DeFord Bailey - Fox Chase

Change is a recurring theme in my conversations with #2 Son. Things change; sometimes change is bad, and everything looks like it's getting worse. Sometimes change is good.

For all of the trouble we have with race relations today, it's nothing like when I was a kid in the 1960s. Change is moving us in the right direction, where what happened to DeFord Bailey simply can't happen today.

Bailey was one of the earliest Country Music stars, back almost before there even was a Country Music. There was a surprising mixing of the races in the poor, rural South - at least when it came to music (at least the music of the poor whites). Bailey was a master of the Harmonica, and began recording some songs and appearing on the new fangled "wireless" programs in the 1920s. This exposure, and his talent opened doors.

Perhaps the best harpsman of his day, he was much sought after. He toured with Roy Acuff (among others), was the first African-American members of the Grand Ole Opry, and was perhaps the only African-American able to draw large audiences of white southerners. But the South in the 1930s and 1940s meant Jim Crow, and so touring meant he had to eat and sleep in different places than the rest of the band. And he was expected to "know his place". As a biographer wrote*:

On the surface, it would appear he was exempt from most of the indignities and humiliations for blacks that are associated with the rigid segregation of the period. To some extent, this was true. As he explained: "Jim Crow didn't mean a thing to me. When I got on the streetcar, I would go to the back, but most of the time someone would call me to come back up to the front and play a tune." On the other hand, he was probably more sensitive to and conscious of the rigid rules than were most blacks of his day.

He emphasized that he "stayed in his place" to avoid any possible problems: "I'd stay there with them (on the front of the bus), but if they got off before I did, I'd go back to my place on the streetcar. I didn't have to be told."

In a sense, segregation also made him expendable. By 1941, musical tastes changed from "Hillbilly" to "Country and Western", and the Opry got rid of him. The reason they gave was that his record contract with BMI didn't let them play his most popular songs on the radio. He spent the rest of his life shining shoes, cutting hair, and even renting out a room of his house. Some folks didn't like that he rented to both whites and blacks, and burned a cross on his lawn one night.

Some of the changes this country has seen have been for the better. Boy, howdy.



It was new when Bailey died in 1982; here's the NBC Nightly News story. That's Roy Acuff and Bill Monroe saying he should be inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame.



DeFord Bailey was was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2005.

* I highly recommend clicking that link and reading the whole story. Things are anything but perfect today, but thank God those days are past.