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(video+mp3) Blackface Ghosts and Things (Emmett Miller)

Podcast Dreamtime Mrjyn Dailymotion via ME

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This is a real ghost story, but like all real ghost stories, you don't get to
see the ghost. Hey, you boy there! What did I just tell you? Please
don't attempt to look at him straight on, son. The harder you try, folks,
the more he fades, and he's just barely with us as it is now.
You'll have better luck looking away. Pretend you don't see him, and
maybe you'll catch a sidelong glimpse from the corner of your eye.
Wait quietly and you'll soon feel his presence in unexpected places.
His influence, from the unexplained creak on the stair, the glass
mysteriously falling from the table, music and voices coming from a
empty downstairs room.
Here's Limbs AndThings' ( mrjyn
http://dailymotion.com/mrjyn ) clip of Scatman
Crothers doing a song from that movie. If you
listen close you'll hear me yelpin' him on!

Nick Tosches has written

extensively about me since the
1970s, and his 2001 book Where Dead
Voices Gather serves as both a biography of mine and a sort of history of minstrelsy. In spite of

Tosches' tireless research, much of my life remains a mystery, and probably always will. I think Nick had a crush

on me, how else could he be so obssesed. Maybe I was the link between genres, but I see myself more of as a

lucky (slightly)drunk hillbilly/jazz/minstrel song stylist than anything else. Of course, I was pretty damned good!

Sure I worked hard but so did countless others I met along the way. Dying penniless can even make an entertainer

moan!
Is that Lovesick Blues? No, maybe it's Bob Wills. Or maybe I'm totally
wrong, and it's really Jimmie Rodgers. It's so faint, so hard to hear. It's like a
ghost singing.
This is a story about a ghost who made music, a ghost named Emmett Miller, a forgotten
son of a embarrassing and often deliberately forgotten American art form, the blackface

minstrel show.
Born in Macon, Georgia on
February 2, 1900, Miller's family
later said he had wanted to
become a minstrel show comedian
almost from the time he spoke his
first word. And he achieved that
goal by the time he and the new
century had reached their mid-20s.
While the early part of Miller's life
is still a mystery between 1919 -
when he left home to pursue his
dream - and 1924, he had built up
his career enough that an August,
1924 issue of Billboard noted that
he had played a three-day
engagement with the Dan Fitch
Minstrels in Poughkeepsie, NY.
Becoming a successful blackface comedian in 1924 must have been a
little bit like finally attaining a lifelong dream to become a horse collar
maker. While there was still work for both professions if you tried hard
enough to find it, your day was done before you had even gotten
started.
Any Time and Lovesick Blues
Our ghost would have probably disappeared unknown, unloved, and unmourned
except that Emmett Miller also made his first recordings in the late fall of the that
year, 1924, for the Okeh label. The recordings included Any Time, his signature song
on stage.
[Any Time (1928 version) - Emmett Miller]
By any measurement and in any time, Miller's Any Time is one strange song,
beginning with what sounds like a cry of pain after a straightforward jazz
introduction and then Miller's blackface partner incongruously noting, "Emmett,
you're looking mighty happy today."
But Emmett doesn't sound happy at all, as he begins Any Time with a stereotypical
minstrel routine, and then moves into the actual song, which in his hands - or maybe
more accurately, his voice - becomes a witches brew of exaggerated blackface
vocalization, jazz phrasing, and country yodeling.
Yodeling. But not the yodel-lay-hee Sound of Music Lonely Goatherd style of
yodeling. Miller's yodel sounds more as if the lyrics were suddenly disappeared. As if
become exhausted, the singer is now without recourse to words, and what bursts out
is this awful, inarticulate cry, until Miller seemingly recovers himself and remembers
that there is a next line.
Small wonder that Miller became known as the man with the "trick" or "clarinet"
voice.

"Without a doubt my father learned Lovesick Blues somehow from

Emmett Miller. It was either by record or he heard him perform it in
person at a minstrel show." - Hank Williams Jr.

The version we heard of Any Time was cut in the fall of 1928, with Miller backed by a
band dubbed the Georgia
Crackers and which included
both Tommy Dorsey and his
brother Jimmy, as well as
drummer Gene Krupa. In an
earlier session, Miller and the
boys also did a remake of his
Lovesick Blues, which he had
first recorded in 1925, and
would eventually become the
foundation for Hank Williams'
1949 hit.
As Hank Williams Jr. noted,
maybe his father learned
Lovesick Blues directly from
Miller - at least one person
remembers Hank praising
Miller's version of the song - or
maybe it was from one of the
cuts Miller put on record. In either case, when Williams recorded his version, it was
obviously influenced by Miller's vocal style.
[Hank Williams - Lovesick Blues]
Lovesick Blues was written by Irving Mills and Cliff Friend in 1922. Incidentally,
Friend's best-known song is probably 1937's The Merry-Go-Round Broke Down,
which became the signature song for the classic Looney Tunes cartoons. Lovesick
Blues had been recorded by several artists before Miller picked it up, but it's his take
on the song in 19 and 25 that put it on the musical map and would eventually catch
Hank Williams attention.
[Emmet Miller - Lovesick Blues]
The Blue Yodels
We can't let our ghost rest in
peace until we take a look at
the Emmett Miller/Jimmie
Rodgers connection. It's
known that during 19 and 25,
Rodgers "put on the cork," as
the minstrel show saying had
it, and was working as a
blackface performer. He wasn't
alone. As well as Jimmie
Rodgers, Bob Wills, Roy Acuff,
and Clarence Ashley all
appeared in blackface during
the course of their careers. But
what's less certain is whether
Rodgers ever ran into Emmett
Miller and heard Miller's unique yodel.
Miller was in Asheville, North Carolina in the summer of
1925, and while Rodgers didn’t move to Asheville until 1927,
the city was one of the premiere stops on the minstrel show
circuit. So it's possible Rodgers at least passed through
town while Miller was in residence and caught one of his
performances. And two years later there's some
circumstantial evidence that the two may have even
performed together.
Ultimately, like all good ghost stories, it remains a mystery
whether Emmett Miller and Jimmie Rodgers ever met, and
whether Rodgers Blue Yodels evolved from Miller's yodeling
style.
[Jimmie Rodgers - Blue Yodel # 9]

'You Look Familiar'

Oscar Vogel: Hello Jack. Do you
know me?
Jack Fate: You look familiar.
OV: I was the star of the show
here. One of the biggest stars. I
was one of your father's favorite
performers once. Everything was
going great... just as long as you
kept your mouth shut. But he
was doing things that were
wrong, your father. His desire for
retaliation and revenge was too
strong.
I was the only one in any
position to say anything,
everybody else was too scared. I had the show, I had a forum. So, I spoke out. It's not
what goes in the mouth. It's what comes out that counts.
OV: They said it was an accident (strums banjo). Some even said it was a suicide.
Some people choose to die in all kinds of ways. Some people jump out of buildings
and slit their wrists on the way down. Some fall on their own swords. I opened my
mouth. You remember? My name is Oscar Vogel.
JF: Oscar Vogel.
OV: (strums banjo)
JF: Well, I gotta get back to the stage.
OV: The stage? Ah yes, the stage. 'The whole world is a stage.' - Masked and
Anonymous
By the end of the decade popular interest in minstrel shows had all but
faded away although, like an inconvenient ghost, the cork kept re-
appearing on stage and in film. Well into the next decade, Mickey
Rooney and Judy Garland would appear in blackface in 1939's Babes
in Arms. Bing Crosby appeared in blackface in 1942's Holiday Inn, the
precursor to the better-known White Christmas, released in 1954, and
which also included a minstrel show number, but which, happily, was
not done in blackface. The Black and White Minstrel Show was a
popular British television series with a 20-year run into the `70s that
presented traditional American "Deep South" songs - usually
performed in blackface.
But even though it kept rolling in the grave well into the 1950s, the
minstrel show was certifiably dead by the early `30s, with the
popularity of movies putting the final nails in its - and its descendant,
vaudeville - coffins. Interestingly, many of the minstrel show
performers just put on a new mask - one that didn't require the cork -
and moved into "hillbilly" music, masquerading this time as folksy
hicks, rather than as rural blacks. In time, many of the pseudo-
hillbillies and cowboys like Jimmie Rodgers and Bob Wills would in
turn make the move into the more sophisticated country-western
genre.

But what of our ghost, Emmett

Miller? As far as the record shows, Miller apparently
stuck to the cork to the bitter end. During the last part of
his recording career, he tried to tame down his vocal
style in an attempt to imitate then popular crooners like
Rudy Vallee. But it didn't take, possibly because Miller
kept including dated blackface routines with his music.
His final recording sessions were in 1936.
But he never stopped working until the work dried up,
performing when and where he could in minstrel revivals,
vaudeville, even appearing with Scatman Crothers in a
1951 movie, Yes Sir, Mr. Bones.
But that was the last gasp for the cork and for Emmet
Miller. He'd return to the town where he was born and die
in Macon, Georgia in 1962.
Bob Dylan's thoughts on minstrel shows and blackface
are unknown. But given the fact that he named an album
after a book about the history of minstrel shows, it's
pretty obvious that he does have some thoughts on the subject. And then there's
Masked and Anonymous, of course. In the movie, Dylan - as the character Jack Fate -
receives a visitation from his predecessor, a blackface minstrel.
"Do you know me?" he asks.
"You look familiar," Dylan replies.
The minstrel man later claims his name is "Oscar Vogel." But I'm not so sure. I think
he may have worked under more than one name. He was once the star of the show
here.
More Reading and Listening: The Wikipedia article on Emmett Miller; The Red Hot Jazz site, which has an
excellent collection of Emmett Miller songs in RealAudio format; There's also a good overview of Miller,
and his importance to country music, written by an an AnnMarie Harrington in 2003 at the appropriately
named "Take Country Back" site.
Much of Harrington's article appears to be sourced from the touchstone of all
Emmett Miller arcana, Nick Tosches' 2001
book Where Dead Voices Gather. Alternately
fascinating and maddening, the book is no
easy read. Tosches' prose can become so
dense as to be impenetrable and much of
Where Dead Voices Gather seems to have
been written as stream-of-consciousness.
When Tosches runs out of things to say
about Miller, which happens quite often, he
falls back on interminable lists of recording
dates, forgotten songs, and minstrel show
bookings until something new apparently
occurs to him. The digressions can range
from slang terms for female genitalia to
whether Dixie was Abraham Lincoln's favorite
song. And we're off and running with Nick
again.
Tosches also isn't particularly well-liked in
the small but active Emmett Millerphile
community, where he's been criticized for
sloppy - or no - research. Even I caught him
out in a mistake while reading Where Dead
Voices Gather. Tosches claims Wanda Jackson recorded the same Right or Wrong
as Miller, but just a listen to a few seconds of either piece of music shows that
they're completely different songs that happen to share the same title.
Having said all that, I still commend Where Dead Voices Gather to your attention. As
frustrating as the book can be, it's still on a par with Greil Marcus' The Old Weird
America as a document of Americana music.
If you like obscure musicians like me let me recommend some of my contemporaries to you. Roy Evans,
Jimmie Rogers, Annette Hanshaw, Jay C. Flippen, Cliff Edwards, Marion Harris, Papa Charlie Jackson, &
Lee Morse (A Real Yodeling Blues Lady, check out Mail Man Blues!). our ghost in blackface is alive and
well in the digital age(but IT'S MYSPACE, SO IF MYSPACE SHUTS DOWN YOUR COMPUTER, IT'S FROM
MYSPACE. IT'S GOOD THOUGH) Emmett's MySpace Page, 107 years after his birth.

***

Dreamtime podcast Ep 40 A Ghost in Blackface

You've been listening to the Dreamtime podcast – occasional commentary on Bob Dylan's Theme Time
Radio Hour.
Dreamtime is researched and written by Fred Bals and is a Not Associated With production. As the name
says, we're not associated with XM Radio, Bob Dylan, or much of anything else.
Some of the music on Dreamtime is provided via the Podsafe Music Network. Check it out at
music.podshow.com. The closing segment's music was an excerpt from Ol' Time Banjo, by David Miles
Huber.
Remember that the Dreamtime team loves to get email. You can write us at dreamtimepodcast@gmail.com
The Dreamtime top cats are Curly Lasagna and Shaggy Bear. Our announcers are the notorious honky-
tonkin' sisters, Jailbait and Joyride.
Until next time, dream well.
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