Delta Dawn: how Sears, Roebuck & Co. midwifed the birth of the blues.

• Author: Kjorness, Chris
• Position: Culture and Reviews - Essay

DELTA BLUES IS as much legend as it is music. In the popular telling, blues articulated the hopelessness and poverty of an isolated, oppressed people through music that was disconnected from popular trends and technological advances. Delta blues giants like Robert Johnson were victims, buffeted by the winds of racism, singing out mostly for personal solace. The story is undoubtedly romantic, but it just isn't true. "It angers me how scholars associate the blues strictly with tragedy," B.B. King complained in his 1999 autobiography Blues All Around Me. "As a little kid, blues meant hope, excitement, pure emotion."

The tragic image of the blues that originated in the Mississippi Delta ignores the competitive and entrepreneurial spirit of the bluesman himself. While it is certainly true that the music was forged in part by the legacy of slavery and the insults of Jim crow, the iconic image of the lone bluesman traveling the road with a guitar strapped to his back is also a story about innovators seizing on expanded opportunities brought about by the commercial and technological advances of the early 1900s. There was no Delta blues before there were cheap, readily available steel-string guitars. And those guitars, which transformed American culture, were brought to the boondocks by Sears, Roebuck & Co.

Music has always been an instrument of upward mobility in the black community. During slavery, performers were afforded higher status than field workers. As the entertainment for plantation soirees, musicians were expected to be well versed in the social dance styles demanded by white audiences. But when performing in slave quarters, they played roughly the same repertoire. Former slaves' narratives reveal that the slave musical ensemble closely resembled later minstrel-show string bands: fiddles and banjos, accompanied by various percussion instruments, usually the tambourine and two bones being struck together as claves. While the image of slaves dancing waltzes seems odd now, it was common in rural black communities well into the 20th century.

At the conclusion of the Civil War, freed black men were suddenly looking for employment. Musicianers, as they were called, could earn more money than the typical day laborer. With newfound freedom of movement, and cultural norms that had established entertainment as one of the few widely accepted jobs for blacks, Reconstruction became a time of great opportunity for black musicians. In an 1882 article in The Century Magazine a white onlooker at a 19th-century Georgia corn shucking described the elite status of the musicianer like this: "The fiddler is the man of most importance. He always comes late, must have an extra share of whiskey, is the best-dressed man in the crowd, and unless every honor is shown him he...