Grafton and the Blues: Lost History Back on the Stage

Grafton, Wisconsin would be, for a variety of perfectly logical reasons, one of the last places that a company recording black blues music would have been established in the 1920s and '30s. Though few traces remain, we know it happened.

It was though someone tried to hide it. Most of the recordings were dumped into the Milwaukee River, near the Paramount recording studio, when it ended its business. Someone even tried to dredge them up in the '90s, and were unsuccessful. The river bottom buried them into history.

But Kevin Ramsey turned the information into a musical presentation at the Stackner Cabaret, affiliated with the Milwaukee Repertory Theater. Called Chasin' Dem Blues, it's playing now, through February 20. As someone who's writing about all the Graftons he can find including the one where he grew up, I just had to go.

It was an excursion into the history of the blues, which meant that we were absorbed in them front to end. Great fun with some songs you might have heard of: "Sweet Home Chicago," from "The Blues Brothers"; "Matchbox" which Ringo Starr sang on the Beatles' album "Something New"; "Motherless Child," sung by Richie Havens at Woodstock. They weren't played in quite the same way, but you can pick out the basic melodies nonetheless. Great singing, great piano, great guitar. The audience was invited to get involved--whoop and holler, get excited, sing along. Some of us, not quite as uptight or concerned about appearances, did so.

The Wisconsin Chair Company, created in Port Washington, Wisconsin, a few miles north of Grafton, in 1888, was responsible for the chain of events that led to the Paramount recording studios in the latter: Making chairs led to making cabinets to store 78-rpm records that led to the recording studio that created the records themselves. I would have liked to have known the thinking that went behind it. Perhaps we'll never know that.

Other questions remain. Why would black artists come up from Chicago through Milwaukee to little Grafton, which had about a thousand people at that time? Did no other recording sites exist? Were they so unknown that to make a name for themselves they had to risk going into places in which they might not have been accepted?

Really? Jelly Roll Morton, whose name made people swoon in New Orleans? And the Satchmo, Louis Armstrong? Really? They were there. They made music. Would no one have recognized them? It begs for someone to find their later relatives and ask if anyone knows why they felt they needed that place. Or would it be a matter of being under contract with Paramount, and being able to find someplace at least reachable by train? But that would mean that Paramount didn't have studios in either Chicago or Milwaukee, far more cosmopolitan areas.

That may not have mattered, either. This was the time of the Great Migration, the time in post-World War I America when hundreds of thousands of blacks moved north, hoping to escape the shackles of Jim Crow in the South and start again. It caused conflicts; Northerners were resentful of the waves of blacks taking jobs. Disturbances shook several cities, including a huge riot in Detroit. Discrimination also prevailed.

Other research done for reports that appeared on PBS indicated that the black artists that performed for those recordings would spend one or two nights in the old Grafton hotel, located well into the last century on a triangular corner comprised of 12th and Washington Avenues (the latter otherwise known as State Highway 57), steps from the Grafton State Bank, steps on which many high school kids, including Yours Truly, would hang out on summer nights in the '60s. (Both buildings are still there.) The musicians were kind of sneaked in so the remainder of the population knew next to nothing about them.

I think of that as sad. But others. too, must have understood the underlying attitudes--the ones that also led to the creation of a German-American Bund-sponsored summer camp for teens at the end of the '30s. It ended only after Milwaukee newspapers exposed it. That both of them took place in the same small town during the same decade--the Paramount studios disbanded in 1933--is a bit mind-bending.

For such a small place to be at the cutting edge of social change gives it notoriety most other small towns don't have--but the type most other small towns wouldn't like, either. Much is good about Grafton, Wisconsin, but to deny that it had a racially negative underpinning would be walking past the truth (also true about communities surrounding it, by the way).

Did that have anything to do with the destruction of the records? I wonder. What else could it have been? Could it simply have been that, with the eventual razing of the building, maybe someone ran into the collection, asked what to do with it, and someone else just said to get rid of them without realizing what they had? Or did they realize what they had and disposed of it with the worst of intentions--to consign what was genuine history to the deep?

Makes no sense. This was, and is, good music. Did it really matter that much who made it? But then, racism makes no sense, either.

These questions are worth pursuing. Meanwhile, I met Kevin Ramsey, who created and produced this story for the stage. Luck follows luck; since I saw this at a cabaret, conversations can more easily take place amongst attendees. The fellow at my table, like myself, had paperwork--I had a notepad, he a list of some kind of stats. Curious, I asked him about it. He said that he was the assistant sound producer. He pointed Ramsey out to me; he was across the room at another table.

I released some personality and sidled over. He's from Los Angeles, and was going to depart the next day. He has my card; I have his number. I hope he has time to talk.

Maybe there will be leads; maybe not. Maybe we have all that there is to know about the development of blues music in the first half of the 20th Century in Grafton, Wisconsin. Maybe that history which was lost or stolen from us will remain so. Kevin Ramsey had enough to create a delightful stage show out of it that's worth your while if you're around during the next month (and I wonder if it has legs to get elsewhere, like Chicago). Maybe that was his motivation after all--to find someone out there who has the willingness to pursue it.

Watch this space. You never know. I'll be back to you on this. Got places to go first, but I'll get there.

Today is Martin Luther King Day. When I had my sports column, I used to write something that connected sports to the black experience, serving it to several communities that had little to none (and, based on my history teaching, that I felt needed it and still do). It feels good and well-timed that I happened to see this show at the Stackner Cabaret the weekend before honoring someone who gave his life to the idea that, if we just forgot about everything else, we could learn to live with each other, that color of skin is just an accident of human development and absolutely nothing else.

Along 12th Avenue, just across from the old Grafton Hotel, there are piano keys painted onto the sidewalk. A society devoted to the awareness of this blues phenomenon has sprung up in Grafton, and it's probably how they got there. On the sidewalk, too, are the names of the more prominent blues artists who found their way to an otherwise nondescript place--and slipped away before it could be as famous as they would be. Kind of a fun way to observe it, though.

At least now it's in concrete. All things disappear in time, but this will take much longer. It's a dead-end street; there's almost no traffic, though the main drag is literally steps away. There's a memorial plaque that the society put up, too. It's along Green Bay Road, just offshore from the Milwaukee River and the reported site of the Wisconsin Chair Company. Few see it, but few bother it, either.

Maybe it's better that way. Be well, be careful, Happy MLK Day, and I'll see you down the road.


Mister Mark