Blind Lemon Jefferson (1897-1929?) Early Blues Musician

             American jazz, with its roots in Southern blues, has had the greatest influence on modern music.  These blues came from Africa, from rhythms chanted during daily tasks and from tribal music played around the fire.  Brought to America in chains, Africans devised songs to ease their strenuous labor.  From the fields these songs evolved into steamboat, railroad, and prison songs. After emancipation these songs focused on sex, heartache, and oppression.  Blues began as a single story on a single theme, sometimes sung along to the chords of an old guitar or the shouts of the audience.  A definite style eventually developed - three line verses that stated the problem, repeated it, and continued it with hope, submission, or ironic wit.  The men who scraped by in the early 1900s, singing in bars and on street corners in the South, probably became the first professional bluesmen.  These men included Charley Patton, Son House, Skip James, “Bukka” White, Huddie “Leadbelly” Ledbetter, Big Bill Broonzy, and Mississippi John Hurt, but the most famous was Blind Lemon Jefferson.

            The youngest of seven children, Lemon Jefferson was born on a small farm outside Couchman, Texas in the summer of 1897. Since he was blind, he started singing for money in the town of Wortham before he was fifteen.  He was singing for parties and dances around Freestone County by the time he was twenty.  Occasionally someone would accompany him, but usually “it would be just him, sitting there playing and singing all night.” 

            Lemon had a surprisingly powerful voice, “…a desolate, lost sound, tinged with loneliness, with the restless guitar moving below it as though searching for a phrase to end its incessant movement.” With the popularity of the blues in the early twenties, Paramount brought Lemon from Dallas to Chicago for his first of many recording sessions.  Bluesmen such as Ed Andrews, Papa Charlie Jackson, and Daddy Stovepipe had done previous recordings, but Lemon’s unique style had the greatest impact on future musicians such as Sonny Terry, Joe Turner, Muddy Waters, T-Bone Walker, and Josh White.

            Although there is discrepancy over the facts of Lemon’s death, the most credible story says he was found frozen to death in a Chicago street one morning in February 1929.  He left behind a legacy of over eighty albums. 

 Adams, 175