On street level, pedestrians swaddled in their Sunday best strolled by the sky-blue building. The only clues to what went on below their feet were the words painted in big white letters on the front window: Traveling Souls Spiritualist Church.
It wasn’t big, but it was hers. In the twenty-odd years since she had fled Jim Crow’s clutches, Annie Bell had clawed her way to self-sufficiency, a miraculous feat for a Negro woman at the time. She was slight of frame and just over five feet tall, but Jesus said it only takes faith the size of a mustard seed to move mountains. If anyone could move a mountain, Annie Bell could. She even earned enough money to buy a little house in a racially mixed neighborhood at 2214 W. Division, where she continued her work as a seer. Most of Traveling Souls’ congregation visited her during the week, and her house was usually lousy with people. Apart from Mercedes, Charles, and their children, at any given moment one might see clients, relatives, latchkey kids, and the occasional moocher hoping to snag a free meal.
Despite so many people surrounding her, my great-grandmother had few friends. She cultivated an aloofness, preferring her own company to that of others. She did most things in her bedroom, and to deal with her usually required doing it in her room, on her terms. Sometimes she’d come out and mingle with the constant stream of visitors, but as soon as she grew tired of socializing, she’d disappear without ceremony into the sanctuary of her room. She passed these traits unchanged to my father.
Her detachment gave her a kind of power. It kept her accessible yet distant, in the mold of all great religious healers. She projected that air, self-stylized as it was, and the multitude packed in every day to breathe it in, bodies weaving around each other, hemmed in by piles of junk. Annie Bell was a hoarder, and she crammed the house full of trinkets from Riverview. Pink and yellow policy slips sat in messy stacks on her dinner table, and Aunt Carolyn earned many a rebuke for playing with the pretty slips. “Don’t touch that! Put that down,” Annie Bell would hiss, with good reason. Policy formed an important part of her income.
In those days, policy was a little like the modern lottery and a lot like a gambling racket. Number runners prowled the neighborhood, marking down wagers in little books kept in their pockets. At the end of the day, whoever picked the right number won a piece of the pie. Annie Bell had a knack for picking the right number. She claimed they came to her in dreams, which was easier to believe after she won again, and again, and again. She’d stash the cash in wads under her mattress, using it to fund Traveling Souls, make house payments, and splurge on a new car just about every year. Annie Bell loved Buicks.
For Aunt Judy, the constant commotion and clutter created a chaotic living space, made worse by the volatile personalities housed within. Annie Bell passed on her raging temper to her children, as Marion had learned with Mannish. Mercedes exceeded them both in cruelty. She and Annie Bell often shook the house with screaming spats, each on opposite sides of a room shouting in no uncertain terms what would happen if the other put so much as a toe over this line.
Meanwhile, every new weekend brought a trip from Marion with my father, Carolyn, Kirby, and Kenny in tow, adding more bodies to the stew. Annie Bell usually hid Judy when my grandmother arrived, so Marion rarely got a chance to see her daughter. Worse, Marion still struggled mightily to keep food on the table, while Judy always had new clothes and plenty of food. Perhaps inevitably, Curtis, Carolyn, and Kenny looked at her as the have, while they were the have-nots. The constant shuffling between the have-nots of Marion’s hovel and the haves of Annie Bell’s house further ingrained the message in Dad’s mind—possessing a special talent earned control, and control brought security.
Curtis and the rest of the kids sometimes stayed the weekend at Annie Bell’s. It was the only time they got a decent meal. Sundays, they’d slink out of bed rubbing sleepy eyes and pad toward the kitchen where Mercedes’s husband, Charles, prepared breakfast. He worked over the food poetically, pots and pans clanging, smoke curling through the house carrying the savory smells of scrambled eggs, steamed rice, hot biscuits, crispy bacon, fried sausage, and steak smothered in tangy gravy. He sang spirituals while he cooked as if they added seasoning, and when he set the food out for a feast just like you’d see on television, it seemed God Himself had been listening to his songs.
After breakfast, a sinister Sunday ritual followed. As Aunt Carolyn remembers, “It wasn’t a pleasant home, because every Sunday morning, you had the big alley fight, cuss-out fight before we went to church. Cuss all the way to the church, and then after church, you’d come home and cuss all the rest of the day.” Only in church would the cussing cease, as no one wanted to cuss in front of the Bible. My father watched these fights, and even though he possessed a much cooler temperament, at times he’d repeat them in his romantic relationships later in life. If Annie Bell’s congregants knew about their reverend’s unholy temper, however, they didn’t seem to mind. They showed up dutifully to Sunday services, and Traveling Souls thrived.
The word “traveling” did not earn top billing in my great-grandmother’s church by accident. Soon after starting the church, she joined the National Colored Spiritualist Association of Churches, a long title made longer by the fact that whites and Negroes in America were separated even before God. The NCSAC held meetings in big cities around the country, and little Spiritualist churches from all over attended, homegrown gospel groups in tow, competing to see who had the best one. Annie Bell wanted Traveling Souls to attend these national meetings, so she had Charles form a quartet featuring his two sons, his stepson Eddie “Paddyfoot” Patterson, and Jerry Butler, a young man with a voice so rich it would change my father’s life.
Jerry’s family transplanted to Chicago from Sunflower, Mississippi, when he was three years old. Like many Southern migrants, they fled home under duress. “My father had a doctor,” Jerry recalls, “and the doctor was the father of another doctor. They had the same name. My father went in and asked the lady for the doctor, and she said, ‘He won’t be in until such and such a time.’ And [my father] said, ‘Well, I want to speak to the old man.’ She got offended, because this black had the audacity to call her boss an old man, and she called the sheriff. The sheriff came and chastised my father for being disrespectful. My mother got so angry, she said, ‘We’ve got to leave this city because somebody’s going to die here.’ She made him pack up and bring us to Chicago.” Such was the situation in Mississippi that two poorly chosen words changed the Butlers’ lives forever.
Even at such a young age, Jerry’s voice made him the clear choice for the quartet’s lead singer. They went by the Northern Jubilee Singers, and as Jerry remembers, “We sang traditional gospel songs. At the time that we started, Sam Cooke was a major star in gospel music. And so anything that Sam sang, we wanted to sing. But we never limited it to that. We did ‘I’ll Fly Away,’ ‘Pilgrim and a Stranger Traveling Through This Wearisome Land.’ Most of these songs were made famous by some other spiritual or gospel group.”
My father begged to get in, but no one wanted him. He was only eight years old, and they stood on the cusp of their teenage years—it was simple politics. He didn’t give up, though. He might have been a loner, but he craved the acceptance of these older boys who did what he dreamed of doing. He’d soon find the key to unlock the door to those dreams.
By this point, Dad’s musical ability had begun to blossom. On a trip to visit Sadie’s relatives in Du Quoin, he discovered the piano, sitting before it like an archaeologist trying to make sense of a hieroglyph. As his fingers fumbled around the keys, he noticed the black ones sounded like the boogie-woogie music he heard on the radio. Soon, he could pick out little melodies on the sharps and flats. He seemed naturally drawn to the instrument, although as he would remember later in life, he didn’t need much prodding. “I never really had to acquire an interest in music,” he said. “I just grew up around people who were a constant inspiration.”
Regardless of his burgeoning piano skills, the older boys didn’t wa
nt him hanging around—Annie Bell didn’t have a piano in the church, anyway. But then came one of those moments in life where fate, that dreamy concept, seems to become a living, breathing thing. As my father remembered it:
[Eddie Patterson] brought a guitar with him to my grandmother’s house. And this guitar would just sit in a corner and sit there and sit there, and no one would touch it. Of course, with my curiosity about music, it just kept pulling me and pulling me until I had to pick up that ax … I picked up this guitar, and when I strummed across it, it was in the standard Spanish tuning, which means when you strum across, you don’t get a chord … Well, I didn’t know what to do. So I tuned the guitar to the black keys on the keyboard … That’s how I taught myself to play guitar.
Without knowing it, he had tuned his guitar to open F-sharp, which meant that when he strummed across the strings without putting his left hand on the fret board, the guitar played an F-sharp chord. No one told him to tune the guitar that way; it happened by that mixture of chance and God-given talent often called genius.
Genius is a much-abused word, of course, but it must apply to a child inventing his own system of playing a six-stringed instrument. No guidebook exists to learn guitar in open F-sharp tuning, no reference manual with chord shapes, scales, or fingerings. It is hard, if not impossible, to think of any other guitarist in the history of the instrument who played it that way. My father had no teachers but his ear and intuition.
Playing the guitar came with secondary benefits. The instrument fascinated the older boys, but only Curtis took the time to learn it. Now he had something they wanted. Within the year, he joined the Northern Jubilee Singers.
The group grew stronger with my father in the lineup. It turned out he had a sweet tenor voice and, even better, he could write songs. At first he wrote gospel music, songs heavily indebted to traveling church acts like the Soul Stirrers and the Staple Singers. As my father recalled, “The church had plenty of little affairs with other churches and we’d go visit other churches and they’d visit us and every church would have a group, a young kid singer vocalist or someone who was singing music. So we got a lot of that. A lot of a cappella and group singing … I was a quartet man, the four and five man groups … I just loved harmony. So that’s where the foundation was laid down for me.”
A whole circuit existed for these gospel acts, and Uncle Charles wanted to get the boys on it. Annie Bell held a service in early 1953 to send the Northern Jubilee Singers off. Winter still hovered, the Hawk slicing its talons into every crack and crevice as congregants shuffled downstairs to the church. The service took place in the evening, which made it feel special. A potbellied stove burned in the back of the basement, providing some semblance of heat. Uncle Charles gathered the children around and explained they would begin attending Spiritualist conventions in other cities. Annie Bell even splurged on new transportation, peeling off a few bills from the wad under her bed and purchasing a bus.
In no time, Uncle Charles had the group running. They hit Detroit and Cleveland, dipping down into Louisiana where Annie Bell visited the family she left behind, then back to Chicago. As leader of the Northern Jubilee Singers, Charles became a hero to the children and a father figure for Curtis. Charles was the guy he could talk to when he had problems, the one who disciplined him when he got out of line. He was the only adult male who offered Curtis tenderness, affection, and guidance.
He also gave Curtis his first taste of life on the road. In the summer of 1953, the group traveled down to Tampa, Florida, to perform at a convention. Few southern states at the time treated Negroes worse than Florida, and as Annie Bell’s bus grumbled into Tampa early in the morning, Curtis and the other boys discovered what they had missed by being born up north. As Jerry remembered, “A group of white boys looking for trouble threw things at the bus, made faces, and called us ‘sanctified niggers.’” Jerry found to his amazement Negroes in Tampa didn’t treat them much better. They didn’t like that these northern cats swooped down and stole the spotlight and, perhaps more important, the girls. He recalled, “They seemed to know only one phrase: ‘You ain’t shit, man.’”
The convention took place at the Pallbearers Union Hall, where the Northern Jubilee Singers sang every night. My father learned from these gigs. Watching how Uncle Charles arranged the quintet, he learned how to voice harmonies, how to structure call and response, and how to write for multiple singers. Soon, he got his own guitar, or something like one. “It was a twelve-string, and it looked more like a lute,” he said. “My grandmother bought it for me. I always wanted a guitar, you know, but I guess she had no idea what one was. She found something that was quite ancient … and it had a very strange shape.”
Later, Marion bought him a Roy Rogers guitar, and he progressed quickly. Though gospel music was still my father’s main interest, secular music lured him like a siren. The blues, after all, weren’t that different from gospel—one was about a woman, the other about God, but the intent was the same. Plus, he heard the blues everywhere he went. He even lived them. It came as no surprise when he formed a loose little blues group with a friend on harmonica and another on snare drum. “When I first started playing guitar I remember that’s what I used to play—strictly down blues,” he later said. “I guess that gave me my basics of being able to understand just the simplicity of those one, two, three changes and the funkiness of blues itself. And the church gave me the inspiration and the harmony overall to be able to take a lyric and build it into other things that might help to inspire or motivate people.”
He still used his unique F-sharp tuning, which gave the licks he copied from Muddy Waters and Little Walter a twist. On Saturdays while Uncle Charles shot pool, Dad’s group played in the back of Charles’s car. Every now and then someone walking by would toss a quarter or two their way. By the end of the day, Dad usually had a few coins to rub together.
Music, both holy and secular, now dominated his life. Sixth grade couldn’t compete with the high of hurtling from gig to gig while the country blurred by before his eyes. When he stood on stage, he felt safe from the schoolyard taunts of “Smut,” safe from jabs at his looks, height, or poverty, and safe most of all from the insecurity that otherwise never left him alone. People treated him differently after seeing him on stage. Girls treated him differently, although in a way, his guitar was the closest girlfriend he’d ever have. He kept it at hand constantly, even in bed. He fell asleep cradling it. He woke up strumming it. He played it gently, lovingly, using his fingers to caress the strings. “It was my other self,” he said. “It dictated to me as much as I dictated to it. The guitar was my twin.”
Out on the road, Dad felt his calling, but he still lived under his mother’s thumb, so his dreams of ditching school for the life of a professional musician would have to wait. He found little encouragement in school, though, and shuffled through at least nine grammar schools before high school. He summed up his scholastic experience saying, “My education didn’t give me any background, not even any backbone, as a black. It just didn’t mean anything. My whole education for whatever I do know was brought to me right here on the road.”
Meanwhile, the social rumblings that framed Curtis’s birth now threatened an all-out tempest. In 1951, a Negro family had moved into Cicero, Al Capone’s former stronghold and Chicago’s most virulently segregated suburb. Cicero’s white residents greeted them with a riot, burning their building and destroying their possessions. The National Guard had to be called to restore order. Curtis and the kids were old enough to know what had happened and why. Marion worried especially for Kenny, who had a tendency to speak his young mind. Whenever racial trouble stirred, she’d usually send him to Annie Bell’s until the threat diffused.
Trouble seemed to be stirring all the time, though. By the early ’50s, the Nation of Islam—a group ideologically influenced by Marcus Garvey—began gaining strength and buying real estate all over the South Side of Chicago. The Nation promoted a mixture of Islamic theology and a the
ory known as Yakub’s History, which held that an evil black scientist named Yakub genetically engineered the white race. The theory said all American Negroes were actually Asiatic, a term uniting Arabs, Egyptians, Chinese, Japanese, Negroes, and many other ethnicities into one group.
The Nation was founded in Detroit in 1930 and moved to Chicago under the leadership of Elijah Muhammad in 1935. As the Nation grew in Chicago, many of Annie Bell’s clients joined its ranks, and her house swirled with political debates, social theories, and heated discussions. Soon, Annie Bell got caught in the tide. As Aunt Carolyn recalls, “When we were little she told us we weren’t black; we were Asiatic. I came home, and I told mama, ‘We’re Asiatic.’ Mama said, ‘That’s a flu.’”
Marion might not have been swayed, but the Nation continued growing, spurred on by a prodigiously talented speaker and lightning rod of a man, Malcolm X. Malcolm had the laser-like focus and unyielding ethics often found in a reformed sinner. He discovered the Nation in prison and became its staunchest defender and strongest promoter upon release, heading Harlem’s Temple Number 7, one of the Nation’s most important sites.
While the Nation baited white racists, referring to whites as “devils” and spouting fiery rhetoric about black supremacy, the NAACP stirred the pot in another direction, one that hit closer to home for my father. Led again by Thurgood Marshall, the group now leveled its sights on segregated education. Soon, several NAACP cases came before the US Supreme Court as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka. In mid-May 1954, the Court delivered one of its most revolutionary rulings, declaring the doctrine of separate-but-equal unconstitutional. For the better part of a century, separate-but-equal formed the legal underpinning for Jim Crow segregation. The Court’s ruling effectively lopped off one of Jim Crow’s legs, leaving it hopping on one foot, violently trying to regain its balance across the South.
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