Keeping the Beat on the Street (11 page)

Photo by Barry Martyn

My mother and father were Laura and Harrison Sterling. I am the last of five children. None of the others are musicians. Originally, I had planned to be a meteorologist. When Hurricane Betsy hit New Orleans in 1965, it was fascinating to me that something like that could rock my parent's house. Watching the news, they showed radar pictures, although they were pretty crude back then. I got interested in the weather and how it moved. I would make makeshift maps of the United States, and when the weather came on TV, I would mark down what was going on. I was seven years old then
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When I was in elementary school, getting ready to go to junior high—this would be around the age of twelve—I was at my cousin's house. We were playing ball in his front yard, and I heard the sound of a banjo—the sound just caught my attention. I was looking round and missing the ball. I said, “What's that noise behind me?” He said, “That's Cousin Danny”—that's what he called him. I said, “We don't have no cousin called Danny, not that I know of”

Anyway, he brought me over there to meet him. I was fascinated at the way his fingers moved up and down the neck—he had switched to guitar by then. I was mesmerized. He was practicing, and he and Miss Louise were getting ready to rehearse. She was in the kitchen cooking. When we got to the back door, this big raspy voice comes out of the house, and there's this lady standing there
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I had never heard a woman with a voice that deep before, so she kind of scared me. She called, “Danny, Ray and his cousin Harry are here.” So we go in the front and we sit down. I'm not saying anything—Ray's doing all the talking. I'm just looking at Danny and thinking, “I've got to do that.”

Two days before my twelfth birthday, it had been on my mind for about a week. I knew I had to go back around there and talk to this man about learning the guitar. I mustered up enough courage to go into their yard and stand at the back door. And this scary woman with this big raspy voice called, “Danny, it's Ray's cousin Harry.” She had remembered my name!

He said, “What can I do for you?” I said, “I want to talk to you.” So we went into the front room, and I asked where his guitar was. He said, “It's in the back. What can I do for you?” And I told him I wanted to learn to play. He said, “Are you sure you want to?” I said, “Oh yeah.” It was fixed in my mind. He asked me if I owned a guitar. I said I didn't, my parents couldn't afford one. He kind of put his head down, and he told me that the guitar was a very wonderful instrument, but it takes a lot of practice and a lot of patience to learn. He explained about how a guitar was strung and what the frets were for. I was absorbing all of it, and I had a smile on my face
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Then he shouts, “Louise! Make this boy a sandwich!”

I'm like, “I don't want a sandwich. I want to learn to play the guitar.” Anyway, Miss Louise comes out the back with this sandwich—ham and cheese, on toast, lettuce, and tomato, pickles, potato chips, and a Coke!

I thought, “Well, I can't insult these people by not eating it.” While I'm eating the sandwich, Danny Barker comes out the back with this little acoustic guitar and this chord book with fingering charts in it. He explained as well as he could that each dot represents your finger, and the strings go down, and the frets go across
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He put my fingers on the guitar, and it sounded terrible. He asked me if my parents were home. I told him my mother was home, but my father was out at the church. He asked me where I lived, and I told him right around the corner, on St. Denis, 1265, and I gave him my phone number. Leroy Jones lived just down the street from me. By now, my finger was beginning to hurt terribly, but I didn't care
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Afterwards, I was walking down the street, wondering how I was going to explain to my mother how come I had this guitar. I went in the house, and she gave me this “report-card day” look: “What is that? Where did you get it?” I told her I had got it from Danny Barker, and she said, “What? Blue Lou Barker's husband?” I said, “Who's Blue Lou Barker?” Then I found out that was Miss Louise with the raspy voice
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I told her, “Mr. Barker says for you to call him.” So she talked to him on the phone. He said, “I'm not charging you a cent. You can't afford a guitar, and I understand. I have quite a few of them, so this one won't be missed. I'm going to teach your boy to play, keep his mind occupied and keep him off the streets.”

This was basically his main premise—he didn't want me hanging out on the corner. But hanging out on the corner wasn't part of my parent's plan for me anyway. Six o'clock was dinner. You had to be inside, washed up, and ready to sit down and eat. My mother said to me, “I'm not going to tell you when to practice. You're on your own. Go get your lessons from Mr. Barker. If this is what you choose to do, that's OK.” But I had made that choice the first day I saw Danny Barker play
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They had to tell me to stop practicing: “Boy, put that guitar up and go to bed. It's time to give it a rest.” I was just trying to get a sound on the guitar that was clear. After about two weeks, I got the first chord to sound like it should. Danny was really pleased about that. So then he started showing me more chords, and the more difficult they got, the more my fingers hurt. I can't tell you—I put the guitar down for one day, and when I went to pick it up, it was agony. I complained about the pain, but Mr. Barker told me that this comes with the territory. If you play the trumpet, your lips are going to hurt; if you play drums, you're gonna get cramps in your wrists
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Danny was fabulous to me—he never raised his voice. When it came down to him making a point about something, he was very, very stern about doing the right thing. He was like a second father. I spent a lot of time by his house, to learn, and what he taught me, the things he said, he meant. He said that being a musician is a terrible thing—there will be days that you're not going to eat, days that you're not gonna work, days that people won't want to hear you play. I understood that sometimes you might starve. But every time I went by his house, he would ask if I was sure I wanted to be a musician. After about two and a half years, he stopped asking me
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I was going to his house practically every day, just to learn something new. Then he told me I didn't need to come every day—I could come once a week. I had to learn to sing and play a particular song for him, and then he would give me another song to learn. I remember learning “The Saints,” “This Little Light of Mine,” “Down by the Riverside”—the traditional New Orleans songs, with basic chord changes. Then one day I went to get my lesson, and he was playing “Eh la Bas.” I fell in love with that song. I asked him what language it was, and he told me it was French. He sang and played it again, and I stopped him and said, “How do you change chords so quickly?” He looked at me and said, “How old are you, Harry?” I told him I was thirteen
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He said, “I've been playing the guitar a lot longer than you've been around. After a while, you memorize the neck of the guitar. You'll learn to play without looking. That's gonna come.” He said, “Grab that guitar.” It was a Gibson Super 400, something I knew nothing about. It was too big for me—if I held the neck, my arms was too short to reach the body. We started playing “The Saints” in F. I had just mastered the chord of F—it's difficult to play: you have to hold down two strings with one finger. He asked me to sing it, and I did
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Then he asked me if I had played in church, and I told him no. I said that there was a program coming up, and I was going to ask my parents if it was OK to perform. I asked my mom if I could play, but she told me that they were very strict, and if you weren't baptized, you couldn't participate. So, being a kid, I said, “OK, I still want to do it anyway.” So we went to the pastor of the church, and he said, “Sure, you can play. What are you going to play?” I said, “This Little Light of Mine.”

So they called my name—and I didn't have no strap! I had to grab a chair, throw my leg on the chair, and throw the guitar on my lap. Members of the choir said, “He looks just like Glen Campbell.” I had my head down; I was playing and I was terrified. The church is packed with maybe a hundred people—and I actually played each chord without looking. It was scary
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Without realizing it, I had been watching TV in my room when I was practicing. I had got used to glancing at the chord book and the guitar without having to move my head. Eventually, I could watch TV without having to look to see where I'm at. Sometimes now, when I'm playing at the Funky Pirate, I'll be watching the ball game on the television at the front while I'm playing—people think I'm just gazing into the distance
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In 1972, Danny told me he was starting a community band. I said I'd like to be part of it, but they didn't need a guitar player. They gathered in my cousin's grandmother's den: Danny Barker, Ernie Cagnolatti, Ayward Johnson, Charles Barbarin Sr., Joe Torregano—the list just went on and on. Charles Barbarin the younger, his brother Lucien, Leroy Jones, Raymond “Puppy” Johnson, Derek Cagnolatti, Roy Paisant on trombone, Steven Parker the tuba player (big tall cat), Thomas and Gene Mimms. Thomas is a doctor now; Gene is a teacher in Atlanta. He still plays from time to time—fabulous soprano sax player. Herlin Riley, he's playing drums with Wynton Marsalis now. Herlin came into the Funky Pirate one night, and I didn't know him. I hadn't seen him since 1975 when he was playing trumpet
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So Danny put this band together, and I wanted to play so bad. I'm listening to them all—they had all started playing years before me, and I had come to it late. Then they started calling the names of the people who were going to be in the band. They called my name, to play the banjo. They told me, “This banjo has six strings, so you'll be able to play it.” So I had black pants, white shirt, and a parade cap. The Jazz Fest was about to come up, and we played at Jazz Fest when it was in Congo Square. With Danny being the one that put the band together, he was playing the banjo. So I carried the band's sign, which I was more than happy to do. I did that for a good while with the Fairview band
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Then came the day I did play the banjo with the band. They took a picture outside Fairview Church—Gene and Thomas on one side, me on the other, Greg, Steve, Leroy, Lucien, Raymond. When you look at the picture, Gene Mimms and me look like twins
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It got to the point where my musical siblings—sort of sibling rivalry—didn't want a banjo in the band. I wasn't really that good a player—these guys were taking solos, and I'm still struggling just to play basic chords. I wanted to play with the Fairview band, but my name was already ex-Fairview band—history
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In the junior high school, I wanted to play something else. I really wanted to learn the saxophone, but the band director put me on tuba. It gave me an opportunity to learn different things, and the late, great Raymond Myers, the gospel maestro, was at high school with me, and he taught me how to play tuba. After about a month, I could play OK
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When I got to the point when I thought I could play OK, I went round the corner to Mr. Barker's house, and he gave me every brass band album he had. By that time, I was going to Houston's for music, on Claiborne next door to the Louisiana Funeral Home. I learned the notes on guitar first and transferred that to the tuba. My favorite tuba player was Wilbert Tillman on records—I tried to emulate him
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By then the Fairview band had become a huge brass band, with three tubas—Anthony Lacen, Steve Parker, and myself. This was just before the start of Leroy Jones and the Hurricane Brass Band. We did this performance out at Chalmette, with
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tubas in the band. We were all playing great. Danny came to the back and signaled me to stop playing. Then he said, “Play.” After the performance, he said to me, “You have the fattest sound I've ever heard on tuba.”

We didn't read at rehearsal. Leroy practiced every day, and we would practice at his house. I had learned most of the tunes from the albums I had borrowed from Danny
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Then Danny told me he was going to be out of town too much to give me lessons, and I had to get another teacher. As time went on, I started venturing away from the traditional New Orleans jazz, because there was so much more out there
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I went to lessons with Mr. Frank Murray at Houston's. I was a little bit arrogant when I went in—I really didn't want to be there. Mr. Murray said, “Play me something,” and I did. He said, “Who was your teacher?” and I told him. Then he sort of sat for about five minutes with his head in his hands. Then he said, “You sound like shit, but when you leave here, you'll be a very good guitarist. A reading musician is a working musician.” I went to lessons with him for three and a half years, every Saturday at exactly twelve o'clock. It was good discipline—he drove me nuts. By knowing the bass clef, I played the bass charts with Kid Johnson's big band
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