of the juke joints. Albert Murray argues that contrary to the “fundamental assumptions” of the church, a blues musician is, “an agent of affirmation and continuity in the face of adversity” ([18], p. 38). However, many of the most influential blues musicians were not nearly as free as their music implies. They were Christ-haunted, operating within the limits of their evangelical Protestant faith; they were Cash’s “hell of a fellow” who enjoyed sensual pleasures but never abandoned the belief that those very pleasures were forbidden and sinful. Certainly some blues musicians experienced no religious angst due to their profession; but many of the most influential early blues musicians were forced to negotiate between an earnest religious faith and their “secular” desires to play blues and enjoy the few pleasures afforded to them. Angela Davis identifies this irony: “The most pervasive opposition to the blues, however, was grounded in the religious practices of the historical community responsible for the production of the blues in the first place” ([27], p. 123). The blues should be understood, in part, as growing out of this religious context, because many of its most influential musicians maintained this evangelical Protestant faith, even as they frequently violated it.
This discussion of the blues will be limited to rural blues musicians of the very early twentieth
century who, in the words of Charles Reagan Wilson while describing Charley Patton, “came as close as
anyone to defining a new art form, the blues, out of the folk ingredients of African American music in
the Delta” ([9], p. 119). Unfortunately, our modern perception of the blues has been excessively shaped
by folklorists like Alan Lomax and the efforts of the 1960s “folk revivalists” who brought attention to
blues musicians fitting their notions of pre-modern, un-commercial “folk” artists. This resulted in an
intense focus on rural, acoustic, male blues guitarists, to the detriment of the urban “Blues Queens”
of the 1920s, commercial-minded composers like W.C. Handy, and urban musicians, who did not fit
the revivalists’ interests in re-discovering a music which gave voice to an oppressed people. I fully
recognize the diversity and breadth of styles and artists that contribute to the multi-faceted genre
called “the blues”, and I do not wish to add to the perception that the history of the blues is the history
of the rural bluesmen of the Mississippi Delta.
My intent is to focus on the religious tensions between notions of “secular” and “sacred” as the
new genre of blues music was first coalescing into a popular and controversial music form. Not only
did the blues first take recognizable form in and around the Mississippi Delta at the turn of the century,
but these religious tensions are most pronounced in the lives and music of the earliest professional
blues musicians. As the blues moved from its rural roots to urban areas, such as Memphis, Chicago,
and Detroit, the “Christ-haunted” features became less pronounced. This fits the well-defined dynamic
that homogenous, rural societies tend to hold on to religious beliefs and other cultural practices more
staunchly than the more heterogeneous and mutable urban ones [28]. For example, the hedonistic
activities that had to be hidden in rural juke joints on Saturday nights in the Delta, could more easily
and publically be enjoyed on Beale Street in Memphis or Maxwell Street in Chicago. The evangelical
Protestant suspicions of “worldly” music and pleasures were strongest in the rural South, and thus
exerted the most pressure on the blues at its genesis.
Although the historical origins of the blues are murky at best, it is clear that it took root most
strongly in the deep South of the Mississippi Delta, north Louisiana, and east Texas around the turn
of the twentieth century. The blues was born from African Americans’ hard physical labor in the Jim
Crow era, such as the field hollers of people plowing behind mules or picking cotton, or the rhythmic
work songs of groups hoeing rows, chopping trees, or driving rails in unison. It did not take long
for these proto-blues songs (in terms of rhythms, rhyming patterns, and lyrical themes) to join with
a guitar or fiddle and move out of the daylight and into the Saturday night juke joints, fish fries,
and “balls” where African American laborers blew off steam and reveled in hard-earned, hedonistic
free time.
Ironically, juke joints—which were rural, ramshackle dwellings used to hold Saturday night
parties—functioned similarly to churches in that they were one of the few autonomous social spaces
available to African Americans in the Jim Crow South, with the significant difference that nearly every
activity occurring in juke joints was prohibited by the community’s evangelical Protestant culture:
