JAMES " IRON HEAD " BAKER

         

Black Betty was recorded in 1933 by John and Alan Lomax for the Archive of American Folk Song project of the Library of Congress. The recording featured James “Iron Head” Baker – who was serving a 99-year sentence as a habitual criminal – and two other prisoners. Black Betty is an example a Work Song sung by laborers in the fields or by prisonors on road crews. Black Betty follows the African Call and Response pattern featuring interaction between the song’s leader and the audience. This style is also common in gospel music and the blues. There is no agreement over just what “Black Betty” refers. Some say it was a whisky bottle, a musket, a prison transfer wagon or a woman. According to “Iron Head” Baker, however, Black Betty was the whip prison guards sometimes used to punish prisoners

               

James "Iron Head" Baker and Moses "Clear Rock" Platt were African American traditional folk singers imprisoned in the Central State Prison Farm in Sugar Land, Texas. They are notable for a number of field recordings of work songs and other material made by John Lomax for the Library of Congress Archive of American Folk Music in the 1930s.

A number of the recordings have been reissued on 78 rpm, on LP and on CD by the Library of Congress and other record labels.

              

Field Recordings Volume 6- Texas (1933-1958) by Alan Lomax Buy the album on which this track appears by going to www.document-records.com Document Records has the largest catalogue of vintage blues, gospel, jazz and old-time country music in the world

Iron Head and Clear Rock were the first two convicts that Lomax was permitted to record in July 1933, having been refused entry at Huntsville Penitentiary. They each performed solo, but responded to and encouraged one another, thus giving Lomax an overview of the idiom and a number of songs to seek out in future collecting. John's son Alan Lomax who assisted him, described the first 1933 session as a collaborative effort. "We wrote down and recorded the songs of Clear Rock and Iron Head for a day and a night, and Clear Rock was still indefatigitably improvising. Those two wore us out." John Lomax devoted a chapter to the two singers in his autobiographical Adventures of a Ballad Hunter.

Iron Head[edit]

James Baker was his prison name. He was generally referred to by his nickname Iron Head. His real name may have Reuben Avery Burrage.[4] When first recorded by the Lomaxes in July 1933 he was sixty-three years old and in his sixth term in the penitentiary. John Lomax, attempting to depict Iron Head's dialect, quotes him proudly claiming to be (in language then acceptable): "De roughest nigger what ever walked de streets of Dallas. In de pen off an' on fo' thirty fo' years. .. I'se a H.B.C. — habitual criminal, you know. Not even Ma Ferguson can pardon me" (a reference to the then Governor of Texas).[5] In reality he was a minor criminal, guilty of nothing more violent than burglary, but sentenced to ninety-nine years as a repeat offender. Iron Head was a trusty with a measure of responsibility and control over other prisoners. He was initially reluctant to sing a sad song because it might make him want to run away and lose his "easy job".

The Lomaxes' appreciation for Iron Head is summarised by Alan's biographer John Szwed: [His] "deep knowledge of songs led John to dub him a black Homer. Baker lived his songs, feeling their emotions viscerally"

John Lomax developed an affection for Iron Head, visiting him when in Texas and sending small gifts of money. Iron Head showed his gratitude with a hand-made gift for Ruby Terrill Lomax, John's second wife, and a card for Christmas 1935. This prompted Lomax to arrange for Iron Head to be paroled so that he could assist Lomax in his collecting sessions in other Southern prisons. This was the role fulfilled the previous year by Lead Belly, except that Iron Head was unable to act as chauffeur. At the end of the engagement, Iron Head was to be set up in business exploiting the handicraft skills he had learned in the penitentiary. The Lead Belly partnership had ended in bitter dispute, and the break-up with Iron Head was initially as heated with Iron Head feeling betrayed and Lomax feeling that Iron Head was irredeemable and ungrateful. On his return to Texas, Iron Head was met by Alan Lomax and helped to find work by Ruby Lomax. Within a year, he was caught burglaring again and returned to prison.[9][10] The break with Lomax was not permanent. In a letter written in 1941 to his son Alan, John quoted Iron Head as telling him "Crime don't pay. I'm walking the straight road now and won't turn back."

Clear Rock

Moses "Clear Rock" Platt

Moses Platt was his prison name. His real name, if different, is unknown. He was generally referred to by his nickname Clear Rock. He told the Lomaxes that he was given the name because he killed three people by throwing rocks at them. For that he was given a life sentence but he "got pardoned out". But then he "took up with" a young woman he described as "a li'l yeller gal" ignorant, he claimed, that she was in fact only fourteen years old. Denounced by enemies, he was recalled to serve his life sentence. When first recorded in 1933 he was seventy-one years old, having spent forty-seven years in Texas prisons. Like Iron Head he proudly described himself as "a habitual".[12] Clear Rock was later pardoned by Governor Ferguson. According to John Lomax, this was after singing Long John to her when she visited his convict camp. According to Clear Rock (in Lomax's spelling):

"One day some of my friends in Taylor heard that Miz Ferguson wuz goin' down to Central Farm a visitin' and they sent a car down there with a letter signed by 30,000 peoples, they wuz de names of all de prominent lawyers an' officers and all other whichocrats around `Taylor, an Miz Ferguso set me free."

To this, Lomax added "The population of Taylor is less than 5,000."

The Lomax's appreciation for Clear Rock is summarised by Szwed: [He] "seemed to possess an endless body of songs. He also was something of a folklorists dream as he knew any number of individual songs, and was able to make up several new ones on the spot. He never sang the same song twice.''"

Alan Lomax was particularly excited by Clear Rock's performance of Bobby Allen (Barbara Allen) which incorporated elements from different textual traditions and different traditional ballads, and by his extended version of the cowboy song of The Old Chisholm Trail. His extempore verses ended in Alan Lomax'x account "... with the cowboy pitched off his pinto and lying hung in a mesquite tree.

"Clear Rock, you left that cowboy in a very uncomfortable position, sprawled across that limb."

''Lemme git him down, Boss. Lemme git him down," he said eagerly.

"Cowboy lyin' on a limb a sprawlin'

Come a little win', and down he come a falliin'

With a bum-ti-hiddle-um-a yeah, yum-a-yeah

With a bum-ti-hiddle-um-a-yeah"