I Went Down To St. James Infirmary
Read the first chapter by Robert Harwood
Discover the song that shocked the nation!
Unravel a Musical Mystery: Discover the rich history of "St. James Infirmary," one of the most enduring and influential jazz-blues songs, tracing its roots from folk traditions to its modern cultural impact.
Dive into Jazz Era Intrigue: Follow a cast of fascinating characters—musicians, moguls, and minstrels—who shaped the song and left their mark on American music and culture.
Meticulously Researched, Wryly Told: Authored by Robert W. Harwood, this book blends humor, scholarly rigor, and vivid storytelling to illuminate the song’s origins, evolution, and mysterious allure.
Praise from Critics and Scholars: Called "the definitive statement on the subject," the book has been lauded for its compelling narrative and cultural insight by music historians and fans alike.
A Must-Read for Music Lovers: Whether you're a jazz enthusiast, history buff, or curious reader, this is a fascinating exploration of music’s power to inspire, unite, and endure.
CHAPTER ONE
DYN’ CRAPSHOOTER’S BLUES
DYIN’ CRAPSHOOTER’S BLUES
(Porter Grainger)
Jim Johnson gambled night and day
With crooked cards and dice
A sinful man without a soul
His heart was cold as ice
He said I feel so doggone blue
I want to die today
The devil told me what to do
But I ain’t had my say
I want you all to know
The way I want to go.
I want eight crapshooters for my pallbearers
And let them all be dressed in black
Nine men going to the graveyard
And only eight men coming back
I want a jazz band on my coffin
Chorus girl on my hearse
And don’t say one good word about me
Because my life’s been a doggone curse.
Send poker players to the graveyard
To dig my grave with the ace of spades
Have police in my funeral march
While the warden leads the parade
I want the judge who jailed me fourteen times
To put a pair of dice in my shoes
Then let a deck of cards be my tombstone
I’ve got the dyin’ crapshooter’s blues.
Folks, I ain’t never been on the level
Now I’m dying and going to the devil
My head’s aching, my heart’s thumping
I’m going down below bouncing and a-jumping
Don’t be standing around me crying
I want everybody to Charleston while I’m dying
One foot up and a toenail dragging
Throw me in that hoodoo wagon
Oh Mr. Devil, stand aside
I’ve got the dyin’ crapshooter’s blues.
It might seem strange to begin an exploration of “St. James Infirmary” with a chapter titled “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Popular history tells us that “Crapshooter’s Blues” was first recorded in 1940, twelve years after Louis Armstrong and His Savoy Ballroom Five recorded the tune under the title “St. James Infirmary,” and thirteen years after Fess Williams and His Royal Flush Orchestra recorded “Gambler’s Blues”—the title by which, in 1927, “St. James Infirmary” was known. But just as songs that went before led to the “St. James Infirmary” we know today, so did “St. James Infirmary” generate variants of its own. One of the most revered of these is Blind Willie McTell’s “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.”
In some ways the latter song illustrates the sorts of difficulties that arose when popular music became a commodity; the artist credited with its composition is not the artist who composed the song. In this respect, “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” shares ethical as well as musical entanglements with “St. James Infirmary.”
“St. James Infirmary” appeared on the cusp of radical changes in the music business. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the publication of sheet music was a major enterprise. Publishers paid entertainers to perform their songs on stage in order to stimulate sales. Even as late as 1920 there were no public radio stations. Record players were just becoming an affordable luxury—even though, at twenty-five dollars for the Victor Talking Machine Company’s low-priced Victrola, many people had to buy them on installment plans.
The music industry had grown substantially over the previous thirty years. In 1890 recorded music was a novelty, a curiosity most often encountered through coin-operated machines in parks, county fairs, train stations—places where people were likely to gather in numbers. As the popularity of this entertainment grew some vendors opened permanent salons. In order to attract a prosperous and respectable crowd, the salons were often decorated in the fashion of upscale hotel lobbies, brightly lit, festooned with baroque decorations, and with large front windows suggesting that the diversions within were of an honourable nature. (A few exhibitors preferred darker settings where they offered “recordings of ‘jim-jam songs,’ profanities, vulgar conversations, and simulated sexual encounters.”1)
Since the technology was too expensive for the average consumer, it was entrepreneurs who bought most of the recordings for their coin operated machines. Insert a pair of flexible ear tubes, drop a nickel in the coin slot, and you might, depending upon which cylinder was in the machine, hear a Strauss waltz or a popular song of the day—“Listen to the Mocking Bird,” perhaps, or “After the Ball.” There was a good chance of hearing George W. Johnson’s “The Whistling Coon,” or “The Laughing Song.” Johnson was very popular. He was the first black to be recorded, and one of the first vocalists to appear on a recording. “The Laughing Song” would have drawn lines of curious listeners to the nickel booths. The melody was rudimentary; the lyrics were silly and, by today’s standards, offensive:
As I was coming ’round the corner, I heard some people say
Here comes a dandy darky. Here he comes this way
His heel is like a snowplow and his mouth is like a trap
And when he opens it gently you will see a fearful gap.
Each verse was punctuated by a melodic refrain of hearty laughter that is still infectious today.
Then I laugh, “Ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha”
I couldn’t stop my laughing, “Ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha, ha
Ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha”
I couldn’t stop my laughing, “Ha ha, ha ha ha ha, ha.”
No doubt many listeners in the 1890s would have burst into laughter themselves, to the puzzlement and curiosity of passersby. It would have been worth a nickel to find out what the fuss was about.
At this time phonograph records were wax cylinders. Unlike the discs that achieved popularity early in the twentieth century, these cylinders could not be mass-produced. However, as many as five records could be made at a time by pointing the recording horn of each machine toward the singer’s mouth. The recording horn focused the sounds onto a diaphragm. As the diaphragm vibrated, a stylus carved impressions into the wax layer of the cylinder. In order to maintain a consistent recording volume, the singer could turn his head neither left nor right. Even the sound of a hand moving across clothes would be picked up by the sensitive stylus, and at the end of each song the singer would have to remain stock-still, with breath held, until the recording had ceased.
Listening to “The Laughing Song” today, one cannot help but be amazed by the seeming spontaneity and sincerity of Johnson’s laughter. He recorded for a fee of twenty cents per two-minute performance, and by 1894 he apparently made and sold over 25,000 copies of “The Whistling Coon” and “The Laughing Song” (sometimes singing the same song fifty or more times a day in the recording studio). As Tim Brooks noted in Lost Sounds, “To appreciate what an incredible total this was for 1894, it is necessary to understand the limited scope of the industry in the early 1890s. There were very few phonographs in private homes, so nearly all the 25,000 had to have been sold to exhibitors and coin-slot operators who played them over and over again for a fascinated, paying public. They must have worn out a lot of copies of these two songs.”2
It wasn’t long before Johnson faced some stiff competition. Noting the remarkable success of his songs, Columbia released the same songs in performances by a white store clerk named John Atlee. There was as yet no copyright law covering recorded music, and even in these early days competition was cutthroat. With the advent of recording, long before the invention of radio, the music business was exploding.
Sheet music cover for “The Laughing Song.” George Johnson sometimes sang “The Laughing Song” fifty or more times a day in the recording studio to meet listeners’ demands. (Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University)
As the years progressed, songs increased in value as financial assets. Although “St. James Infirmary” originated as a folk song that appeared in a number of guises depending upon locale and performer, and was free for the taking, it transformed over time into a piece of merchandise, valued for its return on investment. By the time McTell recorded “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues,” in 1940, the music-publishing industry was in full bloom. Shrewd investors often bought, for a few dollars, songs from indigent musicians and either registered the copyrights in their own names or convinced the performers to assign copyright to them. If a musician did not have the education or savvy to know better, record executives would pay them twenty-five or a hundred dollars to record a song. Even if the song became a hit, the artist received no further money.
Bessie Smith, the “Empress of the Blues,” for example, never saw a penny beyond her cash-per-recording deal with Columbia, despite having authored many of the songs she recorded. Frank Walker, who signed Bessie to Columbia Records, struck out the royalty clause in her contract. That arrangement never changed, even though, as one of Columbia’s most successful artists, she helped keep the company afloat. Bessie valued her recordings for their advertising potential; they increased the size of her listening audience and therefore the box office take at her live performances. There was, and is, much moneymaking sleight of hand in the recording business. One man who mastered the tricks early was Ralph Peer, who travelled the country for OKeh Records in 1923, looking for an artist to rival Bessie Smith. When, in 1920, Mamie Smith’s (no relation to Bessie) “Crazy Blues” was released by OKeh, Fred Hagar was the director of production. Hagar made the decision to record the song. But it was Peer, Hagar’s assistant, who solved the thorny problem of how to classify these songs. For their music catalogues, record companies needed to identify the type of music by genre. Something like “Crazy Blues” couldn’t be listed under, say, “popular music” because all the popular musicians were white. Even the few recordings made by blacks before 1920 were tailored for white audiences. Recording companies had assumed they would make little profit by marketing to a black audience, and imagined they understood what their white audiences preferred. The industry was pretty well controlled by Victor, Columbia, and Edison; these were the companies whose decisions shaped the popular taste in music.3 But the upstart OKeh phonograph company changed that by taking the bold step of recording a black female vocalist, without prettying up the sound to match the popular records of the day. Ralph Peer’s idea, then, was to coin the term “race record” to identify those made by black artists for black audiences. Competing record companies hoping to profit from the growing popularity of this new music soon adopted the term.
Despite his influence on popular music, Peer had little feeling for the music he was recording. His tastes ran to opera, chamber music, and big-band music. He was known to refer occasionally to the artists he worked with in a disparaging manner. He once called Louis Armstrong’s university-educated second wife, Lillian, “an awfully nice ole nigger girl,” and when explaining the lack of correspondence from aspiring black artists (as opposed to the masses of mail he received from hillbilly hopefuls) he said, “Of course, niggers can’t write—southern niggers.”4
Peer was foremost a businessman; profit was his motivation. Much of Peer’s success was founded on hillbilly music, a genre he disliked. But he knew how to travel with the wind, how to predict what might become popular with the public. When OKeh’s chief engineer, Charles Hibbard, convinced company executives that recording studios could be taken on the road and designed equipment to that end, Peer accompanied him to Atlanta. That was in 1923. Flat discs had been the recording norm for about twenty years; 78-rpm (revolutions per minute) had recently been set as the standard turntable speed. One of the sides they recorded on that trip was a nineteenth-century minstrel song, “The Little Old Cabin in the Lane.” Performed by Fiddlin’ John Carson, it is now widely regarded as the first hillbilly record (the term “country music” had not yet been coined). Initially, though, Peer liked neither the music nor the quality of the recording and allowed only five hundred copies to be pressed. Demand soon forced further pressings, however, and the recording soon sold five hundred thousand copies. Peer realized there was gold in hillbilly music. In the summer of 1927, his prospecting led him to Bristol, Tennessee, where he set up a makeshift studio in the warehouse of a hat factory; the twenty-one acts he recorded there included Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family. Two months later Peer’s travels took him to Atlanta, where he was the first to record Blind Willie McTell.5 (Four of the five songs McTell recorded were released on two discs, but neither sold well.)
When he left OKeh in 1925, Peer secured a position with Victor by suggesting they hire him for an annual salary of one dollar; he would control the copyrights of the songs he recorded for them. It was common practice for producers to purchase songs outright. If the song sold well, royalties on sales could be significant. Peer understood that he could attract and retain artists if they anticipated payment beyond the amounts offered for the recording dates alone. He would retain control of the song in return for the promise to pay future royalties. In the case of successful artists such as the Carter Family, money would keep trickling in. Peer assigned a percentage of the copyright royalties to them, pocketing the rest himself. He also retained publishing rights, renewals, and subsidiary rights.6 If another performer recorded one of his artists’ songs, then, it was Peer who collected the royalties.
In order to maximize his profit Peer insisted that the musicians he worked with record “new” songs rather than traditional tunes, which had relatively little monetary value.7 (The copyright on a traditional song applies only to particular interpretations, including modified lyrics, so other artists are free to perform their own interpretations.) Peer realized that one could claim ownership of a “traditional” song by personalizing it—that is, by altering even slightly the melody or the lyrics. Under the guidance of Ralph Peer, for example, A.P. Carter roamed the hills of Appalachia in search of old tunes, reworking them for Carter Family performances and recordings—and for copyright purposes. In the parlance of a 1931 court document that we shall look at later, this reworking was a matter of turning “an ordinary bit of merchandise” into a profitable commodity.
Few of Peer’s artists were accomplished songwriters, but they were accomplished borrowers. Musicians had long been adapting old songs—“messing them up one way or another,” as McTell would say. That’s why there are uncounted variations of “Barbara Allen,” extending back at least as far as the seventeenth century. These variants don’t tell different stories, they tell the same story in different ways. “Stagolee,” “Frankie and Johnny,” “Willie the Weeper,” “John Henry,” “House Carpenter”—the list is long. These songs were common property. But when songs could be assigned monetary value, artists and entrepreneurs were tempted to put their names to songs other people wrote. This is what McTell did with “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.”
By all accounts McTell was an intelligent and honest man. He was familiar with borrowed songs, and, like many a bluesman before and after, he often adapted earlier compositions when writing his own songs. As McTell himself said, “I jump ’em from other writers, but I arrange ’em my way.”8
It had long been thought that Blind Willie McTell was born in Georgia in 1901 … or perhaps 1898. Biographer Michael Gray recently narrowed it down to 1903 or 1904.9 McTell was possibly blind from birth but might have lost his sight as a child. Or he might have been able to perceive light in one eye as a young child or even as a young man. His original family name was not McTell but McTier. His name might have changed when a teacher at a school for the blind misunderstood Willie’s pronunciation. In a 1977 interview, though, McTell’s widow, Kate, claimed that Willie’s father’s side of the family were whisky bootleggers who needed to disguise their identities. Kate and Willie married in 1934 but separated some years later. She is thought to have sung with him on a few recordings as Ruby Glaze—although it might not have been Kate on these records at all. Recent history can be surprisingly elusive.
McTell started playing harmonica and accordion at an early age but soon showed an aptitude for the guitar, an instrument both his parents played. His father seems to have been something of a scoundrel, fond of drinking and gambling. His parents separated soon after Willie was born and, while his mother struggled to make ends meet, Willie’s large extended family helped out as needed. They were living in Statesboro, Georgia, when his mother died in 1920. Not long afterwards McTell left home to play in carnivals and medicine shows, on street corners, at house parties, and fish fries. Most of his adult life he spent travelling. Often he followed the seasonal harvests, where workers would have a few dollars to spend on entertainment. (From McTell’s now famous “Statesboro Blues”: “My mother died and left me reckless / My daddy died and left me wild, wild, wild.”) During this time, he attended several schools for the blind, where he learned to read and write music in Braille. In the twenties he started playing a twelve-string guitar, and by the time he began recording, in 1927, this was his instrument of choice. Many bluesmen used the twelve-string as simply a rhythmic instrument, but McTell mastered complex picking styles that were uniquely expressive and sometimes sounded like more than one guitarist at work. In his “Travelin’ Blues,” an arresting example of the talking blues, McTell’s twelve-string imitates, with startling conviction, clanging train bells, blowing whistles, and clattering steel wheels. Over three decades McTell recorded more than 120 songs—many of them indisputable classics—but he was never able to realize much profit from them. They never sold well. Possibly his biggest hit was his 1929 “Travelin’ Blues,” which sold just over 4,200 copies.10
In 1940 the music historian John Lomax, collecting music for the Library of Congress, went looking for McTell. He found him playing at the Pig and Whistle, an Atlanta drive-in rib eatery. Lomax drove McTell back to his hotel, where Lomax had his recording equipment (the blind McTell reportedly pointing out the sights en route). Lomax encouraged McTell to return the next day. Willie did, and they recorded for two hours. McTell talked and played without interruption. In the absence of hard historical data, much of the McTell lore is derived from these conversations. They are fascinating to listen to. McTell talked about his childhood and his travels, he played examples of different guitar styles and spoke about the history of the blues. He seems to refer to the period between 1908 and 1914 as the time of the “original blues,” and marks 1920 (when black artists started being recorded) as the time of change for the blues.
During the sessions (which can be found on CDs as “The Library of Congress Recordings, 1940”), Lomax urged McTell to talk and sing about the hard times the Negro suffered in the South, about their mistreatment at the hands of whites: “‘Ain’t It Hard to Be a Nigger, Nigger?’ don’t you know that one?” Lomax pressed. McTell insisted that some songs might talk about the meanness of the world, but they have “reference to everybody”: that the world can be a difficult place regardless of one’s colour. Among the songs McTell played for Lomax was “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” He introduced it with the words “I’m going to play this song that I made myself. Originally this is from Atlanta; three different marches of tunes.”
Later, in 1949, under the name Barrelhouse Sammy (the Country Boy), he recorded the song a second time for Herb Abramson and Ahmet Ertegun’s newly formed Atlantic Records. During these Atlantic sessions McTell recorded fifteen tracks, but only two were released—“Kill It Kid” and “Broke Down Engine Blues.”
Ertegun recalled his meeting with McTell in an article Rolling Stone posted on its website, “Ahmet Ertegun: In His Own Words”:
I was walking along a main street in the black section of Atlanta—to me this is the most incredible story of my whole career—and there was a blind man who was sitting on the corner of the street with his back to the side of the building singing gospel songs, with a hat in front of him for people to drop money into. I stopped to listen to him because he was playing incredible slide guitar and singing so beautifully. I handed him some money so that the fellow could tell it was bills, not coins, and he said, “Oh, thank you—thanks.” So I said, “Have you ever heard of Blind Willie McTell?” And he said, “Man, I am Blind Willie McTell.” I said, “I can’t believe it. You are?” He said, “Yeah, that’s who I am.” And I said, “I would love to record you. I’m from a record company in New York.” We went to the studio that same day, but he only wanted to play gospel songs. I said, “Oh, man, but we wanted some blues.” He said, “Well, I don’t sing blues anymore, I’ve found God.” I said, “But you make great blues music—this is not a bad thing—if you could just sing some blues.” “Well,” he said, “don’t put my name on it.” So I said, “OK, we’ll call you Barrelhouse Sammy.” So, we made some blues records and they came out under that name until after he died, when we released them with his actual name. It would have been criminal not to let people know who he was.
But the time had passed when a lone guitarist and singer could make much of an impression on the general public. McTell included “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” again in 1956, during his final recording session. This last session, three years before McTell’s death, was an informal affair in a small record shop on Atlanta’s Peachtree Street. The shop owner, Ed Rhodes, had installed recording equipment he’d bought with the idea of making records to sell locally. In the fall of 1956, a customer took Rhodes to meet a man who was using a cane to walk from car to car in a parking lot behind the Blue Lantern Club, singing anything people would request in return for a few coins. At first McTell refused any invitation to play for the tape machine, but he would drop into the store occasionally to chat about his early days on the road with the John Roberts Plantation Show or about his time as a Georgia still operator in the twenties. Perhaps he talked about his early recordings too, about how he saw little profit in the end, or about singing on street corners for tips when the recording opportunities dried up. But one evening, with the help of a bottle of alcohol, he agreed to tape some songs. When the bottle was empty the session ended and McTell went home. Years later the session tapes were found at the bottom of a pile of trash in Rhodes’ attic.
A CD of the Ed Rhodes tapes, Last Sessions, was released by Prestige/Bluesville in 1992. Although fourteen songs are captured on this record, as well as some of McTell’s conversation, it is a truncated version of the original session. Several of the songs Willie performed that day are missing from the CD, including “St. James Infirmary.” I have not heard this recording, but Michael Gray has and he told me “I’ve heard the full version and I fear you may find it disappointing, if only because it comes very late on in the session, by which time Willie has been fed a good deal of whiskey. All the same, of course, it’s great to have a McTell version at all, and it does tip its hat briefly to its commonality with ‘Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.’”11
Despite the abridged nature of the CD, it is a fine recording. Although slowed by age and ill health McTell performs with flashes of brilliance. He even does an old McKinney’s Cotton Pickers number, “Beedle Um Bum.” And, of course, there’s his revelatory retelling of “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” McTell, with his twelve-string guitar and a bottle of whisky in a small Atlanta record store, said to the owner before starting to play, “Now, I ain’t in no hurry. Not if you ain’t.”12
So McTell chatted and sang as customers walked into and out of the shop. He was more forthcoming about “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” than he had been with Lomax. During an extensive introduction to the song, he revealed that he started writing it in 1929 and finished in 1932. He wrote it for his friend, a gambler named Jesse Williams, who “wanted me to play this over his grave. That I did. See, I had to steal music from every which way you could get it, to get it to fit.”
“Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” is considered the quintessential McTell classic. With a melody reminiscent of “St. James Infirmary” and verses that ingeniously list a number of burial requests (“Dig my grave with the ace of spades,” “Let a deck of cards be my tombstone,” “I want the judge and solicitor who jailed me fourteen times to put a pair of dice in my shoes,” etc.), the song has the reputation of being not only a close relative of “St. James Infirmary” but a link in the chain of songs that extends from a centuries-old British lyric about a soldier dying of syphilis to, in “Streets of Laredo,” a cowboy dying from a gunshot wound. Michael Gray expressed a widely held opinion when he wrote: “This is Willie’s personalized version, one of a whole sequence of songs, based upon the traditional English ballad ‘The Unfortunate Rake’ and which also becomes the black standard ‘St. James Infirmary.’ ‘The Unfortunate Rake,’ ‘St. James Infirmary’ and ‘Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues’ all end up wondrously transmuted into [Dylan’s] ‘Blind Willie McTell.’”13
When I first wrote about these songs in 2004, I enthusiastically agreed: “There can be little doubt,” I wrote, “that McTell reshaped ‘St. James Infirmary’ and its ilk into something worthy of the best of those organic transformations which took place as the songs moved from town to town, from county to county, transported on the feet of troubadours.”14
But McTell did not write “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Nor was he the first to record it. The first recording took place two years before McTell asserted that he started writing the song, five years before he claimed he finished it, and thirteen years before he recorded it himself.
In New York City, on May 5, 1927, blues singer Martha Copeland entered the Columbia Studios to record two songs by the black pianist/ composer Porter Grainger: “Mr. Brakes-Man (Let Me Ride Your Train)” and “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Grainger played piano on both songs. Later that year the song was recorded twice more—by the blues singers Viola McCoy (in August) and Rosa Henderson (in September). And then it languished until McTell resurrected it thirteen years later. With minor differences, Grainger’s song is the same one that McTell performed. The melody is identical, down to the intriguing Charleston interlude that appears toward its close.
Through the 1920s and 1930s Porter Grainger was a respected song-writer, pianist, and arranger. He has since slipped into obscurity. Until I discovered them during my research for this book, even the place and the date of his birth were unknown.15 That is not because the information was deeply buried but because contemporary interest in him was negligible. Those few who have written about him in recent decades have usually dismissed his songwriting and musical talents as meagre. A proper re-evaluation of his work might yield a different verdict.
Porter Grainger. With minor differences, Grainger’s song “Dyin’ Crap Shooter’s Blues” is the same song that Blind Willie McTell performed years later.
Porter Parrish Grainger was born in Bowling Green, Kentucky, on October 22, 1891. From at least the age of nine he lived with his grandparents, but information on his next eighteen years is scarce. He entered the public record in 1917, when he copyrighted his first song, “On the Puppy’s Tail.”
Between 1917 and 1943, the year he copyrighted his last song, Grainger wrote or co-wrote hundreds of songs—more than thirty in 1927 alone. A glance at the titles from 1927 suggests he had a wide range: “The Lord’s Done Been Here” (a spiritual), “Look Out Mister Jazz,” “Prescription for the Blues,” “One More Kiss Before You Go Away,” “Song from a Cotton Field,” “Mister Brakes-Man,” and “Dyin’ Crap Shooter’s Blues.”
Much of what we know about Grainger has been gleaned from recording ledgers or from biographies of his associates. He has occasionally been portrayed as a flashily attired, flamboyant homosexual. If true, his flamboyance would have been either brave or foolish in an era just emerging from the moral inhibitions of the Victorian era. He was married twice and had a daughter called Portia. According to Tim de Brie, a researcher in the Netherlands, Grainger probably died late in 1951, when copyright renewals for several of his songs were transferred to his daughter.16 However, Grainger (or someone using his name) renewed the 1926 copyright of a book he co-wrote with his friend Bob Ricketts, How to Sing and Play the Blues Like the Phonograph and Stage Artists (originally published by Jack Mills, Inc.), on October 7, 1954, so he might have been alive in 1954. Obscurity pretty well defines Grainger’s legacy.
One can find tantalizing glimpses of Grainger here and there. In 1936 the twenty-year-old Orson Welles made his directorial debut in New York’s New Lafayette Theatre. His staging of Macbeth became a notable event, with its all-black cast, many of whom had not acted on stage before. The play was set in Haiti. Welles substituted voodoo priestesses for the Shakespearean witches; prominent sound effects included voodoo drums and rhythmic chanting. Noted British classical composer Virgil Thompson orchestrated original music by black composers James P. Johnson and Porter Grainger. Grainger also appears in a 1939 photograph of eighteen black composers taken in Harlem. Although this is one of the few photographs of Grainger, and only the second I have seen, he is immediately recognizable. Others in the group include Eubie Blake, Jelly Roll Morton, Kay Parker, Andy Razaf, James P. Johnson, and Perry Bradford.17
Photograph of a scene from Orson Welles’ 1936 staging of Macbeth with an all-black cast. Noted British classical composer Virgil Thompson orchestrated original music by black composers James P. Johnson and Porter Grainger. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Music Division, Federal Theatre Project Collection)
Despite the range of his undertakings, Grainger seems destined to be remembered primarily as the piano player in Bessie Smith’s 1928 revue Mississippi Days. Chris Albertson, in his biography of Smith, recognized the full extent of Grainger’s involvement in this production when he wrote that Mississippi Days was “an extravaganza that boasted a cast of forty-five ‘noted’ performers and was billed as a ‘Musical Comedy Triumph.’ Much of the show’s success was owing to Bessie’s new musical director, a shy young man named Porter Grainger, who composed and arranged all the music.”18 Grainger had already written some remarkable songs for Bessie. In fact one of her first records, in 1923, was the Porter Grainger/Everett Robbins tune “’Tain’t Nobody’s Bizness If I Do.”19
There ain’t nothing I can do nor nothing I can say
That folks don’t criticize me
But I’m going to do just as I want to anyway
And don’t care if they all despise me
If I should take a notion
To jump into the ocean
’Tain’t nobody’s business if I do.
The song inspired a number of variations, and has survived the intervening years as a blues standard. Another Grainger tune, “Sing Sing Prison Blues,” was recorded by Smith in 1924 with Don Redman on clarinet. (Redman will figure prominently in chapter 6, where we discuss Louis Armstrong’s version of “St. James Infirmary.”) In this song Bessie is asked by the judge, “Bessie, tell me why you killed your man.” Redman’s clarinet plays a funeral dirge and Bessie pleads self-defence: “Judge, you ain’t no woman /And you can’t understand.”
These and other songs show that Grainger was a gifted songwriter with a knack for a melody that illustrated his lyric, and a lyric that was sensitive to his protagonist, whether male or female. While he achieved popularity in a cabaret-style tradition that was already in decline in the 1920s, he embraced a variety of musical genres. In 1919, for instance, he wrote a sentimental war ballad titled “When Our Brown Skin’ Soldier Boys Come Home from War.” In an era that gave rise to such patriotic favourites as “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Over There,” “Oh, How I Hate to Get Up in the Morning,” and “When the Boys Come Home,” there cannot have been many that celebrated the contributions of black soldiers in World War I. (The U.S. armed forces did not integrate until 1944, twenty-five years later—and that was due to logistical necessity rather than social pressure.) Considering that this song appeared a year before the first black blues recording, it is probably a wonder that the sheet music was published at all—music companies were not yet convinced of the financial viability of marketing to African-Americans.
Grainger’s 1927 “Song from a Cotton Field” (released by OKeh Records, it credited the performer as “Porter Grainger, The Singin’ Piano Man”) shows that he did not shy away from racial issues:
Ain’t no use kickin’ ’cause I’ll be pickin’
’Til all my chillun is grown
By then I’ll shuffle and skimp and scuffle
To have a field of my own.
All my life I’ve been makin’ it
All my life white folks takin’ it
This old heart they jus’ breakin’ it
Ain’t got a thing to show for what I’ve done done.
Another of the songs he wrote that year was “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Although Grainger wrote hundreds of songs, this is one of the few that remains in the popular repertoire. You are unlikely to see his name associated with it, though.
Blind Willie McTell always claimed authorship of “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” When speaking to Ed Rhodes in his Atlanta record store in September 1956, McTell spun such a detailed and lengthy story that one is tempted to believe the song was based on his own experience. McTell tells Rhodes that his friend Jesse Williams was a gambler who was shot on Courtland Street in Atlanta. Williams wished to be buried at home in New York City, so McTell took the dying man there in an ambulance, at a cost of $282.85. McTell sat by his bedside for three weeks. On his deathbed, Williams told McTell what he wanted in the way of a funeral. McTell then told Jesse’s father, who made arrangements for his son to get everything he wanted. Well, almost everything. But McTell wrote the full list of requests into the song, which he promised Jesse he would sing at his graveside.
Sheet music cover of Porter Grainger’s “When Our Brown Skin’ Soldier Boys Come Home from War.” There were not many songs that celebrated the contributions of black soldiers in World War I. (Author’s collection)
Jesse Williams liked prostitutes, and he asked that seventy-seven women attend his funeral. His father could not arrange that—the distance was too great for the women to travel. But according to McTell, he did arrange everything else. The funeral included eight crapshooters dressed in black as pallbearers, a hearse with a crooked card painted on its side, a parade led by the high sheriff followed by twelve policemen, as well as sixteen good crapshooters, sixteen singing bootleggers, sixteen gambling racketeers, and a rolling bar with two people serving drinks. If Jesse Williams did indeed get the funeral he wanted (excepting, of course, the seventy-seven women), it would have been one for the ages. A grand parade, his grave dug with an ace of spades, a deck of cards to serve as his tombstone.
With the exception of the women, the McTell list is virtually the same one that Grainger wrote. Of the thirty-four lines in Grainger’s song, twenty-nine appear in McTell’s, either word for word or altered only slightly. Here’s how Grainger’s song starts:
Jim Johnson gambled night and day
With crooked cards and dice
A sinful man without a soul
His heart was cold as ice.
McTell transforms this into:
Little Jesse was a gambler, night and day
He used crooked cards and dice
Sinful guy, good-hearted but had no soul
Heart was hard and cold like ice.
McTell adds some verses to the song, expanding upon Jesse’s character, but the melody throughout is identical to Grainger’s. Not even that charming coda belongs to McTell. Here’s Grainger’s version:
My head’s aching, my heart’s thumping
I’m going down below bouncing and jumping
Don’t be standing around me crying
I want everybody to Charleston while I’m dying
One foot up and a toenail dragging
Throw me into that hoodoo wagon …
Here’s Blind Willie’s:
His head was achin’, heart was thumpin’
Little Jesse went to hell bouncin’ and jumpin’
Folks, don’t be standin’ around ole Jesse cryin’
He wants everybody to do the Charleston whilst he’s dyin’
One foot up, a toenail draggin’
Throw my buddy Jesse in the hoodoo wagon …
So, McTell did quite a bit more than “jump ’em from other writers but arrange ’em [his] way.” He took a forgotten song and claimed ownership. In a way, though, he made it his own. His interpretations are more interesting to listen to than any of the 1927 versions. McTell sparkles with personality and wit. Had a major label recorded and promoted it, there’s a chance he would have had a hit on his hands. “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues” is an exceptional song. This is not immediately apparent in the 1927 versions, where it takes some concentration to hear the song’s sad, wry, tragic, and comical elements. McTell’s musical and storytelling skills cast a vivid light. He breathed life into the song, revealing a work of enduring quality. And maybe, somewhere in the long unfolding of history, he is helping to resurrect the reputation of Porter Grainger.
1 David Nasaw, Going Out: The Rise and Fall of Public Amusements (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 125.
2 Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890–1919 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 7– 8.
3 Chris Albertson, Bessie (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,2003), 37.
4 Mark Zwonitzer with Charles Hirschberg, Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone? The Carter Family and Their Legacy in American Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002), 84.
5 Michael Gray, Hand Me My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell (London: Bloomsbury, 2007), 197.
6 Nolan Porterfield, Jimmie Rodgers (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 97.
7 Ibid., 98–99.
8 Interview recorded in 1956 on the CD Last Session, as the introduction to the song “Dyin’ Crapshooter’s Blues.” Released posthumously on Bluesville Records in 1962.
9 Gray, Hand Me Down My Travelin’ Shoes: In Search of Blind Willie McTell, 94.
10 Ibid., 211.
11 Personal correspondence with Michael Gray.
12 There has been some disagreement about what kind of alcohol McTell was drinking at this session. Samuel Charters, in the liner notes to the McTell CD Last Session, wrote, “Rhodes got him a bottle of corn whiskey and persuaded him to sit down.” In Hand Me Down My Travelin’ Shoes (Bloomsbury), Gray also mentions corn whiskey, “He drinks from a bottle of corn whiskey and he sings songs.” Novelist and music historian David Fulmer wrote to me that “It was vodka. Rhodes told me himself.” Corn whisky is most often a bootleg concoction, and there is a rough, rootsy, romantic quality to the notion of McTell, a fabled down-on-his-luck blues singer, drinking bootleg liquor at his final session. Still, it is more likely that Rhodes, a record-store owner, would have had vodka at hand.
13 Michael Gray, The Bob Dylan Encyclopedia (New York: Continuum, 2006), 447.
14 Robert W. Harwood, A Rake’s Progress (Kitchener, ON: Harland Press, 2004), 37.
15 Although, in a kind of serendipity that often accompanies research, at least a couple of others had started looking into Grainger’s past at about the same time. Tim de Vries, in Haarlem, the Netherlands, was particularly supportive in helping me uncover song copyright dates.
16 See https://composers-classical-music.com/g/GraingerPorter.htm.
17 David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Black Bottom Stomp: Eight Masters of Ragtime and Early Jazz (New York: Routledge, 2002), 177.
18 Albertson, Bessie, 169.
19 Smith recorded the song in February 1923, at her initial sessions for Columbia. Her first release, and one of her biggest hits, was recorded at these sessions—Alberta Hunter’s “Downhearted Blues.” It sold 750,000 copies in the first six months.
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