Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Went to see the gypsy

  To get my hambone done

  Gypsy say, Man,

  You sure need some

  Well, must I holler

  Or must 1 shake ’em on down

  I’m so tired of hollerin

  I believe I’ll shake ’em on down.

  Hawk’s voice carried through the almost deserted street. He rocked back and forth on his heels, and when the song was over he launched immediately into another, one of an endless number of variations on his theme song, “The Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues.”

  You take a look at my woman

  Make you want to scream

  You see my woman

  She makes you want to scream

  She the meanest woman, man, 1 most ever seen.

  She put strychnine in my coffee, iodine in my tea

  Put strychine in my coffee, she pour iodine in my tea

  Well, I better watch out

  She put some of that poison on me.

  I’m a screamin nighthawk,! believe I better make a change

  I tell all of you wimmins, I believe I better make a change

  Tired of cooking on this gas stove, gonna find me a brand new range.

  When they finished, they laughed and slapped hands. “Man, we really got it, didn’t we?” said Hawk. Kenny just showed a silly gap-toothed grin. “Now you be sure you don’t move from this spot, hear?” Hawk boomed out, as he packed up his guitar again in its case. “I don’t want to have no trouble finding you next time. You tell that to your mayor.” With that Hawk trudged off in the direction from which he had come, and Kenny went back to rattling his cup and playing “St. Louis Blues” in the mumbling apologetic style that he had been employing when Hawk first appeared. Jerry sidled up to the harmonica player, trying to look casual, and placed a ten-dollar bill in his cup. Underneath he saw a twenty, all crumpled up and carefully unfolded, as if it had been in someone’s billfold for a long time.

  He caught up with Hawk just outside of Greenbaum’s, the clothing store where Hawk had hesitated earlier. There in the window was the same black suit, with the same price tag. $39-95, slashed from $119. Jerry shook off a wino who was lying in the doorway as he watched Hawk pause for a moment, devour the suit once more with his eyes, then apparently make up his mind and push his way through the door. Through the window he could watch Hawk and a gaunt white man with a tape measure wrapped around his shoulders. They regarded the suit, spoke, gesticulated, turned away from each other, resumed negotiations. Hawk slammed down a fist emphatically on the counter. The man climbed spryly into the window and tugged at the material. Hawk shook his head and must have said something rude, because the man climbed out again and stood, arms akimbo, as if he had been mortally insulted. Jerry was just about to step in—whatever happened he didn’t want to see Hawk end up in jail over a matter of a few pennies—when Hawk turned on his heel and marched angrily out of the store. The man trailed him, talking all the while, finally caught up with him and touched him timidly on the shoulder. “Ain’t nobody gonna jew me around like that, Mr. Greenbaum,” Hawk boomed out for all the street to hear. Jerry winced. Greenbaum didn’t seem bothered, though. He kept talking. He made conciliatory gestures. Hawk slowed down, though he still looked angry. Then Greenbaum must have hit on the very formulation that Hawk had had in mind all along, because Hawk stopped in his tracks, a broad smile crossed his face, and he allowed Greenbaum to lead him back into the store. When he came out, he had a neat package carefully wrapped, and the black suit was gone from the window.

  And that was the end of his purchases. He headed up the street limping slightly, an old man supporting himself on a crude homemade walking stick. When he got to the car he cast a contemptuous glance back at Jerry, not, Jerry came to realize, out of scorn for Jerry’s person alone, but because Jerry’s car had been stripped clean. The hubcaps were gone. The left front fender looked as if it had been beat on with a tire iron. The trunk was up and the spare was stolen. The radio antenna had been whipped off, but that was all right, because there was no radio anymore. Jerry stared at the wreck bleakly. His glance traveled from Hawk’s dilapidated old relic, which had been untouched, to his own late-model LTD, which had had 6,200 miles on it when he had gotten it from the rental agency. How was he going to explain this to Avis? He couldn’t remember if he had waved the $100 deductible. Hawk just stood there chuckling to himself.

  “It’s not funny,” Jerry protested. Tears welled up in his eyes.

  Hawk shook his head. “Ain’t nobody asked you to come to this funeral,” he said in a low, uncharacteristically subdued tone of voice. Then he got in his car and drove off. Jerry got in his LTD and prayed it would start and that at least they hadn’t taken the battery and then that he didn’t get a flat. He got another spare in Crystal City outside of St. Louis, and after that he was able to rest a little easier, still following his quarry but always at a discreet distance.

  It was three more days before they reached Yola. One night they slept on the road, the next they stayed in Memphis. Hawk made the same rounds in Memphis as he had in East St. Louis, from the clothing stores and pawnshops and boarded-up clubs that were all that was left of the greatness that was Beale Street to a practically deserted W.C. Handy Park, populated only by winos and junkies, where once the music had never stopped.

  “Oh, it used to be somethin’ in those days,” he had told interviewers again and again. “Frank Stokes, that was the medicine show man, and Dan Sains that were his brother-in-law, they played so’s you would think it was one of them playing instead of two. Old Man Stokes, he had a voice that some people might not favor, but I was always partial to it, he sung in the old style with a tremble to it, you know what I’m talking about, like it really meant something. Not like some of these young fellas today, some of these Beats and Rolling Stones and whatnot, that toss it off so cool and nice and polite, like it didn’t hardly mean nothing to them, except the words— you dig what I’m saying, Jack? Well, sure. Then there was the jug bands. On a good day you might have two or three of them, maybe more, and all them musicianers playing so loud against each other you couldn’t hardly hear yourself think. Harmonicas and fiddles and jazz horns and even a tuba now and then—man, I tell you, it was really a ball. And the white folks knowed it, too. Always a gang of them hanging out, even that white boy that went to California, what’s his name? Yeah, Elvis Presley, that the one—he used to come down here all the time, man, from the time he was a little bitty kid, sure I knowed him, sure did, he’d hang around just to get ideas. No, I didn’t teach no guitar to Mr. Elvis Presley. He didn’t need no teaching. Anyone who could make that much money knowing what he knowing, that boy don’t need no education at all. Oh man, in the springtime it was like Mardi Gras, it was like the birds was coming out of the trees, y’understand? That’s how much music there was in the air.”

  Then he might turn gruff.

  “Good old days? Don’t give me none of that. The competition was heavy, man. There was always some motherfucker to try to knock you off your corner, new sucker come to town you had to cut haids. Course I didn’t have to play down there, cause I had my radio show in West Memphis at that time. Me and Sonny Boy and Wolf—we all sold horseshit. Yeah. Fertilizer. Grain. It didn’t make no difference. I had a little song went something like this: “Good morning, everybody, tell me how do you do/ Well, we the Gold Star boys come here to welcome you.” Yeah, just like King Biscuit, it was worth its weight in gold just for the publicity, man. We on every day from twelve-fifteen to twelve-thirty, lunchtime, everybody hungry for the blues, and we would tell ’em where we was playing that night. Aw, we used to play all out in the country back in them days, out at the rough joints. I mean, they was way out in the woods, dirt floors, little tar-paper shacks that you had to go cutting across the fields, I don’t think them people ever even heard of electricity, and this was the United States of America, not no foreign land. I had me a little band back in them days. Me and Son Clark on guitars. Frenchy o
n drums. We had a boy they called Pink playing the can bass. And every so often we’d get us a horn player, Kid Thunder or Clarence Dawkins, the one they all call Monkey-grinder, or maybe it’d be Stormy Weather. The people all enjoyed it. I can say that truthfully. We played for the colored, and we played for the white. Oncet in a while we’d play up at the big houses for a party, somebody getting married, young girl graduating from high school, that kind of junk. You see, the young peoples just wanted to dance-it didn’t make no difference to them that they was dancing to a gang of old nigger music. What did their feets know? Only their feets turned out to have second sight, ain’t that the truth? First the heart, then the mind, then the pecker-excuse my language, ladies, but that’s just the plain truth, you tell me if it isn’t. It was just what them old buzzards was yapping about all along. Course that sort of thing had been going on under the table right along, but then it come right out in the open, didn’t it? A lot of foolishness if you ask me, maybe we was better off in them holdback times, because at least you knowed what to expect from a prejudiced white man, ain’t no telling what you got coming from these old jealous-hearted niggers—”

  It was at this point that Jerry always tuned out. He didn’t want to hear the Screamin’ Nighthawk’s views on racial progress, especially when the Screamin’ Nighthawk was such a patent hypocrite. Though, of course, he always enjoyed the reaction he got from these prle earnest little white boys and girls, he always seemed to get a kick out of their disbelieving, apologetic, guilt-ridden response. If Jerry was there, they’d turn to him for support. And his response was simply to say, Don’t believe what this old bullshitter tells you. He’s just giving you his usual line of jive. Not even knowing if it was true, or if he himself believed it or not. And they would always pull up short at the idea that anything that this discriminated-against, authentic old black man was telling them could be less than the gospel truth. But it gnawed at Jerry. Could it be that everything Hawk said was tinged with this same willful distortion of the truth? Beale Street, Handy Park, the young Elvis Presley, the radio show. When they were making one of their abortive attempts to do the book together, Jerry had tried to check out some of the facts. It was true, Hawk had spent time in Memphis, he had even done a radio show at one point. It was not on from twelve-fifteen to twelve-thirty, lunchtime for the blues. It was on the air early in the morning (it was switched from five-thirty to quarter of six some time in 1948), and it evidently had lasted for scarcely a year. Jerry could just imagine Hawk and his boys strolling into the studio at that hour, after playing an all-night dance out in the country or staying up all night in some West Memphis saloon working for tips. He had even met a record collector in Memphis who remembered the Screamin’ Nighthawk and His Gang performing at a high-school graduation party some time in the early ’50s.

  But that was all. The details were only as Hawk or a dozen other oral informants remembered them, innumerable facts, innumerable stories, all burgeoning, living, bubbling beneath the surface, lost to history. That was the trouble with the book. That was the reason there wasn’t going to be any book. Everything buried in a miasma of memory, a morass of oral tradition. Hawk contradicting himself and everyone else on every occasion he was given even half a chance.

  Hawk wandered around Memphis for an afternoon, seemingly looking for someone or something, and not finding it. He stayed at a little hotel off Union, where the night clerk, a one-armed piano player named Jaybird whom Jerry had met at the Memphis Blues Festival a couple of years before, told him they were full up. Jerry stayed at the Sonesta instead, putting in a wake-up call for six the next morning so as not to miss Hawk.

  Not that it would have made any difference. Hawk was heading home, down Highway 61, there was no question of that, and Jerry could have given him a two-day start and still caught up. He spoke to Lori from the hotel, and she agreed to meet him in Yola the day after tomorrow. Jerry took a bath, had a steak, and for the first time in four nights slept in a comfortable bed. He had a dream that night in which Hawk came to him and confronted him balefully. “You sleeping like a white man again,” Hawk said. “Now ain’t you better suited to that, tell me true?” And Jerry had to admit that yes, he was better suited to it, and no, he didn’t know what he wanted to bother with a mean old man like Hawk for at all. Hawk smiled grimly. “You come to dance at my funeral,” he said with a sudden stab of insight, as Jerry wondered if that could in fact really be the case.

  III

  SO GLAD

  HAWK’S WIFE, Mattie, seemed neither happy nor sorry to see him. She didn’t act surprised, she just looked up, said, “Hunh!” and went on with her work, bustling about in the kitchen, attending to two or three pots that were simmering on the stove, keeping one eye on the color TV which sat beneath a rotogravure Sunday pull-out portrait of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers, her other eye fixed on the baby, Rufus, who was three. Hawk in his turn barely acknowledged her presence. “You take care of my white friend, hear?” he said, with no attempt at irony, for, after all, a guest was a guest. Then he passed through the curtained partition into the bedroom, where they could hear him break wind loudly and then slump heavily on the bed.

  He didn’t look well, Jerry thought. He didn’t look well at all. Mattie just kept on with her work, unfolding an ironing board with one hand while picking up Rufus with the other and slapping him across the knuckles for fooling with the plug to the TV set. The other children were playing in front of the house, Martin (“Little Bo Scooter”) and the girl Elyse (“Dicey”), ten and eight respectively. They, too, had barely glanced up when their father pulled in. They were swinging on a homemade swing set atilt on a scrubby tree out in the midst of all the refuse, hogslop, twisted metal, scrawny chickens, and spare automobile parts that made up Hawk’s front yard. They swung higher and higher, the two of them on the single swing, bending the limb on which the rope was fastened until it looked as if they would soar off into the stratosphere on the next pump. “Be the first black astronauts if they did,” Hawk had said on more than one occasion.

  Hawk’s house was set on a little country lane out on the edge of town. It was built, Hawk boasted, in the old country way, but so far as Jerry could tell that only meant that the workmen must have been drunk when they got it up. It was only eight or nine years old, coinciding roughly with the time of Hawk’s rediscovery, but listed crazily to one side and bulged out in all kinds of unpredictable directions. Since it was put together from scrap lumber and had never been painted, it offered all kinds of richly symbolic inconsistencies for writers to mull over, and it was a poor stringer who didn’t zero in on the anomaly of this jerry-built structure providing shelter for a man who had been declared “virtually a national treasure” by the New York Times. Several had gone so far as to implicate Jerry in this state of affairs, implying that this beaten-down old bluesman had a rapacious manager whose avarice would not permit his client to escape such filthy squalor. Jerry, of course, never entered into combat with these self-appointed saviors of the black race.

  The building kept out the rain, and, padded with newspapers, it kept out the wind, too. Hawk swore it would be able to withstand any earthquake because of the reinforced bolsters at the beams. Not that there had ever been an earthquake, or that there was likely to be one in the next two hundred years. It seemed more likely in fact that if a conflagration were to come it would be set by the neighbors, a bunch of “educated fools,” Hawk muttered, who drove Mustangs and Thunderbirds, got the local paper delivered to their box just to prove that they could read, and wouldn’t even look twice at that low-down, no-account nigger who called himself a blues singer, nor his simpleminded wife neither, though she, poor child, didn’t mean nobody no harm, she couldn’t really help herself, and at least she took the children to church regular. “Those backbiting hypocrites!” Hawk rumbled. “I been seeing them all my life. Well, they can kiss my black ass, and if they don’t like it-” He could think of no conclusion grand enough to finish the sentence with. It nev
er seemed to bother Mattie, though. Nothing seemed to bother Mattie, in fact, whether because of her “slowness” or simply because she was at peace with herself, she was able always to pass through the storm, ignoring insults and acclaim alike, and emerge on the other side with the same settled smile, the same willingness to be of service. At first Jerry had thought she was simple-minded, too-for the first three years he had known her he couldn’t remember her ever uttering a word of more than one syllable in his presence-but then he realized that it was fear and the fact, which he had never quite fully taken in, that she was only thirteen years old when they first met.

  She was the daughter of the legendary Roebuck “Rabbit” Turner, a Yola native who had come up behind the Screamin’ Nighthawk and recorded with the hastily assembled string band which Hawk had put together for Alan Lomax’s Library of Congress recordings. “Some folks say she’s slow,” Hawk liked to boast. “They say she’s dumb, you know what I’m talking about, cause she never learned to read or write, but I don’t hold with any of that mess. Mattie got a sweet disposition. She know how to make a man happy. What I care if she can read and write? I had me a wife that could read and write, and that didn’t do me no good.”