Blind Lemon Jefferson: 1893 - 1929

The popularity of Blind Lemon Jefferson in the 1920s heralded the true arrival of country blues to a mass audience. Jefferson was a genuine musical vagabond, traveling extensively to take his music to the people. Recordings reveal a deftness for intertwining the rhythms of voice and guitar. His guitar technique was, in a word, unpredictable, and most guitarists would be hard pressed to replicate it. Best known for blues gems like “See That My Grave Is Kept Clean,” and “Match Box Blues,” his self-penned compositions were a vivid social commentary on the south in the early 1900s.

The seventh child of sharecropper parents, Jefferson was born Lemmon Jefferson on September 24, 1893 in a small community called Couchman, Texas. Most reports claim Jefferson was born blind, but there is nothing to confirm this. He learned to play the guitar as a teenager and as was the fate of most sightless musicians, played on street corners for tips. Even as an itinerant, his reputation as a singer-guitarist attracted regulars, and friends suggested he try to forge a proper career with his remarkable abilities.

Jefferson possessed a bulky frame, anywhere from 200 to 250 pounds and to make ends meet he did a short stint as a professional wrestler. Promoted more as a novelty act than anything, wrestling was short-lived once he began earning money for his music. He became well-known for roaming the southern states, frequenting small towns, entertaining picnics and Saturday night parties with spirituals, work songs, and folk tunes in the southern tradition.

In 1925 Jefferson was invited to record for Paramount Records at the recommendation of a Dallas piano player and record store employee. His second release “Got the Blues/Long Lonesome Blues” established Lemon as the first best-selling black bluesman and set off a search for more male blues singer-guitarists. Suddenly Jefferson had a new Ford with a chauffeur and a bank account. In less than four years he recorded nearly a hundred sides and along with Blind Blake they became the biggest selling country bluesmen of the 1920s.

This widespread success was attributed to both his guitar playing technique and his singular vocal style. Jefferson’s guitar attack was once referred to as “crazy quilt riffing,” a reference to the intricate melodic structures marked by irregular phrasing and shifting rhythms. He also employed single-string arpeggios, boogie-woogie bass runs, and jazz style improvisations that were beyond most guitarists of his or any era. The vocal half of his sound exhibited penetrating range and tonal subtlety, mannerisms that would help characterize blues singing for years to come.

Jefferson was also a talented songwriter and one of the first to record many of his own compositions. His songs covered a wide range of topics and lyrics were peppered with graphic metaphors: “If your heart ain’t rock, it must be marble stone,” or “I feel like jumpin through a keyhole in your door,” to site a few examples.

Jefferson’s untimely death is shrouded in mystery and a handful of plausible tales circulate. Most versions place his death in the winter of 1929 during a brutal Chicago blizzard, though whether he was mugged and left to freeze, suffered a heart attack, was killed in a car crash, or simply lost his way and froze to death is anybody’s guess. The legend claims he was found with his hand frozen to the neck of his guitar. By Tim Kirker

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