Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Other thing you got wrong, my daddy wasn’t no sharecropper. Course you could call him a sharecropper, that’s what old man Holloway thought he was, but my daddy just lay up in the bed all day, didn’t do no work at all, leastaways that’s what my mama told me. Say, he bad, he bad like Jesse James. He was a bootlegger, he was a gambler, he was a musician—can’t get no worse than that. If he’d just been one or the other, might have been all right, but it was the combination, see, that finally caused him to leave. I wasn’t no more than five or six, there was just the three of us, everybody else grown up and moved out, me, my big sister Lavalle, and Litde Ollie—we called him Pigmeat, or Ham-bone sometimes—that was my daddy’s from his outside woman, but we treated him just like one of our’n, wasn’t no different, every Saturday he go to see his mama, every Sunday we’d all see her in church. My mama and his mama—that was Miss Ida Bee Tarrant that was, later on she married the deacon, Mr. Lacy—everybody call him ol’ Gatemouth cause he get his jaw to flapping all the time, but she wouldn’t tolerate none of that foolishness, “You call him Mr. Lacy,” she say, she get herself so stuck up in the air she didn’t even notice Pigmeat no more, and he was a sad little creature, always needing to be told what to do. “Wipe your nose, Pigmeat.” “Don’t play with no Tarwaters.” Tell him he was just as good as anybody else, but he didn’t believe it, and then he up and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. You know, Ham and me was down in New Orleans then, man it was a fearful sight to see, women screaming and crying, grown men, too, they carried the bodies out and piled ’em up in the streets for the wagons to come. Preachers standing in the corner claiming it was the second coming, day of the judgment, sinners flinging themselves forward saying, “Have mercy, Lawd. Oh Lawd, save me.” Me and Ham call each other Deacon This and Brother That, singing nothing but them way-back raggedy old hymns and the people just throwing their nickels and dimes at us, didn’t mean nothing, they figured they wasn’t going to need no money where they was going, and they was right. Churches and sporting houses doing a full business, me and Pig was just working the streets by day, well, Pig blowed a little harp and he could sing some, too, even though his voice wasn’t never too strong. One night these two sisters, they offer to go home with us—well, they look like they about sixty, and kind of scurvy, too. So Pigmeat go home with them, but I stay out on the streets playing. Well, Pigmeat was the one they wrote the song about—if he didn’t have bad luck, wouldn’t have no luck at all? Wouldn’t you know that them two sisters had the influenza—carried them off, carried him off, too, in three or four days. Well, you see, he really didn’t have no luck! (Hawk laughs—chortle of fiction or chortle of fact? But your father, he is reminded.)

  Oh yeah, well, my daddy was a gambling fool. He bet on anything. He bet on the weather. He bet on the sunrise. He bet on whether you open your eyes one at a time when you wakes up, and if you do which one you opens first.

  But one time he got in deeper than he meant to. See, he bet this big buck nigger he could drink any three men under the table, didn’t matter who they was, get anybody he like. So this Big Nigger—that what they called him, only other name I knowed him by was Hooks—he get these two friends of his, even bigger than him, and they all set up in a row while my daddy go and get him three or four jugs of that old moonshine. Well, the first nigger that took a pop, he just stare at my daddy until his eyes bug out and then he fall down to the ground, not dead, just passed out like. Well, next fella, naturally he don’t want to take a drink, but Big Nigger, he stand over him till that fool just naturally have to swallow it down, and he fall over. Well, Hooks looking at my daddy mighty suspicious now, and my daddy talking fast, trying to get him to go along with it, but Hooks, he may be big, but he ain’t stupid, and he say, Lookahere, Jeff, you go ahead and take your drink out of the same botde, ain’t no need to stand on politeness, I let you go first. And anybody could see, he didn’t want to do that, he trying to act like it nothing but nerves, but finally he take a drink, and then Hooks make him take another and another, and when he seed that my daddy ain’t gonna take any more he poured the rest of it down his throat. So, regardless, he won his bet, but poison whiskey, that’s what got him in the end. (Hawk laughs again, a hig chortling laugh, and Jerry wonders how this squares with the coroner’s report—if indeed there was a coroner’s report—on the death of Ollie Jefferson.’)

  Only thing that was left after the funeral was his git-tar. When he was living home, my daddy never even allowed me to touch it—that’s how jealous-minded he was of that box, I think he loved it more than he did my mama, I know he did. Course I would sneak off anyway late at night when my daddy too drunk to notice, and I creep across the fields down to the creek all among the crickets and frogs making their noises, and I be plunking away and they be plunking away—man, we was all making a racket. Naw, this wasn’t the first git-tar I had. First git-tar I had was a piece of baling wire I strung up side the wall, pull it tight so it be just right, make all kinds of different sounds on that wire, sound like a cat screaming when little boys start to pull it apart —she-it, yes, I think everybody make their start somehow or nother like that. See, I had the feel for music from a baby on, didn’t never need nobody to tell me nothing, didn’t make no difference if you give me a tune, cause I could make up my own, didn’t matter what kind of music it was, I liked it all.

  My daddy didn’t play no blues songs, really, didn’t really pick no git-tar, just frailed on it, old-time songs like “Working on the Railroad,” “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” “Bicycle Built for Two”—oh, all that kind of junk. Course he play anything you pay him to play, don’t make no difference, if he don’t know it he try it anyway. Like I said my daddy was a gambler. And my uncles all played, too, they played git-tar some, and my Uncle Roebuck he play banjo, my Uncle Ferris play the fiddle, and together with my daddy they make up a string band that was known far and wide, far and wide, man, play jigs, play reels, sing them old-time story songs, oh oncet in a while they might have did a blues.

  That’s why it so peculiar in a fashion, I mean it wasn’t nothing I was brought up to, my mama just want me to sing church songs, and my daddy, he just an entertainer like Sammy Davis Jr. or somebody, but for me first time I heard that man, they call him Alabama Red, don’t know why, cause he was from around Greenville, sing the blues down by the railroad track—oh my, people standing around throwing money at him—well, I tell you, the blues turn me every way but loose. Couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, and I knowed that was what I wanted to play.

  Well, of course, it’s 01’ Man Mose that everybody connected up with me, and really he the one that done it if the truth be told —Alabama Red the first, but 01’ Man Mose the man when it come to the blues. Shit, yeah, he even git the chickens to dancing, my mama say he could just about make a preacher lay his Bible down, that’s how powerful Ole Man Mose was. In his prime, I’m talking about, not later on after the whiskey got him. Moses Chatman—I believe he an off cousin to old Sam and Bo that used to play that old “Sittin’ On Top of the World”—well, anyways, Mose played with a bottleneck, and he made that git-tar sing. Lawd have mercy—that’s what that git-tar be saying, Lawd have mercy—he could play so sweet, and he could play hard, too, and I be pestering him, jawing at him all the time so’s he could show me how to do, cause he was like a god to me to start off with, even though he wasn’t no more than fifteen or so years older than me probably.

  Well, it seem like finally he start to show me a few things just to get me off his back, keep me from pestering him all the time. Course by then he was courting my mother, I suspect, leastaways that’s what I think now, but at the time, ten-year-old kid, I never thought nothing about it. He just give me a chord to play, and he say, Youngster, you go off and practice, and I go off by myself for two, three hours, don’t come back till I got that sucker right, say, Lookahere, Mose, I got it now, and he say, Naw, you don’t, gotta go and practice it up some more. So that was just the way it goes
, although it never struck me what was going on at the time, see, I was just a kid, really, I did a grown man’s work, but I don’t think I even knew what a pecker was for. Course I found out a little later on when I started in with Mattie, Mose’s wife, that I run away with to St. Louis. And I thought about it some at that time—sure did.

  Well, Mose wasn’t no nice man. Shit, might as well be honest about it, he was a motherfucker, just as soon cut you as look at you, and that’s the truth. No, you can’t get me to say nothing nice about him. Course he was a good blues singer, till the whiskey drag him down, towards the end he was just a sorry-ass feebleminded old man, and he wasn’t no more than fifty years old when he died in ’32. But he was always mean. Never let nobody else play on his set. Take you out to a gig sometimes, and if he feeling real good he let you second him on guitar—maybe!—but just so you don’t get any ideas he mess you up so you look foolish, change the time, or make a change that you ain’t expecting, just deliberately fuck you up and then point it out to the peoples, saying, Well, I tried to train this boy right, but how’s a body gonna play when he laying down all this racket behind me? Well, get him off then, they say, and I slink off that stage —well, it wasn’t hardly a stage, most of the time we just standing at one end of the room, pushed over in a corner like, little cabin, chimney smoking, people dancing in their bare feet, all that kind of stuff, and me feeling like I’m the worst piece of shit in the world, I feel like I really made a disgrace. I tell you, boy, it was an education, but I wouldn’t do that kind of shit to nobody, cause I know, that’s just the way I came up, and it wasn’t no good way.

  But anyways, well, you know, there was lots of musicianers played just like him back then, only trouble with them they was dumb in the ways of the world. Long time after, after Mose got records out, the scouts’d come down, say, What you got for us, Mose? And he say, Oh sure, boss, I got something good, mmm-hmm, and he parade out some of the most raggedy-ass country clowns, some broken-down old man who couldn’t even sit up straight let alone hit a good lick, and Mose say, Yesssir, Mr. Boss Man, this the best we have. And them old whiteys look at each other, say, That the best he got. So naturally wasn’t nobody get to make records but Ole Man Mose. Not until Barbour gets in the scouting business hisself, and by that time I was thirty years old. Man just listen to two verses of my song, cut me off, I thought, oh boy, that’s the end of it, 01’ Mose right maybe, ain’t nobody know nothing about making records but him. But the man say, Boy, we ain’t never heard nothing like this before, you even better than Mose. You sure you ain’t got your name on no other contract? I say, No, sir. Well, they say, put your mark right here, cause I tell you, boy, you done made a hit. After that I guess Mose seen he better make the best of it, and he tole them, Oh sure, I teached that boy, he was like a baby to me, which is how I guess all them stories got started. But I never did have no more trouble from Mose until the day he died—which, as it happened, was not very long.

  Course I was a full-growed man by then, had kids of my own somewheres. I’d been a rambler and a gambler, worked up the turpentine camps, chopped cotton, worked on the railroad, too, got into a little scrape down around Minden, done just about everything a man could think of and then some, but I always stuck pretty close to home and I always kept my git-tar by my side. Oncet the records started to coming out, though, I was gone, me and that boy they call Wheatstraw, course his real name was Whittacomb, something like that, he just called himself after Peetie Wheatstraw, we jumped all up through Illinois and New Jersey and all up into Canada. Played right out on the streets, people throwed money at us, some of them people had never seen a colored man before. One place, I remember, they had lots of cow farmers up there, I don’t know, might’ve been Wisconsin, them farmers gathered around, and they didn’t even want us to play nothing, just touch our heads and feel our skin, and all the time jabbering away at each other in some foreign language. Other times I just be whomping away on my box, and Wheatstraw blowing harp and popping his eyes out like all get-out and the people laughing and dancing like they never heard nothing like that before.

  And sometimes I come home, my mama would have a new man, but most of the time she alone, just waiting on me to return, cause I was always her favorite—and her hair beginning to turn gray, and she just look at me and shake her head and say, Roosevelt, you just look at yourself. Ain’t you never gonna settle down? You just like your daddy, God rest his soul. And then I play her favorite song for her, which she always like to hear me sing till her grave, “So Glad That I Be Back Home,” and the tears come streaming down her cheeks, and she pat me on the head, and she say, You know, you a good boy at heart, but you just ain’t got no Ruler over you. When you all going to quit your foolishness and come home to the church? And I didn’t tell her then, and I ain’t told her yet, that that day ain’t never gonna come.

  JERRY SURVEYED the material, he went over it again and again in dismay. Trying to sort it out. Trying to make some sense out of it. Trying to determine what was true and what was not. He spoke to Hawk’s sister, Lavalle, an old lady living in a little cabin in Mound Ridge with her daughter. She adjusted the wig she had insisted on putting on before allowing herself to be interviewed. She moistened her lips and poked her mouth around as if she had a set of loosely fitting false teeth, but in truth she had no teeth at all. She cleared her throat and spat out a wad of chewing tobacco, so the tobacco juice dribbled down her chin. Her daughter, Olympia, who looked nearly as old as her mother but was stout where the mother was lean, seemed to have no recollection of Hawk at all. “Of course I wasn’t no more than a baby when he left home, and look at me now.” She laughed a dry old lady’s laugh and sat with her legs comfortably spread under her long gingham dress. “Mama could probably tell you a whole lot about her baby brother, but she don’t remember so good anymore, do you, Mama?” The old lady just smiled. “She remember how her daddy died, though, don’t you?”

  “Kilt in a fire. Drove right into a oil truck stopped for a train. They was all burned to a crisp. You could see the smoke for miles, yessir.”

  “This was Hawk’s father?” said Jerry. “The gambler?”

  “I don’t know nothing about no gambler,” said Olympia. “Oh, he might have played a game of poker or pitty-pat. He just a farmer like everyone else, though, the way I hear tell it. His daddy left him twenty acres, and Mama give it away. To her first husband, y’understand.”

  The old lady giggled. “He never gived me no trouble.”

  “Y’see, her mind wanders. Sometimes she don’t remember nothing, and sometimes she be clear as a bell. She could tell you a whole lot about them days, if you just catched her right. You know, Mama’s had a hard row to hoe. A hard row to hoe,” said Olympia, shaking her head. “She was such a pretty little thing, too, wasn’t you, Mama? You seen her picture?”

  Jerry didn’t even answer before Olympia had waddled inside and come back with two gilt-edged pictures. One showed a lady with flashing eyes, her hair piled up imperially on her head, and a lace mantilla draped across her shoulders. “Well, that my mama’s mama,” she said triumphantly. “Hawk’s mother-?” Olympia nodded. “And this here Mama with her brother Junie, he pass, oh let me see, about ’55,1 think it was.” A young man in a sailor’s uniform stared into the camera straight ahead, hair clipped short, eyes clear and expectant, shoulders squared. The woman beside him was fine-boned and delicate, with a demure scoop-necked dress and a rose in her impeccably waved hair.

  “You think Hawk can pick that git-tar, you should’ve heard Junie. Just ask any of the people hereabouts. Course he wouldn’t play nothing but church songs, didn’t think nothing of Hawk nor his music neither. Mama the only one with a soft spot in her heart for her brother, and that because she practically raised him by herself. Everybody else, when he come around they just say, Oh, oh, look like trouble, money, women, something go wrong, somebody after him. Mama just say, he gonna be all right, that boy gonna be all right some day.”

  “He meant we
ll,” the old lady suddenly interjected. Jerry nodded encouragingly. “You couldn’t count on him for nothing, though.”

  Jerry waited, but nothing else was forthcoming. Well, he supposed she was right, you still couldn’t count on him for much. “Do you ever see him any more?”

  “Oncet in a while. We seen him just last month. Didn’t we, Mama?”

  The old lady cackled. “He a bad weed, the cows gonna cut him down.”

  Jerry confronted Hawk with the discrepancies. They didn’t seem to bother him.

  “Olympia don’t know doodly-squat,” he insisted. “Junie poison her mind against me. I got no quarrel with Lavalle, but Junie had a hairy ass. I don’t even like to think of him, I don’t never mention his name. I swear, he could play the git-tar like it was a charm. He never did nothing with it, though. And he never did a honest day’s work in his life, always getting the other niggers to do his work for him, just like a preacher, so smooth and fat and putting on that hincty smile, tell the truth I never did like to admit that he was my brother—course he might’ve said the same. Might’ve been cause we wasn’t natural brothers, but I don’t think so. I seen natural brothers that couldn’t get along for nothing and stepchildren that was as close as white is on rice. I think he was just naturally jealous-hearted cause I was always Mama’s favorite. She wouldn’t hear nothing bad about me. Lavalle tell you anything?”

  “Not much,” Jerry admitted.

  “Well, then,” said Hawk.

  He talked to Mattie Mae, though, Moses wife, who had run off to St. Louis with her husband’s young protege” and then either deserted or been deserted by him there. She was a light-skinned old lady with liver spots on her hands whom he found in a gigantic project in Cleveland. She showed him into a genteel apartment filled to overflowing with bulky plastic-covered furniture, moving with a slow arthritic shuffle while leaning on a cane. She seemed neither pleased nor displeased at this visit, just nodded when he explained that it was through Hawk (actually it was through the Cleveland Housing Authority) that he had gotten her address in the hope that she could tell him something about the old days. From the wall above a padded red leatherette chair pictures of Jesus (light-brown) and Martin Luther King (the same) looked down. On a low table beside the plastic-covered sofa were pictures of three girls—at a graduation ceremony, at a wedding, and on some other formal occasion—and a snapshot of Mattie Mae in a sparkling white nurse’s uniform.