Figure 5. Blind Boy Fuller Photograph.
Immunity from vagrancy laws for blind musicians was not always the case and in several instances, formal documents permitted the musicians to perform in the street. Blind Boy Fuller (Figure 5) was furnished a letter permitting him to perform on the street from the superintendent of public welfare to the chief of police of Durham, North Carolina.152 This allowed him to play on the street but complicated his access to social assistance forcing him to deny income. His Social Security Report blues was not a song, but a reality because he became ineligible for support if he declared his earnings as a performer and recording artist. Gary Davis, Fuller's acquaintance was furnished a similar letter from the same superintendent two years before Fuller. Davis’s biographer Ian Zack
notes that Davis was asked apologetically not to play on the streets.153 This was fortunate for Davis, who could have been prosecuted. Fuller began losing his vision when he was roughly twenty years old. He was born in 1908 in Anson County, North Carolina before they collected birth records.154 Documentation of Fuller’s condition and treatment are of the few primary sources that specify the condition and speculate the etiology of the musicians’ visual impairment as the result of a physician’s examination (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Blind Boy Fuller 1937 Physician’s Report
While the suggestion that other musicians’ impairment had similar etiology to Fuller’s is supposition, documents of the period describe the prevalence of similar congenital blindness and visual impairment related to the unavailability of health care in their communities. The major cause
153 Zack and ProQuest, Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis, 29.
of blindness during the period was related to congenital cataracts and bacterial infections which were likely to have resulted in the visual impairment of the musicians. This includes congenital rubella syndrome which is associated with early blindness.155
Gary Davis was born in South Carolina in 1896, where six of his siblings died in infancy. According to doctor’s reports, his early blindness was due to “infant glaucoma and ulceration of the cornea,” the same conditions described in Fuller’s report.156 Whether these diagnoses were based on examinations or the physician’s supposition based on racist biases is unclear, as both cases describe the etiology as “probably gonorrhea conjunctivitis.” The probability in both Davis’s and Fuller’s reports may appear dismissive, but understandable considering the examinations were conducted by Social Security Board physicians simply to confirm their blindness, not to provide a complete diagnosis and treatment of their visual impairment.
One explanation for the prominence of blind African American popular musicians, compared to only few blind white popular musicians relates to the closeting of disability as a result of the commitment of dominant power structures to false narratives of white normativity and the perpetuation of them.157 A commitment by the Race record industry to reify minoritarian models of Black otherness by commodifying the “Blind” epithet is uncertain, but they were promoting a trope coded with white normativity for consumption by African American audiences. What response this affected during the period is also uncertain, but its popularity is a certainty.
155 469,924 measles cases were reported in the United States in 1920. Center for Disease
Control, “Achievements in Public Health, 1900–1999 Impact of Vaccines Universally Recommended for Children–United States, 1990-1998,”
https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/00056803.htm. Accessed February 7, 2018.
156 Zack and ProQuest, Say No to the Devil: The Life and Musical Genius of Rev. Gary Davis, 8.
157 See Charles W. Mills and Upso, Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017).
There were at least four white musicians from this period who had the “Blind” title who remain relatively obscure—Andrew Jenkins, Jack Mathis, Joe Mangrum, and Alfred Reed. Possibly, other blind white musicians were not marketed with the “Blind” epithet, as variously Reed appeared on record both with and without it. They produced for a racially separate but similar record industry division, Hillbilly records. Parallels are drawn between the two divisions because they were often produced at the same location recordings and marketed to internally migrated communities during the era.
“Hillbilly” divisions emerged in the mid-1920s and similarly drew from regionally renowned musicians from the South to appeal to communities with the means and accessibility to make them a viable market. The recordings for these divisions often occurred in conjunction with Race on location with mobile studio equipment. Beyond the racial divisions imposed on the phonograph industry were parallels, as well as similarities to previous successful immigrant markets. Okeh records created an “Old-Time Tunes” division during the same period, which was essentially a hillbilly division. The company played to the nostalgia of old-time in a manner that could equally have been the name of downhome Race recordings. The “Blind” epithet on Race records outnumbered blind white musicians in the Hillbilly by roughly ten times. A blind Mexican violinist, “El Ciego” Melquíades Rodriguez, who recorded nineteen songs on location in San Antonio in 1935 and 1936 used the title in Spanish.158
158 Discography of American Historical Recordings, s.v. "Ciego Melquíades (instrumentalist: violin),"
http://victor.library.ucsb.edu/index.php/talent/detail/135637/Melquades_Ciego_instrumentalist_violin. Accessed November 24, 2017.
Blind musicians on Race records only very rarely did not use the moniker. Arizona Dranes, whose recording career began in mid-1926, the same time as Jefferson, Blake, and Taggart, is one of these exceptions. An advertisement by Okeh in Talking Machine World announcing her debut does not mention the Gospel singer’s blindness but contains a sketched image of her with closed eyes. Gary Davis first recorded as Blind Gary in New York City in 1935 for ARC, on a trip with Blind Boy Fuller and talent scout J.B. Long.159 After 1943, he recorded as Reverend Gary Davis.
A tendency in academic studies to situate American popular musical studies within a Black/white binary ignores the heterogeneity of African American communities reflected in vastly diverse musical production. While Radano identifies “the formation of Black modern music” as crucial to Black identity during this period, the cohesion of a singular expression did not occur, but rather an expansion in the range of musical expressions, representative of the fluidity of Black communities. This reduction of “Black” music is common in the essentialization of Black popular music as of a singular character to juxtapose it with white music (in a similar treatment.) This indeed produced music considered reflective of an aesthetic of Black modernity. The producers of this music are considered influential in the construction of the aesthetic of modernity, as with Ellington, Bennie Moten, and others. The period also witnessed the popularization of nostalgic musical expressions. As jazz and classic blues propelled communities into modernity, downhome blues and evangelism inflected the premodern while it remained a current and relevant practice in many communities.
The “Blind” epithet was used in the marketing of Salvatore Massaro, a sighted jazz guitarist better known by his other pseudonym, Eddie Lang. He made ten recordings with Okeh as Blind
Willie Dunn “to mask his race,” during the period of segregated racial divisions in the popular music industry in the United States.160 Scholars argue that Johnson and Lang’s styles were so
unique that the pseudonym was insignificant, as if no other guitars could have produced the recordings. The recordings were sold by Parlophone and Odeon in Europe “correctly credited,” suggesting that a racially integrated duo were not perceived as problematic by record executives there.161 However, identifying that integrated bands were problematic is merely the starting point. The idea that record executives deemed interracial production problematic is not nearly as likely as the notion that integrated production complicated marketing. Ultimately, sales dictated marketing decisions and the use of pseudonym. The success of artists, particularly Jefferson, would seem likely for the use of the “Blind” epithet in the pseudonym and the clear categorization of a Race record, despite Lang’s recognition as a jazz guitarist. Lang complicated the racial divisions of the industry by accompanying the era’s most popular artists, Louis Armstrong, Bessie Smith, Paul Whiteman, and Bing Crosby.
In 1928, Massaro or “Lang” as “Dunn” recorded five duos with Lonnie Johnson and with a racially integrated group, the Gin Bottle Four, that included King Joe Oliver, Hoagy Carmichael, and Lonnie Johnson in 1929. This is notable because of their occurrence a decade before the recordings of Benny Goodman’s combo that included Charlie Christian, Fletcher Henderson, and Lionel Hampton, considered the first all-star racially integrated jazz group.
Sighted normativity suggests that blindness provided a sanctuary from visually perceptible acts of aggression against the musicians, based on race, disability, class, or musical expression.
160 Obrecht, Early Blues: The First Stars of Blues Guitar.
161 "The Lonnie Johnson-Eddie Lang Duets," (New York, N.Y: NewBay Media LLC,
Blind production subverted marginalization from dominant positions in these categories. The musicians shared the embodiment of the intersections of marginalizing stigma, so the reception of the musicians by African American consumers who also shared this experience, whether as an aspect of their present or past is significant. Campbell discusses societal constructions of ableism as those which affirm normativity, in contrast to other scholarship on disability.162 Audiences’ assumptions about the politics of blindness at the juncture of modernity and as a mode of stratifying class within racial subjectivity are themselves determining factors in the construction of disability. Popular blind musicians from within African American communities were actors in this construction, but through buying and listening to the music of blind performers, audiences also served to construct Black cultural memory and discourses of ableism. The representations of artists in advertisements, as well as the appellation alone, served as the starting point of the trope of the musicians in popular music, but the sonic representations of blindness as a site of resistance, agency, and autonomy emanating from the downhome communicated a powerful statement to audiences.
In contrast to the manner in which record labels represented the artists and their music, one could argue they were neither limited to a rural existence nor an “old-fashioned” expression. They were songsters whose livelihood depended on a diverse repertoire, including the current and popular. Christopher Small describes the "songster" tradition as a musician well versed in a variety of styles to satisfy a broad audience, which appropriately describes the itinerant musical practice of the artists whose craft developed through a variety of spaces and street performance.163 Turner
162 Campbell, Contours of Ableism, 16-29.
163 Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue Survival and Celebration in African American Music, (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1998).
Junior Johnson, a blind unrecorded street performer, apologized for singing the blues when he mistook Lomax as a reverend, “You mus’n think hard of me for singing one of these little no harm blues. I don’t mean um. But this is the only way I gets my sumpin to eat…I keeps my mind off the blues when I sings um…; I don’t ever sing um unless they makes me.”164 This apology came after
Lomax gave Johnson the first of two half dollars, he received the second half after his apology to Lomax (reverend or not). According to Kernfield, “(W)orking musicians were required to be immediately conversant with hundreds of tunes in order to play different types of jobs and in order to fill patrons requests.”165 Elijah Wald in his description of street performers’ versatility states, “(T)heir repertoire could range from older church hymns to gospel shouts, from ballads to minstrel ditties, blues, and the products of Tin Pan Alley.”166 As artists of popular music whose acclaim was derived from a singular, signature, style, their versatility was not a quality relevant to their recording careers. In fact, artists recorded under a pseudonym even within downhome idioms. Often this occurred when musicians recorded across sacred and secular contexts.
Artists who performed in a variety of settings for a range of audiences assumed distinct identities on recordings, yet the use of transparent pseudonyms for popular musicians on recordings is curious if it was intended to deceive consumers. Alternate pseudonyms for the musicians maintain the “Blind” epithet, a practice that suggests record companies were capitalizing on a meaning of the “Blind” appellation which did not relate to an artist’s unique identity.
The idea that blind mendicant musicians were versed in a variety of styles to cater to their audiences, yet only produced downhome recordings did not necessarily reflect their versatility as
164 Lomax, The Land Where the Blues Began.
165 Barry Kernfeld and Howard Rye, "Comprehensive Discographies of Jazz, Blues, and
Gospel," Notes 51, no. 2 (1994): 528.
performers. This influenced the limitations placed on their recordings by white, sighted record producers. The confinement of blind artists in their recorded production is indeed vital to the discussion of social formations of disability. This is complicated by the point that white producers presupposed African American audiences interest in their presentation of blindness as disability or extraordinary ability as a musical expression.167 The suggestion that the musicians were playing to the marketing of their blindness further complicates this and truly is impossible to determine.
167 Richard Middleton, Voicing the Popular : On the Subjects of Popular Music (New York: