Standing on the gallows,
His head held way up high,
Twelve o’clock they kilt him,
We was all glad to see him die.
That bad man,
Stackalee.
It’s curious, Cromwell notes, that at the end of the song—a song that has been sung from a remove—Smoot inserts himself in the last couplet. We was all glad to see him die. We. Glad to see a black man put to death. That bad man, Stackalee.
There’s silence on the recording and then Harlan Parker’s voice sounds amid the crackle and hiss.
Very good, Mister Sawyer. Do you know any other verses of this song? Verses after the last one?
Don’t rightly know what you’re talkin’ ’bout, mister.
Verses that continue the story of Stagger Lee?
Continue the story? We’re a god–a-fearin’ people, we don’t sing no songs ’bout that kind of trash.
But you have heard other verses of “Stagger Lee”?
You ain’t got enough shine or tobacky for that. How ’bout “No More Hiding in the Valley”?
All right, Mister Sawyer, that sounds just fine.
Smoot Sawyer launches into another song, very similar in structure to the first, about a boy chasing a girl all over the “holler.” Once he catches her, they go and pick flowers from her mother’s grave. Cromwell scrambles for a notepad and pen from Hattie’s case, and takes down the name of the song and the key and a rough guess at the chord progression. He writes, “No More Hiding in the Valley.” Unknown song and verses. Then: “Stagger Lee,” extra verses? At the end of the record, Cromwell uses the lever that lifts the tone arm. Hattie thumbs the TASCAM’s menu, retrieving the audio file. She hands him the headphones, he places them over his ears, and the crackle and hiss come through. The recording is not perfect, but it is a perfect capture of the degraded audio of Harlan Parker’s recording. Cromwell knows either he or Hattie can batch-process the files once they are back at the offices, removing some noise, and play with the levels. But they definitely have it.
“What was all that about continuing the story of Stackalee?” Hattie asks. “They hanged him.”
“And were glad to see him die,” Cromwell says, shaking his head. He lifts Harlan Parker’s field journal and opens it. “Hopefully, this will give us more answers to what Parker was looking for.”
7
Harlan Parker: The Field Journal
[Inside cover]
Property of
Harlan Parker
If found please return to:
212 Kenmore Ln
Apartment 2
Alexandria, Virginia
By commission of the Library of Congress, to make assay of
the secular folk musics of West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee, including
the Mississippi River Valley, and the Ozark Mountains.
June 6, 1938
The commission has begun, and not a day too soon; I was desperate short of money. The advance on my last book is long gone and there are no royalties forthcoming. I have not had letter or telegraph from my agent in months. I am worried that he’s closed up shop and moved on to some other profession selling something that people actually have the money to buy. Nowadays, most folk don’t have the extra income to spend on print unless it’s a newspaper.
Everywhere you look, there are bedraggled and sad men, down on their luck, hand out for a dime. Without my good fortune in securing this, in a month I would be much like every other Joe, destitute in the breadline or waiting for a tin of cabbage soup.
Even with the money from the Library of Congress, I will have to camp and sleep under the stars more than sleep under a roof. I have sent letters to friends in Knoxville, Memphis, and Greenville and to the administrators of the Federal Writers’ Project in hopes I might be able to bed down in comfort. The Darcy Arkansas Folk Society has promised quite a hospitable stay.
I have also made contact with Edmund Whitten, who will be coming with me. Indeed, when I saw him and mentioned that I would require a driver and all-around assistant (and there was a stipend allotted for the job) he jumped at the opportunity. A good man, Bunny, and one who deserves a better shake at life than he’s got since we returned from Europe. The hard erosion of time and fortune should have a wearing effect on ideals, I would think, but Bunny remains as loyal and enthusiastic as the young man I knew so long ago. There was a time we did not think we would see our twentieth birthdays, as his is very close to mine. We are of an age. In the Somme, scurrying through the trenches, caked in mud, mold growing on our uniforms, he often was the only voice that kept me from going mad, throwing away my Enfield, and squirming out and up through the mud into the light, in the sights of the Germans. Why I should have fared better since the war than Edmund remains a mystery to me. Maybe because he tends toward red—an admiration of Trotsky and having worked for the Daily Worker—which concerns me. I wonder if I can steer him away from that on this trip.
I’ve settled my affairs the best I am able and tomorrow morning we shall meet at the Library of Congress to collect our vehicle and recording equipment. Just today, I received a letter from John Lomax, the senior fellow at the Library of Congress, instructing me to ask each subject to record “Stagger Lee”! As a point of commonality, since it spans both white and black cultures. As if that were not my goal to start with, though they hardly could know that.
I am quite eager to begin and shall have trouble sleeping tonight. I have never relished the idea of remaining in Washington, DC, too long. Bad memories from my youth, after Mother died. There are ghosts here. Ghosts of myself. Ghosts of people I knew. Ghosts of memory, of my time at the Harrow Club, a performing servant for rich men. I am happy to put its humid streets behind me.
I need a drink and now that I have the money, I shall find one. It has been too long.
8
Harlan Parker: A Dream of Mother Chautauqua
June 7, 1938
This morning, we collected the recording device—the SoundScriber, as its small metal plaque bolted onto a wooden side proudly proclaimed—along with its inordinately heavy Edison batteries, the microphone, the mixer, and the gas-operated generator, the “genny,” or so the khaki-clad technician at the Library of Congress called it, as he demonstrated its usage and the process of charging the batteries. All of this we managed to fit within the used Studebaker that Harold Spivacke, our direct superior at the Library, had procured for us for a mere ninety-seven dollars (which is unsurprising, considering its condition: its interior worn and smelling of cigars and grease fire, its Motorola radio silent and unusable—the tubes blown out, the technician tells us). The recording device, however, fits easily in the massive trunk, and the batteries and crates of virgin acetate discs take up most of the backseat. There is room to spare for our personal bags and varied and sundry other gear.
We were on the road before noon.
More than two hundred miles before dark.
Hot, even in June. Sweat beading in the interior of the car, Bunny cursing at the stiff gears and clutch. The Studebaker has a definite pull to the right. Bunny and I discussed the current state of affairs, and caught up.
“After my divorce—” Bunny said.
“Divorce? I didn’t know you had even been married!” I said.
“Evelyn was too radical even for me,” he said.
“How so?”
“After I was canned from the Daily Worker—can you believe that? The mugs, laying off workers from a Communist rag! Well, Evelyn was hot to go to Michigan to rally the black workers outside of Detroit in unionizing efforts. I was not as hot.”
“That doesn’t sound good.”
“It wasn’t. So she found another fella that had the same sort of vim and vigor for Dostoyevsky.”
I laughed. “I much prefer Pushkin,” I said. He smiled but kept his eyes on the road.
“And you?” Bunny said eventually. “Lost track of you for a while.”
“Traveled some. Living off the money
I made from one book, trying to write another book.”
“I heard you were in North Africa. Morocco,” he said, chuckling. “Your love of the tribal rhythms of the dark continent and all that.” He waved his hand, as if indicating a small thing and not the massiveness of Africa, its vast and disparate peoples, and their innumerable cultures and musics.
“Don’t call it that,” I said sharply. “You’re showing your ignorance. It’s not something I’d spend years studying if I thought it a trifle.”
“I don’t have any problem with it. I love swing,” he said. “And your time in New Orleans?” He was asking about my trip to the delta. This is how Bunny talks—a bright but restless mind, hopping all over the garden of thoughts. He laughed. “Never had absinthe. You ever try that down there? I hear it’s the only place you can, in all of the States.”
“Drank a whole bottle trying to bring on the hallucinations. The Green Fairy. All I got was a bad hangover and an empty wallet.”
“I hear the women down there are not to be believed.”
“It’s hot, and everything is sticky,” I said, and left it at that.
It is lovely being with Bunny again, and too easy to fall into the patterns of soldiers’ talk. Together we have faced horrors, and so together we are used to normalcy in the face of the strange, the bizarre. Even the hostile.
We drove on into the night, until we found a remote barn somewhere around Morgantown, West Virginia, and it is there I write this, by the light of an oil lantern. It’s comfortable in the Studebaker’s cabin, and I can stretch out here and sleep on the front seat if I draw in my feet some. Bunny is sacked out in a sleeping bag on the ground in a moldy and graying pile of hay, which, at least, is dry. I must join him in slumber soon. Yet I am keyed up and want a drink. I overindulged last night and the only thing for it is more, but there are no bars or liquor stores I know of within a hundred miles. Tomorrow, we will have to find a town large enough for one. The Lomaxes, in our correspondence, inform me that tobacco and liquor are a necessity for the getting of recordings. It will take whiskey to pry the songs from them. It will not hurt me at all to join in, I imagine, once the SoundScriber is cutting.
I cannot sleep.
I tried, truly I did. And I did nod off and dream, for a short while. The same dream. I was just a boy. Mother and I were at our last chautauqua again and there was a festive air and she had already drunk a bottle of wine and we entered the mouth-shaped entrance at the tent grounds, a Rabelaisian touch that some organizer whimsically threw together. Mother was arm in arm with her new beau—the tall, pale Matthew Insull—and he gave me a dime to spend however I wished. I ran off to watch the Negro minstrels and dancers. I had grown up attending the Mother Chautauqua in New York, and that tradition had continued and spread all over the country into massive affairs with multiple tents, some featuring speakers conversing on the history of agriculture, theology, philosophy, the natural sciences. Finding myself there in the landscape of dreams did not surprise me. All emotion was blanketed, lethargic. I moved like I would swimming through molasses. Or sinking in water.
The minstrels arrayed themselves on the rough pine-planked stage and sang and danced by inconstant kerosene light and gave me peppermint candies after I clapped and offered up my dime. They played “Precious Lord” and “Take My Hand” and “Let My Heart Catch on Fire,” and when they saw I was becoming tired of spirituals (for I have never, even as a lad, been much fond of organized religion), they launched into more bumptious and robust songs. It was night and couples swayed in the darkness, some kissing immodestly, but most holding hands. White people, white faces, come to see the Southern minstrels. The songs swelled. Some made me blush. Some made me want to dance. Some of the black men and women came down from the raw pinewood stage past the kerosene footlights and surrounded me, laughing. The women clasped me to their breasts and kissed me and pulled me onto the stage, where they danced and held my hands. I was just a boy. Moving through song after song, they laughed and imitated Bill Monroe’s twang, as he was the featured artist. It quieted and a kind black man sat me down on a bench on the side of the stage as if I were some prince—an honored guest—and then from somewhere behind him came a simple voice ringing out.
A guitar joined him, then a tambourine. And I heard it for the first time.
“Stagger Lee.”
I do not know his name, the man who sang it. But I remember his abject face as he came into the kerosene light of the stage, his voice rising and falling. He had burnished skin and bright eyes and was dressed in a dapper suit. As he sang, somehow in the fabric of dream, I knew my mother was drowning, swimming drunk in the nearby lake. She sucked water into her desperate lungs as the story of a bad man played out.
And in my dream, I became Stagger Lee. I shot a man and was hanged. I have shot men, though. Bunny killed men as well. At Reims. At Ypres. We both wore uniforms when we did and that guilt does not weigh me down so heavy. Yet I have bad dreams. As I gasped for breath, my mother went below the water. As I thrashed at the end of a rope, she clawed toward the surface of Lake Chautauqua, the moon a sliver of shifting refraction above her. Was that the silhouette of a man? Was Insull with her?
Stillness and then cold. An inhuman hand pressing down, holding me there, below. A voice.
I found myself in Hell. I have seen its mark on the living world, I know it well: The wrecked and body-strewn warrens of the Somme. The muddy battlefields of Europe. When I walk in dreams, I can recognize it. Hell is not full of fire and burning pits like you usually hear. Hell is cold, a maze of rotten trenches.
But Hell is also brightly lit, an office, and tastes of bitter coffee while some man, a man in a uniform, puts his hand on my shoulder and says, “I’m sorry about your mother. We’ve contacted your grandparents and they are coming for you. Can you describe this man? His name is Insull? Can you tell me what he looked like, son?”
I woke, sweating. This summer it will be too hot to sleep without corn whiskey or drink. I will find some today.
It’s been years, obviously, but the dream haunts me.
I think about that song all too often.
Maybe I can sleep now, in these few short hours before dawn. Today, I will find alcohol.
And another version of “Stagger Lee.”
They say every day is a new beginning. But I think they mean there are no endings, just beginnings. And that is a comforting thought.
June 8, 1938
We found a man named Anderson who sold us a hay-filled croker sack with ten mason jars full of moonshine, far back in the overhung hills. It came dear enough, despite prohibition’s end—the Twenty-First Amendment does not quite yet have even distribution across West Virginia. Once the money was exchanged, Anderson was quite content to take us to Mister “Smoot” Sawyer.
Smoot Sawyer was a thickset older white man, stout and ruddy faced, with arms like trees. He had the sort of solidity that comes with a highly physical life of manual labor. I feared that if he gripped my hand and squeezed with some intention, I might be handicapped or rendered feeble.
He sat as if waiting for us on the front porch of his log cabin in a thick copse of the unkempt forests of “West Virginny,” a rifle close enough to grasp, smoking a corncob pipe. A nervous female hand pulled back calico drapes and let them fall quickly. A spotted hound lay near him, and I soon realized the dog’s back legs were paralyzed.
Anderson, who was slightly intoxicated at this point from drinking some of his own stock, said, “Mister Smoot, got some fellers here from the gubmint, want to record some songs.”
“The gubmint?” Smoot said, hand subtly but surely reaching for his gun. “The gubmint’s gettin’ into the music business?”
I slowly explained to Mister Sawyer the mission of the Library of Congress, and the Division of Music, and gave a perfunctory overview of its history. He seemed to have trouble understanding that we wanted regional or songs more recently crafted, outside of the public purview. But once we presented a mason ja
r of moonshine and a pack of cigarettes, he readily enough played for us.
It took an hour to move the SoundScriber to the porch (Sawyer would not allow us to record inside his cabin), attach the batteries, and cut a test acetate—our first!—and prepare another twelve-inch for the songs.
I played the man back our test acetate, and the faint sounds of our conversation emanated what the SoundScriber had recorded. Smoot whistled, eyes large. “I ain’t never heard a ghost before!” He laughed. The man had many questions about the device, and unfortunately took some of the short recording time asking them, on the first disc. I will transcribe them later, once I have world, enough, and time. Sawyer did, however, know a version of “Stagger Lee”—or “Stackalee,” as he called it. He played an up-tempo version of that song and followed it with a colorful local ballad, “No More Hiding in the Valley.”
It was an interesting modality of “Stagger Lee.” When pressed about the later verses, the verses more infernal in nature, Sawyer begged off, proclaiming a sort of rustic righteousness that did not sit well with me, though I made no indication of it.
I played back the recording to Sawyer, who hooted and laughed and dusted his leg with his hat. “I’m fixin’ to be a danged radio man, Lord help me!”
When asked if he knew other musicians we might record, he listed a couple near Pineville. I took down the names and Bunny and I made our adieus, dropped a very drunk Anderson back at his barbershop, and drove south.
We camped on the banks of the Guyandotte River. There was enough timber on the shores for a merry fire, and both Bunny and I sampled a fair bit of the moonshine to be tight enough for easy sleep, though my companion fell into slumber far before I did.
I write this now, weary, drunk, and ready for bed. Still, Smoot Sawyer’s rendition of “Stagger Lee” peals in my head. But the forgotten verses sound as well, indistinct and veiled, and lead me on.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 16