EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 5 - Piedmont Blues

Genre of the Day - Piedmont Blues

Album of the Day - Freight Train and and other North Carolina Folk Songs and Tunes by Elizabeth Cotten (1958)

Time will only tell if the neon, behemoth vaping industry will inspire any music of lasting value. A relic of the time juul became a pariah of the pre-COVID moral panic around kids vaping, there’s the tune “Where’s My Juul” by Lil Mariko brattily parodying addict’s furor when they misplace the slim little nicotine sticks. Good old-fashioned tobacco, though, ties into one of America’s most revered and lively guitar traditions in the form of eastern Appalachia’s Piedmont blues.

North Carolina has been the beating heart (or rather half-capacity lungs) of the US’ tobacco industry since a few centuries ago, particularly in the state’s center region of Piedmont that crosses state boundaries from Georgia all the way up to Pennsylvania. The notorious crop remained the state’s largest income until 2001. In the Jim Crow south of the interwar years, Durham and other growing cities in the Piedmont strip were home to large urban Black communities searching for opportunity outside of sharecropping that was often answered by the massive tobacco industry. Employment abounded with the great deal of manual labor required to sift through and pack tobacco, decent compensation did not; a job was a job. 

Off the clock, these Black communities indulged in an emerging form of music centered around the guitar. Guitar acted as an optimal substitute for the difficult-to-transport and expensive piano in the area’s take on upbeat blues styles. Piedmont blues became characterized by players’ virtuosic finger-picking style that aimed at achieving the flexibility of ragtime piano. These players’ dedication to the guitar was especially impressive in light of the fact that many of the best were not career musicians, but folks who worked long hours in the tobacco and other menial industries and were buoyed by channeling the blues via guitar as a pastime. Though Piedmont blues would become of massive influence to aspiring guitarists in the late ‘50s and ‘60s (and Pink Floyd derived its name from combining the names of two Piedmont region guitarists, Floyd Council and Pink Anderson) when the folk revival began to champion the genre, during its heyday pearl-clutchers disparaged it as low-class and crass for its unflinching lyrical honesty and penchant for suggestiveness. Nevertheless, for a couple of decades the guitar blues were the musical lifeblood of Piedmont's Black communities, played at parties, tobacco auctions where players could earn a buck, and in downtime alike. 

The Piedmont blues talent Elizabeth Cotten had not actually worked in the tobacco industry, so unfortunately her music can’t truly be classified among the vast category of songs only in existence thanks to mankind’s propensity for nicotine addiction à la “Where’s My Juul.” She experienced a parallel life to the struggles of tobacco workers, though, working as a housekeeper most of her life starting at age nine and using her dollar-a-month salary to buy her first guitar. Cooking by the book yields desired results, but Cotten was an inadvertent innovator who learned guitar by way of her brother’s banjo. It lends her fingerpicking style a distinctively rich and unexpected quality. A religious turn in her teens made her compelled her to leave the guitar behind and concentrate on work, the songs she’d written as a precocious young teen collecting dust for decades.

It wasn’t until her fifties that a musically-inclined family she worked for led her to rediscover her talent and bring her skills to prominence at the dawn of the folk revival. “Freight Train,” a song she penned at twelve and that would be covered by a motherlode of big folk names once she finally introduced it to the world, is an astonishing song to write so young, reflecting on the small noises that pepper life like the train at the end of the street and wanting to carry them on with the deliverance of death. In her late sixties at the time of recording, it’s a sentiment that becomes increasingly pertinent with her interpretation of the hymn “When I Get Home.” Oftentimes, though, she eases more into the words of a guitar’s chords than in vocalizations, the marvel of two hands detailing a lifetime of joy, sorrow, and the instruments’ role as a foundational building block of the Piedmont of her youth. She’ll occasionally catch you off guard with the humor of a song like “Oh Babe It Ain’t No Lie” in which she wishes death upon a lying old woman in the same way a grandparent will crack the most wry joke among poignant recollections. I recently found out that one’s vocabulary peaks in one’s late sixties and early seventies, and it seems Elizabeth Cotten’s vocabulary in the way of guitar licks and radiant melody pickings reached a well-earned zenith at that age too.