A Lush and Seething Hell

by John Hornor Jacobs

  I ignored the laughter. “So you learned it from a man in Cummins? What was his name? Had you ever heard verses like that anywhere else?”

  “Naw,” Otis said. “Never heard nothin’ like it, if you don’t count some older folks’ verses of ‘Ole Hannah.’”

  “Who did you get it from? These verses?” I asked again.

  Steck raised an eyebrow at me. “Feller by the name of Honeyboy.”

  “Just Honeyboy?” I said.

  “Naw, his Christian name’s Lucius, but everybody call him Honeyboy.”

  “Why?”

  “One time, ladies liked to kiss on him, I reckon,” Steck said. “Get a little sugar. But he got a head on him. Blue eyes, too, the devil. Some white man was bucking in his momma’s stall.”

  “Can you recall what he was in for?”

  “What you think?” The whiskey had gotten to Steck, and his deference to me had disappeared along with the liquid in the bottle. “Kilt a man. Maybe more. Least that what he said.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Sure. Hell yes I do,” Steck said. “Honeyboy in for life and nobody fucks with him.”

  “He sounds—” I searched for the word. “Formidable.”

  “Ain’t knowing that business, if you catch me, but he’s one baaad man, Honeyboy is.”

  That put me in mind of Stagger Lee.

  “You mentioned ‘Old Hannah,’” I said, and I guess the interrogative was clear in my voice.

  “Yep,” he said. “Ole Hannah the sun. She gone down now.” He began to sing in a quieter voice.

  Why don’t you go down, ole Hannah, well, well, well,

  Don’t you rise no more, don’t you rise no more.

  Why don’t you go down, ole Hannah, Hannah,

  Don’t you rise no more.

  Rise up, dead man, and help me plow my row.

  Wake up, dead man, and help me turn my row.

  Go down, ole Hannah, don’t you rise no more.

  If you rise in the morning,

  Set the world on fire.

  “Apocalyptic,” Bunny said softly. He lit a cigarette, took up the bottle and drew on it, and then chased that with a deep inhalation of smoke. I took the bottle and drank some myself.

  It was simple enough to understand; a people persecuted and ground down within a system constructed and maintained to ensure their subjugation would logically, at some point—when change looked hopeless—dream of a cleansing, overwhelming fire. To end their own misery. For justice against their oppressors.

  I felt a great shame and anger spill over me. These are my brothers. These are my brothers. We are all connected. The hopelessness I felt in that moment was overwhelming. Not just for these men’s continued suffering, but for the fact that their suffering made the wall between us even harder to surmount.

  “Thank you, thank you, gentlemen,” I said, busying myself, uncomfortable with the welling of emotion. I withdrew my wallet and gave each man two dollars—such a puny gesture. I cleared my throat. “Can we get a recording of ‘Old Hannah’? And then I’ll leave the rest of the bottle with you and we’ll be on our way.”

  15

  Harlan Parker: Rosalie Davis

  Bleary, slightly drunk (once again), we were back in Nashville before it was too late, and Schweitzer and his wife had prepared a cold meal of bologna sandwiches and milk for us, which we fell to with great gusto. There truly is no hunger as ravenous as one spurred on by a long fast and exacerbated by whiskey. Afterward, we brought in the SoundScriber from the car and played our day’s recordings for both Anne and Ramsay, who, I think, understood intellectually what we were trying to accomplish—preserving the culture of the folk of the South—but emotionally were not in a place where they could accept that these black voices could have the power to move them. They would rather remain in the safe, sanitized halls of Liszt, Chopin, Debussy.

  On the twenty-sixth, we drove into Alabama following the directions of Ramsay.

  The following day, we drove south and west to record a woman named Rosalie Davis—a real prodigy of the guitar with a voice like a horn of Jericho—who knew “Stagger Lee” but refused to sing it for us and instead insisted on presenting us only spirituals. Her ability with the guitar made the performances a pleasure, but the Library of Congress has quite enough versions of “Amazing Grace” and “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” for this century.

  I am not concerned with matters of salvation.

  If not the opposite, then rumors of it.

  June 28, 1938

  A day of rest. Slept until almost noon. Woke to find Bunny gone, Anne and Ramsay gone, alone in a foreign house.

  Spent my time indexing and cataloging the acetates; transcribing the dialogue and lyrics of the songs. By evening I was recharged.

  Anne and Ramsay returned from visiting her parents, and after a light supper of tuna casserole, we listened to their lovely burnished-wood Coronado radio—Russ Morgan and his orchestra presented by Philip Morris, Horace Heidt’s Brigadiers brought to you by Chevrolet, Fibber McGee and Molly sponsored by Johnson’s Wax, Jimmy Fiddler’s Hollywood Gossip sponsored by Drene shampoo. I grew tired of the endless cheeriness of the programming and constant reminders of sponsors and advertisers and borrowed a novel from Ramsay, thanking them for their hospitality and retiring to the sleeping porch. I read some of that gentleman Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! and found the prose labyrinthine and his fixation upon a certain class of men—the planter class—odious in its worldview and treatment of his fellow man. For Faulkner to linger so lovingly on the doomed fates of the Southern aristocracy while ignoring almost half the population—the black community teeming with life, song, love, hate, violence, longing, and all of the raw emotion of creation and most definitely fiction—he must’ve been a very myopic and shuttered man.

  Late that evening, Bunny returned. He walked with the loose, happy gait of a man who’d recently been vigorous. Wherever he’d been—I’d imagine a whorehouse, though I have no idea how he had the money for it, his per diem surely would not cover that—he’d been drinking.

  “Heard some news,” Bunny said, pulling off his boots and sitting down on his cot on the porch. “They say there’s a feller in a big tent out on Obion River who’s doing an old-time chautauqua. Going by the name of Hines.”

  “Gramp Hines!” I said, sitting up.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We going to find him?”

  “I feel like we are bound to,” I said. “He falls within the purview of this commission. And . . .”

  “We messed with his good-time gal.”

  “I feel like that’s a misnomer,” I said. “Rather, his wife.”

  “If Amoira—what I can recall of her—if she’s his wife, I’ll eat my hat.” Bunny had stripped off his shirt and lay back heavily on the cot. I winced, hoping the canvas wouldn’t tear. We had both put on some weight since our days overseas. “Rather, his good-time gal,” he said, mimicking me.

  “No call for that.”

  “For what?”

  “Getting personal,” I said. Bunny laughed.

  “So, we going after him?” he said.

  “Of course we are. ‘He knowed fifty-two more songs than anyone else,’” I said, doing my best West Virginia mountain dialect impression.

  “Well, that’s just beneath you, Harlan. You’d never do that to Otis Steck,” Bunny said, shaking his head. As he closed his eyes, I realized he was right. It was easier for me to scorn poor whites for what they are than poor blacks. What does that say about me as a man? “And that was Smoot, not Gramp Hines, anyway,” Bunny said, voice thick with slumber.

  Soon he was snoring and I followed suit.

  16

  Cromwell: Morning and Exploitation

  “What the hell, Crumb,” Hattie says. “I’ve been calling. Had to Uber over here.” She places her hand on my forehead as if checking for a fever. “You been here all night?”

  “I couldn’t sleep and wanted to listen to the acetates and rea
d Parker’s field journal. Didn’t think I should wake you.”

  She looks at him closely. She’s younger than him, and his junior in the hierarchy of the Library. Yet, her concern is apparent. “You should’ve woke me. You’re not up to—”

  “The journal. It’s fascinating,” he says. “Listen to this.” He reads to her the section with Amoira Hines and then plays her the recording.

  “Well, there’s definitely something going on there. Sounds like two dudes going at it. Course, back then, they never could’ve admitted it. ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ and all that,” she says. “Never had moonshine before, but apparently, that shit is like tequila but on steroids.”

  “There’s a woman’s voice, too. The laughter is remarkably unnerving.”

  “I’ll say. There’s some weird shit going on there. But the men grunting and knocking boots. I’m thinking this guy is closeted.”

  “Doubtful. From the journal, I get the impression that when they were soldiers, both Bunny and Parker frequented whorehouses in Europe,” Cromwell says.

  “That doesn’t mean anything. But lemme see that,” Hattie says. She holds out her hand, impatiently. She takes the journal and reads for a long while. When Cromwell gestures for her to return the journal to him, she shrugs him off. “Go get us some breakfast. I didn’t get any since you never showed. I need time to read this shit—damn, his handwriting is crap.”

  Dismissed, he leaves. Using his iPhone for directions, Cromwell drives to the nearest Starbucks and buys them both breakfast sandwiches and large coffees. He sits outside the store in the predawn light under the glowing green-and-white sign, staring abjectly into traffic. Cars hissing past on the wet street. It has rained lightly, melting the snow, breaking down the begrimed ice drifts like dirty sugar cubes in black tea. Bare trees mix with power lines, cutting geometrical silhouettes into the gray sky. He goes back to the house.

  Hattie eats her sandwich and drinks her rapidly cooling coffee as she continues to read. At some point, she shuts the journal with a snap. There’s a slightly disgusted look on her face. “Dollars to donuts, Parker had syphilis rotting his brain. Thanks to his time overseas. Or in New Orleans. They might not have been closeted, but Bunny calling the woman—Amoira, what kind of name is that?—a ‘good-time gal’ tells me neither of them had a high opinion of women.”

  Cromwell had not thought of either of those things and says so.

  “Of course you haven’t. You’re like Parker two point oh.”

  He doesn’t know how to take that, so he waves it off. “I don’t have syphilis, if that’s what you’re saying. Whatever the case, if you look at the appended transcripts, it’s quite an addition to the Library,” he says. “Many new songs, the unheard-of versions of ‘Stagger Lee.’”

  “Sure.” Hattie sniffs. “But this is the part of the Library’s mission I’ve always been a little uncomfortable with. All his protestations of love for the black man. Their brotherhood.”

  “You don’t buy it?”

  “Maybe. Was a different time and woke white dudes like Parker and this Bunny fella were rare. But doesn’t mean their false protestations of love for the Negro weren’t—”

  “False? What do you mean?”

  She holds up her hand to silence him. “Doesn’t mean their false protestations of love and brotherhood weren’t justifications for their exploitation of these poor folks. Both black and white.”

  “Exploitation? I don’t see where you’re coming from.”

  “Of course you don’t,” she says. “You’re a part of the same system they were.”

  “If I’m not mistaken, you get your paycheck from the same place I do.”

  She tilts her head. “It’s a matter of perspective, Crumb. I see this shit for what it really is and you’ve got your blinders on. Ever think that, back in Parker’s day, the mission of the Library was coming from a race-based viewpoint? That these fine, upstanding, woke-as-fuck dudes from 1938 were collecting for the archive, but the archive itself was geared toward a white audience? Academic circles were almost wholly white. And all these fellas would go back from collecting and make the speaking circuit to audiences full of white faces wanting to hear ‘primitive’ music and stories of the proletariat.”

  Cromwell shrugs. “Whatever else it is, or represented at the time, it’s data, to be interpreted how it’s interpreted. You’re here now.”

  “And you’re lucky as fuck I am,” Hattie says. “Look, I appreciate what he’s doing, what John and Alan Lomax did, capturing and preserving the culture. But don’t tell me part of it wasn’t exploitative, Crumb.” She pulls out her phone, scrolling through the data displayed on-screen. “Reminded me. Richard Wright said that John Lomax’s treatment of Lead Belly was the greatest cultural swindle of the twentieth century.”

  “I believe Lead Belly successfully sued John Lomax,” Cromwell says.

  “Damn right he did! And took back the rights to his songs,” Hattie says, a triumphant expression on her face. “But he was one of the lucky ones. The Lomaxes, I think, really weren’t in it to exploit black folks consciously. At least Alan wasn’t.”

  “I agree there,” he says, thinking of Lomax’s writings. He was a fan, pure and simple. The hardships the man endured for his love of race music were remarkable, especially in the face of the frowning white society—

  “But still!” she continues. “What happened because of his work is unforgivable. You listen to all the rock-and-roll white dudes in the sixties and seventies discovering Lomax’s recordings. ‘Midnight Special,’ ‘Sloop John B,’ ‘Black Betty,’ ‘Going Down the Road Feelin’ Bad,’ ‘Motherless Children,’ and of course ‘Stagger Lee’ . . . Shit, Crumb, every longhaired dude with a guitar had a part in strip-mining the black experience. Men like Harlan Parker and John and Alan Lomax made that possible.”

  “Your definition of ‘unforgivable’ and mine are quite different. So, better to leave all that history and culture unrecorded?” Cromwell says.

  “No,” Hattie says. “Better to acknowledge up front the inherent exploitative nature of collecting it.”

  “Seems to me that the exploitation comes from the listener, not the person who records,” he says. But Cromwell also slumps into the chair he’s been sitting in all night. “I don’t want to argue about it.”

  “Of course you don’t,” Hattie says, echoing her earlier statement.

  “I’m tired, Hattie,” he says.

  An angry word leaps to her mouth and her face contorts, and then she seems surprised for an instant and she unclenches. As if remembering.

  The ghost of his wife and son stand even here.

  He hates her pity then. He asks, “What did you think of the Amoira Hines stuff? Didn’t you find it bizarre?”

  “Not really our concern. But, yeah. The whole thing is strange, Crumb,” Hattie says. She looks at the walls, at the hidden and locked secret room. “This house is fucked up. This room is fucked up. Why lock all this stuff away?”

  “If Parker did have syphilis eating his brain, maybe his sister had to lock away all this stuff to help control him.”

  “Maybe.” Hattie shrugs. “Why not just destroy it? Maybe his particular stripe of crazy was catching.” Yet even as she says it, she moves to her seat near the TASCAM and looks at Cromwell expectantly. “Well, let’s get this party started.” She presses the power button on the Bluetooth speakers. They make a small digital noise to let her know they’ve powered up, and she connects the miniplug.

  He’s tired from a sleepless night and for a moment Cromwell lets the thought of his hotel room and its bed distract him. He rubs his face and drinks the last of his coffee. But then Cromwell places another acetate disc on the turntable and sets the tone arm on the spinning surface. The room crackles into sound. Harlan Parker’s voice says, “Gramp Hines, accompanied by his family, recorded July 5 on commission by the United States Library of Congress.”

  He opens the field journal.

  17

&n
bsp; Harlan Parker: Chautauqua on the Banks of the Obion

  June 29, 1938

  Goodbyes are always like contrary motion in music—the rising melody of being on the road, and the descending notes full of the sadness of leaving friends behind. I thanked Ramsay and Anne for their hospitality vehemently and vowed to fête them if they ever came to Washington. I just hope my pocket is flush enough to do so if they ever come to call.

  After our departure, Bunny remained cranky and unresponsive to my efforts at conversation—his hangover had seated itself in the flesh—and he smoked and grunted at all of my directions. With each shifting of the map, I could tell I was irritating him and decided, since he was here due to my benevolence and would assuredly have his hand out for his per diem before long, to make sure I folded the map with crispness and often.

  After we’d eaten lunch, and Bunny’s demeanor had softened, he said, “I know what you tell the subjects, but what’s the score on your fixation for ‘Stagger Lee’?” He lit a cigarette and pushed himself back in the Studebaker’s seat. “You’re really hot under the collar for all this devil malarkey.”

  How could I say it? “Stagolee,” or “Stackalee,” or “Stagger Lee” has a different modality for every mind and mouth that renders it, I’ve come to learn. It is a distinctly American song. And like this fair nation, it is impoverished and wars with itself. Its myriad verses contain the stress of inequality, the iniquity of plenty versus want. “Stagger Lee” is a mirror that reflects the desires, and sometimes the shadowy animus, of every man or woman that gives it voice. But with every morphology I’ve found, researched, and documented, I become more convinced that there’s an ur-version of the song, when it first divorced itself from real human events—the sad story of Lee Shelton and William Lyons—and became the upwelling of American cultures before its popularity shattered it into a million scintillate shards.