When I Left Home

by Guy, Buddy

  “Would rather look at the wall.”

  “You keep looking at the wall and you’ll wind up hitting your head against it. You too good to look at the wall. You got to look at the folks paying to hear you play.”

  If it wasn’t for Raymond Brown, I would never have gone back to Sitman’s. He had enough confidence for the both of us. He also had a bottle of Dr. Tichenor’s Antiseptic medicine, usually used to treat cuts and wounds or to rinse out your mouth. He poured the stuff into a glass.

  “Drink this down,” he said, “and you’ll be shouting out the good news in no time.”

  I drank one glass—and then a second. After the second I felt like I could spread wings and fly to the moon. I could get on that bandstand and, despite the dirty looks from Big Poppa, tell him I was ready to sing “Annie” face first.

  “This is your last chance, boy,” he said.

  “Just hit it,” I said.

  I hit it hard. Sang that song for all it was worth. Found me a pretty girl and focused all my attention on her. Her smiling lips were a lot more inviting than the back wall. Yes, sir, with help from my friend Raymond Brown, I faced the people—and I’ve been facing them ever since.

  Big Poppa played harp. He was no Little Walter. This was the time when Little Walter’s “Juke” had taken over the radio stations and the jukeboxes. All you heard was “Juke.” It was just music—no singing—but Walter was singing through that harmonica like no one had ever sung before. He made the thing laugh and cry. Before Little Walter, harmonicas cost a dime. Folks looked at them as toys. After Little Walter, harmonicas cost $5. Folks looked at them as instruments.

  Seeing I was good for his band, Big Poppa took me to all the roadhouses in and around Baton Rouge, joints like the Lakeland Lodge, Rockin’ Lucky, and Joe Bradley’s Dew Drop Inn. If we went outside the city for a little gig, Poppa took his Oldsmobile 98. He was so big that he took up the whole front seat. Poppa’s wife was so jealous that she wouldn’t let no other woman go with us, not even my sister Annie Mae, who liked to hear me play. But we’d sneak Annie Mae in the backseat and take her anyway. Sometimes Big Poppa would give me $2 a night, sometimes $3. But I didn’t care—I was playing.

  I was also listening to other Baton Rouge players. Lightnin’ Slim, who I’d heard in Lettsworth, was around. Schoolboy Cleve and Rafel Neal were his first harmonica players before Lazy Lester. Lazy liked to say, “I ain’t lazy, I’m just tired.”

  In Baton Rouge they was always talkin’ ’bout New Orleans. I knew that Smiley Lewis, Lloyd Price, Fats Domino, and Shirley and Lee were making records down there. Before long Little Richard would be recording in that same city. Richard was the one who sped up the music until they started calling it rock and roll. New Orleans had all kinds of music happening, and you’d think because it was only eighty miles from where I was staying, I’d be down there a lot. But I wasn’t. Had no reason to. Nothing was calling me down to New Orleans. Wasn’t part of my world. Never even went there. But it was a New Orleans artist who rearranged my thinking.

  It wasn’t B. B. King, who was a Memphis artist. Don’t get me wrong—I was in love with B. B.’s style from the time I heard “Three O’Clock Blues.” His guitar had a ring and a sting that snapped back my head. His sound gave me chills.

  This other guitar man, though, gave me something I didn’t get from B. B. This artist showed me how to present myself to the public. He showed me how to put on a show. More than any guitarist I can name, he taught me how to attract and excite a crowd. His name was Guitar Slim.

  Slim had a record out, “The Things I Used to Do,” that, after “Boogie Chillen,” became the biggest record of my life. I say that because I played the thing night and day for many years. Hell, I’m still playing it. Loved that song like I loved my mama. Ray Charles, who back then was living in New Orleans, arranged and produced it for Slim. Ray also played piano on the track. Ray’s production was perfect. Within months of the song’s release there wasn’t a guitarist in the South that couldn’t play “The Things I Used to Do.”

  Minute I heard that Guitar Slim was performing at the Masonic Temple in Baton Rouge I ran over. I was the first guy in line to buy a ticket. Cost fifty cent. The hall had a big ballroom. I knew the place would be packed with dancers, and I wanted to be right up on the bandstand. I wanted to see the man’s hands when he played the guitar. Didn’t take long before the crowd arrived. Soon it was full. Folks pushing and shoving, but I wasn’t moving. Kept my spot so I could see and hear everything. Eight o’clock came and went. Then nine o’clock. Then nine-thirty. At about a quarter to ten the band came on stage and started playing the opening notes of “The Things I Used to Do.” Man, my heart skipped a beat. It was like someone had poured a quart of whiskey down my throat. I was warm all over. I heard the music alright, but I didn’t see Guitar Slim. The guitar kept playing, but there was no guitarist. I thought to myself, Where is he? Where the hell is he?

  As the song kept blasting, the question kept running through my mind. I didn’t know what was going on. I’d paid my fifty cent and wanted to see the man behind the music.

  Finally, I heard a buzz in the crowd. Everyone turned around. From the back of the ballroom, coming through the door, was this giant fat man carrying a guitarist on his shoulders. The guitarist was Slim, playing like his life was on the line. Mounted atop the huge guy, Slim looked like a baby. But he was no baby. He was slick as grease and dressed to kill—flaming red suit, flaming red shoes, flaming red-dyed hair. He made his way through the room until everyone was in a stoned fury. When he jumped down from the shoulders of his man, I saw that his guitar was a beat-up Strat that looked like it’d been through two world wars. He wore the guitar low on his hip like a gunslinger. His guitar strap was made of fish wire and the cord to his amp had to be three hundred feet long. Before this, my idea of a guitarist was Lightnin’ Slim, who sat when he played. Lightnin’ was the one who told me that the guitar was designed to be played sitting down. It fit on your lap. That’s where I figured a guitar belonged.

  Guitar Slim never sat down. He played his guitar between his legs, played it behind his back, played it on his back, played it jumping off the stage, played it hanging from the rafters. Wasn’t nothing Slim wouldn’t do and nowhere he wouldn’t go with that beautiful old Strat of his.

  The Strat was strong. Its one-piece Maple neck was made with steel and could take a beating. The tough construction allowed Slim to sling it around his hip like a bag of potatoes. I liked how he treated it rough, because that treatment got into the feeling of the music. The music was blistering. It was like the Strat was saying, “Go ahead, throw me around, beat me up, I can take all you got and still sound like a screaming angel from heaven.”

  Guitar Slim’s show thrilled me. He wasn’t bending the strings but straight lickin’ ’em. I had heard a little of T-Bone Walker, B. B.’s idol and one of the first to plug the guitar into the wall. I liked how T-Bone could chord the instrument. Slim didn’t know no chords. He was single pickin’ with only two fingers, but those two fingers were causing a riot.

  After the show I hung around just to get a better look at the man. As he was walking off stage a guy stopped him and said, “Hey, Slim, how many different colors of shoes you got?”

  “Got me all the colors of the rainbow,” said Slim. “Got me a dye for every color so I can match my hair to my shoes.”

  “You crazy, man,” said the man.

  “Oh yeah?” said Slim. “Well, one day every goddamn motherfucker you see gonna be dressed crazy like me. That’s the way the world be changing. Me, I’m just ahead of all you other cats.”

  I thought about those words a dozen years later when I turned up in San Francisco and saw the flower-power hippie children dressed up all crazy in every color of the rainbow.

  “Hey, Slim,” said another fan. “You so good, man, I’m giving you a taste of my whiskey. Matter of fact, I’m giving you a whole pint.”

  “Thank you, good brother.” And with that, Slim
sucked down the entire pint.

  “Better watch it there, Mr. Guitar Slim,” said a pretty-legged lady in a tight skirt. “Hear tell you drink too much. Keep drinking like that and you ain’t gonna be livin’ long.”

  “Maybe so, darlin’, but for every regular day you live, I be livin’ three.”

  I followed Slim outside and watched him get into his big Cadillac and roar off into the night. Never did say a word to him because, frankly speaking, I wouldn’t know what to say except “thank you.”

  Guitar Slim showed me to how to play the guitar in front of people. Whatever he did, I wanted to do. The excitement he caused, I wanted to cause. The pleasure he gave, I wanted to give. I wanted a Strat that I could beat up. I wanted a big crowd that I could drive wild.

  I wanted to be Guitar Slim.

  Love in the Mud

  Blues can bring you up or put you down, but in almost every blues, somewhere in the song there’s a female in the room, a female about to do you wrong, do you right, storm out of your life, or let you love her down.

  Blues, love, and lovemaking are all carved from the same piece of wood. They come from the same place. I felt that place during my teen years in Baton Rouge. The blues had stormed my soul while my body was craving what all bodies crave when the nature starts boiling your blood. The nature has you hunting the way men been hunting ever since Adam got a load of Eve.

  Back on the plantation there were more girls than boys. The girls were working right beside us and didn’t have the time, means, or money to get all prettied up. I noticed them, of course, and like I said before, I had one, but that didn’t make me very experienced. In the country, boys didn’t learn how to love so good.

  I remember a friend telling me about taking his girl out to a muddy field on a dark night. Moon was all covered with clouds, a fog was coming in thick, and he couldn’t see in front of him.

  She’s down there on the ground when he goes to get between her legs, but instead of putting it in her pussy, he puts it in the mud.

  “Oh, baby,” he says. “You so good. Feels so good.”

  “You don’t even have it in me,” she say.

  “I don’t?”

  “No, fool, you don’t.”

  “Oh.”

  So he takes it out of the mud, cleans it off, and puts it where it belongs. She starts to a-moaning but he ain’t saying nothin’.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” she asks. “Ain’t it good to you?”

  “To tell you the truth, the mud feels better.”

  I worried that the girls I saw during my few months at McKinley High would think I was too country. They were pretty and wore clothes that showed off what they had. And they had plenty. I spent my day looking but didn’t say a word.

  That changed a little when I got into playing the guitar. Ladies like musicians. Some of them came up to me with a smile or a wink. Naturally, I got excited. But my shyness didn’t go away all that fast, and neither did my feeling that I better be cautious. All around me I saw women getting pregnant—women my age. The men didn’t think nothing of it. Sometimes they married the woman and sometimes they just walked away.

  “You ain’t ever gonna walk away if you get a woman pregnant,” my daddy said. “You gonna take care of her and the child.”

  That’s when I started taking a harder look at older women. Thinking it through, I decided they was a safer bet. As lovers, I saw they could be better than the younger ones. They didn’t mind teaching me what to do and how to do it. I liked learning. I liked how they showed me to take my time. I especially liked the ones who had already been married ’cause they wasn’t looking to have a baby. Matter of fact, having been through it, they were looking not to have a baby.

  One of those ladies, a wonderful woman named Phyllis, had two little girls and asked me to babysit them. I was happy to say yes and even happier to say yes again when Phyllis invited me into her bed. My idea, though, that ladies with kids wouldn’t be wanting any more didn’t prove entirely true. When I was seventeen, Phyllis had a little girl by me—Judy—and three years later we had another girl she called Dorqus. I was pleased with these babies and also pleased that Phyllis wasn’t interested in getting married. She was the kind of woman who liked being independent. She didn’t put no strings on me, she said she would care for these babies by herself, and I was grateful not to be tied down.

  Sometime during my days in Baton Rouge I was at my sister’s playing my guitar—by then I’d gotten a Les Paul Gibson—when who should turn up but Lawrence Chalk, a man we called Shorty. He came from Baton Rouge but later moved to Baton Rouge before going off to Chicago, leaving his wife behind.

  “Shorty,” I said, “good to see you, man. What you doin’ back in town?”

  “My wife, Buddy. She got killed. Terrible accident.”

  “That’s awful, Shorty. I’m really sorry. Out of respect, I’ll put away this here guitar.”

  “Don’t do that, Buddy. You keep playing. I see Annie Mae has opened a nice bottle of wine. I got no reason not to get drunk. And the more I drink, the more I got to hear me some music.”

  I played “The Things I Used to Do.”

  “Well, that’ll get me to drinking,” said Shorty. “That’ll do.”

  As Shorty went to drinking, I kept playing. Soon he and Annie Mae were dancing up a storm. It was like that for another couple of hours.

  “Hey, Buddy,” he said, “how ’bout Jimmy Reed? You know his songs?”

  “I’m learning them.”

  “He lives in Chicago. All of ’em do. Muddy Waters. Little Walter. Howlin’ Wolf. They all up there where I live.”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “Why don’t you come up there?”

  “What am I gonna do up there?”

  “Find a street corner and play your guitar. Someone’s sure to hear you.”

  “I don’t got no money.”

  “Save some,” said Shorty. “Save enough for the train ride. And when you get there, you can sleep where I can stay.”

  “You mean that?”

  “Wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.”

  “How would I find a job up there?”

  “More jobs there than here, Buddy. Where you working now?”

  “LSU.”

  “All kinds of colleges in Chicago. What you getting now?”

  “Twenty-nine dollars a week.”

  “You’ll get twice that in Chicago.”

  “Twice?”

  “Maybe three times. That’s why everyone’s going to Chicago. Chicago’s the place, man.”

  Shorty’s words hung heavy. Couldn’t get them off my mind. Chicago was far enough away to be on the moon. Had no family in Chicago. Besides, no one in our family had ever gone off like that. None of us had been out of Louisiana. But knowing that Shorty was living in Chicago planted a seed in my heart. Took a while, but the seed started to grow.

  Started thinking that if I ever did go to Chicago, I’d have to play better. So I went to see about taking music lessons.

  The music lesson man wanted to give me a book that was hard to understand. Looked like math to me. Didn’t look like no fun.

  “This is the book,” he said, “that you need to begin with.”

  “Well, sir,” I said, “I’ve already begun.”

  “You began with another book?” he asked.

  “Begun with a different kind of book.”

  “What’s it called?”

  “‘Hoochie Coochie Man’ by Muddy Waters.”

  “That ain’t no book. That’s a song.”

  “Yeah, but I can read it like a book. It’s been teaching me like a book. I know every last thing in it.”

  “But you need this book,” the man said.

  After looking it over I said, “Not sure I do. Think I’ll stick with Muddy.”

  Without the music book I was doing okay in the little joints around Baton Rouge. I wasn’t making no money, but I had a little reputation. And after seeing Guitar Slim I got me a
long cord and started out playing in the alley and then strutting in from the street to the club like the man himself. I had to carry a smoldering iron with me ’cause if my wire broke, I didn’t have the money to buy another one—just smoldered the wire together.

  Whether I was up playing in the roadhouses, working at the gas station, doing odd jobs at LSU, or in the bed loving on Phyllis, my thoughts kept going back to Chicago. I didn’t think I was good enough to make a living picking the guitar up there, but I sure did dream of getting a glimpse of Muddy and Walter and them driving around in their fine cars. I just wanted to sneak a peek at the big mansions where they lived. And naturally, I dreamed of going to some beautiful nightclub and hearing them play in the flesh.

  But those were dreams. Dreams weren’t real. At the same time, though, I could get crazy with dreams. The dreams went on for some time until I got the nerve to mention it to my daddy.

  “Daddy,” I said, “you think I’m crazy to be thinking of going up there to Chicago to stay with Lawrence Chalk?”

  “Shorty? Shorty living in Chicago?”

  “Yes, sir. He likes it real fine.”

  “He thinks you could find some work?”

  “That what he says.”

  “You think you could make money with your guitar in Chicago?”

  “No, I wouldn’t even try. I’d find me a regular job. Shorty says there’s jobs to be had there.”

  “Well, if you do play your guitar, play ‘Stagger Lee.’ You know ‘Stagger Lee,’ son?”

  “I heard it.”

  “If you going to Chicago, you best learn it.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “I know you will.”

  They had a radio station in Baton Rouge called WXOK where Ray Meadows worked. His deejay name was Diggy Doo, and he liked me. Because they had microphones and a little studio, he told me I could make a sample of my music. Later I’d learn that’s called a “demo.” I’d written a song called “Baby Don’t You Wanna Come Home.” It wasn’t going to compete with J. B. Lenoir or John Lee Hooker, but it didn’t sound too bad when I heard the playback.