When Elijah Wald first mentioned Josh White to his parents, their memories clashed. His father recalled an earthy laborer, sweating soulfully; his mother, a sleek entertainer who changed his silk shirt twice during a performance. The greatest strength of Wald's "Josh White: Society Blues" is its recognition that this division was intrinsic to White's career and that its balance of folk art and show business was singular, inspired and even heroic.
White was a cusp artist who consolidated his style as country blues was winding down and gospel music was revving up. He was born Feb. 11, 1914, in Greenville, S.C., the son of a laundress and a tailor who served as a part-time preacher in a Methodist church. Much of his childhood was ill-starred. His father was beaten so badly by the police that he ended his days in a mental institution, and his mother could barely support White and his six siblings. He went on the road at the age of 8, guiding blind itinerant singer-guitarists, banging the tambourine, witnessing two lynchings, shivering and starving but sending home good money.
But his precocious talent made a way for him. He was handsome and popular, and the beneficiary of a childhood as artistically fruitful as it was otherwise barren. The main reason was his mother's participation in a sanctified church, one of the small Pentecostal congregations where song and dance comprised most of the service. The harmonic and melodic demands of religious music were far more expansive than blues, and mastering them enabled White to much later "adapt his style to jazz, pop, and European folk melodies." (A similar education led a classical vocalists like Marian Anderson to progress from spirituals to lieder).
Blue notes came originally out of church moans and slurs, and a gospel singer could apply them whenever, wherever. Blues itself might not even be the best vehicle, but White knew that blue tonality was his ace. In 1950, while allowing that white men could play jazz and blues, he added, "Negro musicians manage to get those in-between tones, that sort of strained intonation, better than any white musician can." It was the closest he ever came to a racial challenge.
His recording career began at 18. Wald allows that these early blues exhibit a callow facility but insists that the great work lay years ahead. I disagree. From the beginning, White's style was fully achieved and strikingly new, at least for blues. Greenville was the home of the Dixie Hummingbirds, later to become a world-famous gospel quartet, and White is more properly measured not against Blind Lemon Jefferson and Blind Willie Johnson but against the Hummingbirds and its lead singer, Ira Tucker, or the group's bass singer in 1939, Claude Jeter, who later cultivated a slinky falsetto that would be shamelessly echoed by Al Green. Within a few measures of his first record, "Black and Evil Blues," White leaps into falsetto. A few takes later, his voice drops an octave into a growling bass, part Louis Armstrong, part storefront preacher. Within the first session, he covers almost three octaves. His first instrument had been the tambourine, and he clearly loved percussive, rapid-fire syllables, occasionally singing such lines a cappella because his fingers weren't quick enough.
In 1927, Blind Willie Johnson had recorded the first gospel blues (a minor-key version of the 16-bar form), "Motherless Children," in which his guitar, standing in for the congregation, frequently completed his thoughts in sustained non-vocalized moans. Similarly, White's use of "passing chords" to bind the melodic units derived from melisma, the extravagantly configured runs of a lined-out hymn. Having learned from quartets to sing different vocal parts, White played his guitar high and low, indeed several keys lower than Blind Willie, as if voice and guitar obeyed the same impulse. He seldom belted, preferring a dry, laconic style (not the obvious choice of a young virtuoso) and his reading of songs like "Things About Coming My Way" exhibited an introspective authority that could not be faked unless he was a better actor at 18 than he would be in his 50s.
Perhaps better than his blues, which he recorded under the names Joshua White and Pinewood Tom, were the gospel recordings attributed to "Joshua White (The Singing Christian)." In his early masterpiece, "There's a Man Goin' Around Taking Names," a song he recorded many times but never with the same intensity as the first version, an ad lib spirit allows him all kinds of sanctified freedom ("lord, lord, lord, takin' names") and a blood-curdling conclusion ("he's writing left and right, among the colored and the white").
