Our show today is about a group of musicians who circulated around the Durham/Chapel Hill/Raleigh area of North Carolina’s Piedmont region during the 1930s. Well, it’s about them for sure, but it’s really about the white southern shopkeeper who connected them with their recording opportunities and helped guide their music while being neither a singer nor a musician himself. That man: James Baxter Long.
In 1934 JB Long was a fortunate 31 year-old man. He had a job. And a Wife. And a Young daughter. He had just been hired as the manager of a United Dollar Store in Kinston, NC. United Dollar Stores were the kind of single-story department stores you used to find throughout America. It was similar to a Ben Franklin store, or a McCrory’s, or Woolworths. Being an enterprising young man and full of ideas, JB found that if he played records on a phonograph outside the store, it would attract customers. So, he began stocking records for sale and found that they moved pretty well. Long also noticed that people were asking for a record about a train wreck that occurred near Lumberton NC on Aug. 22, 1933 which killed 9 people.
Well, there was no record or song about that train wreck, so JB Long decided that he’d make both. Long and a girl who worked at the store sat down and wrote out the lyrics to a song they’d call “The Lumberton Wreck”, telling the story of what happened. In those days most serious train accidents and more than a few notorious murders were commemorated with songs.
Long then came up with the idea of holding a contest, two contests actually, one for whites and one for blacks, which he held at the county courthouse. The winner of the white contest was a group called the Cauley Family, while the contest winner for African-Americans was a gospel group called Mitchell's Christian Singers. In August of 1934 Long accompanied the Cauley family to New York to record “Lumberton Wreck” for ARC. JB Long was now in the record business.
But as it turned out, the Cauley Family were the only white musicians ever to record for JB Long. In late 1934, United Dollar Stores transferred Long to nearby Durham, where he had a somewhat larger store that had about a 50-50 black/white clientele. Thanks to the success of the Cauley Family record and the record recorded by the Mitchell Singers, Long had also gotten himself made a Southern regional scout for Columbia Records. He became interested in some of the black musicians who busked outside of the Tobacco warehouses and auction houses. Some of them, like the young Fulton Allen, were blind and wore licenses around their necks issued by the city that permitted them to play for handouts and donations in certain areas usually limited to the tobacco industry areas.
Long and Fulton Allen became friendly and Long wrote to ARC offering to bring Allen to New York to record. By the time the session was organized in 1935 there were now three musicians going to New York. Long had renamed Fulton Allen as Blind Boy Fuller, and also to be traveling along were Blind Gary Davis, who was, more or less, Blind Boy Fuller’s guitar teacher and mentor. Also along was a washboard player, George Washington, whom Long renamed “Bull City Red”, since Washington was a semi-albino.
So why did they need a washboard player? Think about it. Fuller and Davis were blind. It was the segregated South of the mid 1930s. Durham to New York is about 500 miles and there were no superhighways. The trip would take a couple of days at least, and take them through dozens of small towns as well as Richmond, Washington, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Someone would have to take care of the two black blind musicians; take them where white people couldn’t go, find them a place to stay; find them a place to eat; take them to the bathroom.
On July 20, 1935, using his 2 weeks of vacation time from United Dollar, JB Long and his entourage set out for New York City. In the back seat were Bull City Red, Reverend Gary Davis, and Blind Boy Fuller. In the front seat were Long, his wife Frankie, and sitting between them, their six-year old daughter Betty. The temperature in New York that day, topped off at 99 degrees Farrenheit and of course, cars back then had no air conditioning. We don’t know how Frankie felt about having to spend her vacation transporting three blues musicians to record. Until a few months ago, we might have been able to ask their daughter, but Betty Long Yarborough passed away in January of 2020 at age 89.
Recordings began on Tuesday July 23 at ARC’s midtown Manhattan studios. They got a bit lucky, because the temperature that day only reached 76 degrees. Still, the sessions were uncomfortable. By the second day of the sessions, temperatures were back in the high 80s. If you’ve ever been in New York City in mid-summer you know just how hot and miserable it can be. In those days before air conditioning…well, you can imagine. Being in midtown Manhattan, the windows had to be closed and since they were recording, no fan could be on. In addition, because the musicians were blind, someone (and it turned out to be Long) had to sit behind them, very quietly and very closely to them in the recording room and tap them on the shoulder when it was time to end the song. There was a warning light, but the blind musicians wouldn’t be able to see it. Long said that sometimes, when Fuller would really get going on a song, he’d have to literally grab him by the shoulder and shake him.
We don’t know how Mrs. Long and her daughter passed the time. After all, It WAS her Summer vacation. Perhaps she took Betty to the top of the Empire State Building, or bought her a doll at FAO Schwartz.
Three of them, Long, Fuller and Washington, enjoyed the trip very much. As Long put it “We had quite an interesting time. Every time I went to New York, well somebody had never been up there. It was really a picnic.” But not for Gary Davis. He wasn’t having any of it. He didn’t like the recording experience, he didn’t like the heat, he didn’t like being pressured to record blues when he only wanted to record sacred material, and he didn’t like or trust Long or any of the record company people. So, sadly and unfortunately, these are the only recordings made of Gary Davis when he was in his 30s and at his absolute peak as a guitarist. Still they remain some of the finest guitar recordings ever made. Blind Boy Fuller was a very good guitarist, but Gary Davis was a true master of the instrument. Davis never recorded for JB Long again, but only a few years later, Davis and his wife moved to NYC. He didn’t record commercially again until 1960s “Harlem Street Singer” for Prestige. In the early and mid 60s New York was the folk capitol of the world, and most of the folk singers in Greenwich Village made the trip up to Harlem to take lessons from Rev. Gary. He made many more recordings after that and remained a guitar and folk music icon until his death in 1972. Today, nearly 50 years after his death, The Reverend Gary Davis still influences guitarists around the world.
Davis’s recordings did nothing in the way of sales, but Fuller’s turned out to be highly successful. He was back in the New York studio in February of 1937. Bull City Red was with him again, but this time he was joined by another Durham area singer and guitarist, Floyd Council, whom Long nicknamed “Dipper Boy’, since, unlike Fuller and Davis who didn’t drink, Council did. Today Floyd Council is probably best known for being one of the two East Coast bluesmen for whom the band Pink Floyd is named; the other being South Carolina’s Pink Anderson. If Fuller was a disciple of Gary Davis, Council was a disciple of both men and played in a similar style. It makes sense, Davis was the master, but Fuller was the star. In fact, Fuller was such a star that his records, that his record sales, in the field of what was then called “Southern Blues” were rivaled only by Big Bill Broonzy’s. Fuller was also one of the only “Southern Blues” artists who’s records sold regularly to white people.
Between 1935 and his last session in 1940, Blind Boy Fuller recorded 135 songs, enough for 11 or 12 long playing albums or cds if they had them then. Much of the reason for this is JB Long. Long insisted Fuller continue to come up with original material. Long himself would write out the song lyrics, finishing and polishing if he had to. One significant hit song for Fuller, “Step It Up and Go” may have been written entirely by Long, though he drew from existing sources. To prepare for the sessions, Long would have Fuller, and anyone else who was to be on the sessions, come out to his house; his wife would cook and feed them, and Long would rehearse them, making sure their songs were ready for recording. Despite the work he put in on them, Long never added his name to the author credits and didn’t, at least until much later, include himself in a copyright.
Success to Blind Boy Fuller was one of those double edged swords. He was making money, but had both his and his wife’s welfare stipend cut off when they learned of his success. He had a car, which he let other people drive, and, well, you can imagine how that worked out. At one point he was charged with shooting his wife, Cora Mae, whom he married when she was 14. Fuller was almost completely dependent on Cora Mae, and many folks thought it was an accident. Long describes how it all went down. (read excerpt)
In the late ‘30s several new blues musicians entered JB Long’s circle. Sonny Terry was a brilliant harmonica player who had already attracted the attention of the Washington DC Folklore crowd. Sonny would go on to have a long and illustrious career which would include playing at the first Spirituals to Swing Concert in Carnegie Hall, work on Broadway in “Finnian’s Rainbow”, and film appearances in Steven Spielberg’s “The Color Purple”, Steve Martin’s “The Jerk”, and the Robert Johnson film “Crossroads”. And, of course, he partnered for decades with Brownie McGee (who we’ll get to in just a minute), the two eventually receiving a National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts,
Like Davis and Fuller, Sonny was legally blind, but at the time, could see a little. He first recorded with Fuller in December of 1937.
By 1941 it was evident that Blind Boy Fuller’s health was in serious decline. He had a kidney condition which caused him great pain. His condition worsened, and despite several surgeries, he died in February of 1941. He was somewhere between 33 and 36 years old, no one is really sure. His wife Cora Mae lived on until the 1970s. She never remarried.
About the time of Fuller’s illness, a man with a pronounced limp came into Long’s store and told him he wanted to record for him. Walter Brown McGhee, or Brownie McGhee was from Knoxville, TN. He was stricken with polio at age 4, but became able to walk after surgery under the auspices of the March of Dimes. He played Long some recordings he had made earlier and Long agreed to help him, setting up a session in Chicago for Okeh Records where he recorded a tribute to Blind Boy Fuller as “Blind Boy Fuller #2”. McGhee was younger, better traveled, and more sophisticated than the musicians Long was used to working with, and Long seemed to admire that in him. However, McGhee later said that what impressed Long was that McGhee had a high school diploma, and that he had never met another musician who had one.
After the initial sessions where he worked with harmonica player Jordan Webb, Brownie McGhee teamed up with harmonica player Sonny Terry, with whom he recorded and performed for decades. McGhee also made many tv and film appearances including a role as
Toots Sweet” in the 1987 supernatural thriller “Angel Heart” where, at age 72, he has a very hot romantic scene with former Cosby show actress Lisa Bonet.
The last artist to come into Long’s circle was Buddy Moss. Moss was a Georgian, and had recorded extensively between 1930 and 1935, but in ’35 he killed his wife and was sent to prison. When he came to Long’s attention he was working as a custodian at the courthouse. It was a custom and practice in the South during those years, to give murderers, usually wife or husband killers, outside work in various domestic capacities. In most southern states, the governor’s mansions were staffed by wife or husband killers.
Long was able to secure Moss’s release on the stipulation that he provide him steady employment, so Moss went to work on Long’s farm, Long having moved by this time to Elon College, NC.
In October of 1941, Moss, along with Brownie and Sonny, went to New York where Moss cut 13 sides for Okeh records. Shortly after that, America’s entry into World War II ended his career once again. Moss resurfaced in the mid 60s, recording an album for Biograph and appearing at several blues and folk festivals, but he was said to be difficult to get along with, and he eventually slipped into obscurity. He died in Atlanta at age 70. There is YouTube footage of Moss playing at a folk festival at Berea College in 1977 and he’s playing brilliantly.
World War II ended James Baxter Long’s career as record man. After an aborted experience selling insurance, Long opened his own store which he ran until shortly before his death in 1975. In June 1939, Long was elected mayor of the city of Elon College, North Carolina. Between 1952 and 1972,[8] he served five terms as a member of the Alamance County Board of Commissioners.
I think it’s important to mention that Long always made sure his musicians were paid what was due them. He made separate arrangements with the record companies to be reimbursed for his travel expenses, but the musicians always got what they were supposed to get. He could have easily copywritten their songs and added his name as a songwriter as many record men did but he didn’t, even on the songs he actually helped write.
We don’t really know why Long put so much of his time and energy and expended so much effort to help get this music made, but we’re certainly better off for it.
In his 1975 obituary in the Burlington Daily Times News, the writer mentions Long’s terms on the Board of Commissioners, he term as mayor, his chairmanship of the Commissioners Personnel Committee, his 37 year ownership of the Burlington Discount Department Store, his deaconship at the Elon Community Church, and his membership in the Moose Lodge. There is no mention at all in his participation in the creation of some of the finest music ever to come out of North Carolina, and, indeed, some of the great American music ever made.
