by William Gay
You have to eat, Johansen says dismissively of Buster, but the sound he came up with, a sort of blues-Latin-swing combination, predated the swing revival of the 90s and the work of musicians like Brian Setzer by almost a decade.
When Allan Pepper, owner of the Bottom Line, the legendary New York club, was preparing to celebrate the club’s twenty-fifth anniversary, he asked Johansen to perform. But he wanted someone other than Buster Poindexter.
AI had been reading some books about Harry Smith, Johansen says. And I’d gone back and listened to the Anthology, and this four-volume collection from Shanachie called Times Ain’t Like They Used to Be. Depression-era stuff, really rural. And I got interested in this kind of stuff all over again.
Music has always been a part of Johansen’s life, one of the earliest things he remembers. His father was a lover of opera, and he heard a lot of that, but early on, Johansen formed an attachment to old acoustic blues, later widening his appreciation to take in the electric-urban recordings of Muddy Waters and B.B. King and Sonny Boy Williamson. Around the age of fifteen he taught himself harmonica and guitar (I’m still almost as good now as I was then, he says today), which may seem a little unusual for a kid raised in New York City, but the usual has never been what Johansen does.
So for the Bottom Line gig he put together a band with this sort of music in mind: Guitarists Brian Koonin and Larry Saltzman together with bassist Kermit Driscoll and drummer Joey Baron. He had his blues band. Johansen professes to see not much of a stretch between them and the New York Dolls. The Dolls were a blues band, he insists. We just massacred the form. The bass player couldn’t breathe and play at the same time. He’d take these big breaths and hold them and shoot out all these notes. Then he’d have to stop playing to breathe. It just happens that we can do both at the same time.
The show at the Bottom Line was supposed to be a onetime thing, but everything fell together. A write-up in the New York Times caused a lot of interest in the band, and besides, Johansen says, it was a lot of fun.
Norman Chesky, who had known Johansen from his Poindexter days and who owns Chesky records, a label known mainly for the intense quality of its recordings and for the mixture of ethnic, blues, and jazz releases, wanted to make a record with him.
During a three-day session at New York’s St. Peter’s Episcopal Church, the band, now calling themselves the Harry Smiths, recorded twenty-five songs. Thirteen of them made it onto the album.
The result was nothing short of a revelation. The record sounds at once timeless and state-of-the-art, like an Alan Lomax field recording made on some black sharecropper’s front porch using marvelous equipment that did not yet exist. Johansen chose some of the songs from Smith’s Anthology and others of the same somber shading.
I just did songs I like, Johansen says. It’s a pretty dark record, usually someone expires in each of the songs.
The album was well reviewed everywhere from Entertainment Weekly to Rolling Stone to audiophile magazines like Hi-Fi News, and ultimately the British music publication Mojo would select it as one of the ten best blues albums of the year.
The general tone of the reviews was that a cross-dressing New York Doll had reinvented himself as a lounge singer and then again as an eighty-year-old bluesman, but Johansen is complicated and intelligent, and the truth is not quite that simple. A couple of the songs are staples from the Buster Poindexter days, and one of them, Sonny Boy Williamson’s Don’t Start Me Talking, turned up on the Dolls’ second album. Johansen has always been a marvelous actor, from his Doll days up through the films he’s appeared in (such as 200 Cigarettes and Scrooged), but there the seams fade and edges blur, and it is difficult to tell the actor from the man, the singer from the song, and that is the quality that the old alchemist Harry Smith was fascinated with.
You could see it as simply a matter of role-playing, of alternating one mask for another. But there’s never the impression of the Manhattan skyline double-imaged onto a landscape of Mississippi Delta farmland.
The songs on David Johansen and the Harry Smiths are not note-for-note recreations, as the New Lost City Ramblers were wont to do, nor are they old songs reworded and modernized, made more accessible by the use of contemporary arrangements and the hewing off of rough edges, as Bill Morrissey did on his album of Mississippi Hon Hurt songs, or Dave Alvin did on his Public Domain.
He seems to work in the way some of the singers on the Anthology do: Not interpreting the song or reinventing it but inhabiting it.
His take on Oh Death is like a cold, damp wind blowing off the river Styx. More chilling than the Ralph Stanley version on the current O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, it evokes the 1927 Dock Boggs performance, then edges it with a deeper shade of black. The voice sounds at an absolute remove from hope or life, and salvation is not even a consideration. Johansen sounds as if he has hellhounds on his trail and the Grim Reaper peering through the bedroom window, bone fingers already reaching to close his eyes and wire his jaws shut.
When asked about this quality, Johansen mentions darkness and light. Without dwelling on the darkness he was in (this was a guy, after all, who lived the life of a rock star) or the light he sees now, he says, You can be in the darkness and come into the light. But even though you’re in the light, you know the darkness is still out there.
Johansen played some gigs in London earlier this year, just a bluesman sitting on a stool and cradling a guitar with a harmonica brace hung around his neck. It was a far cry from the way he looked in the early days. He had grown a beard, and he was wearing a plain, dark suit. He warned New York Dolls fans to stay away; nevertheless, old Dolls covers like Don’t Start Me Talking got the most applause. But in London as well as New York, audiences seem perfectly comfortable with Johansen as a sort of method actor of the blues, and Mojo magazine said they had just seen a man who would go down in the books as being as artistically honest and creatively daring as the deceased bluesmen he now honors.
Like the tricksters and masked marvels and shapeshifters that populate the Anthology, both Harry Smith and David Johansen have an affinity for morphing roles and presenting an ever-changing façade to the world and, like the songs themselves, an aversion to being categorized or pinned down. They also share the music, for that is the glue that binds them together.
Time done been won’t be no more, Furry Lewis warns in his version of See That My Grave Is Kept Clean, not only singing it but prefacing it with an imperative: Listen, he sings, as if he wants you to remember it, listen. Time done been won’t be no more.
But in a sense, if a moment of time is the world we inhabit in that moment, it is the world that matters and not the clock that measures it.
In the end Johansen’s music seems to be saying that the world doesn’t change, only the guises it goes under, only the masks it wears. Appearance is nothing. The essentials remain. Love is still love, and loss is still loss. Death was ever death and will remain so. The dark is as black as it ever was, and the light is what you struggle toward, and that seems to matter as much to David Johansen as it did to Rabbit Brown or Harry Smith.
I BELIEVE I’LL BUY ME A GRAVEYARD OF MY OWN
WHEN FURRY LEWIS WAS REDISCOVERED in Memphis in 1959 by Sam Charters, nothing much happened. The folk revival, when scholars and musicologists and collectors of worn 78 records on strange labels like Black Patti and Okeh would prowl Mississippi back roads looking for the old men who long ago recorded the music that was strange as the labels, did not come along until the early 60’s. When it did, bluesmen like Mississippi John Hurt and Son House and Furry Lewis found themselves on the road again, playing to new audiences at the Newport Folk Festival and the East Coast coffeehouse circuit. Those old country-blues songs that had been dismissed, almost forgotten, were popular again.
Furry was born Walter Lewis in that fabled, near-mythic birthplace, and graveyard, of the blues, Greenwood, Mississippi. Just when is a matter of conjecture; Lewis was prone to altering his past history to suit the need
s of the moment (he asserted that he invented the bottleneck style of guitar-playing that Robert Johnson used and that he was a protégé of W.C. Handy). The consensus is that he was born in 1893.
He didn’t tarry long in Greenwood. His family moved to Memphis when he was seven years old. Before he was out of school, he was playing with folks who would one day be hailed as Beale Street legends Will Shade, the Memphis Jug Band, and Handy, the man credited with igniting the first blues craze.
Furry was soon touring Arkansas and Mississippi with the medicine shows that were prevalent in the rural South of that time. By his teens, he was playing the jukes with Memphis Minnie and Blind Lemon Jefferson. He claimed to have learned the rudiments of guitar as a child from a street musician known to him only as Blind Joe. The rest he learned on his own, writing original songs in a tablet, and recasting ragtime pieces and popular songs with lines from the stockpile of interchangeable blues poetry that has been dipped into by everyone from Jimmie Rodgers to Bob Dylan.
In the late 1920’s, Furry recorded twenty-three songs. Thus, Furry was squarely part of the 1927-29 historical musical outpouring that was probably the richest period in American recording. Men like Ralph Peer were scouring the South for talent, but no one had yet figured out what would sell and what wouldn’t. The playing field was momentarily level and everyone had a shot, black bluesmen from the Delta and white string bands from the Carolinas, Georgia, and West Virginia. At least until the Great Depression hit and the record business nearly stopped, and then many musicians went back to doing what they were doing before.
What Furry had been doing before, aside from making music, was working for the city of Memphis. Despite losing a leg in a railroad accident in 1917 (doctors had replaced it with a wooden stump), Lewis got employment in 1922 as a street sweeper, a job he would hold off and on for the next forty-four years.
Those twenty-three recorded songs formed the strongest part of Furry’s musical legacy. Mostly based on the twelve-bar blues pattern and played in open tunings, his songs featured familiar blues motifs that bobbed in and out like debris in turbulent waters, railroads and highways, cops and authority, empty beds, women who cling too tightly or won’t hold on at all and all shot through with sardonic humor and violence that lies around the next bend in the road.
“I believe I’ll buy me a graveyard of my own”, he sings in Furry’s Blues, his tone confiding, as if he’s passing on hard-won knowledge, “I’m gonna kill everybody that have done me wrong.”
Impending violence fuels his songs. Frustration and anger seethe just under the surface and there is a feeling that things could go south at a moment’s notice. “If you want to go to Nashville men and they ain’t got no fare”, he sings, “Cut your good girl’s throat and the judge will send you there”.
When things get too heavy, there’s dark humor: “I went down to the I.C. train, laid my head on the I.C. tracks,” he sings in Cannon Ball Blues. “Seen the I.C. comin’, Lord, and I snatched it back.”
Furry’s masterpiece is Kassie Jones, a long, imaginative reworking of the traditional song about the death of engineer Casey Jones in a 1900 train wreck in Canton, Mississippi. But Furry makes it his own, literally. The song begins typically enough with an account of Casey as a folk hero, but takes a trip to the surreal when Furry himself emerges as a character: Chased to his woman’s gate by the police, welcomed to her folding bed, then on the road again, his name on the back of his shirt, “he’s a natural-born Eastman don’t have to work.”
Driven by Furry’s hypnotic percussive bass strings, the song sounds like something Sam Phillips would have recorded at Sun Studio thirty years later.
In the 1970’s, age had enfeebled his musicianship to the point that he was forced to get by on the tricks and showmanship of his medicine-show days, but, paradoxically, a brief fame touched him. In 1975, he opened in Memphis for the Rolling Stones, and in 1976 Joni Mitchell wrote Furry Sings the Blues about him. He even appeared in a movie that stars Burt Reynolds, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.
Furry had attended John Hurt’s funeral in Greenwood, and most of the other country bluesmen were in the ground, too. By the time of his death in 1981, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. The strife and hard times Furry had written about were still around but they were being addressed by a different kind of music. The blues had gone Big City, and the acoustic country blues were practiced mostly by purists and academicians.
Maybe Furry himself said it best, in his reworking of St. Louis Blues, Time done been/Won’t be no more.
THE BANJO MAN
WHEN EMISSARIES OF THE BBC showed up at the Ryman Auditorium in 1946 to record performances by country musicians no doubt to allow perplexed Londoners back home to hear what the rustic folks in the colonies considered entertainment. One of the first musicians they spotlighted was the Dixie Dewdrop. That would be Uncle Dave Macon, David Harrison Macon from Rutherford County, Tennessee, already seventy-six years old in 1946 and as unlikely a superstar as country music has ever seen.
But no one at the Opry was surprised. How could they not have chosen him? Who could compare to Uncle Dave? Macon in full-tilt abandon was like a natural force unleashed, and when he got unwound and release arrived it would be like watching destruction from the eye of a hurricane. He buckdanced and flashed his gold-toothed grin and twirled his banjo like a baton, brought it to his shoulder with the neck pointed at the audience and sprayed notes like a musical Gatling gun. His stamping and percussive rapping on his instrument rendered the idea of a rhythm section laughable: You couldn’t duplicate this pandemonium, any effort would be the palest echo of the seemingly infinite energy he expended. Uncle Dave must have been hard on banjos.
He had arrived at the Ryman by a circuitous route, and in his quieter moments of reflection, late at night and winding down and alone in the Nashville Hotel where he finished out his days, he must have pondered the string of coincidences and singularities that had moved his life in so peculiar a direction.
Macon traveled a path that was to become familiar to the rural musicians who made it to the recording studios in the late 1920’s their names are legion. But that path is now lost, it was unique to its time and place and simply does not exist anymore, no one will travel it again.
The Macons were a prosperous family before the Civil War. They owned upward of two thousand acres and various businesses, including distilleries and sawmills. But the cards fell wrong for prosperous farmers in the South, and by the time David Harrison Macon was born in 1870, things weren’t looking so optimistic. Yankee Reconstruction had its foot on the region’s neck and was pushing hard. Dave’s father, John, struggled until 1883, and then decided, like a lot of other folks, that better times lay in the cities instead of the hardscrabble countryside. So he sold the house and what was left of the land, far fewer than two thousand acres, and loaded furniture and children onto the wagon, hitched up the mules, and started out the long sixty miles to Nashville. Dave was thirteen years old.
They went into the hotel business, and this, in retrospect, looks like the making of Uncle Dave the entertainer. The place they ran was the Broadway House. This was a time when a motley of entertainers would play the line of theaters on Broadway in downtown Nashville, and all these traveling performers had to stay somewhere. A lot of them chose the Broadway House, partly because they could use the huge open basement for rehearsals. These were performers of various stripes, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and magicians, animal acts and blackface minstrels and rube comedians.
These were also the days when audiences demanded showmanship. They’d come to be entertained, to be taken out of the ordinariness of their lives for the duration of the show, and they would settle for nothing less. Style weighed as heavily as content. Incertitude rang hollow, and mediocre showmen didn’t last too long. Dave saw a lot of rehearsals, and he was soaking up influences from all of them.
About this time a circus turned up in Nashville and pitched its tents in a vacant field. Ther
e Macon saw a comedian banjoist named Joel Davidson. The experience must have been revelatory, for Macon himself later wrote, in the often overblown language of the times:
It was Joel Davidson who proved to be the spirit that touched the mainspring of the talent that inspired Uncle Dave to make his wishes known to his dear old mother and she gave him the money to purchase his first banjo.
By 1887 all this had changed by a pocket knife: Macon’s father lay dead in a street altercation and the trial ended in an acquittal for the assailant. Soon the family had abandoned Nashville and the widow Macon headed them for Readyville, a town between McMinnville and Murfreesboro where there was a waystation for stage coaches. She figured that travelers would always need food and a place to sleep. Essentially, they were still in the hotel business.
It is probably here that the idea of becoming a professional musician first entered young Dave’s mind, for he built a makeshift stage atop a barn from which he could give impromptu shows for the travelers who were staying over. One can imagine this: A teenage boy with his open backed banjo and apparently boundless confidence, the end of the day and a skeptical crowd, Dave up there in the falling dark tuning his banjo while the nighthawks dart and check, the audience gauging him and Dave gauging them right back, trying to figure what will work and what won’t for an embryonic repertoire he doesn’t even know he needs yet.
All this time he kept learning songs, collecting them, writing them, stealing them. He also developed a distinctive introductory roll, almost like an invitation, a quiet caesura before the action starts, a musical hand gesturing you inside the song where the story commences, that would kick off most of his later songs.
At the age of twenty-nine, Dave married Matilda Richardson, who over the next twenty years would bear him seven sons. In 1900, with a child on the way, he looked about for a way to make a living. Ever a mule man, he went into the freight business. With a double team of mules, he hauled wagonloads of provisions and building materials and whiskey into towns the railroads did not accommodate. He was barely ahead of the internal combustion engine, but he wasn’t put off by its arrival. He didn’t trust the horseless carriage and he didn’t expect it to last. In From Earth to Heaven, a song he wrote about the freight business, he sings: I’ll bet a hundred dollars to a half a ginger cake/I’ll be here when the trucks is gone.