The son of a preacher, Josh White, as a child, follows in the footsteps of blind guitarist-evangelist Blind Joe Taggart in the Carolinas. He discovered the humiliation and violence suffered by blacks there. Josh decided to leave the South for New York, where he embarked on a career as a musician and led a radical political struggle that got him into trouble during the McCarthy era. From 1930 onwards, he recorded religious pieces, ballads and blues.
His guitar playing, which happily blended that of Lonnie Johnson and Carolinian fingerpicking (strings touched with five fingers), was quite remarkable at the time: crystalline sound and intensive use of blue notes. Some of his songs of the moment (Jesus Gonna Make Up My Dying Bed) are among the masterpieces of American popular music. His urban vocals may have seemed affected, but they earned him the esteem of his fellow coloreds, to whom he gave the rare image of an educated bluesman with a high degree of social conscience. After a serious accident, he lost some of his guitar skills. He made friends in New York folk circles, notably with Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and, right up to his death, recorded more and more folk pieces, as well as some superb blues albums, as in 1963 with Sonny Boy Williamson (Rice Miller).
He was a major influence on Carolinian bluesmen (Blind Boy Fuller, Brownie McGhee) and folk singers alike.
G.H.
