Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  “Well, yes, I suppose it was the way Hawk tells it,” she murmured as she listened to Jerry’s brief account of their tempestuous affair. “I guess he wasn’t no more than fourteen, though he was big for his age. Course I ain’t saying how old I was, that’s a woman’s right, isn’t it?” She smiled coquettishly. “But I was a little older than him, and I had been married to Mr. Chatman for three or four years at that time. But, you know, we women do make mistakes of the heart. I was married to that Mose for no more than six months when I knowed I made a mistake. That Mose was a mean old man. Why, he beat me and whipped me and did things I can’t ever tell another living soul about.” She raised her eyebrows. “And, you know, I was just a little slip of a thing. Not like I am now, all broad and stout, but I had a light-hearted attitude and a girlish figure that I received not a small number of compliments on, if I do say so myself. And of course I loved a good time, that was how I met Mose, and that was how I met Hawk. If it hadn’t been for my willful nature, I would have grown up to be the girl my mama and daddy wanted me to be, but whatever I did I did with my eyes open. See, I used to sneak off to them Saturday-night dances by myself, I always enjoyed a good barbecue or fish fry, I didn’t care if it was rowdy like my mama said or if the people was cutting up all night long. Even after I was married, Mr. Chatman didn’t want me attending none of them parties, cause he said they was too rough for a young woman of my refinement. Shoot, I guess he just wanted to keep me to himself, well, I knowed that, and he didn’t want me running into none of his outside women neither. Course I went anyway, and I guess I seen some things back then that a young girl shouldn’t never see. But, you know, somehow it seemed different being out in the country and all, everybody knowed everybody else, if some child acting bad his parents gonna know about it, not like here. Of course all kinds of terrible things went on, but somehow it just never seemed to bother me. So when Mr. Chatman asked me if I could slip off with him and tie the knot, well my goodness I considered that an honor and a privilege, I imagined that I’d be envied by women in four counties. Little did I know. Mose may have been the best musicianer around, but he sure wasn’t no Loving Dan.” The old lady’s laugh crackled dryly. “Well, see, he’d been to Jackson, he’d been to Natchez, he say he even been as far as Chicago, Illinois, everywhere he go people know who 01’ Man Mose was. So to me, well, I don’t really know how to explain this, it seem foolish to an old woman, but you can’t explain nothing to a young girl who’s got her mind made up, so there wasn’t nothing that would have stopped me, even if I’d known then what I know now.

  “Well, I found out my mistake soon enough. Almost too soon. If I could’ve just taken two steps back—but you ain’t never privileged to do that. Not in this life anyhow, and maybe not in the next either. So I suffered along, I bided my time, I went to my mama, but she said, Baby, you done made your bed, now lie in it. And my papa wouldn’t hardly speak to me at all, it just about break my heart, cause he knew. And I didn’t have no money, no more good times, uh-uh, Mose practically kept me prisoner, locked the door behind him when he went off to play, cause he had seen what happens by him being what they call a backdoor man—you can hear him going out the back every time that front door slam. Well, that was Mose. I guess you might say that’s just about every musicianer, I was to find out to my sorrow.

  “But anyways, I started to notice that there was this young boy coming around, always pestering at Mose to learn him to play git-tar. And he bother Mose and bother Mose so, sometimes Mose just show him something just so’s he can get shut of him, it seemed to me. Anyway he kept coming around and coming around, and then one day I noticed that he was looking at me kind of funny while Mose was showing him a chord. And I didn’t think nothing of it. But one day he came back when Mose wasn’t there at all. And he bang on the door. And I say in my manner, I’m sorry, I can’t let you in, cause Mose took the key. Well, that ain’t gonna stop a young man like Hawk was, so he say, I just be a minute. So he goes around to the rear of the cabin, where there’s a little window just to let in the air, and somehow he squeezed through where no full-grown man could have gone. But he was full-grown, oh my yes, and I knew right then and there that this was the agent of my deliverance. That’s where Mose got the story of the twelve-year-old boy that Elmore stole from him and made such a hit with. Course Hawk wasn’t no twelve years old, but then again I don’t believe he had made fourteen.

  “Well, I harped at him and harped at him, and he thought the world of me, but he thought the world of Mose, too, as a blues musician anyway, so it was me, really, leading him on all the time, cause I think he would have been satisfied just to keep squeezing in through that little window, until finally we run off together to St. Louis. We didn’t do much—Lord, it wasn’t for too long—but we was happy.

  “But eventually we drifted apart, like so many young folks do. Because truthfully I was in love with the city, paved streets and streetcar rides, and folks dressing up fancy, and I had it in mind that I wanted to better myself, which is how I came to be a nurse at a later time. But Hawk, I don’t know, I think he got to getting homesick, after all he was just a young boy, and he always say he want to feel that dirt under his feet—I don’t know. Oh my, we was young and foolish then, but I wouldn’t give up my memories for anything in this world.”

  I only saw Mose one more time, when I was visiting friends in Chicago, and somebody from down home told me Mose was there to do some recording, so I sniffed around a little, looking for him, and finally somebody say, ’Look, he over there/ and I look under the railroad El and there was a bunch of old men, winos, fighting over a bottle, and I didn’t go no closer, just said to myself, Thank you very much, Mr. Chatman, but I believe I’ll leave it right where it is.”

  Jerry thanked the old lady and went back to his hotel in the Loop, where he tried to square the conflicts among the various stories. Had Mose been paying court to Hawk’s mother before marrying Mattie, and was that how Hawk had met his first love? Or was Mose running around with Hawk’s mother while actually married to Mattie at the time? Perhaps both were the case, or then again neither—maybe Hawk had just made up the story to excuse his own fooling around with Mose’s wife and then over the years come to believe it. Or not believe it. Perhaps Hawk had confused his mother with Mattie, and Mose had really been trying to stop him from hanging around Mattie, or—each variation added new complications. Mose and Mattie and Hawk and Lavalle and their mother—he had a cast of characters. Now if he could only figure out what to do with them!

  DR. CLARENCE LEWIS’ MEDICINE SHOW

  The medicine shows were an important part of the blues singer’s educational process. Not only did they provide him with the opportunity for travel, they expanded his musical horizons as well and offered him the ideal forum to perfect his entertaining skills. The medicine shows were a rough apprenticeship. Working under the most primitive conditions, but for the most discriminating of audiences (the black audience, as any student of popular culture will know, has always been in the vanguard of popular taste), the singer’s task was not only to put his song across but to sell his sponsor’s patent medicine as well. Sometimes this gave rise to the most risible of situations (rise/’risible—delete one), as prominent recording artists were drafted to deliver, and sometimes even to record, their sponsor’s theme song as a commercial blues (Sonny Boy Williamson’s “King Biscuit Stomp” is only the most prominent example). Quite naturally recording artists and vaudeville stars were preferred, though at the time the Screamin’ Nighthawk first went on the road, the first so-called country blues had yet to be recorded. Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” was waxed in 1919 some time after Hawk seems to have joined Dr. Clarence Lewis’ Traveling Caravan and Medicine Show. There are few surviving accounts, and so far as I know no one has ever interviewed white medicine-show operators themselves (though for a good account of a prior period and a parallel area of development, see Robert Toll’s Blacking Up, Oxford University Press), so we must rely on subjective accou
nts by artists and audience alike to get some of the flavor of those heady days. Even without any real newspaper coverage, however, there was no difficulty in getting the word out when the show came to town, and of course many of the performers had strong local reputations. “They all knowed me around Yazoo City,” says Hawk, for example. “Whenever we come into that town you can bet that everyone and his brother turn out.” When he started with the medicine show, Hawk was still known in some quarters as Little Mose, despite his unfortunate falling-out with his mentor. By the time that he had served out his apprenticeship, he had a style and a repertoire of his own.

  When Hawk returned home to Yola, however, around 1918 (79/5? earlier? later?), his personal life was in disarray. The woman that he loved, Mattie Mae Turner, had abandoned him for the city (plausible resolution?), which had proved far from hospitable to a country boy “just off the farm,” and Hawk came home in his works “a nervous wreck. 01’ Man Mose was fixing to light a firecracker under my ass. Mr. Holloway was just about ready to skin my hide, cause Mattie Mae was his best cook, raised up with his own chillen. Also I believe he kind of fancied her himself.” QLibelous?’) It is no wonder then that he seized the first opportunity that came along to leave home again, for there was nothing for Hawk at this time in his little home town. “Truthfully,” he says today, “I didn’t know what I got. Course a young man never does. You get to be old, you know, but you can’t do nothing about it. …”

  It is surprising how many shows of this sort actually came through all the little Mississippi hamlets at this time, but then it was the populace’s principal form of entertainment. There was no radio, no television, there were for all practical purposes no phonographs (a decade would change that). Dr. Stokey, Dr. Benson, and Dr. C.E. Hankenson, in Gus Cannon’s neat phrase, were the entertainment order of the day.

  (“Aww, Gus Cannon, that old yardbird, popping his gums all the time. We call him Mushmouth cause of the way he sing. Couldn’t never understand why everybody making all this racket about Gus Cannon this, Gus Cannon that. I heard them records they cut on him when he was a old man, ain’t no telling how old he actually was cause I hear tell from some that he actually go back to slavery time. But they cut him anyway. Him and his goddamn banjo. Couldn’t play worth nothing then, and can’t play nothing now, that’s for damn sure. …”)

  Cannon, an inveterate follower of the medicine-show circuit, was, with Furry Lewis, Jim Jackson, Frank Stokes, and the white blues singer Jimmie Rodgers, among the most prominent recorded graduates of this circuit. The show that young T.R. Jefferson left town with Dr. Lewis’ Traveling Caravan and Medicine Show.

  Dr. Lewis, by all accounts, was an imposing silver-haired gentleman from Muncie, Indiana, who every spring went out on the road first with his white minstrel show and then—because he would never trust any underling to oversee it himself—with his second-string “nigger entertainment.” The “elixir” which he sold was worthless, of course, but to the poor whites and blacks who formed his twin audiences it was a relatively harmless nostrum which apparendy served as a very effective diuretic and purgative. The troupe was a small one and traveled in a number of touring cars with an open flat-bed truck which doubled as equipment van and stage. There was a blues singer, a woman blues singer (Natchez Ma Rainey), a blackface comedian (Negro), a couple of dancers (“They was always high brown and pleasing-featured”), a comedian or two, and the impassive “Indian” who served as straight man and foil to the comedians and master of ceremonies.

  Dr. Lewis sat in his private touring car with the shades all drawn until the entertainment was over, then Son Ford, a tapdancer-comedian who later recorded a few sides for the short-lived Bullet label, tapped tentatively on the window and Dr. Lewis capped his bottle of whiskey (apparendy he was an inveterate drinker, though none of the entertainers can remember seeing him drunk), stretched out his long legs (he was as tall as six and a half feet according to the recollections of some, though Hawk says, “He wasn’t no damn giant, like some of these people be saying”), and was introduced to the crowd, to heartfelt cheers, as “the kind gentleman who brought you this fine entertainment.”

  Members of the cast, including young T.R. Jefferson, then circulated among the audience, each with a case of the magic elixir, as the silver-haired doctor beamed down upon his “little brown brothers” and Peg Leg Markham, the debonair MC, later to become famous as a comedian on the chitlin circuit (though his cousin, Pigmeat, perhaps because he did not suffer the debilitating loss of limb which gave Peg Leg his rather common nickname, gained both the greater fame and greater reward, a source of unending sorrow to the less fortunate cousin), gave the pitch for the medicine, a combination of patter, toasts, and sly material hinting that the man or woman who drank this stuff would see an immeasurable improvement in sexual performance, if improvement was needed, and a sustaining success if success was already at hand.

  By all accounts this pitch was extremely successful, so much so that occasionally the salesmen would run out of botdes of elixir and the good doctor would have to repair to his touring car to mix up a fresh batch with whatever materials were at hand. Sales were not hurt by the antics of the shills, some of whom were not altogether open about acknowledging their condition of employment. One man in the crowd, perhaps a friend of one of the entertainers with whom arrangements had been made beforehand, perhaps one of the roustabouts or entertainers themselves, might take a swig and simply let out a blood-curdling yell. Sometimes, according to reliable sources, a man or woman would throw away the crutches on which (s)he was supporting himself (on which they were supporting themselves?’). Litde Mose always had to remember to retrieve the crutches afterward. “That was just part of my job, man. You know, I didn’t bring those crutches back, it got took out of my pay. What do you expect;5 Sometimes I think I want to ram them crutches up ol’ Doc Lewis’ ass.”

  At first Hawk only got to sing one or two songs, but soon he was fronting the show. He became quite a popular entertainer over the next few years, but, more important, he developed a style of his own.

  I DIDN’T sign on as no singer. I sign on as a roustabout, jack of all work, do just about anything there is to do. Sometimes I be the one that swallow down that elixir, but them poor dumb country niggers never catch on. One time some farmer in overhauls say, Ain’t that the same little booger just stood up there and sung that song so bad? Dr. Lewis step forward and he say, Sir, you are mistaken, I ain’t never seen this little motherfucker before in my life, and besides that other little motherfucker is out there in my private car right now, where he is laying out a new suit of clothes, in case I perspire on this hot July day. Of course he didn’t talk like that in public, out there in front of all them dumb old country clowns, he act just oh so dignified in his morning coat, with them tails that he got to pluck up before he sit down. But Daisy, she tell me—she one of the yellow-skin gals that dance around and shake their ass and just generally cut up—she say, Ooh-wee, you ought to hear that Doc Lewis when he get going, when he get all worked up and stuff, and he didn’t need no medicine neither, cause he always was partial to the high yallers and teasin’ browns.

  Well, that man wasn’t nothing but trouble. Said he was a doctor, but he wasn’t no more doctor than I am. Come to find out, he done some time in Cummins for cutting some poor little gal up, he fix her so she wouldn’t never grin no more cause she wouldn’t do none of his specialties. Course he didn’t think nothing of it cause she was just another yaller, but what he didn’t know was she was a yaller the sheriff was plugging on the side. When he found out what the doc had done—course I didn’t see none of this, this was before my time, understand—he say he gonna cut that peckerwood’s balls off, he don’t care what happen to him cause he love that little gal more dearly than he did his own wife. Anyways it didn’t come to nothing, six months maybe —but we didn’t never go to Arkansas neither, I noticed. Even so the litde gals gathered around that bright-yellow car of his, they running their fingers on it, Ooh, Do
c Lewis, I just want to feel the paint, ooh, Doc, you got such a nice finish on it, and everywhere we go, he take his pick, some of them no more than pickaninnies with their hair tied up in braids. Well, ol’ Doc Lewis, he really like them little gals when they just starting to bud, just starting to get hair on them tight little cracks, sometimes he practically kidnapped them little gals out of them little small villages and towns, say, Boys, we got another dancer to go along. I surprised they didn’t get him on no Mann Act, like they got to protect them young gals against mens just coming in and stealing them away from their mamas and daddies. But ol’ Doc Lewis, he really know how to get his pole greased—so maybe the medicine do something for him after all.

  Anyways I go along and go along, learn to stay away from Daisy and any of the other gals the doc lay his eyes on, come to pass in time I come to be the blues singer on the show. This is how it happen. Already had a blues singer when I joined up, name of Blind Arthur Bell, you probably never heard of him, cause he didn’t make no records that I know about, he was too early for records, but he was a powerful singer, from Florida somewheres to begin with. And besides being such a powerful singer he could play the git-tar in any key that you care to hear, any way that you like. Sometimes he sing the old spiritual songs, make you want to cry, it make you feel so bad sometimes, when he sing about going home and someday all my troubles gonna pass and all such stuff as that. Sometimes the doc come out of his car, tell him don’t sing no more of that shit, boy, cause you getting everyone so downhearted and blue. He say, Goddammit, Blind Arthur, you quit that racket, I gonna have to dismiss you if you don’t. You just cut out all this foolishness, cause you ruining everybody’s good times. Then Blind Arthur look at him, he wasn’t no blind man, of course, he may not have seed too good, but he seen plenty of what was going on, and he say, Dr. Lewis, you tend to your doctoring, and I’ll just stick to my business as well. Don’t I always give you a good show? And he was right! He give a good show all the time, sing that “Crazy Blues” and “Downhearted Blues” that was just coming out on the victrola, do his minstrel stuff, you know, “Nigger and the white man playing seven-up, nigger won the money, scared to pick it up,” oh, the colored love to hear all that kind of stuff.