The blues, hence, changed—something one might not expect from music preordained to be roots music. In Ed Andrews and Papa Charlie Jackson, the first two men to record, record labels saw artists for whom no songwriters, backup musicians, or even recording studio slots had to be purchased. And, as always, folklorists and liberal art connoisseurs aimed to seek out “authenticity” in all its forms and hiding places. Alan Lomax headed the flood of white field researchers who all hoped to find and record the true sound of the black race (voicing its affliction rather than its spirit). Nothing could seem more genuine than backwoods guitarists who relied on guttural sounds, visceral imagery, roots frameworks, and the violent produce of their surroundings. To complement that set of attitudes, folklorists focused in on prisons such as Parchman Farm and also on the Delta region generally, both of which were home to more men than women. So were male forms regimented into the public consumer consciousness as “authentic” blues. But the first blues were made by women and for stage profit, driven as much by current taste as by the abiding fact of tradition.Yet, even among the male forms to follow, blues music was music of real and consistent innovation. The second generation of blues musicians, now more than ever made up of men, were self-reflexive, seeing themselves (just as the women had) as professional artists. This means, in other words, that no legitimate blues master could disregard the need for new material and for marketability, as is supposed. He had no other job beside making music, and for that reason alone he—the second generation singer—had to not only best his competition but also cater to his audience, which was becoming majority white. Keeping an eye on the audience had any number of manifest effects on the music itself. First, the blues tended now to betray the trademark inflections of mass culture; some songs were learned from sheet music and the radio, others codified into an AAB 12-bar format with I-IV-V chords. So, even within the genre misclassified as “authentic blues”—blues that stays true to itself by avoiding the other, outside world entirely—artists were in fact most notable for creative commercialism.
Blues music lost none of its originality but became, at its core, popular music—not the static mouthpiece of an ancient rural tradition. In Charley Patton, perhaps the first popular second generation bluesman, the music was altered to fit new themes; Patton was topical about his lyrical subject matter, including in his songs images of boll weevils and ruinous floods. Not only was he willing to confront new themes— instead of often obsolete folklore—he also sexualized blues. Sexual lyrics, and the sexual stage presence he worked so hard to perfect, were simply most popular with both black and white listeners, and his was an opportunistic generation of bluesmen. What made Charley Patton “of the second generation,” then, was not only the fact that he did not record until 1928, but also the fact that he knew what his audience wanted from him: topical music, sexual music, recognizable music—popular and standardized music that was still as authentic as anything that had ever come before. Robert Johnson, of course, was the man to complete this change to postmodernism, and his music is living proof of active creativity in the blues.
