Deford Bailey – Country Music’s First Black Superstar
DeFord Bailey is the Rosa Parks of country music. Truly a black man in a white man’s world, he was one of the Grand Ole Opry’s earliest and brightest stars. He enjoyed a fifteen-year tenure with the Opry (192641), confounding but inevitably captivating everyone he shared a bill with. Refusing to bow to the Opry’s then-prevailing cracker aesthetic, Bailey forsook coveralls and straw hats for clean pressed suits and wing-tip shoes. Ultimately, he was fired by the Opry over a performing rights feud, the only one of its regular performers to side with ASCAP when the newly formed BMI swept through town. He probably sat anywhere he pleased on public buses, too.
Bailey is best known as a harmonica player, and he’s considered one of the instrument’s true American virtuosos. Songs such as “Pan-American Blues”, with its harp-assimilated train whistles and haunting, natural delay, are the stuff of Bailey legend. But this recently released collection reveals him to be a guitarist and banjoist of equal facility. “Lost John” — the tale of a mid-19th-century minstrel player who frequently performed at prisons — is an exercise in banjo dexterity that rivals picking giants Roscoe Holcomb and Dock Boggs. And Bailey’s vocals are effecting enough to put a crick in your throat and keep it there. His voice is high, choked and thin, like a paper kazoo; his phrasing is soft and toothless. He’s probably the best blues singer you’ve never heard of.
Bailey, like so many of his peers, enjoyed renewed interest during the folk revival of the ’60s. But his bile for the music business — a result of the BMI debacle and a justified mistrust for record companies (several sides he recorded for Columbia in the ’20s remain unissued to this day) — kept him at home, running the shoeshine stand he opened shortly after quitting the Opry. If not for the encouragement of his close friend and recording engineer David Morton, the 26 songs on this collection — recorded in Bailey’s apartment from 1974-76 — would have gone over yonder when Bailey did in 1982. Instead, he leaves behind the map to a truly fundamental crossroads: the place where the blues and country music intersect.