Algia Mae Hinton is Gone at 88

Algia Mae Hinton, one of the last surviving old-style Piedmont blues players, has died at age 88. She died Feb 8, 2018, Thursday afternoon at her home in Middlesex. “It was expected,” said her daughter, Minnie Hinton Wilma. “She just shut down."

Here is an article from last year.

A Hard Life of Bad Luck and Trouble

By David Menconi - April 2017

Algia Mae Hinton, one of the last surviving members of her 
generation of Piedmont blues players, is still playing the blues
at age 87. Hinton used to perform for festivals with crowds in
the thousands - even once at Carnegie Hall in New York City.
Now as one of the last surviving Piedmont blues players from 
the old days, she performs mostly for family and friends.
Juli Leonard

It’s been a while since Algia Mae Hinton was on a stage, but she’s still a dancer. That hasn’t changed, even though she’s wheelchair-bound nowadays.

“The reason I can’t walk, I danced so much and told so many stories, I wore out my legs,” she says and laughs. “But I’m gonna walk again, dance again. Ain’t giving up.”

A recent Sunday afternoon found the 87-year-old Hinton holding court in the living room of her modest country house, decked out to entertain visitors. She wore black-velvet finery with jewelry to accent bright red nails, her eyes hidden behind rock-star shades.

Hinton used to perform for festivals with crowds in the thousands – even once at Carnegie Hall in New York City. Now as one of the last surviving Piedmont blues players from the old days, she performs mostly for family and friends.

But even without a guitar in hand, she still draws a crowd of those near and dear to her. A steady stream of relatives passed through – grown children, younger grandchildren, younger-still great-grandchildren – to give a hug and a kiss and hear a story or a song.

Every adult man got the same treatment: Hinton looking at them askance and clucking in mock-disapproval, “He got so many women.” It brought down the house every time.

Among the visitors was one of Hinton’s longtime music friends, Mike “Lightnin’ ” Wells, who sat on her couch picking Piedmont blues on a guitar. Hinton swayed to the music, doing a little soft-shoe dance in her wheelchair – a version of the thunderous, full-body buck-dancing she used to do in her prime.

“Algia Mae,” Wells finally spoke up in mild exasperation, “you gonna sing or not? I’m here playin’!”

Hinton smiled, muttered about Wells’ “many women” and began to sing.

I’m goin’ down this road feelin’ bad

Lost the best friend I ever had…

Algia Mae Hinton in Middlesex, NC, around 1996.

Courtesy of Timothy Duffy

A lot of the songs Hinton sings are the traditional blues, folk and gospel tunes she learned growing up on her family’s farm in the 1930s and ’40s. But this is one she wrote herself, inspired by harsh real-life circumstances – the night in 1984 when her house burned down.

“Lost everything I had,” she said matter-of-factly, then paused. “Lost a lot of things in this life.”

A working life

In 1996, Wells produced an album for Hinton called “Honey Babe: Blues, Folk Tunes and Gospel From North Carolina.” The title track was the first song Hinton ever learned, and the serial number they gave the album was 82929 – Hinton’s birth date of Aug. 29, 1929.

Born to a farming family, Hinton came along at the end of her parents’ 14 children. They had her out working in the fields almost as soon as she could walk.

“I have done some work in my day,” Hinton said. “In the field picking cotton, cucumbers, tobacco. Housework and schoolwork, too. Cutting wood for the woodstove, did that, too.”

As she spoke, her son Williette Hinton sat nearby. At 61 years old, he is the eldest of Algia Mae’s four children who are still living.

Hacksaw Harney in 2011

Louise Johnson (1908 to late 1940s?)

By Alex van der Tuuk
in New Paramount Book of Blues: Elusive Artists on Paramount Race Records

Son House and unidentified woman in the 1930s Delta

The fourth artist at the famous August 1930 Paramount recording session, alongside Charley Patton, "Son" House and Willie Brown, was Louise Johnson. Not until David Evans interviewed House in November 1964 was her name linked to the session. The pianist on her sides had long been thought to be Cripple Clarence Lofton, but House's recollection was quite clear:

"Son" House: Yeah. Me, Charley Patton, Willie Brown — no, there was four of us. And another girl named Louise Johnson, she played piano.  

David Evans: By herself?  

SH: By herself
DE: Did she sing?
SH: She singed and played. On about one or two of her songs, me and Charley, we commented a little bit with the guitar while she played the piano.
DE: Were these recorded?
SH: Yeah, she was recording, yes.
DE: Oh, with you and Charley in the background.

House remembered Johnson as about twenty-three or twenty-four years old, and Charley Patton's mistress. "She didn't do nothin' but drink and play music; she didn't work for nobody." House added that Willie Brown knew Johnson when she was playing at a place on the Kirby plantation, run by a woman named Liney or Liny Armstrong, who also owned a restaurant in Memphis, where she lived.3 A Linie Armstrong, aged forty, is listed in the 1930 Tunica County (Beat 1) census of April 18, farming and living with her forty-five-year-old brother, James, and a "roomer," Kittie Jones. Many "juke houses" were simply actual houses, with one or more rooms permanently or temporarily used as venues for entertainment. (David Evans saw a place like this on Dockery's, before they tore it down.) Armstrong seems, therefore, to have been farming and running a juke joint on the side.

Joe Kirby's plantation was right above Robinsonville, along Highway 61. The 1920 Tunica County census refers to it as "John A. Kirby plantation, Clack." House referred to it as Claxton or Clack Store. (In 1941, he recorded at the store in Clack for the Library of Congress.) 

"Kirby's plantation was our stomping ground. That's where we drank all that bad corn whiskey. That's where I got Louise Johnson at. She lived on that place. And that's why she got to go with me, and Willie and Charley to go to Grafton to make records, playing piano. Charley made up a song on Joe Kirby, because he played there a lot and because of the corn whiskey."

As well as playing on the Kirby plantation, Louise may have visited Memphis; the lyrics of "On The Wall" mention the Monarch saloon, owned by Jim Kinnane, and Church's Hall.' "On The Wall" also suggests that Louise Johnson may have turned tricks in brothels. The vocal support by Patton, House and Brown during the song is intended to recreate the atmosphere of a saloon or a whorehouse. Johnson may have picked up some of her piano technique in such establishments, but most of it — the hammered right-hand chords, the grumbling single-note and walking bass lines, the way she plays the turnarounds in the last bar — is pure Mississippi.

On April 1, 1930 a Louise Johnson (occupation: "none") was enumerated at 1 South Street West in Tunica, Tunica County, Mississippi. She was listed as having been born in 1908 in Tennessee, which was also her parents' place of birth. This seems to agree with pianist John "Piano Red" Williams' account of the Louise Johnson he knew in Tunica in the late 1920s: a small woman, aged about twenty, who played the piano in a joint attached to the cotton-oil mill quarters.' Red also claimed to have seen her at the Kirby plantation in the early 1930s.7

Although it has been reported that the male members of the party picked up Louise Johnson from Joe Kirby's plantation on the way to Grafton,' in his interview with the late Al Wilson "Son" House mentioned that Patton picked up Willie Brown and Louise Johnson, who both lived just north of Robinsonville, to practice new songs at his home in Lula the night before they left to go north. Brown already knew Louise, and suggested that she come with them. After practicing all night, they were picked up by Wheeler Ford, who had a car and knew the way, because he had already recorded in Grafton with the Delta Big Four. From Lula, they traveled via Memphis Tennessee, through Arkansas, Missouri and Illinois, where they passed through Cairo, (where House and Patton bought new guitars, and Patton and Brown got into a fight), Kankakee (because Wheeler Ford wanted to visit a guitar-playing friend), and Rockford (a detour to allow House to see the John Deere tractor factory) en route to Grafton.

The trip became as legendary as the recording session itself. With "Son" House in the front seat next to Wheeler Ford, Patton, Brown and Louise Johnson sat in the back. Their drinking led to a row between Brown and Patton, just after they had left Cairo. With the car traveling at sixty-five miles an hour, Patton tried to open the door, causing Ford to make an abrupt stop. Brown and Patton jumped out to settle the argument with their fists, and Patton tripped, fell on his new guitar, and smashed it. Back in the car, Patton got into an argument with Louise and slapped her in the face, which led her to transfer her affections to "Son" House, with whom she ended up sharing a room at Grafton's Bienlein Hotel.

Louise Johnson recorded in F and B flat, the latter a key seldom used by blues pianists at that time. She did not use the more common keys of C and G, which indicates that, when learning to play, she was not exposed to the work of many other pianists. The most interesting aspect of her playing on "All Night Long Blues," "Long with From Home" and "By The Moon And Stars" is that, after one or two choruses with a single-note bass line, she switches to a walking bass and picks up speed, eventually doubling the tempo. This changing of the bass lines is otherwise unknown in recorded piano blues of the 1920s and 1930s, and is certainly not due to her oft_ reported nervousness; it seems rather to be a conscious, and very effective element of her style.

After her Paramount session, which resulted in two released records, and an alternative take of "All Night Long Blues," which survived to be released on LP and CDs, Louise Johnson may have moved to Stacy, Arkansas; "Son" House said that she did so about three weeks after their shared recording session. House never saw her again, but his recollection was that she died in the 1940s from natural causes. (In 1940, when "Son" House was on Simpson Tate's Plantation near Highway 3 in Banks, Mississippi, there was a Louise Johnson living a few doors away from him, but she was a widow aged thirty-eight, and House never mentioned her in interviews; it seems unlikely — but not impossible — that she was the blues pianist who was also his former lover.)

It should be added that the memories of Leroy Willis, from Helena, Arkansas, suggest Louise Johnson may have lived longer than House believed. Willis recalled in 1967 that:

Louise Johnson played around Rich, near Jonestown in the 1930s. She was always by herself She was a heavy-sized, brown-skinned woman. She was in her twenties. She got attached with another woman, called "Piano Playing Willie," some called her "Piano Playing Bill." She is in Memphis now. When I first come to know Willie she was living down at Lula. She lived there until around 1950. Louise Johnson used to run with her. They played together a whole summer. She played in Rich, Lula and Dundee. Charley Reynolds, he was from up here. He played with Louise Johnson from up here to Rich and she played at his place in Dundee. "Piano Playing Willie" left with her around 1950. Willie put some sort of club up down there in Memphis, Tennessee. Willie was from Dundee and had a daughter living in Mattson. She is living with Mr. Roy Flowers.

NOTES

1 For a history of the controversy, see Konrad Nowakowski. "Did Lofton Claim to Have Recorded with Louise Johnson?" Names & Numbers 64 (January 2013): pp. 13-17.
.
2 David Evans. Interview with "Son" House, Cambridge, Massachusetts, November 4, 1964.

3 Nick Perls. "Son House Interview, Part One." 78 Quarterly 1 (1967): p. 61.

4 John Fahey, Barry Hansen and Mark Levine. Interview with "Son" House, Venice, California. May 7, 1965. Cassette Ft 2809. Courtesy of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

5 "Church's Hall" is the Church Auditorium, built in Church Park, Memphis, by African_ American millionaire Robert Church Sr. It seems to have become a favored place fo assignations. For the Church family, as both crime bosses and civil rights activists, see Preston Lauterbach. Beale Street Dynasty. W .W . Norton (2015).

6 Bengt Olsson. Memphis Blues. London: Studio Vista, 1970: p. 80.

7. Michael Hortig. Interview with John "Piano Red" Williams, November 1981. Email from Michael Hortig, January 26, 2016.

8 See e.g. Daniel Beaumont. Preachin' the Blues: The Life and Times of Son House. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011: p. 61.

Mississippi ‘Mudbound’ Tells a Tale

If from dust you came, it is to mud you shall return in the latest feature from writer-director Dee Rees, of Pariah (2011) and Bessie (2015) fame. Mudbound, based on Hillary Jordan's prize-winning debut novel, opens in the Arcadian fields of post-World War II Mississippi, where the two McAllen brothers, Henry (Jason Clarke) and Jamie (Garrett Hedlund), are digging a grave for their father Pappy (Jonathan Banks). Before they can finish, a torrential rain descends upon them, so relentless that Jamie nearly drowns in the muddy hole. With that, the film plunges back into the past to unravel the tangled fate of two families, bound — if not helplessly possessed —by the dirt. 

While Jamie fights in the war abroad, Henry moves his wife Laura (Carey Mulligan), their children and Pappy from the city to a country farm. The arrival of this white family immediately upends the relatively quiet lives of a family of black tenant farmers, the Jacksons — Hap (Rob Morgan), his wife Florence (a poised performance from singer Mary J. Blige) and their children. Their eldest son Ronsel (Jason Mitchell) has also just enlisted in the war. Florence and Laura forge a tentative bond through motherhood, but the entitled Henry frequently requires Hap's subservience, despite their shared love of the land.

This obsession with possessing the earth (a passion that neither Laura nor Florence share with their husbands) struck Rees as a natural starting-point from which to make the tale her own. The novel devotes first-person chapters to most of its main characters, apart from the bitterly racist Pappy, and the film largely preserves each perspective through voiceover. In Hap's narration, Rees added a rumination on the dual meaning of 'deeds'.

"I love the play on words, like what good is a 'deed' and the idea of enfranchisement," says Rees. "Even though [Rap's] blood is in the soil, his sweat is in the soil and the blood of his ancestors is in the soil, a piece of paper, a deed, has more meaning than their deeds."

Rees also sought to develop the novel's subjective tone visually. "When we're with Hap, we see the world as Hap sees it. We see the field as this endless stretch of thing to be conquered. With Henry, we see beauty; we understand that this is aspirational."

Together with cinematographer Rachel Morrison —who worked on Dope (2015) and the upcoming Black Panther—the director presents a striking, convincing portrait of pastoral Mississippi, its landscape rendered in all its vastness, bathed in muted natural light. She and Morrison drew inspiration from a number of sources, from documentaries by Les Blank to the series 'The Americans' by photographer Robert Frank. The artist Whitfield Lovell's etchings on wood, based on vintage photos of African Americans during the Civil War era, also provided direction for Rees and Morrison's vision.

"We wanted it to feel like that old style," says Rees. "I'm also very hands-on with things like the smaller casting. So for the character of Rose Tricklebank, I wanted a woman who looks like a woman who runs a general store. In period pieces people remember the hair, they remember the costumes, but they forget about the faces. And I wanted faces that felt like they only got 5 oo calories a day and didn't use moisturizer. I told background casting that these people should look like they've never seen a goji berry in their life."

FIELD OF DREAMS Ronsel and Jamie (opposite),
played by Jason Mitchell and Garrett Hedlund,
are World War II veterans who strike up an
unlikely friendship in rural Mississippi; Rob
Morgan as Ronsel's father Hap (top); and
Carey Mulligan as neighbour Laura (above) 

Throughout the casting process, the director explains that she was drawn to angular, "timeless" faces like that of newcomer Jason Mitchell, fresh from the acclaim of his breakout role as rapper Eazy-E in Straight Outta Compton (201 5). Hedlund, whom Rees had seen in the Coen brothers' Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), had a "tortured quality" that Rees felt integral to the winsome, disillusioned Jamie. 

The two young men return to the South decorated heroes, noticeably haunted by their experiences in the war. Ronsel, in particular, has great difficulty readjusting to the crushing order of Jim Crow-era Mississippi. He longs for the relative freedom of Europe, where he has left behind a German sweetheart and, he subsequently discovers, a mixed-race child. Without the language to articulate their trauma, they each try to acclimate to their new situation, with little success. The land holds no promise for the restless Ronsel, much to his father's chagrin; meanwhile, Jamie finds a miserable solace in alcohol, which drives a wedge between him and his brother, but does nothing to quell the attraction between him and Laura. Ronsel and Jamie eventually realise that their best chance of finding a way to cope within their small, stifling community lies with each other. For the first time they are able to talk about the war with some-one who was there — someone who is able to grasp both the thrill and horror of it.

"I felt it was really interesting that in some ways they're like the spine, thematically, these two men who escaped the bubble," says Rees. Her earlier films Pariah and Bessie focused on queer black women in romantic, frequently complicated relationships, but for all the new film's differences, Rees believes Mudboundexplores similar themes, namely the transgressive nature of Jamie and Ronsel's alliance, out of place in their society.

"Here, still, we have this relationship that's transgressive. I was very cautious — this is one of those things where it could've gone really saccharine and really Hollywood really easily," explains Rees. "So I wanted it to be a slow, low trajectory. My feeling was these guys are not going to be best friends, but there's going to be some simpatico, and they're kind of this port in a storm in a way." Indeed, the friendship that blooms begins tentatively, awkwardly, and the underlying tension never fully dissipates, right up until the climactic moment when Jamie is forced to make a chilling decision.

Jamie and Ronsel's illicit friendship becomes the film's emotional compass, but first and foremost Mudbound is an ensemble piece, and the entire cast delivers impressive performances, notably R&B luminary Blige, the least experienced of the principal cast.

"I wasn't worried because I knew Mary. I wanted her because she has such empathy and such a life behind her eyes," says Rees. "She observes everything and sees everything, and doesn't say everything on her mind. But there's such a genuineness. If you listen to her lyrics, there's a profundity there. The person who writes these lyrics, the person who sings about her life, the way she opens herself in her lyrics and opens herself in her music — her performance is like a therapy session with 3o,000 people. I knew someone that was capable of that would be capable of really being Florence." 

MUDBOUND LAND AND FREEDOM
Jason Clarke's Henry pleads with Hap
(Rob Morgan) and his wife Florence
(Mary J. Blige) to help him bury his father
in Mudbound, by director Dee Rees (below) 

The Bilge who audiences are familiar with completely disappears behind Florence's dark round shades and a countenance that gives up nothing easily. "I'd found this photo," says Rees. "Everybody was like, 'How does she have sunglasses?' And I was like, 'Oh no, this is a reference photo, like sharecropper sunglasses.' So I saved it to show to her because for Florence it's not a vanity, it's an investment in your work. Your work is in the sun, so you're going to put these 25 cents into getting this thing for your work. And it was great character styling because it makes her unknowable at times, but we know she's there." 

Blige's performance provides an anchor for Morgan's idealistic Hap, whose faith in the land is only out-matched by his faith in the church, and who is ultimately bemused by the son who returns to him. 

"I thought it was important to show Hap's mindset that he has a vision for his life," says Rees. "In the book, it was already set up that they were shared tenants, not sharecroppers. And I thought that was an important distinction to keep: that they didn't start out in debt, they paid their rent." 

Unfortunately, before Ronsel returns, an unexpected fall injures Hap and sets the Jacksons behind on payments for the farm. Henry, unsympathetically, forces Hap to purchase a mule, plunging the Jacksons into debt. 

"That's another thing I switched. In the book, [Hap] is working on the mule shed, and for me I wanted it to be Hap working on his church because then the church could represent this unfinished faith, this naked belief—literally, it's naked; in the church you see the sky," says Rees, of the roofless structure — little more than scaffolding — in which Hap preaches to a modest, if enthusiastic, congregation. "I wanted him to start questioning his beliefs, like, 'Why, God, could you let me fall when I'm using the one thing I have, which is my labor of all things? I fall down using my labor and which then plunged me into debt.' Which is kind of how nature can seem to work against you —but nature is indifferent to us." 

When Rees read the original draft of the script by Virgil Williams (who had previously written for television series such as 24, ER and Criminal Minds), she was especially interested in these dynamics between the two families and the nature that they both cultivate and that in turn works against them. Laura—who adapts dutifully but unhappily to life outside the city — observes that violence is "part and parcel of country life". 

My grandmother swore, 'I'm not picking cotton.
I'm not being a domestic worker. I'm going
to be a stenographer.' So I said, 'Well, in
the film Lilly May is going to be a stenographer' 

"Sometimes I'll have images that I want to shoot that are disconnected [from the plot]," says Rees. "When I was pitching the producer and talking about stuff I wanted to do that's not there yet, I was like, 'I want a kid eating dirt. I want her killing a chicken.' It's probably my favorite part from Hillary's book, that whole meditation on nature. I had these images that I wanted to use to encapsulate that. The dead mouse and the dead possum with ants running out of it, that's not stuff that was in the book, but these are ways I can underscore this passage that I love and really show the routineness of death in this world. In a way it's a kind of tonal foreshadowing; we know that this is where death is routine and unremarked upon so what does this mean for our families?" 

The Nashville-born director also recycled the stories of her parents and grandparents' agrarian upbringings. "My grandmother swore, 'I'm not picking cotton. I'm not chopping cotton. I'm not being a domestic worker. I'm going to be a stenographer,"' says Rees. "That's why I said, `Well, Lilly May [Ronsel's younger sister] is going to be a stenographer' She kind of became a cipher for my grandmother who, given what's in front of you, says, 'I choose none of this. Given the choice of option A and option B, I'm going to choose option C, which I can't even see yet." 

Yet even though these themes of systemic inequality and oppression are explored through the experiences of previous generations, the past few months have proved the issues to be as relevant as ever "What the film shows us is that it's us," says Rees. "I think people dismiss the actions of their grandfathers, uncles, where that was 'the times'. That was 'the times' then. No, that was them. We are the times. We create the attitudes; we create what's acceptable and not acceptable. This is not some anonymous unknown force; it's us. It's people who should be accountable."