Josh White – The Elektra Years

Context can be everything. Getting what’s going on in this new compilation demands at least a bit of it. Josh White was once a near-household name of, say, B.B. King or Emmylou Harris proportions; he still was in the years covered here — mid-to-late 1950s — when Elektra was primarily a folk label.

If you’d asked his northern, largely white liberal fan base to name a blues singer at the time, they might well have come up with his name alone, or maybe his plus jazz blues singer Joe Williams. But very little of the music on this set, the song content of a highly polished and practiced yet sometimes politically daring nightclub act, would generally be classified as blues today at all. White’s approach is not the most sought-out among those who only order their American roots music gritty. That’s not to say that the music to be found in these 39 tracks is less than engaging and lasting — but it has to be taken on its own terms.

South Carolina-raised White was already recording as a teenager in the late 20s. Until World War II, his output was in the Piedmont/Southeastern blues vein — with guitar picking as intricate as in the old-time country of the same area, and often with vocal clarity and finesse very different from that of, say, Delta or Texas blues. But his music was as indisputably trad blues, as was the work of a contemporary such as Blind Boy Fuller.

White relocated to New York in the ’40s and was an early civil rights advocate. He joined Woody Guthrie and Pete Seeger in the Almanac Singers, did some work on Broadway, had a pop hit with the lighthearted but sympathetic to the poor tune “One Meatball”, and became the toast of the then-hip nightlife scene centered around New York’s Cafe Society, often appearing on the same bill as Billie Holiday. The surroundings were upscale — and slippery.

His futile attempt to explain himself to the House Un-American Activities Committee left him professionally blacklisted and shunned by the establishment leftist world that had lionized him. It took some guts for producer Jac Holzman just to sign him to Elektra for the recordings culled here, but Holzman and company went further, presenting White as an outright black sex symbol, the powerful individual he could be — with LP covers that stressed both. That cover art is presented in this package along with insightful commentary by White biographer Elijah Wald.

The sound of these Josh White records is a fluid blend of folk and pop influences reflecting the tastes of the cabarets and concert halls of the era, at once looking back to the Popular Front folk of Weavers-type hits (with shades of the calculated “roots music” of Broadway’s Oklahoma) and the audience-pleasing professionalism of upscale New York clubs — a sort of blues and folk quite different from the later “frat house clean” of the Kingston Trio.

The production values are relatively slick, centering on White’s own masterful acoustic guitar, plus the odd drum kit and small jazz combo-style slap bass, often in the hands of Spike Lee’s dad, Bill. The results bring to mind the “concert hall country” records of Tennessee Ernie Ford at the same time. (A lot of houses must have had copies of both the “One Meatball” and “Sixteen Tons” singles, sitting right next to Burl Ives’ “The Blue Tail Fly”!)

When the material is similar to Cousin Ernie’s (common stock storytelling and gospel based songs from the pre-blues and country split), the results are just as outstanding and hold up as well over time — White’s take on “St. James Infirmary”, for example.

What’s happened to Josh’s blues is well-exemplified by “Red Sun” — with a lyric by Langston Hughes, no less. There are more of those fine syncopated sounds and guitar runs, but that club crowd-pleasing and sonic results-oriented side of White cannot lead these ears to quite believe he’s responding to his “baby” having “gone” anywhere. It’s always a careful performance, never sounding totally engaged.

The man’s sheer bravery in bringing on the more political songs and what those numbers had to say — as early as the 1940s — gives them a spine-tingling frisson past their day. In “Jim Crow Train”, that spirit-chilling, segregated train chugs onto the record and speeds up through some guitar pyrotechnics before White informs us that it needs to slow down: “Stop Jim Crow, so I can ride, black and white side by side.” In “Southern Exposure”, White sings of being treated, as a field worker, “no better than a mountain goat.”

And in “Free And Equal Blues”, even that St. James Infirmary is revisited, satirically — with the good scientific news that molecules of blood plasma have no race, so maybe the infirmary could spare a few for a black man in need. Such material was still likely to nicely discomfort a lot of audiences when these records were made. Don’t let the sweet sounds fool you; this was music to be reckoned with. And in our context, it still can be.