The Devil's Dream

by Lee Smith

  We sat up there on the mountain and listened to WSM until the Grand Ole Opry went off the air after midnight. It ended ever time with the Judge saying:That’s all for now, friends,

  Because the tall pines pine

  And the paw-paws pause

  And the bumblebees bumble all around.

  The grasshopper hops,

  And the eavesdropper drops—

  While gently the old cow slips away.

  This is George D. Hay saying So long.

  Daddy was snoring that last half-hour, and I sure did hate to wake him up. But then everbody was gathering up their things, and leaving, and I figgered he would be maddest of all if we walked on back with the others and just left him laying on the ground all night and the dew fell on him.

  So finely I roused him. He looked all around real wild-like at first, and said where was he, and then he started off after the rest. Freda and me picked up our stuff and follered. But then I got afraid he was going to fall and hurt himself for sure, he was stumbling so bad, so after a while I caught up to him and said, “Hey, Daddy,” and put my arm around him, carrying the quilt and the lantern in my other hand.

  The three of us walked the long way back, and even after all the bad stuff that was to happen later, this is what I remember best about Daddy, walking that mountain road along by Grassy Branch with my head full of music and his arm laid across my shoulders. It was way, way late when we got home.

  5

  The Bristol Sessions

  R.C. Bailey paces back and forth on the Tennessee side of State Street—the street that splits Bristol in two like a knife. Tennessee or Virginia: take your pick. It’s ninety-five degrees in the shade, humid and overcast. The sidewalk is hot enough to fry eggs on. Yet R.C. is all dressed up—dark blue suit, boiled white shirt, somber tie, his unruly hair parted in the middle, pulled straight back, and plastered flat down to his head. His ears stick out. He looks like he’s going to a funeral. From time to time he consults his pocket watch—3:10, 3:12, 3:15. Their appointment is set for 3:30. From time to time he looks up at 408 State Street. This is it, all right. The abandoned building does not look promising. It once held a hat factory, then a furniture store. Now its dirty plate-glass windows look into empty rooms with here and there a pile of trash, a shipping box, a broken chair. There seems to be some activity on the second and third floors, however. While R.C. watches, someone passes in front of a window. Then he notices the door at the side, where several people are coming out. One man carries a banjo. Another man looks real familiar to R.C., like somebody he’s seen someplace. It is the harmonica player Henry Whitter. R.C. finally recognizes him from the picture on his record, the one that features “Wreck on the Southern Old 97” on one side and “Lonesome Road Blues” on the other. Holy smoke! Henry Whitter!

  R.C. thumps on the dusty top of the Model T so hard the women all jump. “All right!” he says. “This here’s the place! Get a move on!”

  “Just a minute, sir!” Lucie answers with some aggravation in her tone, unusual for her. “You just hold your horses!” for she is still nursing her youngest child, Bill, ten months old. She switches him from one breast to the other while R.C. smokes and paces and Virgie primps, pursing her red-red mouth and pushing at her curly hair, unable to see the full effect in her compact mirror. Finally Bill stops sucking and lapses off into sleep, his milky mouth slack. He is as relaxed and as heavy as a sack of meal. Lucie hands him over to Tampa while she adjusts her bodice and buttons herself back up. Bill is an easy baby, a good sleeper, like Clarence was. Clarence is eight now. Robert Floyd is seven, a little devil if there ever was one . . . and John and Pancake are almost growed, God help them, nineteen and twenty year old. It sure don’t seem like twenty years since Pancake was borned. Well, they are good boys, all of them. Looking down at Bill’s fat red cheeks, Lucie shakes her head and wonders, Where did the time go? For it seems like no time atall since R.C. came in her aunt’s kitchen selling furniture and she came over to live at Grassy Branch.

  No time atall since Lucie was a girl herself, and sometimes she still feels like that girl she was then. Why, sometimes she stops dead still in the middle of whatever she’s doing and looks around at her family and thinks, Who are all these people? Where did they all come from, anyhow? She’s got moren enough children, that’s for sure, yet Lucie still yearns for a girl, seems like a girl would keep you more company . . . like Lizzie, like Sally, Lord help us all. Lucie still can’t hardly stand to think of little Sally, dead at fourteen of a rapid heart. Of course they had all knowed it might happen ever since she had the measles; Miss Covington had discovered then that her heartbeat was too fast and said she’d have to take it easy all her life, but Lord, you couldn’t slow that youngun down any moren you could slow down the rest of them. Lucie will never forget the day of Sally’s death. March 21, 1913. One minute she looked out the kitchen door and there was Sally, hanging out clothes; the next minute, she looked out and all she seen was the sheets and the bedspreads billowing on the line in the high wind, and by the time she got out there, Sally was dead on the ground. Sally had a thin face and a big wide crooked smile—Lucie will never forget her. She sure would like to have a little girl like Sally sometime.

  Losing Lizzie was awful, too, but that was different because Lizzie was a grown woman and she’d been gone from home so long. In a way it was like they’d lost Lizzie when she first left Grassy Branch. Also, it’s hard to believe somebody is dead if you don’t set up with them and bury them, and Lizzie was buried over there in France, which bothered R.C. something terrible. He couldn’t see why they wouldn’t ship her back and bury her here, but they said it was against the law. Lizzie died of romantic fever and they buried her quick. So Lizzie is laying in foreign soil, which is real hard on R.C., who takes things hard anyway. It’s all or nothing with R.C. Sometimes he’s a ball of fire, other times he’s distant as the moon. There’s not another one like R.C., that’s for sure!

  Sometimes he pays Lucie a lot of attention and sometimes none atall, depending on whatever mood has seized him. One day Tampa came right out and said to Lucie, “I don’t know how you can stand it, I really don’t,” and all Lucie could do was smile at her. How can she say she’d rather have one hour of R.C.’s undivided attention than a whole year with poor old broken-down Durwood? How can she say what it’s like in the bed with R.C.? For a good woman like Lucie can’t say those things.

  “We better go on in there afore he kills us all,” Virgie says, meaning R.C. She snaps her compact shut and puts it inside her purse.

  “Where do you reckon he’s got to, though?” Tampa asks, meaning Durwood, who took off lickety-split the minute they parked the car. Everybody knows he’s out someplace taking a drink. Tampa doesn’t sound mad, though. In fact, Tampa Rainette has surprised everybody by how good she’s been to Durwood after all. It is not any easier being married to Durwood than it is being married to R.C., in Lucie’s opinion anyway. It may be true that you never know what R.C. is going to do next, but you know for sure that Durwood isn’t going to do a damn thing. Nothing. He didn’t do a thing before he got sick, either. R.C. sees to the farm and always has. Durwood sits on the porch playing music or listening to the radio. Durwood sick is not any different from Durwood well. “Durwood has moved taking it easy up to a fine art,” Tampa always said. Still, he’s sweet. He’s real sweet. And this apparently is what Tampa was after, all along. She’d had it with men that are mean to you, and men had been real mean to her, so she fell in love with Durwood purely for being so sweet. She doesn’t get too mad at him for drinking, she takes a drink herself. Tampa has gotten real fat, too, since she came over to Grassy Branch, putting on about ten pounds with each child: Alice, now fifteen; Freda, ten; and Buck, nine. And of course they’ve got Little Virginia living with them, Virgie’s child. She’s already sixteen.

  That Virgie! It’s like all the fire went out of Tampa and straight into Virgie, who is thirty-two years old now but don’t appear to know it, or have a l
ick of sense. She’s bad to drink, too, and bad to take up with a man. She’s done this several times in fact, but so far it hasn’t worked out too good, because Virgie’s picky, too. Not to mention real vain and high-strung. She takes medicine for her nerves right now. Virgie is the only one of the three women who was just as excited about this trip as R.C. She jumps out of the car, smoothing her dress down over her hips. Virgie looks like a souped-up, more intense version of her mother: black-haired, skinny; big dark eyes, pouty red mouth. Everything that has gone soft in Tampa is sharp as a razor in her daughter Virgie.

  Tampa hands Bill out to Virgie. Then Tampa and Lucie get out. Then Lucie takes Bill, and the rest of them get their instruments out of the back. “Oh, Lord,” Lucie says as it hits her what they are about to do. She looks all around at the city buildings, the city cars. She’s got beans to put up, back home.

  “Come on, come on,” R.C. says. He shepherds his women around to the side of the building, past some fellers that are having a big loud argument on the sidewalk, through the door, up the dark staircase to a little landing, then through another door with a pane of frosted glass in it. R.C. doesn’t even knock. He just walks in like he owns the joint.

  Ralph Peer is there waiting for them, leaning against a table covered with papers, pens, notes, coffee cups, drinking glasses. Blankets have been tacked to all the walls.

  The women hang back, looking around, but R.C. crosses right over to Ralph Peer and sticks out his hand. “I’m R.C. Bailey,” he says, “and these here is the Grassy Branch Girls.”

  Mr. Peer makes an elegant little half-bow in their direction, “Ladies, I’m so pleased to make your acquaintance,” he says. “I understand you’ve traveled some distance to get here today.”

  Virgie and Tampa both start talking at the same time, then stop.

  “We sure have,” Lucie says.

  Mr. Peer walks over and tweaks Bill’s cheek. “Now that little feller is not likely to cry, is he?” he asks.

  “Not if we go right ahead on,” Lucie assures him. “He’ll sleep for an hour at the leastest. I will just make him up a pallet right over here in the corner iffen you don’t mind,” she says, and Ralph Peer nods, and she does it while he says to R.C., “Now you, sir, are the manager of this group, as I understand it?”

  When R.C. says that this is so, Ralph Peer motions him to the table. “Well, if you will just take a chair, then, Mr. Bailey, we will conduct our preliminary business with as much dispatch as possible while that little feller is asleep. You ladies just make yourselves comfortable over here.” He indicates several benches and chairs, where the women settle. Tampa takes the autoharp out of its case while Virgie gets out the archtop guitar that she’s been favoring lately. They start tuning up while R.C. discusses business with Mr. Peer.

  The terms are simple. Mr. Peer, representing the Victor Talking Machine Company, will pay fifty dollars per selection plus royalties of about two and a half cents per side. To R.C. Bailey, this is a lot of money.

  Mr. Peer seems especially happy to learn that R.C. has written two of the numbers the Grassy Branch Girls plan to sing this afternoon: “Melungeon Man” and “Down by Grassy Branch.” The other numbers, R.C. assures Mr. Peer, feature his own personal arrangements and may be copyrighted as well. The fifth, “Shall We Gather at the River,” is an old hymn that has been recorded many times previously, by many artists, but R.C. assures Mr. Peer that theirs is a brand-new styling. Mr. Peer nods.

  A dapper, refined gentleman with hooded eyes and a fleshy, florid face, he has little regard for most of the “hillbillies” he deals with. Nor does he like their music much, but a man has to make a living, and this hillbilly music is making him rich. Ralph Peer is no fool. He realizes that R.C. Bailey is smart, a cut above most of the hillbillies who have come in here, and treats him with consequent respect. Many of these hillbillies have never heard of copyrighting songs, for instance, which is “the basis of the music business,” as Mr. Peer tells R.C. now.

  “You know, I have been recording nigger music for many years,” Mr. Peer says, and mentions some of the Okeh 8000 series of “race” records he’s made: Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues,” recorded in Memphis; Louis Armstrong’s “Gutbucket Blues”; minstrel acts such as Butterbeans and Susie, recorded in Negro vaudeville theaters throughout the South. But Mr. Peer is always looking for original material, he tells R.C., and “niggers can’t write.” So he’s turned to hillbilly now. Mr. Peer gives R.C. the necessary papers to sign and R.C. reads them through carefully, as befits the importance of this occasion. Some of the hillbillies Mr. Peer has signed can’t even write their own names. The illiterate fiddler G.B. Grayson signed his contract with an X.

  While R.C. reads over the contract, the two sound engineers come in carrying cold Coca-Colas in a box and hand them around. The engineers are introduced as Mr. Eckhardt and Mr. Lynch, and Virgie immediately begins to make eyes at Mr. Eckhardt. R.C. writes his name across the bottom of the contract in his habitual large scrawl, embellishing the capital letters with a flourish. Mr. Peer nods approval. He appreciates style in a man. Ceremoniously, Mr. Peer folds up R.C.’s copy of the contract and hands it over to him; R.C. deposits it carefully in his vest pocket. He stands up and shakes hands again with Mr. Peer.

  “Now then, girls,” R.C. says.

  The engineers are rigging things up.

  Mr. Peer shows them all over to the platform where they are to sit, since they’d rather sit than stand. “It’s more like home,” as Lucie says, and Virgie wishes the rest of them would quit acting so country. Mr. Eckhardt adjusts the microphone, brushing up against Virgie’s shoulder. “Excuse you!” Virgie says. They grin at each other.

  “All right now,” Mr. Peer says, and nods to Mr. Lynch, who flips the switch that starts up the electrical equipment, made by Western Electric. When Ralph Peer first went out into the country recording for Okeh, the heavy revolving turntable, covered by an inch of wax, was run by a mechanism involving weights and pulleys, like a cuckoo clock. This modern electrical equipment, which ensures a far superior product, fascinates R.C., who crosses the studio to observe its operation at close range while the women sing.

  They start out with “Shall We Gather at the River,” and after the first verse, Mr. Peer nods, a barely perceptible nod, to Mr. Eckhardt. Lucie plays the little Gibson guitar that R.C. got her so long ago, Tampa the autoharp, Virgie the big archtop guitar. Their harmony is perfect. It is a simple, direct, appealing sound.

  “That’s just fine, ladies,” Mr. Peer says when they get done. “Now let’s run through it one more time, and you”—he nods to Virgie—“back off from the microphone a bit. That big guitar is drowning out the other one.” Virgie pouts but does it, scooting her chair back, and they sing it again, flawlessly.

  For the next number, “Melungeon Man,” R.C. joins them on the fiddle, sad and shrill on the refrain: Melungeon Man don’t know where he’s going, Melungeon Man don’t know where he’s been. This is an unusual, mournful tune, and it has a special sound to it, something different. Ralph Peer gets a hunch about this one. He snaps his fingers. Done.

  On “Down by Grassy Branch,” R.C. stays on the fiddle and Virgie switches to the banjo, which fascinates everybody. Girl banjo players are a rarity. This is a rollicking dance tune, and it will require four takes to get it right. Then R.C. sings bass with the girls on “Down in the Valley,” which adds to the song’s deep, sad resonance. Down in the valley, valley so low, hang your head over, hear the wind blow. Bill wakes up crying, so everybody takes a break while Lucie retires to the ladies’ room to nurse him.

  Tampa and Virgie smoke cigarettes out on the fire escape landing with the engineers while R.C., filled with that energy he just cannot control sometimes, strides wildly up and down State Street like a crazy man, running his hands through his hair. The afternoon has grown darker, hotter. It will rain soon. Back on Grassy Branch, R.C.’s crops need rain, but he can’t think about that now. Alone among his carload of kin, R.C. understan
ds the importance of this day, of this new recording equipment, of this infant industry. It is always R.C.’s blessing—and curse—to understand a little too much about everything.

  When the session resumes, Lucie and Tampa sing a duet on “The Cuckoo Song,” accompanying themselves only on autoharp and guitar, while Virgie reluctantly holds Bill.

  For Lucie, this song will always bring back the fresh open faces of Lizzie and Sally, who taught it to her years ago. Tears come into her eyes then but do not fall, and her voice takes on a deeper shading of emotion, a tremor, that renders the simple old song almost unbearably poignant. Mr. Peer raises an eyebrow at Mr. Eckhardt. The last note lingers and lingers on the still, hot air, falling finally into silence. Even Bill is quiet, sucking his thumb, gazing raptly from face to face. Finally Mr. Peer clears his throat.