This article delves into the remarkable life and career of folk singer Josh White Sr., highlighting his journey from poverty and exploitation to becoming a celebrated recording artist and Broadway performer. It explores his early struggles, his mentors, his musical evolution, and the challenges he faced during the McCarthy era.
Publisher and my father, Wilbert “Bill” Tatum, before me. We’ve been reporting the news of the day from a Black perspective since 1909 – the first time in the 125 years of this award it has been given to a Black woman publisher – We are proud to provide no paywall journalism for the Black community we serve, the largest Black and Brown community in the country. News that Josh White , Jr. passed on Dec. 28 at age 84 brought to mind his illustrious folk singing father, Josh White Sr.
, a path the younger White emulated to a relative degree of success. To match his father’s considerable legacy was a formidable task and even summarizing it here takes some time and energy. The elder White, known variously as “Pinewood Tom” and “Tippy Barton,” was born Joshua Daniel White, on February 11, 1914, in Greenville, S.C. where he grew up in the Black section of the city. He was one of four children born to Rev. Dennis and Daisy Elizabeth White. His father told him he was named after Joshua in the Bible. He was still a tot when his mother began teaching him music and placing him in the church choir. After his father threw a white bill collector out of his house in 1921, Rev. White was beaten nearly to death. As a result of this incident, he was locked in a mental institution where he died nine years later. Shortly after the encounter with the bill collector and his father’s institutionalization, White left home with Black folk singer, Blind Arnold, agreeing to be the singer’s guide across the country and to collect money after the performances. From these events, White would send his mother two dollars a week. It wasn’t long before Blind Arnold recognized that he could make more money from White’s emerging talent as a guitarist, singer and dancer. He also loaned White to other blind musicians, including the legendary Blind Blake, and all the while unbeknownst to them White was learning their songs and styles. His employers further exploited him by having him sleep in the fields, barns, and stables, keeping him shoeless and dressed in rags until he was 16. Meanwhile, his employers lived in the Black hotels, had decent meals, and dressed in the best of clothes. White was guiding one of his employers in Chicago in 1927 when Mayo Williams, a producer for Paramount Records recognized his talents and began using him as a session guitarist. Eventually, because of his skills and versatility, he recorded and billed with Blind Joe Taggart. White was the youngest artist on “race records,” all the while still sleeping in horse stables with most of the payments from the records going to his employers. After he ended his touring with Taggart and others, White began his own career as a recording artist, accumulating enough money to take care of his mother and his siblings, and to return home to Greenville. In the late 1930s, ARC Records of New York, sent two A&R men to find him based on his reputation at Paramount Records. When he was at last found, he was crippled with a broken leg and living with mother in Greenville. The company promised his mother, who signed his contract, that he would record only religious songs, not the blues or the “devil’s music.” He subsequently moved to New York City and was billed as “Joshua White, the Singing Christian.” As his popularity grew, so did his repertoire, and he was soon singing and recording the blues, folk, pop, country, political protests songs and more. Some of his songs were infused with anti-segregationist themes as well as international tunes supporting human rights. These records soon attracted the McCarthy goons and he was labeled a communist. In 1936, he injured his hand during a bar fight, having punched it through a window. It became infected with gangrene so badly that his doctor said it had to be amputated. White refused, stopped performing, and began working a number of menial jobs. Several months later, almost miraculously, his left healed and within a two-year period he assembled a group and began playing private parties in Harlem. It was during one of these sessions in 1938 that Broadway choral director Leonard De Paur heard him and recruited him to perform in a musical about John Henry and Blind Lemon Jefferson. All of this had come as a result of De Paur looking for Pinewood Tom and the Singing Christian, not knowing that both of these pseudonyms were White. Two years later, after months of rehearsals, “John Henry” opened on Broadway with Paul Robeson as the titular character and White as Blind Lemon Jefferson
Josh White Folk Music Race Records Broadway John Henry Blind Lemon Jefferson Mccarthy Era Music History
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