Peetie Wheatstraw, the High Sheriff from Hell

Well, maybe I should write sumffin about Peetie Wheatstraw’s / William Bunch’s life, but it would be useless, cause the little information available is already gathered in a good wikipedia entry. The only thing I could add is about the Buick that caused Peetie’s death: it was a gift Peetie received from a record company (Decca, if I’m not misstaken); it was an usual practice that record companies offered some 700$ car to bluesmen, instead of paying them the due percent of sales. OK, I’ll assume you have already read the wikipedia entry.
I won’t analyse any song for now; as a mater of fact, today I’ve been playing, exceptionally, Barbecue Bob (I also played in open D, which is also very rare), and I’m not quite ready to enter a brand new universe. I’ll write instead about two Peetie Wheatstraw verses; they’re from the “Peetie Wheatstraw Stomp no 2″, which Wheatstraw recorded in Chicago (March 26, 1937) for Decca. Unfortunately I’m not allowed to post the song, but here’s a sample. (NB. Peetie – vocals & piano – recorded this song with Lonnie Johnson). Finally, if you wana listen to other Peetie Wheatstraw blues, I found some on Soundpedia.
Now here’s the two verses:

Ev’rybody wonderin’ “What’s the Peetie Wheatstraw do?”
Yee-hee-well, “What’s the Peetie Wheatstraw do?”
Cause ev’rytime you hear him, he comin’ out with somethin’ new

He makes them happy, some he make cry
Eee, makes them happy, some that he make cry
Well, now he made a-one ole lady go hang herself an die.

The scholar orthodoxy about these verses is that they represent a testimonial about the bluesmen’s habit of creating characters (e.g. Tommy & Robert Johnson, selling their souls to the Devil) and advertising their skills or sexual prowess. I won’t try to argue against this thesis, for it describes well enough a widely spread phenomenon (one shouldn’t forget the rough competition between bluesmen, the superstitions which populated the imagination of bluesmen’s audience or the wonders of the new advertising industry, which had a noticeable impact in the African American society in the first decades of the last century). What I’d like to add, though, is a remark about the musician’s self-consciousness.

Musicologists keep writing that Peetie’s playing (both of piano and guitar) was mediocre. Well, I might agree (which I don’t), but I wonder if the audience perceived it the same way. It ain’t likely that a worker who was terrorized by receiving the 304 form (the one announcing his firing) and who really missed the simple life he had left down South paid too much attention to the melodic subtleties. I mean the beat is fine, the 12-bar structure and the harmony (I-IV-V) are there, the singer’s scenic presence is unique and so are the lyrics, all you need is grab a bottle, drink it up and dance. I’d rather think that Wheatstraw’s audience was more attentive to the show than they were to the “partition”. For the blues ain’t so much about the perfect playing of an instrument, but about playing with the states of mind (the ones of the player as well as the ones of the audience).
When Peetie Wheatstraw tells he makes some folks cry, ooh-ooh-well, I really believe him. And I remember a story about Robert Johnson who made his audience crying when he played Come on in my kitchen. And this is the blues.
Now, ef you feel like cryin’, jist looky here:
Lonnie Johnson, Another night to cry

Robert Johnson, Come on in my kitchen