Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  An old man with a cowboy hat spat philosophically in the dust. “You still around, Jefferson? I thought sure you’d be gone by now. Must be getting old, you keep making them babies, you ain’t never gonna get as old as me.”

  “What you talking about? I don’t never want to be as old as you. Gulcher ninety-six year old,” Hawk said, turning to Jerry. “He can remember practically back to slavery time.”

  The old man laughed, a thin high-pitched cackle, and shook his head. “Well, who gonna take care of that little old gal when you gone?”

  “I guess there be somebody. Maybe you be the one to carry my business on. Sarah Mae, my aunty, staying with her and the baby now. Soon as I shake loose of these Northern boys, I gonna be gone. Crops gonna be coming in in Georgia before too long, money gonna be wearing a hole in them Georgia boys’ pockets, and Hawk gonna swoop in there to catch it fore it fall. From there I figure to go on down to Florida. Florida bound to be pretty good by then, too. Then we just gonna have to see. Hey, you ought to get out that harp of yours one of these days, fore you forgets how to blow it. Bring it on down to the Sunset, fore you gets to be a old old man.”

  “Aw, I ain’t got the breath no more. I got the will all right, but I just ain’t got the breath.”

  “Well, go on and see how you feels then.”

  They watched the old man trudging off in the dust. Out on the edge of town beyond where the streets were paved they passed a barbershop-poolhall where the young men dressed slick. Hawk sniffed a little contemptuously and spat out the window. “Any young blues players around here?” Jerry asked.

  “You mean them? Naw, they wouldn’t want to get their hair mussed. I think they spends more time in front of the mirror looking at themselves than they do looking at the girls that pass by. Back then we used to call ’em sissy men, don’t know how they get along less’n they got a gang of women working for them.”

  Then they were out of town and in the cool magnolia-scented breeze. Big pillared mansions sat back from the road across rolling lawns. Hawk gazed at one of them. “Mr. Jack lived there until his business went bust, cause he spent all his money on a high yaller named Dorothy Mae. I played out there back in ’34, when Mr. Jack’s father had the place. We didn’t play nothing but jigs and reels all night long, it was Mr. Jack’s graduation, and all them nice young people danced up a storm. Danced up a storm, them folkses, they say we got to have you back, we got to have you at all our parties. Course they never did. But we played some other fine parties around that time, lots of ’em. Mr. Jack, he have a real craving for yallers.”

  Farther and farther out into the country, past the mansions, past the plantations, dotted with little tar-paper shacks, back into the swamp, where once again Hawk seemed to know every straggling face and have a word on the history or ancestry of the inhabitant of every shack they passed. They never did find Booger Jake, Jerry began to doubt that he even existed, since no one else seemed to have given any thought to him in years. Hawk, he realized, was trying to tell him something. Of course Jerry knew better, he knew what was good for Hawk. Even now Hawk spent less than half his time in this little world. Well, what if instead of going to Georgia he went to England, instead of playing some litde Florida juke joint he played at Harvard? He could probably spend more time around Yola then, come home with more money, earn the respect of those slicks down at Lawson’s Pool Hall and Barber Shop, maybe even retire someday to a well-earned rest. Well, in the end, Jerry thought, neither of them turned out to be completely right or wrong.

  After three more days of this Hard just disappeared one day. Jerry checked the bus depot, which doubled as Myrtle’s Restaurant. Yes, a long-haired Yankee had bought a ticket to Jackson, didn’t say where he was going from there, but Jerry surmised he must have flown back to New York. In any case within a month there was a story in Time magazine hailing the rediscovery of the legendary blues singer the Screamin’ Nighthawk, mentioning the efforts of three collectors but featuring a picture of Hawk and George Hard alone in the Sunset Cafe. Subsequently he wrote a fanciful series of articles in the Village Voice on their rediscovery, a series which, for all of its romantic invention, in its articulateness, generosity, irony, and compassion showed a side that Hard had never evidenced in the flesh. Maybe, Jerry thought, that was the true Hard, a part of him anyway; you couldn’t pretend to be something you absolutely were not. But then within a year or so Hard put out an unauthorized collection of some tapes he must have made while they were in Yola, which included snatches of songs and more complete versions of Hawk cursing out Hard and threatening him with bodily harm if he didn’t put that damn machine away. The fidelity was horrible, there couldn’t have been a total of more than twenty minutes on the two sides, the sleeve was a blank white cardboard with a crude hand-stamped caricature on the cover, and Jerry, who was engaged in delicate negotiations with RCA at that point, got an injunction against him. The deal fell through anyway, probably because RCA couldn’t think of a way to market Hawk regardless of what else he might have out at the time. He wasn’t humble like Mississippi John Hurt nor falling apart with drink and age like Son House. He was just himself, just—Hawk. Jerry saw Hard in court, where Hartl sneered at him that he was glad to see that Jerry was still a friend to the workingman. Since then he had not seen him again. Thayer had published his scholarly treatise in the Journal of American Folklore a couple of years later, complete with footnotes and cross references and a catalog of all the records that were on the jukebox in the Sunset Cafe that day.

  Haiti’s departure left Jerry alone, still hanging around nearly three weeks after the discovery, unable to talk the object of their search into even agreeing to be found, unable to make up his own mind to leave, unable to make up his mind to stay. Mattie was out of the hospital and looked small and scared in the big brass bed, with Scooter grabbing onto her for dear life. She didn’t say anything, just stared at Jerry with big saucer eyes, as if he were some exotic white vision her husband had conjured into their lives. Which in a way was how Jerry was beginning to feel himself: conjured, bewitched, held against his will.

  “What you want to hang around here for?” Hawk demanded of him, as he moped around, seemingly dogging Hawk’s every step. “I be leaving soon. Peaches to be picked in Georgia, those folkses going to have money sure. What you gonna do? You wanna learn something about the road, you stick with me, boy. Ain’t nothin’ I can’t teach you, but ain’t nothin’ you going to learn. What you want with me for anyway? You don’t need no money, I can tell that. You ain’t got the connections to make nothing of it nohow. Now Mr. Melrose—Mr. Melrose, he had the connections, dressed in a great big old derby hat, wore them fancy spats, Mr. Melrose get hold of you, he had the connections to peel off a litde of that green, Jack, for hisself. I tell you the truth. You’re like the boy with the cherry. I don’t think you know what to do if I tell you yes. Why don’t you go on home, I’m doing fine just like I am. You tell the peoples that the Screamin’ Nighthawk passed, ain’t nobody down here who plays that old-style music no more. Just that rock ’n’ roll, like you hear them English boys playing on the radio. Let me just go on about my business, keep playing for my own people until they get too brainwashed to listen anymore.”

  In the end it was pride, or something like it, that got to him. Just as Jerry was prepared to leave, abandon the whole thing as a fruitless quest, and regard himself as something more of a laughingstock than he did already for being unable to persuade this old black man who had nothing that what he had to offer was any better, the article in Time came out, with its picture of Hawk and Hartl and an insert of Hawk some thirty years earlier. The headline read: “Legendary Blues Singer: Address Now Known,” the subhead a quote from “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues” set off in italics. The story led with a description of how the search for Hawk had taken on the status of the mythological quest for the Holy Grail among blues researchers over the years. Then it described the squalid conditions under which he lived today.

  “The
search for long-time blues legend the Screamin’ Night-hawk (real name: Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson) has led down many false paths. Most researchers were convinced that Night-hawk was dead, though the legend of his accomplishments persisted. Many bluesmen have been rediscovered in the past year and a half: Skip James, Son House, Sleepy John Estes, dimly remembered names from an almost forgotten past. None is of greater significance than the Screamin’ Nighthawk, who thirty years ago spawned a searing Mississippi blues tradition, making music that was pure and personal, with a bitter contempt for all of life’s injustices, in a voice which growled, moaned, shouted, screamed the blues.

  “It was just a line from a song that set blues buffs George Hartl, Jerry Lipschitz, and Ralph Thayer, all under thirty, all heavily committed to careers of their own, down Highway 61, a ribbon of highway that is legendary in blues lore. It was on a narrow dirt road just off 61 that they found the Screamin’ Night-hawk through a combination of sharp detective work, careful deduction, and ’just plain dumb luck,’ Hartl says frankly.

  “It was only when an obscure 45 (value: upward of $200) was spotted on a local jukebox that they actually knew they were on the right trail. ’We knew we had him then,’ said Hartl, a slight, earnest, soft-spoken young man whose dedication to the blues goes back to his schooldays when an older brother collected Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bix Beiderbecke records. Says Hard happily today: ’It would make a great detective novel!’ Certainly it has all the elements: a shadowy, elusive hero who for undisclosed reasons is forced to operate under a disguise, false leads, scattered clues, and cases of mistaken identity. In the end the path finally led to a small backwoods saloon, where a powerful middle-aged man eyed them suspiciously as they entered. ’Then he just seemed to give up the pretense altogether,’ says Hartl. ’ “I’m Hawk,” he said. “I hear you been looking for me.”’

  “The aftermath was a bit anticlimactic. At first, Hartl says, the old blues master couldn’t remember his own songs at all. ’He hadn’t played in I don’t know how many years, there just wasn’t anyone who wanted to listen.’ Undaunted, Hartl and his two compatriots produced a small portable tape recorder and tapes they had made up consisting of scratchy versions of most of the Screamin’ Nighthawk’s old songs. ’Aw, I didn’t think anyone was interested in that old stuff,’ said the bemused bluesman. The intrepid researchers persuaded him, however, that there were people who were interested, and the hesitant Hawk set about the painful business of relearning his own songs. Progress has been good to date, though understandably slow, and Hard reports that more than half a dozen record companies are in active competition for the tapes. No bookings are definite yet, but feelers have gone out from the Newport Folk Festival, and a European tour is a ’definite possibility.’ ’I’m a screamin’ nighthawk,’ proclaims this grizzled veteran of the blues, ’Don’t never leave no track/ I goes wherever I please/ And I may not be coming back.’ Now, thanks to three young blues buffs, not only has this Hawk been tracked down after thirty years of undeserved obscurity; it looks as if he’s going to be around for a while!”

  “What a piece of shit,” said Hawk after Jerry had finished reading it to him, going on after the first paragraph only with the greatest trepidation.

  The barber stropped the razor and tilted Hawk’s head back.

  “People really believe all that shit?”

  The barber raised his eyebrows. “People believe anything you tell ’em, man,” he said and quickly returned to his work.

  “That’s it. That’s it,” said Hawk. “All that bullshit, and I don’t see no money. I don’t hear nothing from none of these peoples. All I see is a magazine article. She-it!”

  He grabbed the magazine from Jerry and stared at the picture of him with Hartl, then ripped out the page with one clean motion and stuffed it in his pocket. “The story ain’t about me any how,” he said at last. “Whole thing’s about the other guy, how he track me down, how you all come after me like I’m some kind of wounded beast or something. She-it,” he said, as if pondering something that he had been thinking about for a long time. “I tell you something, I’m going to do it. Let ’em see the real thing for once in their life. None of this tracking shit. Let ’em see the Hawk hisself, large as life. You tell me you with me, boy, and I’ll do it. You handle all them offers that them people keep talking about. If they can pay, Hawk’ll play. You just bring the money. Then, goddammit, we in business, boy.”

  Jerry was completely floored. He had never meant to go any further than simply finding Hawk. What was supposed to happen next he had never really considered. He found himself pumping Hawk’s hand, though. And then shaking hands with the barber. He had never looked back.

  THEY WAITED OUTSIDE while the doctor examined him. Mattie looked worried but busied herself with the dishes, shoved the kids out, pestered Jerry until he accepted another cup of coffee, and then sat at the broken old table quietly wringing her hands. “I knowed he was sick,” she said in a soft voice, “but I never knowed he was sick like this.”

  “I’m sure he’ll be all right,” Jerry said, still shaken by the sight of Hawk, his face gray and drained of color, his hand helplessly shaking, his look almost quizzical, as if this could be none of his doing. “Has it been going on like this for long?”

  “Not so long. Only once or twicet. I can’t call the first time —oh yes, it was right after the boy’s last birthday. Roosevelt had just got back from California, I think, and I put it down to being tired from all that traveling. He been working a long time now, you know, Mr. Jerry.”

  Jerry nodded.

  “Ain’t nothing you can do about it, though, I guess,” Mattie concluded. “He ain’t never been one just to lie down and quit.”

  The doctor pushed the burlap curtain out of the way and stepped into the kitchen. He was a tall, light-skinned man with wavy hair combed out into an Afro. He wore a well-cut suit and vest out of which a gold watch chain protruded.

  “Your husband is a very sick man, Mrs. Jefferson,” said the doctor in clipped precise tones.

  Mattie fell back on her chair as if she had been struck. “Is he going to be all right, Dr. Bontemps?” she said.

  “Well, I’m afraid I don’t know the answer to that. He really ought to be in the hospital, where he could be looked after properly. He’s had a number of incidents now, and, while he’s comfortable enough at this stage, it’s hard to judge the extent of neurological damage. Until we can get him in the hospital and run some tests—”

  Mattie was wringing her hands. “You think we ought to get him in the hospital then, Doctor?” Jerry said, just to fill the silence.

  The doctor looked through him blankly. “Well, from what you say his antipathy toward hospitalization—a trait which, I might add, is not uncharacteristic of his ’generation— would not seem conducive to the establishment of good medical routine. Certainly he should be in the hospital, but it seems as if he would be fighting us every step of the way, and what he needs right now more than anything else is peace of mind. That plus the determination to follow certain prescribed medical routines with-out which all the hospital tests in the world aren’t going to do him any good. Do you understand what I’m saying, Mrs. Jefferson?” Mattie nodded automatically and looked at Jerry. “He must be put on a diet which will have to be strictly adhered to. No alcohol. No fried foods. Vastly lower the intake of salt. He must exercise regularly and take off, oh, I would say, about forty pounds. If he doesn’t follow the prescribed routine, he will simply keep having these attacks, no matter what the tests say, and the next one, or the one after that, could very well be the one that does the trick, that is, kills him.”

  Mattie gasped. Jerry glared at the doctor. He thought he was laying it on a little thick. Evidently the doctor must have thought so, too. “The reason that I say all this to you is to stress how very important it is to make Mr. Jefferson understand the absolute necessity to follow without deviation doctor’s orders.”

  Mattie was shaking her head, still not
crying. “He ain’t gonna follow nobody’s orders. He ain’t never followed anybody’s orders yet, and I just know he ain’t gonna start now.”

  “Well, you’re just going to have to help him then, Mattie,” said the doctor, patting her hand. “You’re just going to have to do the best you can.”

  They sat there, the three of them, staring off blankly into space, until at last the doctor cleared his throat and stood up. “Well, I’ve got to be going. I’m afraid there’s no other course for him for the present. Have him get plenty of rest, don’t let the kids disturb him, no whiskey, Mattie—you pour it down the drain before you let him have a drink of that rotgut. I’ve given him something to help him sleep, and I’ll be back to check on him first thing in the morning. But if anything comes up in the meantime, you give me a call, hear?” He touched Mattie’s shoulder. “Now don’t you worry. I’m sure he’ll be all right.”

  Mattie pulled her head up from the table. Her eyes were red. “It easy for you to talk,” she said. “What am I gonna do without Hawk?”

  Outside Jerry tried to pay the doctor. “I will send my bill at the end of the month.”

  “Well, send it to me,” Jerry said, handing him his card. “I want to take care of it. What do you think his chances are?”

  The doctor hesitated, one foot in his gleaming yellow Ca-maro, sitting incongruously on the muddy, tire-rutted lane. “Do you want my frank opinion?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “I’m afraid Mr. Jefferson’s chances are slim. There’s a pattern to this type of illness. Mr. Jefferson is in an advanced state of hypertension, he would seem to have a good number of other things wrong with him, he’s obviously suffered incidents like this before, and my guess is that he won’t follow one bit of the advice I gave to his wife.”

  Jerry nodded bleakly at the familiarity of it all. It was amazing, the fraternity of the medical profession—white or black, rich or poor, urban or rural, they all considered themselves somehow better than their patients, they all expressed an apparent contempt for those weak enough to become ill. “I remember when I was a boy,” the doctor interjected into Jerry’s thoughts, “hearing Mr. Jefferson sing. They used to call him the Screeching Night-hawk, I believe. My parents always warned us to stay away from him because he was from across the creek, he was always in some kind of trouble or other, and they said he always reeked of whiskey. My father was pastor of the New Bethel Church of the Morning Star, you see. But we children would sneak down sometimes to see him when he was playing at one of these big suppers out here in the country or at Barbour’s Big House, you know it was an old plantation hall, bare dirt floors, kerosene lamps, Lord it must have burned down twenty years ago, but I can still remember the good times the people had, barefooted and raggedy as they were—we used to boost each other up and take turns peeking through the open window or pile up old Coke cartons and listen until someone caught us. He used to be a very stirring singer, you know.”