by Jeff Horton
We went on after that to Memphis to play the King Cotton Festival.
Instead of it being a big outdoor festival, it was in different clubs in different parts of the city. We all went to set up our instruments at the club, and everybody was hungry. My lady friend at the time, who was
my son Willie Earl’s mother, had fixed me up with a big bag of chicken sandwiches. I told the boys, “Every man for himself,” just teasing ’em. I had three dollars and twenty cents, and when we stopped at this liquor store on Beale Street right off of Third, I went on in to get me a pint of Ballantine scotch. Matter of fact, Elmore was with us then, with King Mose. He had left Chicago to go with us. This was about in the summer of ’57, and everybody was broke. If they had enough change, maybe they could chip in together and maybe got one meal for one person
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and split it up. But I had the three dollars and some few cents on my own, so I went and got my liquor and I took a big drink. Elmore says to me, “Man, you know, we all here, I got a little cash, and we all hungry.
You don’t believe in sharing, do you?” I said, “Sure. But if you got some money, you can get you something to eat and you could have a drink
with me. Why don’t you just buy some food and then we’ll all eat. But otherwise I drinks by myself.” I kept my liquor to myself, but I shared out that big bag of sandwiches with the boys.
Around Chicago, when I wasn’t working anywhere or if I had
an off night, I would always get out to see some of the cats I never did hang with over on the West Side, unless I was doing my gig with
Elmore James at Silvio’s. I’d go and see a lot of the guys, but mainly the Howlin’ Wolf. Strange as it may seem, if you’re a man that’s thirty or forty years old, as long as you’re not being obnoxious or anything of the sort, you’re supposed to be able to do what you want to, within reason. But over the years, a lot of people never did know of this happening, but the Wolf would whip the members of his group like they
were kids. They were not allowed to have a drink unless he approved
it. He would always tell the guys when they’d take a break, “All right now, watch yourself !” He’d be sittin’ there having a scotch or rum with his friends, and he’d be telling his band, “All right, look out there, the Wolf got his eye on you!” He would take them back into the dressing
room and whup them like they was little kids. Not many people may
have heard that over the years, but it was true. By him being as tight as he was, he ran a tight group, and then he kept a good band better than most of the guys did. If they were onstage and one of them messed up a song or something, the same thing happened. Wolf said to me one
night, “I’ve seen you play with a lot of guys, but you’ve never come up on my bandstand.” I said, “Wolf, I tell you what, I don’t know you that well, but for me and you to be good friends it would be best for me not to do that, because of the way I am. If you made a mistake
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and forgot that I wasn’t a member of your band, I don’t care how big you are, they don’t have no work in the penitentiary for a blind man.
’Cause, man, I’d kill you!” He just said, “Heh, heh, heh, we gonna always be friends.” I said, “Yeah, no other way to do but be friends. ’Cause the day that happen to me, they’ll either have a double funeral, or yours.”
He just laughed some more and went on.
Elmore used to have a saying, “You run your mouth, but I run
my business.” There was a lady that Robert Lockwood, Jr., used to run with. He just up and gave her to Elmore after he decided he didn’t
want her no more. Lockwood was working at Silvio’s as the house
bandleader. Different musicians would come by on different nights
to play in a jam. They held them a lot different back then than the
way they do now. Like you see across Texas, they do a lot of open
mic stuff, but back then these jams would be professional people displaying what they know, doing it together. If you played on a guy’s
bandstand at a real jam session, your instrument had to be tuned
and you played what you knew. It wasn’t no guesswork. So one night,
we were all sitting around like musicians do, people like Lockwood,
Odie Payne, Fred Below, myself, and just a bunch of guys shooting
the breeze. Everything that Elmore played, if he didn’t play in the key of E, when he wasn’t using a slide he used a capo. We used to call it a clamp. He got up to make a telephone call, and when he came back,
Lockwood had stole his capo and hid it from him. Elmore said, “Man,
I got the perfect song but I’ve got to have my clamp. Damn, where is it?” All the other guys hollered, “I don’t know! I haven’t seen it!” He said, “Well, whoever it was that took my clamp was having sex with
his mama.” That’s when Lockwood spoke and said, “Hey, you didn’t
ask me about your damn clamp. But I’ll tell you this much: I’m the
one that got it and I’m not gonna give it back to you. And you must
have had sex with your mama, but I didn’t have none with mine. But
I’ll do one more thing for you that nobody else has done. I gave you
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a woman the other day, and now I’m gonna show you how to play
without that damn clamp. Then, when you face the world, you’ll know
how to play something.” And after Lockwood showed Elmore the
technique of how to play without a capo, he never used one again.
I never will forget one other time, at the Chess Records studio,
Robert Lockwood, Jr., and Luther Tucker was getting ready to do a
Little Walter session. The song was “Temperature.” It goes, “My baby gives me a high temperature.” People who know Lockwood know that
he was a creator and innovator of a lot of those sessions. He said to Luther, “Man, this might be something here.” But Luther said, “Yeah, man, but instead of me playing that, how about faking it?” So Lockwood looked at him hard and said, “Hey, man, we’re not faking noth-
ing here! Today we’re playing!” So Luther finally got into his head how Robert wanted the music to go, and he played it. That was one of
Walter’s biggest sellers.
When I first started with Anson, the guys in the band were real
musical-orientated. They would always see what songs we could do,
and they would always be inquisitive about different ways we could
do them, to make them better for our performances. The new guys in
Anson’s band are a little different now than in the old days, but they’re real cool guys. One of the funniest things that happened, it was one of Anson’s songs that we used to do a lot. I didn’t tell him, but there was a lady sitting there in the audience who said, “I’ll give you a nice tip for this song.” I tried to sense him into what was happening. It was a simple song, and the lady, after she told me this, she gave me a twenty-dollar bill. But Anson hollered to her, “Sorry, we don’t do that song anymore.”
So after he had told her that, well, there wasn’t nothing else I could say but ask her, “Would there be anything else you’d like to hear?” She said, “You’re sounding good, just play anything.” I asked her name,
and I called it out and then played the next song. And that made that twenty-dollar bill rightfully mine!
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We were riding one day through Chicago, going out to Spellman.
That’s out by one of the universities there. Doug Swancey was driving the bus. Now he drums with Kenny Traylor’s band out of Fort Worth.
We was riding through the city up to where they had pulled down th
e
ramp to the Dan Ryan Expressway. There was untied steel and every-
thing sticking out, and I said to Doug, “What you have to do is take the outer lane of the Dan Ryan. You don’t want to go up onto where
the guys are working.” He said, “I know, but I can’t get over.” I said,
“Just take the outer lanes where the other cars are going and it will get you right to where you need to be.” He said, “I can’t do that,” so I said, “Why in the hell can’t you do it?” He said, “Well, for one thing, I can see where I’m going.” I said, “I got two things against you. I used to live here, and I know my way around Chicago pretty good. You can
see and I can’t, but I sure know what the hell I’m doing and what way to go.” And it broke his heart when he ended up having to go the same way I told him to go.
Another time we were coming out of Cleveland heading into
Detroit. We were going to a club called Sully’s where we were going to be playing. We were on the expressway north of Toledo on Highway
75, so there was a lot of traffic. But before all this happened, we had stopped to have some work done on the bus. I had eased on over to
the mechanic and he said, “I can’t understand why this motor’s not
running free, but I’ll fix what they say.” I said, “What you need to do is to take that governor all the way off so the bus will run freely.” He said, “I hadn’t thought about that. I’ll just take it off, and he won’t know it until he tries to drive slow when he’s not supposed to.” I
was sorry afterwards that I told the guy to take it off, because we was going through Toledo getting ready to hit the outer lanes of 75 going up north to Detroit. We was about fifty miles out and the traffic was pretty heavy. We was on a bridge and Doug swung around and said,
“Boy, we’re moving now!” and I said, “Yeah, you’re moving pretty
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good.” Then he swerved back in, and just as he went to get back over in his lane, this car was coming pretty fast, and by the bus being as long as it was, it hit this guy’s car and almost turned it over. So Doug got right in the middle of the bridge and stopped, but the traffic
couldn’t get by him. He just froze. I said, “You hit that man’s car! You better get your long-haired ass out and go back and see about that
man, see is anybody hurt.” He kept saying, “I ain’t going, I ain’t going, I ain’t going.” So Anson came up to the front and got out and went
back there. I said, “If I was that man and I wasn’t hurt, I’d get me a sledgehammer and come up here and beat you until you really turned
green because you messed up his car.” He just kept saying, “I ain’t
going, I ain’t going,” just like that. So finally we went on and made the gig. It wasn’t too long before he left the group and started working with somebody else, but everybody, they’re all still friends. So that was a pair of Doug Swancey extravaganzas.
Mike Judge was another guy that was in the band. [ Author’s note: Mike Judge is the creator of the TV shows Beavis and Butthead and King of the Hill, as well as the movie Office Space. His animated character Beavis is drawn with a blond pompadour that resembles Anson’s.] He was a bass player, and I thought there was something up with his talent as far as him being in the band. He was a beautiful musician, a great bass player, but he was always coming up with these different sounds.
Like somebody would say something to him, and he’d make a sound
like a siren, like the cops was after him, or he’d remember what somebody had told him and he would be imitating them. That’s how his
career took off, and he’s been going ever since. I think a lot of guys envy him, but if you got talent and can display it in a way where it could be beneficial to you, hey, you should glory in your spunk, you know.
The funniest thing that ever happened to me anywhere, whether it
was on the road or not, was before I was declared as a diabetic. I used to not only make whiskey, I drank a lot of it, too. Back when I was working
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with Elmore in Jackson in a club called the S&S, Camel cigarettes were only thirty-five cents a pack. That’s all I’ve ever smoked. I was going to the telephone, and I had it in mind to get me a pack of cigarettes and then use a dime to get the operator to call my mother. So what I did, I went over to the telephone and I put thirty-five cents in it. Then I grabbed the telephone’s little knob and was pulling and jerk-ing on it. The club owner, John Simpson, came over and said, “Hey,
man, what in the hell are you doing?” I said, “I’m trying to get some cigarettes out of this S.O.B.” He said, “Man, you can’t get no cigarettes out of this thing. Wait a minute.” He hit the change release thing and my money came back, and a little more. He said, “I’m going to split
this with you since we got lucky. But I’m going to take thirty-five cents and go over and get you a pack of cigarettes.” That was about as drunk as I’ve ever been.
Another time, I had been drinking all day. Then I went to work at
night at that same club, the S&S. We were getting ready to hit the road after that, to go up to Cleveland to play a club there called Gleason’s Bar, at Fifty-fifth and Euclid. The guy had a hotel and a bar where we played. I had been drinking all that day, then I was going to go home where I was living at 127 West Davis Street, and we would leave out at eight o’clock the next morning. All the guys, by having to hurry home to get their gear and stuff together and maybe take a nap or two, they all went off and left me. I could have got a cab to go home, but I was still hanging around in the bar. I had drank me a whole lot of liquor that night, but I never did get too wasted when it come to doing my
show earlier in the evening. But by this time, I was off drinking with different guys.
There was this guy standing at the bar who I did not recognize as
being a deputy sheriff. John Simpson and his uncle, Percy Simpson,
was standing there talking to the guy. I said, “Well, it’s about time for me to get on in.” I was just sober enough to know that. The guy said,
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“Well, you’ve about had a night,” and I said, “Yeah, I’ve about had one but I got to head on and hit the road.” He said, “If you’re not going to get a cab or have nobody take you, I’ll drop you off.” I said, “Hey, man, that’s all right, let me know when you get ready.” He said, “I’m ready when you get ready.” I said, “I’m gonna have one more.” I had
drunk right then about a half of a half-pint of whiskey, sitting there at the bar. I never did look up to see who the guy was. We goes out, he caught me by the arm, and we walks out and I gets in the front seat
with him and he goes around to the driver’s side. I remember this, oh, I remember this as if it happened just a few minutes ago. I thought
something was strange that we got downtown mighty fast, so just as
he turned onto Davis Street, I went to ask him what kind of work did he do. About that time I heard his radio go off and say, “All available cars, there’s been a gasoline truck in a wreck out on Highway 80 West.”
I raised up and I said, “Holy shit!” and he looked at me and laughed and said, “What’s the matter? I thought you knew who I was!” I was
riding with the man who could have took me anywhere but home. We
were almost right in front of my house when the radio had come on.
I hopped out, and I was sober and steady as a judge! And ever since
then, whenever he would see me, it didn’t matter if it was in broad
daylight, he would ask me, “Did you ever get sober? Did you ever get straight?” and we’d just laugh. That was in 1959, and he was a white cop. But he was a blues lover and he had been coming by that club to pick up a shakedown, one of those kinds of deals.
I did have one kind of scary thing to happen to me. In Cincinnati,
Ohio, we were doing a festival there. This woman climbed up on stage and started hitting me with her handbag. She didn’t say nothing before, she just walked up and whaled the devil out of me. The woman said I
had jilted her out of a house and left her with a retarded child. I said,
“Oh, no, not me!” I was just took by surprise. The cops, they were supposed to have security there onstage. Now why did they let something
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like that happen? And I took it that she was on drugs, you know.
Everybody had a big laugh about it, but I said, “I’m going to tell you all something. If I had known that was going to happen, they would
probably be picking up pieces of her out in the audience.” And then
I got pissed off at the cops because they didn’t want to hear nothing that I said about it. I could have went over their heads and got restitu-tion in another way, but I didn’t. I don’t care who’s in the audience or who I’m playing with, I’ve always been careful since then. I don’t care where I am, I always have a protective thing with me when -
ever I’m onstage. Sad but true. I usually carry a knife or a gun or
something. And where I’d be a dummy, I’d say, see here, I got this,
I got that. If you’re gonna do something, or if you got something to do something with, if the other person has got it in mind to do harm to you, you’re not supposed to let him know that you’re ready for him.
A n s o n F u n d e r b u r g h :
Back somewhere in the eighties, we’d go down to Austin and do these benefits for Clifford Antone, whose club was always in dire straits. This was back when the place was on Guadalupe Street in South Austin. They had all the usual Austin people there, plus the Kentucky Headhunters. It was just me and Sam who went, and we sat in with the house band. I think it was George Raines on drums and Kim Wilson on harp and singing; that’s all I can remember. I think there’s still a tape of it somewhere. Now, some of these nights at Antone’s could go on forever. They’d shut the doors and play ’til six in the morning if they wanted to. The Kentucky Headhunters were the headliners that night, and they closed the regular show. Later on, after the audience and most of the employees were gone, they started in jamming, and Sam wanted to get up with them. When there’s music to be played, he’s always ready to be a part of it. He might say, “Oh, no, I don’t want to,” and kind of play it down for a minute, but if nobody asks him, he’ll be the first one to start trying to sneak up onto the stage.