News that Josh White, Jr. passed on Dec. 28 at age 84 brought to mind his illustrious folk singing father, Josh White Sr., a path the younger White emulated to a relative degree of success. To match his father’s considerable legacy was a formidable task and even summarizing it here takes some time and energy.
The elder White, known variously as “Pinewood Tom” and “Tippy Barton,” was born Joshua Daniel White, on February 11, 1914, in Greenville, S.C. where he grew up in the Black section of the city. He was one of four children born to Rev. Dennis and Daisy Elizabeth White. His father told him he was named after Joshua in the Bible. He was still a tot when his mother began teaching him music and placing him in the church choir. After his father threw a white bill collector out of his house in 1921, Rev. White was beaten nearly to death. As a result of this incident, he was locked in a mental institution where he died nine years later.
Shortly after the encounter with the bill collector and his father’s institutionalization, White left home with Black folk singer, Blind Arnold, agreeing to be the singer’s guide across the country and to collect money after the performances. From these events, White would send his mother two dollars a week. It wasn’t long before Blind Arnold recognized that he could make more money from White’s emerging talent as a guitarist, singer and dancer. He also loaned White to other blind musicians, including the legendary Blind Blake, and all the while unbeknownst to them White was learning their songs and styles.
Related: Clarice Taylor, an actress capable of comedic and emotional prowess
His employers further exploited him by having him sleep in the fields, barns, and stables, keeping him shoeless and dressed in rags until he was 16. Meanwhile, his employers lived in the Black hotels, had decent meals, and dressed in the best of clothes.
White was guiding one of his employers in Chicago in 1927 when Mayo Williams, a producer for Paramount Records recognized his talents and began using him as a session guitarist. Eventually, because of his skills and versatility, he recorded and billed with Blind Joe Taggart. White was the youngest artist on “race records,” all the while still sleeping in horse stables with most of the payments from the records going to his employers.
After he ended his touring with Taggart and others, White began his own career as a recording artist, accumulating enough money to take care of his mother and his siblings, and to return home to Greenville. In the late 1930s, ARC Records of New York, sent two A&R men to find him based on his reputation at Paramount Records. When he was at last found, he was crippled with a broken leg and living with mother in Greenville. The company promised his mother, who signed his contract, that he would record only religious songs, not the blues or the “devil’s music.” He subsequently moved to New York City and was billed as “Joshua White, the Singing Christian.”
As his popularity grew, so did his repertoire, and he was soon singing and recording the blues, folk, pop, country, political protests songs and more. Some of his songs were infused with anti-segregationist themes as well as international tunes supporting human rights. These records soon attracted the McCarthy goons and he was labeled a communist. In 1936, he injured his hand during a bar fight, having punched it through a window. It became infected with gangrene so badly that his doctor said it had to be amputated. White refused, stopped performing, and began working a number of menial jobs.
Several months later, almost miraculously, his left healed and within a two-year period he assembled a group and began playing private parties in Harlem. It was during one of these sessions in 1938 that Broadway choral director Leonard De Paur heard him and recruited him to perform in a musical about John Henry and Blind Lemon Jefferson. All of this had come as a result of De Paur looking for Pinewood Tom and the Singing Christian, not knowing that both of these pseudonyms were White.
Two years later, after months of rehearsals, “John Henry” opened on Broadway with Paul Robeson as the titular character and White as Blind Lemon Jefferson. The musical had a short run but gave White an opportunity not only to work with Robeson but open the door for other eminent performers, including Woody Guthrie and Lead Belly. In fact, it was his duo performances with Lead Belly that really made him a notable celebrity. He gained additional cache when he and the Golden Gate Quartet performed in D.C. in a historic concert sponsored by Eleanor Roosevelt to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the 13th Amendment.
This led to a succession of significant performances in the 1940s, including performing at FDR’s inauguration. When he recorded “One Meatball” in 1945 and began a series of appearances at Cafe Society, his popularity was sealed forever. Within the succeeding decade the menace of red-baiting returned and he appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee where he closed his testimony reciting “Strange Fruit,” the song made popular by Billie Holiday.
White also had cameo roles in films, most notably the western adventure “The Walking Hills” (1949). When concerts, recordings and other performances dipped, White took his talent to Europe where his popularity was almost equal to his standing in America, Canada and the Caribbean. On February 27, 2010, a 36-inch bust of White was unveiled at the LeQuire Gallery in Nashville, TN. It was part of an exhibit by the sculptor Alan LeQuire’s “Cultural Heroes,” which later toured the country. In this context, White reunited with Robeson, Holiday, Guthrie and Lead Belly. Six years later, Josh White Day was declared in Greenville and the city planned a bronze statue honoring his contributions to music and culture.
White was 55 when he died on September 9, 1969 in Manhasset, New York.
Find Out More
Practically any book on folk music in America has at least a mention of White, and the articles and interviews he conducted are voluminous.
Discussion
It’s not possible here to determine the extent to which his career was impacted by the allegations and charges of red-baiting, though to some degree it gave him greater notoriety.
Place in Context
Though he only lived a little more than a half century, White left a century worth of music and Americana.
This Week in Black History
Jan. 14, 1916: Acclaimed author and activist John Oliver Killens was born in Macon, Ga. He died in 1987.
Jan. 15. 1933: Noted author Ernest Gaines was born in River Lake Plantation in Pointe Coupee Parish, La. He died in 2019.
Jan. 16, 1950: Versatile artist, dancer and producer Debbie Allen was born in Houston, Texas.
Like this:
Like Loading…
