52 weeks of blues

Frank Stokes is one of the true fathers of the blues, though is relatively unknown now days. Along with Charley Patton, Lead Belly and Blind Lemon Jefferson, Stokes was one of the very first generation of bluesmen who took an obscure, regional variation of rag time, blended it with traditional rhythms and sounds from Africa and turned it into the most important musical form of Western culture.
Frank Stokes was born on New Year’s Day, 1888, in Whitehaven, Tennessee, which is now a suburb of Memphis. Frank’s parents died when he was a child and he was raised by relatives across the border in a small railway town that would be named Tutwiler, Mississippi in 1899 – in the area that would become known as the Mississippi Delta. It was in Tutwiler that Frank started playing guitar, learning versions of rag time, gospel and folk songs, and a local music dialect that didn’t have a name.
A man by the name of Henry Sloan was a master of this style, and is quite likely the innovator behind the ideas contained within it. Born in South Carolina around 1870, not much is known about Sloan, but he had travelled around seeking employment on the railways, and was living on a plantation in Bolton Country in the years before the turn of the century. In 1900, a plantation founded in 1895 by Will Dockery constructed a railway platform to connect to the local lines and Sloan settled there.
In 1902, an educated musician and music teacher by the name of W.C. Handy settled in Clarksdale Mississippi in the middle of Delta country. Handy had moved his family to Clarksdale to lead a band, and became interested in the music of the local black communities. One day in 1903, he found himself waiting for a train in Tutwiler when a man started playing a guitar. He used a pocket knife to slide across the strings, and sang about the trains – “where the Southern crossed the Yellow Dog”. “The singer repeated the line three times, accompanying himself on the guitar with the weirdest music I had ever heard” Hand wrote in his journal. It has been suggested that the guitarist was Henry Sloan.
This was the music Frank Stokes was raised on. His adoptive family moved to nearby Hernando around 1900, where Frank worked as a blacksmith. On the weekends the 12 year old Frank would travel the 25 miles across the border to Memphis, where he would play music on the streets for pocket change. Hernando had a community of singers and guitarists, including Jim Jackson who was a few years older than Frank. Frank, and Jim, although teenagers themselves, mentored a group of younger players including Dan Sane, Garfield Akers and Robert Wilkins.
Henry Sloan was doing some teaching of his own over at Dockery Plantation. A young family had moved in and their son showed an interest in the music Sloan was playing. His name was Charley Patton.
Around 1910, Frank and Garfield Akers joined Doc Watts’ Travelling Medicine Show, touring the south performing their local version of what was becoming known as the blues. These Medicine shows were the greatest influence on the next generation of bluesmen; they were the only way the new style of music could be heard. W.C. Handy published the first published blues song “Memphis Blues” in 1912, and the first blues recording was made in 1920. Before then the only way to hear the music was at the Medicine shows and local picnics, performed by real pioneers like Frank, Patton and Henry Sloan.
Frank toured for about a decade before settling in Memphis in 1920, and once again worked as a blacksmith. Memphis had an exploding music scene based around piano blues centred on Beale Street. He teamed up with his friend Dan Sane and played at fish fries, parties and dances as a duo, and joined Jack Kelly’s Jug Busters at the height of the popularity of Jug Band craze. Stokes and Sane called themselves “The Beale Street Sheiks” and quickly became popular with local audiences.
In 1927 the Paramount Recording label sent a field unit to record some of the new sounds coming out of Memphis and the Mississippi Delta. Frank Stokes was one of the first people they tracked down. With Sane, and under the name The Beale Street Sheiks, the duo recorded 7 sides in August and another 5 in September. The records featured some tight guitar playing, with Frank playing lead over Sane’s rhythm, and Frank’s powerful voice. The style was generally an upbeat, urban sound.
Impressed by the great musicianship, song writing and vocals, Victor records tracked down Frank in 1928 and recorded him on 4 tracks with Sane in January, a day after Frank’s 40th birthday, and another 11 tracks in August. Six of those eleven tracks were solo. These songs were more bluesy than the Paramount recordings the year before, especially with Frank’s singing.
The following year Paramount recorded Frank and Sane again under the Sheiks’ name in March; in September they recorded for Victor again, accompanied by the fiddler Will Batts, where they cut another 8 tracks all released under Frank’s name. The final session Frank recorded was a solo session, where he recorded “Frank Stokes Dream”.
The Great Depression killed Frank’s recording career, as it did many others, and those September 1929 sessions were his last. Dan Sane joined a new version of Jack Kelly’s jug band named “South Memphis Jug Band” with Will Batts. In 1933 they recorded 23 songs under the jug band name, and another 4 released under “Will Batts”, including the great “County Woman” which I have previously tabbed out here.
Frank continued to be a popular live performer and toured in medicine shows, the Ringling Brothers’ Circus, tent shows and kept playing the saloons in Memphis throughout the 1930’s and 40’s. Around his 60th birthday in 1948, he semi-retired and moved back to the Delta and settled in Clarksdale, where he would take the stage occasionally and perform as a duo with the legendary slide player Booker (aka. Bukka) White.
Sometime later he moved back to Memphis and died of a stroke on September 12, 1955. In 2012 Frank was inducted into the Blues Hall of Fame, a true legend and pioneer of the blues.

Frank Stokes’ Dream is a bit of an oddity. It starts out as an 8 bar and finishes up as a 12 bar! It’s played in standard tuning in the key of F, so capo your guitar at the 1st fret. Frank takes advantage of different chord voicings, using both open and barre chords to get a wider range of notes for each chord. He starts with an E chord that is a D shape barred on the second fret; and uses an A7 shape also barred at the 2nd for his B chord. The 8 bar was a fairly popular structure for songs back in the day; Skip James’ legendary “Crow Jane” uses an almost identical structure.
The song is very, very fast and Frank uses a picking pattern that uses a bass note, ‘rhythm’ note and a melody note on most beats. His thumb plays the bass note, his index finger plays the rhythm note (usually played on the B string) and his middle finger picks out a melody on the high E. It’s fast, complex and clean – quite tricky to execute correctly. The main focus is on getting the Bass/rhythm note happening; once you get that you can add in the melody notes as you see fit.
The song features instrumental breaks between each verse, which basically consist of two variations. One is pretty similar to the verse structure, the other goes up to the 12th fret over the E chord and descends through major scale notes back down to open position. Practice it slowly, get the phrasing right and increase your speed when you are comfortable with the flow of the piece.

(8 bar)
E                            B7                  A7
And I'm goin', I'm goin', and your cryin' won't make me stay
E                            B7                                                      E
'Cause the more you cry, gal, the further you drive me 'way

When I leave your house, pin the black crepe on your door
Tell your man ain't dead, he ain't comin' back here no more

Ever dream that you're lucky and wake up cold in hand?
I wouldn't have-a my last dollar to give your house-rent man

(12 bar)
E
Take me in your arms, rock me good and slow 
A7                                                                 E
Take me in your arms, rock me good and slow 
B7                                                 C#7                                                      E
So you can hear them Frank Stokes blues anywhere on earth you go

Solo Ah, it's so easy to be easy when you are easy!

And I'm leavin' you, mama, this is the last time I'm ever gon' go
And I'm leavin' you, the last time I'll ever go
When the Frank Stokes blues come around I've got a place to go

Frank hits the intro at a million miles an hour. He plays bass with the thumb, alternating strings in most bars, plays a little note with one finger on the shuffle beat, and plays melody lines with another finger over the top. 3 things going on – on nearly every individual beat!

The song starts off as an 8 bar, as in the intro, and is a 12 bar by the end. Frank plays an instrumental break between every verse, and these also change from an 8 to a 12 bar. The 8 bar sections are all variations on the intro, with the guitar played extremely softly behind his voice, especially in the first few bars. Here’s verse 1…
…which goes into the first instrumental break, which is pretty much the 8 bars of the intro. Verse 2 in a repeat of Verse 1, which leads into the first 12 bar break. The little D shape slide is tricky – play the G string with your thumb and the high E with your finger on the beat, slide both up a fret but pick just the high E on the shuffle beat, then the thumb on the beat with the B string as the shuffle.
Then back to the 8 bar for Verse 3, except in the last bar slide up to the 12th fret on the high E to set you up for the second variation of instrumental break:
Verse 4 is the first 12 bar verse, but it’s pretty similar in structure to the first 12 bar break with the C# to B in bar 10. Only the first 4 bars are different, where it sounds like he drops the shuffle beat for 3 bars, and here they are:
After verse 4, Frank plays a double 12 bar break, pretty much the first and the second variants of the 12 bar breaks back to back, then a final 12 bar to take us out.