by Mezz Mezzrow
Bessie had such a ringing vibration in that voice of hers, and her tones boomed out so clear and clanging full, you could hear her singing all the way down the street. There was a traffic jam out in front of that café; cats and their kittens blocked up the sidewalk, hypnotized by the walloping blues that came throbbing out of Bessie’s throat. She was putting away Young Woman Blues, one of her greatest numbers, when we eased in:
Woke up this mornin’ when chickens was crowin’ for day,
Felt on the right side of my pillow, my man had gone away.
By his pillow he left a note
Readin’ “I’m sorry Jane you got my goat,
No time to marry, no time to settle down.”
I’m a young woman and ain’t done runnin’ roun’,
I’m a young woman and ain’t done runnin’ roun’.
Some people call me a hobo, some call me a bum,
Nobody knows my name, nobody knows what I’ve done,
I’m as good as any woman in your town.
I ain’t no high yaller, I’m a beginner brown,
I ain’t gonna marry, ain’t gon’ settle down,
I’m gon’ drink good moonshine and run these browns down.
See that long lonesome road, Lawd, you know it’s gotta end,
And I’m a good woman, and I can get plenty men.
Dave and I just melted together in the blaze of Bessie’s singing; that wasn’t a voice she had, it was a flame-thrower licking out across the room. Right after that Bessie launched into another one of the numbers that made her famous, Reckless Blues:
When I was a nothin’ but a child, when I was a nothin’ but a child,
All you men tried to drive me wild.
Now I’m growin’ old, now I am growin’ old,
And I got what it takes to get all of you men told,
My momma says I’m reckless, my daddy says I’m wild,
My momma says I’m reckless, my daddy says I’m wild,
I ain’t good-lookin’ but I’m somebody’s angel child.
Daddy, momma wants some lovin,’ daddy, momma wants some huggin’,
Hand it pretty poppa, momma wants some lovin’ I found,
Hand it pretty poppa, momma wants some lovin’ right now.
Bessie was a real woman, all woman, all the femaleness the world ever saw in one sweet package. She was tall and brown-skinned, with great big dimples creasing her cheeks, dripping good looks—just this side of voluptuous, buxom and massive but stately too, shapely as a hour-glass, with a high-voltage magnet for a personality. When she was in a room her vitality flowed out like a cloud and stuffed the air till the walls bulged. She didn’t have any mannerisms, she never needed any twirls and twitches to send those golden notes of hers on their sunshiny way. She just stood there and sang, letting the love and the laughter run out of her, and the heaving sadness too; she felt everything and swayed just a little with the glory of being alive and feeling, and once in a while, with a grace that made you want to laugh and cry all at once, she made an eloquent little gesture with her hand. Bessie maybe never practised her scales in any conservatory of music, wrestling with arpeggios, but she was an artist right down to her fingertips—a very great artist, born with silver strings for vocal cords and a foaming, churning soul to keep them a-quiver.
Her style was so individual that nobody else ever grasped it. The way she let her rich music tumble out was a perfect example of improvisation—the melody meant nothing to her, she made up her own melody to fit the poetry of her story, phrasing all around the original tune if it wasn’t just right, making the vowels come out just the right length, dropping the consonants that might trip up her story, putting just enough emphasis on each syllable to make you really know what she was getting at. She lived every story she sang; she was just telling you how it happened to her.
Jimmy Noone’s band was too much. Playing with him then were Teddy Weatherford on piano, Tubby Hall on drums, Johnny St. Cyr on guitar and banjo, Little Mitch (George Mitchell) on trumpet, and Kid Ory on trombone; and what Jimmy didn’t do with that clarinet of his, weaving in and through and all around those cats like an expert hackie in heavy traffic, just ain’t been invented yet. Jimmy’s clarinet was the most beautiful I have ever heard in my whole life, even better than Johnny Dodds’, and if I can play that instrument at all today it’s thanks to his inspiration. He played strictly New Orleans-style, with a soulful tone instead of the shrill twittering effects you hear today, and he played all over that instrument from top to bottom, hitting every register but the cash one. The little flourishes he came up with “in the windows,” fill-ins at the ends of phrases where the other players took a breath, were really amazing. He was always inventing new things, but they were in the New Orleans idiom every time.
A few months later, when Jimmy’s band was playing in the Apex Club, some distinguished visitors dropped in to catch him. Word had got to the Chicago Symphony guys that the clarinetist at the Apex could do more things on his instrument than the law allows, and the famous composer Maurice Ravel, who was in town to be guest conductor for the symphony, showed up at the Apex one night with the first clarinetist of that longhair crowd. His mouth dropped open at the first riff Jimmy played, and stayed that way all night long; and that classical clarinetist thought he was hearing things too. “Amazing,” Ravel would say to his pal, and the guy would answer “Incredible,” and they see-sawed back and forth on their unbelief like that until the joint closed up. Ravel spent hours writing down Jimmy’s riffs as he played, and the clarinetist swore over and over that he couldn’t understand how Jimmy could get those effects out of the instrument. When he left, the composer said he was going to write a symphony around the phrases he had heard. I don’t know whether he ever got around to doing it, because I ain’t kept in touch with the highbrow world, but I’ll bet that if he tried he sure had trouble.
After her number that night, Bessie and Jimmy came over to our table for a few drinks. When I told her how long I had been listening to her records, how wonderful I thought they were and how Cemetery Blues inspired me to become a musician when I was a kid, she was very modest—she just smiled, showing those great big dimples of hers, fidgeted around and said, “Yeah, you like that?” I asked her would she do Cemetery Blues for me and she busted out laughing. “Boy,” she said, “what you studyin’ ’bout a cemetery for? You ought to be out in the park with some pretty chick.” That night, and every time I saw her from then on, Bessie kept kidding me about the kinky waves in my hair; she’d stroke my head once or twice and say, “You ain’t had your hair fried, is you, boy? Where’d you get them pretty waves? I get seasick every time I look at them.” Many’s the time I almost peeled my whole goddamn scalp off, to hand to her on a silver platter.
You ever hear what happened to that fine, full-of-life female woman? You know how she died? Well, she went on for years, being robbed by stinchy managers who would murder their own mothers for a deuce of blips, having to parade around in gaudy gowns full of dime-store junk and throw away her great art while the lushes and morons made cracks about her size and shape. She drank a lot, and there must have been plenty of nights when she got the blues she couldn’t lose, but she went on singing, pouring out the richness and the beauty in her that never dried up. Then one day in 1937 she was in an automobile crash down in Mississippi, the Murder State, and her arm was almost tore out of its socket. They brought her to the hospital but it seemed like there wasn’t any room for her just then—the people around there didn’t care for the color of her skin. The car turned around and drove away, with Bessie’s blood dripping on the floor-mat. She was finally admitted to another hospital where the officials must have been color-blind, but by that time she had lost so much blood that they couldn’t operate on her, and a little later she died. See that lonesome road, Lawd, it got to end, she used to sing. That was how the lonesome road ended up for the greatest folk singer this country ever heard—with Jim Crow directing the traffic.
I crie
d when I heard about it. A lot of people did. She was mother, sister, friend and lovin’ woman to me and to a lot of guys, and she taught us most all we knew and gave us the courage to keep straight with our music, and they took her and murdered her down South—murdered her in cold blood because, like she said, she wasn’t no high yaller, just a beginner brown, and more real woman than those Jim Crow mammyjamming whites would know what to do with.
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Wolverines? We were more like night owls. Night after night, soon as we finished work at White City, we’d shoot over to my house for a record-playing session, and we never broke up until the teeninetsy hours of the morning. I was beginning to collect hot records like some guys collect telephone numbers, and the ones I had would make a record-fan’s head spin around like a turntable. My landlady finally got her claws on that collection to make up for some back rent. What some people won’t stoop to for the stuff with the dead ones’ pictures.
We had a ritual for these music-appreciation classes: first we dragged out some bottles of gin and made sure a can of golden-leaf was handy, so everybody could gain altitude in his own way. A paper bag was wrapped around the overhead glimmer to curb the brightness, and then we all hunched over my old hand-wound victrola like a committee of voodoo witch doctors in confab over some herbs. The incantations came fast and furious. “Did you hear that?” one guy would whisper when he heard some extra-special riff, and another would exclaim “Get a load of that—let’s put it back!” We were always jumping up and putting the needle back to play a good passage over. Every time there was an explosive break in the music we’d all raise our arms high, like a calisthenics class, then bring them down in unison, yelling “BAM!” so loud the whole house shook. We must have looked like a gang of Arabs in shirtsleeves and suspenders, bamming and salaaming towards some Decca-Mecca. We sure used to scoff back some during those sessions—my wife Bonnie would come on with a mess of green-apple pies and buttercrust strawberry tarts that were really killers. The way we kept shoveling all that fine pastry into our faces while we listened to the music was double kicks.
Chumps who have to rise and shine in the morning, slaves to the alarm clock, sure don’t understand us creative artists none. Every time we got the victrola under way, a strong rhythm section would start jumping in the background, beat out on the walls and ceilings with broom-handles and shoes by our groggy neighbors. We didn’t mind their horning in that way but it sure as hell bothered us that they couldn’t keep time better than they did—early risers just never seem to have any get-up for music at all. To stop their corny anvil chorus we’d take the needle off and play the records with our fingernails, leaning over so close to catch the riffs that we were all practically inside the machine. Later on, Josh Billings, one of our sidekicks, came up with a tricky homemade muffler that was a gangbuster—one phonograph needle stuck halfway into the top of a pencil eraser, and another shoved into the bottom with its point out. When we screwed this gadget into the tone-arm it would play a record real soft, so the early-to-bed citizens could catch up with their bad dreams and everybody was happy. Muggles is the mother of invention. Those early birds always scrambling to catch that worm really puzzled us. Man does not live by worms alone.
Funny how you can get all wrapped up in music, especially when you’ve got some muta to tie the bundle. One night after one of these sessions we grabbed our horns and drove out towards the outer drive along Grant Park, figuring to stage a gay open-air jam session under the auspices of that music-loving motorcycle cop. Most of us were high on muggles and Dave Tough had a bottle of gin, and we rolled along chirping riffs and weaving the car from side to side. Suddenly a red light blinked at us, and we pulled up in back of another car at the crossing to wait for the go-ahead. Time gumshoed by, walking in his sleep. It was about a half hour later that Dave began wondering about that light—“You know something?” he said. “I don’t want to seem impatient or anything like that, I’m not in any rush exactly, but I have a feeling those lights aren’t changing as fast as they used to.”
We all gave him the horse laugh and went on singing; it looked to us like little Dave had midges in his britches. After fifteen minutes or so, when Dave brought up the subject again, I decided to humor him by leaning out and looking the situation over. Goddamn if that car up ahead wasn’t empty as a confessional on Saturday night—it was just parked against the curb, and what we took for a traffic signal was only its rear lamp.
We must have been squatting there for an hour, all told, waiting for a plenty stubborn tail-light to change. When tea grabs your glands you’ve got time on your hands—years and years on every fingertip.
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I was always on the lookout for new records to pep up those wax-fests of ours. One day, thanks to a chick I was chummy with in the Okeh Distributing Company, I got hold of one that almost washed me away. It was a dealer’s advanced pressing of Louis Armstrong’s famous Heebie Jeebies, a milestone in recording history because it marked the first time Old Gatemouth ever put his scatting on wax. Later on Louis tipped us off to how it happened: he’d been mugging at the mike during the recording, just starting to sing his vocal, when he dropped the music with the lyrics on it, so he had to make up some for the rest of the chorus. We thought we were dreaming when we heard him begin singing the words—I got the heebies, I mean the jeebies—and then sail into a sequence of riffs that sounded just like his horn-playing.
If you want an idea of how to tear a lyric limb from limb, maul it, mangle it, and then make mince-meat out of it, take a look first at the words Louis was supposed to sing:
I’ve got the heebies, I mean the jeebies,
Talk ’bout a dance the heebie jeebies,
You’ll see girls and boys,
Faces lit with joys, if you don’t know it
You ought to learn it, don’t feel so blue,
Some one will teach you,
Come on now let’s do that prance
Called the heebie jeebies dance,
You will like it, it’s the heebie jeebies dance.
Right after the phrase, if you don’t know it, the music slipped out of Louis’ hand. He wasn’t stumped, not that cat. On he went, remembering a couple more phrases here and there, and then he forgot about the words entirely, making up syncopated scats that were copied right from his horn tones. Here’s a rough idea of how it came out:
Say I’ve got the heebies, I mean the jeebies,
Talkin’ about, the dazza heebie jeebies,
You’ll see goils and boys, faces wit’ a little bit a joy,
Say don’t you know it, you don’t dawduh,
Daw fee blue, come on we’ll teach you,
Come on, and do that dance, they call the heebie jeebies dance
Yes ma’am, poppa’s got the heebie jeebies bad, ay,
Eef, gaff, mmmff, dee-bo, duh deedle-la bahm,
Rip-bip-ee-doo-dee-doot, doo,
Roo-dee-doot duh-dee-dut-duh-dut,
Dee-dut-dee-dut-doo, dee-doo-dee-doo-dee-doo-dut,
Skeep, skam, skip-bo-dee-dah-dee-dat, doop-dum-dee,
Frantic rhythm, so come on down, do that dance,
They call the heebie jeebies dance, sweet mammo,
Poppa’s got to do the heebie jeebies dance.
Right then and there, when Louis dropped that sheet of paper and gave his improvising genius the floor, he started a musical craze that became as much a part of America’s cultural life as Superman and Post-Toasties. All the hi-de-ho, vo-de-o-do, and boop-boop-a-doo howlers that later sprouted up around the country like a bunch of walking ads for Alka-Seltzer were mostly cheap commercial imitations of what Louis did spontaneously, and with perfect musical sense, on that historic record.
This record of Louis’ took all of Chicago by storm as soon as it was released. When I brought a copy of it down to union headquarters it caused a stampede to the Okeh office, and inside of a week the copies were all sold out. For months after that you would hear cats greeting each other with Louis’ riff
s when they met around town—I got the heebies, one would yell out, and the other would answer I got the jeebies, and the next minute they were scatting in each other’s face. Louis’ recording almost drove the English language out of the Windy City for good.
I brought the record home to play for the gang, and man, they all fell through the ceiling. Bud, Dave and Tesch almost wore it out by playing it over and over until we knew the whole thing by heart. Suddenly, about two in the A.M., Tesch jumped to his feet, his sad pan all lit up for once, and yelled, “Hey, listen you guys, I got an idea! This is something Bix should hear right away! Let’s go out to Hudson Lake and give him the thrill of his life!”
A scramble was on and it was most mad, old man. Bix was fifty miles away, but we were all halfway down the stairs before Tesch’s chops got together again. We dove every whichaway into that green monster of mine (that’s what the boys called my chariot) and started off like gangbusters for Hudson Lake, a summer resort where Bix, Pee Wee Russell and Frankie Trombauer were playing with Gene Goldkette’s Greystone Dance Orchestra. All the way there we kept chanting Louis’ weird riffs, while I kept the car zigzagging like a roller-coaster to mark the explosions. The other drivers on the road must have known that we were musicians because they sure scampered for the ditch fast when we heaved into sight.
It was three in the morning when we busted into that yarddog’s stash that Bix and Pee Wee used for a cottage. Jim, the funk in that dommy was so thick you could cut it with a butterknife, and them cats had the whole insect population of Indiana for their roommates. It was here that Bix composed his famous piano solo, In a Mist, but once you laid your peepers on the joint you wondered why that composition wasn’t named In a Garbage Can.
In their large living room the boys had collected a gang of furniture from the Year of the Flood, trash that Noah threw out without any regrets—chairs with more legs off than on, a sofa with all its springs sticking up through the upholstery and stuffing that kept oozing out like toothpaste, a table that laid on its side because it wouldn’t stand up. There wasn’t sheet one on the beds in this part of the pigpen. I couldn’t tell you if there were any rugs under the dirt, but the room did have an upright piano with a bad list to keyboard standing in the middle of the floor. Bix would sit at that old tinkle-box in the early hours of the morning, beads of 100-proof sweat slithering down his face, knocking out beautiful weird music in the middle of this junkheap. Imagine Paderewski squatting in a city dump, craunching Opus Number Seventeen out of a wheezy organ-grinder’s box, and you get the idea.