Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “He still is,” said Jerry, more fiercely than he really meant.

  The doctor lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, I’m sure he is. I didn’t mean—it’s just that I haven’t heard him—oh, it must be at least fifteen or twenty years ago, when I went away to college, and when I came back, you know, the dance hall had burned down and things were different.”

  Jerry watched him back out on to the paved road and waved weakly.

  Inside Hawk lay in the darkened room. He could hear the sounds outside, children playing, a car driving off, the muffled sound of voices, Mattie’s tears.

  DAMN DOCTOR turn out the light. Don’t that boy understand nothing? I told him, leave the damn light on, I want to see exactly what is going on. Don’t understand all this damn foolishness. Why don’t they send in the boy, like I asked? They know I wants to see the boy, let him show me what he done on that box of his. Shucks, don’t seem so long since I was his age, just playing my diddley-bow upside the wall, trying to get all the little girls to listen. Didn’t have no git-tar then. Sneak off every chance I get with my uncle’s git-tar, he made it himself, him and Mose. Man, they used to make the damnedest git-tars back in those days. Made one out of a phonograph one time, took the wood off an old record player, frets made out of baling wire—shoot, where is that boy? Wants me to hear him do that little song we was gone work up together. That boy all right, he gonna be all right, make suthin of himself, not like his daddy. He gonna have some of the advantages, but he still all right. The other boy all right, too. Course he can’t play no music. He just a promoter, make money off other people’s music. Which is all right, too. Don’t matter how you get by, so long as they’s some-one’ll buy what you’re selling. Now he ain’t nothing like that slick, the first one come to bring me up to Chicago for the Paramount Record Company. I remember Barbour promised to make me a star, said he was gonna call Chicago and get this man to come down. Course we all thought he was just woofing, but that man come down all right. Show up at the old Majestic The-ater, where they have the Saturday-morning talent contests. Come in from playing all night at a barbecue or a fish fry or some juke way out in the country, go right to the Alamo without even going to sleep or anything. Of all the acts that went on that day, I was the only one Barbour come through for. Later on the others all told me Barbour promised them the exact same thing, but I was the only one passed the audition. That man really was smooth; I call him a jitterbug, but that too good for him. He bring me up to Chicago all right, and when we all done he give me twenty-five dollars and a train ticket. Go home, boy, he say. I let you know when I need you. Before I seed that twenty-five dollars, I ain’t seen nothing or heard talk of nothing either. Slept under the El at night, rode the buses all day long, just trying to pick up a little spare change by playing my box. Couldn’t get no other work, because old Big Bill and all them other old jealous-hearted blues singers had the town sewed up tighter’n a twelve-year-old’s snatch. Would’ve been all right if I’d had my boy with me, either one of them, just someone to look out after my own interests. But I was young then, kind of wild, I didn’t think nothing about tomorrow, far as I was concerned the sun done rose for the last time this morning, and I’s going to have a natural ball. And I did. I did. Just a country boy trying to act slick, them jitterbugs had my twenty-five dollars and my train ticket before I even got down to the station. So coming back I had to ride the rods with nothing in my pockets, just like always. …

  IV

  HIGH JOHN THE CONQUEROO

  LORI SHOWED UP that same afternoon without announcement. She got out of the old sway-backed taxi she had ridden all the way from Jackson. Her long blond hair streamed out behind her, she wore a short-sleeve knitted shirt and a pair of dirty white slacks. Jerry hurried out to meet her, feeling that old familiar ache. What she had been doing, whom she had been seeing, why she had been off the road so long, he deliberately declined to know. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and looked him in the eye with that same clear, frank look that always brought him back to the fact that nothing had changed, no matter how much he might have liked it to. Not about his own feelings. Not about her. He wished he could have dismissed her as just another talented kook. Maybe that was all she was, with her constant flirtation with risk and vulnerability, her seeming contempt for her own success. If that was all, though, he could never see it that way. “How’s Hawk?” she said.

  Jerry shook his head helplessly and tried to tell her. Up till now he had been in control the whole time, but in Lori’s presence he almost broke down once or twice and there were long charitably overlooked pauses in his speech.

  “But isn’t there something we can do?” Lori said at last. “Surely there must be specialists—”

  Jerry shrugged. “What are you going to do? Strap him down and fly him to Boston? Hawk’d just turn around when we got to the hospital and say, ’That boy there is kidnapping me. Ain’t never seen him befo’ in my life. Whuffo you white folks want with me?’ “ Lori laughed. “The doctor says if he’ll just follow instructions he’ll probably do okay. He left an anticoagulant that’s supposed to do for a start. He ought to be in the hospital probably, but what good’s that gonna do if it just gets him all agitated? Besides, who knows what kind of a hospital they’ve got down here? I don’t know if I’m worried so much about the way they’d treat him as the way he’d act toward them. I think I’d rather see him take his chances at home.”

  “Let me talk to him?”

  “Sure. Of course. He’s out right now. I don’t know how good shape he’s in to talk. He wasn’t able to—”

  “No, I mean, he’s always listened to me. You know he has.”

  Jerry nodded. She was right. He always had.

  Inside she immediately made herself useful. She first embraced Mattie, who for her part seemed genuinely glad to see her. “Don’t know how long it’s been since we seed you and Mr. Jerry together. Did you see how the children growed?” Then she took Lori out behind the house to see the children and the pig they were raising for slaughter and the chicken pen that Martin had built. Then she and Lori rolled up their sleeves and went to work, busying themselves with a seemingly endless assortment of domestic procedures, rearranging sleeping quarters, dusting and mopping, and cooking what looked like enough food, Jerry thought, for a two-week siege. He sat at the kitchen table listening to the hum of the old refrigerator, glancing at a week-old paper that had been used to wrap up some fish, watching the two women, warm, animated, unselfconscious, at ease with themselves, as if he were no longer in their presence.

  The first concert they had played was at Harvard, and right there Jerry should have known there was something wrong, something irretrievably anomalous about the whole situation. They played at Eliot House Commons, a basement room with a stately grand piano and ornate, ponderous furniture that looked as if it had come with the king’s grant. All of this had been moved to one end of the long room, and folding chairs and a makeshift stage had been set up by nervous members of the Folklore Society who had arranged for the concert. It was late November, and Hawk hadn’t thought to bring an overcoat. He wore a somber black suit and tie loosely knotted at the neck. The top of his shirt was missing two buttons, and his seamed black face was expressionless and calm.

  The room was packed. Although they had not had a chance to advertise the concert, news of it had spread through the classrooms and houses, and a few posters around the Square had announced that the Screamin’ Nighthawk, a blues legend previously thought to be dead for many years, was actually alive, well, and performing at Eliot House.

  The audience was hushed and anticipatory as Jerry nervously clumped up to the stage, nearly tripping on the small step and feeling uncomfortably that every eye was on him. He went on too long—overly flowery and overly technical—trying to place Hawk in a historical context, trying to make these kids understand, he thought at the time, just who Hawk was, who he had been. They were remarkably polite, gratifyingly attentive, as was Hawk, who sat patiendy through it
all with seats empty on either side of him, his leg jiggling ever so slightly. Then at last Jerry emerged from the thicket of credits (to Mose, to Hard and Thayer, to Hawk and the concert organizers), and Hawk heavily mounted the stage, cradling his battered guitar. He sat down, fumbled in his pocket, fiddled with the cord, and then leaned over and plugged in the little Sears, Roebuck amplifier which had been sitting unobtrusively on the stage unnoticed by all or, if it was noted, discounted as a useless prop (or thought to be left over from some rock ’n’ roll rehearsal perhaps). As he plugged in, the buzz from the amplifier was nothing compared to the murmur of shock and disbelief from the crowd. Hawk fiddled with the dials for a couple of minutes, and both hums only grew louder.

  “Oh, dammit,” said the boy beside Jerry, “we’re too late.”

  “What do you mean?” said his companion, a long-haired Radcliffe student in purple tights. “The concert hasn’t even started yet.”

  “I don’t even know if I want to stay,” said the boy, obviously distraught. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s amplified his guitar.”

  The combination of the amp buzzing and Hawk tuning up was deafening. A piercing whistle fed back from the mike. “Good evening, everybody,” said Hawk and without further preamble launched into “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues,” the ringing notes instandy identifiable, the stomping feet inviting an audience to respond with energy of its own. This audience was transfixed; silence hung over the room until at the conclusion of the song it exploded with applause. Hawk glared out balefully at the young white boys and girls, stomped his heavy-booted feet, and launched into one song after another, seemingly challenging the audience to come up with another kind of response. But the angrier he got the more respectful was the silence that greeted his efforts. There was no badinage, there were no pauses for breath, there was no ingratiating small talk, just the music itself going out in Hawk’s booming voice without preface or apology. Finally, after about an hour and a half, Jerry gave a signal which Hawk either did not see or chose to ignore. So Jerry was forced to jump up on stage himself in the middle of a number and commandeer the mike at the end of the song to announce an intermission. In between sets the students all gathered around a punch bowl and Jerry went to talk to the boy who had organized the concert, leaving Hawk on stage stiff and proud, cradling his guitar, the intermittent hum of the amplifier providing inconspicuous response to all the conversation and social chatter in the room. When Jerry came back, an earnest-looking boy in horn-rimmed glasses was sitting next to Hawk, a pad of paper in his hand, pencil poised. “Do you ever do any protest songs, Mr. Jefferson?”

  Hawk shook his head.

  “Well, wouldn’t you say the blues are the original protest songs in a way? As I understand it, they provided a kind of code language that enabled Negroes to speak to each other about the conditions under which they lived, without the white man really knowing just what they were saying—”

  Hawk mumbled something.

  “What? Excuse me. I don’t understand.”

  “Back in slavery times,” said Hawk, “there was a whole different kind of junk. Spirituals and such. ’I gonna be free from this burdensome world some old day.’ All that kind of racket. Blues just tells the truth, don’t do nothing more than that, you know.”

  “Yes, yes, I see, but blues goes back to slavery times—”

  Hawk shook his head vehemently.

  “Surely the work songs—when did blues first come into being then?”

  ” 1904,” said Hawk.

  ” 1904?”

  Jerry felt sorry for the boy.

  “Did you ever write any protest songs yourself? You know, like Leadbelly or Big Bill? ’Bourgeois Blues’—that kind of thing?”

  “Yeah, Leadbelly,” said Hawk, eyes lighting up. “I met that gal-boy down in Angola, wouldn’t let that motherfucker near me. Course I ain’t saying what I was doing down there, but they had him in for some bad shit, man. Everybody knowed the white man bought his freedom, just to get hold of the rights to his songs. Leadbelly told me so hisself. Except they never were his songs anyways. Got ’em off a cat name Shorty George—you know that song he used to sing, yeah. Well, ain’t that the way it always is, though? They pay you just exactly what they think you gonna take—”

  The boy was obviously shaken. “Well, how about the war? It seems as if Vietnam has become a symbol to many black people—”

  “Yeah, I think we ought to bomb the shit out of them motherfuckers,” said Hawk pleasantly. “Well, I better get back to work, my manager over here say I better start earning some of that money you nice white boys and girls is paying.”

  The second half of the concert was the same as the first, only longer. The amplifier buzzed louder than ever, and Hawk fiddled with it some but wasn’t able to fix it. A few of the audience, evidently emboldened by Hawk’s scrofulousness, started shouting out encouragement (“Play it a long time!” “Put it in the alley!”), which only encouraged others to shush them indig-nandy. In this atmosphere of warring expectations, Jerry became uncomfortably aware, people were starting to leave, discreet, on tiptoe, but leaving nonetheless. Hawk just seemed to play louder, more intensely, his eyes following the departing students, his voice booming in the silent hall, seemingly calling out after them. He went through some more of his repertoire, introducing standards like “Shake ’Em On Down” or “Bluebird” with a note that “I remember Sonny Boy when he first cut this tune” or “This one was Tommy’s best,” mosdy in open tuning, sometimes with a slide, sometimes without, performing with a single-minded ferocity. Then without warning Hawk started talking in his rumbling raspy voice. “I want to dedicate this next song to the late President Kennedy. He was a friend to all the people, black and white, he even helped the Chinese.

  “Ohhh, ohhh”—Hawk launched into yet another familiar-sounding melody in the key of D. “President Kennedy dead and gone/ Gone away and left me here to sing this song.

  Well, President Kennedy, he work for the young, he work for the old Peoples,

  we just can’t let his dream go cold

  Well-uh, President Kennedy dead and gone Ain’t nothing for it, just gotta sing this song.

  Well, President Kennedy, he loved throughout the land

  Eeh-hyah, he loved through all the land

  Well, they taken him away, hoy, ain’t nobody raisin’ sand.

  Ooh-ooh, President Kennedy

  Oh yeah, President Kennedy

  Well, his whole life, he just work to set mankind free.

  The room was silent for the longest time, then reverberated with applause. They cheered and cheered, and Hawk was induced to sing one more verse. At the end everyone in the room was on his feet wildly applauding, and the next day the Crimson had a piece on Hawk’s triumphant debut, particularly noting the continued topicality of the blues.

  In the car on the way back to Jerry’s apartment on Walden Street in North Cambridge, Jerry remarked on how moved he had been. “I didn’t know you wrote anything like that,” he said.

  Hawk stared straight ahead. “She-it,” he said, “what did that sucker ever do for me? I just take the Roosevelt thing I cut back in ’46, put another name to it. Mr. Melrose practically beg me to cut that record, say it gonna sell a million. Well, maybe it did, but they ain’t paid me two cents for it yet.”

  From there they played Cornell, Gerde’s Folk City, an almost empty Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hunter College, Club 47, and any number of other colleges and small rooms. It wasn’t long before the novelty had worn off, and even Jerry grew tired of the uncritical adulation, the almost mindless credulity which greeted them everywhere they went. Hawk stayed the same. He scowled in the same bleak way at all the dumb questions endlessly repeated; he kept on-stage talk to a bare minimum; he just kept playing his music with the same uncompromising sternness, the same relentless fury. And yet something seemed to have changed, there was a subtle shift of attitude, and Jerry sensed that Hawk was growing somehow dispirited in an indefinable s
ort of way. For Jerry it was still flattering to be asked his opinion on every blues issue of the day, to be rewarded with the favors of pretty girls who suddenly found him charming, however false the pretenses. Hawk scarcely even spoke to him, though. He sat in silence the whole way down to a concert, arms folded across his chest, as the radio played Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. He had no interest in discussing the show on the ride back. It was culture shock, Jerry supposed. It was only to be expected.

  But then Hawk, too, began to change. First he discarded the suit, wearing the black jacket and tie, then the jacket alone, finally shirtsleeves and baggy brown pants. Then he began to paw at every woman who came near him and make crude jokes at those who kept their distance. At first Jerry thought he was just loosening up, seeking some appropriate way of showing that he, too, wanted to join the festivities. Then gradually he realized that there was an element of both contempt and self-contempt in Hawk’s posturing. Finally it all came to a head when Hawk showed up for a concert at Yale wearing faded overalls and an old straw hat. Jerry tried to persuade him that nothing was to be gained by this unseemly charade, but Hawk refused even to speak about it. At the concert Jerry noted that his demeanor, too, was somehow changed. He didn’t seem so commanding; perhaps, Jerry thought, he was no longer so intimidated because he was more used to Hawk. When they met their hosts, though, Hawk seemed to shrink into himself rather than puff up with indignation and pride. When they encountered the eager interviewer, whose questions they had both heard a thousand times by now, Hawk responded not with his characteristic impatience but was instead relatively meek—for Hawk—slandering only one other blues singer in the course of the conversation and not bothering to correct even the boy’s most obvious misconceptions about the blues singer and the blues. Jerry made the standard introduction, laying it on if anything a little thicker than usual, and Hawk started off with the obligatory “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues.” This time it was different, though. Even as he strummed the opening chords, Hawk leaned forward and murmured into the microphone, “I want to thank all you nice kind people for coming out here tonight. I only hope I can do something to merit your appreciation and deserve your applause.”