When Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson Played the Blues
Their Classic Studio Collaborations
Victoria Spivey’s scrappy, high-pitched voice was less solemn than Ma Rainey’s, less sure than Bessie Smith’s, but it dripped with character and perfectly suited the songs she sang. Unlike most of the “classic” blues women of the 1920s, Spivey composed the majority of the songs she recorded. Her evocative lyrics delivered unflinching views of society from the perspective of those near the bottom. She sang of heartbreak, loneliness, poverty, disease, addiction, capital punishment, suicide, and murder. When the mood suited her, she could also be fun-loving, sexy, and wry. Several of her compositions–“Black Snake Blues,” “Hoodoo Man Blues,” “Dope Head Blues,” “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now,” and “T-B Blues” among them–endured to become blues standards.
The sales of Spivey’s initial sides were so strong that the OKeh and Victor labels brought in some of the era’s finest musicians to back her in the studio: Louis Armstrong, King Oliver, Eddie Lang, Tampa Red, and Georgia Tom Dorsey. Her favorite musician to work with, though, was Lonnie Johnson, the prewar era’s premier blues guitarist. After recording some of the most suggestive duets of the hokum era, the duo would renew their friendship in the early 1960s, when Johnson became the house guitarist for Brooklyn-based Spivey Records. Then in her fifth decade of performing, Spivey was respectfully referred to as “The Queen” by those who knew her.
At the time of her introduction to Lonnie Johnson, the teenaged Spivey was already a seasoned singer, songwriter, and pianist. She was born Victoria Regina Spivey on October 15, 1906, in Houston, Texas. Her father played alongside his sons in a string band; her mother sang secular and spiritual songs. Victoria’s sisters Leona, Addie (a.k.a. Sweet Pease), and Elton (The Za Zu Girl) sang the blues. Her brothers Sam danced and played drums and Willie played piano.
Victoria’s musical abilities became evident during her youth, when Robert Calvin inspired her to learn piano. By age ten she was playing piano accompaniments to silent films at Houston’s Lincoln Theatre. Within a few years she was playing for tips in bordellos, gambling joints, “gay houses,” and whiskey bars, sometimes in the company of Blind Lemon Jefferson, Pearl Dickson, Bernice Edwards, and other blues musicians. During this period, Spivey noted, her “sorrowful moans, low down-home blues piano, and stark, rough blues lyrics developed.”
Witnessing performances by her idol, Ida Cox, profoundly influenced Spivey. But what really convinced her to become a recording artist was the success of another Houston-based singer, Sippie Wallace. In an interview with Paul Oliver, Spivey explained, “My brothers said to my mother, ‘Well, if Sippie Wallace can go and sing, and I know my sister can sing as well as she can. We’ll send her to St. Louis.’ And, well, they got together and they sent me to St. Louis, Missouri.”
At the time, much of the city’s blues activity was centered around Jesse Johnson’s De Luxe Music Shop, located on Market Street just behind the Booker T. Washington Theatre. Upon her arrival, Spivey sought out Jesse Johnson, husband of blues singer Edith Johnson and talent scout for OKeh and Paramount Records. “I walked into this De Luxe Music Shop that Mr. Jesse Johnson owned at the time,” Spivey recollected. “And I spoke to the girl behind the desk. I says, ‘Is the manager here?’ And she says, ‘No, he’s gone to Chicago.’ So I says, ‘When will he be back?’ And she says, ‘He’s due back tomorrow. What do you want with him? I’m the manager here when he’s gone.’ Well, I say, ‘I’m a singer and I wanna make a record!’ Just that simple–that’s true. She says, ‘Girl, you better go home!’ I says, ‘What’s home? I live in Houston, Texas, and I’m not goin’ home. I came to make a record.’ She says, ‘Well, there’s a piano over there. Can you play piano?’ I says, ‘I certainly can!’ I was darin’, you know. So I just sit there and commence to whippin’ on them ole ‘Black Snake Blues’!”
The lyrics, inspired when Spivey overheard her sister call a boyfriend “You ole black snake you,” were unlike any on record:
Some black snake been suckin’ my rider–hear me cryin’, Lawd, I mean it
Some black snake been suckin’ my rider’s tongue
You can tell by that I ain’t gonna stay here long
’Cause my left side jump, my flesh begin to crawl
My left side jumps, my flesh begin to crawl
Bet you my las’ dollar ’nother women kicking in my stall
“Well,” Spivey continued, “she was dumbfounded at that! And the same day I went over to my sister’s in Moberly, Missouri. And two days later Mr. Jesse Johnson rolled up in a blue phaeton–Packard–and signed a contract with me.”
During OKeh’s field trip to St. Louis in May 1926, Ralph Peer and his crew recorded Spivey accompanying herself on piano as she made her first recordings. In the Oliver interview, Spivey claimed that when her first 78 was issued–“Black Snake Blues” backed with “No More Jelly Bean Blues”–“150,000 of those records was sold in thirty days! And then they couldn’t get none–they couldn’t press them fast enough.”
The record’s success brought Victoria Spivey bookings in the Black vaudeville circuit. She would later claim that this song was “the direct absolute antecedent” to Blind Lemon Jefferson’s “That Black Snake Moan,” recorded six months later. Significant differences between the two songs, though, leave this an open question.
Two months after recording “Black Snake Blues,” Spivey met the man with whom she would have her most fruitful collaborations. “It was in the month of July 1926 that I met Lonnie Johnson in St. Louis,” she wrote in the July 1970 issue of Record Research. “I was introduced to him by Jesse Johnson…. This led to some record dates with Lonnie, who not only played guitar for me, but also violin on one occasion.
“Lonnie Johnson had St. Louis sewed up with his brother James on piano. How many people know that Lonnie Johnson was considered the greatest violin player for blues in this world?” OKeh brought Spivey and the Johnson brothers to New York City in August 1926. Over a five-day period, they recorded several selections together and separately in the label’s studio at 145 West 45th Street, where six years earlier Mamie Smith had recorded “Crazy Blues.” OKeh’s newly installed Western Electric recording process added depth and body to the sound of Spivey’s initial New York recordings.
At a St. Louis follow-up session in April 1927, pianist John Erby and Lonnie Johnson, playing six-string guitar with extraordinary skill, backed Spivey on six additional sides. By then, noted Daphne Duval Harrison in her classic study Black Pearls: Blues Queens of the 1920s, Spivey was working as a staff songwriter for the St. Louis Music Co.
The most famous of her April 1927 records, “T-B Blues,” dealt with the inadequate care provided at segregated hospitals during the devastating tuberculosis outbreak. As Spivey explained to Bruce Barlow in 1974, “To write the blues you got to experience life to the fullest. And by that I mean the good and the bad. The ups and the downs. Like my blues called ‘T-B Blues.’ I did that way back in the 1920s. There was a lot of T.B. goin’ around then–especially among poor Black folks. We had it down in Houston, and that’s where I got the idea for the song. Seein’ those poor folks with T.B. in the streets, coughin’ and sufferin’ so. That’s what I put in my blues–true things nobody wanna talk about.”
Six months later Spivey and Johnson met in New York City for another round of sessions highlighted by Spivey’s classic “Dope Head Blues”–one of the first songs to address the dangers of cocaine–and ever-so-dramatic “Blood Thirsty Blues” and “Nightmare Blues,” both recorded on Halloween. Porter Grainger, the pianist on those sessions, convinced Spivey to join the cast of the musical Hits and Bits From Africana. She made her debut with the revue at Harlem’s Lincoln Theatre in November, earning rave reviews as the “Newest Star.” At a follow-up session in September 1928, Spivey was backed by Clarence Williams’ Blue Five, an all-star lineup featuring King Oliver, Eddie Durham, and Eddie Lang.
During mid-October 1928, Victoria Spivey and Lonnie Johnson reunited at OKeh’s New York studio. On the first day of sessions, Saturday, October 13, they revisited Spivey’s best-known poetic theme. Her unique piano playing on the two-part “New Black Snake Blues” combined elements of 12-bar blues with the types of figures used to accompany silent films. Recorded onto matrix 40122-A, their duet “New Black Snake Blues–Part 1” began with Spivey’s sultry moans, followed by Johnson declaring “Something keep a-moaning, I don’t know what it is.” Spivey’s first sung verse employed striking imagery:
In my path lays a black snake, 49 inches, hear me screaming, then I ain’t dreamin’
In my path lay a black snake, 49 inches long
Someone asked me to kill him before he sucks my rider’s tongue
Johnson, whose clear diction is easier to understand than Spivey’s, punctuated the next verse with superlative guitar fills:
When my ride I wake, on my knees I begin to crawl
When my ride I wake, on my knees I begin to crawl
It will be hell to tell the captain if I catch another man kicking in my stall
Before day’s end, the duo also completed “New Black Snake Blues–Part 2,” which featured Johnson singing:
Jest before I left you, my tongue bit you on your leg
Before I left with my tongue I bit you on your leg
I know I’m poison, that’s why I’d rather see you lay
The song concluded on an upbeat note, with Johnson declaring, “You don’t have to worry, mama, I ain’t comin’ back South no more.”
Chances are, the guitar Johnson used during this session was the 12-string he’d bought seven months earlier in San Antonio. A photograph taken around this time depicts a dapperly dressed Johnson holding a 12-string guitar built around the turn of the century, probably by New Orleans luthier Rene Grunewald.
In 1960, Johnson told Paul Oliver, “I got more enjoyment out of the 12-string instrument than I get out of the Gibson I play now, because at that time I was playing with my hands. I just used all five fingers in playing. I done a lot of solo work, and it was sweeter. The sound would come out more perfect, and I had my own way of tuning an instrument. All the strings wasn’t tuned as a natural guitar. I had my own way of tuning.
“The first two strings is the E strings. Those was [tuned] correctly. They were all double. One G string was lower, and one was a tone higher than the other. And the D string was the same. And the bass string, the E sixth [string] was natural, but I had a G string next to it. With the lower pitch, it made a sound of an organ effect. It’s a beautiful, beautiful tone. Believe me, I loved it. Oh, gosh. And you talkin’ about a beautiful tone.” Aural evidence suggests that Johnson occasionally modified the instrument into a 9- or 10-string by removing the octave strings from the lower courses or, alternately, from the B and/or high-E strings.
On Wednesday, October 17, Spivey and Johnson returned to the OKeh studio. Clarence Williams, a prolific songwriter and mainstay of the New York studio scene, was brought in to provide the stately, metronomically perfect piano heard on Spivey and Johnson’s remaining New York records. Cutting onto matrix 401242-A, the trio began with Spivey’s “No, Papa, No!” Johnson tapped percussion on the body of his guitar as Spivey sang of spousal abuse and lesbianism:
You can get my lovin’ day and night
Stomp and kick me when we fight…
No, papa, no
No, papa, no
If you want my money, there’s something you ain’t never done
Now girls in New York got a new plan
Squeezin’ and kissin’, don’t want no man…
With two takes completed, they moved on to their second and final song of the day, “Toothache Blues–Part 1.” U.S. Copyright Office records confirm that this song was co-written by Clarence Williams and lyricist Oscar Jefferson, although “Jefferson” would be the only composer credit to appear on the label. Part skit, part seduction, and pure hokum, the two-part “Toothache Blues” juxtaposed lyrics about a toothache with some of the most unabashedly sexual moaning on record. Their spoken banter, shown here in non-italic type, heated up as the song progressed:
Johnson: Don’t get nervous, honey, when I lay you in my chair
Spivey: “Mmm!”
Johnson: “Sit still, daughter.”
Johnson: Don’t get nervous, honey, when I lay you in my chair
Spivey: “Oh, doctor, doctor.”
Spivey: If you use what’s in your hand, you’ll make me pull my hair
Spivey: “Ow! Ow! Mmm.”
Johnson: “Just a minute…”
Spivey: I feel a funny little somethin’ easin’ into my cavity
Spivey: “Mmm! Ouch! Ow! [giggles]
Spivey: I feel a funny little somethin’ easin’ into my cavity
Johnson: That’s nothing but cocaine and liquor to ease your pains, you see
Spivey: “Oh, doctor! Mmm.”
Johnson: “Wait just a minute now. I got it now.”
Spivey: “Mmm. Oh…”
Johnson: “I’ll pull it. Don’t it feel better now?”
Spivey: “Oh, doctor! Ah! Mmm, mmm.”
Spivey’s orgasmic groaning subsided as the song reached its conclusion.
Upon the trio’s return the next morning, the engineer installed matrix 401244-A. They began with two takes of “Furniture Man Blues–Part 1,” a seduction skit co-composed by Spivey and Clarence Williams. The performance began with a knock on the door and Johnson announcing “Furniture man.” With another of her patented moans, Spivey answered, “Aw, sure, I ain’t got no money today.” They sang the verses in a call-and-response pattern, each singer answering the other’s line:
Furniture man, please don’t take my furniture away
I got to take it, I ain’t goin’ to let it stay
I’m a hard-workin’ woman…
Yes, but you don’t seem to get much pay
Don’t be so mean, give a poor girl a little time
You done had your time, and now it is a crime
But I’m a good lovin’ mama…
But you ain’t got a single dime
Furniture man, don’t move my lovin’ foldin’ bed
I’m goin’ to move it or lose my job instead
That’s where I get my pleasure…
Oh, no, that’s where you rest your head
Leave my stove ’cause it’s gettin’ too doggone cold
I got to haul your ashes before they get too old
Oh, please remove that clicker
Then it will be red-hot, I’m told
The first part completed on the first take, they went right into “Furniture Man Blues—Part 2,” capturing the released version on the second take. Spivey sang the first line, after which they took turns with each line. By song’s end, the furniture man ends up giving his money to the woman:
When I get through, you’ll cancel every debt I owe
And when I get you, mama, we will do so-and-so
Well, then make me know it…
Well, c’mon, honey baby, let’s go
Come into my parlor, furniture man, and close the door
Baby, I can’t stand it, you will get me nervous, I’m sure
I’ve got somethin’ for you…
Why ain’t you said that long before?
Furniture man, say you’ll give me just another chance
You can have some money, mama, just take it in advance
Now you talkin’, daddy…
There it is, mama, right over in my pants
Beneath its adult-oriented party vibe, this record delivered an all-too-serious description of the fate facing some women trapped in a cycle of poverty.
Spivey and Williams next collaborated on two takes of “Mosquito, Fly and Flea,” a Spivey original about the woes of trying to sleep while being pestered in “this wonderful bed of mine” by the “awful bugs” referenced in the title. Lonnie Johnson rejoined them for the session’s final recording, “Toothache Blues–Part 2,” completed in a single take on matrix 401243-B. Once again, Spivey injected sultry moaning throughout the song. The singers shared verses, one singing the first two lines and the other the answering third line:
When I start to drillin’, mama, don’t scream and shout (x2)
Yes, but the things you usin’ is bound to knock me out
You’re a rough old dentist, you make me moan and weep (x2)
Mama, yes, I’m grinding into your root too deep
Yes, you kept on probin’ until I lost my head (x2)
Now you don’t remember the many things you said
In the song’s climax, the singers split some of the lines:
I’m weak and dizzy…
I told you that you were…
You left me weak and dizzy…
I told you that you were, I hope all the pain’s left you
Yes, doctor you did me good
In the final verse, Spivey informs the dentist that she’ll recommend him to her friends because he “cured my toothache blues.”
OKeh’s advertisement for the first of these records to be released declared the two-part “New Black Snake Blues,” OKeh 8626, “The Most Sensational Race Record Ever Released! Two of the Most Famous Blues Singers are to be Heard on One Record. Mean! And How!” The ad’s graphic depicted two angry snakes, mouths open, menacing a pair of frightened, wide-eyed minstrel-style Black faces. “No, Papa, No!” and “Mosquito, Fly and Flea” were issued as OKeh 8634. “Furniture Man Blues–Part 1 and Part 2” came out as OKeh 8652, Harmony 1087, and Vocalion 03260.
The most popular record of all, “Toothache Blues–Part 1” and “Part 2,” was released in the United States as OKeh 8744 and Vocalion 03243, and in Great Britain as Parlophone 8744. Johnson and Spivey recorded together again a year later, producing the two-part “You Done Lost Your Good Thing Now.” After that, they lost track of each other.
Spivey, then at the height of her popularity, appeared in King Vidor’s 1929 all-Black musical Hallelujah. She signed with Victor Records and produced 14 issued sides by 1931, including “Blood Hound Blues” and “Dirty T.B. Blues.” As the 1930s progressed, she moved to Chicago, recorded for Vocalion and Decca, and toured the country with Hunter’s Serenaders and the Dallas Tan Town Topics. A savvy businesswoman, she then managed and toured with her husband, Harlem hot dancer Billy Adams.
Following their divorce and what she described as “an unfortunate family loss” in 1951, Victoria moved to Brooklyn and went into semi-retirement. During the ensuing decade she occasionally performed at jazz clubs, but most of her musical activities were devoted to her church, where she played organ and led the choir.
Her musical career came roaring back when she reunited with Lonnie Johnson. “We lost touch with each other until Chris Albertson and Prestige Records brought us together for recordings in 1961,” Spivey wrote. “I had Lonnie over to my home and we began to work on some new blues duets and songs which I wrote special for the occasion. Just like the old days in St. Louis! The first Prestige recording date in July with Lonnie was my first real one in nearly 25 years–and it gave me the go to go back in the recording biz.”
Spivey parlayed her business acumen into a label, launching Spivey Records with Len Kunstadt the following year. Headquartered at 65 Grand Avenue in Brooklyn, the label issued Victoria’s own works, old and new, as well as contemporary tracks by her old friends Lucille Hegamin, Alberta Hunter, and Hannah Sylvester. Spivey oversaw new recordings by Willie Dixon, Sonny Boy Williamson, Sunnyland Slim, Homesick James, Otis Spann, Roosevelt Sykes, Memphis Slim, and Big Joe Williams with young Bob Dylan on harmonica. She collaborated on a pair of albums with Lonnie Johnson, Three Kings and the Queen and The Queen and Her Knights.
Lonnie Johnson and Victoria Spivey toured Europe with the 1963 American Folk Blues Festival, during which they were filmed performing “Black Snake Blues” together. As Jim O’Neal described in Rolling Stone, “Audiences often saw a gay, zany stage act as the Queen, decked out in slinky black costumes, rolled her eyes and flashed coy grins all around. But many of her blues were grim tales of death, despair, cruelty and agony–underscored by her somber piano and stark Texas blues moans.”
With her sharp recollections of first-generation blues artists, Spivey became a touchstone for blues researchers. Her incandescent energy astounded some of her interviewers. Derrick Stewart-Baxter, for instance, described her as “a human volcano bounding with energy…. When her time comes, Miss Spivey will not die, she will explode.”
After Lonnie Johnson passed away on June 16, 1970, Spivey eulogized him in Record Research as “the greatest blues guitarist man in the business–and what a beautiful blues ballad singer he was too! Everywhere I turn, I hear him in T-Bone Walker, B.B. and Albert King, Muddy Waters, and the younger fellows like Buddy Guy. And, of course, all the white kids are playing Lonnie, most of them thinking they’re being influenced by B.B.”
Victoria Spivey carried on, frequenting the clubs of Greenwich Village. Daphne Duval Harrison noted, “Having a ball was what life was all about for Spivey, so glamorous clothes and lively partying were her kind of action. Alcoholism became a problem, and sometimes she vented her temper on anyone in her presence, no expletives deleted, but people liked her anyway. One reason was her generosity; she was always helping someone in show biz.”
Victoria Spivey continued to write hard-hitting songs until the very end. Len Kunstadt reported that the song she was working on just before her death on October 3, 1976, was titled “Kiss My Sweet Black Ass.” “The blues is life and life is the blues,” she once explained. “It covers from the first cry of a newborn to the last gasp of a dying man. It’s the very existence.” And what an existence she had!
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An earlier version of this article appeared in Living Blues #279. For more prewar Lonnie Johnson, check out The Lonnie Johnson-Eddie Lang Acoustic Guitar Duets.
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