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pieces, was out-of-date by the turn of the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.