What could he say? I had him trapped like a rat, cornered in his own dressing room. So I broke out the guitar, and I went through the song perfectly. Not a single mistake. All I could think was, “I got it. I got it.” I was ecstatic, and to top it off, when I finished Brownie said he liked it, and I think he actually did. So I packed up my guitar and was heading out the door, when a thought crossed my mind. I turned around and said, “Hey Brownie, how old were you when you wrote that song?”
He said, “Oh, about fifteen.”
Brownie was a very funny cat. He and Sonny knew each other better than most husbands and wives do, and when they were getting along, they were getting along, but a lot of the time they were kind of at odds with one another, and they really knew where all the buttons were. Around 1962 I was working a club in Philadelphia and they were working right down the block. In those dear dim days, you would get booked into a room for a week at a time, or even two weeks, and we were all three staying at the same hotel, the old Rottenhouse. So every night after I finished my last show, I would go over to where they were working, and the three of us would take off to South Street, where there was this marvelous soul food restaurant.
Sonny had some trouble with his weight, and right then he was on the most heartbreaking diet I have ever seen. Brownie and me would be piling on the viands, scarfing down chitlins and collard greens and pecan pie, and Sonny would be sitting there with a salad and a glass of water, practically crying. Every now and again, he would say, “Brownie, could you give me just a taste of that?” And Brownie would say, “Come on, man, you’re getting fat as a pig. You look like hell up there on that stage. You got to lose some weight.” So Sonny endured, and every morning, around ten or eleven o’clock, the three of us would meet and go down for breakfast at this luncheonette across the street. There was a scale there, and Sonny was blind, so he would have Brownie lead him over to the scale, put in a penny, and read off his weight. And every day, Brownie would tell Sonny that he had gained another pound.
One afternoon during that Philadelphia sojourn, there came a knock on my door and it was Brownie, and he had a guy with him who was wearing a sleek, impeccably cut, rust-colored zoot suit. I hadn’t seen a zoot suit since I was seven, and I was dazzled enough just by that. Brownie gave me a big smile and said, “Hey, look who I found.” I must have looked very blank and stupid, because he says, “You don’t know who this is?” I said no. He said, “This is Lonnie Johnson.”
Now, Lonnie Johnson was the man who invented jazz guitar. He made a lot of blues records and was a very influential singer from the 1920s right up through the late 1940s, but what I knew him for was his duets with Eddie Lang and his work with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Duke Ellington—I mean, this was the guy who played behind Baby Cox on “The Mooche”! Brownie had just happened to run into him, and it turned out that he was working in the kitchen at the Ben Franklin hotel as a saucier. As far as I know, he had not performed since the early 1950s, but shortly the blues fans got wind of his existence and Lonnie had a new career. Unfortunately, it never really worked out the way either they or he would have hoped. Part of the problem was that Lonnie had not done any fingerpicking since the 1930s, and he simply did not remember how to do that stuff. Instead, he would get onstage with a flat-pick and play jazz standards, improvising lovely, long choruses on things like “Red Sails in the Sunset.” All the hard-core folkies and blues buffs would be sitting in the audience, going “Arghhhh! Sing ‘Mean Old Bed Bug Blues!’ What’s the matter with you?” They were really disappointed and upset—and they were a bunch of tone-deaf snobs. If they had just listened with an open mind to what the guy was putting down, they would have loved it, but they could not bring themselves to do that.
Naturally, Lonnie was unhappy about this state of affairs. I talked with him about it one time when we were playing at a benefit for the Hazard miners’ strike. We were backstage, and he said, “Man, they want me to play all this stuff I recorded in 1925 . . . That was a long time ago!” I felt very bad for him, because as far as I was concerned, he was playing as well as he ever had. But, like any scene, the revival had its own aesthetic, and he did not fit it.
Of all the old blues players, the one who fitted best into the folk scene, and the one I got to know best aside from Gary Davis, was Mississippi John Hurt. I had been a fan of John’s work ever since hearing him on the Harry Smith Anthology, but he had recorded those sides in 1928 and already sounded like an old man back then, so we all assumed that he was long dead. Then, in 1963, a blues fan named Tom Hoskins was listening to John’s record of “Avalon Blues,” which starts out, “Avalon, that’s my home town, always on my mind,” and it occurred to Tom to wonder whether there was an Avalon, Mississippi. He checked, and indeed there was, and he went down there—it was just a wide place in the road, a general store and a post office—and he went up to some guys who were lounging around, and he says, “Look, I’m trying to find some guy here, he used to make records in the 1920s, his name’s Mississippi John Hurt.”
They say, “Oh, you mean Ol’ John . . . Yeah, he’s right down the block.”
I met John later that year, at the Café Yana. I was working in Cambridge and I had the night off, so I went over and caught his show, and then we went to a party that was being thrown by some relatives of his who lived in Roxbury. It seems it was his birthday, and the family was anxious to make sure Uncle John was shown a good time. I had a good time myself, and much of the evening is a blur, but the last thing I remember was a snowball fight in a graveyard. John was seventy that year, but he had a high, hard pitch that you would not believe—I think I still have a lump on my head.
John had never been a professional musician prior to his rediscovery. He used to play at picnics and play-parties and that sort of thing, but he was essentially a farmer, and he was the sweetest, gentlest man that ever came down the pike. To get an idea of his personality, you just have to listen to his records, because that is exactly the kind of man he was. In life as in music, he was an understater and a minimalist. Most blues artists deal in intensity, but he dealt in subtlety and nuance. The beat was always there, rock solid, but there was also a lyricism and deftness, and he was very, very easy on the nerves.
John spent a lot of time around the Village and seemed to genuinely enjoy hanging out with us. I remember one time somebody was passing around a joint, and it came to John. He looked at it for a moment, and said, “Oh yeah, I remember this. We used to call it ‘poor man’s whiskey.’” And he just passed it on. He was a delight. One of the odd things about him was that he did not like beds; he preferred a good, comfortable armchair. He was the easiest man to put up overnight: “Here John, we have a couch.”
“Oh, I don’t need a couch. Say, that looks like a great chair . . . ”
John never had a bad word to say about anyone, not even people who really did deserve a few bad words. We were sitting around one night, and someone brought up the subject of Tom Hoskins, the guy who had rediscovered him. That relationship had ended badly: Hoskins had signed John to a contract where he earned a ridiculous percentage of John’s wages, owned his publishing, and controlled all his business, and John actually had to go to court to get out from under his thumb. Naturally, we were filled with righteous indignation, and I was cursing Hoskins up hill and down dale, and John was just sitting there and listening, not saying a word. Finally, I paused and looked at John, waiting to hear him chime in. And John said: “Well, you know . . . if it weren’t for Tom, I’d still be chopping cotton in Mississippi.” No way to argue with that.
I had been playing John’s “Spike Driver’s Blues” ever since the mid- 1950s, and it wasn’t until I met him that I realized I had got the basses backward. John and I were sitting around with a guitar one evening down at the Gaslight, and I was playing my version for him, and this puzzled look came over his face. He started watching my right hand, and he said, “You’ve got those basses backward.” And he played me a few measures of it the way he did it.
It was just like on the record, and by God, he was right. I said, “Oh, shit, back to the old drawing board.” And he says, “No, no, no. You really ought to keep it that way. I like that.” That’s the folk process for you: some people call it creativity, but them as knows calls it mistakes.
“Spike Driver’s Blues” was one of two songs by John that had been included on the Anthology. The other was this gorgeous piece of fingerpicking called “Frankie’s Blues.” It was a beautiful arrangement, and when those albums came out in the early 1950s, we all immediately set ourselves to learn that thing. It was incredibly fast, though, and after a week or two I dropped by the wayside. A few persisted, and my friend Barry Kornfeld, for one, disappeared into his chambers and emerged six weeks later, blinking like a mole, and he had it. Note for note, just as clean and fast as on the record.
When I first saw John at the Café Yana, there he was playing “Frankie’s Blues.” However, I noticed that it was a lot slower than on the record. Of course, he was a good deal older, but it also struck me that it sounded better at that tempo. I wanted to ask him about it, but I wanted to be as diplomatic as possible—I didn’t want to just say, “So, Pops, can’t cut it anymore, eh?” Very tentatively, I said, “You know that ‘Frankie’ thing you played . . . ”
Apparently I was not the first person to have asked, because John intervened and saved me any further embarrassment. He just smiled and said, “Oh, you want to know why it’s so much slower than on the record.”
I said, “Yeah . . . ”
He said, “Well, you know, that song was so long that they had to speed it up to get it all on one side of a 78.”
All I could think of was Barry, sidelined with acute carpal tunnel syndrome.
John played the Gaslight pretty regularly, and he would also hang out there whenever he was in town. Clarence Hood, the owner, was from the same part of Mississippi, and they would sit around for hours, talking over old times. It was the strangest thing, because they obviously had lived very different lives down there, but they really seemed to enjoy each other’s company. John would also join us upstairs at the Kettle of Fish, and one night we were sitting around, and it was just John, me, Jack Elliott, and Sam Hood. At that time, we had an understanding with the owners of the Kettle, only I never understood it: whenever a group of us was at a table, they would bring over a bottle, make a line with a wax pencil to show how much whiskey was in it, and then when it was finished, charge us for three bottles. But what the hell, those were flush times.
John’s favorite drink was Old Grandad, so there we were with a bottle of Old Grandad. We had gotten down to where there was about two inches left in the bottle, and we were feeling no pain, and boys will be boys, even if one of these boys was seventy-some years old. So I don’t know whose idea it was, but we started to arm-wrestle. Jack was just back from out west, where he had been bulldogging steers, Sam was an all-state Mississippi high school football champion—he had been given the Order of No Neck by the governor, personally—and I was a big, strong guy, as well. So we’re arm-wrestling, and John is sitting there, kind of bemused by our antics. Finally, somebody says, “Come on, John, give us a shot.” Now, John was a little guy, and damn near as old as the three of us put together, but he plants his elbow on the table, and blam! blam! blam! He throws all three of us.
This did not sit well with me. I do not have a sporting drop of blood in my body, and I was damned if this superannuated sharecropper was going to make us look like idiots. But I figured, look, he just threw these three bohrans; his arm must be tired by now. So I said, “John, that was just a fluke. We weren’t ready. Let’s try it again.” And, blam! blam! blam! He threw us again. As I remember, he even did it a third time, just to put us in our places. By now that man has been dead for almost forty years, and he’s probably still in better shape than I am.
All in all, the number of colorful characters and the amount of talent that was around in those days was incredible. Skip James showed up a year or so after John, and did a week at the Gaslight on a double bill with Doc Watson. Lightnin’ Hopkins was around pretty regularly, as was John Lee Hooker. Those guys were an integral part of the scene, as much as people like me and Dylan and Ochs, and that is one reason that I tend to cock a jaundiced eye at the recurring rumors of another folk revival. There will undoubtedly be times when there is a heightened interest in folk music, but we simply do not have the deep sources of talent that we had in the 1960s. Unless we can hatch another generation like Gary, Skip, and John, or John Lee and Muddy Waters, the quality will be sadly second-rate—and the world that produced those people is long gone.
Even at that time, the older musicians often seemed like emissaries from a vanished, mythic age—though of course that was our perception and not theirs. I have often been asked whether it wasn’t awfully strange for them, especially the ones like John who had spent their lives working on farms in Mississippi, to suddenly find themselves in this completely foreign situation, carried off to the big city and being carted around clubs full of young white fans. Obviously, there is no single answer to that: some of them loved it, some didn’t; some of them really did not like to be in the cities, and some thought it was very interesting; some were amused, some were bemused, and some were annoyed. But overall there was a lot less culture shock than one might think. These people were mature men and women who knew who they were. That was one of the most important things about their music, and why they had become famous in the first place: because they played and sang like people who knew who they were. So they were not people who could be overawed all that easily. It doesn’t much matter if you are a sharecropper from Texas or a Harvard grad; if you don’t know who you are, you are lost wherever the hell you find yourself, and if you do, you do not have much of a problem. A lot of them actually found the whole thing kind of funny: “Gee, look at this. What am I doing here?” But in a way it was not all that different for the rest of us. While we weren’t coming from rural Mississippi, none of us was prepared to suddenly be onstage in front of twenty thousand people. Anybody who did not from time to time think, “Gee, what am I doing here?” had to have something wrong with him. Because what is anybody doing in a situation like that? But then again, it’s like when somebody asks me, “What the hell are you doing in Sandusky?” The flag follows trade! It was a good payday, and most of them were glad to get it. Different people took it different ways, but I dare say you can say the same about any group of traveling musicians.
What some people have trouble understanding is that these were remarkable men and women, not exotic exhibits in the blues museum. They were friends of ours, and they were working musicians. When we would sit around and shoot the shit, it was not just us youngsters asking, “Tell me about Charlie Patton in 1927.” A lot of the time, the conversation would be, “That sonofabitch at the so-and-so club stiffed me last time through. Did he do that to you?” There was a lot of shop talk. And that was a good way to get to know them.
There is one last story that perfectly illustrates this point. I did not get this firsthand, and it probably has improved some in the telling, but it gives an idea of what I mean. Champion Jack Dupree was one of my favorite blues singers and piano players. He was originally from New Orleans, but in the late 1950s he moved to Europe and ended up settling in Germany. In the 1980s I started to tour over there a lot, and for a while it seemed as if we were playing tag across the continent. I would hit town, and there would be posters plastered all over the place: “One night only! Champion Jack Dupree! You just missed him, schmuck!” or “One night only! Champion Jack Dupree! But you’ll be playing in Dusseldorf that night!” So I never got a chance to meet him, but you could not be a blues musician in Europe and not hear Jack Dupree stories. The man really carved himself out a legend, and this story is a good example.
Sometime in the early 1960s Jack was living in Hamburg, and he got a call from an agent there. The guy said, “Jack, I’m going to put you on the tour of your life. We’re going to start yo
u in Stockholm, and we’re going to send you from Lisbon to Leningrad.” It sounded all right, so Jack signed on. He was traveling with a small band, and they trundled from country to country, town to town, and eventually they got to Kiev, I think it was. That was still the Soviet Union, and this was the height of the Cold War—how they arranged to get in there at that time is anybody’s guess. In any case, there they were, and all of a sudden, the tour just evaporated. There Jack was, stranded in Russia, with no money, three or four musicians, and no way to get home.
God knows how he wiggled out of that one, but musicians get to be very good at that sort of thing—our improvisational skills are by no means limited to music. In any case, somehow or other he limped back to Germany, licking his wounds.
The years go by, and then one fine day he gets a call from the same guy, with the same offer: “Jack, I’m gonna put you on the tour of a lifetime. We’ll start you in Stockholm, and you’re gonna be in Lisbon, in Marrakech, in Kiev . . . ”
Dupree said, “Now, wait a minute. I remember you. First of all, I am going absolutely nowhere unless I have airline tickets covering every single stop on the tour, in my pocket before I leave my house.” There was an audible gulp at the other end of the line. And Jack added, “I fly first class.”
There were more gulps, but eventually the guy said, “Well, OK, Jack.”
Jack said, “All right, I’ll be at your office tomorrow morning, and you just have those tickets ready. Then we can talk through the rest of the terms.”
The next morning, Jack showed up at the agent’s office, and the agent handed over a sheaf of tickets for him and his band that looked like a Gutenberg Bible. Jack went through them carefully, checked that they covered the whole tour from beginning to end, and said, “Yes, this looks all right.” Then he left, went over to the Lufthansa office, cashed them all in, and went home.
The Mayor of MacDougal Street Page 23