Backwater Blues
Listen to this article here.
When it rained five days, and the skies turned dark as night
When it rained five days, and the skies turned dark as night
Then trouble taking place in the lowlands at nightI woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door
I woke up this morning, can’t even get out of my door
That’s enough trouble to make a poor girl wonder where she want to go
Bessie Smith’s ‘Backwater Blues’ tells the story of a woman displaced by a flood.
That’s the simple, passive interpretation I came to when I first heard it, having been encouraged and conditioned all my life to listen with detachment to songs about tragedies that happen in some other place or some other time. Let’s call it the BandAid or ‘We Are the World’ model of listening, in which there’s an assumption of the audience’s unfamiliarity with the subject matter. ‘Do They Know It’s Christmas?’—and do you? Like all forms of charity, the logic of capitalist property relations is baked in: there will always be poor people but it’s up to those of us enjoying Christmas On Earth to ameliorate the worst effects of poverty by opening our ears, our hearts and our wallets. It’s not only a way of listening that’s being constructed here; this is how our Western subjectivity is formed.
‘Backwater Blues’, like the blues in general, makes the opposite assumption—it assumes familiarity and a shared subjectivity. It’s what made the blues so effective as a repository for African-American history and collective consciousness, but also as a commodity for white record company executives to build a market on.
It’s probably Smith’s most famous song. She penned it herself shortly before recording it in February 1927 with the Harlem stride pianist James P. Johnson. For decades, musicologists and historians believed ‘Backwater Blues’ to be about the Mississippi River Great Flood of the same year, which to this day remains the most catastrophic natural disaster in American history. The banks of the river burst across seven states, inundating an area nearly the size of Scotland. David Evans, writing in the journal Popular Music in 2007, describes how ‘between 250 and 1,000 people lost their lives, between 600,000 and a million people became refugees, over 162,000 homes were flooded, 41,000 buildings were destroyed, and up to a billion dollars in economic losses were sustained.’1 The majority of victims of this disaster were African-American.
A backwater is another name for a flood plain. Flood plains are not prime real estate. In fact, because everybody knows that rivers flood and flood plains are there to take the hit, you would only put houses on a flood plain if you didn’t give a shit about the people living there. It feels almost tacky to point out that Southern landowners at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t give a shit about Black people. The concentration of Black residents in these areas led to the massive loss of life and livelihoods described in ‘Backwater Blues’. Like Hurricane Katrina in 2004, you couldn’t call the disaster “natural” without laughing up your sleeve.
It was equally a disaster of racist property relations and it extended beyond the flooded Mississippi and into the relief effort. People displaced by the flood were herded under armed guard, forced to work for rations of food and clothes on pain of prison or even death, with the refugees eventually contracted out to the landowning class under conditions resembling the slavery they had escaped only decades earlier. Evans suggests that this ‘last straw’ contributed to the Great Migration of African-Americans to the industrial North. Black Southerners escaping rural dispossession accounted for a large swath of the growing Black working class—the very record-buying audience of blues recording artists like Bessie Smith.
But Bessie Smith didn’t write ‘Backwater Blues’ about the flooded Mississippi, which we now know, because she recorded it two months before this particular flood happened. Over time the song became associated with it because the horror of that specific event pertained in the case of every other similar event of the time—of which there were many. The underlying property relations that made it so catastrophic weren’t specific to the Mississippi Delta, and audiences who hadn’t necessarily experienced floods were still able to see something of themselves in the implicit theme of race and class dispossession.
Evans’s article makes the case that Bessie Smith found inspiration for ‘Backwater Blues’ on Christmas of 1926 when the Cumberland River flooded during her stay in Nashville. With her show cancelled, she found herself in a boarding house above an undertaker’s, crowded together with people who’d been displaced. Angela Davis, in Blues Legacies and Black Feminism (1998), recounts the words of Smith’s sister-in-law, Maud Smith:
there was a lot of other people there, and they were trying to get her to stay, so they started hollerin’ “Miss Bessie, please sing the ‘Back Water Blues,’ please sing the ‘Back Water Blues.’” Well, Bessie didn’t know anything about any “Back Water Blues,” but after we came back home … [she] came into the kitchen one day, and she had a pencil and paper, and she started singing and writing.2
So ‘Backwater Blues’ isn’t about the Mississippi flooding—but it sure as hell is about a long-suffering but resilient group of people who needed their story to be told in the wake of a disaster that was as much man-made as it was “natural.”
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ‘cross the pond
Then they rowed a little boat about five miles ‘cross the pond
I packed all my clothes, throwed ‘em in, and they rowed me alongWhen it thunders and lightning, and the wind begins to blow
When it thunders and lightning, and the wind begins to blow
There’s thousands of people ain’t got no place to go
All songs mean different things to different audiences. You can like it, and you can ‘get’ it, and sometimes one can happen without the other. When Bessie Smith sang ‘Backwater Blues’ into a microphone in a recording studio in New York City, she was telling two stories at the same time.
One story, the one that white executives at Columbia Records thought they were using to realise a profit, depicted an unfortunate event—what Davis calls a ‘merely private misfortun[e].’ The fact that hundreds of thousands if not millions of African-Americans could relate to this experience offered capital a selling point. Black Americans were an early target market for the record industry and female blues singers provided the product. Davis points out that Mamie Smith’s ‘Crazy Blues’, released in 1920 on Okeh Records, stands as the first ‘race record’ of its kind. ‘Within one month’s time,’ Davis writes, ‘black people had purchased 75,000 copies at a dollar each.’ Bessie Smith’s mastery of the blues also proved profitable with white audiences titillated by her ‘shouting and moaning and praying and suffering’ in a ‘wild, rough, Ethiopian voice’ (to quote a contemporary review by Carl Van Vechten in Vanity Fair). The audience for this first story was the record buying public whose sensibilities, as well as their musical tastes, might lend themselves to active or passive listening—with the tension between the two subsumed in the form of the record as commodity.
The other story began before ‘Backwater Blues’ was written, with the dispossessed people above the undertaker’s pleading with Smith to ‘sing the Back Water Blues’. Whether these people bought Columbia’s records or not, they’d certainly heard Smith sing live—and almost certainly heard nothing ‘Ethiopian’ in it because this story is uniquely American. It was their story and it didn’t start with Bessie Smith. She picked up the thread and carried it farther and wider than anyone had done before—so wide, in fact, that it reached all the way here, to me, now. But songs like ‘Backwater Blues’ must have taken on a specific quality for Smith’s Black audiences; something at once more personal but also bigger than a ‘merely private misfortune.’ Sitting in my little home office in Glasgow, typing this on a laptop, I’ll never know exactly what that is. All I’ve got is the recording—which is something. But there’s something else that’s lost forever: the subject-forming quality of the blues and its demand that this way of looking at the world finds a vehicle for expression, to make sense of what’s happening. That’s something I can ony get a glimpse of, if I put in the effort to find it.
Davis argues that the ‘collective property’ of songs like ‘Backwater Blues’ and their ‘socializing character’ helped ‘carve out a new space in which black working people could gather and experience themselves as a community.’ Having really lived the blues, and being shaped by the same immanent forces that spawned the blues format, ‘blues song represents the collective woes of the community, along with the determination to conquer them,’ Davis writes. The musical style and the real life phenomenon of the the blues were inseparable.
Some music never gets old because we need to believe this about it—that it’s got some affective potential that binds us to others, and to each other, across unwalkable space and unwaitable time. I think if there’s a tie that binds people to begin with, a shared experience of trauma and oppression, music like this can offer a series of neural pathways through which a collective consciousness can flourish. Davis’s argument, in this light, is spot on.
But what about now, when the world is the way it is, and we are the way we are—atomised, alienated, without a political channel to turn discontent into organised resistance, endlessly visible to each other but mediated by companies much more sophisticated in their ability to gauge audiences than Columbia Records ever was? Music that speaks to and even operates as a social consciousness and memory—how has this changed over time? Can music in America and other “developed” capitalist societies still do this? Are there modern-day equivalents? Or has the political economy and its shaping of the way we hear music undermined our ability to have this kind of collective experience?
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then I went and stood upon some high old lonesome hill
Then I looked down on the house where I used to liveBackwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go
Backwater blues done caused me to pack up my things and go
‘Cause my house fell down, and I can’t live there no more
As the twentieth anniversary approaches of the September 11th, 2001 attacks, it’s easy to see how these collective experiences can be weaponised against the very people they happen to. The families of 9/11 victims and survivors are scathing in their opposition to President Biden’s planned appearance at memorial events. They cite successive administrations’ refusal to release documents alleged to show Saudi Arabia’s complicity in the attacks. The threat of terror provided justification for the USA PATRIOT Act, the opening salvo in a steady war of attrition on Americans’ civil liberties since 2001 (and in reality long before). The so-called War on Terror ended not with a bang but a whimper as the US scrambles to evacuate from Afghanistan—which the Bush administration invaded on the flimsy pretext of ‘getting’ Osama bin Laden and avenging our wounded national pride. The disaster of the Iraq War produced a memory hole bigger than any Orwellian fantasy of totalitarianism, with apparatchiks like David Frum—the man who actually composed the phrase ‘Axis of Evil’—now writing articles lamenting how things could have gone differently. Meanwhile drone warfare has escalated, largely under the aegis of a president who came to power on some vague suggestion of ending our imperialist interventions. Capitalism itself teetered on the brink in 2008, with Western economies yet to fully recover. The Movement for Black Lives forced the issue of police and prison abolition into the mainstream, even summoning insurrectionary energy in the streets; though with no organised channels to direct that energy we’ve seen it dissipate without any substantial change in the way the ruling class defends private property. The twenty-first century has so far seen more extreme weather events than at any other time in living memory, while an obedient corporate media continuously fail to point out how the bloated US Department of Defense is the number one polluter on the planet, favouring instead a focus on drop in the ocean consumerist tinkering—and litigating the question of whether climate change is even happening. We’ve watched, skulking and glassy-eyed, as a virus wipes out the old, the infirm and those who can’t afford to social distance because they’re too busy serving those who can, while the people putatively responsible for public health spend more energy keeping the tills ringing than they do keeping our hearts beating and our lungs breathing air. Our world and our epoch are defined by crises: epistemological, racial, class and gender-based, political and existential.
There’s no music that captures the ‘collective experience’ of any of this, not because music can’t do it but because we’re not experiencing it collectively. Still, Bessie Smith’s ‘Backwater Blues’ can tell us a lot about ourselves here in this moment. It might not provide the answers, but it certainly raises the right questions. The race and class antagonisms embedded like metadata in ‘Backwater Blues’ are the thread of a story to be picked up and carried farther and wider. We can break the transactional habit of listening at a remove by cracking open the shell of music’s commodity form.
Then, something radiates from the past through recordings like this. Sure, you can’t just reach out through fossilised aeons and touch the person or people who made these diamond-like musical artefacts, but like a satellite picking up signals broadcast from miles away you’re in some kind of direct communication with them and the world they came from—which is your world too. And like a satellite, it gets to a point where either you or the music (the metaphor works either way) are too far out in space to stay connected, no gravity holds us together and the line goes dead. The two worlds are lost to each other forever, inevitably, tragically—but how beautiful it is that that hasn’t happened yet!
Now that the “natural” disasters have started happening to us—not to some other who’s far removed enough to deserve our pity—how do we make sense of it? Will we recognise in each other our collective potential as a group, as a people, as a class with our imminent dispossession in common? Or do we have to wait until some kind of flood washes our lives away, until we’re standing upon some high old lonesome hill, looking down to where we used to live?
Mmmm, I can’t move no more
Mmmm, I can’t move no more
There ain’t no place for a poor old girl to go.
David Evans, ‘Bessie Smith’s “Back-Water Blues”: The Story behind the Song’, Popular Music, 26.1 (2007), 97–116.
Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday (New York: Vintage Books, 1999).