G Tune: Southern Soul

Born in 1914 in Greenville’s working-class Sterling neighborhood, blues and folk musician Josh White rose to fame by traveling the humblest of paths, ascending to the top of the music charts playing alongside some of the biggest jazz musicians of his era, eventually befriending a U.S. president and his family. Yet, in his own hometown, White remains largely unknown.

White lost his father, Dennis—a Methodist minister at Greenville’s historic Allen Temple—when he was only seven. To support his family, Josh became a child troubadour and street-performing sidekick to blind African-American musicians traveling throughout the South.

It wasn’t long before White picked up the guitar styles and repertoires of his mentors—including Blind Man Arnold and Blind Joe Taggert—and at age sixteen, found the silver lining in his family’s stark circumstances. ARC (later Columbia Records) discovered White after hearing studio recordings that he had made with blues, gospel, and folk musicians; they tracked down the teen at his mother’s home in Greenville and convinced the leery Mrs. White to co-sign her son into stardom, appeasing her fears by telling her that Josh would sing only gospel music.

From then on, like his guttural ballads, White’s life strung notes both high and low. In 1933, he began recording blues under the pseudonym Pinewood Tom (a disguise for his strict Christian mother who did not want her son to play “the devil’s music”). A Renaissance entertainer and a virtuoso guitarist, White recorded songs and played guitar as both a solo artist and studio sideman. But in 1936, he shattered a window with his strumming hand during a bar fight, halting his recording career until the mid-1940s when he rocketed to ultra-fame with his hit “One Meatball.”

White became one of the top-ten black recording musicians of the 1920s and 1930s, and he later worked in radio, starred on Broadway and in film, and performed with leading artists of his day, including Billie Holiday, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, and the Golden Gate Quartet. After performing at Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 inauguration, White eventually became a confidant to the president and lifelong friend to Eleanor Roosevelt. The Roosevelts were actually the godparents of White’s son, Josh White Jr.

Like many McCarthy-era entertainers, musician-cum-activist White was blacklisted in 1950 because of his liberal political views, and he voluntarily appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) to defend his civil-rights stance. His performance at the 1963 March on Washington had him playing in the presence of Martin Luther King Jr. and hundreds of thousands of supporters of equality. Although White’s career suffered because of the government’s allegations, his music would continue to highlight social injustices—particularly in the South—until 1969 when he died of heart complications. His legacy of activism lives on, in the soulful music created throughout his remarkable—albeit locally largely unrecognized—career.