DeFord Bailey

This paper was written by David Morton and presented at the Afro-American Culture and History 12th Annual Local Conference held at Tennessee State University in Nashville on February 10, 1993.

It is virtually impossible to talk or write about DeFord Bailey without dealing with the issue of race. His uniqueness as the only black person in early country music clearly stands out. It often seems to overshadow while yet confirming the significance of his accomplishments as a performer and musician in an overwhelming white musical field.

Today I'll be sharing with you some of the notes I made of conversations with DeFord Bailey that deal specifically with black and white issues. Much of this is in the biography I wrote about him, but some of the information has never been printed before. I'll also be including a few excerpts from my collection of taped conversations with him.

To set the proper tone, I'd like you to hear directly from DeFord on the subject of race:

“We got to learn to live as one. No matter what color you is, we is one, just like man and wife; and treat each other right and have respect for everything, cause we all come here the same way and we're going away from here the same way.”

De Ford believed strongly that it shouldn't matter what color or race someone was, but throughout his life race was an issue that he could never forget:

“The sun never goes down on the white person. You see, anywhere he goes, night hits, he can stay there. You see, I don't care how cold or how hot it is. But the black man when he gets in that town back in them days, there'd be a sign up 'You can't read, run anyhow!' That meant don't let the sun go down on you there. You had to go. That's all there was to it.”

DeFord remembered his grandfather, Louis Bailey, a former slave who was half Cherokee Indian, warning him of white men with “their fancy arithmetic.” As Louis Bailey expressed it, “Figgers are figgers, oughts are oughts, all for the white man and none for the Niggers.”

DeFord grew up understanding that black people in the South in the early 20th century were treated very differently from white people, and at an early age he began wondering why. As he expressed it:

“I've been studying people, two sets of people since I was 11 years old. I remember sitting on a fence watching the stock in the field. They didn't seem to notice no difference in the color of the other cows and horses. I wondered why it was different with people. That's when I first started trying to figure out people.”

He grew up knowing that blacks and whites in rural Tennessee all enjoyed music and that it frequently brought them together. At the same time, he was fascinated by the differences in the way blacks and whites played music. He felt that his own music clearly identified him as a black man. “You can tell I'm a black man to hear me play. I got too many tangles in there. It's just natural.”

He once remarked to me that white people want to change music (like cars) way too often, instead of improving what they have; blacks will keep playing the same thing over and over trying to perfect what they are doing. DeFord like to point out that he worked on his train's whistle for 17 years.

As a teenager, he had an opportunity to get to know a white couple extremely well. He worked as a houseboy for Mr. and Mrs. Gus Watson, a storekeeper in Thompson's station, for well over a year. He lived in their home with them and became very closely attached to them.

As a young adult in Nashville, he also worked in the homes and businesses of several other white people. Possessing keen observation skills and what he called “plain old horse sense”, he was able to make much progress in his quest to figure out both white and black people.

In his musical career, DeFord was in a truly unique position to figure out white people and how they differed from black people. He was the only African American to play regularly on any of the country music or old-time music radio shows that proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s, and one of the few in this period who could draw large crowds of white southerners. Most black performers of the period performed primarily to black audiences, but not DeFord Bailey. He played for both races, and his appeal was apparently even stronger in the white community than in the black.

Accordingly, he was accepted into many white circles and activities. He participated in functions that few, if any, blacks of his days would have dreamed of doing. The combination of his skills as a musician and his diminutive, non-threatening physical appearance opened doors for him that were not open to other black people. He was exposed to things that few blacks saw or experienced during the long years of Jim Crow.

On the surface, it would appear he was exempt from most of the indignities and humiliations for blacks that are associated with the rigid segregation of the period. To some extent, this was true. As he explained: “Jim Crow didn't mean a thing to me. When I got on the streetcar, I would go to the back, but most of the time someone would call me to come back up to the front and play a tune.” On the other hand, he was probably more sensitive to and conscious of the rigid rules than were most blacks of his day.

He emphasized that he “stayed in his place” to avoid any possible problems: “I'd stay there with them (on the front of the bus), but if they got off before I did, I'd go back to my place on the streetcar. I didn't have to be told.”

DeFord learned how to relate to whites in such a manner that he would not be viewed as “pushy” or “forward.” He enjoyed talking and visiting with the other Opry performers but seldom initiated these conversations: “I stayed in my place. I didn't push myself forward. If someone wanted to shake hands or talk to me, they came to me.” On stage between numbers, he would merely say “thank you” to the audience and then go on to the next tune. He had a seat in one corner of the WSM studio. When he arrived every Saturday night, he went straight to his chair and sat there except to perform or go to the bathroom. (He did, by the way, use the same bathroom as the white performers.) After his part on the program was completed, he didn't hang around; he came to perform, then he went home.

His colleagues on the Opry have confirmed this. According to Fiddlin' Sid Harkreader, “DeFord was never out of place. You would never know he was here. He was very nice if someone talked to him. He never butted in.” Kirk McGee said, “He would just about answer your questions.”

DeFord's fellow Opry performers would have been surprised to know that, as a child, he had talked so much he was nicknamed “Talk-a-Lot” by his foster parents. His mother told him once that, since he loved to talk so much, he ought to become a lawyer. As an adult, his love of conversation was as strong as ever when he was with family or friends.

DeFord's reticence was clearly self-imposed. In groups of white persons, he assumed a background role that blacks in that day were expected to assume. He would sit in the corner saying little, but he wasn't deaf or dumb. “I would just play dumb like I didn't know anything, but I was soaking it in like the rain,” he remembered.

At times, he walked a thin line. It was a necessity for him, but it limited him as a performer. As he explained it, he was “handicapped”:

“I could have been a better musician, but I was handicapped and I was afraid I'd do something wrong. See, white people could do wrong, they'd just do wrong. They can't do nothing with one another …I knowed in my time...it don't work like that (for a black man). I held down a lot of things I could do playing on a harp, which would go over big today if I was a young man and had a place to do it...I could do things, me walking, laying on the floor, turning over, turning somersaults, and blowing the train. Well, back in that time (they would have said), ‘Well he's too smart …He does too much…’ “

DeFord had been forcefully reminded of how far he could and could not go in 1925 when he was playing on WDAD radio. Pop Exum, the manager of the new station, decided to stage a harmonica playing contest on the air. The winner would receive a tube radio set, the runner-up a crystal radio set. Many of DeFord's white friends-especially a Dr. Grant, whose office was in the building where DeFord was working-urged DeFord to enter. Reluctantly he agreed to. When the day of the contest came, he was surprised to find out that he was the only black in it. “No black folks entered because they all knowed I could beat 'em,” he said. He wasn't as well known in the white community. At first, none of the contestants objected to his entering, but after they heard him play, several complained that he should have competed with other blacks, not with whites.

Looking back on the contest, DeFord felt he really outplayed everybody there but sensed that it would not do for Exum to give him the prize. In fact, Exum compromised and gave first prize to a white harp player and the runner-up prize to Bailey, saying that they were “the best of each race.” DeFord took his prize, made no objection, and quietly left for home. Later he learned that by doing so he may have avoided serious trouble. Some of the other performers, still not happy with Exum's compromise, were angry that any black should receive a prize over a white-even if it was the runner-up prize. It frightened DeFord and bothered him; he resolved that he would never again enter contests of this type.

Partially as a result of this experience, he turned down an opportunity a year or two later to go to Detroit for a harp contest that Henry Ford had set up. They were giving away a Ford and a Lincoln to the two winners. DeFord was certain he could have won the Lincoln, but he feared repercussions back in Nashville if he'd have come back home with it. As he put it, “...I probably wouldn't have made it with the public like I make it without that thing...that would've been too much for a black man at that time. I'd have ruined myself. “

“The world knows I was cheated out of money. They used to send people up on the stage to tell me it was a pity I had black skin. I got cheated out of so much money. Well, I know that. I realize that, but there wasn't nothing I could do about it. And wasn't no use in getting mad and acting nasty about it. You have to go ahead. See, God stands behind all rough stuff if you let him. He's the best gun in the world. “

For some time after DeFord appeared on the Opry, there was no mention “on the air” that he was “a black or colored man. “ Many people listening to him on the radio never knew this. Often, they would learn of his race only if they saw him perform on tours or saw him on the Opry itself. This was not accidental. Judge Hay told DeFord he was afraid “they'd blow us out” if his race were publicized. As time went on, the concern proved to be groundless. Bailey's race made little difference to the listening public. He never met with any hostility or difficulties from his audiences, wherever he went, but there were many times where he felt particularly conspicuous.

“I been to some places with the Grand Ole Opry show where I was the first black man that had been there since the Civil War. Some of the white children had never seen a black man. Nobody ever hurt me...but they'd look at me hard sometimes.” He believed that he avoided many problems because of his appearance and the way he acted: “My character and looks kept me going. You know the way I carried myself. Just like a fine German Shepherd with a collar. You know somebody's behind it. They knew if something happened to me, somebody would be checking on me.”

There was one trip in the 1930s that DeFord made when he was genuinely frightened to perform because of a serious and highly publicized racial incident. Just before he was to play in Scottsboro, Alabama there had been an alleged rape of two white women by several black men, and racial tensions were highly inflamed. The Opry group decided to go ahead with the planned show including DeFord, and he was well received as always. After the show, several white persons in the audience told him how much they had enjoyed hearing him play. One person told him he had black skin but a white heart. They all urged him to come back soon to Scottsboro. DeFord remembered responding as politely as possible, “Yes, ma'am, thank you ma'am” but all the time he was saying to himself, “DeFord, you ain't never coming back to this town.”

Even when he wasn't afraid, he still faced many difficulties in his trips out on the road. Segregation was the law in most states where he traveled and when it wasn't, it was usually the custom. Interestingly, he said it was frequently more difficult for him up north, especially in Indiana and Illinois, than in the South. It was always a problem for him to find a place to eat wherever he was, north or south. He usually had to eat in the car, but sometimes he'd eat in the kitchen of a white restaurant.

All of his fellow performers would make certain that he got something to eat and drink, but some went beyond that. The Delmore Brothers, Alton and Rabon, were especially sensitive to his well-being:

“I enjoyed going with them, because they'd stick by me through thick and thin. They was 100 percent. They watched out for me. ‘If you can't feed little DeFord, we can't eat here either,’ I remember them saying a many a time.

“I usually had to eat in the kitchen, but at least they saw to it that I got to come inside to eat, and not have to set out in the car. If the place wouldn't let me come in at all, then they'd drive on down the road fifty miles or more to find another place that would. Most of the other performers would get me a sandwich and bring it to me to eat in the car, but not them boys.”

Finding a place for DeFord to sleep was an even more serious problem. According to him, “That was like trying to walk without no feet.” Only a few hotels would knowingly allow him to stay with the white performers. Often he simply went in with the group and no questions were asked. On some occasions, he was “smuggled” into the hotel room by posing as a baggage boy. Some proprietors merely looked the other way, perhaps glad to have an alibi. Uncle Dave Macon would insist that DeFord was his valet and was often able to get in that way. Most of the cars had a seat that was removable, and Uncle Dave would have it brought into the hotel room for DeFord to use as a mattress on the floor.

If a bed or mattress was not available for him, the Delmore Brothers and some of the other performers would share their beds with him.

When hotels refused to admit him, his fellow performers would try to find him other accommodations. It was not uncommon for one or more of them to be walking down dark streets in a strange town with him, at two or three o'clock in the morning, looking for a place for him to stay. If a placed looked too rough, he wouldn't stay there. “I seen some terrible places,” he said. Highly conscious of his small size, he knew he would be an easy target for muggers and thieves.

He was in Virginia one night “in the dead of winter” with Honey Wilds when they couldn't find him a place to stay. The only remaining place Wilds could think of was the local jail, but DeFord adamantly refused. “I'd have been safe there, but I didn't like the sound of it, 'being in jail.' I was ready to quit. I hadn't never stayed in no jail and I wasn't going to start then.” Reluctantly, they kept looking and finally found him another place to sleep - in the lobby of the local funeral home.

A problem that I did not discuss in DeFord's biography was that of finding bathrooms he could use when he was on the road with Opry tours for a week at a time. He told me that he wore “a truss” the last several years of his life, and he blamed this on the problems he had repeatedly encountered in finding a bathroom when he needed one during those travels. “I had to hold my water for hours at a time,” he explained, and often the only toilet he could find was “an old barn somewhere.”

However difficult things were for him, he almost never complained. He realized that he was fortunate to be on the Opry cast and to be traveling around the country with a group of white performers. In fact, he often joked about his uniqueness as the only “colored” or black person on the Opry cast: “One Saturday night me and Mr. Roy Acuff was up at WSM. We lay up there in the window. Some ladies, two or three of them, asked, 'Which one are you?' Mr. Roy said, 'I'm one of them.' When he said that, I said, 'And I'm the blackest one of them.' They laughed. I've been a mess. I'm telling you the truth.”

DeFord saw the humorous side of his situation on the Opry and had no hesitation making jokes about himself: “I used to have them dying laughing. I'd get sleepy. Robert Lunn, you know, and me, we'd be setting in the back seat all the time. He'd fall on me and go to sleep, and I'd fall on him and go to sleep. I said, 'Just fall over here. I ain't going to fade on you, I done faded.' I'd have more fun than a little bit with them.”

DeFord usually found some humor in even the most awkward situations:

“One time I was in Myrtle Beach, playing with Roy Acuff and his band. They all was out there in the ocean swimming. That was the first time I'd saw the Atlantic Ocean. Just to say I've been in it, I rolled my britches legs up and walked out in it. When I walked out, a policeman came up to me. He said, ‘John Henry, colored folks go swimming about eighteen miles up.’ I said, ‘Anybody fool enough to go in that ocean, you ought to let them go in any place they want.’ Everybody laughed.”

It was fortunate that DeFord could laugh about such situations; otherwise, it would have been even more difficult for him to deal with them. On the one hand, he was lauded and cheered by white audiences and eagerly sought out by promoters and performers; on the other hand, he had to endure all sorts of things merely because of his color. On stage he was an equal to the other performers, but off stage he couldn't go with them into a restaurant or a hotel lobby no matter how well he dressed, how clean he was, or how much money he had. A white man could go in such places no matter how untalented, dirty, or poorly dressed he was. While he said nothing about these things to anyone, they left their mark on the sensitive DeFord. He had no choice but to go along with the system, but he knew it wasn't right:

“This is a great big world, but, you know, I ain't never been free. Even now, I can't go in a restaurant without worrying about whether I should go in or not. I been to places with Honey Wilds where they would not sell him a sandwich for me. I didn't suffer, but I was handicapped. I been penned up all my life. You got to know how to take it and go on. “

“That's gone now, but I still can't feel welcome restaurants, if I don't see no black folks in there. I’m not against white folks. It's just the way I had to live for so long.”

Though he couldn't forget it, he didn't think it was helpful to dwell on the injustices or problems of the past. He questioned the wisdom of showing programs on television like “Roots,” because they might make young blacks today “try to get even” for injustices of the past. “Them days is gone,” he said. We need to look at the future, not the past.” Moreover, he thought it was wrong to hold one person responsible for what another person did years ago. “You can't blame somebody now for what their grandpa did,” he philosophized.

“We all need to work together, not against each other,” he said. “We need each other…Now the black is got to fight for the white and the white got to fight for the black…We got to learn to stick to each other…this other way we been living is wrong…”

Where DeFord could control things, he was ahead of his time. When he was renting rooms in his home on Lafayette street, he rented to whoever wanted to stay with him, white or black. He had numerous white people who stayed overnight in one of his rooms, and often he had whites in one room and blacks in another at the same time. Though DeFord was never officially licensed as a motel operator, for several years he operated what was in effect Nashville's first integrated motel.

There was a very frightening occurrence one night in 1937 or 1938, apparently in response to his renting of rooms to both blacks and whites. DeFord never spoke to me of this, but DeFord, Jr., remembers it vividly. His father was out of town on a tour. He and his mother awakened to find a burning cross in their front yard. For the next few nights they had male relatives from both sides of the family stay with them, but nothing else occurred, and DeFord continued to rent to all comers.

His shoe shine shop was always open to both blacks and whites:

“They'd come out there and white people would stop and say, ‘DeFord can we get shined in your shop.’ I'd say, ‘Yeah. Anywhere I got something to sell, I'm selling to everybody. If I can't sell to you I won't be here,’ and they'd laugh. I was downtown working at a white shop and bringing all of 'em in.”

How was he able to have an integrated motel and shoe shine shop in the 1920s and 1930s? He thought his music was the key:

“A white barber asked me one time how I could mix them up in my shoe shine shop using the same seat. He said they'd run him out of town if he did that. Well I said, ‘They all know me and all want to hear the same tune.’ “

His musical skills and fame clearly set DeFord apart in the eyes of many white southerners. Whites who wouldn't think of going into other black establishments would come to his shoe shine shop. Some would even stay overnight in his home just to get a chance to hear him play his harmonica. In the process, they would use the same facilities that were used by blacks without objection. They, along with DeFord's black customers, “all wanted to hear the same tune.”

Regardless of whether he was breaking segregation barriers or conforming to them, DeFord was always conscious of racial or black and white issues. He did not, however, dwell on the negative. “Everyday's been Sunday,” he told me often, and as I've pointed out to you today, he frequently tried to see the humor in his situation and in racial issues in general.

As an example, not long before he died he bought a new suit and proudly showed it off to me. In doing so, he noted that it was “off-white” in color. Laughingly he said that since he now had “an off-white suit,” he must be “an off-black man.”

In closing, I remember DeFord's pleasure in seeing the end of legal segregation in the 1960s and 1970s in the South, and the progress that was taking place prior to his death in 1982 in improving opportunities for blacks. He didn't think, however, that everyone's ideas and beliefs would change even though the laws had. He believed that “the older folks would have to pass on” before prejudice and discrimination would go away.

He wanted to see the day when we “all live as one, no matter what color we are,” but he didn't think it would come in his generation. He was hopeful, however, that his grandchildren would live to see that day. “We're all God's children. He made us all. Some just a little fortunate'r than the others, just the same. We're all gonna carry the same with us.”

“We got to learn to stick together.” “This other way we been living is wrong.”