A Visit with deford bailey, the first star of country music

From the book Harmonicas, Harps, and Heavy Breathers, publshed by Simon and Schuster

Deford Bailey (1899-1982)

One gray afternoon in November, 1977, I parked my car at a street corner on Edgehill Road in a black neighborhood in Nashville. The man I was looking for had managed a shoeshine stand on that corner as recently as six years before, but now there was no sign of it. I walked into a nearby drugstore that had obviously been there for years and asked the pharmacist behind the counter if he might know where I could find DeFord Bailey. He obligingly pointed out a high-rise apartment building across the street.

I walked into a lobby furnished with chairs filled with old men and women reading newspapers and conversing quietly and found Bailey’s name and apartment number listed in a tenant directory on the wall. A few minutes later, I was knocking on the door of number 30, which swung open to reveal a tiny, white-haired black man, impeccably turned out in a white brocaded shirt, sharply creased pants, and gleaming patent-leather shoes. I stammered out an introduction and, stretching the truth only a little, said that I was a harmonica player who had traveled across the country just to meet the man who had recorded “Ice Water Blues.” Smiling, Bailey welcomed me in a quiet voice, stepped aside, and ushered me into his apartment, a small place filled with photographs and train memorabilia in which time seemed suspended sometime between the world wars.

We talked about his songs and DeFord produced a tape recorder containing a cassette of his old recordings. I had heard that Bailey would play his harmonica only on a cash basis, so I placed a twenty-dollar bill on a nearby side table as discreetly as I could and told him how much it would mean to me to hear the sound of his mouth organ in person.

“I play the banjo, you know,” he responded, and produced a five-string from somewhere and began fingerpicking it left-handed. After a time I steered the conversation back to the harmonica again.

“I play the guitar, too,” he volunteered, and in a minute he was cradling a guitar and picking out a melody in a subdued, tuneful style reminiscent of Mississippi John Hurt’s.

I decided to force the issue by pulling out a Marine Band and attempting my own version of my host’s “Ice Water Blues.” I stewed in my embarrassment as he pondered my playing. “You got some of that in there pretty good,” he finally said. “Keep practicing, son—keep practicing. I’ve been playing the harmonica for seventy-five years. You know I must know something.”

Bailey carefully opened a box containing a Marine Band in the key of G, confiding that the A and the G models were the best for his songs but that he could get by with a Bb if he had to. He cradled the harmonica in his right hand, brought it to his mouth, and for the next few minutes his remarkable playing filled the small room.

We listened to the tape of Bailey’s old recordings and discussed the finer technical points of harmonica playing. After a lesson from DeFord on how to play the bones properly, I asked him if I could have a picture taken with him. He agreed, but saying that he would like to change his clothes, he politely excused himself and disappeared behind a curtain that divided the single room into a parlor and a bedroom. A few minutes later he reappeared, this time in a black frock coat, string tie, and a Stetson hat that looked as ifd it were enjoying its first trip out of the box. He posed with me, we shook hands, I tried to tell him what his records meant to me, and then I was walking down a stairwell, trying to imagine Bailey as a young man in the WSM studios, perched on a Coca-Cola crate in front of a microphone, harmonica in hand, waiting for George Hay’s introduction.

*   *   *   *

At the close of the NBC “Music Appreciation Hour” on the night of December 11, 1927, host Walter Damrosch commented stiffly that “while most artists realize that there is no place in the classics for realism, I am going to break one of my rules and present a composition by a young composer from Iowa. This young man has sent us his latest number, which depicts the onrush of a locomotive.”

After the stirring orchestral train imitation was finished, those listening to the network broadcast over Nashville’s WSM heard George Hay follow Damrosch’s lead. Promising his audience “nothing but realism, down-to-earth for the earthy,” he called on DeFord Bailey, “The Harmonica Wizard,” to perform his train piece, “Pan American Blues.” After Bailey’s artificial steam had dissipated, Hay reminded listeners that “for the past hour we have been listening to music taken largely from the Grand Opera, but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.”

DeFord Bailey, despite his undeniable genius, was an unlikely candidate to become the most popular of the many fine  harmonica players in the early days of country music. He was a quiet man, a tiny hunchback barely four feet ten inches tall. And he was black.

Bailey was born on his parents’ farm near Bellwood, Tennessee. “Everybody in my family played music,” he told Bengt Olsson. His mother and his aunt both played the guitar, his brother was a banjoist, and his father and grandfather were fine fiddlers. Bailey claimed that one of his uncles was the best black banjoist he had ever heard. Two of DeFord’s uncles played the harmonica; one, Albert, had quite a local reputation. DeFord remembered his family as being known as “the best musicians since slavery times.”

Bailey’s physical shortcomings were the result of a bout with polio at the age of three. Bedridden for a year, he spent his convalescence trying to unravel the mysteries of the harmonica and mandolin. “I tried to learn more about my harp from other people when I was a boy,” Bailey told David Morton, “but I didn’t learn very much…I was in a different class.” Bailey told me that as a child he was so obsessed with perfecting a train imitation that he would spend whole days sitting under a nearby railroad trestle, studying the shuddering roar of passing locomotives. He later became justly famous for his harmonica train pieces, which were so accurate that a railroad engineer once visited WSM studios for the express purpose of congratulating the mouth organist on his achievement and to suggest a few subtle corrections to DeFord’s whistle pattern for crossings.

Bailey’s physical problems, the racial climate of his day, and his talent for music all helped to give him an introverted, dreamy character. “I’ve always been like a child,” he told Bengt Olsson. “I have a very vivid imagination. I think like a child and I feel like a child. People say I drive them crazy after a while.” Bailey confided to David Morton that his schooling was sketchy. “I didn’t study nothing else but my harp.” When the white family for whom he did chores moved to Nashville in 1918, DeFord went with them.

His solitary personality notwithstanding, Bailey sought the musical spotlight. Preposterously, he teamed up with mirror image of himself—another diminutive, crippled African American harmonica player named Bob Lee—and together they played around Nashville. Bailey also worked as an elevator operator, playing his harmonica between stops for passengers, one of whom encouraged him to make his first radio appearance as a contestant in a contest sponsored by WDAD. A description of the competition in the Nashville Tennessean reported that “the first prize in the French Harp contest was one by J. T. Bland who played ‘Lost John.’ The second prize was won by DeFord Bailey, a negro boy, who played “It Ain’t Gonna Rain No Mo’.”

Dr. Humphrey Bate brought Bailey to an Opry broadcast, introducing him to Hay as “the dangdest harmonica player who ever lived” and convincing the announcer to put DeFord on the air that same night. Bailey was made an Opry regular in 1926 and within a year became the most popular member of its cast with his own regular fifteen-minute segment.

There is no hard evidence that the Opry tried to keep DeFord’s race a secret from the Opry audience. Bailey rarely spoke during his broadcasts, but this may have been in keeping with DeFord’s essentially shy nature, and he did sing occasionally on the air. While Bailey was the only black regular on the Opry, other African American gospel singers, guitarists, and blues performers appeared on the program. Whatever notions the Opry audience had about DeFord’s background, they responded enthusiastically to his performances; his fan mail was sizeable. According to Charles Wolfe, “it wasn’t at all uncommon for DeFord to appear for two or even three sets in a single Saturday night show.” Opry scholar Richard Petersen has documented that in 1928 Bailey performed almost twice as often on the Opry as any other performer.

In 1927, Bailey traveled to Atlanta and cut two sides for Columbia that were never issue. Two weeks later, Bailey was on a train for New York, where he recorded eight tunes in two sessions for the Brunswick label. On October 2, 1928, Bailey was the focus of the first recording session held in Nashville, during which he cut eight sides for Victor.

At the time, record companies had a practice of issuing blues recordings—then aimed solely at black audiences—as “race” records; recordings of white country music performers were sold as “hillbilly” discs. Bailey’s race, his status as a star of the Grand Ole Opry, and the fact that his purely instrumental music reflected the overlapping musical repertoires of blacks and whites in the Tennessee hill country (Bailey himself always contended that he played “black hillbilly music”) enabled Victor to release his recordings in both series. DeFord Bailey had become the first crossover star in country music.

As Paul Oliver’s research has shown, the material that Bailey recorded was not especially original. “Old Hen Cackle” was a traditional fiddle tune, “John Henry” was a well-known favorite of both blacks and whites, “Ice Water Blues” was based on a tune called “The Preacher and the Bear,” and “Davidson County Blues” was a rewriting of the piano showcase “Cow Cow Blues.” Bailey’s recordings, however, do not reveal the full extent of his range, which included blues, pop, sacred, and jazz numbers as well as traditional tunes.

What they do give us is solid evidence of his genius. His tone is unfailingly beautiful and astonishingly full, and his numbers are strongly melodic and cleverly conceived. What puts Bailey squarely in the ranks of the greatest of harmonica players is his polyrhythmic brilliance, which has never been equaled. In tunes like “Ice Water Blues” (a popular record that was released three times), Bailey effortlessly juxtaposes a melody line against two or three rhythmically distinct cadences that somehow dovetail seamlessly. Bailey once tried to describe to David Morton what distinguished his style from that of other players: “My timing is different from theirs….I got a double sound. I can’t play single. It doesn’t sound good to me….I add time to vacant space.” He took great pride in the clarity of his playing, and he liked to inject something unique (he called it “throwing in a little judo”) into each of his pieces.

Bailey often headlined touring package shows featuring Opry stars that drew large audiences. “When I first came to town, he was one of the top stars and was much in demand for personal appearances,” Roy Acuff admitted. “I carried him on my band. I wasn’t known and he drew a crowd….He helped me get where I am.”

“Rabon and I used DeFord on a lot of our personal appearance,” wrote Alton Delmore of the Delmore Brothers. “[He] was a pioneer in the field of playing the harmonica. When we joined the Opry we saw a lot of DeFord and he was a real friendly fellow and we liked him very much. So did the rest of the entertainers on the Opry….We all thought just as much of DeFord as we did our white friends. He was a little fellow who commanded our admiration and respect.”

On the road, Bailey was no longer sheltered by the faceless anonymity offered by radio. He usually could not eat at the same restaurants as his Opry colleagues. Although he suffered some indignities at the hands of his fellow performers on these road trips (on one tour DeFord was wheeled onstage at each performance in an oversize baby buggy), many of them were particularly solicitous of his welfare. When he toured with Uncle Dave Macon, Macon would often claim that Baley was his valet so that the harmonicist could room with him. Most of the time, however, Bailey had to scour black neighborhoods in each town for lodging. As Bill Monroe told Jim Rooney, “We’d walk the streets together, two, three o-clock in the morning, nobody out, in the roughest parts of town we’d be down there getting him a place to stay….Then he would get in the room and lock the door and stay there until I went to get him the next day.” Bailey slept with a pistol under his head while on these tours.

A trend toward modernization at the Opry led to the steady reduction of Bailey’s airtime, which by 1935 had shrunk to five minutes. By the early 1940s he was called on to play only if time permitted. Bailey’s close friend David Morton feels that Bailey was the victim of a publishing battle between ASCAP, which published most of his repertoire, and BMI. WSM had invested in BMI and pressured its cast of regulars to write new songs that would be published in the BMI catalog.

Bailey was finally given his notice by Hay in 1941. In a souvenir pamphlet published four years later, Hay commented on the end of Bailey’s Opry career: “That brings us to DeFord Bailey, a little crippled colored boy who was a bright feature of our show for about fifteen years. Like some members of his race and other races DeFord was lazy. He knew about a dozen numbers, which he put on the air and recorded for a major company, but he refused to learn more, even though his reward was great. He was our mascot and is still loved by the entire company. We have him a whole year’s notice to learn some new tunes. But he would not. When we were forced to give him his final notice, DeFord said, without mailice: “I knowed it wuz comin’, Judge, I knowed it wuz comin’.” Bailey himself, however, was steadfastly bitter about his firing, claiming that he never got paid more than five dollars for an Opry performance and that his treatment had not been on a par with that received by other performers.

 Bailey had stared a shoeshine parlor with an uncle in 1931, and he went to work there after leaving the Opry. When he parlor became a casualty of a 1971 urban renewal program, he moved into a nearby housing project for the elderly. He steadfastly resisted offers from the Newport Folk Festival, for album projects alone and with folksinger Pete Seeger, for network television appearances, and for a cameo appearance in the Burt Reynolds film W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings. When the Opry called, however, Bailey still answered; he stole the show at an Old Timer’s Night at the old Ryman Auditorium in 1974 and played at the new Opryland complex on his seventy-fifth birthday. He would occasionally talk about recording again, but never did.

In 1982 Bailey spent several weeks in the cardiac care unit of Nashville’s Baptist Hospital for treatment of heart disease. Shortly after his release, on July 2, Bailey was rushed to the hospital’s emergency room, where he was pronounced dead on arrival from kidney failure and heart congestion.

The Hohner Company formally petitioned the Country Music Hall of Fame to induct Bailey. Minnie Pearl and Alcyone Beasley, Humphrey Bates’ daughter, urged his selection, but Roy Acuff told the New York Times that Bailey did not deserve a place in the Hall of Fame, saying that the harmonica player’s contributions had done nothing to further country music.

Thanks to the tireless efforts of Daniel Morton, June 23, 1983 was declared DeFord Bailey Day in Nashville. A striking granite headstone, engraved with a diatonic harmonica and the words “Harmonica Wizard,” was unveiled in a ceremony at Nashville’s Greenwood Cemetery. Roy Acuff, Bill Monroe, and Herman Crook were among the crowd. Acuff was still smarting from the criticism he had received over his comments concerning Bailey’s qualifications for the Country Music Hall of Fame. “If his name is ever put on the ballot,” he told reporters, “he will have a vote from Roy Acuff.”

Bailey would have enjoyed the occasion. The Crook Brothers played two of his favorite breakdowns, “Sugar in the Gourd” and “Grey Eagle.” Bill Monroe performed Bailey’s “Evening Prayer Blues” on the mandolin, and James Talley contributed a version of “John Henry.” After the headstone was unveiled, Herman Crook brought the observance to a close with a solo harmonica rendition of “Amazing Grace.” Some of those in attendance then drove to the Country Music Hall of Fame, where several Bailey artifacts—three hats, some shoes, a folding can chair, and two of his megaphones—were donated to the Country Music Museum.