Josh White

Well, we heard it from Lead Belly.

Let's hear it from Josh White.

Too late, too late, too late.

It's too late, too late.

And Radio Luxembourg.

Yeah, but then you had like Marty Robbins people, and particularly people like Josh White suddenly appeared.

Oh, yeah.

A black singer with a small guitar, and he would be singing, but then it sort of went...

Let It Roll is a Pantheon podcast, and you can listen to more great podcasts at www.pantheonpodcasts.com. Today, Nate and Dave Thompson continue the Let It Folk mini-series, which focuses on Dave's book, An Evolving Tradition, The Child Ballads in Modern Folk and Rock.

Today's episode continues the story of the Child Ballads as the early recording and broadcasting era segues into the first folk revival, and we meet characters like Alan Lomax, Ewan McCall, Jean Ritchie, Josh White, and a young Judy Collins.

Email us at letitrollpodcast at gmail.com.

Pop in those earbuds and enjoy.

[laughs]

It's not a history of folk music, I tell you.

[laughs] It's not, but we will be discussing Alan Lomax and, uh, Charles Seeger and his wife and, um, [sniffs] Ewan McCall and Gene Ritchie and Josh White.

So it's not a folk, a history of folk music, but we're gonna be talking about a lot of the major figures in folk music because they intersected with our friend Francis J.

Right.

Josh White.

The duet I really wanted to feature was Tampa Red and Georgia Tom, which that sort of gives you an idea of their geographic disparity, Tampa, Florida, and Georgia, but they recorded together in Chicago.

Right, because that's

untainted by the commercial demands.

But at the same time, it's a very artificial construct by people like Lomax and Hammond who are going back and looking at this music.

And then you have musicians like Lead Belly and Josh White, who had literally no connection to the African-American popular audience, and yet have become, especially Lead Belly, major figures in American musical history.

Yeah, because

When she returned to Treetops, she began thinking about her singing career.

She didn't want to work with Josh White anymore, possibly because of whatever had transpired privately between them.

But the public reason she gave was that she wanted to try singing to piano accompaniment rather than guitar.

Through White, Libby had met Gerald Cook.

His academic bent suited her stated mission of educating the audience on aspects of American musical history.

As she told the New York Post, "I think so few people know anything about the music that is indigenous to their own country.

Perhaps I am helping to educate as well as entertain." Plus, with a sex appeal quotient somewhat less than Josh White's, Cook wouldn't threaten to upstage Libby as the star of the show.

Libby's act with Cook used a similar set list to the shows she had performed with White, combining traditionally Black folk music with her signature torch songs.

One of Ray's more controversial acts as a producer of this show came in response to letters from CBS listeners who wrote in to complain that they couldn't decipher the words Lead Belly was singing.

Ray subsequently sidelined Lead Belly and had his songs sung by a Black blues guitarist named Josh White.

The handsome 27-year-old White had started his career as a child, serving as a guide for blind street performers.

In 1940, he was cast opposite Paul Robeson in the Broadway musical John Henry, in which Robeson played Henry and White, drawing on his ample experience with blind musicians, played the singer-guitarist Blind Lemon Jefferson.

He played up to the Uncle Tom image of the Negro." Back Where I Come From was canceled by CBS in early 1941, allegedly by the network's founder, Bill Paley.

"Our agent at William Morris told us we were set for life," recalled Lomax, "And then the great paw of America reached out and stopped it.

Mr. William B. Paley said that he didn't want any of that goddamn hillbilly music on his network, and that was that." A few months later, Ray, now a regular at Greenwich Village variety club The Village Vanguard, convinced that club's owner to let him put together a new show featuring Lead Belly and Josh White.

"For a nightclub audience to take more than 40 minutes of Lead Belly alone was risky," Ray said.

And there's a whole thing that they do in the early Red Scare you got.

People like Josh White, who's this blues singer who they call him in front of HUAC and they call Burl Ives the singer in front of HUAC.

Burl Ives, they're like, who's a communist? Who is at the meeting? With Josh White, all they want from Josh White is the communist used me as a sucker.

They claim to speak for black people.

The FBI did not want black people and communists cohabitating because they The communists, again, to their credit, and I do have a fair amount of critique of them, in the 30s, they were people who were willing to stick their neck out against lynching, against racism, defending the Scottsboro Boys.