Blind Lemon Jefferson: His Life, His Death, and His Legacy

by Robert Uzzel

Eakin Press, 109 pp., $17.95 (paper)

The story of “Blind” Lemon Jefferson is a striking, if frustrating, tale of the Twenties’ most successful — and most unlikely — male blues singer. Published late last summer by this longtime Austin press, author Robert Uzzel crafts a spare picture of the bluesman’s short life. Born in Couchman, Texas, in 1893, the man revered by musicologists for his rural blues remains something of a mystery. Uzzel augments the lack of information on Jefferson’s early life with a revealing look at Dallas’ Deep Ellum district and its place in the formation of Texas blues. Deep Ellum was an auspicious place in the mid-Twenties for Jefferson and contemporaries such as Leadbelly, T-Bone Walker, and Lightnin’ Hopkins. After he was spotted by the talent scout who led him to Paramount Records, Jefferson’s next stop was Chicago, which became his headquarters as he traveled extensively throughout the South until his unexplained death during a Chicago snowstorm in 1929. That might have been the end of Jefferson, had his field hollers, spirituals, and country blues not caught the ear of folklorists like John Lomax, who found his rural style intriguing. Jefferson wrote prodigiously, about 100 titles between 1926 and 1929, and his music heavily influenced successive generations of musicians beginning with B.B. King and Lowell Fulsom. Songs like “Black Snake Moan” (recorded by Joe Ely as “Long Snake Moan”) and “Match Box Blues” still find their way into recordings. Uzzel, a minister in Fort Worth, doesn’t fluff Jefferson’s sketchy life with unnecessary juke-joint scenes or speculative recording sessions. The result is a brief, dry accounting of the bluesman’s short life; bibliography, endnotes, and other extras flesh out the 70 pages of biography into 120 pages of book. Remarkably, this is the first biography of Blind Lemon Jefferson, an indispensable part of not just black history, but American culture.

This article appears in June 6 • 2003.

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