The Mayor of MacDougal Street (31 page)

I got to know some of the old-timers pretty well, because I was working in the same clubs, so we had a chance to hang around between shows. They were some remarkable men and women, to say the least. Gary Davis was the first that I spent a serious amount of time with, and then when I began working more, I would run into people like Josh White, and Brownie McGhee and Sonny Terry, who had been on the folk scene since the forties
but had also made 78s back in the “race records” period. When I started to spend more time on the road, I saw a lot of Brownie and Sonny, and it was always a pleasure.

Brownie had been one of my favorites back to when I was first getting into blues: there was a period when I could probably have fought my way through a couple dozen of his songs. My favorite was “Sporting Life Blues,” which I had picked up on a 78 when I was about fifteen years old. When I first came across that song, it just knocked me out. “That night life, that sporting life is killing me”—no one has
nostalgie de la boue
like a fifteen-year-old, and it was the most wonderfully morbid thing I had ever heard. I had to learn it, so I buckled down and worked and worked, and I put together a pretty decent version. But somewhere along the way, I had a rare attack of common sense. It hit me: “What’s it going to look like, a fifteen-year-old kid singing a song like this? There’s no way I’ve paid enough dues yet.” So I decided to table that song until such time as I had enough experience to back it up, and there matters rested for many a long year. The song would come to my attention, and I would potchke around with it for a while, and then I would say, “Nah, not yet.”

Finally, sometime in the late 1960s, I said to myself, “That’s it. Fuck the dues, I’m going to sing that song.” I put together an arrangement of it and I tried it out onstage, but the weirdest thing happened: every time I would play it, something would go wrong—I would forget a verse, blow a lick. It was like there was a hex on that song for me, and I had almost decided to forget about doing it. Then I happened to be doing a show in Atlanta, and in those days the city had two acoustic clubs, and Brownie and Sonny were working at the other. I had a brainstorm: if I can sing this song for Brownie, I can sing it anywhere. So after my first set, I packed up my guitar, trundled over to the other room, went backstage, and said hello to Brownie. We chatted and swapped some gossip and whatnot, until finally I screwed up my courage. I said, “Brownie, you know your song, ‘Sporting Life Blues’? I’ve worked up a version and I’d like to play it for you.”

What could he say? I had him trapped like a rat, cornered in his own dressing room. So I broke out the guitar, and I went through the song perfectly. Not a single mistake. All I could think was, “I got it. I got it.” I was ecstatic, and to top it off, when I finished Brownie said he liked it, and I think he actually did. So I packed up my guitar and was heading out the
door, when a thought crossed my mind. I turned around and said, “Hey Brownie, how old were you when you wrote that song?”

He said, “Oh, about fifteen.”

Brownie was a very funny cat. He and Sonny knew each other better than most husbands and wives do, and when they were getting along, they were getting along, but a lot of the time they were kind of at odds with one another, and they really knew where all the buttons were. Around 1962 I was working a club in Philadelphia and they were working right down the block. In those dear dim days, you would get booked into a room for a week at a time, or even two weeks, and we were all three staying at the same hotel, the old Rottenhouse. So every night after I finished my last show, I would go over to where they were working, and the three of us would take off to South Street, where there was this marvelous soul food restaurant.

Sonny had some trouble with his weight, and right then he was on the most heartbreaking diet I have ever seen. Brownie and me would be piling on the viands, scarfing down chitlins and collard greens and pecan pie, and Sonny would be sitting there with a salad and a glass of water, practically crying. Every now and again, he would say, “Brownie, could you give me just a taste of that?” And Brownie would say, “Come on, man, you’re getting fat as a pig. You look like hell up there on that stage. You got to lose some weight.” So Sonny endured, and every morning, around ten or eleven o’clock, the three of us would meet and go down for breakfast at this luncheonette across the street. There was a scale there, and Sonny was blind, so he would have Brownie lead him over to the scale, put in a penny, and read off his weight. And every day, Brownie would tell Sonny that he had gained another pound.

One afternoon during that Philadelphia sojourn, there came a knock on my door and it was Brownie, and he had a guy with him who was wearing a sleek, impeccably cut, rust-colored zoot suit. I hadn’t seen a zoot suit since I was seven, and I was dazzled enough just by that. Brownie gave me a big smile and said, “Hey, look who I found.” I must have looked very blank and stupid, because he says, “You don’t know who this is?” I said no. He said, “This is Lonnie Johnson.”

Now, Lonnie Johnson was the man who invented jazz guitar. He made a lot of blues records and was a very influential singer from the 1920s right
up through the late 1940s, but what I knew him for was his duets with Eddie Lang and his work with Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five and Duke Ellington—I mean, this was the guy who played behind Baby Cox on “The Mooche”! Brownie had just happened to run into him, and it turned out that he was working in the kitchen at the Ben Franklin hotel as a saucier. As far as I know, he had not performed since the early 1950s, but shortly the blues fans got wind of his existence and Lonnie had a new career. Unfortunately, it never really worked out the way either they or he would have hoped. Part of the problem was that Lonnie had not done any fingerpicking since the 1930s, and he simply did not remember how to do that stuff. Instead, he would get onstage with a flat-pick and play jazz standards, improvising lovely, long choruses on things like “Red Sails in the Sunset.” All the hard-core folkies and blues buffs would be sitting in the audience, going “Arghhhh! Sing ‘Mean Old Bed Bug Blues!’ What’s the matter with you?” They were really disappointed and upset—and they were a bunch of tone-deaf snobs. If they had just listened with an open mind to what the guy was putting down, they would have loved it, but they could not bring themselves to do that.

Naturally, Lonnie was unhappy about this state of affairs. I talked with him about it one time when we were playing at a benefit for the Hazard miners’ strike. We were backstage, and he said, “Man, they want me to play all this stuff I recorded in 1925 . . . That was a long time ago!” I felt very bad for him, because as far as I was concerned, he was playing as well as he ever had. But, like any scene, the revival had its own aesthetic, and he did not fit it.

Of all the old blues players, the one who fitted best into the folk scene, and the one I got to know best aside from Gary Davis, was Mississippi John Hurt. I had been a fan of John’s work ever since hearing him on the Harry Smith
Anthology
, but he had recorded those sides in 1928 and already sounded like an old man back then, so we all assumed that he was long dead. Then, in 1963, a blues fan named Tom Hoskins was listening to John’s record of “Avalon Blues,” which starts out, “Avalon, that’s my home town, always on my mind,” and it occurred to Tom to wonder whether there was an Avalon, Mississippi. He checked, and indeed there was, and he went down there—it was just a wide place in the road, a general store and a post office—and he went up to some guys who were lounging
around, and he says, “Look, I’m trying to find some guy here, he used to make records in the 1920s, his name’s Mississippi John Hurt.”

They say, “Oh, you mean Ol’ John . . . Yeah, he’s right down the block.”

I met John later that year, at the Café Yana. I was working in Cambridge and I had the night off, so I went over and caught his show, and then we went to a party that was being thrown by some relatives of his who lived in Roxbury. It seems it was his birthday, and the family was anxious to make sure Uncle John was shown a good time. I had a good time myself, and much of the evening is a blur, but the last thing I remember was a snowball fight in a graveyard. John was seventy that year, but he had a high, hard pitch that you would not believe—I think I still have a lump on my head.

John had never been a professional musician prior to his rediscovery. He used to play at picnics and play-parties and that sort of thing, but he was essentially a farmer, and he was the sweetest, gentlest man that ever came down the pike. To get an idea of his personality, you just have to listen to his records, because that is exactly the kind of man he was. In life as in music, he was an understater and a minimalist. Most blues artists deal in intensity, but he dealt in subtlety and nuance. The beat was always there, rock solid, but there was also a lyricism and deftness, and he was very, very easy on the nerves.

John spent a lot of time around the Village and seemed to genuinely enjoy hanging out with us. I remember one time somebody was passing around a joint, and it came to John. He looked at it for a moment, and said, “Oh yeah, I remember this. We used to call it ‘poor man’s whiskey.’” And he just passed it on. He was a delight. One of the odd things about him was that he did not like beds; he preferred a good, comfortable armchair. He was the easiest man to put up overnight: “Here John, we have a couch.”

“Oh, I don’t need a couch. Say, that looks like a great chair . . . ”

John never had a bad word to say about anyone, not even people who really did deserve a few bad words. We were sitting around one night, and someone brought up the subject of Tom Hoskins, the guy who had rediscovered him. That relationship had ended badly: Hoskins had signed John to a contract where he earned a ridiculous percentage of John’s wages, owned his publishing, and controlled all his business, and John actually had to go to court to get out from under his thumb. Naturally, we were filled with righteous indignation, and I was cursing Hoskins up hill and down
dale, and John was just sitting there and listening, not saying a word. Finally, I paused and looked at John, waiting to hear him chime in. And John said: “Well, you know . . . if it weren’t for Tom, I’d still be chopping cotton in Mississippi.” No way to argue with that.

I had been playing John’s “Spike Driver’s Blues” ever since the mid- 1950s, and it wasn’t until I met him that I realized I had got the basses backward. John and I were sitting around with a guitar one evening down at the Gaslight, and I was playing my version for him, and this puzzled look came over his face. He started watching my right hand, and he said, “You’ve got those basses backward.” And he played me a few measures of it the way he did it. It was just like on the record, and by God, he was right. I said, “Oh, shit, back to the old drawing board.” And he says, “No, no, no. You really ought to keep it that way. I like that.” That’s the folk process for you: some people call it creativity, but them as knows calls it mistakes.

“Spike Driver’s Blues” was one of two songs by John that had been included on the
Anthology
. The other was this gorgeous piece of fingerpicking called “Frankie’s Blues.” It was a beautiful arrangement, and when those albums came out in the early 1950s, we all immediately set ourselves to learn that thing. It was incredibly fast, though, and after a week or two I dropped by the wayside. A few persisted, and my friend Barry Kornfeld, for one, disappeared into his chambers and emerged six weeks later, blinking like a mole, and he had it. Note for note, just as clean and fast as on the record.

When I first saw John at the Café Yana, there he was playing “Frankie’s Blues.” However, I noticed that it was a lot slower than on the record. Of course, he was a good deal older, but it also struck me that it sounded better at that tempo. I wanted to ask him about it, but I wanted to be as diplomatic as possible—I didn’t want to just say, “So, Pops, can’t cut it anymore, eh?” Very tentatively, I said, “You know that ‘Frankie’ thing you played . . . ”

Apparently I was not the first person to have asked, because John intervened and saved me any further embarrassment. He just smiled and said, “Oh, you want to know why it’s so much slower than on the record.”

I said, “Yeah . . . ”

He said, “Well, you know, that song was so long that they had to speed it up to get it all on one side of a 78.”

All I could think of was Barry, sidelined with acute carpal tunnel syndrome.

John played the Gaslight pretty regularly, and he would also hang out there whenever he was in town. Clarence Hood, the owner, was from the same part of Mississippi, and they would sit around for hours, talking over old times. It was the strangest thing, because they obviously had lived very different lives down there, but they really seemed to enjoy each other’s company. John would also join us upstairs at the Kettle of Fish, and one night we were sitting around, and it was just John, me, Jack Elliott, and Sam Hood. At that time, we had an understanding with the owners of the Kettle, only I never understood it: whenever a group of us was at a table, they would bring over a bottle, make a line with a wax pencil to show how much whiskey was in it, and then when it was finished, charge us for three bottles. But what the hell, those were flush times.

John’s favorite drink was Old Grandad, so there we were with a bottle of Old Grandad. We had gotten down to where there was about two inches left in the bottle, and we were feeling no pain, and boys will be boys, even if one of these boys was seventy-some years old. So I don’t know whose idea it was, but we started to arm-wrestle. Jack was just back from out west, where he had been bulldogging steers, Sam was an all-state Mississippi high school football champion—he had been given the Order of No Neck by the governor, personally—and I was a big, strong guy, as well. So we’re arm-wrestling, and John is sitting there, kind of bemused by our antics. Finally, somebody says, “Come on, John, give us a shot.” Now, John was a little guy, and damn near as old as the three of us put together, but he plants his elbow on the table, and blam! blam! blam! He throws all three of us.