I hated my piano lessons, but I never hated the piano. It reminded me too much of Kershaw. Before it came to us, it had stood in the corner of my grandmother’s living room. Scrollwork lyres adorned the front, and small pillars anchored the sides. Its tobacco-brown finish was a maze of cracks, and like nearly everything in that ramshackle house down in South Carolina, it harbored the musty, desiccated smell of neglect, of attics and closed rooms full of things old and no longer used but from which one cannot be parted. When the piano came to us, that smell came with it, and every time I lifted the lid, I inhaled a memory of that old house, which by the time I knew it was more museum of the past than living residence.
Not pretty, not even handsome, the piano was big and clumsy looking. But I couldn’t have loved it more if it had been a calliope or a jukebox. My mother and I each saw it as our link to the past. For her, it conjured up a time when people still gathered around the piano to sing while she played, when she was still queen of all she surveyed. I simply saw a time that predated my own troubles at the keyboard. It made me think of visits to Kershaw when I was quite young, five at the most. It was always either summertime or Christmas. As soon as we arrived, I took up my post, lurking in the front hall or on the porch swing. From either spot, I could keep an eye on who came and went in the living room, a room that, while I waited, I memorized: the two tall windows flanking the piano on each wall, the window at the front letting in the green light from the deep front porch, the sofa and chair in matching dark wicker and hard satin-covered seat cushions, the tall ceilings, the Blue Boy and the Rose Girl in their oval frames suspended on golden braided cords hooked on the picture molding, and behind one of the double doors that led to the front hall, a tall, glass-fronted bookcase stocked with a set of encyclopedias so unconsulted that when I opened the bookcase one day and took out a volume, the pages, compressed for years, fell to pieces in my hands. If it was a Christmas visit, there would be coal burning in the shallow ceramic-tiled fireplace and a cedar tree decorated in the corner, its wispy branches drooping under the weight of the sparkling lights, lights so old that the paint was chipped away in places and the raw filament showed through like a wound. When I complained that the tree compared poorly with the nicely proportioned balsams we put up, my mother explained that in Kershaw they still got their trees from the woods, the way they did when she was my age. I’m sure I didn’t bother hiding my impatience—and I would have been impatient with this or any other story—because I did not want to listen to her reminisce. I was there because the piano was there, and I gave her no peace—it never took much coaxing—until she raised the lid and began to play.
The only other object in the house that could compete with the piano was the hand-cranked, floor-model Victrola that stood in the dark hall beside the telephone table. The hall was more like a small room, a room with no windows but with a door in each of the four walls. One door opened onto the front hall, which was really a foyer that separated the living room from the front guest bedroom. Facing that door was the door that opened onto the back hall that led to the kitchen. The other doors opened into bedrooms, one of them shared by my grandmother and Kathleen. The other bedroom was used for storage, and that door was never opened. That was the room where my mother’s brother, Buddy, had mysteriously died in his sleep when he was twenty, and she was five.
No matter how hot it got outside, that center hall was always cool and shady, and if I wasn’t on the front porch in the swing or listening to Mother at the piano, that was where I camped out during our visits. No one else ever spent any time there unless they were talking on the phone, and no one in my family was much for long telephone conversations—even my mother, otherwise loquacious, seemed to view a telephone with some suspicion. A cane-bottomed chair sat beside the telephone table, which also held a small lamp and phone book slim enough to stick in your back pocket. Across the hall sat an old, overstuffed armchair big enough for me to curl up in and read and nap. No one bothered me there, and I came to think of the hallway as my room in that house. But what really drew me back and held me there was the Victrola.
Taller than I was when I first encountered it, that primordial record player reminded me of one of those lacquered cabinets from which magicians made their pretty assistants vanish. To my mind, the real business of this machine was hardly less magical. When you opened the doors on the front, you found a shelf for records and a space where the sound came out (the only volume controls were the doors on the cabinet—to make it softer, you closed the doors). On top was a domed lid that you opened to reach the turntable, a broad platter covered in still-bright green felt, and the tone arm and needle holder, a rococo device that began as a wand and terminated in a solid metal wheel, ornamented on each side with concentric circles, deco style. The wheel was hinged to the wand, and the true fit of that hinge, oiled metal gliding over metal, was reason enough to make you want to fool with that machine.
To play a record, you wound the crank on the side of the cabinet, then manually set the needle onto the already spinning disc. There were around a dozen shellac records in the cabinet, some so old they were printed on just one side. I remember only one disc out of the collection, because after I’d sampled what was there, that was the only one I played. On one side was a song called “Talking Blues.” The flip side held a song called “Hannah.” The artist was Chris Bouchillon. I was crazy about both songs, but I was craziest about “Talking Blues.” It began with a nimbly finger-picked guitar intro, and then a man began talking, not singing, in a pleasant tenor over the music: “If you want to get to heaven, lemme tell you how to do it:/You grease your feet in a little mutton suet,/Fan right out of the Devil’s hands/And slide right over to the Promised Land./Go easy./Make it easy./Go greasy.” Here was something new: a funny song about religion! “Behind the henhouse on my knees,/I thought I heard a chicken sneeze./It was only a rooster saying his prayers/And giving out the hymns to the hens upstairs.” Then the same man who has just explained how to get to heaven changes direction: “Standing in the corner by the mantelpiece,/Up in the corner by a bucket of grease,/I greased my feet with a little axle grease,/And went slipping up and down that mantelpiece,/Hunting matches,/Cigarette stubs,/Chewing tobacco.” Smoking, drinking, dodging work—there were ten verses in all; every one testified on the side of laziness, frolic and sin, and I memorized them all. At first, my recitations amused the rest of my family, who plainly stopped listening after the first couple of verses, given the benign tolerance with which they regarded my performances. “Make up the beds, gal, make ‘em up nice./Old Preacher Johnson’s gonna be here tonight./He’s a chicken eater./Loves cake./Loves the ladies, too.” No one could say how the record got in the house, but the crackling hiss on its surface told me that someone had played it a lot. That, and the information on the black and gold Columbia label, was all I knew. I thought Bouchillon was black, since he sang, “Ain’t no use me working so hard./I got a woman in the white folks’ yard.” I didn’t know that this couplet was ubiquitous in old blues songs and sung as frequently by whites as blacks. I had no way of knowing that he was, in fact, a white man from Greenville, South Carolina, who had enjoyed some success in the twenties and thirties with a string of comic songs that he and his brothers and sometimes his wife honed on the medicine-show circuit. I didn’t know medicine shows had ever existed outside of the Westerns I watched on television. I didn’t know that this “Talking Blues,” released in 1928, when it sold an impressive 90,000 copies, was in all likelihood the first of its kind and would inspire the more famous talking blues of Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan. For that matter, I’d never heard the blues, or a song played on a guitar. My family knew nothing about music like this. Blues musicians, country fiddlers, soul shouters, gospel choirs, guitarists who played on the street for nickels and dimes—all the people who would inspire the folk revival that would blossom in the sixties—these people were our neighbors, but we didn’t know them, and if we had, we probably wouldn’t have thought much of them. I
once asked my father, years later, if he’d ever liked Hank Williams, since his life was so much like a Hank Williams song lyric. No, he said, he liked Bing Crosby.
Like any child who has been taught all his life to resist temptation when there is almost nothing to resist, I was easy prey for the first even vaguely sinful thing that came my way, and the first time I played that old 78, I was hooked. I can’t think of any other single song that exploded in my head quite like “Talking Blues.” I didn’t think rationally about it at the time. I was only five or six the first time I played it. But if I could have put my feelings in words, I think I would have said, “So this is what music can do to you. This is how powerful it can be, and with tools no more complicated than a voice and a guitar.” It was my first encounter with the boogie disease, and the only cure was more. But there was no more. No one in the family knew anything about Chris Bouchillon or his record. And while no one forbade my playing his songs, no one shared my pleasure in them, either. Here, for the first time that I can remember, I stepped out of my family’s shadow. There was nothing bold about this. At the time, I didn’t even notice. Apparently neither did anyone else, because years later, when the house was sold, Tom and Melita sold or gave away most of the contents, including the Victrola and the old records.
As far back as I can remember, I loved to sing. We sang around the house when I was little, and we always sang in Sunday school (“Jesus Loves Me,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Jesus Wants Me as a Sunbeam”) and in the 11 o’clock service. The best time to sing in church was at Wednesday Night Prayer Meeting, because then they sang old gospel songs that for some reason didn’t get sung on Sunday morning. On Wednesdays we sang “The Little Brown Church in the Wildwood” and “Bringing in the Sheaves.” My favorite was “Onward, Christian Soldiers,” because I got to stamp my feet while I sang.
In my mind I associated certain songs with certain people. Mother and Daddy both liked Glenn Miller’s “String of Pearls.” Daddy liked “Little Brown Jug,” and Uncle Tom sang “Asleep in the Deep” and “K-K-Katy.” Aunt Melita taught me “Church in the Wildwood” and “When You Wore a Tulip,” and we sang when the mood took us, while she cooked or cleaned house, with one of us singing the first line, “When you wore a tulip, a big yellow tulip,” then both of us together: “And I wore a big red rose.” I knew that Mother was in a good mood as soon as she got through the first couple of lines in “Blues in the Night”: “My mama done tol’ me, when I was in knee-pants—” And I knew to make myself scarce as soon as she began singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” It wasn’t the self-pity or the melodrama that drove me away. It was the baldness of her need. She did better when she made fun of her misery. Of the songs she sang when she was in a good mood, my favorite was “(Won’t You Come Home) Bill Bailey.” At the time I took no notice of the wry self-awareness that colored her delivery. I liked the song the way I liked all songs, not for any important or even very explicable reason but merely because of a funny rhyme or a repeated phrase or because something in the lyric, some odd fact, reminded me of things or people in my life. I liked “Bill Bailey” because the name seemed familiar—there were some Baileys in our church. I liked it because Bill Bailey was a railroad brakeman and I was crazy about trains. Mostly I liked it because the lyrics were about ordinary, everyday things and no moon-June-spoon stuff. “I’ll do the cookin’, honey, I’ll pay the rent … Remember that rainy evening, I drove you out, with nothin’ but a fine-tooth comb?” Mother stopped singing that song long before my childhood ended.
When I was eight, I fell in love with the girl who sat behind me in Mrs. Jenkins’s second-grade class at North Elementary School. Kathy was a blonde with a narrow face and suspicious blue eyes. I don’t think she liked me much, but I didn’t care. She knew all the words to “The Battle of New Orleans,” the Jimmy Driftwood song that Johnny Horton had a number-one hit with in 1959. I was a fool for that song, because its hero was Andrew Jackson, who was born not twenty miles up the road from my birthplace in Lancaster—fatherless, Scots-Irish and a Presbyterian in the bargain. Cecil B. DeMille’s remake of The Buccaneer had come out that same year, and the craggy Jackson’s defense of New Orleans against the British in the War of 1812 was my kind of story—underdog Americans defeating the pompous Redcoats. Even better, it had pirates, although sulky Yul Brynner in a shellacked wig was pretty hard to take as Jean Lafitte.
The Horton song told the whole story in a few verses (“In 1814, we took a little trip, along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip”), and Kathy knew every one. I was impressed, even after I learned the whole song myself. I was so swayed by her charms that I invited her to my birthday party. My family met this invitation with some skepticism. Who was this girl? What did we know about her? You might have thought she was out for my trust fund, the way they carried on. And that she knew “The Battle of New Orleans” cut no ice with them. Still, I guess I put up some kind of fuss, because they let her come, along with all my pre-certified little friends. It was all for nothing, though, because when it was over, she let me know, in so many words, that unless I was prepared to offer her cake and ice cream every day, nothing would ever come of our romance.
So Kathy slipped away. All she left me was the song. I went around singing about the Battle of New Orleans for another year or more, and the song stuck in my memory far better than anything I learned in school that year. After a while I got it down to its essence—unconsciously—when I simply ignored the lyrics and hummed the melody. What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t find out for years, was that the melody was an old fiddle tune called “The Eighth of January,” named after the date of the famous battle in 1815. It is also my birthday. If only Kathy had known that.
One afternoon, after a particularly dismal piano lesson, I asked Mother if she would teach me. It was not the first time I had broached the subject, and the answer had always been a firm no, but I never gave up hope. I tried flattery. “You would be a great teacher. We could have a lesson whenever we felt like it.” She smiled. “No, honey, they say that you should never teach your own children.” I had heard this before, too. She never said why it was a bad idea, and I knew that she never did anything she didn’t want to do, no matter who told her to do it, but I knew better than to challenge her. “Maybe I should just quit, then.”
“That’s not like you to say something like that.”
“I know.”
“When I was a girl about your age, I wanted to play basketball at school. But Mama told me I had to choose. I could play ball or keep on with my piano lessons.”
I didn’t have time to figure out what that had to do with my problem before she continued. “I don’t know why she made me choose, but I never hesitated. Goodness knows what would have happened if I hadn’t kept it up then. You know, piano is something that you’ll have your whole life. It may not mean much to you now, but later it will.”
“I just wish I could learn some different music.”
“Bach isn’t good enough for you?”
“No, I—”
“This is what I’m trying to explain to you. My daddy paid for piano lessons, he paid for college for any of us who would go. Now Kathleen wouldn’t go to college, I don’t know why, but she wouldn’t, and look at Kathleen now, living down there in Kershaw all alone, living by herself in Mama’s house, doing nothing but going uptown to the café for lunch every day. I don’t understand that. She’s just not like the rest of us, is all I can figure. Daddy believed in culture. We’re a cultured family, and there’s something you should take pride in. There are a lot of things you’re learning that you don’t understand now, but down the road you will.”
I don’t remember ever winning a dispute with my mother. If you cornered her with a point of logic, she simply changed the subject. It was like debating a greased pig. And sometimes she would preempt any further discussion by saying something astonishing enough to render you speechless. A few years before she died, we were arguing over t
he definition of a good parent, and I asked her for examples. Just who did she think embodied the Christ like qualities she seemed to think a good father or mother possessed? I asked the question with a certain smugness, assured that no matter who among our acquaintances she might nominate, I would be able to counter with some flaw or other. As always, I underestimated her. After thinking for a moment, she responded irritably, as though the answer was so obvious that it pained her to have to point it out: Ben Cartwright. “Just see how he raised those boys,” she said. “Adam, Hoss and Little Joe. And without a mother.”
Mother never articulated precisely what she meant by a cultured family, besides the kind of family that paid for piano lessons. But there were piecemeal clues, and by eavesdropping and inferring, I worked out a pretty good idea of what she thought. Mostly it amounted to a series of negatives. It wasn’t a matter of what you were. It was more about what you didn’t want to be. It meant despising anything unrefined, low class, tacky: hillbilly music, rock and roll, rhythm and blues, stock-car racing, professional wrestling, beehive hairdos, snuff dipping, hot rods, loud talk, dirty jokes, people who said chimley for chimney or Mizrez for Mrs., and anyone who drank alcohol. On the other hand, one was cautioned to “never get above your raising.” This translated into rolling your eyes at anyone who liked jazz, classical music, art museums and movies with subtitles—this was a more abstract prejudice, since we had never met anyone who liked those things. But all that scorn for the lows and the highs left scant room for anything in the middle. The attributes of a cultured person, so far as I made it out, started and stopped with good manners, good grammar and a perfect attendance record at church.
“Look at Gene Self. A grown man taking piano lessons. If he can do it, you shouldn’t have any trouble. It’s easy to learn when you’re young. And you know what he told me? He said, ‘I wish I hadn’t wasted all that time before I started.’ You should think about that.”
Little Boy Blues Page 12