The last kind words I heard my daddy say,
Lord, the last kind words I heard my daddy say,
“If I die, if I die, in the German War,
I want you to send my money,
Send it to my mother-in-law.
“If I get killed, if I get killed,
Please don’t bury my soul.
I cry, just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole.”
The subsequent verse had a couple of unintelligible words in it, whether from mumbling on Wiley’s part or from the heavily crackling static that comes along with deteriorated 78 rpm discs. One could hear her saying pretty clearly, “When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field,” after which it sounded like she might be saying, “If I don’t bring you flowers / I’ll bring you [a boutonniere?].” That verged on nonsense; more to the point, it seemed nonidiomatic. But the writer of the piece I was fact-checking needed to quote the line, and my job was to work it out, or prove to the satisfaction of my bosses that this couldn’t be done. It was Ed Komara, in those days keeper of the sacred B.B. King Blues Archive at Ole Miss, who suggested contacting Fahey. Actually, what I think he said was, “John Fahey knows shit like that.”
A front-desk attendant agreed to put a call through to Fahey’s room. From subsequent reading, I gather that at this time Fahey was making the weekly rent by scavenging and reselling rare classical music LPs, for which he must have developed an extraordinary eye, the profit margins being almost imperceptible. I pictured him prone on the bed, gray bearded and possibly naked, his overabundant corpus spread out like something that got up only to eat: that’s how interviewers discovered him, in the few profiles I’d read. He was hampered at this point by decades of addiction and the bad heart that would kill him two years later, but even before all that he’d been famously cranky, so it was strange to find him ramblingly familiar from the moment he picked up the phone. A friend of his to whom I later described this conversation said, “Of course he was nice; you didn’t want to talk about him.”
Fahey asked for fifteen minutes to get his “beatbox” hooked up and locate the tape with the song on it. I called him back at the appointed time.
“Man,” he said, “I can’t tell what she’s saying there. It’s definitely not ‘boutonniere.’”
“No guesses?”
“Nah.”
We switched to another mystery word, a couple of verses on: Wiley sings, “My mother told me, just before she died / Lord, [precious?] daughter, don’t you be so wild.” “Shit, I don’t have any fucking idea,” Fahey said. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway. They always just said any old shit.”
That seemed to be the end of our experiment. Fahey said, “Give me about an hour. I’m going to spend some time with it.”
I took the tape the magazine had loaned me and went to my car. Outside it was bleak north Mississippi cold, with the wind unchecked by the slight undulations of flatness they call hills down there; it formed little pockets of frozen air in your clothes that zapped you if you shifted your weight. I turned the bass all the way down on the car’s stereo and the treble all the way up, trying to isolate the frequency of Wiley’s voice, and drove around town for the better part of an hour, going the speed limit. The problem words refused to give themselves up, but as the tape ran, the song itself emerged around them, in spite of them, and I heard it for the first time.
“Last Kind Words Blues” is about a ghost lover. When Wiley says “kind,” as in, “The last kind words I heard my daddy say” she doesn’t mean it like we do; she doesn’t mean “nice”; she means the word in its older sense of natural (with the implication that everything her “daddy” says afterward is unnatural, is preternatural). Southern idiom has retained that usage, in phrases involving the word kindly, as in “I thank you kindly,” which, and the OED bears this out, represents a clinging vestige of the primary, archaic meaning: not “I thank you politely and sweetly” but “I thank you in a way that’s appropriate to your deed.” There’s nothing “kind,” in the everyday way, about the cold instructions her man gives for the disposal of his remains. That’s what I mean about the blues hewing to idiom. It doesn’t make mistakes like that.
Her old man has died, as he seems to have expected: the first three verses establish that, in tone if not in utterance. Now the song moves into a no-man’s-land. She’s lost. Her mother warned her about men, remember, “just before she died.” The daughter didn’t listen, and now it’s too late. She wanders.
I went to the depot, I looked up at the sun,
Cried, “Some train don’t come,
Gon’ be some walking done.”
Where does she have to get to so badly she can’t wait for another train? There’s a clue, because she’s still talking to him, or he to her, one isn’t sure. “When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field,” if I don’t bring you something, I’ll bring you something else, at least that much was clear, and part of an old story: if I don’t bring you silver, I’ll bring you gold, et cetera.
Only then, in the song’s third and last movement, does it become truly strange.
The Mississippi River, you know it’s deep and wide,
I can stand right here,
See my baby from the other side.
This is one of the countless stock, or “floating,” verses in the country blues, and players passed them around like gossip, much of the art to the music’s poetry lying in arrangement rather than invention, in an almost haiku approach, by which drama and even narrative could be generated through sheer purity of image and intensity of juxtaposition. What has Wiley done with these lines? Normally they run, “I can see my baby [or my “brownie”] / from this other side.” But there’s something spooky happening to the spatial relationships. If I’m standing right here, how am I seeing you from the other side? The preposition is off. Unless I’m slipping out of my body, of course, and joining you on the other side. Wiley closes off the song as if to confirm these suspicions:
What you do to me, baby,
it never gets out of me.
I believe I’ll see ya,
After I cross the deep blue sea.
It’s one of the oldest death metaphors and must have been ready to hand, thanks to Wiley’s nonsecular prewar peers. “Precious Jesus, gently guide me,” goes a 1926 gospel chorus, “o’er that ocean dark and wide.” Done gone over. That meant dead. Not up, over.
Greil Marcus, the writer of the piece I was fact-checking, mentioned the extraordinary “tenderness” of the “What you do to me, baby” line. It can’t be denied. There’s a tremendous weariness, too. “It never gets out of me,” and part of her wishes it would, this long disease, your memory. (“The blues is a low down achin’ heart disease,” sang Robert Johnson, echoing Kokomo Arnold echoing Clara Smith echoing a 1913 sheet music number written by a white minstrel performer and titled “Nigger Blues.”) There’s nothing to look forward to but the reunion death may bring. That’s the narrow, haunted cosmos of the song, which one hears as a kind of reverberation, and which keeps people up at night.
I was having an intense time of it in the old Toyota. But when I got back on the phone with Fahey, he was almost giddy. He’d scored one: blessèd. That’s what her mother told her, “Lord, blessèd daughter, don’t you be so wild.” I cued up to the line. It seemed self-evident now, impossible to miss. I complimented Fahey’s ear. He cough-talked his way through a rant about how “they didn’t care about the words” and “were all illiterate anyway.”
This reflexive swerving between ecstatic appreciation and an urge to minimize the aesthetic significance of the country blues was, I later came to see, a pattern in Fahey’s career—the Blind Joe Death bit had been part of it. It’s possible he feared giving in to the almost demonic force this music has exerted over so many, or worried he’d done so already. I’m fairly certain his irony meter hovered close to zero when he titled his 2000 book of short stories How Bluegrass Music Destroyed My Life. More than that, though, t
he ability to flick at will into a dismissive mode was a way to maintain a sense of expert status, of standing apart. You’ll find the same tendency in most of the other major blues wonks: when the music was all but unknown, they hailed it as great, invincible American art; when people (like the Rolling Stones) caught on and started blabbering about it, they rushed to remind everyone it was just a bunch of dance music for drunken field hands. Fahey had reached the point where he could occupy both extremes in the same sentence.
He’d gotten as far as I had with the “boutonnière,” which remained the matter at hand, so we adjourned again. Came back, broke off. This went on for a couple of hours. I couldn’t believe he was being so patient, really. Then at one point, back in the car, after many more rewindings, some fibers at the edge of my innermost ear registered a faint “L” near the beginning of that last word: boLtered? A scan through the OED led to bolt, then to bolted, and at last to this 1398 citation from John de Trevisa’s English translation of Bartholomeus Anglicus’s ca. 1240 Latin encyclopedia, De proprietatibus rerum (On the Order of Things): “The floure of the mele, whan it is bultid and departid from the bran.”
Wiley wasn’t saying “flowers”; she was saying “flour.” The rich man’s flour, which she loves you enough to steal for you. If she can’t get it, she’ll get bolted, or very finely sifted, meal.
When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field.
If I don’t bring you flour,
I’ll bring you bolted meal.
Fahey was skeptical. “I never heard of that,” he said. But later, after saying goodbye for what seemed the last time, he called back with a changed mind. He’d rung up people in the interim. (It would be fun to know whom—you’d be tracing a very precious little neural pathway in the fin de siècle American mind.) One of his sources told him it was a Civil War thing: when they ran out of flour, they started using bolted cornmeal. “Hey,” he said, “maybe we’ll put you in the liner notes, if we can get this new thing together.”
The new thing was still in development when he died. On the phone we’d gone on to talk about Revenant, the self-described “raw musics” label he’d cofounded in 1996 with a Texas lawyer named Dean Blackwood. Revenant releases are like Constructivist design projects in their attention to graphic detail, with liner notes that become de facto transcripts of scholarly colloquia. Fahey and Blackwood had thought up a new release, which would be all about prewar “phantoms” like Wiley and Thomas (and feature new, superior transfers of the pair’s six sides). The collection’s only delimiting criteria would be that nothing biographical could be known regarding any of the artists involved, and that every recording must be phenomenal, in a sense almost strict: something that happened once in front of a microphone and can never be imitated, merely reexperienced. They had been dreaming this project for years, refining lists. And I’d contributed a speck of knowledge, a little ant’s mouthful of knowledge.
* * *
Almost six years passed, during which Fahey died in the hospital from complications following multiple bypass surgery. I assumed with other people that he’d taken the phantoms project with him, but in October 2005, with no fanfare and after rumors of Revenant’s having closed shop, it materialized, two discs and a total of fifty songs with the subtitle Pre-War Revenants (1897–1939).
Anyone with an interest in American culture should find a way to hear this record. It’s probably the most important archival release of its kind since Harry Smith’s seminal Anthology of American Folk Music in 1952, and for the same reason: it represents less a scholarly effort to preserve and disseminate obscure recordings, indispensable as those undertakings are, than the charting of a deeply informed aesthetic sensibility, which for all its torment was passionately in communion with these songs and the nuances of their artistry for a lifetime. Listening to this collection, you enter the keeping of a kind of Virgil.
To do it right entailed remastering everything fresh from 78s, which in turn meant coaxing out a transnational rabbit’s warren of the so-called serious collectors, a community widespread but dysfunctionally tight-knit, as by process of consolidation the major collections have come into the keeping of fewer and fewer hands over the years. “The serious blues people are less than ten,” one who contributed to Pre-War Revenants told me. “Country, seven. Jazz, maybe fifteen. Most are to one degree or another sociopathic.” Mainly what they do is nurse decades-old grudges. A terrifically complicated bunch of people, but, for reasons perhaps not totally scrutable even to themselves, they have protected this music from time and indifference. The collectors were first of all the finders. Those trips to locate old blues guys started out as trips to canvass records. Gayle Dean Wardlow became a pest-control man at one point, in order to have a legitimate excuse to be walking around in black neighborhoods beating on doors. “Need your house sprayed?” Nah. “Got any weird old records in the attic?”
Something like 60 percent of the sides on Pre-War Revenants are “SCOs,” single copy only. These songs are flashbulbs going off in immense darknesses. Blues Birdhead, Bayless Rose, Pigmeat Terry, singers that only the farthest-gone of the old-music freaks have heard. “I got the mean Bo-Lita blues,” sings the unknown Kid Brown (“Bo-Lita” was a poorly understood Mexican game of chance that swept the South like a hayfire about a hundred years ago and wiped out a bunch of shoebox fortunes). There’s a guy named Tommy Settlers, who sings out of his throat in some way. I can’t describe it. He may have been a freak-show act. His “Big Bed Bug” and “Shaking Weed Blues” are all there is of whatever he was, yet he was a master. Mattie May Thomas’s astonishing “Workhouse Blues” was recorded a cappella in the sewing room at a women’s prison:
I wrassle with the hounds, black man,
Hounds of hell all day.
I squeeze them so tight,
Until they fade away.
In what is surely a trustworthy mark of obscurantist credibility, one of the sides on Pre-War Revenants was discovered at a flea market in Nashville by the very person who engineered the collection, Chris King, the guy who actually signs for delivery of the reinforced wooden boxes, put together with drywall screws and capable of withstanding an auto collision, in which most 78s arrive for projects like this. The collectors trust King; he’s a major collector himself (owner, as it happens, of the second-best of three known copies of “Last Kind Words Blues”) and an acknowledged savant when it comes to excavating sonic information from the wrecked grooves of prewar disc recordings. I called him, looking for details of how this project had finally come to life. Like Fahey, King graduated college with degrees in religion and philosophy; he knows how to wax expansive about what he does. He described “junking” that rare 78 in Nashville, the Two Poor Boys’ “Old Hen Cackle,” which lay atop a stack of 45s on a table in the open sun. It was brown. In the heat it had warped, he said, “into the shape of a soup bowl.” At the bottom of the bowl he could read PERFECT, a short-lived hillbilly label. “Brown Perfects” are precious. He took it home and placed it outside between two panes of clear glass—collectors’ wisdom, handed down—and allowed the heat of the sun and the slight pressure of the glass’s weight slowly to press it flat again, to where he could play it.
Sometimes, King told me, he can tell things about the record’s life from how the sound has worn away. The copy of Geeshie Wiley’s “Eagles on a Half” (there’s only one copy) that he worked with for Pre-War Revenants had, he realized, been “dug out” by an improvised stylus of some kind—“they used anything, sewing needles”—in such a manner that you could tell the phonograph it spun on, or else the floor underneath the phonograph, was tilted forward and to the right. Suddenly you have a room, dancing, boards with a lot of give, people laughing. It’s a nasty, sexy song: “I said, squat low, papa, let your mama see / I wanna see that old business keeps on worrying me.” King tilted his machine back and to the left. He encountered undestroyed signal and got a newly vibrant version.
Strangest of the songs is the very oldest,
“Poor Mourner” by the duo Cousins & DeMoss, who may or may not have been Sam Cousin and Ed DeMoss, semifamous late-nineteenth-century minstrel singers—if so, then the former is the only artist included on Pre-War Revenants of whom an image has survived: a grainy photograph of his strong, square face appeared in the Indianapolis Freeman in 1889. These two performed “Poor Mourner” for the Berliner Company in 1897. (Emile Berliner had recently patented disc, as opposed to cylinder, recording; discs were easier to duplicate.)
Dual banjos burst forth with a frenetic rag figure, and it seems you’re on familiar if excitable ground. But somewhere between the third and fourth measure of the first bar, the second banjo pulls up, as if with a halt leg, and begins putting forward a drone on top of the first, which twangs away for a second as if it hadn’t been warned about the immediate mood change. Then the instruments grind down together, the key swerves minor, and without your being able to pinpoint what happened or when, you find yourself in a totally different, darker sphere. The effect is the sonic equivalent of film getting jammed in an old projector, the stuck frame melting, colors bleeding. It all takes place in precisely five seconds. It is unaccountable. Chris King said, “That is not a function of some weird thing I couldn’t fix.” I asked if maybe the old machines ran slightly faster at the start. He reminded me that the song didn’t start with music; it started with a high voice shouting, “As sung by Cousins and DeMoss!”
Pulphead: Essays Page 23