that to happen to me. The people in the South have always brought their old music up to the North and polished it up too much in order to get anywhere and to be able to sing, and to be able to record it on a record. You gotta fix it, and do it the way they want you to do it, take some of your verses and add some of their verses in it. Before I started singing I was working as a short-order cook, and then I was selling ice-cream on St. Simon's Island, Georgia. Alan Lomax came down there to make a film on the island for CBS. The people come thinking they were going to a modern kind of rock and roll film session. When they got there, they found he wanted traditional music. They were singing some of the songs I hadn't heard for years in public, and me singing them to myself. So I sung along too.'
[I have excerpted the preceding notes from a tape interview I made with Mable in Philadelphia in the summer of 1967. Hedy West, London 1968]