LITTLE ROCK — He makes some people happy
He makes some people cry
Well, now, he made one old lady
Go hang herself and die.
Peetie Wheatstraw, “Peetie
Wheatstraw Stomp No. 2” (1937)
I got an e-mail last week from a guy named Chuck Roscopf, who lives in Helena and is a board member of the Sonny Boy Blues Society. It seems that on June 4, starting at 2 p.m., there will be an event held in downtown Cotton Plant-“a celebration of the life of William Bunch.” If you can make it, maybe you’ll want to go.
Bunch died a long time ago, on Dec. 21, 1941, in East St. Louis, on his 39th birthday. He was a passenger in the back seat of a Buick that collided with a stopped freight train. It’s been said that the three men in the car were on their way to a liquor store, in order to continue their celebration of his birthday. Shortly before the accident they’d stopped at the house of the blues singer Blind Teddy Darby to pick him up-but Darby’s wife forbade him to go anywhere with Bunch and his friends.
Anyway, while his companions were killed instantly, Bunch suffered massive head trauma and lingered in a hospital for a few hours before expiring. Afterwards they sent his body back to Cotton Plant, where he had grown up, for burial in an unmarked grave. What Roscopf and the Sonny Boy Blues Society want to do is to raise enough money to giveBunch a grave marker, and to erect a historical marker besides.
Because when William Bunch died, his death warranted a cover story in Downbeat magazine. For Bunch was not only the most popular blues artist of the 1930s, he was-in the persona of “Peetie Wheatstraw”-perhaps the first blues artist to validate the music as a viable commercial genre. Peetie Wheatstraw was a role model for aspirational performers like Robert Johnson, who saw their music less as cri de coeur than a way to make a living. Peetie Wheatstraw was a star during the Depression, a era when a lot of record companies were cutting blues performers from their rosters.
We know only a little about Bunch-it’s generally agreed he was born in Ripley, Tenn., and he was raised in Cotton Plant, and that he started playing both guitar and piano at a young age. He arrived in East St. Louis in 1929, as an accomplished performer who was already using the Peetie Wheatstraw moniker, and employing an elaborate mythology derived from black folklore: He was “the devil’s son-in-law, thehigh sheriff of Hell” who had traded his soul at the crossroads for success as a musician.
There is some confusion as to whether Bunch invented Wheatstraw or merely appropriated an existing folkloric character. (I’ve heard people claim that the character was well known, but I’ve never been able to find any reference to him before Bunch.) In any event, like Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson, Wheatstraw exploited the rural Faustian legend; but if Wheatstraw wasn’t the first to make it his shtick, he at least had the most success at it while he was alive.
He was so good at it that hisimitators didn’t even pretend to originality-Harman Ray recorded sides for Decca as Herman “Peetie Wheatstraw” Ray and for Bluebird as “Peetie Wheatstraw’s Buddy.”Jimmie Gordon was “Peetie Wheatstraw’s brother” and Robert Lee Mc-Coy “Peetie’s Boy.”
His manner was of the jaded rounder who’d seen it all-who’d camped in hobo jungles and lived in the Ritz, a cad who preferred bad women and good whiskey. He sang in a slightly hoarse, slurring drawl that prefigured the casual phrasing of Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger.
And he was probably the most important contemporary influence on Robert Johnson, who not only lifted lyrics from Wheatstraw songs-which, to be fair, pretty much belonged in the public domain already-but he copied Wheatstraw’s trademark falsetto “ooo-well,” a vocal lick Wheatstraw inserted into the third verse of almost every one of the more than 170 recordings he left behind.
It’s pretty easy to hear him today, all you have to do is Google his name to find some YouTube clips, but modern ears are liable to find his recorded work a little corny and, if you listen to more than a few songs, formulaic. He used the same piano introduction over and over.
(Yes, piano. While the only extant photograph of Wheatstraw shows him holding a National resonator guitar, he was primarily a piano player-I believe his piano playing was a huge influence on Robert Johnson’s guitar playing; you can especially hear it in the high triplet figures Johnson plays.)
But one of the reasons we tend to underrate an artist like Wheatstraw is because we only hear him after decades of hearing music that’s been built on the foundation he laid. Prometheus mightn’t seem so impressive if you’ve access to a flamethrower. One of the reasons Robert Johnson is so revered is that we only have a glimpse of him-two recording sessions, a couple of hours’ worth of his guitar and vocals, a few lines of biography, a couple-actually three,probably-photographs. We get to fill in the gaps. We don’t have to consider that Robert Johnson probably played reels and dance tunes as well as the spooky ooky stuff we all know.
On the other hand, Peetie Wheatstraw seems like, well, kind of a clown. His spooky stuff is all selfaware showbiz-his records sold, people knew who he was and when he died it was noted in the newspapers. It’s safe to think of him as a kind of period piece.
But let’s change the context just a little-pick out a few salient facts, obscure the success William Bunch/ Peetie Wheatstraw enjoyed. Say we only recently re-discovered a handful of his songs, “Kidnapper’s Blues,” say, and maybe “Four O’Clock in the Morning” and a few others. Let’s say the Peetie Wheatstraw persona wasn’t a showbiz come-on but a whispering campaign. Suddenly dying at 39, after recording “Hearseman Blues” and “Bring Me Flowers While I’m Living,” maybe that makes William Bunch the King of the Delta Blues Singers.
I’m just sayin’. There is a world that exists independent of our observation of it, but we have a need to manufacture legends. Peetie Wheatstraw strikes me as an inchoate legend, an almost forgotten piece of Americana that nevertheless has infiltrated our cultural DNA.
He deserves at least a marker.
Read more at
Perspective, Pages 74 on 05/29/2011