Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Saturday nights we’d go out to different whiskey houses. We’d go out with our guitars, try to get a good shot of that white whiskey and feel good. Then we’d start to holler the blues. People would be pouring in. We done had a good time around there.

  Then one day we left down the river, me and Joe left there, hitchhiking and hoboing. Back then when a musician was on the road with a guitar, cars would stop and pick you up. “Where y’all goin’? Play me some music, y’all!” We’d fall in the back and play the blues. Sometimes they’d stop and get us a drink, buy us a sandwich.

  And Joe Williams would catch trains. Joe wasn’t nothing but a hobo! He couldn’t write his name! But he had a lot of sense, mother wit sense. He could go to any town, get off at a corner and look around. He’d say, “Well, let’s go to such and such a place.” And when we come back there and you think, “Hell, was this where we was?” he’d say, “Uh-uh. You go down further.” He knew. He couldn’t read or write, he didn’t know his name hardly when he saw it. That’s right! But he knowed the spots that he went by. And he’d be right, too.

  Me and Joe stayed together about eight or nine months. We come to Jackson, Mississippi, and we come to Vicksburg. I met quite a few musicians. Frank Haines, he was a guitar player; he was in Jackson. Johnny Young was down in Vicksburg, playing the mandolin. He was real young, working with a fellow named Blue Coat who played violin. We stayed with a guy who run a riverboat and sold whiskey, he kept a good-timing house. We left Vicksburg, crossed the Mississippi River to Tallulah. Went to Rayville, a little town that stayed up all night and all day barrelhousing. Then we went to West Monroe, played over there. They had a big paper mill over there, and we went to the paper mill quarter and played. And when we left there we went to New Orleans.

  I stayed with Joe till I got plumb good. Joe Williams would play in high Spanish with a capo on his guitar, and he run me down in E, open key. When I played open key behind that high Spanish, it sounded just like a bass behind a mandolin or something because of that high tone of his with the capo. And I got a low tone in the key of E, but it’s the same key. Nine strings, he always had those nine strings on his guitar. That’s something he invented himself. He bored holes at the top of the neck of the guitar and made himself a nine-string guitar. That’s the way he played all the time.

  He was playing “Brother James,” all them old numbers like that. “Brother James,” “Highway 49,” “Stack O’Dollars.” “Stack O’Dollars, keep a-knockin’, you can’t come in. Stack O’Dollars, you can’t come in.” “Baby, Please Don’t Go,” “Milkcow Blues.” He played all them old numbers. Some songs he made up, and I just played second guitar behind him. He’d just make up songs on the spot, and they’d be good songs, too. And we got pretty good; we made money. Because there wasn’t a whole lot of blues players in the streets then. They was scattered around; it was hard to find a good blues player. You could find anybody to sit up and holler and go on. But to find something with life and a sound, you couldn’t run up on that every day.

  Joe was the first man that learned me how to hustle on the road. He could go anywhere, and he knew how to hustle with that guitar. I was following Joe, because Joe was like a dog. He knew everywhere, knew every train. Joe was the laziest man you ever saw; he wanted to work no way. I don’t think he’d work in a baker’s shop if you gave him a cake every time the pan came out. He played that guitar and made enough nickels and dimes and quarters to get rooms.

  At that time, you could get rooms anywhere for three dollars a week. It wouldn’t be a nice, classy room, but you had somewhere to sleep and eat at. Sometimes we’d pay six dollars a week and get board, room and board. The woman would cook you two meals a day. You get your breakfast, hot biscuits, bacon. Most of the people then raised hogs and had all that ham hanging in the smokehouse. Them old womens would put a couple big slices in the skillet, make the rice, put that ham gravy on the rice. Have bacon and rice and biscuits. That’s six dollars a week. And that didn’t cost them much because they raised that meat.

  We could go on a Friday night, get two dollars apiece at a little country dance. In the daytime, in a set on the streets, we pass the hat around and sometimes we’d make up five or six dollars apiece. That was natural money. With a couple of dollars in them country towns, you could do alright. Nickel and dime, go and change it up for some greenbacks. We hustled—we gambled with them guitars.

  He learned me how to go on the road, he learned me how to stand on the streets and make nickels and dimes and learned me how to hustle in barrelhouses. I learned under Big Joe. He’d take me in them places when I wasn’t old enough to go in there and people let him bring me in.

  When he wasn’t playing, Joe would be messing around with the women, getting drunk, having fun. I remember one time he was in a room with a woman and he broke her bed down! That woman was saying, “Mister, don’t tear my bed up,” and he said, “Well, this bed just ain’t no damn good!” Joe, he didn’t gamble too much but he drank and played with the women. I’d be out shooting marbles with some boys on the streets. I loved to play guitar but I was still young; I had childish ways. He’d say, “Come on, Honey, get your guitar. Let’s go.” And he fed me, gave me a little money to keep in my pocket. I appreciate that, he kept me out of the field. He changed my life and I’m glad of it.

  In New Orleans, that was good hustling there. I always did want to come to a big city. We stayed with a Creole woman of Joe’s in the French Quarter. It was something to see them bright lights. There was streetcars and the Canal Ferry was running then, men loading banana boats on the river, people everywhere on wagons and in old cars and on horses. It was beautiful.

  We was the only ones playing blues around there then. New Orleans always been a jazz town. But the people got excited over the blues we was playing. Me and Joe would play around Rampart Street at the little joints, go in the bars, get chairs, and set down and play. In New Orleans in them bars people didn’t drink white whiskey. They’d sit at a table and get a gallon of wine and a pitcher of ice. They let me play in the bars even though I wasn’t but a boy. Things wasn’t so strict and I’d sit behind Joe. We’d play in them bars, serenade in the streets, play for the whores, play at the train station, different places all over New Orleans.

  Joe started drinking heavy in New Orleans, started drinking heavy on the pint. I was young, I didn’t weigh but 110 pounds, and Joe started wanting to fight me. So I slipped off and left there walking. Slipped off one day and left Joe sleeping. And I come out of New Orleans and hit number 90 Highway, coming down the coast. I had my guitar on my shoulder and I’m wondering what I’m going to do because I hadn’t been by myself before. I caught a ride to Bay St. Louis and got out on a bridge where there was people catching crabs. Some guy stopped me. He said, “Can you play that guitar?” And I said, “Yeah, I can,” and I started to play it a little bit. “You’re good!” I didn’t know how good it was, but I was trying to play like Joe. This man starts to throwing me dimes and I thought, Hell, I don’t need Joe.

  I come into Gulfport and I went to the music store there and found a little old harp rack. I started playing the harp and guitar and that was sounding alright.

  I hitched a ride from Gulfport to Columbia, Mississippi, with two white men in a old black Ford. Friday come up and I played at the mill quarters there, at a big sawmill. All the people lived at the mill, in those section houses. I got up at the barrelhouse, playing my guitar, and them old women got drunk and started to hollering, going on, chunking that money at me. I played there for about a week, made a little money, and finally pulled up for home.

  I lit out hitchhiking and got to Greenwood in a couple of days. When I got there, all of them, my sisters and them, was standing around me like somebody they never seen before. They said, “Honey can play now!”

  THE LITTLE CHURCH

  By William Faulkner

  [From Soldier’s Pay, 1926]

  … The road dropped on again descending between reddish gashes, and across
a level moon-lit space, broken by a clump of saplings, came a pure quivering chord of music wordless and far away.

  “They are holding services. Negroes,” the rector explained. They walked on in the dust, passing neat tidy houses, dark with slumber. An occasional group of negroes passed them, bearing lighted lanterns that jetted vain little flames futilely into the moonlight. “No one knows why they do that,” the divine replied to Gilligan’s question. “Perhaps it is to light their churches with.”

  The singing drew nearer and nearer; at last, crouching among a clump of trees beside the road, they saw the shabby church with its canting travesty of a spire. Within it was a soft glow of kerosene serving only to make the darkness and the heat thicker, making thicker the imminence of sex after harsh labor along the mooned land; and from it welled the crooning submerged passion of the dark race. It was nothing, it was everything; then it swelled to an ecstasy, taking the white man’s words as readily as it took his remote God and made a personal Father of Him.

  Feed Thy Sheep, 0 Jesus. All the longing of mankind for a Oneness with Something, somewhere. Feed Thy Sheep, 0 Jesus… The rector and Gilligan stood side by side in the dusty road. The road went on under the moon, vaguely dissolving without perspective. Worn-out red-gutted fields were now alternate splashes of soft black and silver; trees had each a silver nimbus, save those moonward from them, which were sharp as bronze.

  Feed Thy Sheep, 0 Jesus. The voices rose full and soft. There was no organ; no organ was needed as above the harmonic passion of bass and baritone soared a clear soprano of women’s voices like a flight of gold and heavenly birds. They stood together in the dust, the rector in his shapeless black, and Gilligan in his new hard serge, listening, seeing the shabby church become beautiful with mellow longing, passionate and sad. Then the singing died, fading away along the mooned land inevitable with to-morrow and sweat, with sex and death and damnation; and they turned townward under the moon, feeling dust in their shoes,

  DOWN AT THE CROSS

  By James Baldwin

  [From The Fire Next Time, 1962]

  I was saved. But at the same time, out of a deep, adolescent cunning I do not pretend to understand, I realized immediately that I could not remain in the church merely as another worshipper. I would have to give myself something to do, in order not to be too bored and find myself among all the wretched unsaved of the Avenue…

  The church was very exciting. It took a long time for me to disengage myself from this excitement, and on the blindest, most visceral level, I never really have, and never will. There is no music like that music, no drama like the drama of the saints rejoicing, the sinners moaning, the tambourines racing, and all those voices coming together and crying holy unto the Lord. There is still, for me, no pathos quite like the pathos of those multi-colored, worn, somehow triumphant and transfigured faces, speaking from the depths of a visible, tangible, continuing despair of the goodness of the Lord. I have never seen anything to equal the fire and excitement that sometimes, without warning, fill a church, causing the church, as Lead Belly and so many others have testified, to “rock.” Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, “the Word”—when the church and I were one. Their pain and their joy were mine, and mine were theirs—they surrendered their pain and joy to me, I surrendered mine to them—and their cries of “Amen!” and “Hallelujah!” and “Yes, Lord!” and “Praise His name!” and “Preach it, brother!” sustained and whipped on my solos until we all became equal, wringing wet, singing and dancing in anguish and rejoicing, at the foot of the altar…

  Mother’s Day in Shaw, Mississippi, 1974

  Being in the pulpit was like being in the theater; I was behind the scenes and knew how the illusion was worked. I knew the other ministers and knew the quality of their lives. And I don’t mean to suggest by this the “Elmer Gantry” sort of hypocrisy concerning sensuality; it was a deeper, deadlier, and more subtle hypocrisy than that, and a little honest sensuality, or a lot, would have been like water in an extremely bitter desert. I knew how to work on a congregation until the last dime was surrendered—it was not very hard to do—and I knew where the money for “the Lord’s work” went. I knew, though I did not wish to know it, that I had no respect for the people with whom I worked. I could not have said it then, but I also knew that if I continued I would soon have no respect for myself…

  In spite of everything, there was in the life I fled a zest and a joy and a capacity for facing and surviving disaster that are very moving and very rare. Perhaps we were, all of us—pimps, whores, racketeers, church members, and children—bound together by the nature of our oppression, the specific and peculiar complex of risks we had to run; if so, within these limits we sometimes achieved with each other a freedom that was close to love. I remember, anyway, church suppers and outings, and, later, after I left the church, rent and waistline parties where rage and sorrow sat in the darkness and did not stir, and we ate and drank and talked and laughed and danced and forgot all about “the man.” We had the liquor, the chicken, the music, and each other, and had no need to pretend to be what we were not. This is the freedom that one hears in some gospel songs, for example, and in jazz. In all jazz, and especially in the blues, there is something tart and ironic, authoritative and double-edged. White Americans seem to feel that happy songs are happy and sad songs are sad, and that, God help us, is exactly the way most white Americans sing them—sounding, in both cases, so helplessly, defencelessly [sic] fatuous that one dare not speculate on the temperature of the deep freeze from which issue their brave and sexless little voices. Only people who have been “down the line,” as the song puts it, know what this music is about. I think it was Big Bill Broonzy who used to sing “I Feel So Good,” a really joyful song about a man who is on his way to the railroad station to meet his girl. She’s coming home. It is the singer’s incredibly moving exuberance that makes one realize how leaden the time must have been while she was gone. There is no guarantee that she will stay this time, either, as the singer clearly knows, and, in fact, she has not yet actually arrived. Tonight, or tomorrow, or within the next five minutes, he may very well be singing “Lonesome in My Bedroom,” or insisting, “Ain’t we, ain’t we, going to make it all right? Well, if we don’t today, we will tomorrow night.” White Americans do not understand the depths out of which such an ironic tenacity comes, but they suspect that the force is sensual, and they are terrified of sensuality and do not any longer understand it. The word sensual is not intended to bring to mind quivering dusky maidens or priapic black studs. I am referring to something much simpler and much less fanciful. To be sensual, I think, is to respect and rejoice in the force of life, of life itself, and to be present in all that one does, from the effort of loving to the breaking of bread. It will be a great day for America, incidentally, when we begin to eat bread again, instead of the blasphemous and tasteless foam rubber that we have substituted for it. And I am not being frivolous now, either. Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become. It is this individual uncertainly on the part of white American men and women, this inability to renew themselves at the fountain of their own lives, that makes the discussion, let alone elucidation, of any conundrum—that is, any reality—so supremely difficult. The person who distrusts himself has no touchstone for reality—for this touchstone can be only oneself. Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much), are historical and public attitudes. They do not relate to the present any more than they relate to the person. Therefore, whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.

  REDEMPTION
SONG

  By W.E.B. Du Bois

  A great song arose, the loveliest thing born this side of the seas. It was a new song. It did not come from Africa, though the dark throb and beat of that Ancient of days was in it and through it. It did not come from white America—never from so pale and thin a thing, however deep these vulgar and surrounding tones had driven… It was a new song and its deep and plaintive beauty, its great cadences and wild appeal wailed, throbbed, and thundered on the world’s ears with a message seldom voiced by man… America’s one gift to beauty; as slavery’s one redemption, distilled from the dross of its dung.

  “I (TOO) HEAR AMERICA SINGING”

  By Julian Bond [1960]

  I, too, hear America singing

  But from where I stand

  I can only hear Little Richard

  And Fats Domino.

  But sometimes,

  I hear Ray Charles

  Drowning in his own tears or Bird

  Relaxing at Camarillo

  or Horace Silver doodling,

  Then I don’t mind standing a little longer.

  [*ln the vernacular of the day, cock was female genitalia.]

  THE ROAD TO MEMPHIS

  Directed by Richard Pearce

  The interesting thing about making a film about Memphis is that it was an extraordinarily fertile ground for the development of a whole musical style that emerged from the Delta. The artists who came to Memphis and then went on the radio suddenly had a huge audience—initially a black audience—which created a life for these guys who went out on the road to play. That is what became the chitlin circuit. That’s how they became stars: All of a sudden, the audience out in the Delta got to know them, and they went out and played these clubs. B.B. King represents a generation that came out of the cotton fields and became major figures, major stars on a world stage. And they’re not gonna be around that much longer. It’s extraordinary to have been able to tell B.B.’s story—a guy who was a tractor driver and heard music and went to Memphis to become part of a world that he’d only dreamed of.