Rattle and Hum, 1927:
the 78s of Cryin' Sam Collins
photo from Nugrape Records
by W.C. Bamberger
(April 2009)
Sam Collins' work comes and goes: available from 1927 to 1931; gone until one song was reissued in 1962 and an LP three years later; available intermittently since in various formats. And now, the 78s are on MP3--every nuance of his singing, every surface scratch and pop of the brittle originals is now available for download. I first encountered Collins more than forty years ago, on LP. I bought this in the spring 1968. Doing the math now, I see that this was exactly midway--41 years--between the time Collins first began to record, in April 1927, and now, spring 2009. The music still holds up fine 82 years along, but it mattered to me most those 41 years ago.1In the spring of 1968, the music of taproot bluesmen was hard to come by on my side of Flint, Michigan. There were no acoustic blues albums available there; no one I knew had any, no one I knew had heard any. The fact that one of the greatest acoustic one-man blues-bands, Isaiah Ross ("Dr. Ross, the Harmonica Boss") lived less than three miles from me (on "the other side of town," on a street now completely erased by urban bulldozing) was something I was not to learn for another two years. But I had read about country blues, picked up crumbs of information that made me sure this was a path I'd like to follow. So it came to pass that the first time I drove a car outside those city limits it was expressly in search of those elusive country blues albums. And, 50 miles later, I finally found myself in front of bins full of the stuff.
I chose by instinct, by an impulse to reach as far back in time as I could. I bypassed the slick albums, snubbed those with colored covers and electric guitars, and scooped up two with black and white covers on rough paper: Country Blues Encores and Crying Sam Collins and His Git-Fiddle, both on the OJL label. The Collins album reproduced a grainy half-tone ad, a drawing of a man playing guitar while seated on the whirling throne of a 78. Collins was "Crying Sam Collins" only in this anonymous ad writer's alliterative imagination. He was never billed as such on any of his records. But the record company chose to reproduce the ad as the album's cover and the title stuck. OJL was short for "Origin Jazz Library" (sic: no grammatical "-al" or "of" anywhere). When record companies first began reissue country blues records they fumbled about for a while, trying to market the albums to trad-jazz fanatics. The first Robert Johnson album on Columbia was, for example, credited as belonging to "The Thesaurus of Classic Jazz" series.
Country Blues Encores was truly a revelation, or rather a series of revelations, as each track displayed a unique style--the ragtime smuttiness of Charley Jordan's "Keep it Clean"; Blind Joe Reynolds' "Outside Woman Blues" (covered the year before by Cream, who had likely learned it from a copy of this LP); Henry Sims' vibratoless, bucksaw violin sound and the way he sang, as if swallowing every word just before it could escape his mouth; and Jaybird Coleman's truly eerie singing and the reed-crimping force of his harmonica playing. In early 1968, this was the soundtrack of an alternate earth. Then I put on the Collins LP. Unlike the shifting style-cargo of the compilation, this was one voice, one style, and over the length of the side it invited deeper listening. The first track, "Riverside Blues," seemed lackluster after the Gatling-gun pyrotechnics of the compilation; the guitar-playing was rudimentary except for a few runs at the end, and Collins' singing was pleasant, though without any real tooth. Still, his voice held my interest simply by being laid-back, underplayed, by dragging just a little behind the beat. The blues singers I had heard, even the best of those few such as Paul Butterfield or James Cotton, were to my ears, just trying too damned hard. Collins was laconic, drawing out the notes as if the coming corner of the chord change meant nothing to him at all (Collins was to remain for me the ultimate blues singer--until I heard Muddy Waters).
The second track on the Collins LP, "Loving Lady Blues," had a run-through-the-ductwork echo, the first verse had no third line, so no rhyme... but Collins' voice truly soared. At his best, as here, Collins voice is a high tenor that brushes against the underside of falsetto. On "Loving Lady Blues," it is high and clear, and more than makes up for the busted-spring sounds of his painfully out-of-tune guitar. The more I listened, the more I was transfixed by the sound of his voice--calling, luring, plaintive, imploring. For me, Collins' voice was (and remains) as mysterious as the famous face on the moon is for others: recognizable on its surface, in that the words are intelligible, but there is clearly much more to it than what's on the surface. For all it's high keening (and Collins' voice has a whetstone texture that this once justifies the word), there is a steady sympathetic pedal tone, the shape more than the sound of a shadowing bass drone, a tonic hum that anchors even his highest singing.
But there was something more that appeared for the first time on this second track, a rattling clatter that followed the contours of his slide work, a sound I had heard before, a sound I had made before. There was even more of it in the next song, "Yellow Dog Blues," and again in "Devil in the Lion's Den." It was Collins' slide rattling against the edge of the frets as he played. My own slide guitar attempts, lipstick holder on the little finger of my left hand, to "make a blues noise here" often gave rise to just such a rattle. In Collins' music, it didn't sound like a mistake, it added a physicality that made the slide work more powerful. This blue rattle was the first sound I could make that perfectly matched the record I was trying to copy. Of such small common accidents are life-long attachments made.
The inaudible hum that shadowed his voice, the physical presence of the fret rattles, these two things combined to create a hypnotic depth below the recognizable face of the lyrics: "Going up the country / Crying won't make me stay." A singer who had a lower 40 hit record with a variation of this line was another Sam Collins fan. Al Wilson, singer-guitarist with Canned Heat until his suicide, said, "Collins is the third best one-song man. [Garfield] Akers is THE best and King Solomon Hill is second... Collins has the most amorphous right hand of all time." Which one-song that was, Wilson didn't say. The late John Fahey, not known for unqualified praise of other performers (asked to contribute a blurb for John Miller's First Degree Blues on Nick Perls' Blue Goose label, Fahey wrote, "A thoroughly enjoyable album--that's quite a change from Mr. Perls' usual shit... It must have been recorded by accident"), said of Collins, "He's always out of tune, but it doesn't matter." In Fahey-speak, that qualifies as a strong endorsement. 2
And Collins is out-of-tune on some of his recordings, though not all. The beauty of two of the most harmonious tunes, "My Road is Rough and Rocky," and "Lonesome Road Blues," arises from Collins' voice and the simplicity of the (in-tune) accompaniment. In "Lonesome Road Blues" Collins reaches into the tradition for one of its lesser known--and most melodramatic--figures: "A fast mail train came around the bend/ Killed my little brownskin dead. / Her head was found in the driving wheel / Her body has never been found." But what lodges it in memory is the chorus: "Beauty caused me to weep, beauty caused me to moan / Beauty caused me to lose my home."
Neither of these two songs is "a blues" in structure. Collins was near forty when he first recorded, and seems to have come from the "songster" tradition. In addition to blues, he would have known hymns, ballads, novelty songs, even hillbilly tunes. Songsters were the human jukeboxes of the turn of the twentieth century. Collins clearly knew tent show and vaudeville type songs, as well: his "Pork Chop Blues" is his take on a popular theme--Jim Jackson recorded "I Heard the Voice of a Porkchop" in 1928 in Memphis. Collins was also the first black performer to record "Midnight Special." His version of the widely-recorded "Salty Dog" may have been a theme song of sorts: one of his pseudonyms on 78 was "Salty Dog Sam." His take on "Hesitation Blues" is puppy-gleeful and headlong, and puts the joy back into this over-recorded classic. The two spirituals on the OJL LP were as memorable as the blues. Years ago, when Grand Funk Railroad released "I'm Your Captain," I would buttonhole GFR fans and tell them, "Listen to Sam Collins' ‘Lead Me all the Way' [his version of a hymn titled ‘Let Jesus Lead You']. That's where they stole the melody!" (In his pre-GFR days I once bought a show pigeon from bassist Mel Schacher's coop beside his father's body shop, but Sam Collins of course didn't come up). Wherever Collins' voice and guitar led, I followed.
An all caps declaration above Pete Whelan's notes to the OJL album tells us that "ON (sic) APRIL, 1927, SAM COLLINS BECAME THE FIRST OF THE GREAT MISSISSIPPI BLUES SINGERS TO RECORD IN ANY DEPTH." However, Collins was not released in depth. Every title from his first two recording sessions for Gennett, in April and September of 1927, were issued. He recorded for Gennett again in December, but of the fourteen titles mastered, twelve were never released. He didn't record again until October of 1931, for a different record company. Of the two dozen titles he recorded during those sessions and in one last studio visit in December of 1932, half were never released, and the masters likely discarded. There is poetry in the titles of these lost recordings: " Midnight Dream," "Long Time Rubin," "My Mother Took a Train One Morning,' "Atlanta Fire," "I Believe I'll Get Dirty," "Blue Heaven Blues," and--the most regrettable loss of all--"Toenail Flang Dang." But by 1931, blues 78 manufacturers were suffering, because blues 78 buyers were. Sam Collins lived, according to one source, until the 1950s, but he never recorded again. 22 songs are all we have.
For me, there were other country blues highlights later, both on record--Blind Blake's "West Coast Blues," Mother McCollom's "Jesus is my Aeroplane," Skip James' "Hard Time Killin' Floor"--and in person: I saw Son House and Mississippi John Hurt twice each; I saw the spooky and intense Robert Pete Williams; the smiling and lightning-fast John Jackson... But Collins' music has remained a nearly daily contributor to my inner dialogue. It was his music that opened a door that led me to virtually every musical place I have visited since; it was Collins, more than any other musician, who activated my novelty-seeking gene.
I still have my copy of the OJL Country Blues Encores. And I have Collins' music on CD and cassette. But at some time in eth mid-1980's I dropped my Collins LP on a cement floor and it broke into three pieces. As I said, Collins' music comes and goes.
FOOTNOTES
1. Collins’ work is available on the Document CD Crying Sam Collins Complete Recorded Works (1927–1931). The CD I have, which is basically the OJL album with the tracks reordered, is Yazoo 1079. For two tracks not on this CD see Yazoo 1038, Lonesome Road Blues: 15 Years in the Mississippi Delta, 1926–1941.
2. Both quotes from the booklet written by Pete Welding that was included in the OJL album.