Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Jerry almost fell out of his seat. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Hawk say more than one or two words between songs, and this kind of acknowledgment was wholly uncharacteristic. When he finished the song, Hawk leaned forward again. “You know, it’s quite a thrill and a honor for a country boy like me just off the farm to perform for a bunch of fine young ladies and gentlemens like yourselves. And if my speech is not so good, I hope you will kindly bear with me, because I never did have the benefit of a education like you kind peoples is lucky enough to get. Where I growed up you got your education behind a mule, and that’s all I knowed until my manager, Mr. Jerry Lip—schitz, discovered me and instructed me that there was people who was waiting to hear from me. And so I took him at his word, and that’s why I’m here in front of you all today, and I hope you will kindly accept my music in the spirit in which it is offered.”

  Jerry cringed. During intermission he took Hawk aside. “What are you doing?” he said in a fierce undertone.

  Hawk just played dumb. “Don’t know what you talking about.”

  “I mean all this country-boy shit. The overalls. All that talk about how you’ve never been off the farm. At this point you wouldn’t know the front end of a mule from its hindquarters. That’s what I’m talking about.”

  “Oh, that,” said Hawk innocently, still not looking Jerry in the eye but at the well-dressed boys and girls instead. “You know, man, I didn’t mean nothing—”

  “No? Well, I’ll tell you something,” said Jerry, surprising even himself, “if you ever do anything like this again, that’s it. I quit.”

  “No shit?” said Hawk, looking almost amused.

  But evidently he took Jerry seriously, because he did bounce back, he may not have liked it, he frequendy vented his spleen (he wouldn’t have been Hawk if he had grown all of a sudden meek), but it seemed as if they had come to an understanding. Not that Hawk be refined, just that he be himself.

  By the standards of the day Hawk was not particularly successful. He was on a par perhaps with Skip James, not as lovable as Mississippi John Hurt, not as intensely emotional as Son House. They all existed in an uneasy alliance, competing for the few openings there were for ancient bluesmen, these survivors of thirty years of historical neglect who had reemerged strangely to satisfy a new white audience that needed them. It was indeed ironic, Jerry reflected as he walked about the Newport Festival grounds with his performer’s badge giving him free passage, to see convicted murderers, long-haired folksingers, Irish dancers, and Scottish bagpipers all mingling under the apparent guise of shared art and good fellowship. The night before there had been a party at the Blues House at which everyone had gotten outrageously drunk, the old men and their younger followers, and Hawk had ended up with a red-headed girl from Sarah Lawrence. That he could actually have screwed her Jerry couldn’t imagine, but in the morning he was talking about “these white bitches with their milky skin and little no-account titties and slits ain’t deep enough to even dip your wick in.” Jerry tried to quiet him down and finally managed to get him out the door while the blues legends lay sprawled across cots and on the floor amid the clutter of bottles and debris from last night. With Hawk he walked around the festival grounds and told him about the proposed European tour.

  “I ain’t interested in no European countries,” Hawk said emphatically, maintaining so brisk a pace that Jerry had to trot to keep up. “Man, I just want to go home. I don’t want to hear no more of this racket. Just don’t dust me with no broom, man, cause I ain’t for it, you know what I’m talking about? All them broken-down old jitterbugs, can’t even see straight no more—I ain’t never heard so much caterwauling in my life before. I’ll tell you the truth, man, and they say the truth may hurt but personally I don’t give a shit, I’m sick and tired of you paddies.”

  Yes, yes, Jerry agreed, as they trotted along, past the deserted stages and concession stands, past the kids in sleeping bags and the few maintenance people who were up and about at this hour. Yes, sure, Jerry said, he understood, it was frustrating, it was humiliating, it was dumb. It was just that this was one chance in a million, the money was good, it might never come again. “You can bank it,” Jerry said, “for your kids. You can piss it away if you want—”

  “Oh man, you just like all the rest,” Hawk said with a shrewd appraising glance. “How come this thing’s so important to you?”

  Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know—”

  “You want to go to Europe so bad?”

  “It’s not for me—” Jerry started to say, but Hawk just snorted, and Jerry was hurt. It wasn’t for himself, it wasn’t a question of going to Europe, if it was a question of going to Europe he could afford it without even blinking, couldn’t he?

  But what would be the point, what was the point of going anywhere with no purpose in mind, with no goal? If he went over there with Hawk, he would be working toward something, he would be working toward a greater historical good, he would be doing something for somebody. Hawk was right. His motives were entirely selfish, Jerry realized, when Hawk said, “Well, all right, if it mean so much to you.” And despite himself Jerry had to admit he was disappointed that Hawk had given in.

  Then they heard it. Someone playing the piano, at first it sounded as if it were far away, then Jerry realized it was coming unamplified from the main stage, tentative at first with a rhythmic subtlety but a seeming inability to fully realize all of the player’s ideas, crude, out of practice, nothing exceptional, really. At first they could barely make out the voice, then it became less tentative, more distinct. The singer was a girl, the song she was singing was “Time and Again,” a smoky torch song with surprising dissonances and a bluesy feel.

  Time and again I get lonely

  Time and again I get hlue

  Time and again I start smiling

  Thinking of nothing hut you.

  Jerry glanced up at the distant figure. At her long blond hair whipping about in the morning breeze. He wanted to talk some more about Europe. But Hawk stood in his tracks seemingly transfixed. “That girl really saying something,” Hawk said in a quieter tone of voice than he would ordinarily have used. They made their way up the long aisle, between the rows of empty seats. Hawk sat down in the front row, arms folded across his chest. When the song was over he applauded, bringing his palms together with heavy deliberation. The girl looked up distracted. She was thin and very pale and kept tossing her long blond hair over her shoulder with a nervous flip. Jerry couldn’t stop staring at her. Even afterward he would have had to admit that it sounded ordinary to him, he missed whatever it was that Hawk heard, to him it was just a young girl trying to sound old and black on a song that turned out to be an original but original clearly based on Irma Thomas’s “Wish Someone Would Care,” which was itself a takeoff on an old New Orleans tradition. To Hawk none of these things mattered. “That was very nice,” Hawk said.

  “Thank you,” said the girl, coloring.

  Jerry closed his eyes, for he could imagine almost anything at this point, and the girl was so stunningly beautiful that he didn’t want to imagine anything at all. That was how they met Lori.

  “IT’S EMBARRASSING,” Lori said.

  “Why?” said Jerry, hoping to press a point by opposing it.

  “She thinks we’re still together.”

  “Well, we are in a way, aren’t we?”

  Lori looked at him. “Yeah, well, I mean, but not in the way that—oh, you know what I mean.”

  She gave him a peck on the cheek, and Jerry felt as miserable as he did every other day of his life when he was reminded of Lori, and Lori and him, and what he would have liked to be, and what he sometimes thought he could have been.

  “I suppose I could get a room in a motel.”

  “Oh, you don’t have to do that. I mean, it’s just so sweet of her. It’s as if she were trying to push us together, even though she knows—I mean, I’m sure she knows, in the back of her mind anyway, that it’s not like that for us.”
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  “Look, I can always sleep on the floor.”

  Lori tossed her hair back, catching it between her fingers and then letting it run out in a light shimmering stream. “Oh, look, Jerry, I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m upset. I just never thought it would be like this for Hawk, you know? I never thought he’d get old, get sick, is this the way it’s going to have to be—it’s just so unfair. I just always figured that if he went he’d just go, like that, not linger on and get weaker and weaker, be dependent on doctors—oh Christ, is that the way it’s going to be?”

  “I don’t know,” said Jerry. “The doctors say if he takes care of himself—”

  “Oh, that’s a lot of shit, and you know it.” A car approached, slowed down, and stopped to stare at this unlikely-looking couple. “Doctors … shit!”

  “Look, Lori, what I don’t understand, I mean why couldn’t it work? Not as some great thing, just for what it is. Maybe we should take this as a kind of sign, I don’t know, throwing us together—” He trailed off, hoping she would overlook the sense of what he was saying but be captured by its emotional undercurrent. If she could just feel sorry for him, he wouldn’t ask for anything more than that—

  “Oh, come on, please, Jerry. I don’t want to talk about it. Hawk is dying, and what you’re talking about—isn’t—anything.”

  “It’s got to be something, though—”

  “Look. We had something for a while. It wasn’t everything, but it was something. It isn’t there anymore. I wish for your sake that it were. You know that I love you. But I can’t live my life for you. Everything in your mind is totaled up in some way. It’s all ordered and neat. You think you’ve got me figured out. Or you think you love me, but you just want to fit me into a little slot. I’m not like that. I can’t figure out what’s coming, I don’t want to figure out what’s next. Maybe you could tell me, but I don’t want to know. I mean, maybe we’ll even sleep together tonight, but if we do, don’t make something of it other than what it is. It doesn’t mean anything, none of it means anything, except that on some level we care for each other very much.”

  “I wouldn’t think it meant anything,” Jerry lied.

  They had never gotten it right in the studio, Jerry thought. The music was never quite captured the way that Jerry heard it in his head or even the way he had heard it for the first time in the Sunset Cafe. On the records they made it was somehow inhibited, it didn’t jump out at you, there was something stiff and businesslike about the proceedings, although the reviews were uniformly respectful and even listening to the old recordings Jerry thought he could now hear the same premeditation, the same withholding of self that you rarely got in live performance. At first he was looking for a big contract and wouldn’t let Hawk record for any of the myriad of little collector labels that besieged them with requests. Hard put out the bootleg tape on his own Jamboree label, but he only had four complete cuts and wouldn’t have sold enough copies to matter even if Jerry hadn’t brought suit against him. For a long time Jerry thought they were going to sign with RCA while Robbie Fielding was still following them around. They opened up a month’s worth of gigs in New York City, and Fielding showed up at every one, a thin hyper kind of kid who always seemed to be up on dex or bennies or just plain manic energy. He made Hawk nervous, and Hawk hated nothing more than when he came up on the bandstand to play harp behind the old man. “He ain’t got no time,” Hawk argued, slamming his foot down on a bench in the little dressing room in the back of the club. “He always making the changes ahead of me, without he wait and see where I’m going. He make me look like some kind of asshole, man. Besides, he don’t never listen to what key I’m in.”

  Jerry nodded. “Look, just see if you can tolerate him until we get the contract signed. He’s the hottest new thing that RCA’s got going; he’s already recorded one of your songs, and he’s talking about a whole bunch more. If he’s behind you, it’ll mean better distribution, more sales, a bigger advertising campaign, promotional tie-ins, more money—”

  Hawk’s face broadened in a grin. “Well, right there you just said the magic word—”

  “So you think you can take him?”

  “Oh, I can take him all right. I may not like him, but I can find it in my heart to overlook that.”

  But it wasn’t long before even this new resolve was tested. Robbie Fielding was a pain in the neck, always pestering Hawk to teach him songs, always wanting Hawk to hear his latest. He wrote nearly a song a day, some explicit protest, some country, some blues (one, “The Ballad of Screamin’ Nighthawk,” subsequently unreleased until it was bootlegged in the ’70s, celebrated a hero who “didn’t take shit from no one/ He never said a mumbling word”), and he was always looking to play them for anyone who would listen and offer praise. “I don’t know nothing about that,” Hawk complained. “I don’t want to hear none of that folderol. He always be after me to work out some new kind of song. He want to know what songs I gonna put on the album. I ain’t gonna play that stuff for no one. I had too much of that stuff stolen from me in my lifetime. I keeps it locked up now, right here in my heart.”

  Jerry didn’t believe him. He doubted that Hawk had any new material at all, but he knew Hawk’s rules: no play without pay; and never, under any circumstances, whatever the temptation, tip your hand.

  Then he kicked Robbie off the bandstand one night. The kids, who were now turning out in the expectation that Robbie Fielding might show, went crazy as they always did when Robbie made his way in little shambling steps up to the tiny stage. He tuned his guitar to Hawk’s, fished out a harp and put it in his rack. They had scarcely gone eight bars into the song when Hawk abruptly stopped, leaving Robbie stranded in the middle of a guitar strum, his harmonica wheezing along in that asthmatic way that was peculiarly his own. Hawk glared at him until he finally came to a halt, then announced, “That’s it,” in his low rumbling voice. “I don’t want to hear no more.”

  Robbie just stared at him. It was about the time his second album came out and the reviews had acclaimed him as the new Bob Dylan. After what seemed like an hour, but was really only a few shocked seconds, he shrugged and stumbled off stage, continued on out the door and never came back.

  “Good,” said Hawk. “If he come back before eternity, it’ll be too soon.”

  But it cost them. It cost them plenty. First the RCA contract negotiations broke off just a few days later. Then, too, it closed off their entree to a great many clubs and concerts, because Hawk got the reputation of being a “difficult” performer, as the Robbie Fielding story followed him every where. Why? Jerry kept asking himself. Why couldn’t Hawk have held off a few more days, a few more weeks? But, of course, then that wouldn’t have been Hawk.

  After that Jerry held out for a while, but eventually he signed a nonexclusive one-time recording contract with one of the smaller companies. Then when Hawk was out in California on his own, he recorded another album without Jerry’s knowledge for which he got a flat fee of $300. A college radio station recorded one of his concerts, and despite absolute promises to Jerry, somehow the end result found its way on to record. In Europe he recorded in both England and Denmark for small cash advances and negligible royalty arrangements. Soon there was a glut of Screamin’ Nighthawk albums out on the market, none of them very outstanding, none particularly successful, distinguished from each other principally by the different titles assigned to familiar songs, not one capturing the sound that Jerry had carried in his head since first hearing Hawk in Yola, Mississippi.

  If it hadn’t been for Lori’s unexpected success, in fact, Jerry doubted that Hawk would have been able to continue in the business at all. There just was not enough of a market for a cantankerous old man who couldn’t decide whether to contemptuously kiss the hand that fed him or spit in his public’s eye. Lori changed all that, although when they first met her no prospect could have seemed less likely. Jerry in fact had never thought that he would see her again. She was, she had told them shyly, from far-off Califo
rnia, had studied piano as a child for the requisite number of years, played a little guitar, knew every record that Hawk had ever made, and surprised Jerry when she called him to propose a concert at Mills College, where she was president of the newly formed Blues Society. When they finally went out there in the spring, there was scarcely anyone in attendance, and Lori looked as if she was on the brink of tears, apologizing to them over and over again, introducing Hawk to the thirty or forty girls in the room, few even with dates, in a tremulous voice that upbraided the cultural indifference of the community. Hawk shuffled up to the stage and patted her hand, then crashed out the first notes as if it didn’t matter in the slightest whether he was playing for six or six hundred, this was one concert he was playing because he wanted to.