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Illustrations by Margie Greve

John Milward

Northeastern University Press | Boston

Northeastern University Press Library of Congress Cataloging-in-
An imprint of University Press Publication Data
of New England
www.upne.com Milward, John.
© 2013 John Milward Crossroads : how the blues shaped rock ’n’ roll
All rights reserved (and rock saved the blues) / John Milward ;
Manufactured in the United States of America illustrations by Margie Greve.
Designed by Mindy Basinger Hill    pages   cm
Typeset in Minion Pro Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–55553–744–9 (cloth : alk. paper) —
Illustrations courtesy of Margie Greve, 2013 ISBN 978–1–55553–823–1 (ebook)
1. Blues (Music)—History and criticism.
University Press of New England is a 2. Blues (Music)—Influence.
member of the Green Press Initiative. 3. Rock music—History and criticism. I. Title.
The paper used in this book meets their ML3521.M56 2013
minimum requirement for recycled paper. 781.66'1643—dc23  2012047684
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 Contents
vii Preface
xi Prelude Cross Road Blues

1 one Rare Records and Working Musicians

13 two Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues
24 three Bohemian Blues and the Folk Revival
37 four British Blues
51 five Out of the Past
62 six University of Chicago Blues
74 seven Ballroom Blues
85 eight Out of the Past and Into the Present
99 nine The Cream of (Mostly) British Blues  
113 ten Baby Boom Blues  
127 eleven Rockin’ the Blues  
143 twelve Stoned Blues  
153 thirteen Exiles on Star Street  
169 fourteen Fathers, Mothers & Sons  
178 fifteen Texas (Rock Star) Blues  
191 sixteen Sweet Home Chicago  
204 seventeen Further On Up the Road  

221 Last Call  

223 Notes  
241 Bibliography  
249 Index  
Preface
In a suburban living room in 1967, two teenage rock ’n’ roll fans, happy
to have the house to themselves on a Saturday night, slipped an LP onto
the turntable and cranked up the volume. The record was not a predict-
able favorite by the Beatles or the Rolling Stones, but one by an American
artist that they’d seen mentioned in articles about Britain’s most heralded
electric guitarist, Eric Clapton. It was a live recording of a concert, and as
the needle hit the grooves, the murmur of the audience seemed to fill the
room. “Ladies and gentleman,” said the announcer, “how about a nice warm
round of applause to welcome the world’s greatest blues singer, the king of
the blues, B.B. King!”
B.B. King’s Live at the Regal was recorded in November of 1964 in front
of an enthusiastic black audience in Chicago, and for a couple of white
suburban kids, it made for thrilling, even exotic listening. King’s music was
certainly different from the blues-rock Clapton was making with Cream.
The choice of that record with my friend Paul reflects the way that many
in the 1960s got introduced to the blues, the soulful bedrock of American
music.
Crossroads explores a history of connections between blues musicians,
folk singers, and rockers, and how that influenced both their lives and the
music they played. It’s neither an encyclopedic history of the blues, nor a
full accounting of the blues-rock universe (apologies to, among many oth-
ers, Albert Collins and Rory Gallagher). Rather, Crossroads chronicles the
evolution of a musical tradition through the careers and personal interac-
tions of a crew of extraordinary musicians who built a bridge between black
and white, as well as rock and the blues.
Blues fans are forever worrying about the health of the genre, but in fact,
the music and the context in which it has been heard has been in constant
flux for the past one hundred years. The pre-Depression country blues
of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Charley Patton was rarely heard outside a
community of poor Southern blacks. The more urbane styles of players like
 Lonnie Johnson and pianist LeRoy Carr found a broader national audience
alongside the big bands of the 1930s. In the ’50s, the electric blues of such
Chicago titans as Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf appealed to both urban
and rural blacks. The gradual integration of white fans into the audience
for blues in the 1950s and ’60s was the last big change in the demographic
drawn to the blues, but it was far more radical in its implications.
Consider the Newport Folk Festival, which in the mid-1960s, presented
such rediscovered Depression-era blues legends as Son House, Skip James,
and Mississippi John Hurt. It was as if these musicians had walked right
out of the Delta past onto the contemporary stage. “They were not ghosts
up there,” said Eric Von Schmidt. “It was a minor miracle.” In 1962, John
Lee Hooker, who’d been rocking ghetto clubs with his electric guitar since
he hit it big with 1949’s “Boogie Chillen,” played his acoustic guitar in a
Greenwich Village coffee house with an unknown folk singer named Bob
Dylan as an opening act. Off-stage, they bonded over drinks and guitars.
In San Francisco, B.B. King pulled up to the Fillmore Ballroom and was
confused to see not his usual black audience, but a crowd of longhaired
hippies. After promoter Bill Graham introduced King to a standing ova-
tion, his life was forever changed. In Chicago, Muddy Waters disappeared
backstage thinking that the white guy who’d entered the crowded club just
had to be from the I.R.S. Instead, Paul Butterfield had come to learn about
the blues from a primary source. A few years later, the Butterfield Blues
Band featuring guitarist Mike Bloomfield would cause a stir of its own at
the Newport Folk Festival.
Muddy Waters also had a small but devoted following in England, where
a scruffy band of blues lovers named itself the Rolling Stones after one of
his classic songs. For bluesmen like Waters and King, the interest of famous
rock musicians and exposure to their fans during the 1960s gave them
commercial life even as they lost much of their traditional black audience
to the more contemporary sounds of soul and rhythm and blues. And for
the rockers, the blues offered a more mature musical vocabulary than what
was typically found at the top of the pop charts.
Sixty years ago, the few who cared had to work hard to learn about and
listen to the blues, which was largely the domain of a clique of opinion-
ated purists known as the “blues mafia.” Record collectors drawn to the
blues would go door knocking in a quest to buy rare 78 rpm records, while
P r e fa c e

folklorists became song catchers, traveling the countryside to document

players who never got near a recording studio. The blues revival of the 1960s
viii prompted record labels to reissue the cream (and much more) of their cata-
logs. These days, the whole history of the blues is available on disc or to be
downloaded; for instant gratification, you can listen to virtually any artist
mentioned in Crossroads on such on-line outlets as YouTube and Spotify.
Blues has traveled a long way from its birth in the Mississippi Delta and
other Southern black communities. In 2012, Barack Obama, the country’s
first black president, hosted a public television concert called “Blues at the
White House.” Both sides of the Crossroads were on the guest list, including
B.B. King, Buddy Guy, Jeff Beck, and Mick Jagger. “If you come from the
cotton fields like I did,” said Buddy Guy, “and now you’re up there in the
White House playing for the Commander in Chief and the First Lady, how
high can you go?” At the end of the show, Guy cajoled Obama into singing
a few lines from the classic blues about his adult hometown, “Sweet Home
Chicago.” Robert Johnson, who wrote the song in the mid-1930s, and who
came to embody the intersection of blues and rock, composed “Sweet Home
Chicago” when he was a “walking musician” in the Mississippi Delta. And
as he rambled, Johnson couldn’t help but find himself at the crossroads.

P r e fa c e

ix
prelude
Cross
Road
Blues
Robert Johnson was just shy of unknown when his short life ended in 1938.
Today, following the centennial of his 1911 birth, he’s considered one of the
most significant artists in the history of the blues. Johnson is said to have
started his journey at a crossroads. The story goes that to obtain his virtuosic
skills, the aspiring musician had to sell his soul to the Devil. The deal was
struck at an intersection near Clarksdale in the Mississippi Delta. Johnson
arrived a little before midnight, and quietly picked the strings of his guitar.
At the top of the hour, an outsized, fearsome black man approached the
bluesman, took his instrument, twisted its tuning pegs, and played a sweet,
scary song. He handed the guitar back to Johnson, and for the promise of
an extraordinary musical gift, pocketed
the pledge of the young man’s soul.
Son House went to bat for this tall
tale. House said that Johnson would
come to see him perform with his
partner Willie Brown and pester
them to let him play the guitar
during their breaks. But Johnson
made such an unholy racket that
House had to make him stop. The
next time Johnson saw House,
less than a year had passed; he
now had a guitar slung over his
shoulder, and once more asked
for a chance to play. With a re-

ohnson
1938

Rob ert J 1911–

 luctant shrug, and a roll of his eyes, House offered Johnson his seat. “When
he finished, all our mouths were standing open,” said House. “I said, ‘Well,
ain’t that fast! He’s gone now!’ ”
Truth be told, Robert Johnson stood at a number of crossroads. Johnson’s
collected works offer a persuasive argument that he was at the pivot point
between down-home rural blues and the style of electric blues that was born
in Chicago in the years after his death. More than most early bluesmen,
who’d typically draw lyrics from a pool of commonly used verses, Johnson’s
best tunes revealed him to be a much more artful, and creative songwriter.
In that regard, he was the most modern of the rural bluesman, and ended
up influencing not just the music that Muddy Waters created in the 1940s
and ’50s, but the entire blues-rock aesthetic of the 1960s. Time has served
his legend well. The most famous among many rock-era interpretations of
Johnson’s songs was “Crossroads,” Cream’s high-octane update of “Cross
Road Blues” that was cut live at San Francisco’s Fillmore Auditorium in
1968. That now forty-five-year-old track was recorded just thirty-one years
after Johnson’s original.
Johnson spent the 1930s as a “walking musician,” traveling the country-
side in search of music gigs while fashioning songs from his fingers, his
imagination, and everything he heard on the radio and the jukebox. He
was of the first generation of blues musicians that learned songs not just
from other players, but also from records. Entertaining on a street corner or
for a party hosted by the local bootlegger, it was important for a musician
to be able to play the latest hits, and Johnson was a famously quick study.
According to bluesman Johnny Shines, an occasional traveling companion,
Johnson was just as likely to sing a song by pop crooner Bing Crosby or
country star Jimmie Rodgers as a blues by Blind Blake or Lonnie Johnson.
Johnson didn’t make his first recordings until the mid-1930s, a somewhat
unlikely occurrence given that the market for down-home blues had largely
passed. Fortuitously, the improved studio technology endowed Johnson’s
records with much better sound quality than discs cut early in the decade.
Between surface noise and the quick deterioration of the cheap shellac
used to produce so-called “race records,” those discs offered less than high
fidelity; by contrast, Johnson’s recordings let the listener accurately hear
the sweet, silvery sound of his slide guitar and the dramatic range of his
savvy vocals.
Prelude

Johnson’s first recordings for ARC Records were made over three days
in November of 1936 in San Antonio, Texas. That week, the company also
xii cut records by two Mexican groups and a country swing band called the
Chuck Wagon Gang. Johnson famously positioned himself facing the corner
of the room, prompting suggestions that he was either hiding his guitar
technique from the other musicians, creating a reverb-like effect by bounc-
ing the sound off the hard plaster walls, or was simply shy on the occasion
of cutting his first record. In any event, he did two takes apiece of sixteen
different songs, including songs that would become latter-day blues stan-
dards (“Sweet Home Chicago” and “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom”) and
performances that would define his singular artistry (“Cross Road Blues”
and “Come On in My Kitchen”).
Johnson, like many other blues musicians, used elements of existing
songs to create new ones. “Sweet Home Chicago” owed a musical debt to a
1934 tune by Kokomo Arnold, “Old Original Kokomo Blues,” which in turn
looked back to Scrapper Blackwell’s “Kokomo Blues.” In hindsight, it’s easy
to see why an ode to Chicago as opposed to a small city in Indiana would
become an evergreen for blues bands all over the world (Junior Parker
turned it into an R&B hit in 1959).
“I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom” drew from songs by Arnold and Leroy
Carr but didn’t become a blues classic until Elmore James outfitted his 1951
version with an electrifying slide guitar lick. Johnson’s original employed a
walking bass line derived from ragtime and boogie-woogie piano. “In the
early thirties, boogie was rare on the guitar,” said Johnny Shines. “Because
of Robert, people learned to complement [themselves], carrying their own
bass as well as their own lead with this one instrument.” Guitarist Eddie
Taylor, who in the 1950s helped Jimmy Reed create his influential shuffle
rhythm, said “I got the style from Charley Patton and Robert Johnson.”
“Come On in My Kitchen” was a song of sexual seduction that shared
a lyric line with a ghostly tune recorded in 1931 by Skip James, “Devil Got
My Woman.” But it’s the sensual swing of Johnson’s slide guitar that made
it a masterpiece. Johnson had a sophisticated ear for arrangement, and his
guitar parts mixed passages picked with his fingers alongside melodies
carved with his slide. “Cross Road Blues” featured Johnson’s virtuosic slide
and lyrics about trying to hitch a ride that led some listeners to wonder
what else he might have been looking for where one road crossed another.
Johnson’s first session, for which he was paid around $100, included the
song that would be his biggest hit, “Terraplane Blues,” a hard-driving car
song that was thick with the kind of sexual double entendres that is a fa-
Prelude

miliar lyrical technique in the blues. “Terraplane Blues,” released in March

of 1937, and backed with “Kind Hearted Woman Blues,” was estimated to
have sold four or five thousand copies. The record’s success prompted ARC xiii
 to summon Johnson for a second round of recording sessions in June 1937.
He arrived at the Dallas studio with thirteen more songs, including tunes
that would in later decades be covered by the Rolling Stones (“Love in Vain,”
“Stop Breaking Down Blues”), Cream (“From Four Until Late”), and Led
Zeppelin (“Traveling Riverside Blues”). He also recorded more songs that
alluded to his relationship with the fiery underworld, including “Me and
the Devil Blues” and “Hell Hound on My Trail.”
In 1961, Columbia Records released a compilation of the blues musician’s
work entitled Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues Singers. Over the next
decade, it sold around twelve thousand copies. A second volume of Johnson
songs was released in 1970. Interest continued to quietly percolate over the
decades—in 1987, he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame—
until 1990, when Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings was released
on compact disc and sold over a million copies. The collection received
a Grammy Award for “Best Historical Recording.” Fifty-three years after
he died, Johnson had become a platinum-selling, Grammy-winning star.
This remarkable posthumous career was due to more than just the finely
wrought songs that appealed to generations of blues-rock musicians. There
was also the allure of the crossroads myth and a dramatic death involving
two staples of the blues life, whiskey and women. Johnson was such a hard-
drinking ladies man that even the liquor-loving Son House was moved
to give him some advice. “When you playing for these balls,” said House,
“and these girls get full of corn whiskey and snuff mixed together, and you
be playing a good piece and they like it and call you. ‘Daddy, play it again,
daddy,’ well, don’t let it run you crazy. You liable to get killed.”
In August of 1938, Johnson was playing a Saturday night gig with Dave
“Honeyboy” Edwards in Three Forks, Mississippi. They’d played there be-
fore, and according to Edwards, the promoter had become convinced that
Johnson was fooling around with his wife and conspired to have a pint of
poisoned whiskey passed along to the philandering musician. After a good
long drink, Johnson continued to perform until he finally collapsed and
was taken to his lodgings in nearby Greenwood. Accounts vary as to the
precise circumstances of his death. Aleck “Sonny Boy Williamson” Miller
claimed to have seen Johnson crawling on the floor and barking like a dog.
Others have said that he succumbed not to the effects of poison, but to
pneumonia or syphilis. The only thing that’s fairly certain is the date of his
Prelude

death: August 16, 1938. Numerologists take note: Elvis Presley died exactly
thirty-nine years later.
xiv John Hammond was hoping to book Johnson for a concert at New York’s
Carnegie Hall called “From Spirituals to Swing” that was designed to cel-
ebrate the breadth of African American music, from blues and gospel to
jazz. Hammond had written about Johnson’s ARC recordings, calling him
“the greatest Negro blues singer who has cropped up in recent years,” and
adding, “Johnson makes Lead Belly sound like an accomplished poseur.”
Hammond was sorely disappointed when he found out that Johnson would
be unavailable to play the big show, and enlisted Big Bill Broonzy, a sophis-
ticated Chicago musician, to represent down-home blues. But Johnson was
still part of the program, as Hammond played two of his songs , “Walking
Blues” and “Preachin’ Blues (Up Jumped the Devil),” over the hall’s public
address system.
Great songs, superb performances, sex, booze, jealous husbands, end-
less travel, a command performance at Carnegie Hall, still-to-come hit
records, litigation, and paternity suits—no wonder Johnson became a vital
link from the Delta to not only the Chicago blues stars of the 1950s, but
to the blues-rock musicians of the 1960s. His visit to the crossroads had
transformed Robert Johnson into both the last of the great Delta bluesman
and America’s first rock star.

Prelude

xv
 Rare Records and
one

Working Musicians
There was a smudge of crayon on the black-and-yellow label of the 78 rpm
Paramount disc with its signature logo of an eagle astride the earth. Other-
wise, the thick, hefty record was remarkably clean considering the journey
that it had taken from its 1931 pressing in a Wisconsin chair factory to a
used-record store in Washington, D.C., in 1952. Because discs were actively
recycled for their shellac during World War II, some prewar recordings
were now quite rare if not all but extinct.
The record was “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” by Skip James. Dick
Spottswood had never heard of Skip
James, but at age fifteen he already
had a record collector’s taste for the
odd, the obscure, and the valuable.
The store let you sample records
before you bought them, and the
song’s minor-key guitar lines and
the singer’s eerie falsetto voice in-
trigued Spottswood. The “killin’
floor” referred to the violent heart
of a slaughterhouse, but at the
dawn of the Depression, James
saw danger wherever he looked.
While the blues typically traded
in the downbeat, Skip James was
downright dire.
At that moment, however,
James had reason to be hope-
ful. He’d won the chance to re-

Son
Hous
e 190
2–1
988
 cord after auditioning for H. C. Speir, the Jackson, Mississippi talent scout
who’d already found Charley Patton and Tommy Johnson, and would later
discover Robert Johnson. Speir tried out performers in a room above his
store, and James won his approval by singing a haunting song called “Devil
Got My Woman.” Speir gave James a $65 guitar and put him on an Illinois
Central train to Grafton, Wisconsin. James recorded eighteen tunes (and
possibly a couple more) on both guitar and piano, and declined a flat fee for
his efforts, opting instead for future royalties. James figured he was going
to be a star like Patton or Blind Lemon Jefferson. But by the end of 1931, he
had slipped back into obscurity with $40 in royalties.
Spottswood bought two Skip James records in 1952: “Hard Time Kil-
lin’ Floor Blues” backed with “Cherry Ball Blues” cost him a dollar, and a
worn “22–20 Blues” backed with “If You Haven’t Any Hay Get On Down
the Road” went for sixty cents. “Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” was not
made with a white teenager in mind. Recorded on the cheap to sell to poor
southern blacks, it was a so-called “race record.” A thumbnail history of
the blues would start with the early-1920s popularity of female singers like
Bessie Smith, and later in the decade, with male singers accompanying
themselves on guitar. Charley Patton and Blind Lemon Jefferson fit that bill,
and the South was thick with other “walking musicians” who’d wander the
countryside playing for tips on the street or for the local bootlegger. Good
Christians considered the blues singers to be no-good sinners playing the
Devil’s music. But for people wearied by a long week in the fields, dancing
and partying was an earthly taste of Heaven. And the guilty could always
make amends on Sunday morning.
The young Spottswood was savvy enough about the vintage record mar-
ket to know a clean King Oliver jazz record was worth more than an obscure
blues by a virtual unknown. At the same time, collectors also knew that a
rare disc could draw unexpected attention among the small fraternity of
fanatics who perused the classified ads in a magazine like Record Changer.
In this case, James McKune, a New York blues fan , telephoned Spottswood
about his Skip James records.
“I guess he [McKune] knew I had the records because I had come to
know [collector] Pete Whelan by that time,” said Spottswood. “They had
apparently been offered at auction in the Record Changer in 1948, but no-
crossroads

body had bid on them, and they wound up in the used record store where
I found them.” After Spottswood told McKune that the records weren’t for
sale, McKune made arrangements to travel to Washington to simply listen
2 to the rare 78s. “He took a Greyhound bus,” said Spottswood, “and since
I wasn’t old enough to drive, he somehow found his way to my house in
Bethesda. He listened to those Skip James records once, maybe twice, and
then turned around and went back home to Brooklyn.”
McKune lived in a single room at a Brooklyn YMCA where he kept his
collection of 78s stored in boxes beneath the bed. Through the 1940s and
’50s, he was at the center of a group of blues aficionados who’d swap shoptalk
at the Jazz Record Center (also known as “Indian Joe’s”) on West Forty-
Seventh Street and argue the merits of various blues musicians. McKune had
initially preferred traditional jazz, but in 1944, after buying a crackly copy
of Charley Patton’s “Some These Days I’ll Be Gone,” he became obsessed by
the raw, lonesome power of a solitary guitar player singing a down-home
blues. He soon trolled stores with a wish list of thirteen hundred records.
McKune’s pilgrimage to hear the Skip James records was perhaps moti-
vated by the memory of the two boxes of mint-condition Paramount 78s
that he let get away. McKune had discovered the cache on a 1942 visit to the
Central General Store on Long Island, but because he’d yet to discover his
passion for blues, he passed on the deal and alerted a West Coast record
collector with whom he corresponded. Harry Smith promptly bought them
all. Ten years later, some of those discs would be included on the Anthology
of American Folk Music, a highly influential collection of vintage recordings
that Smith compiled for Folkways Records
Harry Everett Smith was a world-class bohemian who became known
not just for the Anthology, but also for his experimental films, his study of
Native American rituals, and his expertise with string figures. “If he was in
a good mood,” said Patti Smith, who met him when they both lived in the
Chelsea Hotel in the late 1960s, “he would pull a loop of string several feet
long from his pocket and weave a star, a female spirit, or a one-man cat’s
Rare Records and Working Musicians

cradle. We all sat at his feet in the lobby like amazed children watching as his
deft fingers produced evocative patterns by twisting and knotting the loop.”
Harry Smith grew up around Seattle, Washington, where as a schoolboy,
he studied the customs, music, and languages of the Lummi, Nootka, and
Kwakiutl Indian tribes. Beginning in 1942, he studied anthropology at the
University of Washington and worked nights at a Boeing plant manufactur-
ing bombers. The job gave him money to buy old 78s, for while the govern-
ment was destroying discs for their shellac, the effort had also brought a
bounty of records out of dusty attics. During those years, said Smith, “there
were big piles of 78s. Enormous groaning masses of them . . . I rapidly
amassed many thousands of records. It became like a problem. . . . It was
an obsessive, investigative hobby.” 3
 Smith had eclectic tastes, and was drawn to the early country music of
the Carter Family and Jimmie Rodgers as much as to the blues of Charley
Patton and Sleepy John Estes. “I was looking for exotic records,” said Smith,
who quit school after a couple of years and relocated to Berkeley, Califor-
nia. “Exotic in relation to what was considered to be the world culture of
high-class music.” A “race record” certainly fit that criterion. After Smith
won a Guggenheim grant to pursue his work in film, he moved his massive
collection to New York City in the early 1950s. When money got tight, he
offered to sell the records to Moses Asch, president of Folkways Records,
who instead challenged him to pick the cream of the crop for a compilation.
The Anthology package, which Smith artfully designed and fully anno-
tated, was essentially a bootleg recording, with none of the artists or original
recording companies compensated for the eighty-four individual songs.
Like later compilers of old 78s, Asch reasoned that the record labels had
relinquished their rights by letting the recordings go out of print. Because
of the relative obscurity of the material, few noticed the legal sleight-of-
hand, but history certainly took note of the profound effect the recordings
(initially released as three, two-record sets) had on the folk revival of the
1950s and the blues revival that would follow.
“In 1952 fiddler Eck Dunford, blues guitarist Furry Lewis, the Eck Robert-
son and Family string band, bluesman Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Cannon’s
Jug Stompers were only twenty or twenty-five years out of their time,” said
Greil Marcus, who wrote about the profound influence the Anthology had
on Bob Dylan. “Cut off by the cataclysms of the Great Depression and the
Second World War by a national narrative that had never included their
kind, they appeared now like visitors from another world, like passengers
on a ship that had drifted into the sea of the unwritten.”
Musicians had a more pragmatic view of the Anthology. “The set became
our Bible,” said Dave Van Ronk, who would become a central player in the
Greenwich Village folk-blues scene. “It is how most of us first heard Blind
Willie Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, and even Blind Lemon Jefferson.
And it was not just blues people. . . . It was an incredible compendium of
American traditional musics, all performed in the traditional styles. . . .
Without the Harry Smith anthology we could not have existed, because
there was no other way for us to get hold of that material.”
crossroads

John Fahey, who went on record collecting trips with Dick Spottswood
and would become an influential acoustic guitarist, was also smitten by
the collection. “I’d match the Anthology up against any other single com-
4 pendium of important information ever assembled,” said Fahey. “Dead Sea
Scrolls? Nah. I’ll take the Anthology. Make no mistake: there was no ‘folk’
canon before Smith’s work. That he had compiled such a definitive docu-
ment only became apparent much later, of course. We record-collecting
types, sifting through many more records than he did, eventually reached
the same conclusions: these were the true goods.”
“Hard Time Killin’ Floor Blues” by Skip James did not appear on the
Anthology, and chances are it wasn’t among the records purchased by Smith
after being alerted to the cache of Paramounts by Jim McKune. That’s be-
cause according to 78 Quarterly, a collector magazine started in 1967 by
McKune’s friend Pete Whelan, only two copies of the record were known
to exist. These days, you can download the song from iTunes, or purchase
a CD of the complete Paramount recordings of Skip James. But in 1952,
you had to work to hear music that had nearly been lost to history. Twelve
years later, in the thick of the 1960s blues revival, a living, breathing Skip
James would himself enter the lives of John Fahey and Dick Spottswood.

Record collectors constitute a community of connoisseurs who typically

celebrate music that isn’t heard on the radio or listed on the pop charts. In
this case, they helped to nurture an interest in Depression-era blues that had
rarely been heard outside the black community. Folklorists go even further,
seeking out music that’s not just obscure, but that was rarely recorded, or
heard outside of earshot. The aim of the folklorist is to document the music
before it disappears. In 1933, John Lomax, an author and musicologist, struck
a deal with the Library of Congress to collect field recordings using the Li-
brary’s state-of-the-art recording machine. Lomax and his eighteen-year-old
Rare Records and Working Musicians

son Alan tore out the back seat of the family Ford to transport a 315-pound
disk recorder, along with playback equipment, a microphone, and a large
stash of blank aluminum discs. It was on this trip that the pair discovered a
singer named Huddie Ledbetter at the Louisiana State Prison at Angola. The
world would come to know the seminal folk singer as Lead Belly.
By 1937, Alan Lomax had established his own curatorial relationship with
the Library of Congress. In 1941, he traveled through the Mississippi Delta
with John Work, an African American musicologist from Fisk University.
The men were looking for musicians in general, and information about
Robert Johnson in particular. At Stovall Plantation, they recorded McKin-
ley Morganfield, a musician who’d once seen Johnson perform. “It was in
Friar’s Point,” said Morganfield, already known as Muddy Waters, “and this 5
 guy had a lot of people standin’ around him. He coulda been Robert, they
said it was Robert. I stopped and peeked over, and then I left. Because he
was a dangerous man.”
Singing into Lomax’s microphone, Waters performed “Country Blues,”
which was his version of Robert Johnson’s “Walkin’ Blues,” which was in
turn Johnson’s re-write of Son House’s “My Black Mama.” That’s the way
songs were passed between Delta musicians, with variations of guitar licks
and lyrics transforming one song into another. When Lomax replayed the
disc for the singer, it was the first time Waters had heard himself on record.
“Man, you don’t know how I felt that Saturday afternoon when I heard that
voice and it was my own voice,” said Waters. “Later on he sent me two cop-
ies of the pressing and a check for twenty bucks, and I carried that record
up to the corner and put it on the jukebox. Just played it and played it and
said, ‘I can do it, I can do it.’”
When Lomax asked what other musicians he should record, Waters di-
rected him to one of the most powerful musicians in the Delta, Son House.
“I used to say to Son House, ‘Would you play so and so?’ because I was trying
to get that touch on that [bottleneck slide] thing he did,” said Waters. “Once
he played a month in a row every Sunday night. I was there every night, close
to him. . . . I loved Son House because he used the bottleneck so beautiful.”
House had traveled to Wisconsin to record for Paramount in 1931, and
appreciated the fact that a waitress from the hotel next to the studio would
bring the musicians drinks. “Anytime that you end a piece,” said House,
“she’s right there with . . . your whiskey—that old, real good dark whiskey
smells good, taste good, and make you so high you rock like a rockin’ chair.
Ten years later, Lomax recorded House at Klack’s country store in Tunica
County, Mississippi. Lomax subsequently wrote that “with [House] the sor-
row of the blues was not tentative, or retiring, or ironic. Son’s whole body
wept, as with eyes closed, the tendons in his powerful neck standing out with
the violence of his feeling and his brown face flashing.” But at this session,
there was no brown whiskey. “He [Lomax] came down and recorded me
and [guitarist] Willie Brown and he didn’t give us but one Coca-Cola,” said
House. “Willie grabbed up the Coca-Cola first and I didn’t get nothing.”
crossroads

Folklorists and record collectors are more interested in history than the
hits of the day, which during the late 1940s and early ’50s, included seminal
6 blues recordings by Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, B.B. King, How-
lin’ Wolf, and Muddy Waters. These artists drew from the past, but were
also professional musicians creating songs for the here and now. All five,
with the exception of Hopkins, moved north from Mississippi, an artistic
subset of the Great Migration that saw hundreds of thousands of blacks flee
sharecropper lives on rural plantations for jobs in urban factories. For these
transplants, the blues was like a letter from home. But these five bluesmen
would do more than just score a couple of hit records; over subsequent
decades, they would also bring their down-home blues into the broader
American culture, and across the ocean to Britain. Through these and other
gifted musicians, the blues would come to have a profound influence on
popular culture in general, and rock ’n’ roll in particular.
The late 1940s were a time in which major changes were occurring in
black popular music. Early in that decade, big jazz bands led by Duke El-
lington and Earl Hines shared chart success with singers like Ella Fitzgerald
and Billie Holiday. But as the years passed, smaller combos led by Louis
Jordon and Nat King Cole came into fashion, with others like Roy Brown
and Joe Liggins and his Honeydrippers anticipating the hard-driving sound
of rhythm and blues. Reflective of both a change in taste and sensibility,
in the summer of 1949, the trade magazine Billboard changed the name of
its African American bestseller list from “Race Records” to “Rhythm and
Blues Records.”
A bluesman now had the chance to go nationwide. Sam “Lightnin’”
Hopkins was born in Centerville, Texas, in 1912, and spent his adult life in
Houston. At the age of eight, he saw country blues singer Blind Lemon Jef-
ferson playing at a gathering of the General Baptist Association of Churches.
Hopkins is said to have traded a few guitar licks with the popular musician,
and to later serve as a guide for the bluesman. He also spent time rambling
Rare Records and Working Musicians

and playing music with his cousin, Texas Alexander.

Hopkins got his big break in 1946 when a talent scout saw him playing
in Houston’s Third Ward and arranged a deal with Aladdin Records in Los
Angeles. Because he was paired with a pianist named Wilson “Thunder”
Smith, Hopkins was dubbed “Lightnin’.” He immediately scored a regional
hit with “Katie May,” and then reached the national rhythm and blues charts
with tunes like “Shotgun Blues” and “Short Haired Woman.” Hopkins came
to define Texas country blues with a guitar style that decorated a steady-
thumping bass with melodic lines played on the treble strings. His lyrics
seemed to come off the top of his head (and often did).
Rayfield Jackson played gigs with Hopkins in the early ’50s when he was
still in high school. “We was playing in little old joints,” Jackson said, “with 7
 about three or four tables in them, and when you had five or six people in
there, you had a crowd. . . . Wouldn’t have no drummer, just two guitars—
and Lightnin’ stomping his feet. That’s it. He’d have them big old shoes on
and a big old wide hat with a feather stuck up in it—looked like a peacock.”
Hopkins didn’t like to travel, which is why he’d play the local bars. He
also didn’t put much faith in recording contracts or the promise of royal-
ties, which is why he cut discs (earning flat fees) for a dizzying number
of labels. Working without a manager, Hopkins knew that he was selling
his songs outright, but figured he’d just as soon leave the studio with $100
to $150 a side instead of royalties that might never materialize. When his
pockets were empty, Hopkins would simply make up some more songs for
another record label.
The music of John Lee Hooker could make the blues of Lightnin’ Hopkins
seem almost ornamental; his propulsive guitar typically revolved around
one chord while his big voice wailed to the persistent thump of his foot.
He broke out of Detroit in 1948 playing big-city, big-beat blues that bore
the stylistic stamp of the Mississippi Delta. Hooker was born in 1917, one
of eleven children in a family of sharecroppers in Clarksdale, Mississippi.
He learned guitar from his stepfather, Will Moore, a popular local musi-
cian who was a friend and host to such famous pickers as Charley Patton,
Blind Lemon Jefferson, and Blind Blake, a master of ragtime guitar. Hooker
took off for Memphis as a teenager, and relocated to Cincinnati before fi-
nally settling in Detroit in 1943. He worked the auto plants by day and the
noisy clubs along Hastings Street by night, playing an electric guitar to cut
through the cacophony.
In 1948, Hooker entered a Detroit recording studio. After laboring over
the presumed A-side, “Sally Mae,” he tossed off “Boogie Chillen,’” a mes-
merizing performance that nailed the gritty ruminative style that would
become his musical signature. With Hooker’s voice drenched in echo, and
the tone of his guitar perched on the edge of distortion, the insistent beat
conjured a kind of urbane Delta trance. When the track was picked up
by Modern Records for national distribution, it became an R&B smash.
Bernard Besman, the local record distributor who’d financed the session,
was listed as the cowriter of “Boogie Chillen.”
Like Hopkins, Hooker created a crazy quilt of a recorded library that
was spread over a couple dozen labels. His driving license might have read
crossroads

John Lee Hooker, but his records bore names like Texas Slim, Delta John,
Birmingham Sam, John Lee Booker, and Boogie Man. But nobody was
fooled, for by the time he scored another national hit with a seductive blues
8 ballad, 1951’s “In the Mood,” Hooker’s sound was one of a kind.
 Muddy Waters, born in April 1915 in Rolling Fork, Mississippi, was dif-
ferent, a stay-at-home bluesman; where walking musicians wandered the
countryside to find gigs, Waters ran his own Saturday night juke so that
instead of just picking up change for playing music, he could also sell moon-
shine and fried fish sandwiches. The craps games were strictly between the
customers.
Waters traveled north in 1943, not long after being recorded by Alan
Lomax. “I came to Chicago on a train,” he said. “Alone. With a suitcase, one
suit of clothes, and a guitar. Got here Saturday morning, got a job Saturday
evening. Boy, luck was with me.” Music opportunities weren’t far behind,
first as a sideman with piano players like Eddie Boyd and Memphis Slim.
Two solo sides for Columbia went unreleased, but in 1947, when an Aris-
tocrat session for Sunnyland Slim ended early, Waters again stepped up to
the microphone. He performed two songs (“Little Anna Mae” and “Gypsy
Woman”) that were good enough to earn him his own session, which pro-
duced his breakthrough 1948 hit, “I Feel Like Going Home.” That tune was
a variation of “Country Blues,” the Lomax cut from 1941.
“All of a sudden I became Muddy Waters,” said the man born McKinley
Morganfield about the effect of having “I Feel Like Going Home” climb the
R&B charts. “Just over night. People started to hollerin’ across the streets
at me. When they used to hardly say ‘good morning,’ you know?” But this
early hit, cut with just his guitar and a stand-up bass, was low-key compared
to the music Waters was making with his musician friends.
“We come in, plug up the amp, get us one of these half-pint or pint bottles
and get some ideas,” said guitarist Jimmy Rogers of his early rehearsals with
Waters. “We’d run through a few verses and finally, after maybe three or four
days fooling around, you’d done built a number.” They were soon joined by
Marion Walter Jacobs—Little Walter—whom Rogers had spotted playing
Rare Records and Working Musicians

for tips at the outdoor market on Maxwell Street, and who revolutionized
the sound of the harmonica through his innovative use of amplification.
“When I run up on Little Walter,” said Waters, “he just fitted me.” The
band played on. “Muddy would cook some rice and chicken gizzards,” said
Rogers. “We have a pot on the kitchen and we’d get us a bowl, get us some
water and get a little drink. Then we’d sit back down and do it some more.”
Muddy’s live band, which also included Otis Spann on piano, was nick-
named “The Headhunters” because they’d drop into clubs, play when the
featured attraction took a break, and show up the headliner with their su-
perior musicianship. In 1950, Leonard Chess, who’d bought out his partners
in the Aristocrat label and renamed it Chess Records, let Waters record with
the band. The result was powerful group performances of songs like “Baby 9
 Please Don’t Go” and “Blow Wind Blow” that gave Waters’s rural blues a
potent urban sound, and also established the instrumental format (bass-
drums-guitar plus keyboards and/or harmonica) of the rock and roll band.
“Muddy was playing when I was plowing,” said B.B. King. “Mules that
is.” King, born in 1925, met bluesman David “Honeyboy” Edwards as a
child. “Christmas of 1937 I was playing the streets in Inverness and I made
fifteen dollars in dimes and quarters,” said Edwards. “I noticed a young
boy, standing there listening at me play. The next day I was going down the
road walking and this boy was out in a field plowing. He came over and
talked to me, said, ‘I saw you playin’ on the streets. My name is Riley King
and I play the guitar, too.’ That was B.B. . . . The next time I saw him was in
Memphis, and he was the Beale Street Blues Boy.”
King hit Memphis in 1946 and stayed with his cousin Bukka White, who
played a steel-bodied guitar and knew a thing or two about the blues. “He’d
[Bukka] been a boxer and a baseball pitcher and served a long time in the
famous Parchman Farm Prison for murdering two men,” said King. “Said
he killed in self-defense. And was quick to warn me to stay out of trouble.”
He got his first break singing Ivory Joe Hunter’s “Blues at Sunrise” on the
West Memphis radio show of Sonny Boy Williamson; later that night, King
subbed for Williamson at a gig he couldn’t make at the 16th Street Grill.
“That night I couldn’t sleep for the pictures running through my head,”
said King of his first live performance. “I saw them [women] dressed and
undressed, bending over and stretching, grinding and grinning and show-
ing me stuff I ain’t ever seen before.”
King, who was billed as the Beale Street Blues Boy (the moniker was
quickly shortened to B.B.), soon got his own show on WDIA in Memphis,
the first radio station specifically programmed for a black audience. Dur-
ing his show, King would hawk an alcohol-based elixir called Peptikon.
The radio helped to generate demand for live appearances, which brought
King to Clarksdale, Mississippi, where he ran into Ike Turner, who offered
to sit in with King’s band. “He played piano and made us sound a whole
lot better,” said King. “Whatever little money I got, I gave some to Ike, who
seemed to appreciate it.”
King encouraged Turner, who’d gotten his first childhood piano lesson
from Pinetop Perkins, to see Sam Phillips in Memphis about recording.
crossroads

Turner’s group, the Kings of Rhythm, worked up a song called “Rocket 88”
on the drive from Clarksdale to Memphis. Turner arranged the tune, which
was recorded in 1951 by Phillips at his Memphis Recording Service. Before
10 Phillips launched Sun Records, he’d lease recordings made in his studio to
various labels. “Rocket 88,” credited to singer Jackie Brensten and his Delta
Cats, became the first number 1 hit in the history of Chess Records, with
its piano-pumping four-four beat prompting some historians to declare it
the very first rock ’n’ roll record. The band earned $20 each for the session.
Turner also attended a 1951 B.B. King recording session and ended up
playing piano on King’s breakthrough hit, “Three O’Clock Blues,” which
hit number 1 on the R&B charts and lingered for three months. King rep-
resented a different side of the blues than a player like Lightnin’ Hopkins.
King wasn’t a solitary singer-guitarist but a bandleader with a great voice
and a killer touch on the electric guitar. Indeed, King would let his guitar
speak up where his voice left off. He played melodic, emotional guitar
solos, evocative of T-Bone Walker (who wrote the definitive slow blues
tune, “Call It Stormy Monday”), but was also influenced by jazz musicians
like Charlie Christian and Django Reinhardt. B.B. King became not just
the most important electric guitarist in the blues, but also an essential role
model for future blues-rock guitar heroes.
It was at the “Three O’Clock Blues” session that Ike Turner met producer
Joe Bihari, the co-owner of Modern/RPM Records. Bihari hired Turner for
$100 a week plus expenses to be his talent scout. “The top job for anybody
was something like $45 a week,” said Turner. “I had more money than
anybody.” Turner would hit a town, inquire about local musicians at the
local bar or barber shop, then hold auditions and take note of what he
found. Bihari would periodically drive from California with a four-input
Magnecord tape recorder and make demonstration recordings of Turner’s
discoveries. All things considered, this scenario was not unlike the endeavor
of a folklorist like Alan Lomax, except in this case, the motive was not
preserving history, but finding hit records.
Rare Records and Working Musicians

Some of Turner’s finds weren’t exactly exclusive. Chester “Howlin’ Wolf ”

Burnett was a blues singer who was born in June of 1910 and who had a
squawking harmonica style reminiscent of Sonny Boy Williamson. When
he was eighteen Wolf met Charley Patton, who inspired him to become a
musician as well as a farmer. By 1948, he had a radio show in West Memphis
and was the leader of a band that would soon drive around in a twelve-
passenger, black-and-yellow DeSoto with “Howlin’ Wolf ” painted on the
side. Between Muddy Waters in Chicago and Howlin’ Wolf in West Mem-
phis, the Delta blues was going electric.
“Muddy, Jimmy Rogers, and Little Walter were shaping their definitive
ensemble sound during these years, and, as another amplified group play-
ing updated versions of traditional Delta Blues, Wolf ’s band, one would 11
 think, would have been comparable,” said critic Robert Palmer about the
ground-breaking music created between 1948 and 1950. “In fact, it was both
more primitive and more modern than Muddy’s group, for while Wolf was
moaning and screaming like Charley Patton and Son House and blowing
unreconstructed country blues harmonica, his band featured heavily ampli-
fied single-string lead guitar by Willie Johnson and Destruction’s rippling,
jazz-influenced piano.”
Sam Phillips first heard Wolf sing on the radio. “When I heard Howlin’
Wolf,” said Phillips, “I said, ‘This is for me. This is where the soul of man
never dies.’” Phillips invited Wolf to check out his recording facility. “He
would sit there with these feet planted wide apart,” said Phillips, “playing
nothing but the French harp, and I tell you, the greatest thing you could
see to this day would be Chester Burnett doing one of those sessions in
my studio.” Nobody who’s heard Howlin’ Wolf ’s “Moanin’ at Midnight” or
“How Many More Years” would question the word of Sam Phillips, who
leased his Wolf tracks to Chess Records. Ike Turner, meanwhile, took Wolf
to a studio in West Memphis to recut some of the same songs for Bihari’s
Modern Records. A settlement was eventually reached whereby Wolf would
record for Chess in exchange for that label giving Modern the recording
rights to Roscoe Gordon, who’d just enjoyed a number 1 hit called “Booted.”
“Leonard Chess kept worryin’ me to come to Chicago,” said Howlin’ Wolf.
“They talked me into the notion to give up my business and come. I turned
my farming business over to my brother-in-law, my grandfather’s farm that
he left me. I moved to Chicago in 1952 or 1953. I had a $4,000 car and $3,900
in my pocket. I’m the onliest one drove out of the South like a gentleman.”
But Wolf was not alone. He and his blues were on a trip alongside Waters
and Hooker and Hopkins and King. Their music was rooted in its southern
past, but having traveled to the city, would now be heard in a broader envi-
ronment where it would mix it up with folk music and rock ’n’ roll. Waters
and Wolf would record songs that, a decade later, would become essential
material for British rock bands. Hooker would pick up an acoustic guitar
and beguile the coffee house crowd, while King would ultimately become
a worldwide celebrity. Just as surprising, these bluesmen were also heading
to a time when they would once more make music alongside long-forgotten
figures of the Delta blues: Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt,
crossroads

and Robert Johnson, who was still dead, but not yet a legend.

12
 Chicago Blues and
two

the Birth of Folk-Blues

Club Zanzibar on the West Side of Chicago was like a second home to
Muddy Waters and his band from 1948 until the mid-1950s. If they weren’t
on tour, you’d find them there most every week. Fourteen-year-old Otis
Rush saw Waters at the Zanzibar when he was visiting his sister in Chicago
and knew right away that he wanted to be a guitar player. Texas-born Fred-
die King lived next door to the club as a teenager, and soaked up the sounds.
A few years later, King and Earl Hooker (John Lee’s cousin) would barn-
storm the city’s bars with their guitars. “They’d be shaking when we walked
in,” said King. “They’d say, ‘Here they
come again, man. Watch all your
scotch. Watch your women.’”
Clubs like the Zanzibar were
the laboratories where Muddy
sculpted his sound. “The beat is
almost like somebody falling off
a bar stool,” said Paul Oscher,
who played harmonica in one
of Waters’s later bands. “It’s
not a straight, steady thing.
. . . Muddy worked the au-
dience, and he used time
to do that. He’d sing, ‘You
say you love me baby . . .’
and he’d wait, drag that
shit out. There was no
time there, you’d just
wait on him. ‘Please
Mudd
y Wa
ters 191
3–1
983
 call me on the phone sometime.’ He’d wait till he thought it was right to
tell the story.”
Willie Dixon spent many nights at the Zanzibar, but when he first came to
Chicago from Mississippi, he wanted to be a boxer. The stocky, six-foot-two
Dixon won the novice division of the Illinois Golden Gloves Heavyweight
Championship in 1937; he went professional, but after four fights had a fall-
ing out with his manager over money, and turned to music, not yet aware
that it had the same business ethics as boxing. Dixon went to prison for
ten months during World War II after declaring himself a “conscientious
objector.” “Why should I fight to save somebody that’s killing me and my
people?” he said. He performed songs like “Violent Love” with the Big Three
Trio when he got out, wrapping his enormous frame around a stand-up
bass. After playing a 1948 session for Robert Nighthawk, he became an
integral part of the Chess Records family as house bassist, arranger, talent
scout, and songwriter.
One night, Dixon was in the bathroom at the Zanzibar teaching a song
to Muddy Waters. He told him to get a little rhythm pattern going, and
since Waters couldn’t read, Dixon coached him through the lyrics. “The
gypsy woman told my momma,” da-da-da-da-da! “before I was born,” da-
da-da-da-da! During the next set, Waters gave the song a shot. The crowd
got louder at each blast of the band—“You got a boy child coming,” da-da-
da-da-da! “He’s going to be a son of a gun”—until Muddy seemed to float
above the stage like the sexiest man in Chicago, if not the world. A big hit
(and a blues standard) had been born: “(I’m Your) Hoochie Coochie Man.”
Dixon had by then become the preeminent composer of the modern
blues song. The components were still drawn from a reservoir of overlapping
lyrics and melodies that constitute the musical aquifer of Delta blues, but
Dixon spiced his songs with hints of big-city panache and was careful to
compose stylish intros and instrumental hooks. Not insignificantly, Dixon
was also a tireless self-promoter, and working at Chess, he was blessed to
have the inside track on selling songs to two of the best voices in blues,
Waters and Howlin’ Wolf.
When Wolf arrived in Chicago, Leonard Chess asked Waters to make him
feel at home. Waters let Wolf stay at his house, and introduced him around
town. “He took me in and I respect him for it today,” said Wolf. “But while
crossroads

I was there, I paid for every mouthful of food I ate and every night I slept
there. He didn’t do it for nothing.’”
Wolf had no trouble finding work in Chicago clubs, as his records had
14 preceded him, and a rivalry inevitably developed between the two Chess
stars. Their live performances were quite different, with Muddy centered and
commanding but relatively sedate compared to Wolf, who might choreo-
graph a lyric by crawling across the stage (if not the bar). One night, when
Wolf was exciting the women in the audience, a jealous girlfriend stabbed
him in the thigh with a butcher knife. Wolf kept singing as he headed out
the door (and to the hospital). Both Wolf and Muddy were known to do
the bottle trick, in which the singer would shake up a bottle of Coca-Cola
and slip it into his slacks. Then, looming over the crowd from the lip of the
stage, the singer would slowly unzip his fly, pop the cap, and spray soda
over the first few rows.
Waters and Wolf both worried that Dixon was giving his best songs to the
other guy, prompting him to play the angles. “It got to the place where they
thought I was writing better songs for the other,” said Dixon. “Wolf would
say, ‘You giving Muddy the best songs,’ and Muddy would say the same thing.
So if I wanted Wolf to do the song, I’d say this is a song I wanted Muddy
to do, and vice versa. Then everybody would be satisfied.” Waters recorded
such Dixon songs as “I’m Ready,” “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” and
“You Shook Me” while Wolf cut “Evil,” “Spoonful,” and “Little Red Rooster.”
At the Zanzibar, Muddy would often let the band start the show, and sit
ringside with his brandy and lady friends before taking the microphone at
mid-stream. Wolf would be on the stage for the first downbeat. They both
worked hard to keep a steady line-up of musicians, but after Little Walter
left Waters’s live band after scoring a major 1952 hit instrumental called
“Juke,” Muddy’s group was more often in flux.
Junior Wells was the first replacement for Little Walter. When Wells
dropped out during a southern tour, Muddy sought out James Cotton,
Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues

who’d recently recorded a single for Sun Records. Cotton had just finished
a day of hauling gravel when a sharply dressed man introduced himself as
Muddy Waters. “That’s nice,” said Cotton. “I’m Jesus Christ.” Identities were
soon confirmed. “We worked the Hippodrome on Beale Street [in Mem-
phis] Saturday night,” said Cotton. “That Sunday we played the state line
of Arkansas and Missouri, and that Monday we was in Chicago. I moved
in on the second floor.” Cotton’s rent was $12.50 a week.
“Muddy had a plantation mentality when it came to Chess Records,” said
Jimmy Rogers, who besides playing guitar with Waters, cut his own sides for
Chess. “Leonard was the boss and Muddy did as the bossman said. Smart
but unlettered, Muddy knew he could get what he wanted out of Leonard,
and he flaunted it in the new cars he rode and the flashy clothes he wore.
But Wolf was a rebel who’d left the plantation behind. All his life, he strove 15
 to be his own man.” Wolf bought his own cars—Waters paid for his via
uncollected record royalties—and considered Chess Records merely his
place of employment.
Wolf was barely literate when he arrived in Chicago, and he took adult
education classes to get basic skills in reading, writing, and math. He also
took guitar lessons from Reggie Boyd, who played on Chess sessions, and
taught Wolf how to read music and the rudiments of theory. During inter-
mission at a gig, Wolf was apt to put on his glasses and do his homework.
He also looked at his band as a business, and took deductions for Social
Security and unemployment insurance out of the musician’s salary. Wolf ’s
accountant taught his wife Lillie how to do his books. “Wolf had to match
whatever he took out for those boys,” said Lillie, adding, “He wanted to
shoot straight with them.”
Wolf ’s right-hand man was guitarist Hubert Sumlin, who first saw Wolf
when he was playing a juke in Seypel, Arkansas. Sumlin, who was a curi-
ous kid, climbed up on a stack of Coca-Cola crates to peek into the club.
“Well, these Coke cases started to come unbalanced,” said Sumlin, “and I
fell through the window into the club, in the middle of a song. Over on the
old Wolf ’s head I landed—right on the dude’s head.” Wolf shrugged him off
and planted him in a proper seat. When the show was over, Wolf drove his
youngest fan home. “When he got there,” said Sumlin, “he made me wait
in the car while he went in to see Momma. And he told her, ‘Don’t punish
him, Mother, he just wanted to hear the music.’ That’s the first time I saw
Wolf and I followed him ever since.”
Waters and Wolf ruled Chicago, but throughout the ’50s, a second genera-
tion of blues musicians arrived from the South. Buddy Guy, born in Lett-
sworth, Louisiana, in 1936, got to Chicago in September of 1957 with $100
in his pocket. “I was as green as a pool table and twice as square,” said Guy,
who aimed to play like B.B. King but with the flamboyant showmanship of
Eddie “Guitar Slim” Jones. Guy carried an extra-long electric guitar cord
so that he could recreate Slim’s shtick of stepping out onto the street while
playing a gnarly solo. He also chose Slim’s hit “The Things That I Used to
Do” when Otis Rush challenged the newcomer to take the stage at Chicago’s
708 Club. His playing won over the discerning crowd, and a couple days
later, Waters came by to meet the new kid in town.
“I’m in there trying to get a glimpse of Muddy Waters,” said Guy, “and
crossroads

somebody grabbed me from behind and say, ‘I’m Muddy Waters. I hear
you’re hungry.’” Waters figured a newly arrived country boy just had to
be starving, so he brought Guy out to his Chevy and made him a salami
16 sandwich. Guy was soon playing the 708 Club three nights a week (at $25
per) and getting the occasional all-night recording session at Chess (for
$40). He also shared the stage with B.B. King, who invited him to come by
his hotel. “It was like a father-and-son talk,” said Guy of his visit with King,
“and it got rid of a lot of shyness in me. . . . B.B. is the only person who
ever shown me anything on the guitar. Other than what he taught me, I’m
completely self-taught.” On that day, following King’s advice, Guy started
playing with a flat pick.
B.B. King had learned many lessons since his early days in Memphis.
Where Waters and Wolf were in Chicago for weeks at a time between pe-
riodic, mostly Southern tours, King was on the road constantly. In 1956, he
played 342 shows, and subsequently averaged 330 dates a year. During his
travels, he ran into a wide variety of musicians. Dizzy Gillespie introduced
him to Charlie Parker. “I’m a blues player, B.,” said Parker. “We’re all blues
players.” King went to see Miles Davis and John Coltrane play at Birdland.
Standing at a urinal, he heard the trumpeter’s unmistakable rasp: “Mother-
fucking blues-singing B.B. King. Yeah, that’s one cat who plays his ass off.”
King was also stirred by a recital by classical guitarist Andrés Segovia, and
wore out Frank Sinatra’s In the Wee Small Hours.
Nights off, however, were rare, and keeping a band on the road was a
constant struggle. On the weekend his insurance lapsed, his tour bus (“Big
Red”) crashed and killed two men in another vehicle. King had to pay out
$250,000 and finance another bus, and then ran into trouble with the IRS,
which kept him fiscally underwater for a decade. Record sales didn’t help.
King claims that RPM Records paid him a penny or less per disc, but that
wasn’t the worst of it. “They would take a song I’d write and add another
name to it and copyright the new one,” says King, who said he never met
such “cowriters” as Joe Josea and Jules Taub.
Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues

“They never had a lawyer look at their contracts,” said Scott Cameron
who would in later years handle the business affairs of Waters, Wolf, and
Dixon. “It [Chess Records] was like a family affair. Somebody would put
something in front of them with a pen, say sign it, and zip, they’d sign
it, take the money and run.” As always, the devil was in the details; Arc’s
publishing contracts were often “work-for-hire” arrangement wherein a
songwriter would collect a salary but not own the publishing rights to their
songs. “That generation [of record executives] was terribly paternal,” said
veteran record executive Bob Krasnow. “James Brown would come off the
road, and Syd Nathan at King Records would buy him a bunch of clothes,
a Cadillac, a case of wine, and send him home to take a couple of weeks
off. Then charge it to his royalties.” The record company kept the books, of
course, and the artists rarely got a look inside. 17
 Leonard Chess and his brother Phil got into the record business after
running a Chicago liquor store and then a popular black nightclub, the
Macomba Lounge. He knew nothing about song publishing until 1953 when
Gene and Harry Goodman (clarinetist Benny’s brothers) proposed a part-
nership called Arc Music. Arc would specifically handle international rights
and Chess-owned songs covered by non-Chess acts. Covers turned into a
goldmine when pop singers like Bill Haley, Pat Boone, and the McGuire
Sisters had hits with Chess songs. The songwriters didn’t profit, however,
as Arc’s early publishing contracts said that royalties were not to be paid
on such recordings.
Record executives know that musicians often have a blind spot when
it comes to business. Chuck Berry was encouraged by Muddy Waters to
approach Leonard Chess about the chance to make a record. (Berry had
sought out his favorite blues singer during a visit to Chicago, and later
showed Waters around his hometown of St. Louis.) Chess liked a country-
ish Berry tune called “Ida May,” but pressed for a catchier title. It became
“Maybellene,” and was cut at Berry’s first recording session in May of 1955
along with “Wee Wee Hours,” “Thirty Days,” and “You Can’t Catch Me.”
During those few hours, with Willie Dixon on string bass, Berry helped
to create rock ’n’ roll by building a bridge between the blues and country
music, a combination that was also exploited by Elvis Presley. Berry’s mu-
sical signature became rocking double-stop guitar licks and teen-friendly
lyrics; his secret weapon was pianist Johnnie Johnson. After the session,
hamburgers and soda pop were brought into the studio for the hungry
musicians. Around ten o’clock at night, Chess took Berry into his office to
sign a few papers.
Berry read every word of the two contracts. “Some of the statements
were beyond my knowledge of the record business,” said Berry, “such as the
‘residuals from mechanical rights,’ the ‘writer and producer’s percentages,’
and the ‘performance royalties and publishers fees,’ but I intentionally would
frown at various sections to give the impression that a particular term (I
actually knew nothing of) was rather unfavorable.” Berry said he also knew
“full well that I’d sign that darn thing anyway.”
When “Maybellene” became a huge hit—number 1 R&B, and number 5
pop—Berry noticed that there were two other writers listed on the record
label. One was Alan Freed, the influential New York (via Cleveland) deejay
crossroads

who’d famously coined the term “rock ’n’ roll.” Payola ruled the airwaves
in the 1950s, and Marshall Chess did his part to grease the wheels of com-
merce. He even declared his pay-for-play payouts as a business expense
18 on Chess’s corporate tax returns, which is why he wasn’t dragged into the
payola scandal that ruined Freed’s career. Offering the disc jockey a piece
of the song’s publishing was simply another (extremely generous) way to
insure airplay. Berry didn’t obtain full ownership of his first hit until the
copyright held by Arc Music expired.
Chuck Berry became the most successful artist on Chess, which also re-
corded rock ’n’ roll records by Bo Diddley (including some songs written by
Dixon). Meanwhile, in Memphis, B.B. King met Elvis Presley, who was fast
becoming the biggest star in popular music. “The roots of rock ’n’ roll went
back to my roots, the Mississippi Delta,” King said, adding, “I understood
it, but couldn’t embrace it. I lacked the flash of other black entertainers like
Little Richard, Chuck Berry, or Bo Diddley. I missed the boat.”
The audience for the blues was aging, but while the genre’s popularity
would begin to wane in the late 1950s, the influence of the bluesmen would
linger. “When I was a little kid,” said James Hendrix of Seattle, Washington,
“I heard a record playing at a neighbor’s house turned way up. That song
called to me, and now I don’t even remember which one it was. I left my
yard, went down the street, and when the song was over, I knocked on the
door and said, ‘What was that playing?’ ‘Muddy Waters,’ the guy said. I
didn’t quite understand. He repeated it and spelled it out—‘M-U-D-D-Y.’”

“Sometime around 1954 or 1955,” said Dave Van Ronk, “I happened to

be walking across Washington Square Park on a Sunday afternoon, and
I noticed this guy playing an old New Yorker Martin, a very small, very
sweet guitar, and he was doing something that sounded an awful lot like
‘Stackalee.’ It immediately grabbed my attention, because he was doing the
Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues

whole thing by himself. His thumb was picking out the bass notes while
he was playing the melody with his fingers.” When the music stopped, Van
Ronk asked the guitarist (Tom Paley, who later played with the New Lost
City Ramblers) to show him what he was doing.
Van Ronk hurried home for the first of many practice sessions devoted
to learning how to fingerpick. He considered himself a jazz guitarist, and
would typically use a flat pick to either play rhythm chords or single-note
melodies. The integration of bass, rhythm, and melody in this different
style of guitar playing encouraged Van Ronk to experiment with a wide
variety of music, including ragtime tunes typically played on the piano.
The burgeoning interest in folk and blues also prompted him to ditch his
jazz band and perform as a solo singer-guitarist.
Van Ronk, who made his living as a merchant seaman, played the open- 19
 ing night of a Greenwich Village club called the Café Bizarre in August of
1957. Odetta, the evening’s headliner, offered to pass along a tape of Van
Ronk to the man who ran the Gate of Horn in Chicago, a show-business
newcomer named Albert Grossman. Smelling the potential for a big break,
he quickly made a recording, but unbeknownst to him, the tape never
made it to Odetta, let alone Grossman. Frustrated, Van Ronk impulsively
hitchhiked to Chicago. Grossman, seated at the bar of his empty club, told
Van Ronk to take the stage for an impromptu audition. “When I got off,”
said Van Ronk, “Albert still had not batted an eyelash. ‘Do you know who
works here?’ he asked. ‘Big Bill Broonzy works here. Josh White works here.
Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry play here a lot. Now tell me, why should I
hire you?’” Van Ronk was back at Washington Square the following Sunday.
“The musicians were in different groups scattered around the fountain
and near the arch,” said guitarist Happy Traum describing a typical Sunday
in the Greenwich Village park. “There were Pete Seeger-type folk singers,
there were old-timey musicians, there were a couple of different bluegrass
bands, there were people singing the blues. At first I went to the folk group,
but I also started liking blues, and met Dave Van Ronk for the first time
there, playing ‘St. James Infirmary’ and songs like that. He was definitely one
of the first people I have an image of meeting there, because he was singing
real loud and you could hear him from across the other side of the park.”
When Traum studied at the Bronx campus of New York University, he
met a charismatic student who rode a motorcycle and played the guitar.
“His name was Ian Buchanan,” said Traum, “and he pulled out this guitar
and started finger picking all this obscure old blues material. He was very
eclectic in his taste in music, but when he played guitar, it was blues finger
picking. Here was a guy who’d play ‘Canned Heat Blues’ by Tommy Johnson,
which was not an everyday occurrence.” (Johnson, who recorded from 1928
to 1930, had a snappy guitar style and an insatiable appetite for women and
liquor. “Canned Heat Blues” was about Sterno, his drink of choice when
actual spirits weren’t available.)
Buchanan transferred to Antioch College in Ohio, where his playing
would inspire Jorma Kaukonen, who would later play in Jefferson Airplane,
and John Hammond Jr., the son of the famous talent scout. “Some of the first
things he taught me,” said Kaukonen, “were ‘Hesitation Blues,’ ‘Death Don’t
crossroads

Have No Mercy,’ and ‘Keep Your Lamps Trimmed and Burning.’ Those were
my departure points, and then I went off to learn from the recordings.” The
three songs were all by the Reverend Gary Davis, and they became peren-
20 nials in Kaukonen’s post-Airplane blues ensemble, Hot Tuna.
 Traum, meanwhile, found a new guitar hero when he heard a Folkways
ten-inch called Brownie McGhee Blues. Traum telephoned McGhee, who
lived in Harlem, to ask about taking lessons. “Brownie had two or three
white guys like me who’d go to his apartment to take lessons,” said Traum,
who paid $5 per session, “and he had his lessons fairly down pat. There
were certain things he’d teach you, and other times he’d play a song and
you did your best to keep up. You’d have to stop him to ask, ‘How do you
play that lick?’”
Everybody, it seemed, was looking to learn how to play like the people
on the Harry Smith anthology. “I was at the Washington Square jam ses-
sions from 1956 on,” said David Cohen, who grew up in Brooklyn, and who
would later play keyboards with Country Joe and the Fish. “I wouldn’t miss
it even if it was raining, so I really grew up with people like Joshua Rifkin,
Stefan Grossman, Danny Kalb. John Sebastian was around, though he was
a little younger than us. Happy and Artie Traum. And then there was the
older crowd like Dave Van Ronk.”
Lots of white folk music fans were discovering the blues. Eric Von
Schmidt was born in 1931 and lived in Westport, Connecticut. He was the
son of Harold Von Schmidt, a successful illustrator and a regular contributor
to the Saturday Evening Post, and figured to follow in his father’s footsteps.
“Then one day,” said Von Schmidt, “it was on a Sunday, I was by myself out
in the studio, painting a poster for the Senior Football Dance, and I heard
this incredible voice coming right out of the radio. . . . It was honey-smooth,
but had the bite of a buzz-saw cutting through a cement block. It was Lead
Belly, and it changed my life.”
Von Schmidt’s father bought his son a Gibson acoustic guitar, and he
Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues

spent hours trying to play along with Negro Sinful Songs Sung by Lead Belly.
Since he was going out with a girl called Irene, he quickly mastered one
of Lead Belly’s biggest hits, “Goodnight Irene.” Later, he found two books
of folk songs by John and Alan Lomax, and noted that the “Folk Song
Archives of the Library of Congress” had recorded copies of many of the
songs. He visited the archive in 1950. “It was like finding buried treasure,”
said Von Schmidt. “You could sit all day and listen to these funky records,
and they really had good notes and the words and everything. Because I
couldn’t read music, the songbooks just whetted my appetite. Hearing the
actual songs was a feast.”
Elsewhere, in the nation’s capitol, Dick Spottswood continued to comb
used record stores in search of desirable discs. “I’d go hunting records with
John Fahey,” says Spottswood. “We used to go down to the area around 21
 Tidewater, Virginia, and around Norfolk and Hampton and knock on doors
and ask people to sell us old records. We would try to find black neighbor-
hoods, which was about as far as our strategy went.”
Fahey, who lived in Takoma Park, Maryland, bought his first guitar from
the Sears-Roebuck catalog for $17. As a young musician and collector, he
liked country and bluegrass and initially dismissed the blues. Then Fahey
and his friend went on a 1956 record-hunting trip and came back to Spott-
swood’s house to listen to their purchases. Fahey was initially dismissive of
“Praise God I’m Satisfied” by Blind Willie Johnson. “A couple hours later,”
said Spottswood, “John calls me up and says, ‘Would you play that record
again?’ So I played it for him over the phone, and he said, ‘I’ve changed
my mind—I really like it.’” Fahey later compared his embrace of blues a
“conversion experience.”
Fahey evolved into an idiosyncratic bluesman playing what he called
“American primitive guitar.” Joe Bussard, a pal who was in the process of
amassing an estimable collection of rare 78s, also had a bare-bones record-
ing studio (complete with a disc-cutting machine) in his parent’s Maryland
home. Fahey recorded some 78s for Bussard’s Fonotone label, and also a
full-length album that was credited on one side to Fahey, and on the other
to “Blind Joe Death.” Fahey pressed up a hundred copies and tried to sell
them at the Langley Park gas station where he worked. He also sent a copy
to Sam Charters, who had just published the first real history of down-home
music, The Country Blues. “I still have a letter from 1959,” said Fahey, “where
I sent Charters a copy of my first record and he wrote me back to tell me
how terrible I was and how [Ramblin’] Jack Elliot and so on and so forth
were much better than me.”
Charters, born in 1929, spent his childhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,
and California. After studying at Harvard, he got a degree in economics from
the University of California at Berkeley. By then, Charters had amassed a
huge collection of vintage 78s and had spent time in New Orleans studying
the city’s musical culture. While producing field recordings that were released
on Folkways Records, he did research for The Country Blues, an ambitious
book that he figured would have flaws, but that he hoped would inspire oth-
ers to hunt for more information about a heretofore arcane subject.
Charters’s book gave the “down-home blues” a new name—“country
crossroads

blues”—and he compiled a companion Folkways LP that included fourteen

tracks by such musicians as Blind Lemon Jefferson, Sleepy John Estes, Lon-
nie Johnson, Bukka White, and for the first time on record in twenty-one
22 years, Robert Johnson. While working on his book, Charters also nursed
the hope of finding Lightnin’ Hopkins, a Texas bluesman who’d all but dis-
appeared after having a handful of R&B hits in the early 1950s. Hopkins, it
turned out, was hiding in plain sight.
To help in his search, Charters enlisted the help of Mack McCormick,
a record collector and writer who’d known Hopkins, and who also knew
his way around Houston. They checked pawnshops and ghetto bars but
came up empty; the next day, Charters cruised Dowling Street by himself
and stopped at a red light. “A car pulled up beside me,” said Charters, “and
there was a man with sunglasses saying, ‘You lookin’ for me?’ And I said,
‘Are you Lightnin’ Hopkins?’ And Lightnin’ said, ‘Yeah.’ So he found me. I
had been checked out and the decision was that I was safe.”
When the talk turned to making a record, Hopkins asked Charters to get
him an electric guitar at the pawnshop; instead, the folklorist procured an
acoustic and a fresh set of strings. They recorded at Hopkins’s rented room
at 2803 Hadley Street. Charters used a portable Ampex tape recorder and
an Electrovoice microphone, and offered $300 for the afternoon session.
Hopkins wanted $100 a song, but also needed the money, so he signed a
release. Charters cajoled nine songs out of Hopkins, partly by piquing his
interest with well-informed questions about Blind Lemon Jefferson. “I did
it all with a hand-held microphone,” said Charters. “I would [hold it aloft
to] do the vocal and move it down to get the guitar solos . . . As an old folkie
myself, I kept insisting that he tune the guitar.”
Charters was in the right place to capture a moment in time. “He is one
of the last of his kind,” Charters wrote of Hopkins in the last paragraph of
The Country Blues, “a lonely, bitter man who brings to the blues the intensity
and pain of the hours in the hot sun, scraping at the earth, singing to make
Chicago Blues and the Birth of Folk-Blues

the hours pass. The blues will go on, but the country blues, and the great
singers who created from the raw singing of the work songs and the field
cries, the richness and variety of the country blues, will pass with men like
this thin, intense singer from Centerville, Texas.” Shortly after recording for
Charters, Lightnin’ Hopkins would play his country blues at Carnegie Hall.

23
three
Bohemian Blues
and the Folk Revival
Stefan Grossman was a fifteen-year-old Brooklyn kid when he called up
the Reverend Gary Davis in 1960 to ask about taking guitar lessons. “Sure,”
said Davis, “come up and bring your money, honey.” The next Saturday,
Grossman’s parents drove him to a section of the Bronx that he said looked
as “bombed out as Dresden.” Grossman found his teacher “in a three-room
sharecropper’s shack behind a burnt-out tenement.” It was a revelation to
see “a musical genius living in utter poverty.” Even before unpacking his
guitar, Grossman had learned a lesson in the blues.
The Reverend Gary Davis was a
guitar virtuoso, arguably the most
famous street singer in the history
of the blues, and a teacher of en-
during renown whose students
also included David Bromberg,
Ry Cooder, Ian Buchanan, Roy
Book Binder, and Woody Mann.
His influence spread to such non-
students as Bob Dylan, Jorma
Kaukonen, and Dave Van Ronk,
all of whom were inspired by the
snappy syncopations of such
Davis instrumentals as “Buck
Dance,” “Twelve Sticks,” and

vis
72

a
–19

D
1896

Gary
Reverend
“Cincinnati Flow Rag.” Those guitar players lucky enough to study within
the smoky haze of the Reverend’s White Owl cigars enjoyed a rare op-
portunity to literally step into the folk tradition and learn directly from a
master instrumentalist. In the early-’60s, folklorists would scour the South
in search of forgotten figures of Depression-era blues, some of whom had
stopped playing music. New York guitar players had only to take the subway
uptown to find a street-singing Segovia who not only had never stopped
playing, but had also gotten better.
“Play what you know,” Davis told his students. “Play just what you know.”
Davis knew plenty. Blind since shortly after his 1896 birth in South Caro-
lina, Davis was playing guitar and singing in the Baptist Church by the
time he turned eight. He played in string bands as a teenager, but was a
loner by nature and spent much of his life as a street performer, settling in
Durham, North Carolina, in the early 1930s and relocating to New York
City in the 1940s.
Fingerpicking guitarists from the southeast are said to play in the Pied-
mont style, a term that accommodated such distinct instrumentalists as
Blind Blake, Josh White, Blind Willie McTell, and Blind Boy Fuller. Davis
had a boisterous, fleet-fingered style that drew upon most every music
that had crossed his path, including blues, jazz, gospel, parade marches,
and popular tunes. But he probably owed the most to ragtime, the synco-
pated piano music that was popular in the early twentieth century, and best
known to contemporary listeners from “The Entertainer,” the Scott Joplin
tune used in the 1973 film The Sting. Had Joplin played guitar instead of
piano, the foremost composer of ragtime might have sounded something
like Gary Davis.
Grossman would not just bring his guitar to his lessons but a tape recorder
B ohemian Blues and the Folk Revival

as well. That way, he could study the tunes at home and try to replicate the
tricky passages. Grossman also took his recorder to Gerdes Folk City in
Greenwich Village, where he taped a week of 1962 Davis performances
that were eventually released in 2009. Students brought Davis income and
valuable support, with Grossman and others accompanying the Reverend
to music gigs both secular and sacred.
“On Friday night, he’d come down to the Village and go to some coffee-
house and earn maybe a hundred bucks passing the hat,” said Grossman.
“Saturday there might be a Bar Mitzvah, and you’d take him, not to the
ceremony, but to entertain your Jewish friends. The parents loved him.
Then on Saturday night, there’d be a concert at a college, and you’d find
yourself eating with the president of Swarthmore, and the first thing Rever- 25
 end Davis would do was take out his false teeth and put them on the table.
Then he’d eat with his hands. Finally, on Sunday, he’d take us to a storefront
church, with maybe fifteen people in the congregation, and you’d have him
preaching, and then he’d get into a song and get the spirit. He doesn’t get
that spirit when he’d sing the song in front of a white audience at Gerdes.
But in church, he’d go to places where I’ve never been.”
Dave Van Ronk, who by the early ’60s was an established figure on the
Greenwich Village folk and blues scene, saw the Reverend play and preach
in a storefront church. “His sermons were remarkable,” said Van Ronk.
“He would set up a riff on his guitar, and then he would chant his sermon
in counterpoint to the riff, and when he made a little change in what he
was saying, he would make a little change on the guitar. There was this
constant interplay and interweaving of voice and guitar, and these fantastic
polyrhythms would come out of that—I never heard anything quite like
it, before or since.”
Davis embodied the psychological conflicts that can confront a musician
playing the blues and songs that praised the Lord. After recording a pair of
blues during a 1935 recording session, Davis refused to perform anything
but religious music. Over the years, he fudged on the pledge like a God-
fearing man happy to savor a drink of whiskey; Grossman said Davis and
his wife, Annie, would call him the “Devil’s Son” because he would always
be after his teacher to show him blues songs. The Reverend even showed
David Bromberg some naughty blues. “When he taught me the ‘Maple Leaf
Rag,’” said Bromberg, “he had words to go with it: ‘Get it up, get it up, get
it up in a hurry.’ I also remember him singing, ‘Old Aunt Diana, don’t you
know, used to give her two nickels just to look at her hole. Laid down old
Diana on her back, gave me my two nickels back.’”
Van Ronk also taught guitar to supplement his income as a coffeehouse
performer and recording artist. “My blues-guitar-artist-to-be-path accel-
erated with my discovery, at the age of 17, of my mentor, the great Dave
Van Ronk,” said Danny Kalb, who would later play lead guitar in the Blues
Project, an influential blues-inflected rock band. “Dave was a trip, the
perfect shock mentor, a grown-up, a bohemian, living in a West 15th Street
neo-tenement. An anarcho-syndicalist wise in the ways of the outré left—he
gave me the real skinny on the Rosenbergs, a shock to this Westchester
crossroads

Stalinist kid at the time—a pot-smoker iconoclast up the wazoo and more.”
Van Ronk worked the same club circuit as Davis, and they once shared a
late-night drive from Boston to New York City. The Reverend was sprawled
26 across the back seat idly picking “Candyman,” one of his most famous songs.
“By New Haven it was really beginning to bug me,” said Van Ronk, “but
what could I say? This was the Reverend Gary Davis playing ‘Candyman.’
Bridgeport, somewhere around Stamford, something inside me snapped. I
growled, ‘For Christ’s sake, Gary, can’t you play anything else?’ And I turned
around, and he was asleep.”
Van Ronk called his autobiography The Mayor of MacDougal Street,
which was metaphorically true, but being a bluesy folkie wasn’t a trip down
easy street. Recording a folk-blues album for Folkways paid in the low
hundreds. The good news was that the records stayed in print, which was
important for a walking (or driving) musician, who never expected a record
to do much more than promote the next live gig. Prestige Records paid a
little better, but it was in a more commercial sphere than Folkways, where
Mo Asch’s first priority was marketing even the most esoteric music.
Economically, it behooved a folkie bluesman to be flexible. In the late
’50s, not long after Britain’s Lonnie Donegan launched a skiffle craze in
Britain with a version of Lead Belly’s “Rock Island Line,” Van Ronk aimed
for a similar sound with a group called The Orange Blossom Jug Five with
guitarist Sam Charters (preparing to publish The Country Blues) and his
future wife Ann (an accomplished pianist) on washboard. During the early
’60s vogue for jug bands, Van Ronk formed the Ragtime Jug Stompers with
his former student Danny Kalb on lead guitar.
Greenwich Village was by now crowded with musicians who disparaged
the commercial folk music of the Kingston Trio but didn’t hate the buzz
of tourists it drew to the clubs and coffeehouses located near the intersec-
tion of Bleeker and McDougal Street. Albert Grossman had moved from
Chicago to New York and approached Van Ronk about joining a trio that
would sing folk songs with a male-female vocal blend reminiscent of the
B ohemian Blues and the Folk Revival

Weavers. Van Ronk passed on the offer to join Peter, Paul and Mary, but
was thrilled when that best-selling trio recorded one of his tunes. Gary
Davis’s “If I Had My Way” was also included on the group’s debut album.
“Peter, Paul & Mary wanted him to have the publishing royalties to ‘If I
Had My Way,’” said Ernie Hawkins, who moved to New York from Pitts-
burgh to study with Davis, “and he and the group and his manager were all
gathered in a lawyer’s office and they asked him, ‘Did you write this song?’
And Gary Davis said, ‘No.’ There was silence and then the Reverend said,
‘The Lord gave it to me in 1927.’ Coincidentally, that was when Blind Willie
Johnson recorded it. So he had loopholes. He was a smart guy.” He also now
had the money to buy a house in Queens.
Greenwich Village bohemia was transitioning from the era defined by 27
 the Beat Generation to that of the hippies. Poet and musician Ed Sand-
ers opened the Peace Eye Bookstore in the East Village and published an
avant-garde journal called Fuck You. In 1964, he formed the Fugs with Tuli
Kupferberg (Stefan Grossman was briefly a member of the group). Harry
Smith produced the first Fugs album, and was paid with a bottle of rum.
“During the session,” said Sanders, “I think perhaps to spur us to greater
motivity and energy, he came in from the recording booth where we were
singing and smashed the bottle of rum against the wall.”
Liquor wasn’t the only available intoxicant. “One thing I regret empha-
sizing in my publications was the defiance in shooting up [heroin],” said
Sanders. “I had a bit of a cavalier attitude toward the use of the needle. In
some apartments on the Lower East Side a hypodermic needle boiling on
a gas ring was almost as prevalent as a folk guitar by the bed. Miriam [his
wife] noticed how, just as in later decades a person might ask, ‘Do you
mind if I smoke a cigarette?’ Back in those days it was likely to be ‘Do you
mind if I shoot up?’”
On any given Village night, Van Ronk, Patrick Sky, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott,
and whoever else was around would gather to drink at the Kettle of Fish.
During the day, they might stop at Izzy Young’s Folklore Center to look
through the LPs, try out an instrument, or maybe buy a fresh set of guitar
strings for a performance at the Gaslight, which was just downstairs from
the Kettle of Fish. Bob Dylan got his first break in this Bermuda Triangle
of bohemianism when he ran into Van Ronk at the Folklore Center trying
out an old Gibson guitar. Dylan asked him how to get a job at the Gaslight.
When Van Ronk inquired if he could push a broom, Dylan picked up the
Gibson and played an old blues, “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down
and Out.” Van Ronk invited him to come to the Gaslight that night and
sing a couple songs during his set.
Dylan soon found his way to the city’s premiere folk club. “I spent a lot of
time at Gerde’s,” said Peter Wolf, who was studying painting in New York,
and who would later gain fame as the singer of the J. Geils Band. “I got to
see John Lee Hooker. Bob Dylan opened for him.” The Gerde’s gig was still
a novelty for Hooker, who was new to the coffeehouse circuit and was now
being booked into venues like Boston’s Club 47 and the Ash Grove in Los
Angeles by Albert Grossman.
crossroads

For Hooker, the folk clubs meant trading his electric guitar for an acoustic
and choosing a repertoire that would appeal to an attentive audience as
opposed to a rowdy crowd in a noisy tavern. “He’d sit around and watch
28 me play,” said Hooker of Dylan. “He’d be right there every night, and we’d
be playing guitars in the hotel. I don’t know what he got from me, but he
must’ve gotten something. A lot of guitar players have.” Including Pete
Townshend of the Who. “Without him there would be no ‘power chord,’
said Townshend, describing an abbreviated chord that uses not three notes,
but two. “It is time to give credit for that little invention to the man who
really created it, John Lee Hooker. Take it from me. I know.”
Dylan’s second engagement at Gerdes, opening for the Greenbriar Boys,
won him a rave review in the New York Times that was seen by John Ham-
mond, the legendary Columbia Records talent scout. Hammond met Dylan
when he played harmonica on a recording session for Carolyn Hester, and
quickly signed him to Columbia. He sent him home with a copy of a soon-
to-be-released album, Robert Johnson: King of the Delta Blues. Dylan was
knocked out by the record, listened to it repeatedly, and wrote down the
lyrics to better appreciate the flow of the words and the construction of the
songs. If Woody Guthrie was Dylan’s yin, then Robert Johnson became his
yang. “In about 1964 and ’65,” said Dylan, “I probably used about five or six
of Robert Johnson’s blues songs forms, too, unconsciously, but more on the
lyrical imagery side of things. If I hadn’t heard the Robert Johnson record
when I did, there probably would have been hundreds of lines of mine
that would have been shut down—that I wouldn’t have felt free enough or
unpraised enough to write.”
Dylan knew Hammond’s son, John Jr., who was equally smitten with
Robert Johnson. Hammond’s parents split up when he was five years old,
and his mother brought him up. His father first played him Johnson’s “Terra-
plane Blues” and “Milkcow’s Calf Blues” in 1957; two years later, Hammond
gave his son a tape of ten unreleased Johnson tunes. Hammond Jr. didn’t
start playing guitar until he was eighteen, but he caught on fast. In 1961, at
B ohemian Blues and the Folk Revival

Antioch College, he learned the rudiments of country blues guitar from Ian
Buchanan, who played on Friday nights at a local bakery. Hammond soon
dropped out of school, and went to the West Coast to launch an unlikely
career as a white country blues musician. Hammond found work at the
Ash Grove, a Los Angeles club that booked folk, blues, and bluegrass acts.
His first gig there was opening for the Staple Singers, and over the next few
years, he played shows around the country with a wide variety of acoustic
bluesmen. But nothing compared to the first time he played the Ash Grove
with Howlin’ Wolf.
“I was just trembling with the fact that I was on a show with Howlin’
Wolf,” said Hammond. “I came backstage, and it was just him in the dress-
ing room. He said, ‘Come here and sit down. Where the fuck did you learn 29
 to play that?’ It was a Robert Johnson song, and I said I learned it off the
record. He said, ‘Play that right now for me!’ So I played him the song, and
he said, ‘Man, that’s evil.’” For Hammond, who’d heard complaints that it
was inauthentic for a white kid to play country blues, Wolf ’s support meant
the world. “And then,” said Hammond, “he picked up my guitar and played
[Charley Patton’s] ‘Stone Pony Blues.’ At the end, he flipped the guitar, made
three turns, and then hit the last three notes! It was the most slick thing
I’ve ever seen.”
Hammond would enjoy a career as a solo performer and occasional
bandleader; in 1965, he recorded So Many Roads with the Hawks, the group
that backed rocker Ronnie Hawkins before working with Bob Dylan and
becoming the Band. One night, between shows at the Gaslight, Hammond
ducked into the Café Wha? to check out Jimmy James, a guitarist whose real
last name was Hendrix. “He was playing a Fender Stratocaster upside down
and left-handed,” said Hammond, “one of those things that just boggles your
mind. I just could not believe it—playing with his teeth, and doing all those
really slick techniques that I had seen in Chicago on the South Side on wild
nights. But here was this guy doing it, and he was fantastic playing blues.”
Bob Dylan had always considered blues as indistinguishable from folk
music and recognized that both genres embraced a tradition in which one
song was built upon another, with a melody from here, and a lyric from
there. That’s why the “folk revival” logically fed into the “blues revival” and
why it was natural that Dylan’s early repertoire was as likely to include a song
by Woody Guthrie as Blind Lemon Jefferson. During a trip to Boston, Dylan
hung out with the city’s premiere white blues singer, Eric Von Schmidt, and
learned some of the songs that he sang, including a Blind Boy Fuller tune
called “Baby Let Me Lay It on You.”
“Later,” said Von Schmidt, “somebody said, ‘Hey, Bob’s put one of your
songs on his album.’ They were talking about ‘Baby, Let Me Follow You
Down,’ which had a spoken introduction saying he first heard it from me
‘in the green fields of Harvard University.’ The tune was the same [as ‘Baby
Let Me Lay It on You’], and the chords were real pretty, but they weren’t
the same. . . . He also did Van Ronk’s version of ‘House of the Rising Sun’
on that record which pissed Dave off.”
The label on the Dylan album listed “R. Von Schmidt” as the composer of
crossroads

“Baby, Let Me Follow You Down,” though he never collected any royalties,
as Witmark Publishing had registered Dylan as the composer. When Von
Schmidt complained, he was told they were honoring a prior copyright.
30 Only later did he figure out that Witmark wasn’t talking about a copyright
that belonged to Blind Boy Fuller’s heirs, but to Dylan. As for “House of the
Rising Sun,” Van Ronk had the last laugh when the bluesy British rock band
the Animals “stole” the song from Dylan and made it into a worldwide hit.
Albert Grossman was now Dylan’s manager, which suggests that it might
have been more than good taste that led to the inclusion of three Dylan
tunes on the second Peter, Paul and Mary album, including the epochal
“Blowing in the Wind.” Chuck Berry, Willie Dixon, and B.B. King could
have used an advocate like Grossman. Before he had a manager, Dylan
had signed a contract with Leeds Music Publishing for a $100 advance.
Grossman fronted Dylan $1,000 in cash to buy himself out of the contract
before he started writing hits.
In 1962 both Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul Mary released their debut albums.
The Robert Johnson collection, which was just one of the blues reissues
finding an avid audience in a small but influential group of musicians and
collectors, also came out that year. Jim McKune, the New York blues collec-
tor who’d traveled hours to hear a Skip James record, hated the compilation
that Sam Charters had produced to accompany The Country Blues, mostly
because it didn’t include anything by Charley Patton. He encouraged Pete
Whelan, a drugstore heir and fellow blues fan, to cull the best recordings
from other collectors and start a reissue label.
Whelan’s first Origins Jazz Label LP was devoted to Charley Patton; the
multi-artist second release alluded to Charters’s book with the title, Really!
The Country Blues. Legally speaking, since Whelan didn’t own the rights to
these recordings, these LPs were “bootlegs.” But since these records were
pressed in the hundreds, major labels that technically owned the material
either didn’t notice or declined to litigate. There was one famous exception:
when Columbia Records learned that Whelan was going to produce a record
B ohemian Blues and the Folk Revival

of Robert Johnson tunes, it threatened legal action. Ironically, Columbia

couldn’t locate some of Johnson’s master recordings, and had to reach out
to collectors to copy some of the songs from vintage 78s.
Record collectors did more than produce bootleg compilations; they
were also a valuable resource for musicians. Stefan Grossman made the
rounds of collectors and made tape recordings of their 78s. Dave Freeman
turned Grossman on to Blind Boy Fuller, and steered him to Whelan and
Bernie Klatzko, who introduced him to the songs of Charley Patton and
Skip James. If collectors could be fetishistic about their rare 78s, Grossman
was equally fastidious about the music, learning and transcribing each song
in painstaking detail.
Grossman was a regular at a Saturday afternoon jam session at Allan 31
Another Random Scribd Document
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The Project Gutenberg eBook of Die
Frauenfrage im Mittelalter
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Title: Die Frauenfrage im Mittelalter

Author: Karl Bücher

Release date: August 5, 2019 [eBook #60062]

Most recently updated: October 17, 2024

Language: German

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DIE

FRAUENFRAGE IM MITTELALTER ***
 Anmerkungen zur Transkription
Der vorliegende Text wurde anhand der 1910 erschienenen Buchausgabe so weit wie
möglich originalgetreu wiedergegeben. Typographische Fehler wurden stillschweigend
korrigiert. Ungewöhnliche und heute nicht mehr gebräuchliche Schreibweisen bleiben
gegenüber dem Original unverändert; fremdsprachliche Begriffe wurden nicht korrigiert.
Umlaute in Großbuchstaben (Ä, Ö, Ü) werden, abgesehen von der Titelseite, als deren
Umschreibungen (Ae, Oe, Ue) wiedergegeben. Die Verwendung des ‚scharfen S‘ (ß)
entspricht nicht in allen Fällen den heutigen Rechtschreibgewohnheiten.
 DIE FRAUENFRAGE
IM
MITTELALTER

VON

KARL BÜCHER.

ZWEITE VERBESSERTE AUFLAGE.

T Ü B IN G E N
VERLAG DER H. L A U P P’SCHEN BUCHHANDLUNG
1910.
 Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Druck von H. Laupp jr in Tübingen.

 FRAU
LINA LUDWIG

GEWIDMET.
 Das Beste, was Frauen uns geben, können wir niemals
wiedergeben, und wenn ich dieses Büchlein Dir, der lieben guten
Mama, zueigne, so weiss ich, dass damit die Dankesschuld nicht
abgetragen werden kann, zu der ich mich bekennen muss. Aber
vielleicht ist es Dir doch eine Freude, dadurch an die Zeit erinnert zu
werden, wo sich auf dem Frankfurter Stadtarchiv mir die Gedanken,
die es enthält, zusammenfügten und ich an so manchem schönen
Sonntag bei Euch in Heppenheim ausspannen durfte.
Ausgesprochen wurden diese Gedanken zuerst in einem Vortrage,
den ich am 28. März 1882 im Liebigschen Hörsaale zu München vor
gebildeten Frauen und Männern gehalten habe. Aus dem Kreise der
Zuhörer sahen damals zwei freundliche Augen zu mir empor, die
seitdem meinen Lebensweg erhellten und die jetzt erloschen sind.
Du wirst es vor allen verstehen, dass ich mich lange nicht
entschliessen konnte, das Büchlein, das damals gedruckt wurde, zu
erneuern, als es vergriffen war. Wenn ich es jetzt dennoch tue, so
bin ich nicht der Versuchung erlegen, was ich einst in keckem
Jugendmute hingestellt hatte, mit altem, bedächtigem Kopfe
umzumodeln. Die Schrift scheint doch manchem so, wie sie ist, lieb
geworden zu sein, und wenn ich heute vielleicht auch vieles anders
sagen würde, in ihren tatsächlichen Feststellungen hat sie vor der
Kritik bestehen können. Die Verbesserungen der neuen Auflage
beschränken sich deshalb auf kleinere Berichtigungen und Zusätze
und auf eine grössere Aenderung am Schlusse, zu der die Ergebnisse
der Berufszählung von 1907 Anlass gaben. Ausserdem sind in den
Anmerkungen einige genauere Belege gegeben, ohne dass
Vollständigkeit der Literaturangaben erstrebt wurde. Eine gelehrte
Abhandlung sollte mein Vortrag nicht werden.
Eine neue Zugabe ist das Bildchen auf Umschlag und Einband. Es
stellt eine der Hilfsarbeiterinnen des Frankfurter Wollenhandwerks,
wenn nicht alles trügt, in Bekinentracht dar, entworfen von einem
Frankfurter Schreiber, der das Bedebuch von 1405 mit lustigen
Federzeichnungen versehen hat. Das Bildchen steht bei der
Lindheimer Gasse, die im damaligen Weberviertel der Altstadt liegt.
Bei der Härte der mittelalterlichen Bede ist eine amtlich illustrierte
Steuerliste eine so seltsame Erscheinung, dass ihr Urheber
wenigstens in einer kleinen Probe seiner Kunst dem steuergeplagten
XX. Jahrhundert bekannt zu werden verdiente, stünde diese Probe
auch nicht in so enger Beziehung zum Inhalt dieses Büchleins, als es
tatsächlich der Fall ist. Vielleicht kann sie seinen Ernst um ein
Weniges mildern und durch ihr Wirklichkeitsgepräge den Irrtümern,
deren es immer noch genug enthalten wird, die freundliche
Nachsicht erwirken, deren wir alle bedürfen.

L e i p z i g, den 25. Oktober 1909.

K a r l B ü c h e r.
 I n h a l t.
Die Frage 1. — Ihr zwiespältiges Wesen 2. — Ihre
statistische Wurzel 3. — Das Zahlenverhältnis der
Geschlechter im Mittelalter 5. — Ursachen des grossen
Frauenüberschusses 7. Verschärfung durch
Ehebeschränkungen 9. — Wirtschaftliche Stellung der Frau im
deutschen Altertum 10. — Berufsbildung und Entlastung der
Frauen 12. — Angeblicher Ausschluss von zünftiger
Erwerbstätigkeit 13. — Tatsächliches Verhältnis 15, — in der
Textilindustrie 16, in der Schneiderei 18, — in anderen
zünftigen Gewerben 19, — in nicht zünftigen Berufen 20. —
Versorgungsanstalten: a) Klöster 24; — b) Leibrentenkauf 26;
— c) Samenungen 27; — d) Gotteshäuser 32. Statistisches
34. Statuten 35. Tätigkeit der Bekinen 36.
Aufnahmebedingungen 38. Lebensweise 38. Religiöse
Stellung 40. Entartung 41. — Soziale Stellung der Frauen im
Mittelalter 43. — Gegensätze 45. — Fahrende Frauen 48. —
Die gemeinen Frauen in den Städten 55. Frauenhäuser 56.
Sittenpolizei 60. Eingreifen der Kirche 61. Reuerinnen 62.
Rettungshäuser 63. — Rückblick 66. Wandlung seit der
Reformation 67. — Die heutige Frauenfrage 71. —
Anmerkungen 76.
D ie »Frauenfrage« bildet nach allgemeiner Annahme eine
Zeitfrage von so eigenartig modernem Charakter, dass es von
vornherein fraglich erscheinen könnte, ob man berechtigt sei,
diesen Ausdruck auch auf Erscheinungen der Vergangenheit
anzuwenden. Wenn wir aber überall da von »Fragen« reden, wo wir
die vorhandenen Zustände in einem auffälligen Widerspruche sehen
zu dem, was Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit fordern, so wird es wohl
kaum noch einem Zweifel unterliegen, dass wir auch von Fragen der
Vergangenheit sprechen dürfen, wo wir immer derartige
Widersprüche zwischen dem, was w a r, und dem, was hätte sein
sollen, entdecken. Es ist dabei ziemlich gleichgültig, ob die
tatsächlich vorhandenen Widersprüche als »Fragen« in das
Bewusstsein der Zeitgenossen getreten sind; es genügt vollständig,
wenn ein derartiger Widerspruch nachgewiesen werden kann, oder
wenn sich Versuche und Anstalten zu seiner Beseitigung erkennen
lassen. Oder wollte etwa jemand leugnen, dass die moderne
Frauenfrage lange vor der Zeit schon existiert hat, wo sie anfing, in
populären Vorträgen, auf »Frauentagen« oder bei ästhetischen
Teegesellschaften verhandelt zu werden?

Wenn ich in diesem Sinne von einer Frauenfrage im Mittelalter

sprechen will, so bin ich weit davon entfernt, mich auf den
Standpunkt derjenigen zu stellen, welche die gesamte rechtliche,
politische und soziale Stellung der Frau im Widerspruch finden mit
den Forderungen der Vernunft und Gerechtigkeit. Von diesem
Standpunkte aus gab es sicherlich im Mittelalter weit, weit mehr zu
»fragen« und zu wünschen als heutzutage. Ich denke mich vielmehr
auf jenen engeren Teil der Frauenfrage zu beschränken, den man
vielleicht richtiger als »Frauene r w e r b sfrage« bezeichnen würde.
Freilich hat auch noch in diesem engeren Sinne heute die
Frauenfrage eine doppelte Seite. Sie stellt sich dar einerseits als
Frauenschutzfrage mit Bezug auf die zahlreichen weiblichen Arbeiter
der Industrie, anderseits als Frage der Erweiterung des
Erwerbsgebiets der Frauen für diejenigen weiblichen Glieder der
gebildeten Klasse, welche aus irgend einem Grunde ausserhalb der
natürlichen Tätigkeitssphäre ihres Geschlechtes in der Wirtschaft
Verwendung suchen.
Welche von diesen beiden Seiten der Frauenerwerbsfrage man
nun auch ins Auge fassen mag, immer wird man darauf
zurückgeführt, die W u r z e l derselben zu suchen in der Tatsache,
dass gegenwärtig ein ansehnlicher Teil der Frauen innerhalb der
Familie nicht diejenige Versorgungsgelegenheit findet, die wir ihm
aus allgemeinen Gründen wünschen müssen. Diese Tatsache beruht
in erster Linie auf einem statistischen Missverhältnis, welches
obwaltet zwischen der Zahl der heiratsfähigen Frauen und Männer,
sodann aber auf einer entweder notwendigen oder freiwilligen
Enthaltung von der Ehe auf Seiten eines Teils der heiratsfähigen
Männer.

Was zunächst jenes statistische Missverhältnis betrifft, so ist es

eine bekannte Tatsache, dass fast in allen europäischen Staaten
unter den Neugeborenen die Zahl der Knaben überwiegt, dass aber
durch rasches Absterben der männlichen Kinder das Zahlenverhältnis
zwischen beiden Geschlechtern bis etwa zum 17. oder 18. Jahre sich
ausgleicht. Wo nun eine Bevölkerung weiterhin nur natürlichen
Einflüssen ausgesetzt ist, d. h. wo die Verminderung der
Geschlechter nur durch Absterben erfolgt, da kann sich das
Zahlenverhältnis derselben etwa vom 18. bis zum 30. Jahre, also
dem eigentlichen Heiratsalter, im Gleichgewicht erhalten. Es würde
bei rechtzeitiger Verheiratung jede Frau einen Mann bekommen
können. Vom 30. Jahre ab gewinnt überall das weibliche Geschlecht
ein Uebergewicht und steigert dasselbe von Jahrzehnt zu Jahrzehnt,
so dass in den höchsten Altersstufen auf 10 Männer durchschnittlich
14–20 Frauen zu kommen pflegen.
So gestaltet sich das Verhältnis der Geschlechter unter rein
n a t ü r l i c h e n E i n f l ü s s e n. Allein diese natürlichen Einflüsse
gelangen in vielen Staaten nicht zu ungestörter Wirksamkeit. Kriege
und Auswanderung, sowie die nachteiligen Folgen mancher
Berufstätigkeiten verringern die Zahl der Männer schon zwischen
dem 18. und 30. Jahre so stark, dass fast plötzlich um das 20. Jahr
das anfängliche Uebergewicht des männlichen Geschlechts in ein
Uebergewicht des weiblichen Geschlechtes umschlägt. Insbesondere
ungünstig prägen sich die Ergebnisse der angedeuteten nachteiligen
Einwirkungen in der Geschlechtsgliederung der deutschen
Bevölkerung aus. Von den Altersstufen zwischen 20 und 25 Jahren
kommen im Deutschen Reiche nach der Zählung von 1900 auf 1000
Männer schon 1012 Frauen; im Alter von über 20 Jahren überhaupt
auf 1000 Männer 1064 Frauen. Noch ungünstiger gestaltet sich diese
Betrachtung, wenn wir berücksichtigen, dass normaler Weise das
Heiratsalter des Mannes um etwa fünf Jahre höher ist, als das der
Frau. Stellen wir demgemäß die Männer im Alter von 25–30 Jahren
den Frauen im Alter von 20–25 Jahren gegenüber, so erhalten wir
für die deutsche Bevölkerung auf je 1000 Männer 1105 Frauen.
Es kann demnach ein beträchtlicher Teil der heiratsfähigen
Frauen unter keinen Umständen heute zur Verehelichung gelangen,
selbst den Fall vorausgesetzt, dass alle Männer heiraten wollten und
könnten. Dieser Fall trifft nun aber bekanntlich nicht zu. Ein
ansehnlicher Teil der Männer (in ganz Deutschland gegen 10%)
bleibt unvermählt. Es ist klar, dass beide Umstände, der statistische
Frauenüberschuss und das soziale Uebel der männlichen
Ehelosigkeit, in ihrem Zusammenwirken einen beträchtlichen Teil der
unverheiratet bleibenden Frauen auf eine Existenz durch eigene
Erwerbsarbeit hinweisen. Zu einem eigentlichen Erwerbs-Notstande
führen dieselben indes nur in den sogen. höheren Klassen der
Gesellschaft, für die es an passenden Frauenerwerbsgebieten fehlt.
 Aus ganz derselben Ursache, wie die moderne
Frauenerwerbsfrage, entspringt die mittelalterliche Frauenfrage, von
der im Folgenden die Rede sein soll. Wenn ich im allgemeinen von
einer m i t t e l a l t e r l i c h e n Frage spreche, so soll damit nicht
gesagt sein, dass das ganze Mittelalter und alle Klassen der
Bevölkerung in die Erörterung hereingezogen werden sollen. Ich
muss mich vielmehr beschränken auf die Zeit und die Teile der
Bevölkerung, für welche uns allein Quellen über diese Dinge fliessen,
auf die deutschen Städte von der Mitte des XIII. bis zum Ausgange
des XV. Jahrhunderts.

Statistische Ermittelungen, welche über drei der bedeutendsten

mittelalterlichen Städte Deutschlands angestellt werden konnten[1],
haben übereinstimmend einen so bedeutenden Ueberschuss der
erwachsenen weiblichen über die gleichalterige männliche
Bevölkerung ergeben, dass man mit Notwendigkeit auf die
Vermutung geführt wird, es müsse die Frauenfrage im städtischen
Leben der beiden letzten Jahrhunderte des Mittelalters weit schärfer
und brennender aufgetreten sein als heutzutage. Eine zuverlässige
Zählung der Nürnberger Bevölkerung, welche am Ende des Jahres
1449 vorgenommen wurde, ergab unter der bürgerlichen
Bevölkerung auf 1000 erwachsene Personen männlichen Geschlechts
1168 Personen weiblichen Geschlechts. Aber nicht bloss in den
bürgerlichen Familien, sondern auch unter der dienenden Klasse
(den Knechten, Handwerksgesellen und Mägden) überwog das
weibliche Geschlecht. Rechnen wir diese mit der bürgerlichen
Bevölkerung zusammen, so kamen gar auf 1000 männliche Personen
1207 weibliche. In Basel scheint um 1454 das Verhältnis ähnlich
gewesen zu sein. In den beiden Kirchspielen St. Alban und St.
Leonhard trafen damals auf 1000 männliche Personen über 14
Jahren 1246 weibliche Personen der gleichen Altersstufen. Eine
Zählung endlich, welche die grössere Hälfte der erwachsenen
Bevölkerung von Frankfurt a. M. im Jahre 1385 umfasst, ergab 1536
männliche und 1689 weibliche Personen oder auf 1000 Männer rund
1100 Frauen. Diese letzte Ziffer ist eine Minimalziffer; es lässt sich
mit guten Gründen wahrscheinlich machen, dass der
Frauenüberschuss in Frankfurt a. M. im Jahre 1385 noch weit
beträchtlicher gewesen ist.
Diese Zahlen reden jedenfalls eine sehr deutliche Sprache; ihr
Gewicht wird indess noch verstärkt durch eine Reihe von
Beobachtungen, von denen ich hier nur e i n e kurz mitteilen will. Das
Frankfurter Stadtarchiv besitzt noch heute einen grossen Teil der
Listen, welche über die Erhebung der Vermögenssteuer (Bede) im
XIV. und XV. Jahrhundert geführt wurden. Diese Erhebung erfolgte
ebenso wie die Einschätzung durch den Rundgang einer Kommission
von Haus zu Haus. Das Vermögen wurde nach eidlicher Versicherung
der Steuerpflichtigen zur Steuer veranlagt und die Hausbesitzer
waren bei schwerer Strafe gehalten, alle in ihren Häusern
wohnenden Personen mit eigenem Vermögen anzugeben. Dieses
Verfahren bietet ohne Zweifel die Gewähr grosser Genauigkeit mit
Bezug auf die Ermittlung der Steuerpflichtigen. Da ist es nun
überaus auffallend, wie häufig unter den Steuerzahlern
alleinstehende Frauen auftreten. Nach zahlreichen statistischen
Ermittlungen[2], welche die Jahre 1354–1510 umfassen, machten in
diesem Zeitraum die Frauen den s e c h s t e n bis den v i e r t e n Teil
aller Steuerpflichtigen aus. Bedenkt man, dass es sich bei diesem
Verhältnis grösstenteils um alleinstehende, selbständige Frauen
handelt, dass die zahlreichen Nonnen, Pfründnerinnen und Bekinen
meist nicht mitgerechnet sind und dass Frauen auch im Mittelalter
viel schwerer zur Selbständigkeit gelangten als die Männer, so erhält
man eine Ahnung davon, wie schneidend das Missverhältnis in der
Zahl beider Geschlechter im bürgerlichen Leben der Städte
hervorgetreten sein muss.

Hier wirft sich zunächst die Frage auf: woher kommt dieser
bedeutende Ueberschuss der erwachsenen weiblichen über die
männliche Bevölkerung? Ich will versuchen, dieselbe mit ein paar
kurzen Andeutungen zu beantworten. Drei Ursachen scheinen mir
besonders in Betracht zu kommen:
 1. die zahlreichen Bedrohungen, welchen das männliche Leben in
den mittelalterlichen Städten infolge der fortwährenden Fehden, der
blutigen Bürgerzwiste und der gefahrvollen Handelsreisen ausgesetzt
war;
2. die grössere Sterblichkeit der Männer bei den oft sich
wiederholenden pestartigen Krankheiten. Mindestens weisen auf
eine derartige Vermutung hin die stärkeren Ziffern für die Frauen,
welche regelmässig nach Pestjahren in den Frankfurter Steuerlisten
auftreten[3];
3. die Unmässigkeit der Männer in jeder Art von Genuss.
Ausserdem ist wohl die Vermutung nicht abzuweisen, dass die
städtische Berufsarbeit in engen, ungesunden Räumen, zwischen
hohen, dicht zusammengerückten Häusermauern bei der
Unvollkommenheit der technischen Hilfsmittel viel mehr aufreibende
Muskelarbeit von den Männern erfordert habe, dass der
Daseinskampf bei dem raschen Wechsel von guten und schlechten
Jahren, von hohen und niederen Lebensmittelpreisen, von
Ueberfluss und Mangel für sie, wenn auch vielleicht im ganzen nicht
schwieriger, so doch unregelmässiger und wechselvoller sich
gestaltet haben müsse als in Zeiten besserer Gesundheitspflege und
ausgebildeten nationalen und internationalen Verkehrs.
Welcher von diesen Entstehungsursachen nun auch der
mittelalterliche Frauenüberschuss vorwiegend zuzuschreiben sein
mag — sicher ist, dass er vorhanden war und dass er in mancherlei
Verhältnissen des sozialen Lebens seinen Ausdruck fand. Sicher ist
auch, dass die dadurch für zahlreiche Frauen gegebene
Unmöglichkeit einer Versorgung in der Ehe zu Uebelständen führte,
die das Mittelalter klar erkannte und auf seine eigene Art zu heilen
suchte.

Ehe wir zur Betrachtung dieser Verhältnisse übergehen, müssen

wir kurz die Frage berühren, wie weit Beschränkungen des Rechts
zur Verehelichung das Uebel noch vermehrten.
 Hier tritt zunächst das Cölibat der Geistlichkeit uns entgegen.
Ihre Zahl war allerwärts in den Städten unverhältnismässig gross.
Sie lässt sich in Frankfurt a. M. für das XIV. und XV. Jahrhundert bei
einer Einwohnerzahl von 8000–10000 auf 200–250 Personen
berechnen[4]. Für Lübeck darf man in derselben Zeit 250–300
Weltgeistliche und gegen 100 Klosterbrüder annehmen[5]. In Wismar
belief sich um 1485 die Zahl der Weltgeistlichen auf 150; in
Nürnberg wird 1449 der geistliche Stand auf 446 (einschliesslich der
Dienerschaft) angegeben. Wie ungünstig ihre Ehelosigkeit die
Heiratsziffern des weiblichen Geschlechts in diesen kleinen
Gemeinwesen beeinflussen musste, liegt auf der Hand.
Sodann wirkte die zünftige Ordnung des Gewerbebetriebes
nachteilig auf das Heiratsalter eines grossen Teiles der männlichen
Bevölkerung ein. Die Verehelichung des Handwerkers hing von
seiner Zulassung zur Meisterschaft ab, und diese wieder von
Bedingungen, welche die Angehörigen der Zunftmitglieder
begünstigten[6]. Der Geselle durfte als solcher im allgemeinen nicht
heiraten[7]. Infolge der Schliessung vieler Zünfte, der Beschränkung
der Betriebsstätten und Verkaufsbänke bildete sich deshalb im XIV.
und XV. Jahrhundert ein eigener Gesellenstand, der keine Aussicht
auf Selbständigmachung und Familiengründung hatte. Indessen
zeugen doch die vielfachen Verbote der Zunftstatuten, verheiratete
Gesellen anzunehmen, sowie viele Beispiele der Frankfurter
Steuerlisten dafür, dass Gesellenheiraten nicht eben selten waren.
Auf keinen Fall aber waren sie so leicht und häufig, wie heute die
Ehen der Fabrikarbeiter.

Wenn wir uns nun anschicken, die Frage zu beantworten: w a s

wurde im Mittelalter aus den zahlreichen
Frauen, die ihren »natürlichen Beruf« zu
e r f ü l l e n v e r h i n d e r t w a r e n? so müssen wir uns vor allen
Dingen von der Anschauung los machen, welche den meisten von
uns aus unseren frühesten Schuljahren anklebt. Wir hören da nach
den Schilderungen in Tacitus’ »Germania« von der hohen Achtung,
der fast göttergleichen Verehrung, welche dem Weibe bei den alten
Germanen gezollt wurde; aber wir übersehen nur zu leicht, dass
derselbe Tacitus die Stellung der Frau in der Wirtschaft so
beschreibt, dass wir mit Notwendigkeit auf eine grosse Ueberlastung
des weiblichen Geschlechts schliessen müssen. Der Mann achtet
keine Tätigkeit ausser derjenigen mit dem Schwerte. Träge liegt er
im Frieden auf der Bärenhaut; Schlaf, Trunk und Würfelspiel füllen
seine Zeit. Die Sorge für Feld, Haus und Herd bleibt den Frauen, die
mit den Kindern, den Schwachen und Unfreien die Wirtschaft führen.
Neben der erhaltenden und verwaltenden Tätigkeit des Hauses, die
heutzutage den Frauen hauptsächlich zufällt, hatten sie also auch die
gesamte Gütererzeugung zu bewerkstelligen; oder, um einen
geläufigen Ausdruck zu gebrauchen: die Frau ernährte die ganze
Familie. Sie war Arbeiterin, Wirtschaftsführerin, Haushälterin und
Erzieherin der Kinder zugleich. Die Germanen machten also in ihrer
primitiven Periode keine Ausnahme von der Erwerbsordnung, die wir
noch heute bei Naturvölkern finden.
Dieser Zustand änderte sich nach den grossen Wanderungen, als
in währenden Friedenszeiten und bei wachsender Bevölkerung die
deutschen Männer sich herabliessen, auch den Acker zu bebauen.
Immer aber blieb noch ein grosser Teil der Landwirtschaft,
namentlich die Be- und Verarbeitung vegetabilischer Stoffe, den
Frauen überlassen. Auch als mehr und mehr aus der alten
geschlossenen Hauswirtschaft einzelne Tätigkeiten als Gewerbe sich
absonderten, blieb das Arbeitsgebiet der Frau immer noch sehr
gross, wie wir deutlich aus der Verteilung der Arbeiten in den
grundherrlichen Grosswirtschaften erkennen. Da finden wir unter
den männlichen Leibeigenen freilich schon Müller und Bäcker,
Schneider und Schuster, Grobschmiede und Waffenschmiede; den
Frauen lag aber nicht bloss die Arbeit in Küche und Keller, in Garten
und Stall ob, sondern auch die Besorgung der Gewandung von der
Schafschur und der Flachsbereitung bis zum Weben, Färben,
Zuschneiden, Nähen und Sticken, ferner das Bierbrauen,
Seifensieden, Lichterziehen und eine Menge von anderen
Verrichtungen, die später nach und nach von besonderen
Gewerbetreibenden übernommen wurden[8].
 So sehen wir bis in das XIII. Jahrhundert hinein in dem Masse,
als die gewerbliche Berufsbildung fortschritt, eine immer weiter
greifende Entlastung der Frau von schweren körperlichen Arbeiten
eintreten; ihre Tätigkeit beginnt sich auf dasjenige Gebiet zu
beschränken, welches wir als die Haushaltung zu bezeichnen
pflegen. Aber immer war dieses Gebiet noch bedeutend
umfangreicher als heutzutage. Das Spinnen und Bleichen, das
Backen und Bierbrauen wurde auch in den Städten noch vielfach von
den Frauen besorgt; der Schuster und Schneider, der Sattler und der
Bauhandwerker arbeiteten im Hause auf der »Stör«; eine grosse
Anzahl von Produkten, die wir heute fertig zum Verbrauche kaufen,
bedurfte noch der Zurichtung durch die Frauen.
Dies alles weist darauf hin, dass eine grössere Zahl von Frauen in
den mittelalterlichen Haushaltungen verwendet werden konnte, als
dies heute möglich wäre. So mögen vielfach elternlose Mädchen und
verwitwete Frauen in den Familien ihrer näheren oder entfernteren
Verwandten Unterkunft und Beschäftigung gefunden haben; der
Familienzusammenhang war ohnehin damals noch viel stärker als
gegenwärtig. Diejenigen alleinstehenden Frauen dagegen, welche
keinen derartigen Rückhalt besassen, waren allem Anscheine nach in
den Städten sehr übel gebettet. Auf dem Lande mochten
Frauenhände immer in der Wirtschaft erwünscht sein; in den Städten
war die Frau (abgesehen von der Eingehung eines
Dienstbotenverhältnisses) nach der gewöhnlichen Annahme von der
Erwerbsarbeit in den zünftigen Gewerben fast vollständig
ausgeschlossen.

In der Tat wird sich nicht leugnen lassen, dass die gesamte
Stellung der Gewerbe im Mittelalter ein selbständiges Eingreifen der
Frauen in dieses Gebiet grundsätzlich auszuschliessen scheint. Das
Zunftwesen, welchem alle einigermassen entwickelten Gewerbe
unterworfen waren, war seinem innersten Wesen nach auf die
Familie gegründet. Die Zünfte waren nicht bloss gewerbliche
Vereine, sondern Unterabteilungen der Gemeinde mit rechtlichen,
politischen, militärischen und administrativen Aufgaben. Das Recht
zum Gewerbebetrieb schloss die Verpflichtung zum Waffendienst und
zu anderen Leistungen in sich, zu welchen Frauen nicht wohl
herangezogen werden konnten. Bei der Teilnahme an den politischen
Rechten, von der ja die Frauen ausgeschlossen waren, spielten die
Zünfte wieder eine Rolle, welche die Zulassung weiblicher Mitglieder
untunlich zu machen schien.
Adrian Beier[9], der Verfasser des ältesten Kompendiums des
Handwerksrechts, stellt denn auch den Satz auf: das männliche
Geschlecht sei eine der unerlässlichen Grundbedingungen für die
Aufnahme in eine Zunft gewesen. Die ganze gesellschaftliche
Ordnung, meint er, beruhe darauf, dass jedes Geschlecht diejenigen
Geschäfte übernehme, welche seiner Natur am angemessensten
seien, der Mann die Erwerbsarbeit, die Frau die Küche, den
Spinnrocken, die Nadel, die Wäsche; auch das Weben,
Lichtergiessen und Seifensieden solle ihr noch gestattet sein. Das
Mädchen sei zur Ehe bestimmt; man könne nicht wissen, wen es
einmal heiraten werde; eine gelernte Schusterin sei aber dem
Schmiede nichts nütze. Ausserdem könne man nicht allein in der
Lehre lernen; von ungewanderten Junggesellen und gewanderten
Jungfern werde aber beiderseits wenig gehalten. Der Umgang mit
Männern in der Werkstätte sei in sittlicher Hinsicht nicht
ungefährlich. Endlich sei die Zunft eine öffentliche Einrichtung; das
Meisterrecht sei mit staatlichen Leistungen, als Wachen und Gaffen,
verbunden, wozu Weiber nicht taugten.

Trotz dieser anscheinend in der Natur der Sache liegenden

grundsätzlichen Ausschliessung der Frauen wenigstens vom
zünftigen Gewerbebetrieb sehen wir das ganze Mittelalter hindurch
die Frauen vielfach im Gewerbe tätig — ein Beweis, dass eine
derartige Beschäftigung derselben durch die tatsächlichen
Verhältnisse sich als notwendig aufdrängte. Ja wir finden sogar
Frauenarbeit in einer Reihe von Berufsarten, von denen sie
gegenwärtig tatsächlich ausgeschlossen ist.
 Ich will hier die Tatsache nicht weiter betonen, dass die Witwe
eines Meisters das Geschäft ihres Mannes forttreiben durfte; das ist
bekannt genug. Ueberdies ist dieses Vorrecht in manchen Gewerben
und Städten zeitlich begrenzt oder an die Bedingung der
Wiederverheiratung mit einem Gesellen des gleichen Handwerks
geknüpft. Ich will auch kein grosses Gewicht darauf legen, dass
Frauen und Töchter, oft auch die Magd eines Handwerkers
demselben im Geschäfte helfen konnten; das liess sich bei aller
Bevormundung, die dem Mittelalter eigen war, so leicht nicht
verbieten. Viel wichtiger erscheint mir, dass Frauen und Mädchen
innerhalb eigener oder fremder Gewerbebetriebe zahlreiche
Verwendung fanden, bald als abhängige Lohnarbeiterinnen, bald
sogar als selbständige Meisterinnen. War das betreffende Gewerbe
zünftig, so konnten hier und da die Frauen in eigenem Namen den
Zünften mit gleichem Rechte wie die Männer angehören; war es
unzünftig, so waren sie selbstverständlich keinerlei Beschränkungen
unterworfen. Endlich finden wir sogar Gewerbe mit zünftiger
Ordnung, die ausschliesslich aus Frauen bestanden.
Natürlich handelt es sich hier zunächst um Gebiete, in welchen
die Frauen von Alters her tätig gewesen waren[10]. Dahin gehört das
ganze Gebiet der Te x t i l i n d u s t r i e. Die Weberei war zwar seit
dem XII. Jahrhundert ein eigenes Gewerbe in Männerhand; indessen
blieben die Vorrichtungsarbeiten, das Wollkämmen, Spinnen,
Garnziehen, Spulen, fast überall noch lange Zeit in den Händen der
Frauen. Wir finden deshalb an vielen Orten ein zahlreiches
weibliches Arbeiterpersonal in der W o l l w e b e r e i: Kämmerinnen,
Spinnerinnen, Spulerinnen, Garnzieherinnen, Nopperinnen — meist
abhängige Lohnarbeiterinnen nach Art unserer Heim- oder
Fabrikarbeiterinnen. In Frankfurt a. M. standen sie unter der Aufsicht
von zwei Mitgliedern des Rats. Ihre Tätigkeit war an sehr
eingehende Vorschriften gebunden, und wir haben in der Frankfurter
Weberordnung von 1377 wohl das älteste Beispiel einer Regulierung
der Frauenarbeit durch die öffentliche Gewalt[11]. Auch als
Weberinnen finden wir die Frauen nicht selten tätig, und hier nicht
bloss im Lohndienst, sondern auch als selbständige Mitglieder der
Zunft. So in Bremen, in Köln, in Dortmund, in Danzig, in den
schlesischen Städten, in Speier, Strassburg, Ulm, München. »Wer
Webermeister oder Meisterin ist«, heisst es in einer Münchener
Ratsverordnung aus dem XIV. Jahrhundert, »der soll haben, ob er
will, einen Lernknecht und eine Lerndirne und nicht mehr«.
Was die L e i n e n w e b e r e i betrifft, so ist hier eine vielseitige
selbständige Beteiligung der Frauen am Handwerk um so weniger zu
bezweifeln, als in einem grossen Teile von Deutschland auf dem
Lande die Frauen bis ins XIX. Jahrhundert hinein Leinwand gewebt
haben. In Hamburg konnten Frauen in der Leinenweberei beim
sogen. »schmalen Werke« selbständig werden (1375); in Strassburg
wurden die Schleier- und Leinenweberinnen (1430) zu den
Zunftlasten herangezogen; in Frankfurt a. M. finden wir ebenfalls
selbständig steuernde »Lineberssen« (1428), ohne dass es freilich
ersichtlich wäre, ob dieselben als Meisterinnen oder als
Lohnarbeiterinnen betrachtet werden müssen. Die Schleierweberei
und Schleierwäscherei ist dort ganz in den Händen der Frauen;
ebenso scheinen sie die S c h n u r- und B o r t e nwirkerei im XIV. und
XV. Jahrhundert allein betrieben zu haben. In den schlesischen
Städten bildete das Garnziehen ein eigenes Gewerbe, an dem
Männer und Frauen beteiligt waren. In Köln bestand eine eigene
Zunft von Garnmacherinnen; sie mussten sechs Jahre lernen und
keine Meisterin durfte mehr als drei Mägde oder Lohnwerkerinnen
halten. In der zu Anfang des XV. Jahrhunderts aufgekommenen
B a r c h e n t w e b e r e i haben dagegen weibliche Arbeitskräfte bis
jetzt nicht nachgewiesen werden können.
Etwas anders lagen die Verhältnisse im S c h n e i d e r g e w e r b e.
Hier konnten freilich die Frauen auch das Recht hergebrachten
Besitzes für sich geltend machen, da sie in älterer Zeit nicht bloss die
eigenen Kleider, sondern auch diejenigen der Männer gefertigt
hatten. Lesen wir doch noch im Nibelungenliede, dass Chriemhilde
mit ihren Mägden den ausziehenden Recken das Gewand bereitet.
Aber beim ersten Auftreten der Schneiderzünfte arbeiteten die
Schneider nicht bloss alle Arten von Männerkleidern, sondern auch
die Frauengewänder, ja sie hatten selbst die ganze
Weisszeugnäherei[12]. Indessen bemerken wir doch auch hier eine
rege Frauentätigkeit. Nicht nur dass im Schneidergewerbe Frauen
und Töchter der Zunftmeister in weiterem Masse als in anderen
Handwerken mitarbeiteten; an nicht wenigen Orten konnten auch
Frauen als selbständige Meisterinnen in die Zunft treten, ja sie
durften selbst Arbeiterinnen haben und Lehrmädchen annehmen. In
Frankfurt und Mainz, wie wohl in allen mittelrheinischen Städten,
suchte man ihre Aufnahme in die Zunft durch Festsetzung geringerer
Aufnahmegebühren für Frauen zu erleichtern[13]. Erst im XV.
Jahrhundert entstanden in den rheinischen Städten sehr langwierige
Streitigkeiten zwischen den Schneidern und den Näherinnen, die
schliesslich damit endeten, dass das Gebiet der letzteren auf
diejenigen Arten des Nadelwerks beschränkt wurde, welche noch
heute den Frauen eigen sind.
Noch eine Reihe von anderen Handwerken lässt sich nachweisen,
die im Mittelalter Frauen im Amte hatten. Es würde indes zu weit
führen, hier auf die Einzelheiten einzugehen. Ich begnüge mich
deshalb damit, hier kurz die zünftigen Gewerbe zu nennen, bei
welchen weibliche Arbeitskräfte Verwendung fanden. Es sind: die
Kürschner (in Frankfurt und in den schlesischen Städten), die Bäcker
(in den mittelrheinischen Städten), Wappensticker, Gürtler (Köln,
Strassburg), die Riemenschneider (Bremen), die Paternostermacher
(Lübeck), die Tuchscherer (Frankfurt), die Lohgerber (Nürnberg), die
Goldspinner und Goldschläger (in Köln). In den Statuten der
letzteren hiess es: »Kein Goldschläger, dessen Frau Goldspinnerin ist,
darf mehr als drei Töchter zum Goldspinnen haben; die
Goldspinnerin dagegen, deren Mann nicht Goldschläger ist, darf vier
Töchter haben und nicht mehr, dass sie ihr Gold spinnen.« An der
Spitze beider Gewerbe stand je ein Meister und eine Meisterin,
welche das Werk des Amtes zu besehen und zu prüfen hatten.
Natürlich konnte es sich hier überall nur um Gewerbe handeln,
welche der Natur ihres Betriebes nach für das zarte Geschlecht
geeignet waren; denn es war stehender Grundsatz des alten
Handwerksrechtes, dass niemand in der Zunft sein solle, der das
Gewerbe nicht mit eigener Hand treiben könne.
 Im ganzen können wir sonach behaupten, dass im Mittelalter die
Frauen von keinem Gewerbe ausgeschlossen waren, für das ihre
Kräfte ausreichten. Sie waren berechtigt, Handwerke
ordnungsmässig zu lernen, sie als Gehilfinnen, ja selbst als
Meisterinnen zu treiben[14]. Indessen bemerken wir schon frühe die
Tendenz, die Frauenarbeit mehr und mehr zurückzudrängen.
Dieselbe wendet sich zunächst gegen die Meisterswitwen, deren
Recht auf eine gewisse Zeit (Jahr und Tag) beschränkt oder an
bestimmte Bedingungen geknüpft wird. Sodann gegen das
Mitarbeiten der Mägde und der weiblichen Familienglieder, endlich
auch gegen die selbständige Tätigkeit der Frauen in den Zünften.
Die Gesellenverbände fangen an, sich zu weigern, neben den
weiblichen Arbeitern zu dienen; die Meister klagen über
Beeinträchtigung ihres Nahrungsstandes. Im XVI. Jahrhundert leistet
noch die öffentliche Gewalt diesen engherzigen Bestrebungen
Widerstand, im XVII. Jahrhundert erlahmt sie darin völlig, und so
kommt es, dass nur in vereinzelten Fällen bis ins XVIII. Jahrhundert
die Frauenarbeit im Handwerk sich erhalten hat[15].
Was die nichtzünftigen Gewerbe betrifft, so unterlag in diesen die
Frauenarbeit wohl nie irgend welchen Beschränkungen. Nur beim
stehenden Kleinhandel, der jetzt so vielen Frauen Selbständigkeit
und Unterhalt gewährt, scheint die Marktpolizei vielfach zu
Ungunsten der Frauen eingegriffen zu haben, während sie beim
Hausierhandel anscheinend stärker vertreten waren. So wird bei den
Gewandschneidern und Fischhocken in Frankfurt der Verkauf durch
die Frauen verboten, mit Ausnahme des Falles, wo der Mann
abwesend ist; in München sollte keines Fleischhackers oder Metzgers
Weib in der Bank stehen und Fleisch verkaufen[16]; in Passau durfte
die Frau eines Salzhändlers nur wenn der Mann krank war dessen
Geschäft versehen. Die Hocken und Viktualienhändler sind fast
allerwärts Männer; nur in Ulm bilden die Käuflerinnen ein eigenes
weibliches Gewerbe[17].
Es wird vielleicht zur Veranschaulichung des Gesagten beitragen,
wenn hier noch kurz die Berufsarten namhaft gemacht werden, bei
welchen ich in Frankfurter Urkunden aus der Zeit zwischen 1320 und
1500 Frauen beschäftigt gefunden habe. Sie lassen sich in vier
Gruppen zerlegen. In der ersten, welche die Berufe umfasst, für die
nur weibliche Namen vorkommen, ergaben sich 65
Beschäftigungsarten. Die zweite enthält die Berufe, in welchen die
Frauen überwiegen; ihrer sind freilich nur 17. Aber ihnen stehen 38
Berufe gegenüber, in denen Männer und Frauen etwa gleich stark
sich vertreten fanden und 81, in denen der Umfang ihrer Tätigkeit
hinter derjenigen der Männer zurückblieb[18]. Das ergibt rund 200
Berufsarten mit Frauenarbeit. Unter ihnen treten allerdings die schon
erwähnten Hilfsgewerbe der Textilindustrie am stärksten hervor. Die
Verfertigung von Schnüren und Bändeln, Hüllen und Schleiern,
Knöpfen und Quasten ist ganz in ihren Händen. Wie an der
Schneiderei beteiligen sie sich an der Kürschnerei, Handschuh- und
Hutmacherei, verfertigen Beutel und Taschen, lederne Brustflecke
und Sporleder. Selbst bis in die kleine Holz- und Metallindustrie reicht
ihre Tätigkeit: Nadeln und Schnallen, Ringe und Golddraht, Besen
und Bürsten, Matten und Körbe, Rosenkränze und Holzschüsseln
gehen aus ihren Händen hervor. Die Feinbäckerei scheint
vorzugsweise ihnen obzuliegen; fast ausschliesslich beherrschen sie
die Bierbrauerei und die Herstellung von Kerzen und Seife. In dem
außerordentlich spezialisierten Kleinhandel überwiegen sie: Obst,
Butter, Hühner, Eier, Häringe, Milch, Käse, Mehl, Salz, Oel, Senf,
Essig, Federn, Garn, Sämereien werden fast nur von ihnen
vertrieben. Das Hockenwerk und das Trödelgeschäft, ja selbst der
sehr entwickelte Handel mit Hafer und Heu sind vielfach in den
Händen von Frauen. Sie treiben sich unter den Abenteurern und
Gauklern hausierend umher. In den Badstuben Frankfurts bedienten
30 bis 40 Bademägde; ja man konnte sich zuweilen selbst von zarten
Händen rasieren und immer in den Weinschenken sich von
weiblichen Musikanten, wie Lauten- und Zimbelschlägerinnen,
Pfeiferinnen, Fiedlerinnen und Schellenträgerinnen, etwas vorspielen
lassen. Abschreiberinnen und Briefdruckerinnen kommen wenigstens
vereinzelt vor; schon 1346 wird eine Malerin und von 1484 ab häufig
Juttchen die Puppenmalerin genannt. Ja selbst im städtischen Dienst
werden Frauen verwendet, nicht bloss als Hebammen und
Krankenpflegerinnen, sondern selbst als Schlaghüterinnen,
Pförtnerinnen, Turmwächterinnen[19], Zöllnerinnen und beim Hüten
des Viehs. Unter den 11 Personen, welchen 1368 der Rat das
Geldwechselgeschäft übertragen hatte, werden nicht weniger als 6
Frauen genannt; wir begegnen einer Frau als Pächterin des
Leinwandzolles und einer anderen als Aufseherin und Einnehmerin in
der Stadtwage[20]. Im XIV. Jahrhundert findet sich häufig eine
weltliche Schulmeisterin, Lyse, die die Kinde leret, auch kurz lerern
oder kindelern — vielleicht eine mittelalterliche Kindergärtnerin. Aber
1361 wird zugleich mit ihr Katherine schulmeistern genannt — ein
Beweis, dass keine vereinzelte Erscheinung vorliegt. In Lübeck war
es von alters üblich, dass ehrbare Frauen kleine Mädchen schreiben
und lesen lehren durften. Ferner hat es während des ganzen XIV.
und XV. Jahrhunderts in den meisten Städten weibliche Aerzte
gegeben. Zwischen 1389 und 1497 konnten in Frankfurt nicht
weniger als 15 Aerztinnen mit Namen nachgewiesen werden, unter
diesen 4 Judenärztinnen und 3 Augenärztinnen[21]. Verschiedenen
von ihnen werden sogar wegen Heilung städtischer Bediensteten
Ehrungen und Steuererleichterungen vom Rate bewilligt. Endlich war
es nichts seltenes, dass in unsicheren Zeiten, wenn raubende und
plündernde Haufen in der Umgegend sich sammelten, Frauen im
Kundschafterdienst verwendet wurden[22]. Einer der höchsten
Träume unserer modernen Emanzipationsfreunde war somit im
Mittelalter schon einmal volle Wirklichkeit.

Wie ausgedehnt man sich auch das Gebiet selbständiger

Erwerbstätigkeit vorstellen mag, welches den Frauen im Mittelalter
zugänglich war — auf keinen Fall reichte es hin, sämtliche des
männlichen Schutzes entbehrenden Frauen zu beschäftigen. Für die
jüngeren bot hier wohl der Gesindedienst, der im Mittelalter
verhältnismässig mehr Kräfte erforderte als heute, Arbeit und Brot;
auch gab es ausser der Weberei und der Bekleidungsindustrie noch
andere Handwerke, die weibliche Arbeitskräfte beschäftigten. So in
Lübeck die Nadler, Maler, Bernsteindreher und Bader. Aber die
Weiberlöhne[23] waren auch im Mittelalter überaus niedrig, wohl
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