So, Geeshie Wiley . . .
I happened, in 2014, on a piece from the New York Times Magazine, a fascinating and long multi-media exploration titled “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” by John Jeremiah Sullivan. It begins:
In the world of early-20th-century African-American music and
people obsessed by it, who can appear from one angle like a clique of pale and
misanthropic scholar-gatherers and from another like a sizable chunk of the
human population, there exist no ghosts more vexing than a couple of women
identified on three ultrarare records made in 1930 and ’31 as Elvie Thomas and
Geeshie Wiley. There are musicians as obscure as Wiley and Thomas, and
musicians as great, but in none does the Venn diagram of greatness and lostness
reveal such vast and bewildering co-extent. In the spring of 1930, in a damp
and dimly lit studio, in a small Wisconsin village on the western shore of Lake
Michigan, the duo recorded a batch of songs that for more than half a century
have been numbered among the masterpieces of prewar American music, in
particular two, Elvie’s “Motherless Child Blues” and Geeshie’s “Last Kind Words
Blues,” twin Alps of their tiny oeuvre, inspiring essays and novels and films
and cover versions, a classical arrangement.
Yet despite more than 50 years of researchers’ efforts to learn who the two women were or where they came from, we have remained ignorant of even their legal names . . .
I wandered through the 14,000-word piece, listened to snippets of the rare six sides the two women recorded (fewer than ten copies, total, of the three records remain in existence, Sullivan writes), and marveled as a reader and as a one-time reporter at the tale Sullivan told and at the work – historical reporting can be grubby and glacial – and found the six tracks that Thomas and Wiley recorded in audios at YouTube.
(The New York Times website grants a few free articles before activating the paywall, so “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” is easy to access.)
I strained to hear through the noise on the tracks, noise created by casual handing of the rare records in the long years before they were thought to have any value beyond entertainment, and noise intrinsic in the records because records released on the long-ago Paramount label were of poor quality to begin with. (The label, active in the 1920s and 1930s, was owned by the Wisconsin Chair Company, which sold record players and had no connection with the later Paramount Studios. Owning a record label – which numerous furniture companies did in those years – provided product for the buyers of record players.)
In the nine years since I read Sullivan’s piece, mp3s of the six tracks recorded by Wiley and Thomas have found their ways into my digital holdings, and I run through them occasionally. And I keep going back to “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” caught up in the search and the story.
(Wiley’s real name, Sullivan learned, was Lille Mae, and Thomas actually went by her initials – L.V. – but wound up being credited on her records as Elvie. Wiley’s nickname, Geeshie, is thought to have come from “Geechie,” a term found in the Black Gullah culture of the islands off Georgie and the Carolinas, a term used to describe someone from the country, perhaps like “hick” or “rube.”)
And beyond “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” I’ve read more about Wiley and Thomas and their records: Historian and critic Greil Marcus takes on “Last Kind Words Blues” in “Disappearance and Forgetting,” one of the sections in his book Three Songs, Three Singers, Three Nations. Sullivan writes in his essay “Unknown Bards” (collected in his book Pulphead Essays) about fact-checking an earlier Marcus piece about Wiley. And in Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne A. Brooks explores the meaning of Wiley and Thomas to the LBGTQ community. (Thomas, according to Sullivan’s New York Times Magazine piece, likely was lesbian. Was Wiley? Sullivan does touch on the question but without, I think, conclusion. I couldn’t finish Brooks’ piece, defeated by the dense academic prose, so I have to assume there is some evidence beyond conjecture of Wiley’s orientation, too.)
And one of the most compelling places I found Wiley and Thomas was in Do Not Sell At Any Price, a book by music critic Amanda Petrusich. The book explores the culture of collectors of 78 rpm records, a seemingly contrarian and suspicious bunch. Through her research, Petrusich heard for the first time Wiley’s “Last Kind Word Blues.” In an interview with Jessica Roarke for the website Electric Literature, Petrusich says:
The record I keep bringing up that sort of changed the trajectory of my life is the Geeshie Wiley. She became this cipher; I could project whatever I wanted onto her and onto it. Then, a few months before the book came out, all this information came out about Geeshie Wiley and Elvie Thomas in this great article by John Jeremiah Sullivan — maybe she and Elvie had a relationship, maybe Geeshie Wiley stabbed her husband, the story’s incredible — and having read that story and having read more about her life, yeah, absolutely, I do hear new things when I listen to the song now. But I also appreciate that I had that first opportunity to hear it.
And I’m like Petrusich in that way. Wiley’s “Last Kind
Words Blues” pulls me somewhere. The few cover versions of it – I’ve shared two
of them here in recent weeks – are good (the website Second Hand Songs lists
fourteen covers, all recorded since 2002), but there’s something about
straining one’s ears to hear through the hiss wrought by cheap production and
history that makes the original more vivid. Here it is:
– whiteray
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