by Lee Smith
I mentioned this to Virgie one time, but she looked at me hard and said, “Just shut up, Katie Cocker! I don’t know what you’re talking about, and it’s not good for a girl to think too much, either.”
Then there’d be a gospel act, maybe an instrumental after that, and then us, after which there would be another Crazy Water Crystals spot.
Well, this particular Saturday night, me and Georgia were getting real nervous because we’d already had the first spot, and now the Johnson Family was gathered around the microphone singing “Tomorrow May Mean Good-bye,” and still Virgie had not showed up. She was often late, but she had never been this late before, or not since I’d joined the show.
Colonel Jack came up to us while the Johnson Family was singing. “Well, girls, where is she?” he asked, puffing like mad on his cigarette. He smoked all the time.
We had to say we didn’t know.
“I’m sure she’ll be here momentarily,” Georgia said. Now she had started putting on airs to match her businessman boyfriend.
“Momentarily, my ass!” Colonel Jack stomped his cigarette out on the floor and squeezed the ends of his mustache into little points, another habit of his.
“I tell you what I’ll do, girls,” he said. “I’ll run Arthur in here for a extry act. Then I’ll do the next Crazy spot, and you all can foller it. But I tell you what. If she ain’t here by the time Arthur gets done, you’re history. Am I making myself clear?” He lit another cigarette.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
“Oh, I suppose so,” Georgia said in that new way of hers.
Colonel Jack looked at her good. Georgia held out her hand and looked at her manicure.
“My nerves is bad,” Colonel Jack said to nobody in particular, “and the women in this business is about to kill me.”
“Why “don’t you drink you some of them Crazy Water Crystals then?” somebody in Shorty’s band called out, and everybody laughed.
“Hellfire,” Colonel Jack mumbled into his mustache, stepping back over to the microphone. “And now, neighbors, here’s that general handyman around the old Jamboree, Arthur Smith! and when I say handyman, I mean just that. One week Arthur plays his banjo, and the next the mandolin, and he’s even done a little singing, too. Seems like whatever you folks ask for, it don’t matter much, Arthur’s always ready with a bang-up good tune like the one he’s going to play right now. Folks, here’s Arthur Smith’s big hit from 1946, the world-famous ‘Guitar Boogie.’”
The studio crowd went wild, because this act wasn’t listed on the program, and Arthur Smith was the biggest star in Charlotte at that time, and a real nice man to boot.
Georgia had gone over to stand by the studio door with the red light above it. When Arthur Smith was nearly done, I looked over at her and she shrugged her shoulders. No Virgie.
All of a sudden I got an idea. I stepped up to Colonel Jack and grabbed his elbow. “Let me and Georgia go on by ourselves, Colonel,” I begged him. “Please, sir. We can do it.”
He stared at me with his little beady eyes, blowing out smoke. “A duet, huh?” he asked. “A sister act?”
“Yes, sir,” I said. “We sing together all the time,” which was a lie, we didn’t do hardly anything together since Georgia took up with that boyfriend.
I swear I don’t know what came over me. I just couldn’t stand to give up the spot. I couldn’t stand not to be on the air!
Colonel Jack got out his pad of paper. He wrote something down. “So what’re you going to sing?” he asked.
“I’ll have to talk to Georgia first,” I said with my heart just bumping away.
“Honey, I ain’t got time for that,” Colonel Jack told me, for sure enough, Arthur Smith was done.
“Just announce us, then,” I said. “We’ll come on and say what we’re going to sing.”
Colonel Jack nodded and wrote it down. I flew across the room to tell Georgia as, behind me, Colonel Jack started in on the second Crazy spot. “Isn’t it pitiful?” he said into the microphone. “That as conditions get better all over the world, as we recover from those lean war years, and dare to look back on our misfortune, still thousands in our own country remain hungry to this day, unable to eat due to chronically upset stomach. I ask you, is there anything more pitiful than to sit at a table loaded with good things, and watch others regale themselves, yet not be able to eat?”
I had Georgia by the sleeve, dragging her through the gospel group, across the studio.
“What in the world is the matter with you, Katie Cocker?” she was sputtering. “Virgie’s not even come yet. Now let go of my arm!”
“Colonel Jack said you and me could go on anyway,” I said, “just the two of us. We can sing anything we want to.” By then we had made it over to where our instruments were, and I was getting my guitar out of its case.
“Without Virgie?” Georgia’s face turned white.
“Sure,” I said. “Let’s do ‘White Linen.’”
“Unh-unh!”
“What do you mean, unh-unh? Let’s just do ‘Living on Love,’ then.” We had done that one so much, we could have sung it backward and blindfolded.
But Georgia folded her arms and stood fast, tapping her foot. “I’m not about to make a fool of myself,” she said. “We’re enough of a fool already.”
“Pucker up your face and keep smiling!” Colonel Jack hollered out.
“Then don’t,” I told Georgia. “Just don’t. But I am. I’m a-going to do it.” I took off my straw hat and fluffed up my hair, and unbuttoned the top button of my red-and-white-checkered dress. I decided to sing one of those songs I’d been writing up on Grassy Branch, a real sad number named “It’s Either Her or Me.”
“And now, folks, another unexpected treat for you tonight, two beautiful sisters from the Virginia hills, those Virginia Raindrops!”
Georgia and me just looked at each other. “I swear I can’t do it,” she said.
I stepped up and grabbed the microphone like I’d been doing solo acts on radio all my life. “Actually it’s just me by myself,” I said into it. “My name is Katie Cocker.” Then I stopped cold, for I just couldn’t do it, I just couldn’t sing “It’s Either Her or Me.” I had never sung it for anybody, much less for thousands of people on the radio. Nobody but me had ever heard it. I swallowed hard. Then I heard myself saying, “And I’m going to entertain you tonight with a real old song that my family has been singing down through the years. We call it ‘The Cuckoo Song.’ ”
Then I put my guitar down and sung “The Cuckoo Song” flat-out with no accompaniment, not daring to look over at Colonel Jack. In fact I didn’t look at anyone. I closed my eyes and clasped my hands behind my back and sang in the old style, and a hush came over the crowd. I still don’t know what possessed me to do such a thing, to sing this song which I had not sung in years, but I just felt like it all of a sudden, and so I did it. When I got done, you could have heard a pin drop. Then everybody started clapping and hollering, and Georgia was hugging me.
“I can’t believe you did that,” she said. “That old thing. Whatever got into you?”
“Whatever it was, she’d better get shed of it real fast,” a familiar voice said then, and I looked over Georgia’s shoulder to see Virgie, red-faced and bleary-eyed, with her hair falling down in the back.
“What the hell is going on here, Jack?” she asked Colonel Jack in the most hateful voice, over the noise of a little Cherokee Indian doing “Pan-American Express” on the harmonica, it sounded just like a train.
“Now Virgie,” he said, “let’s you and me get together after the show, honey. We’ve got some serious talking to do.” Then he put his arm around her and kissed her on the cheek, meanwhile winking at Georgia and me. Colonel Jack was smart. It was the only way he could have got her to shut up while the Jamboree was still on the air.
“And I’ve got some things to say to you, too,” Virgie told me, but she was getting a little wobbly on her feet by then, and some of the fire had gone
out of her. One of the Jordan Brothers led her over to a chair, where she snoozed for the rest of the show. When it was all over, she woke up with a jerk and looked straight at me.
“You’re fired,” she said.
It was hard to believe that somebody who could be as nice as Virgie could be so hateful, too.
“All right,” I said.
“And I quit.” Georgia had her coat on, ready to leave, with her boyfriend probably waiting outside.
“I don’t give a damn,” Virgie said. “You think I can’t get some more Raindrops? Hell, girls ask me all the time if they can be a Raindrop. I’ve got my pick of Raindrops.” Colonel Jack appeared then, offering his arm, and Virgie arose regally, wobbly as ever, to take it. “Raindrops are a dime a dozen,” she said.
4
I Act Like a Fool
Lord, I hate to even tell this next part, it makes me look like such a fool. Well, I was a fool. I might as well say it. But I was real young. I am not the first person to fall for a smooth line and a handsome face, either. And Lord! Wayne Ricketts was a good-looking devil, I have to say. He certainly didn’t look mean as a snake or downright dishonest, which he was. The first time I set eyes on Wayne Ricketts, I couldn’t quit staring at him, he had this effect on everybody.
It was just about dusk when I drove into that trailer park in Shreveport, bone-tired, looking for a trailer to rent. A nice woman over at the Hayride, where I had just been hired to sing backup, had told me to go over there. A trailer was a lot cheaper than an apartment, she said. She was older than me and kind of beat-up-looking. You could tell she’d been around some. She was trying to take care of me, to give me some good advice. I hadn’t ever thought about renting a trailer before. It sounded like a good idea at the time.
I was driving that green Buick I had saved up for by working clubs and juke joints in Charlotte, and I thought I was headed for a new life. That’s what I was after—a new life. I was young enough and foolish enough at that time to really believe there was any such thing. I had cut all my ties to the past—I wasn’t ever going to speak to Virgie again, or Mamma or Mamma Tampa, and Georgia was too involved in keeping house for Mr. Right to pay any attention to me, and Rose Annie was busy having babies with Buddy Rush, and she was just so weird now, anyway—well, I got in that green Buick and took off.
I was determined to make it on my own.
I went to Louisiana because I liked the sound of it, Louisiana , it sounded pretty and frivolous, like a party dress. It sounded like fun.
And Lord knows, I needed a little fun!
I was not but twenty-three, yet I felt ancient. I felt as old as the hills. All I’d done for the longest time was sing and take care of Annie May. I was tired of it. I felt like a dishrag, wrung out and hung up to dry.
Wayne Ricketts was standing right by the trailer with the yellow awning and the sign that said OFFICE. He was leaned up against a tree, smoking a cigarette. Something about the way he was standing suggested that he had all the time in the world. Now this was certainly attractive to me, since I felt like I’d been rushing around for several months like a chicken with its head cut off. He just stood there. No shirt, great tan. Wayne Ricketts was the only person I ever knew in my life that had truly green eyes.
“Yessum,” he said, stepping up to my car window. “How can I help you?”
I believe we both knew the answer to that question immediately.
But what I said was, “I’m looking for a trailer to rent,” and he said he thought there was one available. He leaned against my car, looking in the window, and all of a sudden I felt faint, like I was having a heatstroke.
“Oh,” I said. “Oh, I . . .” I felt awful.
“Here, honey,” he said. “Why don’t you and this precious baby child come inside with me for a minute, and relax and put your feet up. Then we’ll talk about the trailer.”
Now it was hot and humid that day in Shreveport, but not that hot and humid! Not enough to make a girl lose her natural mind. Which I proceeded to do. It was like I’d been charmed, the way old Cooney Hart up on Grassy Branch used to charm snakes. Of course, what old Cooney always said about the snakes could be said of me: Ye can’t charm a snake if it don’t want to be charmed, he’d say. So I reckon I was ripe for charming.
I got out of the Buick and picked up Annie May and walked with Wayne Ricketts to his trailer, which was not the manager’s trailer, he wasn’t the manager of course, he’d just been acting like it, to impress me. We went in his trailer and he fixed me a bourbon and Coke without even asking did I want one or not, and I sipped it while Annie May went lurching all around. The trailer was a mess. Wayne Ricketts apologized for it, saying his wife had left town several months before, and he wasn’t much of a hand at cleaning up.
“I never knew a man who was,” I said. Then I asked him if he had any children.
“No,” he said, but his face darkened, or saddened, or something, so I wondered if he was telling the truth. He started to say something else and then did not. Instead he put some more bourbon in my Coke and got Annie May a deck of cards to play with and came over and sat down beside me on the sofa with its stuffing coming out.
“You’re awful pretty,” he said. “What do you do?”
“I’m a singer,” I said. “What do you do?” By now I was feeling better.
“I’m an independent contractor,” he said.
“Contractor for what?” I asked. Some little voice in the back of my mind—it sounded a lot like Mamma—was saying, Be careful, be careful.
“Anything you want.” Wayne Ricketts smiled a big outdoors trust-me kind of smile, and I shut that little voice off.
“I just got me a job over at the Hayride. I was real lucky,” I said. “They just happened to have an opening. A girl quit today. That’s what I came down here hoping for.” Naturally I had noticed the guitar case propped up in the corner. “Is that yours?” I asked.
“Yes.” Wayne Ricketts moved over closer on the couch.
“You sing?” I asked.
“Used to.” Now his leg was touching mine. I couldn’t look at him. I couldn’t hardly breathe, to tell the truth.
Neither of us said anything for a minute. The sun was setting over this little putrid lake that was right next to the trailer park. Dust went around and around, slow and lazy, in the last red rays of sun that came in through the dirty glass on the trailer door. Annie May’s hair was shining like real gold in that sun where she sat on the floor and played. All of a sudden she looked up from her deck of cards and said something that sounded like, “I’m hungry.”
I started crying.
Wayne Ricketts stood up. “You reckon she’d like some cheese and crackers?” he asked. “I don’t keep much of a house.”
I pulled Annie May up on my lap and held her tight. “You don’t understand,” I said in between crying. “She hasn’t ever talked before. She can’t talk. She had polio.”
“Well, I did notice that little limp,” Wayne Ricketts said. “But I’d swear I heard her say she was hungry.” He went over and knelt down in front of us and turned Annie May’s little face toward his. “Honey, ain’t you hungry?” he asked.
Annie May bobbed her head up and down so hard her curls bounced.
“Well, then.” Wayne stood back up. He was so tall his head grazed the top of the trailer. He crossed the trailer in one stride and opened the little refrigerator, which didn’t have a thing in it but beer and Velveeta cheese and half a package of hot dogs. He got the cheese out and cut it up in little square pieces with his pocketknife, then put them all in a saucer and brought it over to Annie May where she sat beside me on the couch. “Sorry, no crackers.” He grinned at me.
Annie May started eating the cheese one little piece at a time, real dainty like she was at a tea party.
“Come on,” Wayne said to me. He pulled me up.
“Come on where?” I said. I couldn’t think straight, I couldn’t get over Annie May talking.
“Let’s go ge
t your stuff,” he said. “You’re beat. You all can stay over here with me tonight.”
I followed him out the door like a zombie, out into Louisiana. The lake was red in the last of the sun. Strange birds swooped overhead. Any direction I looked in, I could see distance—the swamp across the lake, the little twinkling lights of the cars way out on the highway, a blue blinking neon sign. I was used to mountains, hemming me in, holding me back. But Louisiana stretched out as far as I could see. Wayne Ricketts pulled me to him and kissed me hard.
We lived right there in that trailer for the whole time we were in Shreveport. I took Annie May’s starting to talk as a sign of good luck, and for a while it appeared to be so. Things were going my way at last. In those days, getting on the Hayride was a surefire way to get to Nashville, and I felt like I was on my way. I was aiming for the top. Webb Pierce had been here—shoot, he even played the Hayride for free at first, just to be on it! Even the late great Hank Williams had played the Hayride, plenty of times. It thrilled me all over just to stand on the floor where Hank had stood. And I did real well, catching the eye of Horace Logan right away. Horace started featuring me regular, and then he moved me up front—always a good sign.
Of course Wayne Ricketts took full credit for everything, everything I did, since he had elected to be my partner, my manager, and change my image to boot.