by David Henry
Williams was the most popular entertainer of his day and arguably the first African American superstar. Erudite, highly educated, and aspiring to theatrical greatness, Williams quickly learned that he could draw greater laughs if he dropped his refined manners and kept his learning to himself. According to vaudeville historian Trav S. D., Williams found it much easier to lose his inhibitions and play the clown when he donned blackface. W. C. Fields recognized both sides of the dilemma when he declared Williams “the funniest man I ever saw and the saddest man I ever knew.”
Williams built his act around a character he described as “the shiftless darky to the fullest extent, his fun, his philosophy. Show this artless darky a book and he won’t know what it is all about. He can’t read. He cannot write. But ask him a question and he’ll answer it with a philosophy that’s got something.”
Adopting a style of storytelling that recalled Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus tales, Williams recounted the exploits of one Spruce Bigsby, a street-savvy savant. Like Richard’s character Mudbone, Williams’s Bigsby played off the sentimentalized image of the tale-spinning Negro who had migrated from a bygone South only to find himself beguiled by life in the industrial North.
Bert Williams’s most enduring character, however, may be his charlatan minister Elder Eatmore, a direct forebear of Richard’s recurring preacher, as evidenced in this excerpt from Williams’s recording of “Elder Eatmore’s Sermon on Generosity”:
The Lord loveth a cheerful giver. Tonight, my friends, you can omit the cheerful. The truth is the light, and here is the truth: y’all is way back in my salary and something has got to be done here this evening. . . . Because if something ain’t done, your shepherd is gone. That’s all. THAT IS ALL. I admit that times is tight because when there used to be a ham coming here and fowl or two there from different members of this flock, I managed to make out fair to middlin’. They all comes to he who waits. But you all done learnt me that self-preservation is the first law of he who gets it. And the Lord helps they who helps their selves.
Everything has got so scientifical nowadays, that they done commenced building such things as smokehouses and hen houses out of pure concrete. And they’ve invented locks for them the same as the combination on the First National Bank. True, true, that makes it harder for all of us. It’s pretty nigh ruint me. And my friends I need, I need . . . T’ain’t no use talkin’ about what I need I needs everything, from my hat down, and from my overcoat in.
When Richard created his version of this archetypal preacher, the truth poured out of him. And the truth was he had nothing but contempt for the needs of his flock and couldn’t be bothered to offer up even a pretense of compassion or moral rectitude.
The Walker family brought in their son and they said to me, ‘Can you heal our son?’ Well, I apologize because he’s a big wally-head boy and I wasn’t going to touch the motherfucker, I’m tellin’ you that right now. Little nigger had a head about this big and they wheeled him in his head was bobbing back and forth. I was not about to touch the motherfucker because that shit’s contagious. Give the nigger a big hat or something—leave me alone!
And some of the deacons come down on me for that. But I’d like to say to the crippled peoples that come here, can’t you find another church to go to? Goddamn! You come in here knockin’ shit down, breakin’ up furniture and shit. Learn how to crawl! Shit! And you deaf and dumb motherfuckers who can’t talk, we don’t need you here! All that “ah-whoo ah-hah” shit—kiss my ass!
Silent movies wounded vaudeville. Still, the two managed to cohabit peaceably for a time, sharing bills in the same venues, although the performers could not help but notice how many new theatres were being built without stages, only screens. Then radio came along and killed vaudeville completely.
With the advent of radio, people could hear their favorite stars without even leaving the house. Milton Berle and Jack Benny entertained far more people in a single broadcast than they could have in a lifetime out on the road. Those who made the leap to radio found themselves suddenly flush with cash—and frantic to come up with new material every week or, in some cases, every night. In contrast, a vaudevillian could live off one well-honed routine for an entire career.
Such was the case with Clinton “Dusty” Fletcher who performed a solo skit called “Open the Door, Richard” for more than twenty years. The premise: Fletcher’s character returns to his rooming house late at night without his key. He pounds on the door and calls out to his roommate to let him in. The audience never sees or hears Richard. He may not even be in there. The skit inspired a hugely popular song of the 1940s and for years remained a popular catchphrase.
Jazz saxophonist Jack McVea had seen Fletcher perform the bit hundreds of times in the early 1940s as the opening act for Lionel Hampton’s band. On a rainy afternoon in Portland, Orgeon, McVea, in need of material for his own band, set a simplified version of the skit to music. When McVea recorded the song in October 1946, it went through the roof.
The song’s refrain cropped up in routines by Jack Benny, Phil Harris, Jimmy Durante, numerous Bugs Bunny cartoons, in ads for everything from ale to perfume, and generally made life miserable for anyone named Richard.*
Time magazine reported that radio comedians “had only to mention the word Richard on the air to put their studio audiences in stitches.” The phrase became part of the early civil rights movement, as the title of an editorial in the Los Angeles Sentinel calling for black representation in city government. In Georgia, college students marched to the state capitol demanding the resignation of segregationist governor Herman Talmadge with banners that read OPEN THE DOOR, HERMAN.
With the song’s success, Dusty Fletcher emerged from semiretirement to claim authorship, saying he had written the skit after seeing a drunk thrown out of a railroad station bar in South Carolina. The ejected patron, Fletcher recalled, stood out in the street and yelled for the bartender to let him back in.
Once the song broke, it seemed every singer and band in the country rushed to record it. Within months of McVea’s hit, at least eighteen versions were released by the likes of Louis Jordan and his Tympani Five, Dick Haymes, the Pied Pipers, Jo Stafford, Burl Ives, and Bing Crosby. Both Count Basie and nightclub trio the Three Flames scored number-one hits with the song. There was even a Yiddish version by a quartet known as the Yokels.
But, at the end of the day, “Richard” belongs to Dusty Fletcher. The recordings were mere novelty numbers, whereas Fletcher had honed his stage performance to a work of art incorporating pantomime, pratfalls, and an acrobatic balancing act atop a freestanding ladder. Happily, it was captured twice on film, as a ten-minute short directed by William Forest Crouch, and as a vignette in the Cab Calloway movie Hi-De-Ho.
Fletcher portrayed his nameless character as a drunk who mutters to himself between shouts up to his unresponsive roommate. In each segment of the routine he peels back layer upon layer of a complicated man gamely soldiering on with his threadbare existence in a harsh, uncaring world.
Critic Jake Austen notes that Fletcher’s work, like Richard’s, dealt with “fairly horrifying subjects: abject poverty, extreme alcoholism, spousal beating, homicide, and other rib ticklers.” Traces of genetic material from “Open the Door” show up in Richard’s “Wino & Junkie,” the signature piece he developed over a period of several years. It grew along with him, becoming deeper, ever more fearless, and less dependent on jokes. By the time Richard recorded it for his 1974 LP That Nigger’s Crazy, there was nothing overtly funny about it.
WINO: You better lay off that narcotic, nigger, that shit done made you null and void. I ain’t lyin’, boy. What’s wrong with you? Why don’t you straighten up and get a job?
JUNKIE: Get a job? Motherfucker, you talkin’ to the kid, baby. Shit! I worked five years in a row when I was in the joint pressing them motherfuckin’ license plates. I’m a license plate-pressing motherfucker too, baby. Where a nigger gonna get a job out here pressing license plates?
Black comics learn their craft on the street corner, Richard once said. “That’s where niggers rehearse. If you want to be a speaker, you rehearse your speeches. You tell your stories. Singers start there. Players run their game. . . . That was my stage.”
In communities large and small, African Americans found free expression in games of signifying; playing the dozens; and exchanging raunchy, rhyming tall tales of “bad niggers” like Stagolee, Shine, Petey Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law and trickster characters harking back to High John the Conqueror, Br’er Rabbit, and the Signifying Monkey. Richard found genius in this cosmology of language and humor that, up until that time, had kept sanctuary in barbershops, pool halls, street corners, front porches, and back rooms. Then, to nearly everyone’s dismay, he went and paraded it out in front of company.
“White folks don’t play enough,” Richard contended. “They don’t relax. They don’t know how to play the dozens . . . nothing.”
We used to have good sessions sometimes. I remember I came up with a beaut, man. I killed them one day. We was doing it all day to each other, you know? Bang bang—“Your shoes are run over so much looks like your ankles is broke,” and shit like that. And I came up with, I called the motherfucker “The Rummage Sale Ranger,” you know what I mean? ’Cause that’s where he got his clothes. “The Rummage Sale Ranger”—that was a knockout. I saved that one for the last. That ended it.
Black Panther Party minister of justice H. Rap Brown recalled how he and his friends played the dozens for recreation “the way white folks play Scrabble.”
In many ways, though, the Dozens is a mean game because what you try to do is totally destroy somebody else with words . . . It was a bad scene for the dude that was getting humiliated . . . It was like they were humiliated because they were born Black and then they turned around and got humiliated by their own people, which was really all they had left. But that’s the way it is. Those that feel most humiliated humiliate others.
Playing the dozens—aka mother-rhyming—has been known to turn deadly. Most often, though, in the words of British author and blues scholar Paul Oliver, young men play the dozens to “work off their excesses of spirits in a harmless and cheerfully pornographic blues-singing competition.”
Black humor as practiced in the community or after-hours clubs seldom, if ever, concerned itself with mainstream or non-black existence, either in imitation of it or in reaction to it. As Henry Louis Gates Jr. put it, these performances carried “an invisible racial warning sticker: For domestic consumption only—export strictly prohibited. . . . You don’t want white people to see this kind of spectacle; you want them to see the noble dramas of August Wilson, where the injuries and injustices perpetuated by the white man are never far from our consciousness.”
Factor in Richard’s observation that “white folks get upset when they see us laughing—‘Wha’d’ya think they’re doing, Martha? Are they laughing at us?’ ” and it’s likely that the one aspect of black humor whites would find most disconcerting (were we privy to hear it) is how largely absent they are. Gates, again, describes a production making the rounds of the Chitlin’ Circuit as recently as 1997: “The subject of racism—or, for that matter, white people—simply never arises.” What black humor concerns itself with most are the immediate problems and pleasures of everyday life: love, jealousy, sex, death, rivalries, tall tales, intoxication, and food—the same territory covered in the blues and other black music, which, praise be to popular recordings, we have in abundance.
Although the blues has its origins in the music of West Africa, it is unique to the United States. The music entered the United States by the port of New Orleans, then migrated upriver to spawn—mutating, crossbreeding, and adapting to regional conditions as it spread out through the tributaries. All manner of love songs, folk legends, feats of derring-do, murder ballads, conjure tales, ghost stories, courtly European balladry, and blues got passed down and passed around, openly consorting and cross-pollinating with each other.
It was similar to the way the scattered stories and figures that make up The Iliad and The Odyssey had been recited, embellished, and bowdlerized by generation upon generation of Ageans before someone like Homer came along with the wit to see what it could be, gathered up all the strands, wound them together, shook them up in his sorcerer’s hat, and pulled out those epic twin pillars of world literature.
So it was with Richard. In the truest Homeric tradition, he soaked up everything around him and, by virtue of wise blood or mother wit, made of it something new. And if it now seems as though that new thing had been there all along, waiting for someone game enough to grab hold and take it for a ride, either to see where it would go or how long one could hang on, that’s because it was.
All of which is just to say, as Black Panther Party cofounder Bobby Seale observed in ascribing the forces that gave rise to the movement, “It was already going on.” And, as Robert Fitzgerald wrote in the postscript to his translation of Homer’s Odyssey, “Our poet came late and had supremely gifted predecessors.”
Skinny and bearded, Richard Pryor holds the stage of a dark basement club, its brick walls lending it the air of a boiler room fallout shelter where a small crowd nervously laughs and awaits an all-clear of something from somewhere. Steaks and peppers are listed for sale on a chalkboard behind him; chicken curry, beer.
There is a silence that follows each jab of a phrase, the mostly white audience puzzled and uncomfortable as Richard sticks and moves, looks for his way inside . . . talking aches and pains, winos and whores and politicians and pimps; catching the clap, and having sucked another man’s dick. These are not jokes he tells but character sketches and vignettes that spool out and surprise like a tablecloth snatched off a birdcage, revealing no living bird but something furry and feral in its place, uncomfortably large for its quarters, grunting and pissing.
Richard seems not to register the quiet and discomfort, or he pays it no mind. He keeps watch over his shoulder, is patient and slow as he lets out his line. He weaves fractured scenes above the heads of those in attendance but seems rarely to glance their way. He is already seeing beyond; over them; out.
* When Bob Dylan and the Band reinvented the song during the raucous 1967 recording sessions in West Saugerties, New York, that would come to be known as The Basement Tapes, Dylan changed the title to “Open the Door, Homer,” even while keeping “Open the door, Richard” as the song’s refrain, because, it is said, the Band’s keyboardist Richard Manuel detested the original song, having been taunted with the phrase his whole life. And Allen Ginsberg, no less, declared that “Open the Door, Richard” had influenced his poetry during the pivotal road trips he took with Jack Kerouac in the late 1940s: “I would say ‘Open the Door, Richard’ opened the door to a new sound and music, to new consciousness.”
“THERE’S A BAD MUTHAFUCKA COMIN’ YOUR WAY”
In his 1995 memoir Pryor Convictions, Richard told how his grandfather Roy Pryor had been crushed in the coupling of two boxcars while working for the railroad in the 1920s—an incident that should have killed any man on the spot. Instead, Richard tells us, the cars parted, his grandfather made his way to a tavern, downed a drink, and then died.
Nothing miraculous about that, Richard explained. The man wanted a drink.
Richard apparently had confused his paternal grandfather, LeRoy Pryor, with his maternal great-grandfather, Richard Carter, whose obituary appeared in the Decatur Daily Review of September 20, 1925:
RICHARD CARTER DIES OF INJURIES
Colored Man Crushed between Cars
Richard Carter of 1144 South Jackson street died at 4 o’clock Saturday afternoon at the Wabash Employee’s hospital from injuries received earlier in the day, when he was crushed between two cars. He was fifty-five years old.
Mr. Carter was one of the well-known colored men of Decatur. He had been here many years and was well liked by those who knew him. He had been employed in the yards of the Wabash roundhouse for a long ti
me. About 11 o’clock Saturday forenoon he was crushed between some cars that were switching in the yards and was so badly injured that he died five hours later.
Richard’s grandmother, Rithie Marie Carter, was one of seven children born to Richard Carter and the former Julia Isabelle Piper. She was born sometime in 1899, perhaps in New Orleans, shortly before her family joined the great migration up the Mississippi early in the century. This first wave of African American migrants, employed as musicians or servants on northbound riverboats, jumped ship in the comparatively free Midwest, and Illinois seemed especially appealing. Marie’s family settled in Decatur.*
Marie married LeRoy (or Roy) Pryor, a janitor and apartment building caretaker, in Decatur on a Saturday evening in August of 1914 at the home of Elder T. S. Hendershott, pastor of the Church of the Living God.
Further documented facts of LeRoy Pryor’s life include his birth on March 21, 1889, in Mexico, Missouri; his plea of guilty to a charge of grand larceny in Macon County, Illinois, in 1928; an arrest for disorderly conduct in Decatur in 1931; his registration for military service in 1942 at the age of fifty-three; and his death on January 15, 1946, in Decatur, Illinois.
One final documented event in LeRoy’s life occurred a little more than a year after he and Marie were married, as shown by an item that appeared in the Decatur Review of December 6, 1915:
CLAIMED WIFE ATTENDED BALL
Roy Pryor, Colored, Fined for an Assault on Spouse
Roy Pryor, colored, 362 East Main Street, pleaded guilty before Justice J. Edward Saxton Monday morning to the charge of assaulting his wife and threatening to kill her. He was fined $5.30. Pryor’s assault was provoked, it is alleged, by Mrs. Pryor attending a grand ball some place when Pryor wasn’t along.