POWERHOUSE
By Eudora Welty
[From A Curtain of Green and Other Stories, 1941]
Powerhouse is playing!
He’s here on tour from the city—”Powerhouse and His Keyboard”— “Powerhouse and His Tasmanians”— think of the things he calls himself! There’s no one in the world like him. You can’t tell what he is. “Nigger man”?—he looks more Asiatic, monkey, Jewish, Babylonian, Peruvian, fanatic, devil. He has pale gray eyes, heavy lids, maybe horny like a lizard’s, but big glowing eyes when they’re open. He has African feet of the greatest size, stomping, both together, on each side of the pedals. He’s not coal black—beverage colored—looks like a preacher when his mouth is shut, but then it opens—vast and obscene. And his mouth is going every minute: like a monkey’s when it looks for something. Improvising, coming on a light and childish melody—smooch—he loves it with his mouth.
Is it possible that he could be this! When you have him there performing for you, that’s what you feel. You know people on a stage—and people of a darker race—so likely to be marvelous, frightening.
This is a white dance. Powerhouse is not a show-off like the Harlem boys, not drunk, not crazy—he’s in a trance; he’s a person of joy, a fanatic. He listens as much as he performs, a look of hideous.
powerful rapture on his face. Big arched eyebrows that never stop traveling, like a Jew’s—wandering-Jew eyebrows. When he plays he beats down piano and seat and wears them away. He is in motion every moment—what could be more obscene? There he is with his great head, fat stomach, and little round piston legs, and long yellow-sectioned strong big fingers, at rest about the size of bananas. Of course you know how he sounds—you’ve heard him on records—but still you need to see him. He’s going all the time, like skating around the skating rink or rowing a boat. It makes everybody crowd around, here in this shadowless steel-trussed hall with the rose-like posters of Nelson Eddy and the testimonial for the mind-reading horse in handwriting magnified five hundred times. Then all quietly he lays his finger on a key with the promise and serenity of a sibyl touching the book.
Powerhouse is so monstrous he sends everybody into oblivion. When any group, any performers, come to town, don’t people always come out and hover near, leaning inward about them, to learn what it is? What is it? Listen. Remember how it was with the acrobats. Watch them carefully, hear the least word, especially what they say to one another, in another language—don’t let them escape you; it’s the only time for hallucination, the last time. They can’t stay. They’ll be somewhere else this time tomorrow.
Powerhouse has as much as possible done by signals. Everybody, laughing as if to hide a weakness, will sooner or later hand him up a written request. Powerhouse reads each one, studying with a secret face: That is the face which looks like a mask—anybody’s; there is a moment when he makes a decision. Then a light slides under his eyelids, and he says, “92!” or some combination of figures—never a name. Before a number the band is all frantic, misbehaving, pushing, like children in a schoolroom, and he is the teacher getting silence. His hands over the keys, he says sternly, “You-all ready? You-all ready to do some serious walking?”—waits—then, STAMP. Quiet. STAMP, for the second time. This is absolute. Then a set of rhythmic kicks against the floor to communicate the tempo. Then, O Lord! say the distended eyes from beyond the boundary of the trumpets, Hello and good-bye, and they are all down the first note like a waterfall.
This note marks the end of any known discipline. Powerhouse seems to abandon them all-he himself seems lost—down in the song, yelling up like somebody in a whirlpool-not guiding them—hailing them only. But he knows, really. He cries out, but he must know exactly. “Mercy! … What I say! … Yeah!” And then drifting, listening—”Where that skin beater?”—wanting drums, and starting up and pouring it out in the greatest delight and brutality. On the sweet pieces such a leer for everybody! He looks down so benevolently upon all our faces and whispers the lyrics to us. And if you could hear him at this moment on “Marie, the Dawn Is Breaking”! He’s going up the keyboard with a few fingers in some very derogatory triplet-routine, he gets higher and higher, and then he looks over the end of the piano, as if over a cliff. But not in a show-off way—the song makes him do it.
He loves the way they all play, too-all those next to him. The far section of the band is all studious, wearing glasses, every one—they don’t count. Only those playing around Powerhouse are the real ones. He has a bass fiddler from Vicksburg, black as pitch, named Valentine, who plays with his eyes shut and talking to himself, very young: Powerhouse has to keep encouraging him. “Go on, go on, give it up, bring it on out there!” When you heard him like that on records, did you know he was really pleading?
He calls Valentine out to take a solo.
“What you going to play?” Powerhouse looks out kindly from behind the piano; he opens his mouth and shows his tongue, listening.
Valentine looks down, drawing against his instrument, and says without a lip movement, “‘Honeysuckle Rose.’“
He has a clarinet player named Little Brother, and loves to listen to anything he does. He’ll smile and say, “Beautiful!” Little Brother takes a step forward when he plays and stands at the very front, with the whites of his eyes like fishes swimming. Once when he played a low note, Powerhouse muttered in dirty praise, “He went clear downstairs to get that one!”
After a longtime, he holds up the number of fingers to tell the band how many choruses still to go—usually five. He keeps his directions down to signals.
It’s a bad night outside. It’s a white dance, and nobody dances, except a few straggling jitterbugs and two elderly couples. Everybody just stands around the band and watches Powerhouse. Sometimes they steal a glance at one another, as if to say, Of course, you know how it is with them—Negroes-band leaders-they would play the same way, giving all they’ve got, for an audience of one… When somebody, no matter who, gives everything, it makes people feel ashamed for him…
They play “San” (99). The jitterbugs start up like windmills stationed over the floor, and in their orbits-one circle, another, a long stretch, and a zigzag-dance the elderly couples with old smoothness, undisturbed and stately.
When Powerhouse first came back from intermission, no doubt full of beer, they said, he got the band tuned up again in his own way. He didn’t strike the piano keys for pitch—he simply opened his mouth and gave falsetto howls—in A, D, and so on—they tuned by him. Then he took hold of the piano, as if he saw it for the first time in his life, and tested it for strength, hit it down in the bass, played an octave with his elbow, lifted the top, looked inside, and leaned against it with all his might. He sat down and played it for a few minutes with outrageous force and got it under his power—a bass deep and coarse as a sea net—then produced something glimmering and fragile, and smiled. And who could ever remember any of the things he says? They are just inspired remarks that roll out of his mouth like smoke.
They’ve requested “Somebody Loves Me,” and he’s already done twelve or fourteen choruses, piling them up nobody knows how, and it will be a wonder if he ever gets through. Now and then he calls and shouts, “Somebody loves me! Somebody loves me, I wonder who!” His mouth gets to be nothing but a volcano. “I wonder who!”
“Maybe …” He uses all his right hand on a trill.
“Maybe …” He pulls back his spread fingers, and looks out upon the place where he is. A vast, impersonal and yet furious grimace transfigures his wet face.
“… Maybe it’s you!”
RAY CHARLES DISCOVERS THE PIANO
By Michael Lydon
[From Ray Charles: Man and Music, 1998]
West of Greenville, Florida, North Grand Street soon wore down to a double wagon track, and songbirds and buzzing bugs drowned out the sawmills. Wild morning glories wrapped green vines and blue trumpets over sagging fence posts. Rickety shacks perched on tiny lots squeezed between forests and farms. Across from th
e big wooden New Zion Baptist Church, a nameless smaller road turned south across the railroad tracks and past a second wooden church, the modest New Shiloh Missionary Baptist. A half-mile farther a cluster of small houses and shacks stood under tall pines and oaks, a black quarter everybody called Jellyroll.
The name, rightly, had a raffish air. Colored folk who had lived in Greenville for years lived in Blackbottom, the black quarter in town watched over by the white folks on top of the hill. Jellyroll was out from under white eyes, a sandy clearing in the woods where transient workers had thrown up tar-paper shacks when work held through more than one season. Nobody had lived in Jellyroll long, nobody knew where the others had come from or might go next. The men and women of Jellyroll were by and large greenhorns from the plantations, drawn by the promise of cash for menial labor. Living close to Greenville felt more like town than the sharecropper cabins they had left, but Jellyroll was still country. On Sunday the people prayed hard, all week they worked hard, and Saturday night they found a bit of the free and easy at Mr. Pit’s Red Wing Cafe.
Wiley Pitman was a jovial brown-skinned man, fat, with a wide grin, and known far beyond Jellyroll as a fine piano player. With his wife, Miz Georgia, he owned the Red Wing, a wooden plank building facing the road from North Grand, The cafe doubled as a small general store where Miz Georgia sold kerosene and matches, flour and salt, cold beer and pig’s-foot sandwiches. A few tables filled the middle of the floor, and against one wall stood a jukebox and a piano. Out back stood a boardinghouse where Mr. Pit had rooms for the watermelon pickers who overflowed the place in summertime, and rooms, as one longtime resident put it,”for husbands going with other men’s wives,” Behind the boardinghouse stood several shacks.
[This is where the young Ray Charles Robinson (“RC,” as everyone called him) grew up.]
“Either RC was playing the piano or he was listening to the jukebox”—that is Greenville’s universal memory of the young Ray Charles, and the grown man’s memory fully agrees. “I was a normal kid, mischievous and into everything,” Charles recalled years later, “but I loved music, it was the only thing that could really get my attention.” One day when he was about three, RC was playing by the shacks when he heard Mr. Pit break into a driving boogie-woogie on the Red Wing’s battered old upright. Magnetized by the clanging chords and rocking beat, RC ran up the alley past the boardinghouse, pushed open the battered screen door, and stared amazed at Mr. Pit’s flying fingers. Seeing him, Mr. Pit laughed, swept the boy onto his lap, and let him reach out his hands to the keys, run his fingers up and down over their warm ebony and ivory textures.
From then on whenever RC heard Mr. Pit playing, he’d race into the cafe and, as he remembered years later with gratitude, “the man always let me play,” Wiley Pitman was no amateur, as Ray Charles recalled him, but a stride pianist who, had he not chosen the simple life in Greenville, could have duked it out with giants like Pete Johnson and Willie “the Lion” Smith. That may be a student’s exaggeration, but Mr. Pit did prove to be a superb teacher, showing RC first how to pick out a melody with one finger.”Oh no, son, you don’t play like that,” he said when RC banged too hard on the keys, but when out of awkward tumblings the boy got a beat going on his own, Mr. Pit encouraged him with noisy shouts of “That’s it, sonny, that’s it.”
Ray Charles recording for Atlantic Records, New York City, 1962
Near the piano stood the cafe jukebox, a marvel of flashing lights and moving metal. For a nickel, a mechanical arm would lift a black platter from a drum of records and set it spinning, the steel needle falling into the groove with a scratchy hiss, filling the room with electric sounds magically recorded long ago and far away. RC soon had a special place on a bench beside the jukebox where he sat for hours, his ear pressed up against the speaker. Sometimes when he was given a few coins for candy, they’d end up in the jukebox instead. More often RC didn’t have the money to pick his own songs, so he listened to everything anybody played: boogie-woogie piano by Albert Ammons, gutbucket blues by Tampa Red, the big bands of Fletcher Henderson and Duke Ellington. Work and music, running in the woods, church on Sunday—life flowed on for RC.
FINDING PROFESSOR LONGHAIR By
Jerry Wexler
[From Rhythm and the Blues: A Life in American Music, 1993]
Ahmet Ertegun had eyes to make records. He also had ears and tremendous taste. His taste led him to a suite at the Ritz-Carlton when he came up to New York to see about getting into the business. His taste also drained his meager finances. Counter to what many believed, he did not have an inheritance of any consequence. What he did have were his instincts, and they led him into a friendship with Herb and Miriam Abramson. I also knew Herb and Miriam and respected them both; they were a culturally evolved couple with a righteous feeling for hip music and left-wing politics. Herb was a blues expert, especially well versed in the Delta school. He’d also gone to dental school and worked for National Records, producing great sides with Joe Turner, Pete Johnson, and the Ravens. He’d begun his own gospel label, Jubilee, and jazz label, Quality. Though short-lived, they gave Herb experience. He was someone Ahmet admired, and in 1947 they formed a partnership. They were advised by record store owner Waxie Maxie and Jerry Blaine, a record promoter and close friend to Ahmet. With financing from Dr. Vahdi Sabit, a Turkish dentist, they started Atlantic.
I’d started noticing Atlantic’s early releases with Professor Longhair’s “Hey Now Baby,” “Hey Little Girl,” and “Mardi Gras in New Orleans.” Fess-as the Professor was called—was a revelation for me, my first taste of the music being served up in Louisiana in the late forties. There were traces of Jelly Roll Morton’s habanera-Cuban tango influence in his piano style, but the overall effect was startlingly original, a jambalaya Caribbean Creole rumba with a solid blues bottom. In a foreshadowing of trips I myself would later take to New Orleans, Ahmet described the first of his many ethnomusicological expeditions.
Henry Roeland Byrd, a.k.a. Professor Longhair
“Herb and I went down there to see our distributor and look for talent. Someone mentioned Professor Longhair, a musical shaman who played in a style all his own. We asked around and finally found ourselves taking a ferry boat to the other side of the Mississippi, to Algiers, where a white taxi driver would deliver us only as far as an open field. ‘You’re on your own,’ he said, pointing to the lights of a distant village. ‘I ain’t going into that niggertown.’ Abandoned, we trudged across the field, lit only by the light of a crescent moon. The closer we came, the more distinct the sound of distant music—some big rocking band, the rhythm exciting us and pushing us on. Finally we came upon a nightclub—or, rather, a shack—which, like an animated cartoon, appeared to be expanding and deflating with the pulsation of the beat. The man at the door was skeptical. What did these two white men want? ‘We’re from Life magazine,’ I lied. Inside, people scattered, thinking we were police. And instead of a full band, I saw only a single musician-Professor Longhair—playing these weird, wide harmonies, using the piano as both keyboard and bass drum, pounding a kick plate to keep time and singing in the open-throated style of the blues shouters of old.
‘“My God,’ I said to Herb, ‘we’ve discovered a primitive genius.’
“Afterwards, I introduced myself. ‘You won’t believe this,’ I said to the Professor, ‘but I want to record you.’
“’You won’t believe this,’ he answered, ‘but I just signed with Mercury.’“
DR. JOHN AND JOEL DORN ON NEW ORLEANS PIANO STYLES
Born Malcolm John Rebennack, in 1942, Dr. John—or “Mac” to his friends—is one of the best-known musicians New Orleans has produced. He started his career as a teenager, playing guitar and piano on recording sessions. When Rebennack began combining his interest in voodoo and psychedelia with his funky rhythms, he created the persona Dr. John the Night Tripper. His first hits, “Right Place, Wrong Time” and “Such a Night” (both 1973), and over-the-top costumes and stage presence brought him nat
ional notoriety. Longtime producer Joel Dorn first met Dr. John in the late 1960s, when Rebennack was signed to Atlantic, where Dorn was a staff producer. A Philadelphia native, Dorn began his music career as a disc jockey on a jazz station in that city. In addition to working with roots artists like Dr. John and numerous jazz musicians, Dorn signed Roberta Flack (producing her first hits), among many other popular artists. Dorn and Dr. John got together one icy December day in 2002 to talk about New Orleans’ post-Jelly Roll Morton piano sound combining Delta blues, ragtime, jazz, zydeco, and boogie-woogie, pioneered by Professor Longhair, Huey “Piano” Smith, Fats Domino, Allen Touissant, James Booker, and others Dr. John has known and played with over the years.
JOEL DORN: When did you start to play piano?
DR. JOHN: I was real little. My uncle Joe and aunt Andre used to come by the pad and play boogies. And my aunt taught me how to play “The Texas Boogie.” I learned how to play with two hands as a little bitty kid. I could do the left-hand part with two hands. All of a sudden, I figured out how to do it with one hand. Then she showed me the other part with the other hand, but she had to modify it so I could play both hands at once. She taught me a right-hand part that was different notes but the same rhythm, and then one day I figured out how to do something she did without her showing me, and that’s when she took an interest in me. From that, I learned how to play a Fats Domino song. The guy that was my hero was Pete Johnson, the piano player from Kansas City—I had dreams of being like him. I used to listen to his record with Big Joe Turner. I had all them old records my dad [who owned a record store] used to play—I’d get the old 78s. JD: The first time I heard New Orleans piano was on American Bandstand in 1955. Dick Clark was playing a record called “Happy Times.” Remember the first album Allen [Toussaint] made on RCA? The Wild Sounds of New Orleans by Tousan? The first time I heard that, I went nuts. That was the warmest piano I ever heard in my life. I was about fourteen. And then the first place I heard “Rockin’ Pneumonia”— with that great piano figure—was also on Bandstand again. Then I would hear other records by guys and I could tell that they’d been to New Orleans or that they’d recorded in New Orleans, or they were thinking about New Orleans. Like you’d hear Ray [Charles] and you knew he went through there. You’d hear it on [Little] Richard’s records.
Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Page 39