by Jeff Horton
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same thing if I had said yes, because they were going to say I was there anyway because I was in the band. There was a whole lot of guys in and out of the band with him at the time, but he basically had Johnny Jones on piano, J. T. Brown on tenor sax, and Grady “Fats” Jackson blowing two saxes at the same time. I didn’t meet Fats until we did the Big
Joe Turner session.
Elmore did a lot of stuff for the Bihari brothers on RPM and a
few other labels. What people would do, they would try to capture his music from different gigs, even though he never did do a live album.
They would always try to record him on his live shows, but he was
against that. On most all of the Bobby Robinson Fire and Fury ses-
sions from 1958 until 1963, I was on a lot of that stuff. We also did sessions in Chicago, New Orleans, and then New York. That was a pretty
interesting thing. We recorded “The Sky Is Crying” in Chicago at
Chess Studios, but it was on Bobby’s Fire and Fury label. A lot of labels did work there, like a lot of stuff they did on Delmark. They figured that by them not having a studio of their own at the time, since
they were using Chess Recording Company musicians, why not just
go into their studio and do it there? Like Cosimo’s in New Orleans,
they would lease out to all labels. Johnny Vincent and Ace Records,
that’s how he did a lot of his stuff out of New Orleans. He would
cut it in Jackson at Trumpet and have it pressed down there in New
Orleans. He had a lot of Louisiana musicians that he recorded with at Cosimo’s. That was the big studio at the time.
Anyway, back to Elmore. He did “The-Twelve-Year-Old Boy,”
which was a remake. I was in the studio at the time, but I wasn’t playing drums on that one. But the first one, with Wayne Bennett, I was on that. That’s kind of a strange song. The story behind that, there was a kid who used to hang around Elmore’s house. The woman, she just
liked youngsters, like most women of today. But twelve years old,
that’s mighty small at that time period. He mentioned that the young
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boy used to hang around his house until late hours of the night, and he wouldn’t have thought with a kid that young that she would have
in mind to treat him right. In the song he says, “If a young boy hangs around, you should do what I should have did, send him over to your
neighbor’s, and hope your neighbor likes kids.” That was just a wild thing. Elmore should have been doing his homework, yeah. He just
wasn’t thinking. He was probably looking for a place to make some
whiskey, or was heading out the door to a gig.
We had some good times together, in and out of the studio. Elmore
recorded “Dust My Broom” over a dozen times with different labels.
He really had an identifying thing with his slide guitar, though. A lot of guys played slide, but the minute that he put that slide on his finger and ran it across those strings, you would know it was him doing it.
We used to play a lot out at one of Percy Simpson’s clubs in Jackson, Mr. P’s. It wasn’t a really big club, but it was nice-sized. They had gambling facilities in the back, and guys would come there just to
gamble. While they would gamble, their lady friends would stay up
front and listen to the music. Boy, there was a lot of gamblers who
lost their women up in there! Lost their money and their women. But
it was a real nice place to play. That club was the highlight of Jackson for a long time until they went out of business. They moved it and
changed it to Club 77. If you knew we were going to be playing there on the weekend at ten o’clock, you had to get there about seven to get a good seat. They kept a thriving business, so we would play there on Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night whenever we was in
town. It was just a home-based gig for us.
Being as Elmore was originally from Mississippi, we would always
come back to Jackson when we wasn’t on the road. He’d get some
bookings from his recording company, but back then they didn’t have
too many agents that would go to bat for him. That’s where we would
remain, in Jackson, until we hit the road again. Sometimes Elmore
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would do recordings with the same people he traveled with, and
sometimes he would record with a lot of different people. But he
would always try to record with the same people he traveled with.
Elmore was a nice guy to be around. He wasn’t a flashy guy; he
didn’t have a lot of ego. People who’d be talking to him that did have ego, the first thing he’d say to them was, “It’s good that the world is not full of people like you. There’s enough room out here for everybody.”
Those would be his words. “Don’t think you’re so great that you can’t respect your fellow man.” He was the kind of person, if he had anything that you needed, he’d let you have it. What was so strange about him, if he was broke, he wouldn’t take nothing from you. I never
could understand that about him.
He always would tell me, “Man, you know what, you should never
worry. If somebody who owes you is in business, you always got a shot at ’em. But the person who you should worry about is the son of a gun who owes you and won’t pay you and he’s going out of business. That’s the one that’s really getting over on you, you know.” And that’s true.
Elmore and I ran a little sideline together back in Mississippi. We
had us a still on the banks of the Pearl River in Jackson, right across from the Stillwell Reservoir, where the floodgates were in that north corner. What was good about that spot was that you had swift running water, and anywhere you had a fast stream of clear running water, that’s where you made your best whiskey. We were right at the spillway, leading from the river into the reservoir. Right there at that spot, there was a guy that was working for the company that was building it. He
was a good friend with us, and he gave us the layout with the map and everything that they were going to do. So we never did get caught while we had our still, but a lot of people around us did. There was a revenue man named Sam Newman. He said if anybody was making whiskey
anywhere in the state of Mississippi, he would catch ’em. But he never did catch us.
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We went in it, not blindfolded, and we got out of it at the right
time. What would happen, when we were off the road, we’d be in there making whiskey. The way we would do it, we had a lady that would
help us. We called her “Big Mama.” She took our orders, plus she sold the whiskey for us. Then we had a couple of guys in the police department to keep stuff down, to let us know what was happening. We had
our airtight thing, you know? My deal was, before we would go to the still, I’d make it my business to go down to the corner of Monument
and Farish Street there in Jackson to see what I could hear. There was this black guy, Jake, that ran with the revenue guy, Sam Newman. Jake would be down there on the corner talking about the stills they hit.
“Every one of you guys, you have it good, I didn’t get in until about four o’clock this morning. We was off in Rankin County . . . ,” and all that sort of stuff.
We had a smart thing going on while we was in the whiskey-
making business. There was a guy on the police force who was really
sick. I had always told him that I’d like to have his radio. He went into the hospital, and he never did come out. That radio was one of the
things among his personal things that didn’t nobody get, because I
&nbs
p; stole it. We could get a frequency on the highway patrol, the sheriff of Hinds County, and even the city cops. And I had to be careful about
carrying it to a radio shop. I had some work I needed to have done on the durn thing, but I knew a guy who had his own business on Mill
Street. He knew the kind of radio it was, but he fixed it for me. And I used to just turn the thing on and listen to police calls, the wrecks on the highway, and the stuff that the deputy sheriffs was doing even long after that. When you had tubes that would be gone bad, you had to be careful about that. You had to really be on the watch as to what you were doing. But the way I had that thing fixed up after I got it, there would’ve been no way, unless they were special looking for it, for them to have been able to find out what it was. I even had it painted a
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different color, and where the name of the radio was, I had taped over it. If anybody saw it and if I didn’t have it on, they’d just think it was a ham radio. I kept that radio a long while.
One time, they almost caught us. I don’t know if someone tipped
them off to where the still was or if they were just wandering blind.
This guy Newman had all different kinds of ways to catch people selling whiskey. Now where we was, there wasn’t no cattle over there. But he put a cowbell around his neck and he’d be walkin’ along. If anybody heard it, they’d think it’d be a cow, and before they’d know anything, he’d be up on ’em. So we had our setup going, everything cooking and slowin’ and goin’ in a hidden deal by some brushwood. A person could walk by it all day long, and if they didn’t see nobody out there, if it wasn’t operating they wouldn’t even know it was there. So, in the middle of a conversation Elmore and me was having, I heard something.
We both had a rifle apiece; I had a .30-30 Winchester and I was as good a shot as anybody else. What a lot of people don’t know right today
that knows how to use weapons, what would make it more accurate for
you to hit your target, you got to be able to hear as well as to see.
I said, “Man, somebody’s cow must’ve got out over here.” He said,
“There ain’t no cows within miles of this place.” And there wasn’t,
because from where we was, far from any settlement where people
lived, they had nothing but a big steel mill. So Elmore said, “Man, you hearing things, there must be something back in Chicago on your
mind.” I said, “No, hell, it ain’t either, my mind’s right here in these woods. Did you see that light flash?” He said, “You gotta be crazy now,
’cause there’s not even lightning.” I said, “That wasn’t what it looked like. It looked like it was some kind of a flashlight.” He looked and he saw it and he said, “Damn, I must be going crazy, too, ’cause I saw it then. I hear a bell, it went ding-ding-ding-ding.” I said, “Yeah, do you want to know something about it?” He said, “What’s that?” I said, “Did you know a cowbell don’t ring up high? It ring down low.” He said,
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“That do sound strange.” I said, “Yeah.” He said, “Hot dog, I heard it again.” I said, “Well, I heard it too. It’s either we gettin’ wild amongst one another in these woods or somebody’s coming up on us.” He
said, “No, hell, you right, I see the light now.” And he was about as far from us as about a hundred feet. Elmore said, “Man, put out the fire and let’s get up this shit and get out of here!” I said, “Well, before we do that, that’s Sam Newman, I know it is. We could kill that SOB and won’t nobody know that we did it.” I reversed the rifle, and just then Elmore said, “Hey, man, put out the goddam fire, put out the fire!” I put the fire out and I said, “You see the light now, don’t you?” He said,
“Yeah. They right here on us!” I said, “Well, I’m going to pick him off!”
He said, “Man, put that rifle down and let’s go!” And so I put it back in position and we took off running. And they got about as close from me as ten feet but they couldn’t see us. We could see him ’cause he was running blind in the dark, too. They had those flashlights, but that brushwood kept ’em from seeing who we was, and we run until we
got up on the highway. I said, “Yes sir, here that son of a gun’s truck is, parked right behind us.”
Where he messed up at, he did not do like a lot of people did back
then; he didn’t fix our truck to where we couldn’t leave. They probably was waitin’ for us to run for it, they thought they were going to catch us right at the deal. And we had fake tags, too. Back during that time they had license plates where you could switch license plates and have another state’s tag under your own. It could be the same truck. When you’re doing stuff illegal, you gotta do every illegal aspect that you can.
We throwed our stuff in the back, put our rifles up in the rack over our heads and jumped in. The truck just went, “Ummmmmm!” Now, that
durn truck had been cranking ever since before then. I said, “Oh, hell, man, we better hurry up and do something because they coming up in
the highway.” And just at the time when Newman’s foot hit the pave-
ment, that durn motor turned over—rhoom!—so we took off. And
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they shot at us, they might have killed us, but they had pistols. If they had rifles like we had, they could have shot us up. But I wanted to
shoot that man, though. I really did.
The next morning I went down on the corner to select informa-
tion. Newman’s guy Jake said, “Man, you know what, last night we was over on the Fannin Road in Rankin County. I don’t know who it was
but we almost caught ’em.” I said, “Yeah? What happened?” He said,
“Well, we parked behind ’em, it was a blue Ford. I think I know whose it was, but I’m not saying.” I said, “Well, there’s a lot of blue Fords around here.” He said, “Yeah, but there is only one particular truck that’s like it.” Then he didn’t want to talk about it any more. I said to myself, yeah, you black son of a bitch, you almost got killed and didn’t even know it. So that’s the closest we ever come to being caught. We used to go back and forth to the still in that durn truck.
We gave a guy six hundred dollars for it. He said, “Well, I need
some money, that’s the reason why I’m lettin’ y’all have it. But I used this truck to run whiskey.” I said, “Woodrow, you a friend of mine, and I don’t want you to say nothing about this, but what the hell do you think we want the truck for?” He said, “That’s what I figured you want it for. But if there’s anything ever happen, I want that truck back.”
I said, “Twelve hundred bucks and you can get it back whenever we go out of business.”
There was this one guy who we got our copper coil pipes from at
the Jackson Iron & Metal Company on Rankin Street, in south Jackson.
We used to make whiskey for him because he let us have that pipe for free, more or less. When we decided that we were getting out of the
whiskey business, he gave us a thousand dollars for the copper. That was good money back then. And we had about two hundred-something
gallons of liquor that was left over. He said, “I’ll give you fifteen dollars for every gallon you got.” We said, “Do you want us to cut that copper up?” He said, “No, don’t cut it up.” Normally you’d think if
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you were working at an iron and metal company like him, he would
cut it up himself. He sent some men over, and the only thing they cut was the pipes from them tanks so they could get it onto their truck.
And when they brought that durn truck in on the day that he paid us
off, I noticed he didn’t park the truck in the line on the crushing side where they have the welding torches and the cutters. He had it parked over on the other side
of the yard.
After he paid us for the still, he gave us the fifteen dollars for every gallon of the leftover whiskey that we had. He wanted to know, did
we want that in separate checks? We said, “You just add it up and
just make us one check.” He said, “Well, I’ll just go ahead and pay you cash money for this,” and so he did. We asked him, “Hey, man, we’ve
got a flaming cutting torch, we could cut the thing up for you.” No, he didn’t want to cut it up. We pointed the copper out to him where it was.
Course, he had been there and saw our operation so many times, he
was the one who gave us the copper coil pipe and the stuff to join ’em off to get the still going. He used one of the company trucks to pick the copper up. He had a truck that was big enough; he could just load the whole thing on it without even cutting it up.
I happened to be thinking about it one night after it was over
with. We were rooming with a guy named Johnny Temple. We were
sitting watching TV, getting ready to go to work out at Percy Simpson’s place. I said, “Elmore, don’t you think it would be strange for a person, if they was in the iron business and was going to buy some iron, why they wouldn’t just crush it with all the rest of the iron?” He said, “Well, that might have been his personal thing.” I said, “Yeah, it was. I bet you that guy might go into a business of his own.” He said, “Well, no doubt he would. Hell, he paid for it, so what can you say?” So after Elmore had passed, I found out that the guy had retired from the
Jackson Iron & Metal Company. Years later I saw him in Lynchburg, Tennessee. He had gotten government approval to make whiskey for
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the Tennessee distilleries, to make Jack Daniel’s. I had thought it was kind of strange that he didn’t put the pipe from that still over with the rest of the iron. He just piled that truck over by itself, away from that area. And so that’s the way it went.
With Elmore, we toured and played on what they called the
Chittlin’ Circuit through the South. We went to Camden, Texas, a