The two great northern migrations of the early 20th century

One gave us country music, one gave us blues, and they both provided a steady supply of factory workers

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The main way I know about these things is the fact that I am an American music historian. These two northward treks - whites out of Appalachia and blacks out of the Delta - cemented American music’s distinctiveness, but they also changed the face of our society in a more broadly sociocultural sense.

Both were emblematic of the American spirit in the same sense that, in the previous century, Americans of various types acted on the urge to see what kinds of possibilities lay to the west of the settled states they and their forebears had been living in for a few generations. It’s the quest for a brand new start, for an opportunity to invent one’s own way of life.

The great white migration was mainly about Appalachians wanting something other than coal mining work and tar paper shacks tucked into the hollers.

I’ll be bringing music into this general discussion, because, as I say, that was the first lens through which I learned about this and acquired the tools to ponder its significance.

Nashville was a thriving metropolitan area by 1925, when the WSM Barn Dance, a Saturday night radio broadcast changed its name to the Grand Ole Opry and established the template for similar shows out of Shreveport, Louisiana, Cincinnati and Chicago. The program had come out of record companies’ search for musical acts performing old-time string band music. That in turn had its roots in the 1893 paper that University of Wisconsin history professor Fredrick Jackson Turner presented to his academic field’s annual meeting. Turner posited that, with the most recent US census (1890), it could be seen that there was no more American frontier. The population was spread evenly enough from coast to coast , and there were enough urban areas on out to the Pacific, that the very character of the nation was now undergoing a profound change. This idea filtered down through the various levels of American culture and led to the search by record companies mentioned above, as well as revived interest in such quickly disappearing features of American life as quilting bees and old-time recipes.

But the city fathers in Nashville were none too keen on the effect this hillbilly music was going to have on the city’s image. It had heretofore had a rather buttoned-down atmosphere.

As alluded to above, much of the audience for hillbilly music, which waxed fondly about an idealized version of rural southern life, actually wanted to get out of there.

Cincinnati served as the gateway for the great migration out of Appalachia, and out of that came a very interesting record label that existed between 1943 and the end of the 1960s, King Records.

Syd Nathan was a squat little cigar-chomping, foul-mouthed Jewish entrepreneur with thick glasses who had been hearing the Midwestern Hayride on Cincinnati’s WLW and wondered if all the acts presented had recording contracts. Some homework led him to conclude there were ripe opportunities if he started a record company. He set up a one-stop shop, where everything from auditioning acts to writing material to recording to packaging and distribution happened in an abandoned ice house on Brewster Avenue. He signed such hillbilly acts as Grandpa Jones, the Delmore Brothers and Moon Mullican.

As World War II came to a close, Nathan became aware of changes happening in black American music. Most swing orchestras were downsizing into smaller units, paring down their horns to one or two saxophones and perhaps a trumpet. The result was jump blues, a romping, stomping dance music that borrowed such conventions from territory-band swing as riffs and a prominent backbeat. A squealing, honking tenor sax generally took the solos in tunes, at least until the electric guitar gained a prominent place in such ensembles at the end of the 1940s. Other black-music changes, such as the advent of bebop, and a new type of vocal harmony group, some examples of which performed rousing gospel and some of which performed dreamy secular ballads characterized by a falsetto lead vocal and an impossibly low bass.

Nathan entered that market by hiring Henry Glover, a trumpeter from Lucky Millinder’s big band turned jump outfit. Glover then mined the Milliner band for talent, including Bull Moose Jackson and Wynonie Harris. Soon the King roster included the leader of a Cincinnati big band turned jump outfit, Tiny Bradshaw. By 1950, the label, and its various imprints, had on its roster black gospel and doo-wop vocal groups.

King was a major player in the classification of the various forms of black popular music as rhythm and blues (although that term was coined by Billboard magazine reporter Jerry Wexler, who went on to be a partner in Atlantic Records.)

Nathan had his white, that is to say hillbilly, operation on one side of the hallway of the King building, and the black side across the hall. Enterprising sort that he was, he told songwriters on each side of the hall to come up with material that could be arranged for product from the other side. Thus he enjoyed country chart success with Wayne Raney’s version of “Why Don’t You Haul Off and Love Me” and R&B success with the version by Bullmoose Jackson and his Buffalo Bearcats.

Nathan was basically motivated by making a buck, but he orchestrated an intriguing experiment in racial integration with his operation.

Those coming northward in both the great white migration from Appalachia and the great black migration from the cotton farms of the Mississippi Delta and the lumber camps farther south swelled the populations of such cities as Detroit, Indianapolis, Chicago and St. Louis. Work could be found in those cities’ automotive plants, meatpacking plants, steel mills and smaller shops down the supply chains of each. Just as Cincinnati had been the gateway city for whites, Memphis was the first urban area to which blacks gravitated.

Chess Records in Chicago was a similar case of a couple of Jewish guys, Polish immigrants, taking an interest in black music (and making money). The first big star at Chess, Muddy Waters, was a classic example of the black migration. He left the Stoval Plantation in Rolling Forks, Mississippi for theWindy City, where he worked various day jobs and started playing blues in southside clubs.

My own father was an entrepreneur at the smaller-shops-down-the-supply-chain level of industrialization I mention above. He had a metal stamping factory in a very small town thirty miles south of Indianapolis that provided parts to the automotive, diesel-engine, and electrical fields.

He was intensely loyal to his white workforce, on more than one occasion bailing an employee out of jail, and even giving informal financial counseling to employee families.

That’s not to say he wasn’t above a little class-conscious humor. He used to say that Kentuckians taught their young from an early age the three R’s - readin’ writin’ and US 31 north. I remember him telling a joke one time that you could tell a rich Kentuckian by the fact that he had two junk cars in his front yard.

As I reflect on my dad’s career and the people who worked for him, they basically came in two types - the churchy ones and the hard drinkers. Both were dedicated to him and did their best to put in an honest day’s work.

I should also note that my parents were northerners and came to central Indiana without a lot of acquaintance with the migrants to whom my dad made possible a living.

As a music historian, I’ve also thought about the fascination for the blues among us Baby Boomers, and the slightly older white musicians, both British and American, who, in the 1950s and 60s, brought the work of America’s blues and R&B artists to an audience broader than those black performers had enjoyed.

It upended everything about American music, mainstreaming a raw and primitive approach to it. It completed the revolution that the first generation of rock and rollers had launched.

But what was the impetus? Did we, the raised-in-comfort fans of this stuff, have any idea what the lives of those who’d shaped the blues lineage had really been like? What was behind the desire to emulate the image of the guitar-slinging bad man from the cotton fields and steel mills? Was something lacking in our deepest yearnings that only something so exotic could provide?

It’s now a different time, of course. The industrial belt has become the Rust Belt, and in the smaller communities completely dependent on one or two major drivers of economic robustness, opportunity dried up and despondency set in. In the large cities, disillusionment took the form of gang activity.

I’m not sure I’m going to draw any hard and fast conclusions about all this, at least at present. But it’s important to me to get this basic outline of what has happened over the last century down. It’s affected my life on so many levels. It’s an important tool for working on figuring out who I am.