This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  My earliest memories are of my mom. She was pretty, with blond, curly hair and piercing blue eyes. She was fun to be around, always joking and laughing. She was the disciplinarian of the family and kept an immaculate house. “Get out of my kitchen!” she’d yell, usually because she was working in there. She was a great cook, and that’s the way she raised us up. She felt the best you can really do for anybody is to set ’em down and feed ’em good. You may not be able to do anything else, but you’ll at least have ’em in a good holding pattern so life can go on. Nell (her real name was Emma) was basically a traditional farm housewife. She worked in the fields in spring and fall just like we all did. “Lavon, go bring me some stovewood and a bucket of water.” Mom didn’t believe in slapping me when I got into trouble, but she did have long fingernails, and if I really acted up, she’d drop her hand, fingers pointed down, onto the top of my head. “Don’t do that.” So I learned to cover my head when punishment was imminent, whereas other kids learned to cover their rears.

  Her brother Herbert Wilson was a tractor mechanic who lived with his kids—my cousins—down in Crumrod, Arkansas, below Elaine. When I was a toddler we’d stay with them, and Uncle Herbert would clean out a tractor barn on Saturday nights and show movies. I remember those flickering images like it was yesterday: a little fat guy in a hat yelling at a skinnier guy in a suit and mustache. It must have been 1943. Years later I realized that’s where I first saw the comedy team of Abbott and Costello.

  This was during the war, and cotton production was at its height. All day and night the freight trains carrying bales and cottonseed oil came rolling down the Cotton Belt, and I ran to see every freight that went by. My cousins would hold me down to teȧse me, and I’d fight ’em off just so I wouldn’t miss seeing that freight.

  Back at home, we were a musical family. Mama sang in a clear alto voice, and Dad and I sang together as far back as I can remember. He liked all kinds of music and taught me “Sitting on Top of the World” when I was four years old. All us kids remember sitting on his lap in the evenings while he relaxed in his chair. He’d sing to us and affectionately rub our hands with his rough farmer’s fingers until we’d get calluses on our knuckles. My father knew so many songs, he was like a fountain of music. He was still teaching me songs when he passed away at age eighty-two in 1992. His mother, Grandmaw Dolly, was the bell cow of our family for a whole lot of years. She had remarried a gentleman named Luther Crawford and would organize family get-togethers at her house in West Helena or at Old Town Lake in Elaine. A beautiful old lady.

  If I think back, I can still hear faint echoes of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on our family radio. We’d have to buy a battery two and a half feet long and maybe eight inches thick; a big, heavy damn thing! I remember my dad pulling our tractor right up to the window of the house one night when the battery was down, and he plugged the radio into the tractor battery so we wouldn’t lose the Grand Ole Opry, The Shadow, The Creaking Door, Amos ’n’ Andy—those were the shows you couldn’t miss. Sky King. From about four-thirty in the afternoon on, I was so close to that radio that my memories are of the rest of the family behind me. That was our entertainment. My dad and Clyde Cavette would go into town and get two fifty-pound ice blocks that would fit in our iceboxes. You could chip off them for a week. They’d buy an extra fifty pounds of ice, and we’d get together that night and make freezers of ice cream. Mom and Arlena would bake up a couple of big cakes: one coconut, one pecan. On special occasions the two moms would collaborate on lemon icebox pies, their own invention. They’d beat two cans of Pet milk until it was whipped to foam, adding sugar and lemon juice until it congealed. Then they’d freeze it in the icebox. I loved this beyond belief. It was so sweet your mouth would pucker. After I was old enough to work, they’d have to make three pies: one for each family and one for Lavon. And I’d guard mine. Then we’d make the radio the main feature, maybe play cards, visit.

  Going to music shows was high-level entertainment for our family. They’d set up tents at the edge of Marvell and have a stage, folding chairs, and refreshments. The first show I remember was Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys on a summer evening in 1946, when I was six years old. Boy, this really tattooed my brain. I’ve never forgotten it: Bill had a real good five-piece band. They took that old hillbilly music, sped it up, and basically invented what is now known as bluegrass music: the bass in its place, the mandolin above it, the guitar tying the two together, and the violin on top, playing the long notes to make it sing. The banjo backed the whole thing up, answering everybody. We heard Bill Monroe regularly on the Grand Ole Opry, but here he was in the flesh. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were in the band when I saw them.

  That was the end of cowboys and Indians for me. When I got home I held the broom sideward and strutted past the barn, around the pump, and out to the watermelon patch, pretending to play the guitar. I was hooked.

  After that I made it a point to soak up as much music as I could. I really liked Bill and the Carliles, a famous novelty group that performed funny songs that got into the country charts. My favorite was called “Knothole,” the chorus of which went: “Knothole, knothole, you oughta see what I saw through the old knothole.” Bill Carlile had his pretty wife playing in a band with stand-up bass and an electric guitar. Who else? Muddy Waters was extremely popular; he had the first real electric blues band and some hit records. We loved Lonzo and Oscar, Onie Wheeler, Homer and Jethro, Noble “Thin Man” Watts, whoever we could get on the radio from Memphis, Shreveport, or Nashville.

  Whenever one of the big traveling shows came to town, the Helms would be there. Silas Green from New Orleans had a twelve-piece orchestra that we all liked, but everyone’s favorite was the F. S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrels from, I believe, Biloxi, Mississippi. Posters and handbills announcing the shows would go up weeks in advance. They’d set up with the back of a big truck as their stage. They had a nine-piece house band down in front of the stage, a fast-talking master of ceremonies, a good-looking mulatto chorus line, blackface comedians, and singers. This was like another world for us kids.

  I’d stare at the drummer all night because with those horns and that full rhythm section, the drums always looked like the best seat in the house. The sound of the cymbals and the snare drum popping was synonymous in my mind with Saturday night and good times. F. S. Walcott had a fantastic left-handed drummer, whom I’d study as closely as I could from my seat. This was a problem in those days of segregation, because the audience was split down the middle by an aisle. On the left were the black to light-skinned folks, while the light-skinned to people with red hair sat on the right. The left-handed drummer sat on my right, which put his tom-toms between me and him. So he’s working the snare drums in front of him, favoring the band, and as he’s getting ready to roll he’s coming right around toward me. I’m sitting two rows back at the most. I’m probably in the front row, in fact, studying what he’s doing for the whole two-hour show. I’m naturally right-handed, but people have always told me that I play left-handed. If I have any technique at all, that’s where it comes from.

  Our favorite act was “The Lady with the Million Dollar Smile,” F. S. Walcott’s big featured singer, who’d come on in the third quarter of the show. She was an armful. She wore very bright dresses and had all her teeth filled with diamonds! She sang all those real get-down songs like “Shake a Hand.” Later on the master of ceremonies would announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a great evening. We haven’t played a show this good since New Orleans! I sure wish every night could be this good. …

  “Now it’s time for what we call the Midnight Ramble. I know a lot of you have to get up early and get to work, a lot of you have your families with you, and we want to thank all of you for coming and wish you well till next year. In the meantime, for those of you who can stay late and have a mind for more sophisticated entertainment …” He’d introduce one of the beautiful dancers from the four-girl chorus line and tell us how Caledonia would show us wha
t made her famous down in Miami, Florida, where she hails from.

  The Midnight Ramble cost another dollar, dollar and a half. You’d see what in those days was defined as a hootchy-kootchy show. The comedians would do some of their raunchier material, and people’d be holding their sides. The band would get into its louder rhumba-style things, and the dancers would come out in outfits that would be right in style today but were bare and outrageous back then. The master of ceremonies might get caught up in it and jig across the stage like a chicken or anything familiar from the barnyard, which always set the crowd off. That was the Midnight Ramble, so called because it usually ended at twelve o’clock.

  Today, when folks ask me where rock and roll came from, I always think of our southern medicine shows and that wild Midnight Ramble. Chuck Berry’s duck walk, Elvis Presley’s rockabilly gyrations, Little Richard’s dancing on the piano, Jerry Lee Lewis’s antics, and Ronnie Hawkins’s camel walk could have come right off F. S. Walcott’s stage.

  We got our supplies from A. B. Thompson’s grocery store in Turkey Scratch. Mr. Thompson was also our amateur country doctor; he’d bandage you up if you fell off your bicycle or stepped on a thorn. There was a one-room school at the Turkey Scratch church called the County Line School, with all the grades together. Our teacher, Miss Stella Harris, lived with the Thompsons during the school term. This is where I started my education.

  Just getting to the bus stop on the hard road could be a problem when the fields were flooded. Sometimes Mary Cavette and I would be covered in mud from our trip by wagon and mule to that bus stop. Mary would be crying and I’d be laughing. Sometimes a tractor had to pull the bus through a mudhole. This went on for a couple of years until my father went before the school board and demanded a little panel truck so we and the Cavette sisters could be driven up to the hard road, where our neighbor Anna Lee Williams was usually waiting for us.

  I loved school when I finally got to it. I met up with my right-hand man, Charles “Mutt” Cagle, whose family lived a stone’s throw from us. Mutt was my first pal, and we’ve buddied together ever since. I especially loved those school lunches, which changed every day, unusual for a little boy used to the routine of the farm. Things went pretty well for a couple of years until I hit the second grade. That’s when I got put off the school bus for fighting. I don’t remember the specifics, but I got into it with some older kids who went to the bigger school back in Marvell. After that I walked the few miles to school for a year or so. When that old yellow bus passed me on the road, I didn’t look at them, and they didn’t look at me. It was a standoff.

  One of my most vivid memories of childhood is the sultry summer night in the late forties when they inoculated all the children for measles or diphtheria; whatever they were doing that night. Oh, God, that was a mess! The kids had gotten wind of it, and we were scared to death of those big glass syringes with the thick steel needles. They hung an old tarpaulin around the pump house. That was ugly. Us kids knew we were in trouble now. It was usually wide open, a nice place to sit and have your lunch. All of a sudden it was dusk, and the pump house was hidden by this tarpaulin lit by yellow kerosene lanterns inside. It was like a slaughterhouse, with farm folks holding their terrified children. I tried to hide out, but someone caught me and threw me in the wagon, and the mules pulled up to that pump house. It took a fight, but they eventually got us all.

  Tornadoes were my other main childhood fear. We had two tornado seasons, spring and fall, but tornadoes could breed any time the warm breezes coming up the Mississippi Valley from the Gulf of Mexico collided with the cooler winds coming from the west over Oklahoma and Kansas. The storms would move east from there on a north/south axis with the Cotton Belt in the center—Tornado Alley. We all grew up with horror stories about brooms stuck into trees, straw end first, and baby chickens blown inside Coke bottles, and people and things simply disappearing forever. So we’d hurry to the storm house when the sky got dark and terribly still, with puffs of hot and cold winds alternating from different directions.

  Tornado weather could turn a beautiful spring day into a hellish orange color that led all the way west to the heart of the approaching storm, dark blue and gray, rolling and churning eastward. Lightning bolts zigzagged across the whole mass with a sound like a hundred runaway trains. At night the sky turned blacker than Egypt, and lightning sent fiery bolts slamming to earth, setting big trees afire with a roar like a cannon going off. The lightning struck houses, barns, wire fences, mules—anything that didn’t have a lightning rod attached. We lost two coon-hunting dogs chained to a wire fence this way when lightning hit.

  A tractor with its plow in the ground is a perfect lightning rod, and this proved fatal to my Big Creek fishing buddy Elmer Snyder. Elmer had more nerve than fear and thought he could squeeze out the last few rows of a cotton field before the rain started falling. He was on his last pass when the heavens opened and threw down a yellow bolt of electricity that hit midway between plow and tractor, melting the plow points, bending the frames, and blowing out the tires. God had called Elmer home.

  The Helm family knew all about life in Tornado Alley. One summer night, after a big July Fourth family dinner, all hell broke loose. My older sister Modena was in my father’s arms, huddled with my mother, my aunt Geneva, and my cousin Eddie behind our kitchen door. There was leftover pecan pie and fried chicken on the table when the house started shaking. My father was about to tell everyone to run for the ditch when the whole house cartwheeled over and over, ending up in the cotton field as the wood stove, furniture, dishes, and people crashed around in a mess of broken glass and debris. When the house stopped rolling, they climbed out a window and walked over to the neighbors, using the light from the flickering lightning to find their way. The neighbors tried to get them cleaned up, and J.D. always remembered how he couldn’t get a comb through his hair for all the pecan pie stuck in it. Mom remembered that one little jar of mustard was smeared all over everyone in a thin film of goo.

  After that we always had a storm house on our farm. A delta storm house was about six feet wide by eight feet long, dug into the ground to a depth of five feet. The roof was covered with planks and waterproofing, then mounded over with dirt and sown with Bermuda grass. Floorboards were laid above the seeping groundwater, and a vent out the top and a hand pump kept it dry and breathable. The door faced east, away from the weather. It was a dark, musty hole of a room, but with a tornado raging and a kerosene lantern hanging from the ceiling, it became a safe, bright, warm, and cozy place, friends and family crowded on low benches, the children asleep in the middle on piledup coats, protected from the wrath of the Almighty. The down side of these excursions to the storm house was walking home barefoot through the mud after the storm subsided. My mom was fussy about her clean home, and before I could slip between my cool cotton sheets, I’d have to pump a washpan full of water and wash my muddy feet. On bad nights in Tornado Alley, when we’d gone home before the storm had run its course, we’d be roused awake and led confused and stumbling back to the storm house. One night I had to wash my feet four times!

  [Sound of a dinner bell over an old forties radio]:

  “Clang! It’s King Biscuit Time, so pass the biscuits!”

  It’s high noon on our farm, any day of the year, and the radio’s tuned to KFFA, 1250 AM, for our daily dose of the blues.

  “King Biscuit Flour presents Sonny Boy Williamson and His King Biscuit Entertainers every day, Monday through Friday. Now friends, the King Biscuit Entertainers want to play your favorite song, so you can have a special request. Just write it down on a postcard or letter and mail it to King Biscuit Time, Post Office Box 409, Helena, Arkansas.”

  Then Sonny Boy would play his harmonica and let it fly. He was the king of the delta blues in our area, a friend and disciple of the late Robert Johnson, though Sonny Boy was older. (His passport gave his birth date as 1909, but 1899 and 1894 have also been suggested.) Sonny Boy had traveled with Johnson during Robert’s brief delta
stardom in the 1930s. They were regular performers on street corners and in the juke joints of Helena and Elaine, where Robert’s hit records like “Terraplane Blues” were well known, and passed through Marvell on the way to Helena. Robert lived there with a woman and her son.

  After Robert Johnson was killed in 1938—allegedly poisoned by a jealous husband—Sonny Boy teamed up with Robert’s stepson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, and kept Johnson’s music alive. Around 1941 they began regular broadcasts on the Interstate Grocery Company’s King Biscuit Time show on KFFA in Helena. Sonny Boy blew harp and Robert Jr. played electric guitar. It was the first time many delta residents—and that might have included Muddy Waters—had ever heard the instrument. Sonny Boy’s singing became so popular in Arkansas and his native Mississippi that the company put out a new product: Sonny Boy Cornmeal (still sold in the South). For a while the program was called The Sonny Boy Cornmeal and King Biscuit Show.

  “That was ‘West Memphis Blues,’” the announcer is saying. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a fact: To bake up delicious corn bread, you’ve got to have the freshest cornmeal. All good cooks know this. It’s a very simple job to turn out piping-hot corn bread dishes when you use famous Sonny Boy Meal. Just read the recipes on the back of any two-pound, five-pound, or ten-pound bag of Sonny Boy Meal and pick out the one you like; whether it’s corn muffins, corn sticks, hush puppies, or just plain skillet corn bread. So why not pick up a bag of Sonny Boy Meal and see all the delicious corn bread dishes you could bake up? And now, Sonny Boy is going to play ‘Crazy ’Bout You Baby.’”