When Robert Johnson decided to “dust his broom” in 1936, he had embarked on what today might be described as stalking. Like a lot of other male-orientated blues lyrics, his indicate how he’d been mistreated by a woman and was determined to phone her, write to her, or otherwise contact the “no good doney” wherever she was. He’ll go to great lengths and distances; not just to West Helena and East Monroe in Arkansas but to “Chiney” and the Philippines. The desired conclusion of such a pursuit, one assumes, was to wreak revenge rather than renew vows or talk things over.
The singer “don’t want no woman, wants every downtown man she meets”. He wants her exclusively, in other words, which would be a reasonable statement if we knew the whole story – what his part in the relationship had been and if it offered good grounds for her looking elsewhere or just decamping from an unsatisfactory arrangement. The list of troubles Johnson is experiencing in Stones In My Passway include the woman he’s leaving “who don’t mean a thing”.
In If I Had Possession Over Judgement Day, “some other man” has got his woman and if he had his omniscient way, she wouldn’t be allowed to supplicate. But Johnson’s was a complex personality and at the end he simply wants her to listen while he tells her how bad “they” treated him; “they” being all the Fates ranged against him as a black male, or as any male with men’s problems. Still, the little woman is ill-defined, almost of no consequence except as a possession.
The woman’s place here is interesting in the domestic hierarchy established by external circumstances. Just as poor whites living cheek by jowl with poor blacks were the most virulent form of racist, over-asserting their racial superiority in order to compensate for their economic privations, so the woman in a relationship with a black, putatively second-class male suffered from an over-emphasis on his gender primacy.
The woman who has deserted B. B. King in Three O’Clock Blues is sought because her man wants her to to hear him confess his sins. She is still out of reach for singer and listener, but unlike the quarry in the foregoing songs, might have contributed to the sinfulness. We just don’t know, because the information is one-sided. Polly Ann, the woman of the eponymous John Henry in the song by Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee, is much more appreciated, if not exactly revered. When JH was taken sick and “had to go to bed”, Polly “drove steel like a man” as a kind of Rosie the Riveter. The woman made love to by Muddy Waters’ Mannish Boy can’t resist his advances. As sung by Waters, Hoochie Coochie Man is an inventory of the vocal qualities that will make the singer irresistible to women, who in turn will be made to “lead me by the hand – me, with my black cat bone, my mojo, and my John the Conqueror root”.
In Roll ’Em Pete, Big Joe Turner praises his woman to the hilt. She’s so beautiful but has to die one day. Her mortality, though, is less important than his need for “a little lovin’” before she shuffles off. Elsewhere, Big Joe was in awe of women: “I’m like a one-eyed cat, peepin’ in a seafood store/Well, I can look at you and tell you ain’t no child no more.” Wilbert Harrison in Kansas City, however, seems focused only on the metropolis as home to “some crazy little women”, of whom he’s “gonna get some”.
Women could hold their own in the blues when they were doing the singing. Big Mama Thornton’s Hound Dog could wag its tail but she’d done with feeding it. One could argue that this is just the foregoing chauvinism in reverse, with the distaff side wielding the stick for no explicit reason. They are soon back against the wall, as it were, in Roy Alfred’s I’ve Got News For You, a Ray Charles hit. Here, it’s the woman as duplicitous, whose “awful tame” life was exposed as a lie when the singer took her to a night club where “the whole band knew her name”, and implicitly not for her musicianship.
Man’s need for female attachment is nowhere more stark than in Mercy Dee Walton’s lyrics. In one instance, the protagonist is “gonna find me some kind of a companion/Even if she’s dumb, deaf, crippled, and blind”. Maybe that reflected the desperation of living “a thousand miles from nowhere in a one-room county shack”. In the stix, a woman was unlikely to have had the kind of temptations to promiscuity available nightly to her sisters in the city. That’s a predictable way of putting it.
One might say, dismissively perhaps, that the sentiments expressed by women in the blues simply reflect the way men treat them, which might in turn suggest an equality reached by cancelling out each other’s attitude. Somehow, it doesn’t ever sound like that. It would certainly leave the problem unresolved.
I’m writing this at the end of a year in which women have been as vociferous as ever in pointing out how the unwanted attentions of men connect with instances of abuse, violence and death. What has this got to do with jazz? Well, we’ve reached the stage at which male domination of the music is being counterpoised non-aggressively by women to the extent of an exclusive promotion that excludes men. Whereas gender separation in sport, for example, is predicated on physical strength, music-making can have no such justification, unless strength is defined as influence. But there’s been a historical imbalance in jazz that cannot be redressed in any other way. The goal must be a gender-neutral zone of equal opportunity.
For women musicians – today we’d have to say “non-male” – there’s a route out of the impasse that involves the dissolution of labels. Bassist Ursula Harrison, the BBC Young Jazz Musician 2024 winner, whom I interview in these pages, even eschews the label “jazz musician” itself. Maybe women musicians are tempted to redefine jazz as they battle to renegotiate their status within it.
This is not to say that blues sentiments are oddities locked in time: there will always be conflict between men and women based on their sexualities and, with increasing self-consciousness no doubt, they’ll find an outlet in dodgy songs. Listening to Joe Williams overcoming his amorous reluctance by singing “Well alright, OK. You win, well I’m in love with you”, as if the prospect of romance were something to be wary of, or to Jimmy Rushing complaining that the woman he sent for took 24 hours to arrive, thus suggesting he’s not worth any urgency of response, one wonders if performers and listeners are bothered by lyrics and their connotations. It would be a poor outcome for lyricists if they weren’t.