When I Left Home

by Guy, Buddy

  Life ain’t never been the same since.

  “Before you go, Coot,” I said, “please show me how to play ‘Boogie Chillen.’”

  “Simple,” said Coot. “You just lock in these here notes.”

  He showed me the notes. At first my mind couldn’t talk to my fingers. I had to ask Coot to show me again. By then, though, he was deep into his wine and didn’t wanna bother.

  “Please,” I begged. “I gotta learn ‘Boogie Chillen.’”

  “This is the last time, boy.”

  He showed me how to move my left hand up and down the neck of the guitar and which of the two strings to pluck with my right hand.

  I had it. I played it. My sisters and brothers were happy to hear me play, but after the fourth or fifth time they said it was okay to stop. I didn’t stop, though, because Coot was good and drunk and in no condition to show me a third time how to finger the song. So like a fool in love with a lady he couldn’t leave alone, I couldn’t leave the song alone. I wouldn’t stop playing it. I played it for an hour, and then for two. I played it walking around the back of the house, walking out through the cornfields, walking down by the bayou and then up into the woods. I kept playing it because I was scared silly that if I stopped, I’d forget it. I had to play this song until it was as much a part of me as my liver or my beating heart. When the hour turned late and I couldn’t hold my eyes open any longer, I went to sleep with the guitar in my arms, afraid that when morning came, the song would be gone and I’d never be able to play the song again. So I hummed it in my head and prayed that I’d keep playing it in my dreams. When I woke up, I grabbed my guitar, wondering whether the notes of “Boogie Chillen” would still be there.

  They were.

  Mitchell

  At the start of the 1950s I was sitting on a porch in Baton Rouge, playing that same guitar my daddy bought from Coot. I was fifteen years old and had moved from Lettsworth to live with my big sister Annie Mae. I was about to enroll in high school. Mama and Daddy encouraged this move for one simple reason: they wanted me to go further than they did. There was no high school in Lettsworth, and if I was to advance my education, Baton Rouge was the only place. I was a little uneasy about the move because our shack on that great big plantation was all I ever knew. Back then Baton Rouge couldn’t have had many more than 120,000 people. Compared to where I was coming from, though, that was a lot. It wasn’t no New York or Chicago or even New Orleans or Memphis, but it would take some getting used to. Looking at it now, I see it as a kicked-back rural kind of city, a country town, but when I arrived fresh off the farm, there was an adjustment to make. And that lil’ ol’ two-string guitar helped me make the adjustment.

  Out there on the porch I was fooling with a new song by John Lee Hooker called “I’m in the Mood.” Every John Lee song said something to me.

  “You sound like you’re serious about the guitar,” said a man passing by. His skin was black as coal.

  “I am, sir.”

  “That there guitar looks mighty beat up,” he said.

  “I got it from a guy who had it for a long time.”

  “I see it’s only got two strings. Ain’t guitars supposed to have six?”

  “I think so,” I said, “but I’m happy to have any guitar at all.”

  “I bet if you had a good guitar, you’d get more better playing it. You’d probably get more better in a hurry.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Say, son, you gonna be around tomorrow?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Tomorrow’s Saturday and I don’t gotta work. I’ll pass by here tomorrow and look for you.”

  “I’ll be here.”

  Had no idea what the man had in mind, but I was back on the porch on Saturday, still fooling with “I’m in the Mood.”

  In early afternoon that same man passed by.

  “You ready?” he asked.

  “Ready for what, sir?”

  “Ready to get you a guitar.”

  “How am I gonna do that? I got no money for a guitar.”

  “I do. Let’s go downtown to where they sell them things.”

  And just like that, the man took me downtown in his raggedy old car, walked me into a music store, and had me pick out a Harmony six-string guitar.

  “How much is that?” he asked the store owner.

  “Fifty-two dollars.”

  To me, $52 was all the money in the world. Who in hell had $52 to spend on a guitar?

  This man did. He reached in his pocket, pulled the cash out of his wallet, and handed it to the owner. The owner carefully counted the money. It was right. Then he handed me the guitar.

  All I could say was “thank you.” I thanked the man who bought it, I thanked the owner of the store, and in my silent mind I thanked the Good Lord in heaven.

  On the way back to Annie Mae’s house, the man stopped to buy himself a quart of beer. At Annie Mae’s he and I sat on the porch while I played and he drank. The Harmony was made of golden brown wood with a tone so pretty you could cry. It was clear and pure and strong. I didn’t exactly know what to do with them strings, but I was learning fast. The strings were tight and felt good to the tips of my fingers. Wasn’t long before I was playing “Boogie Chillen” with all six strings. What a difference between two and six! Was like I had a whole orchestra in my hands.

  Before long Annie Mae arrived, talkin’ ’bout, “What’s this here country boy doing with a shiny new guitar?”

  The man said it was a gift and offered Annie Mae some beer.

  “Don’t look like you got enough for two,” she said. “I better run and get us another quart.”

  “I’m doing the buying today,” said the man, who got up, went off to the liquor store, and returned with more beer.

  As they was drinking and I was playing, Annie Mae got an idea.

  “You know where Lettsworth is?” she asked the man.

  “Sure enough,” he said. “Know it well.”

  “Well, it’s Saturday night. Let’s ride on out there in that car of yours and visit our folks. We can bring ’em some beer and they can hear this little brother of mine playing on his new guitar. What you say?”

  The man said yes. I said yes. We put a dollar’s worth of gas in his car and rode the fifty miles north from Baton Rouge to Lettsworth. We pulled right up in front of the wooden cabin where I’d been raised.

  My dog started barking his friendly bark. Out in the country no one had locks on their doors. Your dog was the only warning you needed to hear whether it was a stranger or friend come to call. My dog was licking my face when Daddy came out to greet us.

  “My, my, my,” he said. “Annie Mae and Buddy. This is a right beautiful surprise.” Then he looked at the man and said, “Ain’t you Mitchell? Mitchell Young?”

  “That’s me,” said the man. “And ain’t you Sam?”

  “I’m Sam Guy and you’re the same Mitchell I grew up with when we was little boys.”

  The two men shook hands before giving each other a good hug.

  “Mitchell just bought Buddy a new guitar,” said Annie Mae.

  “Knowing he was my son?” asked my daddy.

  “Knowing nothing about that,” said Mitchell. “I heard something in this boy that said he needed a real guitar.”

  By then Mama had come out of the house and taken me in her arms. She’d heard the whole story.

  “Lord, have mercy,” she said. “Ain’t this a beautiful night!”

  The Rouge

  The idea was simple: move to Baton Rouge, go to high school, and learn something better than farming.

  “Farming ain’t getting you nowhere,” said Daddy. “You gotta get some schooling, boy. We gonna be living hand to mouth long as we on this land. The business is set up to keep us down. But I don’t want you down, son. I want you up.”

  Sister Annie Mae was happy to take me in. She had a decent job at LSU, and her husband worked at Standard Oil. She gave me fifteen cent a day for my little expenses and a rollaway
bed where I slept in the front room. Annie Mae was wonderful to me. She was also something of a mess, but what I’d call a beautiful mess. Come Saturday night, she’d be deep into the wine and beer. She could get wild. Many were the times when the police had to put her in jail for getting crazy in the barrooms. She never did get violent on me, though, and for those first months that I was away from home she became my second mom.

  I finished out eighth grade at McKinley High and had every intention of going on with my schooling. Then one day Annie Mae came running in the house. She had just been out to Lettsworth. Her eyes were wet with tears.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Mama just took a stroke.”

  “What’s a stroke?” I had to ask.

  “They say it’s when the blood doesn’t flow to your brain right. Everything gets thrown off.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She can hardly talk. Can hardly move.”

  “Is Mama about to die?” I asked.

  “I don’t think so, but I don’t really know. All I know is that the doctor says she’ll never be the same.”

  That same day I went out to Lettsworth and saw that Mama couldn’t talk and could hardly walk. Her mouth was droopy and her eyes were far away. She’d always been a woman up and working before anyone. She looked after her husband and kids with all the love and care in the world, and seeing her like this broke my heart. Broke Daddy’s heart too. Never seen my father look helpless before—he always knew what to do.

  “Doctor says ain’t nothing to do,” said Daddy.

  But I knew what I had to do.

  I had to go home.

  When Mama took her stroke, everything changed. She could no longer smile. I’d seen that smile my whole life. It was my sunshine. That smile told me the world was alright and that I could get through anything. I’d be hungry for that smile for the rest of my life.

  We tried, but without Mama we couldn’t go back to our old lives. I left Baton Rouge and went home to work the fields, but the Guy family could never be what it once was.

  One night after we’d been picking cotton all day, me, Daddy, and my brothers were sitting around, tired in our bodies and our minds. Mom was in the bed. Daddy went and took her hand.

  “You know, Isabell,” he said, “you’d never let any of us come home to a dirty shirt or a dirty sheet or a dirty dish. Never did happen. You never did miss a day of work. And on most days you did more work than three or four strong men. Ain’t that right, honey?”

  Mama couldn’t answer, but Daddy kept talking.

  “You gonna be all right,” he said. “We all here for you. We waiting on you, Isabell. We waiting for as long as it takes. We right here. I know you hear what I’m saying.”

  Daddy looked at Mama in her eyes. I thought I saw her eyes smiling, but her mouth couldn’t make a smile.

  We went on wishing and praying that Mama would return to her old self. Even though the doctor said that wasn’t gonna happen, we wanted to believe it would. We had to believe it would. We had to hold on to hope.

  But hope lasts only so long before cold reality sets in. Reality told us that living on a plantation with a very sick woman wasn’t fair to that woman. She needed to see a doctor on a regular basis.

  Daddy decided to leave the plantation and move the family to Baton Rouge. Him and us kids getting different jobs would mean more money to help care for Mama. The landowners were sorry to see us go—we were their best workers. They wished us good luck and loaned us a truck to move our stuff. Daddy found a small house to rent, I went back to sleep on a rollaway at Annie Mae’s, and our life in Lettsworth was over.

  My life in Baton Rouge began and ended with me working. I worked a conveyor belt in a beer factory, where the temperature had to be 110. The job was monotonous and taxed me a hundred more times than working on the farm. On the farm I was outside. I could hear the birds and see the animals. I dealt with live crops growing or dying according to the weather. I had the sky over my head, not a dirty ceiling in a factory that smelled like it hadn’t been cleaned in a year. Farm work was hard, but I was seeing that farm work could feel free. This factory work felt like jail. The job didn’t last long.

  Service station work was a little better. At least I was outside. I’ve always been good with cars, so dealing with them was okay, except during the dog days of summer. In those years customers couldn’t pump their own gas. The attendants did the pumping. That was easy and so was checking the tires. But when it came to checking the battery and water, the second I popped open the hood of the car the 96-degree day turned to 120. I did good not to pass out from the fumes. The average sale in those days, when gas cost twenty cents a gallon, was under a buck. The owner of the station also had me doing tow truck service. Before long I knew every street and back alley in Baton Rouge.

  I also found work at LSU. I was a maintenance man. The atmosphere on a college campus was calm, and I didn’t mind cleaning and sweeping and driving their utility vehicles to do all kinds of odd jobs. They even had a tractor I could handle good as anyone.

  For the next years the routine would have me working at the school during the day and at the gas station at night. In between this work, though, my passion for the guitar heated up even more. The records from jukeboxes kept me locked into Muddy and Lightnin’, Wolf and Little Walter. Jimmy Reed was coming up strong. They said he could blow harp and pick his guitar at the same time. His main guitarist, though, Eddie Taylor, gave off a twangy sound different from anyone. Reed had a nasal voice, thick like Mississippi mud, that sang over the funky rhythm to where you had to reach for a drink or a woman.

  I loved these people. But I loved them from far off. I dreamed of seeing them, but they didn’t come to Baton Rouge. In the meantime, though, a famous guitarist did come, and I did go see him. I had heard his record, and I liked him. I knew he was good. Until I saw him up close and in person, though, I didn’t know that he would change all my ideas of what it meant to play the blues. I didn’t know that he’d rearrange my brain and set me soaring in a new direction.

  Where Is He? Where the Hell Is He?

  On the little radio that Annie Mae kept in the kitchen, I was listening to Dizzy Dean on Mutual Radio broadcasting a Saturday game between the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Braves. The night before, I was up late listening to the St. Louis Cardinals–New York Giants game. I closed my eyes and imagined what it was like to see Stan Musial or Willie Mays smash a baseball clean out of the park.

  After the game was over, me, Annie Mae, and a friend with a car drove over to the School of Agriculture at LSU, where they had a department that taught you to be a butcher. The teacher showed the students how to cut up the choice parts of a pig. When class was over, they’d throw the pig’s head, chitlins, and feet into a barrel. They considered that stuff garbage. Well, we went through the garbage, gathered up the parts they discarded, loaded ’em into a big box, and sold it off cheap to the folks in the neighborhood who knew how to cook it.

  The only other little extra money I got came from music. That didn’t begin all too good. Remember, when I left the farm for Baton Rouge, you couldn’t find anyone more country than me. On top of that, I have a naturally shy nature. Never been good at going out and introducing myself to people I don’t know. As a kid and a teenager, I stayed quiet most all of the time. Didn’t feel like I had nothing to say.

  When there was downtime at the service station, I picked up that Harmony guitar and played. Might be Lightnin’ Hopkins’s “Fast Life Woman” or Muddy’s “Hoochie Coochie Man” or Elmore James’s “Dust My Broom.” These were the kind of songs I was always trying to learn. The station owner would hear me and say, “You oughta get paid for doing that.”

  “Who’s gonna pay me?”

  “Well, keep playing and someday someone’s gonna hear you and wanna pay you. I guaran-goddamn-tee you.”

  Wasn’t no more than a week later when this big mountain of a man drove up to the station just when I was trying to pla
y some Jimmy Reed.

  “Ain’t bad,” he said. “My name’s Big Poppa. Who you?”

  “Buddy. Buddy Guy.”

  “Well, look here, Buddy. I got me a band and been looking for another guitarist. You free tonight?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “We playing up at a barroom called Sitman’s. You know ‘Work with Me, Annie’?”

  “Hank Ballard and the Midnighters,” I said. “They used to be called the Royals. Yes, sir, I know it real good. Know all the notes.”

  “But can you sing it?”

  “I know all the words.”

  “Be at Sitman’s at nine o’clock tonight.”

  I thought I was ready. But when I agreed to play with Big Poppa, I didn’t know what playing music in front of strangers would be like. When I walked into Sitman’s, the joint was jammed—wall-to-wall people waiting to hear something good.

  “Found me a youngblood,” said Sitman to the crowd, “who can sing one of your favorites.”

  The band broke into “Work with Me, Annie.” There wasn’t no rehearsal, but that didn’t bother me. I knew the tune. And I knew just when to jump in and start singing. What bothered me, though, was facing the audience. I just couldn’t. Shyness got the best of me. So I turned my back on the crowd and sang to the wall.

  “You crazy, boy!” screamed Big Poppa. “You out your goddamn mind! You can’t play to no fuckin’ wall!”

  More he yelled at me, shyer I got until it would have taken a shotgun to my head to make me turn around.

  When we got through with the song, Big Poppa said, “You fired!”

  “But I just got started!” I protested.

  “You got started on the wrong foot—and turned in the wrong direction. Get the fuck out!”

  I got out, felt terrible about the whole thing, and went home to bed. Next morning I told a friend, Raymond Brown, about how I’d messed up.

  “Well, Buddy, you ain’t gonna mess up a second time. This time I’m going with you to Sitman’s. I got just the right medicine to loosen you up until you ain’t afraid to look the people dead in the eye.”