Joshua Daniel White (February 11, 1914–-September 5, 1969), best known as Josh White , was a legendary American singer, guitarist, songwriter, actor, and civil rights activist. In the early 1930s, he also recorded under the names "Pinewood Tom" and "Tippy Barton."
White grew up in the Jim Crow South. He later became a 1920s and 1930s star of race records, with a prolific output of recordings in genres including Piedmont blues, country blues, gospel, and social protest songs. He was billed in concert as "The Sensation of the South". In 1931, White moved to New York and within a decade his fame had spread widely, and his repertoire expanded to include urban blues, jazz, Tin Pan Alley, cabaret, folk songs from around the world, and hard-hitting political protest songs. He soon was in demand as an actor on radio, Broadway, and film. However, his pioneering guitar playing never altered or diminished, while some would even argue it broadened with the expansion of his musical repertoire.
White also would become the closest African-American friend and confidant to the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt. Ironically, however, White's anti-segregationist and international human rights political stance presented in many of his recordings and in his speeches at rallies resulted in the right-wing McCarthyites incorrectly assuming that he must have been a Communist. Accordingly, from 1947 through the mid 1960s, White was caught in the vise grip of the anti-Communist Red Scare, and combined with his resulting attempt to clear his name, his career was harmed immeasurably. However, regardless of the purists' debate over the artistic change in his presentation or from those who opposed his politics, White unarguably inspired several generations of guitarists with his new and unique stylings and techniques, and is cited as a major musical and social influence by dozens of future stars, including Blind Boy Fuller, Brownie McGhee, Pete Seeger, Lena Horne, Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, Lonnie Donegan, Eartha Kitt, Alexis Korner, Odetta, Ray Charles, Elvis Presley, the Kingston Trio, the Clancy Brothers and Tommy Makem, Merle Travis, Dave Van Ronk, Peter, Paul and Mary, Bob Dylan, Eric Weissberg, Judy Collins, Mike Bloomfield, Danny Kalb, Roger McGuinn, David Crosby, Richie Havens, Don McLean, Roy Harper, Ry Cooder, John Fogerty, and Eva Cassidy.
Career
Early years
Born into the very strict religious home of the Reverend Dennis and Daisy Elizabeth White in the black section of Greenville, South Carolina on the day before Abraham Lincoln's birthday, 1914, young Joshua was always told by his father that he had been named after Joshua in the Bible--and that, not unlike the Joshua of old, he would be destined in his life to tear down the walls of injustice in America. Life was hard and cruel for African Americans of this era living in the South under the Jim Crow laws, which created state and local government-sanctioned segregation with the intent to negate the federal government's 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments to the Constitution.
Amidst this oppression, however, the family of Reverend White was very proud and applied formal etiquette standards in their home and in their dress and speech. The family was home-educated, and though very poor by national standards, their little house was maintained daily in a clean and spotless condition. Joshua never heard his parents address each other with any name other than Mr. White and Mrs. White, and in their household, it was demanded that everyone dress up formally for the nightly dinner meal. By the age of five, Joshua was taught to read the Bible by his parents, and he loved singing with his mother in the church choir. He had four younger siblings, and as the oldest child, he worked hard at his daily home chores of scrubbing the walls and floors till they shone. In addition, in order to help make financial ends meet at home, he also assisted his father with their horse and buggy whenever a white family requested they move a piece of furniture.
One day in 1921, an extremely rude and unfriendly white bill collector came to their home for the late payment of a bill. After the bill collector disrespected the family and home by spitting on Mrs. White's clean parlor floor, Reverend White grabbed him by his collar and pants and threw him out the door with a strong admonishment. One hour later, the seven-year-old Joshua witnessed five white deputies from the sheriff's office walk into their home and beat his father nearly to death. They then tied him up and dragged him through the streets of Greenville behind a horse -- to set an example to Greenville's African American community. After more beatings in the jailhouse, they sent Reverend White to a mental institution, where he died in 1930. Joshua now felt a responsibility to be the man of the house, and the quick life-lessons he would soon adopt, and which would guide him for the remainder of his life, were: 1) in order to survive in America, he had to learn to stay one step ahead of the competition; 2) he had to be adaptable and change like a chameleon whenever necessary; and 3) he could never really trust white authority.
Two months after his father's death, Joshua left home with an old blind, black street singer named Blind Man Arnold. It was agreed that Joshua would lead Man Arnold across the South and collect the coins for him from each street performance, and that Arnold would send White's mother and his four younger siblings two dollars a week. Arnold soon realized that he could profit from this gifted boy who quickly learned to dance, sing, play the tambourine, and artfully collect the coins from the onlookers; and over the next eight years he rented the boy's services out to 66 different blind street singers, including Blind Lemon Jefferson, Blind Blake, and Blind Joe Taggert. Joshua walked his blind men as far south as Miami, Florida, as far west as Dallas, Texas, and as far north as the cold streets of Chicago -- always barefoot and dressed in ragged shorts (to gain sympathy from the onlookers who would throw coins).
The dusty dirt roads and towns of America's South in the 1920s were not always a safe place for an old blind black man with a young boy. Most days the boy was only fed one meal, and most nights he and his street singer would sleep in the cotton fields so as to safely hide from the Ku Klux Klan. However, on more than one occasion while sleeping in those fields, Joshua and his blind man were awakened with sounds of screams, shouts, and laughter in the near distance, as the boy would witness with horror and whisper his visions to the old man of the Klan tar and feathering black men, lynching them, and in one instance, burning a man at the stake. Amidst experiencing these terrifying life horrors as a child, his tough task masters cruelly demanded that he learn his trade quickly. Within a year he would soon learn all the street singers' repertoires, and soon thereafter begin mastering the various styles of all the guitarists he worked with until he would become the pioneer blues guitarist of the late 1920s and 1930s.
White arrived in Chicago with Blind Joe Taggert in 1927. Mayo Williams at Paramount Records recognized the boy's prodigious talents and began using him as a session guitarist. He backed up many artists for recordings before finally scoring his first popular Paramount recording "Scandalous and a Shame", singing and playing in the duet "Blind Joe Taggert & Joshua White" in 1928 -- while becoming the youngest blues star of the era. Yet he still lived under the yoke of servitude of Arnold and Taggert (who was renting his services), as he continued sleeping in the horse stables of Chicago or the cotton fields of the South and not allowed to wear shoes or long pants. Mayo Williams had left Paramount to start his own label in Chicago, but still remained close with the young boy. In late 1928, angry with how Taggert was treating the boy, Williams threatened the blind man that if he didn't pay the boy for his recording services, buy him a suit and shoes and move him from the horse stables to a black hotel, he would call the authorities and have him arrested for indentured servitude and keeping the boy out of school. White was finally free. For a few months thereafter, White shared a room with Blind Blake at Mayo Williams' home before finding his own place and a sense of freedom and independence at the advanced age of fifteen. For the next two years, White continued an active recording schedule in Chicago, until he finally had saved enough money to return to Greenville and take care of his mother and the younger children.
1930s: "The Singing Christian" and "Pinewood Tom"
Late in 1930, New York's ARC Records (predecessor to Columbia Records) sent two A&R men on the road to find Joshua White, the lead boy who had recorded for Paramount and had led all the old street singers across America while mastering their repertoires of Negro folk, blues and gospel songs. After months of searching, they found the boy at his mother's home in Greenville, and for one week labored to convince Mrs. White to sign a recording contract for her underage son. After promising Mrs. White that they would not record the "Devil's Music" (the blues), and only have Joshua record religious songs, she finally agreed to sign a contract for $100, allowing them to record and own every song Joshua knew.
With contract signed, the boy moved to New York and began a new career as "Joshua White - The Singing Christian". Within a few months, after recording all of
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