Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “Well, that’s good,” Hawk said. “I’m glad somebody doing something. All them doctors getting at me, telling me I can’t do nothing, gotta take it easy, rest—”

  Lori’s eyes lit up impishly. “Yeah, well, you better get some rest if you gonna do all these things you been boasting about. People keep telling me how this dirty old man keeps promising to fix my business for me, but don’t look like you ready to fix nobody’s business just yet.”

  Hawk laughed loudly. “Lookahere, gal, you just crawl in betwixt these sheets, and you see if I can’t still be doing it. Only thing is, you’re gonna have to control yourself, cause Mattie ain’t gonna stand for no screaming or crying—”

  Out in the kitchen they could hear Mattie’s voice. Lori smiled, came closer to Hawk, flung her arms around him, and received his hug in return. “You’re gonna be all right, Hawk,” she said. “I know you are. Ain’t anything can keep a tough old buzzard like you down—you’re too mean to die.”

  Hawk shook his head solemnly. “Ain’t nobody too mean to die. But I ain’t prepared just yet. Hey, Mattie fixing me something to eat?”

  Lori grinned. “Mattie’s always fixing you something to eat-even when you ain’t got no appetite. I think you just like to boss her around sometimes, just to make sure she’s still gonna jump. What you gonna do when she says to fix your own self something to eat?”

  Hawk shrugged. “By then I guess I be too old for the orphans’ home.”

  “How are you, really, though? Do you feel all right?”

  “Oh, I don’t know, I’ve felt better-”

  I guess.

  “But then I felt worse, too. Can’t rightly recall when. Maybe the time I drunk that poison whiskey. Let me tell you something, don’t never fool around with no bootlegger’s wife. I didn’t think he knowed nothing about it. It was the perfect setup, too. Him off in the woods all the time, making corn. Annie Mae just so fat and contented with her backdoor man—that’s me. Sam coming home all wore out and not having to be pestered by no hungry wife—you know what I’m talking about. Only thing I didn’t figure on was nosy neighbors and just generally jealous-hearted people. That and the poison whiskey. I thought that sucker was my friend. To your health, he says, and I drinks it down. I just about didn’t have no more health after that—I never did feel so twisted up inside. But I tell you the truth, my records would’ve been worth a sight more money if that whiskey had rubbed me out. Just like that boy, that Johnson boy, shoot, if he lived as long as I did, he’d be scuffling, too. Some day, I’m gonna tell some white kid, Yeah, I knowed Robert Johnson. Matter of fact, I seen him just the other day. That kid’s eyes gonna poke out like he was a goggle-eyed perch. Course he ain’t gonna believe me at first, but the suspicion gonna sneak up on him, this nigger just might know. So he’s gonna say, cool and cautious-like, What? Where? Wha-wha-when? And I’m gonna stand there just as sure as I’m born and tell him, I seen Robert just last year, he joined the church, Holiness church, he ain’t touched his git-tar in years, and he’s working as a bartender in Milwaukee.” Hawk started to chuckle. “That’d really get ’em, wouldn’t it?”

  Lori laughed. She laughed so hard the tears came into her eyes. She wondered if it was that funny or if she wasn’t just looking for some excuse, if she wasn’t overreacting. “Oh, you’re such a lot of talk,” she said. “You know I’m going to put out a book that says the Screamin’ Nighthawk behaved like a perfect gentleman at all times, he was true to his music, he was true to his wife—”

  “Don’t you do it, girl. You gonna put me out of business.” “I hear the doctor thinks you should be in the hospital,” Lori said. “He says you should be some place where they can take proper care of you—”

  “I ain’t going to no hospital. Them doctors all doing their best to Jcil J me. I already excaped from one of them places, ain’t going back no more. If I’m gonna die, let me die at home, in my own bed, with my own people.”

  “How come you’re giving Jerry such a hard time?”

  Hawk put on a pained expression. “Aw, I ain’t never done nothing to cause him grief. That boy always complaining about someone mistreating him; ain’t no one mistreated him more than he has mistreated hisself.” When he saw that this wasn’t working, he tried another tack. “I know he mean well, but you tell that boy to stop jawing at me. You know, if he’d just leave me be, wouldn’t be no problem. Oncet he knowed I was coming home, what’s he gonna stay on my tail for all the time like he did, why not just let me be? I taken care of myself for seventy-eight years, I imagine I can do all right on my own by now.”

  “He was just worried about you.”

  “Well, I know that. He always worried about me or you or some damned body. He be better off if he worry about hisself.”

  Lori couldn’t help smiling.

  “Well, it’s true. You know just as well as I do that it’s the God’s honest truth. It’s not that that boy don’t care about hisself all of the time. It’s just that he don’t never speak up, just look at you with them big sad eyes, like how come you treating him like this and him just begging for more all the time.”

  Lori laughed. “Well, you certainly hit the nail on the head, didn’t you? Ah, shit, how come you know so much and you still so dumb?”

  “My mama,” said Hawk with a proud grin, “didn’t raise no dumb babies.”

  “I wish I could’ve met your mama.”

  “Yeah,” said Hawk reflectively. “You would have liked her. She was a little hitty thing, come up no higher than your shoulder, I outgrowed her when I was eleven years old. Didn’t never talk much, never told me what to do and what not to do, said, what’s the sense of that, you gonna do it anyway? So she told me what to do after I done what I wasn’t supposed to do. It was just after slavery time when she was borned, and she never got off the plantation, but everybody liked her, didn’t matter if they was white or black, everybody had a kind word to say about Miz Jefferson, Auntie Ruth. She lived to be ninety-three years old, you know, a old old woman, died just about when I met the boy—well, hell, you knowed that. Never did nothing big, never went no further than Memphis—and that was only oncet, to see Roseamanda married—but she never quit neither, never just curl up and die, used to go around with a fruit basket, little special things she cooked for the old ladies. By the time she passed, she was fifteen, twenty-five years older than some of them old ladies she was visitin’. Some folks got the spirit of life inside ’em, and she was one. Whenever I come home she was always there, and that what I be thinking of still when I come over that hill, that little rise, you know, where you can see the creek and the hollow, thinking about how she loved to hear me sing my songs. You see, she didn’t never give up, not even when she was crippled and bent over with the arthritis, she still work up there in the white folks’ house, they like to treat her like a doggone queen. They respect her, see, cause she respect herself, thass what I’m talking about. Long as I’m suckin’ in air, I’m gonna be the Screamin’ Nighthawk. Can’t be the Screamin’ Nighthawk no more, might as well hang it up, you know what I’m talking about, gal?”

  Lori nodded, as Hawk came out of his reverie.

  “Trash, that’s what I’m talking.”

  The bottom dropped out of the blues market. For a few years it had actually paid off, and Hawk could make a living off the coffeehouses, European tours, SNCC benefits, Vietnam teach-ins, and college concerts. His records for Cascade sold no more than an average of a couple of thousand copies apiece, but they garnered good reviews and opened the door to more and better bookings. Hawk bought a new car (a ’61 Chevy) and a color TV. It was a comfortable enough living.

  Then one by one they dropped out of sight, decimated by death, illness, personal problems, or a combination of all three. Skip James, Son House, Mississippi John Hurt, Bukka White-all of whose discoveries were heralded with such self-righteous fanfare—were one by one forgotten as their audience grew bored with Use majeste. But Hawk wouldn’t go away. He was too real, too ugly, he s
aid, too demanding to be taken up by a small coterie, too self-contained to be cast aside. He was angry when Cascade didn’t pick up his option. He called up Sid, somehow got through to him, and cursed him out in no uncertain terms. Then he started calling around the country to all the little labels whose numbers he had accumulated in the course of his recent travels, shouting into the mouthpiece with that staccato, rapid-fire delivery that left everyone baffled as to what he was saying. Finally Jerry negotiated a deal with Pharaoh, a little label in St. Louis that specialized in blues records. He kept going for the next few years with a myriad of small-label deals—he would spend no more than a couple of hours on the record itself, offering new titles but familiar tunes recycled for each session—plus the few bookings Jerry could get for him, blues festivals, and the rare occasion when he might consent to open for Lori and pick up a couple of thousand bucks.

  He survived. He survived, Jerry realized, just as he had been surviving in the world Jerry had been so intent on rescuing him from, only now he was no longer suited to that world either. It didn’t really matter anyway. Whether it was Sweden or the Florida Panhandle, always he headed back for Yola, always he headed down to the barbershop or to the Sunset Cafe, always you could spot him swaying, almost lurching down the street, weighted to one side by the big battered guitar whose equally battered case was covered with stickers from all the places that Hawk had been. There were the same old men sitting around, chewing tobacco, eager for the latest word, playing dominoes and pitty-pat. There was always an old man in a Stetson slowly rocking along on his mule. There was always an old lady dozing drowsily on a porch. There was always Hawk, dominating the conversation, spinning out his monologues, sitting back, hands folded across his stomach, and lecturing his audience as if they were schoolchildren listening attentively to fairy tales. “Them European countries is different, man,” he would sometimes begin. “Don’t know nothing about color, they treat you like royalty over there. I mean, they really appreciates the blues, got them little white boys come running around, say, Mr. Hawk, Mr. Hawk, can you teach me what the blues is all about? She-it.” His audience all laughed. “Next time, I telled ’em, I’m gonna take y’all over there with me, so they can see what some real niggers look like, see if they can appreciate some gen-u-ine funk—”

  Jerry never knew if they really believed him. Hawk showed them the clippings. He showed them the homburg he had bought in London, and of course they knew he had been away. But he had always been going away, and if he came back with a homburg for all they knew that was what people were wearing in Oklahoma City this year. Once a BBC crew came down to film Hawk for a British documentary. It seemed as if everyone in town turned up for the filming out at Hawk’s house, as the director and his assistant and cameraman all were transfixed by the mass of black faces peering up at Hawk on his front porch. “This here’s my house, and my wife, and my kids,” he said, introducing them one by one. “Them people over there is my neighbors, who is a bunch of no-account niggers who ain’t had nothing to do with me since the day I moved in, cause they too high-class and got their nose up their ass.” There was a murmuring in the crowd, and some of them started to go home. “These here, they my friends from the Sunset Cafe.”

  The television crew followed him down to the barbershop and the Sunset Cafe and out into the country, where they surveyed the charred remains of Paul Barbour’s juke joint, the Big House. “Used to be some fine times out here,” said Hawk. “Me and Elmo and Muddy Waters used to play all night sometimes, people would come from five counties when they knowed someone big like us was going to be playing. White folks burned it down. Don’t really know why, but I reckon Mr. Barbour just wasn’t paying his taxes or something—he was mixed up in a whole heap of things, Barbour was.”

  Jerry followed the crew all around town, embarrassed by the director’s unabashed appreciation of even the most prosaic sights. “Beautiful,” he said as he saw an old lady who looked as if she had never set foot in town hike up her dress in drunken glee as Hawk rocked the joint at the Sunset Cafe. People were shouting and laughing and screaming, just as they always did; it was in fact just as it had always been, awkward, unforced, with no one but Jerry aware of, or concerned with, this intrusive presence, the camera, which somehow made everything seem so different, while nothing that you could put your finger on actually had changed.

  “It’s marvelous, just like Wales,” said the director, sighting Hawk through the viewfinder. “I’ve never seen such poverty before. That’s right, that’s right,” he said, as a big fat woman thrust her belly jovially in front of Hawk’s face. “They really can’t help being themselves, can they? I believe you’ve got a national treasure in Hawk. It’s just marvelous that we’re able to capture him in his native surroundings like this.”

  Jerry made the requisite sounds of agreement and worried that he had somehow betrayed a trust.

  V

  THE SCREAMIN’ NIGHTHAWK: LAST OF THE LEGENDARY BLUESMEN

  AN INTRODUCTORY NOTE

  Why a biography of yet another blues singer (Jerry had written)? This is a question I ask myself as we see the proliferation of literature on a music that is basically unconcerned with the test of literacy, that started out in fact as a substitute for formal communication. For blues originated in the fields, a kind of shorthand communication among fieldworkers who to begin with had neither a language nor a musical instrument other than the one they brought from Africa (the skin is the drum—look up Zora Neale Hurston”) in their enslaved state. The first blues can truly be said to have been hatched when the first slave, perhaps to lessen his almost unblankable burden (shit!), perhaps to reaffirm that he was not alone, called out to another in song, “Well, the work, it sure go hard,” and his friend answered back, “Sure beats working in the boss man’s yard.” (Something like that? Check Odum and Johnson. Is this total bullshit?) It was the true birth of the blues.

  Why another book on this subject, though? Why more words on what is essentially an emotive offering, one which demands not a sociological but a soulful response? Well, it is precisely for that reason that I want to avoid most of the conventions (strictures?) of this form. Over the last few years I have had the rare opportunity to be associated with one of the great blues legends, a man I think I can call my friend. We have lived together, worked together, traveled together, cursed each other out, and fallen into each other’s arms (figuratively speaking? God, what hullshii) when we got the news that Hawk had won the 1969 downbeat award for his historic double album A Man And His Roots. We’ve had good times and we’ve had bad times together. I’ve witnessed Hawk paying his dues, playing the little clubs and back-country juke joints where his appreciative audience has numbered no more than twenty or thirty day laborers. We’ve been through a lot together. I’ve even seen Hawk recognized in his own home town (how many times does a prophet live to enjoy that kind of acclaim?), as December 27, 1972, was declared Screamin’ Nighthawk Day in the drowsy little town of Yola, Mississippi, and the mayor presented this last of the itinerant blues singers with a key to the city in which he had grown up and lived most of his long life. (How could he have lived there if he was traveling all the time? Re-phrase.) It’s been a long journey for Hawk, from a backwoods cabin to the modest home he has been able to build in the last few years on the basis of royalties and concert fees; from the rough, no-holds-barred world in which he grew up to the polite applause of the college campus. I think that’s why it occurred to me, as it occurred to Hawk, too, as more and more of this world is dying off—not only the men and women who remember it, but the world itself, disrupted by interstates and television and all the creature comforts of twentieth-century progress—it occurred to us that the true story of this world has never been told. The brutal day-to-day existence which the blues singer of necessity has always led, the almost existential acceptance of the vicissitudes brought on by fate and character (oh shit, merde, Meurseult, God, more fucking existentialism). . . In short, my aim in these pages is to do so
mething no one else has done, to communicate the plain unvarnished truth about the blues singer’s life simply in terms of one individual. This is oral history, and you must remember it is all dependent on the memory of one man, now past seventy. An effort has been made to check facts and provide documentation, but, as in so many memoirs of this sort, you run up against the impenetrable wall of conflicting memories, vaguely recollected scenes (due to either real or selective memory gaps), and a haze of names (phonetically spelled out, with no written records to check against), dates, places that have forever retreated into the miasma past. With these qualifications, then, herein begins the unlikely collaboration of an amateur historian (who didn’t know what he was getting into) and one of the great repositories of the oral culture of our time, as well as one of the most remarkable men I have ever met, the Screamin’ Nighthawk.

  MISSISSIPPI ROOTS

  The Screamin’ Nighthawk was born Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson on December 27, 1902 (1901? draft card says 1907), in Issaquena County on the Holloway Plantation just outside of Yola, Mississippi, to William “Ollie” Jefferson and his common-law wife, Ruth Mae Johnson. Ollie was a sharecropper who had been born on the Holloway Plantation to parents who had worked the fields as slaves—

  RIGHT THERE you got two things wrong (Hawk’s voice intrudes rudely on the first of several dozen reels of tape). My draft card say 1907, but that was just so’s they could take me for the Big War. Shit, they didn’t have no records on me at all till they made them up, how many times I got to tell you that? Fact is, I was born in 1899, reason I know, that was the year they all talking about Teddy Roosevelt gonna be president or some shit like that. But that wasn’t why my mama named me no Theodore Roosevelt, it was because that dude run his troops up San Juan Hill, a-whoop-ing and a-hollering, with a colored man in the lead. I even made up a blues about it, but you don’t want to hear that sucker, cause it ain’t got nothing to do with nothing.