Kevin Belford’s an artist, not a historian. But when he started making portraits of old bluesmen—Henry Townsend, Bennie Smith, Leroy Harris—he heard their stories. And he spent the next 15 years piecing together what came before them.
The conclusion’s startling.
Everybody knows blues moved out of the Delta and upriver to Chicago, its weary poetry roughened by the husks of slave-picked cottonseed… But St. Louis had its own early blues, distinct and powerfully influential. It wasn’t just Southern music migrating northward. Many of its musicians never left town—but they shaped music’s future from here.
Sophisticated and urban, full of double-entendre, St. Louis blues saw no shame in being broke, and it laced its melancholy with wit. Built on ragtime and blurring into jazz, it looked forward, not backward, and music historians ignored it, because it didn’t fit the stereotype.
“In the history of the blues, St. Louis gets maybe a paragraph,” Belford says. “Between ragtime and Chuck Berry, there’s a section missing, because writers all focused on the South, with its idyllic, moss-covered scenery. It was beautiful writing, but it wasn’t accurate.”
So Belford wrote—and couldn’t help illustrating—Devil at the Confluence: The Pre-War Blues Music of St. Louis. He wagers “98 percent of what’s in the book has never been published before.”
He took names the old-timers gave him and pored over old programs, newspapers, and photographs. Then he went through recording-company logs from the 1920s and ’30s, line by line. “There were more than 200 St. Louis names,” he says. “From the Delta, we’re probably only talking dozens.
“Jelly Roll Morton spent a winter here and took our music to New York,” he points out. “Ma Rainey first heard the blues traveling through a small town in Missouri. W.C. Handy [whose song is our hockey team’s namesake] first heard them on the St. Louis levee.
“This is more than just the blues. This is St. Louis’ heritage.”
