Dave Rubin: Baseball and the Blues in Black and White

Another winter slowly recedes, and you know what that means: Opening Day. Dave Rubin not only knows the blues, but he knows baseball, too. He shared this with me a while back, and it's excellent.

By Dave Rubin

When bluesman Chuck Willis sang, "I feel so bad, feel like a ball game on a rainy day" in 1953, he knew his audience, who were both music and baseball fans, would get the metaphor. Now, it was probably purely coincidental that Martin Scorsese's PBS series The Blues and baseball's first round of post-season playoffs were both vying for viewer attention the last week of September 2003, but the history of baseball and the blues in America tells the parallel story of two cultures, white and black, in transition.

Strictly segregated for many years, they were eventually drawn together until they intersected in the sport and the music, in the process illuminating that unique aspect of our national character that strives for inclusion.

Tracing baseball and the blues back to their primordial beginnings is an unfinished and ongoing search. Proto-baseball games were played in 18th century America and the roots of the blues go back centuries to Africa and the folk music of the British Isles. However, 1839 could suffice as a more or less "modern" benchmark to begin the search, for it is the mythological year that has Abner Doubleday sitting down one day on the shore of Lake Otsego in Cooperstown, New York, after watching local boys play a chaotic game of "town ball."

Though he was actually some distance away at West Point, it was believed for many years (along with the myth that a thrown ball does not curve) that like Moses, he was divinely inspired to write down the rules of the game and christen it baseball. At the same time, an English actress named Frances Anne Kemble was living out the second year of her stay on her husband's plantation on the Sea Islands of Georgia. She presciently kept a remarkable journal in which she described in horrific detail the daily living conditions of the slaves.

Kemble also heard the songs they sang while transporting her about by boat. Writing to her friend Elizabeth Sedgwick in March, she noted: "I told you formerly that I thought I could trace distinctly some popular national melody with which I was familiar in almost all their songs; but I have been quite at a loss to discover any such foundation for many that I have heard lately, and which have appeared to me extraordinarily wild and unaccountable. The way in which the chorus strikes in with the burden, between each phrase of the melody chanted by a single voice, is very curious and effective, especially with the rhythm of the rowlocks for accompaniment..."

Extraordinarily wild and unaccountable, indeed, as were aspects of baseball, where for some time runners were literally "put out" by being "soaked" (hit) with the ball. Though not yet the blues that would become codified with the advent of sound recordings after 1920, the vocal music that Kemble heard was clearly a precursor of the work songs of the post-Civil War era that were in turn proto-blues.

Kemble's observation is also the first allusion to the fact that the slaves had already been influenced by European music. This blending of African and Anglo cultures would eventually produce the blues, a music that did not and could not exist previously outside the United States. Similarly, the very British games of cricket and rounders had been brought to New England by the early colonists and developed with Yankee ingenuity into crucially different American versions called "old cat," "sting ball," "stick ball," "round ball" and "base."

Meanwhile, on the fringe of society, slave children hit makeshift balls with tree limbs.

Certifiable evidence of the game's emerging acceptance did not occur in bucolic pastures upstate, but on the mean streets of New York City. By 1842 young men in Manhattan were playing ball on weekends and in 1845 Alexander Cartwright organized 28 of them into the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club for intra-squad games.

Cartwright helped draw up the fundamental rules of the game, eliminating "soaking," and a year later his team played the New York Base Ball Club in an official contest. Minstrel shows also began in the 1840s as grotesque satires of Negro entertainment, mostly performed by troupes of whites in black face that showed the majority population's awareness of and willingness to appropriate the most obvious and stereotypical aspects of minority culture.

Union troops brought bats, balls and guitars along in their campaigns and left some of them behind in the South after the Civil War, furthering baseball's growing popularity while introducing the critical instrument that would find its way into the hands of black musicians. Though blacks organized their own teams after the war and even played on white teams, in 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players forbid integration or the formation of professional African-American teams.

Cap Anson, a pre-1900 pioneer and Hall of Famer, was one virulent racist who campaigned with unusual zeal against blacks playing baseball. With Jim Crow laws restricting "emancipated" blacks from equal participation throughout society, they found an expressive outlet in their most personal music of work songs, field hollers, breakdowns and ballads. In the 1890s, "Joe Turner Blues" appeared throughout Dixie and is generally considered, along with "Frankie and Albert," to be one of the earliest bonafide blues.

Though white involvement in the performance of the music at this time is unlikely, they certainly heard it on the plantations and street corners in the South, and it obviously made an impression. The first published blues in 1912, "Baby Seals Blues," was "written" by Arthur Seals, a white man.

Concurrently with Mamie Smith's "Crazy Blues," the first recorded blues by an African-American in 1920, blacks created the Negro National League and "separate but equal" was institutionalized in baseball. It would remain so for almost thirty years, though exhibition games between barnstorming major leaguers and black professional ball players in the off season regularly proved there was no disparity when it came to skills and talent.

Josh Gibson, often referred to as the "black Babe Ruth," was only one of many who could have and should have competed in the major leagues. Walter Johnson, the Hall of Fame pitcher for the old Washington Senators, once summed him up as such: "There is a catcher that any big league club would like to buy for $200,000. His name is Gibson… he can do everything. He hits the ball a mile. And he catches so easy he might as well be in a rocking chair. Throws like a rifle… Too bad this Gibson is a colored fellow."

The growing popularity of the blues from the mid-1920s on encouraged many white country music performers like Jimmie Rodgers and the Allen Brothers to record "Blue Yodel" and "Laughin' and Cryin' Blues," respectively. The pioneer white jazz guitarist Eddie Lang recorded an astonishing series of duets with the incomparable black blues guitarist Lonnie Johnson in the late 1920s, but had to go under the pseudonym of "Blind Willie Dunn" in response to the inflexible cultural segregation of the era.

In addition, George Gershwin was acutely aware and appreciated the blues, as is evident in his "Rhapsody in Blue" and most prominently in "Porgy and Bess." Boogie woogie, an offshoot of the blues, became all the rage with white and black bands around World War II. (Note: Blues and boogie pianist Jimmy Yancey was a groundskeeper for years at Comiskey Park in Chicago).

Even though members of the black community heard and even liked some white artists, the blues remained, by and large, a black domain. For the music and the game, however, two events in the postwar years would reverse the seemingly unstoppable tide of exclusion.

In 1947, Jackie Robinson broke the color line in baseball, kicking open the door for an eventual influx of black and Hispanic athletes to enter and add immeasurably to the quality of play. At the same time in Chicago, blues legend Muddy Waters was applying electricity to acoustic country blues guitar in a manner that would have an immense effect not only on the blues, but the blues-powered rock 'n' roll waiting to be born.

For white kids growing up in the 1950s and 1960s, rock was their entrée into the blues, especially the raw, visceral amplified variety, and they sought out in surprisingly large numbers the music of John Lee Hooker (who was a San Francisco Giants fan) and B.B. King, among others.

Likewise, for many the siren lure of electric blues was so great that they were compelled to play it, with the results being several generations of accomplished white blues musicians, from Eric Clapton to Stevie Ray Vaughan (who once played the "Star Spangled Banner" before a Houston Astros game) to Jonny Lang and beyond.

So complete has been the assimilation that Muddy Waters used to refer to Johnny Winter as his "son," and Bob Margolin, a white guitarist and former member of Muddy's band, has tutored Big Bill Morganfield, the master's literal progeny. As for the national pastime, beyond the record-breaking blacks and Hispanics, great Japanese players like the Mariners' Ichiro Suzuki and the Yankees' Hideki Matsui are so far removed from the original gentlemen playing 150 years ago as to have made Cap Anson break his bat over his knee.