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Hawkins-Holly Lake Ranch, Texas - GAZETTE ARTICLE ONLINE

WOOD COUNTY HISTORY - AS TIME GOES BY

 

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AS TIME GOES BY

Wood County History

By LOU MALLORY — Chairperson, Wood County Historical Commission

 

Henry (Ragtime Texas) Thomas   12-10-05

 

This early exponent of country blues was born in Big Sandy in 1874. He died sometime during the 1950s.

 

Thomas was one of nine children of former slaves who sharecropped on a cotton plantation in the northeastern part of the state. He learned to hate cotton farming at an early age. He left home as soon as he could, and, about 1890, began to pursue a career as an itinerant “songster.” Some critics have commented that Thomas was the best songster ever recorded.

 

Thomas taught himself to play the quills, a folk instrument made from cane reeds. It has a sound similar to the quena used by musicians in Peru and Bolivia. Later, he picked up the guitar. Thomas made 23 recordings between 1927 and 1929. On these recordings, he accompanies himself on guitar and, at time, on the quills.

 

His accompaniment work on guitar has been ranked by critics with the finest dance blues ever recorded. According to one critic, “Its intricate simultaneous treble picking and drone bass would have posed a challenge to any blues guitarist of any era.”

 

The range of Thomas’ work makes him something of a transitional figure between early minstrel songs, spirituals, square dance tunes, hillbilly reels, waltzes and rags, and the rise of blues and jazz.

 

Basically, his repertoire, which consists mostly of dance pieces, was out-of-date by the turn of the century when the blues began to grow in popularity

 

Thomas’ nickname, “Ragtime Texas,” is thought to have come to him because he played in fast tempos. For some musicians, this was synonymous the ragtime. Five of Thomas’ pieces have been characterized as “rag ditties.” His “Red River Blue” and such rag songs are considered the immediate forerunners and early rivals of blues.

 

Out of Thomas’ 23 recorded pieces, only four are bona fide blues, so he is looked upon as a predecessor of the blues rather than a blue singer as such.

 

Thomas’ “Bull Doze Blues” ends with the four-bar “Take Me Back,” a Texas standard of the World War I era, which Blind Lemon Jefferson recorded in 1926 as “Beggin’ Black.”

 

Thomas’ “Texas Easy Street Blues” contains the verse made famous by Jimmy Rushing and Joe Williams in their 1930s to 1950s versions of the Basie-Rushing tune, “Goin’ to Chicago”: “When you see me comin’, baby, raise your window high.” Another well-known phrase found in this early Thomas piece is “blue as I can be.”

 

Clearly indicative of Thomas’ transitional position between early Black music and jazz is his “Cottonfield Blues,” which contains several standard blues themes: field labor, the desire for escape, and the role of the railroad in providing a freer lifestyle.

 

Thomas escaped from a life of farm work by taking to the rails to make living by singing along the Texas & Pacific and the Katy lines that ran from Dallas-Fort Worth to Texarkana. In “Railroadin’ Some”, Thomas describes his itinerary, which includes Texas town such as Rockwall, Greenville, Dennison, Grand Saline, Silver Lake, Mineola, Tyler, Longview, Jefferson, Marshall, Little Sandy, and his birthplace, Big Sandy. Thomas was last known to be active in Tyler in the 1950s.

 

Thomas even traveled into the Indian Territory, as he still called it, to Muskogee, over to Missouri. He traveled over to Scott Joplin’s stomping grounds at Sedalia, and up to Kansas City, He then went to Illinois, to Springfield, Bloomington, and Joliet, then on to Chicago where he attended the 1893 Columbian Exposition, as did Joplin.

 

In discussing this piece, William Barlow calls it the most “vivid and intense recollection of railroading” in all the early blues recorded in the 1920s. The cadences of this early rural blues “depict the restless lifestyle of the vagabonds who rode the rails and their boundless enthusiasm for the mobility it gave them.”

 

Thomas’ recordings represent a wide variety of sources for his Texas brand of country music, dating back to a time before the blues became popular and before they subsumed many other popular song forms. Three of his songs, “Fishing Blues,” “Woodhouse Blue,” and “Red River Blues” are not actually based on the blues but may have taken the name as a way of capitalizing on the form’s growing popularity.

 

Thomas’ recordings are important as a compendium of popular song forms of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The works, from spirituals to rag songs to blues is enhanced by the range of instrumental techniques found in his work.

 

Henry Thomas represents a vital ink between the roots of black music in Africa, 19th and 20th century American folksongs including hillbilly, spiritual and rag, and the coming of the blues. All of these contributed to the birth of jazz in its various forms. The varied approaches to rhythmic, tonal and thematic expression practiced by “Ragtime Texas” decades before he made his series of recordings in the late 1920s contributed to the later developments in blues and jazz.

 

 

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