Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  They found nothing. Not a single trace. No one who would admit to so much as having heard of the Screamin’ Nighthawk, let alone any knowledge of his present whereabouts. It was as if the earth had swallowed him whole, but that couldn’t be, Jerry thought, because his songs were still being sung, better-known bluesmen like Muddy Waters or Howlin’ Wolf, who had moved to Chicago years ago, insisted that the Screamin’ Nighthawk was still around, members of their bands had seen him only three or four years ago-in Mobile, Decatur, Jackson, St. Louis. Sometimes Jerry got the feeling it was perversity. More often with the few blacks he spoke to it seemed to be fear. A couple of times they would stop out in the country to ask a farmer walking behind his mule or a wizened old lady rocking inexorably on a falling-down porch. The response was inevitably suspicious, closed-off, deliberately opaque. Once Jerry thought he had found something as he idly conversed with some colored mechanics on their lunch break at Romeo’s Garage. “Oh sure,” they started to respond, then caught the disapproving glance of the white foreman, presumably Romeo. Jerry suggested to the others that they wait until work let out and talk to the mechanics then, but they decided it would be a waste of time, and for all Jerry knew those impassive black faces, with their impenetrable looks and impenetrable language, were only putting him on, perhaps recognized the name, very likely had nothing more to say. It was all very strange, Jerry thought, but hardly surprising. Who knew what happened to anyone in this country after they faded from the limelight:?

  In Cleveland they managed to stumble across the man who had engineered Hawk’s last official sessions in Jackson almost fifteen years before. He was a tall stringy-looking country boy with a prominent Adam’s apple who had played on some early rockabilly sides and to their surprise vividly remembered Hawk. “Sure do. Didn’t leave no forwarding address. He jes’ wanted his money on the table, you know, like all them people. I remember he had quite a roll, of course it might have been built up some, all ones on a cardboard backing, I’ve seen that once or twice in my time. Bunch of cards, too, letters, old newspaper clippings, I remember he had a gang of ’em. Course I knowed him some before that anyways. My brother-in-law was Uncle Charley-you maya heard of him, his real name was Charley Stewart, and he sold tires for a living, but he was pretty well known as a radio personality in these parts-he used to have him on his radio show oncet in a while, I can remember one time we went out in the country to a place he was playing. Way out in the woods-man, you oughta seen it, you oughta seen them niggers jump. Half of them not wearing any shoes, I ain’t seen nothing like it since I was a kid, and that old Nighthawk, he just kept trailing away on his guitar, he could play all night and all day, like to wore me out. That’s about all I know, boys. Course you could check with Miz Gaynor.”

  Their hearts leaped, and they eagerly took down whatever information the engineer could proffer on Miz Gaynor, who lived over near Greenville now and had owned the Jackson label with her husband, a dentist, until a fire burned down their home and made a widow of her. “Undependable,” she started out un-promisingly. “There was quite a few times when my husband, Dr. Gaynor, had to go down to the city jail and talk Mr. Rogers into letting Nighthawk out. And, of course, often I had to send my husband or my son-that’s Fred-over to one of them rough nigger joints, I wouldn’t dare go in there myself, to get him and sober him up so we could do a session. But he could sing, I’ll say that for him. He was the best of the lot. The people really liked him. And I suppose he was a nice enough old fellow, minded his own business, never gave me any backtalk that I can recall, never had much to say for himself at all as a matter of fact. Sure sorry I couldn’t help you boys any more,” she said not very convincingly. Jerry didn’t think she was sorry at all.

  But they kept on down Highway 61 with nothing else to go on, all because once, in a song that Hawk had recorded several times in the ’30s, he had declared, “Highway 61 rolls right by my door/ Next time you see me I be heading down that old dusty road.”

  They were five days into their pilgrimage and just about ready to turn back. They had argued about matrix numbers, the ethnic purity of the blues and the ruinous effects of amplification upon the folk tradition, the centrality of Robert Johnson’s role (assimilator or creative genius?), and the true identity of King Solomon Hill. Thayer had stopped speaking to Hard some time the previous day when Hartl had said, “My God, if you don’t shut up about the sociology of the South, I think we’re all going to suffocate from the shit.” Thayer, who was lying down in the back seat for a rest, demanded that Jerry stop the car.

  “You heard what he said. I’ve taken about as much of his shit as I’m going to. I don’t have to take that kind of shit from anyone.” He kept poking Jerry’s shoulder with increasing force, until Jerry thought he would have to stop the car or run off the road.

  “Ah, Christ,” said Hard. “I’m just sick of hearing all this liberal bullshit about white oppression and how it affected the poor bush nigger in his primitive state. God, what drivel!”

  “There, you heard it!” Thayer said, grabbing Jerry by the shoulder and practically jerking his head around. “It’s out, you heard it, I knew it all along. Racist, colonialist rhetoric, you can’t deny it. I won’t go another foot with this white-colonialist.”

  “Ah, why don’t you grow up, Ralph? You act like you never got fucked before.”

  “I think,” said Jerry, taking a deep breath, “we ought to all remember why we’re here. I mean, we have committed a certain amount of time and energy and money to finding an artist who has made a significant impact on the lives of all of us. I think that impact is large enough to allow us to forget our petty differences—”

  So they stopped talking to each other, and, if they had anything to say, communicated it through Jerry.

  Then outside of Yola they had their first real glimmer of hope. They had already completed their rounds, tried the post office with no luck, had it politely suggested to them by the police chief that they were wasting their time and his, when Hard, spotting a Coke machine, bright red and spanking new, in front of a rundown cafe and general store, suddenly developed an uncontrollable thirst and asked Jerry to have Thayer stop. On the porch there was an old man in a straw hat and earwarmers, rocking away. Inside the store around a potbellied stove was a group of black men, grown suddenly silent as Jerry and Thayer stretched their legs, checking out the store and examining the beat-up jukebox that sat in a corner. James Brown, Otis Redding, O.V. Wright, James Can—Jerry saw Thayer’s face wrinkle with disgust. But there in the middle of all these up-to-the-minute homogeneous offerings of a mechanized age was a handwritten card (B-4) announcing a selection of “So Glad,” of which only a half-dozen copies (all of the others 78s) had ever surfaced, so far as any collector knew. Jerry could scarcely contain his excitement. He glanced at Thayer to see if he, too, had noticed, but Thayer had walked away sniffing the air, clearly oblivious. With trembling fingers he dug in his fingers for change, found a dime, pushed down the buttons, checking three times to make sure he had the right number, and waited in breathless anticipation. Nothing happened. He touched the jukebox gingerly, wanting to shake it until it burst into song, but then he noticed it wasn’t plugged in. Its cord trailed off and dangled uselessly on the floor with no visible outlet or way for it to be connected.

  Without saying anything to Thayer, Jerry sidled over to the counter and waited for what seemed like an interminable period until one of the old men separated himself from the rest, came around behind the counter, and said in a loud, unmodulated voice, “Something I can do for you?” Jerry explained, and the man offered him his dime back, but that was not, Jerry insisted, what he was looking for. He wanted to hear the song. Somewhat resentfully, all the while muttering to himself, the man strode across the room, retrieved an extension cord, marched back, plugged the old machine in.

  The first notes were inaudible because the tubes were still warming up, but then Jerry heard it, and Thayer whirled around, hearing it too, the unmistakable so
und of Nighthawk’s ringing guitar, the big bass voice booming out, “So glad I be back home, see my mother’s face one more time.”

  They were as flabbergasted as he. Even Hard showed signs of animation and enthusiasm. They played the record again and then the other side, which none of them had even heard except on a faint tenth-generation dub. Then the questions began. Did anyone know the artist? Had anyone actually seen the Screamin’ Nighthawk perform? Why no, didn’t believe they had. Where had the record come from? The man behind the counter, round and unwrinkled in a dirty white apron, scratched his head. A man brought ’em by. What man? Well, shucks, he didn’t know, the records all came from Jackson, he supposed, he didn’t know how long they’d had that one, didn’t really remember hearing it before. Did the name Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson mean anything to any of them? Well, no, they didn’t believe it did. Of course they knew Franklin Roosevelt. He was a great man. The blank impassive black faces, calm, imperturbable, just a little bit pained at not being able to provide better answers for these nice gentlemens, slightly puzzled and embarrassed at all this fuss. Thayer and Hard grew increasingly impatient until at last they started tugging on Jerry’s sleeve. “Let’s get out of here,” Hard insisted. “This is just a waste of time.” But Jerry persisted. He had gotten so far as to clarify that the last name was Jefferson.

  “Oh, Jefferson, Jefferson,” the man who had plugged in the jukebox boomed. “Well, why didn’t you say so in the first placer1 Yessir, there’s lots of Jeffersons. There’s Purvis Jefferson and Clovis Jefferson, which is the Jefferson that passed, lived over by Browns Point—used to play a little harmonica, the people would call him Boot sometimes cause his feets was so big and he used to wear them big old clodhopper boots, you know them cut-off old square-toes, you know what I mean—” Jerry nodded bleakly. Hard regarded the man with undisguised contempt.

  “Well, this Jefferson,” Jerry explained, “plays the guitar. And we hope he’s alive. He used to make records, and they called him the Screamin’ Nighthawk. If you looked at the label, I’ll bet the composer’s credits would read T.R. Jefferson.”

  The others just stared at him blankly.

  Outside Thayer had started the car. They would leave him here, Jerry sensed in a panic. They would abandon him without a moment’s thought. He cast one eye toward the door and turned back one last time to the old men clustered around the stove.

  “You say this fella named T.R.?” said one in an oversized checkered cap that puffed up from his head. “Well, say, this T.R., did he have a big old guitar, one of them hollow-bodied old Stellas that he plug in to a electric box?”

  Jerry shrugged. For all he knew the Screamin’ Nighthawk was no more than a figment of his imagination.

  “Well, say, I knew a boy used to work down at Dooley’s Garage, used to play a big old guitar until he joined the choich” —Jerry’s spirits fell—“but naw, that was J.R., isn’t that right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. J.R. J.R.,” a chorus of voices answered him.

  “Yeah. J.R. Benwell, that the one. You want to speak to J.R. Benwell, you gwine have to speak to the warden down at Parchman first. He doing life for cutting his woman’s throat. Course that woman was cheating on him every kind of way, and the poor fool didn’t know it until he come home find her in bed with another woman. But the judge sent him up just the same.”

  They shook their heads sadly over the fate of J.R. Benwell. Jerry thought he was going to cry. They were just toying with him, he thought helplessly. Outside Thayer leaned on his horn. The old man on the porch was still rocking when Jerry came out. He didn’t mean any harm; he just didn’t know how to show it.

  “T.R., T.R.,” said the squat, heavy-set man with the big voice, standing in the doorway behind him. “Well, you know, I think that might ring a bell. Ain’t he the feller lives out on the edge of the swamp, out on the old Holloway Plantation?” From within Jerry could hear a mumbled chorus of assent. “Well, say, now, that might just be your man.”

  “T.R. Jefferson,” Jerry repeated patiently.

  “Yeah, that the one. You want to know where he lives, right?”

  Jerry nodded, not quite trusting his own voice.

  “You think you can follow directions? Well now. You follow the old West Oak Road, turn towards the river at the first fork you come to, then you come to an old bridge, go straight on across—don’t take no turns-after you cross that bridge you just follow the signs to the Holloway Plantation, you can’t miss it, unless’n you take the wrong turn—”

  Excitedly Jerry took the directions down in his little notebook, blurted out his profuse thanks, and practically fell over himself running down the steps toward the car, which was turning around on the dusty shoulder. The old mummy on the porch had scarcely moved.

  They got hopelessly lost. By the time they had finally come to a bridge—and they hadn’t the slightest idea if it was the right bridge—they had been driving around for nearly two hours in what was beginning to seem like trackless Arctic waste. Thayer and Hartl were yelling at him separately. “Well, that’s what you get for listening to those shiftless niggers,” said Hartl. “About all they’re good for is singing and dancing anyway.”

  “God,” said Thayer. “You really have led us on a wild goose chase, haven’t you?”

  “I mean, it’s all right listening to the music, but as far as giving directions goes, they’re not really worth a shit.”

  “The first thing we should have done,” said Thayer, “was to have him show us on the map. I can’t believe I have to travel all the way to Mississippi just to find another New York racist.”

  Was this what it was like, Jerry wondered, for Alan Lomax on his great pioneering field expeditions?

  They saw an old man on a mule riding at a somnolent gait down a solitary dirt lane by the side of the road. He was wearing a broad-brimmed preacher’s hat and seemed half asleep when Thayer slowed the car down and called out to him. “Excuse me,” said Thayer to the old man, “we were looking for a black man named T.R. Jefferson, a blues singer. You wouldn’t happen to know where he lives?”

  “You on the wrong road,” said the man without a moment’s hesitation. The mule proceeded at its stately pace, and Thayer kept the car even with him in herky-jerky fashion.

  “This gentleman seems to be a cut above his fellows,” whispered Hartl with embarrassing volume. “You can tell from his professorial mien that he’s read Hegel.”

  “This man, Mr. Jefferson, is an old-time blues singer,” Thayer explained gravely. “Professionally he has been known as the Screamin’ Nighthawk.”

  “Hunh!”

  “He used to play an old Stella,” said Jerry.

  “I already done tole you, you headin’ in a wild goose chase if you lookin’ for his house. Now you got to turn around, go back to the bridge, take your second left, road go down in between the fields, you jes’ keep driving till you can’t drive no more.”

  “And then?”

  The man looked at them with some disdain. “That’s Jefferson’s house.” When none of them said anything, he kicked the mule, which seemed to affect its gait not at all, shook his head, and muttered half to himself, “Ain’t that what you said you wanted?”

  They left him in the dust. Thayer, with one hand on the wheel, started fiddling with the portable tape recorder. “Will you tell him to keep his eyes on the road, for God’s sake?” said Hartl. “You know, I get the impression, gentlemen, that we may be on to something. Do you suppose that jigaboo has any conception of the historic service he may have done the world?”

  Jerry’s hands were sweating.

  “My God,” said Thayer, “do you think we’ve really done it? Can you imagine what it will be like to have rediscovered the Screamin’ Nighthawk? I can’t even imagine what his reaction will be.”

  “What do you mean?” said Jerry.

  “Well, this is almost like finding out that Robert Johnson is still alive or rediscovering Blind Willie McTell.”

  “
But he knows that he’s still alive,” said Jerry. If he was still alive, if this wasn’t one more joke on the part of the state of Mississippi, which seemed aligned in a common conspiracy, black and white, against them.

  “But he doesn’t know how important he is.”

  They headed down the mud-rutted road between the cotton rows, picking up speed and sending up dust. It seemed as if the low leafy cotton plants would never stop but go on forever, and Jerry was sure they were off on another wild goose chase. “Maybe we’ll find Tommy McClennan off in the bushes somewhere,” said Hard. “After all, didn’t he record ’Cotton Patch Blues’?”

  At last the rows of cotton plants gave out, and they came to one or two pitiful little tar-paper shacks, but the road kept going, so they did, too, until finally it gave out altogether, just became a rutted wagon track which Thayer was reluctant to subject the rented car to. So they got out and walked, proceeding single-file in the direction of an isolated misshapen structure, propped up on poles beside a muddy creek, which was as far as you could go. They approached the house with trepidation, though it looked deserted. Inside there was no clear sign of recent occupancy. In the single main room there was a dirty mattress, a straw pallet, a rusty old woodburning stove with a pot of fetid water sitting on top of it, and a big brass bed. The walls were patched with newspaper and decorated with pictures of dogs of all kinds. In the yard a few chickens ran loose. It was hard to say whether the house had been left that morning by people who lived there and actually intended to return or if it had been abandoned some months before. There was no indication of who its occupants were or had been. They called out loudly, but of course no one answered, and when they went outside the children who had been playing in the fields nearby had disappeared. When they got back out to the highway, they met the old man again, seemingly no closer to his destination than he was when they first spied him. “You find T.R.’s place all right?” he asked equably.

  “There wasn’t anyone there.”