Sins in Blue

by Brian Kaufman

  “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t open Mr. Wein’s mail.”

  Kennedy bumped his head against the pay phone once, twice. “Okay, okay. Can I ask a favor?” Without waiting, he plunged ahead. “Ask Mr. Wein—George—to look for the tape I sent. It came in a brown mailer. The return address was Pittsburgh—”

  The operator interrupted, asking for more money. Kennedy gave silent thanks for his waitress and fed the pay phone the last of his quarters. “Are you there?”

  “Yes sir, I’m still here.”

  “Please try to find the tape and make sure he listens to it—”

  “I’m sorry, sir, but Mr. Wein tends his own mail.”

  Kennedy groaned. Time was running out. “Please, please, can you write down a message?”

  “Of course. Go ahead.”

  “Tell Mr. Wein that rock and roll wasn’t invented in the fifties. It was invented in the 1930s by an old bluesman named Willie Johnson. The tape I sent you came from one of Rickman’s aluminum disk recordings. You can hear the file number at the start of the song and everything. The tape proves rock started way before anyone thinks. And I have the original rock and roller under contract. Mr. Wein needs to get him on stage in Newport for the—”

  The operator interrupted again, but he was out of quarters. Kennedy slammed the receiver back in the cradle and punched the wall. How could he book his act if he couldn’t connect with Wein? How many quarters was it going to take?

  He walked back to his seat, deep in thought. Wein should have received the tape a week ago. Kennedy acquired the recording through a friend of a friend. He’d been corresponding with other record collectors, extolling the greats, sharing thoughts on how to build a collection without breaking the bank, and arguing the kind of minutiae that fired the imagination of blues fanatics. Through those connections, he began writing to Patricia Hawke.

  Patricia (“not Patty—Patty is a girl’s name”) worked as an intern at the Library of Congress in Washington. She claimed to be cataloging the Alan Lomax recordings, something he initially distrusted out of hand, much as he’d questioned the photo she’d sent. No woman that beautiful would write a Pittsburgh kid to argue how Lomax’s preference for prison music over church music influenced popular perceptions of the black community. “Lomax liked sinful music,” she wrote. Staring at the picture she’d sent, Kennedy decided he liked his music sinful, too.

  The Holy Grail of all blues collections was housed in Washington at the Library of Congress. Alan Lomax was a musician and scholar. He traveled the back roads of the country in the Twenties and Thirties, making field recordings of authentic American music, including the blues artists that speckled the heavens of Kennedy’s pantheon. Using an RCA disc-cutter that etched the sound directly on aluminum discs, Lomax and his father recorded the likes of Lead Belly and others.

  Patricia wrote Kennedy often, talking about her adventurous life cataloging music. He replied to her letters with lies of his own (assuming she wasn’t being strictly truthful).

  Then the tape arrived with a terse message, and everything changed.

  Dear Kennedy,

  The world has turned upside down, and you are the only one I can share this with.

  We received a letter from someone named Willie Johnson. He claimed to have recorded for Mr. Lomax and wondered how to get a copy of the recording. He was fuzzy on details, owing to having been “drunk off my ass” when he recorded the songs. He is living in Colorado, of all places. I was curious, so I searched the discs, which was no small feat. As I’ve mentioned, there are tens of thousands of discs to sort through.

  Well, I found his two songs. One was a slow blues without much to recommend it. His singing voice was a little froggy. But the other song!

  I’ve enclosed a tape. I suppose I’ve broken every rule possible by sending this to you. Willie Johnson should be playing at Newport and recording for Columbia. If you negotiate a deal, I hope you’ll remember to include a finder’s fee in the contract!

  The enclosed song was recorded in 1934. The name of the song is “Bitch Train.” (How drunk was he?) There’s no mistaking the shuffle rhythm and the beat. And the guitar work? You won’t believe how many notes someone can jam into twelve bars.

  She concluded with Willie’s return address and her signature closing, “With all warmth—Patricia.” Kennedy immediately pulled out the tape player his mother had given him for Christmas. The recording quality was bad (and the copy he’d sent Wein was even worse), but he could make out the song well enough. The guitarist punctured the chug-chug rhythm with bursts of high-speed blues runs, like Clapton on amphetamines. He listened to the two-minute song again and again while the sun played a light requiem on his bedroom wall. By the time it was dark, he knew what his future held.

  If only Wein would play ball.

  And Willie, of course. Willie’s letter proved he was still interested in music (and was still alive). Kennedy needed two things. He needed a signature on the contract he’d copied from the library, and he needed Wein to answer the damned phone.

  Kennedy sat with his back against the brick wall, looking around the room. The pretty waitress was busy talking to her two friends. Too bad—if she knew how close he was to being famous, she’d have paid him more attention. He closed his eyes. The sunshine and uncertainty outside could wait while he made his plans.

  Once Willie signed, Kennedy would negotiate a record contract. He’d have to hold some sort of auction among the various record executives and take the highest bid. As soon as he got his share of the money, he would fly home and confront his father. Here you go, he’d say. Take Mom out to dinner and a movie. Pay the mortgage ahead a little while you’re at it. It’s on me. You know, the son who’ll never amount to anything, listening to nigger music? Well, guess what? He finished his root beer and smiled.

  • • • • •

  After work, Willie walked home, cutting across the Colorado State University campus. His feet hurt all of the time, so he moved with a loping sort of gait. Bella, the maid, said he walked like an ape, which made him angry and self-conscious. On campus, though, he was invisible. Young people attending the summer semester moved past him like a river flowing around a bridge pylon.

  The bright sun felt good on the back of his neck. The laundry room at the motel was humid like New Orleans—the kind of heat that suffocated a man. On campus, the sun’s dry warmth danced with the thin breeze to the sound of rustling leaves and the laughter of pretty young girls. Walking home took him an hour—the happiest part of his day.

  Crossing through the plaza by the student center, he ran into a crowd, gathered to listen to a political speech. When Nixon sent troops into Cambodia, the campus became a cauldron of heated opinions. Two overweight boys in dress shirts waved a flag at the periphery. The rest of the crowd looked like the remnants of a sleepover—sweat suits, mismatched tee shirts and shorts, and enough hair to give a barber a wet dream.

  “We have to decide! We have to decide what we’re going to do!” The speaker’s megaphone cut through the rumble of voices. “We can do this like they want us to, all calm and polite, and hope someone listens. Or we can tear this place down! But one thing’s for sure. Whatever we decide, we have to stick to it! We’re in this together! And we’ll do whatever we decide, together. Because we’re all in this together! Am I right?”

  Some of the crowd shouted back, clapping and cheering. Others stood silent, arms folded.

  With his head turned, Willie caught his foot on a seam in the concrete, nearly tripping. Watch your step, old man. He looked around. The eyes of bystanders were on the man with the megaphone, not on him. Willie walked on, his limp more pronounced. His hip would never be right, and it altered his gait. The knee took the brunt of it. Bursitis. Better
ice that when I get home.

  Glancing back, he looked at the second-floor balcony of the student center, overlooking the student plaza. Students lined the railing. Conspicuous by his nondescript dress, a man in a plain suit watched with arms folded. Willie stopped to look closer. The man wore no expression. Plainclothes detective or FBI? “Hello, Captain,” Willie whispered.

  Below the rail, half the crowd stood and the other half sat. Megaphone man shouted again. “Those against using any means?” The students who had been sitting stood up, while others sat. “All right then, that was pretty close, but for now, it looks like—”

  “Excuse me!” A boy stepped back, hands in front of him as if to ward off an attack. He wore a brown and tan tie-dyed jeans jacket and glasses with black plastic rims.

  “Sorry there, fella,” Willie said. “I should watch where I’m going.”

  “That’s okay. Sorry about that.” The boy sidestepped, yielding the right-of-way.

  Willie gave a slight bow and moved on. From behind, megaphone man chatted up the crowd, trying to draw cheers.

  Politics. A waste of time. Unless the government was headed by Hitler or Stalin, killing their own damned citizens, the things politicians argued over didn’t amount to much. Decades of staying in and out of trouble taught him a few simple rules. Stay away from the police or end up in a crowbar hotel. Hands off another man’s muffin. Don’t bump your gums. Mind your business and other people will mind theirs.

  Anything else was a trip for biscuits.

  Past the library, the crowd thinned out, and he could breathe. He liked seeing so many young people, and he longed for some kind of contact, but crowds agitated him. That didn’t strike him as a contradiction. In his experience, people were generally nice as long as they didn’t congregate. Paired up, they turned into something else. Something dangerous, if enough of them got together.

  He stopped to rest, sitting on the benches outside the liberal arts building. A young girl at the other end of the bench smiled and he smiled back.

  “Hello. How are you today?” She was shouting. Perhaps she thought him deaf.

  “It’s a beautiful day,” he answered. “The sun feels good on my face.”

  She tilted her head back, her freckles and red hair tinged with the sun’s rays. “You’re right,” she said. “I’m glad you said so. You reminded me to notice.”

  She reached into her backpack, rummaging through the contents. “Do you live here in town?” she asked without looking up.

  “Other side of campus.”

  She glanced at him, a shy smile on her face, and asked, “Do you belong to a church?”

  Oh, damn. “No. Had a church back home.”

  “Where’s home?”

  “Mississippi.”

  “I’d never have guessed! You sound—”

  “Been all over,” he explained.

  “Well!” She pulled a pamphlet from the backpack and scooted across the bench. “I belong to Mercy Farm.”

  “The pie people?”

  She laughed. “We do make pies, the best in town. That’s how we fund our outreach missions. We’re a church—”

  “I know,” he said, a cold sort of finality in his voice.

  “Well,” she continued, seemingly oblivious, “I thought that if you’d like to find a place to worship, you might share our fellowship.”

  He stood up, clutching the pamphlet. “I’ll give this a look when I get home,” he said. “So nice to talk with you.”

  She beamed. “So nice to talk to you!”

  He walked on, chewing on the things he hadn’t said. Wasn’t Mercy Farm more of a commune than a church? They funded their efforts by demanding that new members donate everything they owned to the group. The girl, though, was a cute young thing. Pert little breasts. He had suppressed an urge to say I’d like to try a slice of your pie. That sort of thing could get him killed, of course.

  “No, Sugar,” he said. “No church. I’ve been dancing in the Devil’s fire far too long.” Too bad—he’d wanted to talk to someone. Anyone outside of work. And she’d been friendly enough, church talk aside.

  The subject of religion called to mind the Washing the Disciple’s Feet Resurrection Ministries back in Mississippi. Those people would have burned Willie at the stake if they’d had their way. Some of the congregation used to stand outside the juke joints and shout “sinner” at him, and he’d always laughed at them. The idea of sin struck him as funnier back then.

  Almost home. Willie lived in a small white frame house west of campus. The place was older than he was, with just one bedroom, but the rent was cheap. The landlord didn’t like renting to students, who tended to tear up a property. For years, Willie had done minor repairs on the place for free, which endeared him to the owner, though lately, he had no energy left over for pipes and rafters. The summer before had been hot, and Willie hadn’t done a good job with the lawn. Big patches of brown bracketed the front walk. One of the two shrubs beneath the front window had died. Someday, maybe soon, the old bastard would take a long look at the lawn and raise the rent or evict him, and Willie would be on the street. If Willie were younger, he might rent a place with two or three students and split the rent, then stick the savings straight into the bank. As it was, he had $311.75 in his savings account (a penny or two more if the bank had posted interest) to show for a lifetime of sweat and excess.

  Music is no way to get rich.

  He paused inside the front door. The postman had dropped two advertisements through the slot. The letter he wanted wasn’t there.

  When leaving for work, he’d vowed to clean up the front room. Another broken promise. Gathering up the dirty laundry meant taking everything to the laundry mat, and he didn’t have the energy. He grabbed a pizza box off the couch and jammed it into the trash can next to the refrigerator, pushing down until the box fit. The dirty dishes could wait, too.

  He hobbled over to the bedroom and sorted through the books stacked inside. Tonight, he’d grab something light like Burroughs. Old Edgar Rice could spin a tale. The problem involved finding the right damned book among the stacks, some of them waist-high. He found most of his reading material at used bookstores, though a fair number of the volumes were stolen from the college library. The piles had grown taller over the years.

  Sifting through the stacks, he found Robert Howard’s boxing stories. Willie didn’t like Conan, but he loved the boxing stories, all of which centered on heroes who could take a punch. Willie could take a punch. He had to. Over the years, he’d lost most of the fights he’d been in.

  He restacked the books and took his Robert Howard into the front room. The sun still shone and would for a few hours. No need to fix dinner. His stomach was being finicky again. Later, he would eat a few Rolaids and get some sleep. For now, he would slip into a book.

  The hero, Mike Brennan, had a “granite jaw and a chilled steel body.” And no defense. He took a hammering, fight after fight, trying to make enough money to marry sweet Marjory, who would always love him, win or lose. The story made him smile. By the time Iron Mike Costigan finally knocked poor Brennan out, ending his fight career, the Fort Collins sun was setting.

  Willie set the book aside and stared across the room. His beat-up Kalamazoo sat propped against the record shelf, whispering to him. The pull of music was inevitable. He walked into the kitchen, filled a small glass with whiskey, and carried it into the front room. Grabbing the acoustic guitar, he sat down on the couch, took a sip from the glass, and began to play.

  He warmed up with Big Bill Broonzy’s Key to the Highway. Eight-bar blues, simple as pie, but he fumbled the seventh chord on the turn and stopped. His fingers felt old and stiff. He played a simple blu
es run in A. Sounds like a kid at a lesson. Shit. He stretched his fingers, shook his hand, and ran up and down the scales until his fingers warmed a little. Then he started the song again.

  He played on, running through old favorites. He didn’t play any of his own songs, but that was merely a postponement. He would have to play the one song. Sometimes, he went a week without playing it, but tonight, as the room faded to dark, he would return to Sins in Blue.

  The last of the light slipped away, washing the color from the couch and curtains, draping him in gray. He began to play, picking his way through the melancholy melody. His playing was not perfect, but now the mistakes—owing much to his poor, old fingers—sounded real and true. Like so many nights before, the song made him weep.

  When he finished, he leaned the guitar back against the record rack. Then he fetched the battered pillow and blanket from the end of the couch and settled down for another long night. He might sleep. Tomorrow was a day off. Not having to worry about getting up early sometimes helped.

  Eyes closed, he thought about the song and the things he’d done, which left him swallowing the acid at the back of his throat. He’d forgotten the Rolaids, but he was too tired to fetch them from the bathroom. He shifted on his back, trying to take pressure off his hip. His knee ached—he’d forgotten the ice pack, too. He tried to think of something else. He always came back to music. He remembered the first time he played a juke joint, and that made him smile, which in turn let him settle into the couch and rest a bit.

  CHAPTER THREE: THE SPINNING MULE

  “Saturday night is your big night.

  Everybody used to fry up fish and have one hell of a time.

  Find me playing till sunrise for 50 cents and a sandwich.

  And be glad of it.”

  ~Muddy Waters

  1927