The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  The house she was born in is listed as “vacant” in the city directory, which adds that her family was living in the “rear.” It’s most probable that her father was a man named Peter Grant, and that her name at birth was L. V. Grant. The name Thomas seems to have come from a short-lived marriage very early in her life, in her early teens, to a man who in the absence of a marriage license eludes us.

  So, L. V. Thomas was first L. V. Grant; her mother, evidently a woman named Cora. We know only a few things about her childhood: that she left school after the fifth grade and that around the same time, at the age of eleven or so, she started playing the guitar. At some point L. V.’s mother, whether or not she was ever married to her father, married a man named Chris King, who “played all the string instruments,” she says. “Mandoline mostly, but guitar and banjo, too. He didn’t go out to the country suppers but mostly played in saloons here in Houston.”

  The country suppers: Mack had written about them, in his notes to the Treasury of Field Recordings liner notes, 1960, the year before he met L. V. They were picnics on Saturdays that would last all day and night. “I guess I was about 17”—it was 1908 or ’09—“when I started going out playing at country suppers,” L. V. says.

  Something goes wrong. A 1910 census taker finds her an inmate in the Harris County Jail. For a serious crime? If you were black in Houston in 1910, it was not hard to get arrested for doing nothing. She was working as a dishwasher, the census says. Any records related to the arrest or any trial that took place are gone.

  When she gets out—after years or a day—she’s still playing music, and not just that, but she’s playing with someone major, a singer whose name figures highly in any serious effort to get back through the veil of early recording and hear what the blues might have sounded like on the other side, Alger (Texas) Alexander. “One time Texas Alexander wanted me to go out to West Texas with him, but I didn’t like to be away,” she says. “I used to play for Texas sometimes down on West Dallas Street or go out to suppers with him.” Alexander: small, dark, and handsome, with a voice that could fill a noisy barroom or a canyon, as occasion demanded. Musicologists consider him precious because his singing was very close to the fields. He didn’t play an instrument, just sang, beautiful wavering songs, and he did with tempo what he wanted. When the race-record people found him and recorded him, starting in 1927, they supposedly had to work to find accompanists who could handle playing in “Alexander time.” Texas Alexander: My God, L. V. had backed him? In two sentences she leapt from the edges of the tradition to the center. All of a sudden at the country supper in my mind, Texas Alexander walked through. Which meant that so did Blind Lemon Jefferson (they worked together). The little boy leading Blind Lemon by the hand and passing the cup for him is T-Bone Walker. We are here in this meadow. It’s an environment where any kind of hybridization could happen.

  “I remember one night was a big party,” L. V. says, “when Sippie Wallace came back to town and all the songsters came together. It was like a contest of a kind. Everyone sang a number, and the audience would call for who they wanted to hear some more and I remember they pulled everyone out but me. Seem like they wanted to hear me most of all.”

  The ghost had shown up at a singing contest and outsung Sippie Wallace. And L. V. was not a bragging woman. “I was out in the world when I made those records, but now I don’t want to talk about it,” she says. He asks her about “Last Kind Words Blues,” which he’d never heard, at that point; all that had transpired, Geeshie and Elvie–wise, in 1961, is that they were name-checked six years earlier in Jazz Monthly, and the Blues Mafiosi had heard them, become interested in them. But Oliver sent McCormick a manuscript of some kind that included the lyrics, and Mack read them to her. “I guess it could have been one of my songs,” L. V. said. “Lots of them I made up.”

  On no subject did her guardedness frustrate him more than on that of Geeshie, her partner. “One thing,” he had written to Oliver in those first letters he gave me, “it appears there was some trouble between she [sic] and Geeshie Wiley and the story here would be quite a tale I suspect, if it can [be] unearthed.” He went on, “Most aggravating of all is the fact that L. V. Thomas apparently know[s] something more of [Geeshie’s] present whereabouts than she will offer.”

  L. V. did give him some scraps on Geeshie during those two afternoons at her house. “The way I came to make records,” she said, “was that I went around a lot with a girl named Lillie Mae Wiley. She was called Geetchie Wiley.

  “Mr. Laibly of the Paramount record company came to her house one time, and she carried him on over to see me. He listened to me play, and he listened to her, and then he said he’d like for us to go up North and make some records. We knew about his company. I think we both had some Paramount records, and we’d heard of others going up there. I was the older. I was about 38 or so then, so I said all right.”

  Arthur Laibly. A peripatetic salesman who worked his way up in the company and often gets a bad rap for having essentially presided over Paramount’s implosion, though he couldn’t really help the Depression.

  McCormick asks how Laibly found her and Geeshie. “I don’t know how Mr. Laibly heard of her,” she says. “I suppose someone down at the music distributing house told about us. We had a pretty good name as two girls to hire for music.”

  I got in touch with Alex van der Tuuk, a generous and much-esteemed Dutch blues historian, who knows as much about Laibly as anyone alive. He said that Laibly would regularly pack up his car with fresh Paramounts and go on long trips through the South, visiting the record “houses” that sold race records. In one of those stores he must have asked, “Who’s good, who’s worth recording?” And the guy at the counter says, “You need to check out these two girls, Geeshie and L. V.” The guy must have sung their praises. They’re the only musicians Laibly recruits during this trip to Houston, that we know of. It’s doubtful anyone would have turned him down. He sets out for Geeshie’s house, 1205 Saulnier Street, the house where she must have written or at least worked on “Last Kind Words Blues.”

  Lillie Mae (Geeshie) Wiley. For the first time her silhouette holds steady in front of the lens for a moment. Sharing a house with her husband, a man named Thornton Wiley, who worked at a metal shop around the corner. She was young, twenty-one or twenty-two, no children. Laibly knocks on her door.

  “At the very first I started going out alone,” L. V. says. “I played all by myself. Then my first partner was Lillie Mae.”

  That was in the early 1920s. They may have met at one of the country suppers, where they couldn’t have missed each other’s playing. “When I first met up with her, she was all alone,” L. V. says. “She was from some country place”—one census document says Louisiana, born there around 1908—“and living here in Houston when we got together.”

  In the rooming house on Ruthven Street where L. V. lives, they sit and play for Laibly. Their best stuff, no doubt. The lovely and sinister “Skinny Leg Blues.”

  I got little bitty legs, keep up these noble thighs,

  I got little bitty legs, keep up these noble thighs,

  Aah, keep up these noble thighs.

  I got something underneath, and it works like a boar hog’s eye.

  Laibly puts them on the train. “Lillie Mae and I went up there to Milwaukee,” L. V. says, where their train ride would have ended. You had to go by car or tram the extra twenty or so miles north to Grafton, where the studio and pressing plant were.

  The year 1930. Segregated cars. April: wildflowers in the fields. Seeing the first true cities they’ve ever seen. The front page of the Chicago Daily Tribune reads, “Bull Gets Blues.” The true crash of the Depression is underway.

  I asked Alex van der Tuuk to help me reconstruct their arrival in Wisconsin, what would have been most likely to happen, when they got off the train. How close could we get to a little movie, sticking to only what we know?

  It was cold, about as cold as they’d ever felt. Ice floes had jamme
d the Milwaukee River, causing a flood in Graft on, where they were scheduled to record the next afternoon. It’s possible that they had to wait a few days until it thawed.

  They would have most likely taken the tram to the recording studio and been driven back by a man named Alfred Schultz, the pressing foreman at the Paramount plant. Schultz was a young, narrow-faced man who had worked his way up at the company over a decade. Van der Tuuk wrote a very good minibiography of him for Vintage Jazz Mart some years back, based on interviews with his daughter. He was well liked, and the company noticed he got along easily with the singers from the South.

  Paramount didn’t usually keep the black musicians in Graft on. It was an all-white town of mostly European immigrants. The company often housed them instead at a boardinghouse in Brewer’s Hill in Milwaukee. They go up the next day by tram, up the Lake Michigan shore, with glittering blue-glass views of the lake to the right as they rode.

  They pull into a tiny town with a water wheel on the river, to power the plant.

  The studio building was a reddish structure, described by everyone who saw it as “like a barn.” There are no photographs of the studio interior, but Van der Tuuk, in Paramount’s Rise and Fall, skillfully layers the memories of musicians who remembered it. The space is divided into two rooms, the control room and the performance space. There’s a wall between them with a door and window in it and a red light that comes on when the artists are recording. There’s an upright baby grand piano. The room is cold and damp. The windows were “draped with burlap and blankets” to reduce the reverberation. Thick carpets on the floors. A dark, furred box. A horrible place to record.

  They would have been offered illegal liquor, but not too much, just enough to limber them up.

  The recording equipment itself, as reconstituted by Van der Tuuk, was a strange liminal beast that probably should have never lived. It was electrical, but it looked acoustical. You sat and sang into a giant wooden horn that was two feet wide at the mouth and eight feet long. The horn was meant to focus and direct the sound toward an electrical microphone. We may be able to hear the eccentricities of the weights and pulleys in the way the speed seems to change slightly about two-thirds of the way through “Motherless Child Blues.”

  Another nice detail: Schultz’s daughter, Janet, not yet four, is impossible to keep out of the studio. The Schultz house is nearby. She has learned “very quickly to be quiet so I could be with my dad.” So, there’s a little girl in the corner when Geeshie and Elvie record “Motherless Child Blues” (though not, you would hope, when they record “Skinny Leg Blues,” with its earthy exhortation, “Squat low, papa, let your mama see, / I wanna see that old business keeps on a-worrying me”).

  There they sit. Two guitars. Laibley’s there. Schultz is there. The light comes on.

  That fearsome A minor. Buzzards circle. Dark clouds form in the little muffled cave. Mack McCormick is in the womb.

  They recorded on four consecutive afternoons. L. V. remembered “dozens of songs,” but that was probably high. Certainly more than six. After each session Schultz would take the records to a “test room,” where he sat and listened to the songs. after each record, he wrote the name and song title on a white label, adding terse reviews.

  L. V.’s thumb, thumping on her bass string. “She’d sing one, I’d sing one,” she told McCormick, “and each of us would bass for the other.” She uses “bass” as a verb like that. It has caused me to hear the six songs in a new way, to know that this is how they conceived of their arrangement; it’s part of what makes their sound so distinctive.

  “I didn’t hear too much back” from Paramount, L. V. tells Mc-Cormick. “We never did get any royalty money or anything from those records. Just what they paid then.”

  Something minuscule but determining occurs: Laibly, or Laibly and Schultz, one or both of them, changes the spelling of L. V.’s name. “It’s just the letters L. V.,” she says, “that’s all the name I got but he made it out ‘Elvie’ someway.” Maybe he wanted to make sure customers knew it was a woman on the song; two women playing guitars (unusual).

  As he writes the five letters, he presses a long, invisible blade down between two destinies, hard enough to cut them off from each other for eighty years. There will be Elvie, a singer, who lives nowhere, and L. V., a woman, at her house in Houston. They call her song “Motherless Child Blues,” even though it doesn’t have those words anywhere in it and the woman singing, in the song, is not an orphan, so that when thirty-one years later Mack finds her and asks about that song, she doesn’t know what he’s talking about, she never had a song called “Motherless Child Blues.”

  And Geeshie? Where did that name come from? “I called her Geetchie,” L. V. says, “and that’s the name Mr. Laibly decided to put on the records. I was the one started calling her Geetchie—I just picked that for her name.” An affectionate way of calling her a hayseed, more or less? Blacks in parts of the South still use it that way. Maybe Lillie Mae talked funny, being from the country, from somewhere in Louisiana.

  “I haven’t seen her since 1933. I left her in Chico, Okla. Something like Choco … Chico. We’d gone out playing around together, traveling, and I left her up there and came on back.”

  McCormick has penciled in the margins, “Checotah, Okla.! South of Muskogee.”

  You can tell from the transcript that he keeps asking about Geeshie, where she could be.

  “Last I heard of Lillie Mae was about four or five years ago,” L. V. says. “She was supposed to be in West Texas then.”

  So, L. V. was still aware of her, almost thirty years after she’d seen her last.

  What about her name, before she married this man, Thornton Wiley? How was she born? Lillie Mae something. Lillie Mae what? “I can’t think of her name before she was married,” L. V. says.

  She tells McCormick that she has bread in the oven, and is “anxious” for him to “leave her alone.”

  He has acquired tape recordings of the songs since the first time he’s seen her, maybe through Oliver, and wants to play them for her, wants her to hear their music again, to see if it jogs anything.

  “All that’s gone out of my mind and I don’t want to bring it back.”

  I got a text from Caitlin at about 5 in the evening that said “!!!!!!!” Then another one that said, “Check your email.”

  She was digging around at the genealogical library out there. Houston has a very good one.

  I opened the message and the attachment. It was an official form, like a birth certificate. No, a death certificate. State of Texas. Thornton Wiley. Not that exciting. Not “!!!!!!!” Of course he died. Wait, though—it was from 1931, just a year after she was living with him on Saulnier Street in the Fourth Ward. Not long after they made the records. He died young. That was sad. Maybe she loved him, despite L. V.’s seeming distaste for his character. Maybe she is thinking of him in “Last Kind Words” when she sings, “What you do to me, baby, it never gets out of me / I believe I’ll see you after I cross the deep blue sea.” I’m reading down through the crowded handwriting. “Inquest.” “Homicide.” He had been murdered.

  Manner of injury: “Stab wound in between collarbone and neck.”

  His brother is listed as the informant. He told the police what happened, or a version of what happened. They were out in Fort Bend County, outside Houston, on a farm near a place called Fulshear, maybe at a country supper. But he’s listed as single, so he and Geeshie had recently split.

  Then the form got to the cause of death. “Knife wound inflicted by Lillie Mae Scott.”

  Six months of work to learn more about the murder came to nothing. There wasn’t a scrap of paper. The inquest records are lost. I communicated with a lawyer in East Texas who’d worked on similar cases, murders of husbands by wives, not this long ago but fifty years ago. He said that very often, the police were so indifferent to the reason a particular black male had been killed, they would happily accept a self-defense theory, if one were put forward
. Easier night. Let ’em stab each other. On the other hand, this was a particularly violent one, the knife from above, into the neck at an angle, one cut and deep enough the first time to kill. Also, the brother had been the informant to the police, so it’s doubtful they received a sympathetic account of her reasons for killing him. Maybe they did arrest Lillie Mae. Or maybe they tried to arrest her, and she ran away, with L. V., to Oklahoma. And maybe she stayed away.

  Up in Grafton, on “Skinny Leg Blues”:

  I’m gonna cut your throat, baby,

  Gonna look down in your face.

  I’m gonna let some lonesome graveyard

  Be your resting place.

  Lillie Mae’s trail seemed to end there, or with L. V.’s vague “out West.” She had slipped away again, replacing one ghost with another. There are graves of Lillie Mae Scotts in Texas and Oklahoma, and Lily May Scotts, and Lilly M. Scotts, and maybe one of them is hers, and maybe none of them are. Maybe she changed her name completely, or maybe she kept the name Wiley. She could be alive. She’d be about 106; it happens. Maybe you are reading this and you have a great-grandmother named Lillie Mae who told you once that she used to sing and make records. Or maybe nothing. That might be best. That she stay Geeshie, but more so. Lillie Mae of Louisiana was better than myth; she was a mystery. She was the one who had ghosts.