History-Making Cover Songs, Part 2 of 3

This one's not as happy. But it may run deeper.

Hank at the Opry

The last time I wrote about transformative popular-song covers—“Respect” and “Make Me an Angel”—I defined my various terms (or failed to define them!) and gave some music-business-history background, so I won’t do that here. That post, the first in a series of three, turned out to be about how two women, each in her own way, forever reinvented songs written and first recorded by men.

In this second entry on covers, and then in the third and final, I’m exploring how certain white men reinvented certain songs written and recorded by black men [UPDATE, NOT DOING THAT AFTER ALL IN #3], as well as certain songs recorded by white men pretending to be black men. In a way, this is a territory at once bleak and familiar. By now, everybody has at least some sense, I think, that black artists were copied, copped, and ripped of by white producers. Everybody also may have some sense of the pervasiveness of blackface minstrelsy in the formation of American music and theater.

In another way, though, I think the particular stories I’m looking at point to artistic, racial, and business issues more complicated than often acknowledged and tell us things about our American vernacular and its history that will always remain compelling and hard to deal with.

Today: “Lovesick Blues,” a song that has a place in the annals not just of classic country & Western but of overall roots Americana, thanks to the great recording by Hank Williams, released in 1949. Have a listen. Peak “hillbilly”—as the genre then being renamed country & Western was still somes called.

By the end of ‘48, Williams had been performing the song live, for enthusiastic audiences, on the “Louisiana Hayride” radio broadcast. And yet he recorded it against the advice of both his band members and his MGM-connected producer/impresario Fred Rose.

The singer’s instinct was better: “Lovesick Blues” became a number-one country chart hit and made Hank Williams a star. He joined “The Grand Ole Opry,” the top country radio broadcast, released six big country hits in the succeeding months, and the rest is a suicidal history of stardom, misery and self-abuse. Hank died at 29.

A quirky thing about the role of “Lovesick Blues” in Williams’s career. He’s justly revered as a great songwriter, and many of his most famous hits are songs he wrote; some were covered by pop-chart singers. But he didn’t write his big breakthrough. “Lovesick Blues” is a cover. In some ways it’s a country cover. In other ways it’s a country cover of a pop song, a category that gets us, as it always does, into blackface, and the drill-down into the roots of “Lovesick Blues” is stranger even than that foreshadowing might suggest.

The recording that Williams was most obviously covering in ‘49 was an earlier hillbilly-chart version of “Lovesick Blues.” (“Cover,” at its most precise, once meant a pop-chart rendering of a hit song from a non-pop chart—but we’re not being that precise; in those days, artists revived older songs in new versions all the time.) In 1939, the country artist Rex Griffin, whose career had peaked with his 1937 hit “The Last Letter,” released “Lovesick Blues,” to little effect.

Hank Williams clearly knew the Griffin recording. He straight-up copped a good bit of its vocal arrangement. And like Williams, Griffin was a well-regarded songwriter.

But Griffin didn’t write “Lovesick Blues” either. He was covering, or remaking, or what you like, an even earlier recording.

The earlier recording is by Emmett Miller, and it’s important. Miller actually released the song twice, once in 1925 and again in 1928; the 1925 recording was made for Ralph Peer, a New York City record producer who helped launch the country-music business by traveling to the rural South to seek out and record local talent. Most famously, Peer recorded the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers, in 1927, in Bristol, Tennessee. Both acts became huge stars and made hillbilly recording a big business.

Peer recorded Emmett Miller even earlier than that, though, in Asheville, North Carolina, so Miller can be seen as preceding the Carters and Rodgers in establishing the business of hillbilly recording, and here's where our drilldown hits a hard spot. The categories bust up, the drillbit shatters, fragments fly. Duck your head.

When Peer recorded him, thereby launching country music as a comercial category, Emmett Miller was already a professional pop singer, in a long American tradition where white men performed, in blackface, a grotesque parody of racist derogations of black men. Going all the way back to the first half of the 19th century, blackface minstrelsy was originally a northern and urban theatrical depiction of a totally fake plantation South, but by the time Peer recorded Miller, minstrelsy had spread into the actual South and dovetailed everywhere with the rise of blues, swing, and, yes, country.

A few years ago, I probably would have linked you to the two Miller recordings of “Lovesick Blues,” which are easily found on YouTube; his work was also reissued in 1996 on a compilation CD, “Emmett Miller, Minstrel Man of Georgia,” which you can easily find. Today I’ll leave it to you to decide if a direct encounter with blackface will be useful for you or not. Recoil is natural. For whatever it’s worth, I don’t see a lot of daylight between Emmett Miller and rock and roll or—the point of this piece—that supposedly whitest of all genres, country. But there’s no need to listen if you don’t want to. The point is the same.

The point is that blackface was all over early country. Jimmie Rodgers performed both in blackface and not in blackface. Uncle Dave Macon did a lot of minstrel-tradition songs. Many songs thought of today as rural and traditional come from commercially published blackface-minstrel-theater staples. Country music, a commercial genre expressing a rural, “folk,” “trad,” backwoods white southernness (“three chords and the truth”), was at its origins fully dependent on polished, professional, northern, urban theatrical forms enmeshed in music influenced by and parodying music made by black people.

Some say Hank Williams knew the blackface Miller version as well as Griffin’s country version of “Lovesick Blues.” Others deny it. Whether or not we can prove Hank’s familiarity with Miller, the effort to deny it seems pretty strained, and if Williams did know Miller’s version, he would probably have known the later recording, made in 1928, with sidemen listed as the Georgia Crackers. That was a classic name for a hillbilly band. Country involved a lot of rubeface. Those sidemen in fact included the great white swing players the Dorsey Brothers and Gene Krupa, so now we’re way beyond mere imitation and parody. Jimmie Rodgers did perform at times in blackface, as did so many others; he also recorded great tracks with Louis Armstrong on trumpet and Lil Hardin playing piano, and there’s nothing “inauthentic” to me about Rodgers’s vocal on those tracks. Armstrong himself, one of the greatest jazz artists of all time, took a lot as a performer from blackface styles practiced by black performers in minstrelsy’s later years. The great early work of Duke Ellington was created for the Cotton Club’s “jungle” reviews, beloved by white audiences.

Hank’s breakthrough, “Lovesick Blues.” has driven us down into the nation’s bad history. It’s also landed us in a place where there’s no such thing as pop, country, r&b, swing, or rock and roll. It’s not about “genre-crossing.” It’s about the non-existence of genres—at least when you’re listening to the music. Purists exist in every part of every industry, but Hank Williams didn’t think “that song’s not authentically rural and white, better avoid it”; Louis Armstrong didn’t think “better stay away from anything but true jazz.” They knew music, theater, and audiences. They were artists.

Anyway, I’d been aware for a while of Hank Williams’s roots in Emmett Miller’s blackface, but here’s something I only learned recently. I’ll make it the last wrinkle in this piece.

“Lovesick Blues” wasn’t written by Emmett Miller, either. He too was covering and tweaking even earlier recordings of song first entitled “I’ve Got the Love-Sick Blues,” which came out of that great pop-production machine known as Tin Pan Alley, a late-19th and early-20th-century New York City phenomenon that cranked out sheet music both for the stage and home use. “I’ve Got the Love-Sick Blues” was really first written by the songwriting team Cliff Friend and Irving Mills, in 1922. Friend, a Midwestern white Protestant, had been ushered into the business by the Jewish blackface star Al Jolson. Mills, born Isadore Minsky, in Odessa, would later manage and produce Duke Ellington and co-write the Cab Calloway hit “Minnie the Moocher.” That’s just the way things were.

The original Friend-Mills “I’ve Got the Love-Sick Blues” was performed on stage, in a 1922 review, by the light mezzo-soprano Anna Chandler. The first recording, on 78-rpm shellac, was probably made that same year, by Elsie Clark, a white singer who mainly did somewhat stiff covers of Bessie Smith-like material. That one’s hard to find—at least for me, at least so far.

But the song was also recorded, that same year by Irving Kaufman, singing under the goyish pseudonym Jack Shea. This is one you’ve got to hear, because it turns out that if you're looking for the deepest roots of peak Hank Williams hillbilly, you'll find them in 1922 in the pop vocal stylings of a first-generation Russian American Jew from Syracuse, New York.

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Endnote: I learned about the Irving Kaufman recording from an amazing compilation entitled “Protobilly: the Minstrel and Tin Pan Alley DNA of Country Music,” produced by Henry Sapoznik, Dick Spottswood, and David Giovannoni, with Dom Flemons—of the Carolina Chocolate Drops and his own solo work—joining in on the fascinating liner notes. Highly recommended if you’re into this stuff (note that you will encounter uncensored racial slurs by the score).

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