This Wheel's on Fire

by Levon Helm

  “Thank you very much, my man,” Sonny Boy says. “This one is going out for Miz Pearly Mae and her husband. That’s down on Franklin Street, yassir!”

  And they’d tear it up, raw country blues, while we sat listening to the radio at dinnertime.

  Sometimes Sonny Boy and the band played in Marvell on Saturday afternoons. They’d set up on the loading dock behind the depot. It had a tin roof that created a good band-shell type of sound. Their old school bus had KING BISCUIT TIME written on it, and the logo with Sonny Boy sitting on a corncob, playing the harp. The first thing you noticed about Sonny Boy was his size: This was a big man. He’d lay out a tarpaulin on the ground and set his mike on it. Then he’d open the back door of the bus, and there’d be an upright piano. (Mutt Cagle and I would watch this carefully from a respectful distance, ever mindful of Sonny Boy’s notorious reputation as one tough son of a bitch.) His drummer, James “Peck” Curtis, would set up his cymbals, a big wooden snare, and a wooden bass drum hand-lettered KING BISCUIT TIME/KING BISCUIT ENTERTAINERS/J. P. CURTIS/KFFA/MONDAY THRU FRIDAY. Sonny Boy and the guitar player would set up some amplifiers and microphones, just plug in, and have a show and street dance. They knew all the big hits of the day, like “Eyesight to the Blind,” “Do It If You Want To,” and “Mighty Long Time.” They played what they knew their audience wanted to hear.

  Sonny Boy in person was a powerful, extremely impressive man, in overalls and a straw hat. His huge mouth had calloused lips from years of playing the harp. When I first saw him, I noticed he sang into his harmonica. Sonny Boy’s voice passed through the metal harp and came out sharpened like a straight razor before it hit the microphone, giving the song an extra metallic jolt of energy. I remember the feel of that music vividly. It had a twang to it, a whip, punching straight ahead. Sonny Boy overpowered you with his amplified open-air country R&B.

  When I was a little older, maybe ten or eleven, I’d make it my business to catch a ride on a farm truck into Helena whenever I could. First stop was Habib’s Cafe, where I’d buy three doughnuts for a dime. Then I’d run down Cherry Street to the KFFA studio, where they knew me as a young entertainer from 4-H Club shows. They’d let me sit in the corner and watch the King Biscuit boys do their show. Robert Jr. Lockwood might stop in, or Memphis Slim, or Robert Nighthawk, all from our area. I didn’t bother them, so I got to sit in that studio quite a few times. I’d try not to stare at Peck Curtis, but it was hard because he was a hell of a drummer. Between numbers, while the announcer was selling cornmeal, I’d watch Sonny Boy run the band in a raspy, low voice. “‘Stormy Monday’ in C,” he’d say. Peck or the guitar player couldn’t quite hear what he said, so Sonny Boy would whisper hoarsely, “C, goddamn it! I said play it in C, motherfucker!” (You just didn’t want to mess with Sonny Boy.) Or he’d call a tune but change the tempo at the last second as the commercial was ending: “‘Come Go With Me,’ in the same beat, same key—no, we’ll do it in eight; do an eight.” The band would scramble to adjust as the announcer turned the mike back over to Sonny Boy, who’d in turn pitch that evening’s show in nearby Clarksdale, Mississippi, before crashing into “Come Go With Me”—as a rhumba.

  Boy, that was about as good as it got. I’d be buzzing all the way home to Turkey Scratch after one of those sessions. Sonny Boy Williamson—our local musical hero.

  I was nine years old in 1949. That was the year I got my first guitar and started farming with my dad.

  The land was our legacy. Most of my father’s generation spent a good part of their lives building levees just to keep the high water off us so we could farm. Most of the farm houses we lived in were raised up on stilts. My dad started me on the tractor that spring. I’d been riding with him for years, and now I got to drive it. We started in April, turned the fields over with the breaking plow, and then got on top of it again with a disk. Some years, if your soil demanded it, you went back and disked it over again into fine-tilled soil. Just before planting, you’d work the ground with a section harrow, a flat, metal-toothed rake that furrowed the ground, smoothed it, and broke up any clods of dirt. Clouds of birds whirled overhead and around the tractor, searching for worms and insects in the freshly plowed earth. Eventually you’d have big fields of fine delta soil in rows about four inches high.

  Then we’d hitch a cotton planter to the tractor. It had a wheel that cut into the dirt and a spout that dropped the right amount of seed. The wheel rolled on an angle and pushed the dirt back on top of the cottonseed. You planted two rows at a time, and you needed to be done by the end of April, weather permitting, because the summer heat would follow you right into the shade. If your cotton was up by the middle of May, you wouldn’t have to be out in the field replanting on a tractor when it was 110 degrees.

  We cultivated and chopped the cotton all summer. You went in with a hoe and thinned the crop from one solid row of plants to a lot of little mounds with maybe two stalks each, six to eight inches apart. Got the grass out of it, blocked out those extra plants; backbreaking work. We worked one row at a time with ten to fifteen choppers in a field.

  You had to water those folks and keep ’em hydrated, or they’d all just drop. My first job on the farm was waterboy, but I wanted to hang with my dad and all that machinery, those tractors: Ford, John Deere, Allis-Chalmers. Dad would buy ’em through the bank. Each farmer had a connection with the John Deere distributor. By the time I was nine, I’d rode so many rounds I could cultivate on my own.

  The cotton blooms into big yellow and purple blossoms in June. By the end of July you want to be “laid by.” That means all your cultivating is done. When the cotton loses its bloom, it’s left with a boll, which grows all summer and starts to pop open in September, bursting into four locks of snow-white cotton. Now it’s September, early October, and time to pick the cotton. The work was too much for the local people, so we’d hire Mexicans to help chop the cotton. There were always three or four big farmers who’d be farming 1,500, 2,000 acres of land—big sections of 640 acres each. They’d get together and hire a Texas contractor to bring up a load of workers, maybe sixty to eighty people. We’d go through one of the big farmers and subcontract a crew of laborers. They’d be with us for three or four weeks chopping and picking, then go pick cherries in Michigan. One of my first jobs off the farm was working at Vic Thompson’s grocery store in Marvell on Saturdays. I had to learn a little Spanish so I could help the Mexican customers with eggs, butter, and milk. They all wore their standard white shirts and big white hats, and a few of them were funny as hell. I liked ’em because they were just so interesting.

  All of us—black people, white people, Mexicans—worked together in the fields. Our family worked side by side with the Tillmans, black neighbors who were important members of our little farm community. Our families were so close that Sam Tillman gave me a spanking when I needed it. My mother might cook dinner for as many as six or eight people working in the fields. If we had a truckload of Mexicans, Dad would round them up and take ’em to the grocery store or bring in bread, cheese, sandwich meat, some cold Pepsi-Colas, and maybe some apples. Then he’d gas up the tractor while we found some shade in the tree brakes. The older I got, the more I enjoyed those shade trees.

  All this old-fashioned agriculture has vanished, of course. My youth in Arkansas was really the last of it. In the 1950s field hands were replaced by the big mechanical cotton pickers and choppers they came out with. That whole world of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, field hands and waterboys, is ancient history now. It exists only in the long memories of those of us who lived it.

  For a kid like me, looking to have fun and raise a little hell on a cotton farm, resources were somewhat limited. You had to work with what you had. For my purposes, this proved to be my daddy’s AllisChalmers tractor. I’d take that old three-wheeler with the disk cutter on the back of it, put it in high gear, and had a hell of a lot of fun running tractor wheelies across a cotton field. That disk brought the tractor’s front end up in the air, so if you po
pped your clutch just right you could run for acres out there on two wheels.

  High gear, wide open. You’d see that drainage ditch coming, so you picked up that disk nice and smooth. The side of the drainage ditch was the closest thing we had to a hill, and you’d hit it with that front end and force it in the air, bounce it up, run twenty yards on the back wheels. It couldn’t turn over because the disk was there.

  I’d stand up during these stunts, just to make my dad crazy. I’d be coming around the corner, about to hit that turn row on two wheels, and I’d see J.D. jumping and waving by the gas tank, trying to get me to stop. Wide open: Hit the clutch, hit one of the brakes, and start skipping up to that gas tank where old J.D. is having a fit, and at the last moment flop that disk. Fooomp! All stop.

  Bad things could happen too. You could hit that turn row and catch the axle of your disk on a fence post—there wasn’t much margin for errors of judgment—and find yourself heading into the thicket with your chains dragging so you couldn’t pick up the disk. If you weren’t careful, the chain could hook onto your back wheels, and you had an accident, Bubba. Throw that section harrow right on top of that tractor. In our area, a lot of people got hurt or killed outright in those days.

  We were pretty fortunate in our section, because we had only one accident that I can remember. It was a late, wet spring, before I was old enough to work. The tractors had lights on them by then so they could work at night when it was cooler. One night they were refueling at the tank, a fire started, and one of the tractor drivers burned his leg pretty bad. There was a downside to farming, like anything. It was damn hard work. The tractors didn’t have umbrellas when I started, so we were out in the broiling sun. As soon as school let out, my dad made me get out there every day. I hit the fields in the morning and didn’t come in until late in the afternoon. There it is. A country childhood isn’t all running around barefoot and trips to Big Creek.

  A few years later, when my dad was buying Allis-Chalmers equipment from the Helena dealership owned by my friend Eddie McCarty’s dad, I started to drive for Allis in tractor contests. Eddie’s dad would put out a WD for me, a big tractor circa 1945. Hand brakes, hand clutch, left-foot plunge; good tractor. The WD45 had a single wheel in front, and you’d turn that thing, hit your brake, and you could spin it right around. By the time I was a teenager, I was one of the tractor-driving champions of Arkansas.

  Thank God you didn’t have to pick cotton until September. My folks insisted I get an education, so we had an understanding that as long as I stayed in school, my dad wouldn’t keep me home to work in the fields.

  In September 1949 I started a new school. All the little country classrooms had been consolidated, so in fourth grade we were bused to Marvell to go to school out there with forty in a class. This was too scary, since I’d already been put off the bus for fighting with some of those kids. To us Marvell was the big town, and there were some real tough guys. Mutt Cagle and I had to stand back-to-back a couple of times and just fight ’em off. But there I met my lifelong friend Edward “Fireball” Carter, with whom I got into all sorts of trouble over the next nine years. You have to pity the poor souls who tried to teach us through high school, because if any two people didn’t know the answer, it was me and Ed.

  Ask Mary Cavette if you don’t believe me.

  She was a year ahead of us in school and remembers me well. Call her up; she lives in Tennessee.

  “Oh, my word, was he a big tease,” she’ll say. “Lavon lived to pull jokes. He’d tease the girls until they’d cry. He was the worst! It was his whole life if he could pull a joke on you. He loved it. He’d get everyone involved, and everyone knew about it except you. Lavon was so good at it. He’d laugh and laugh, and you got so mad at him, but then he’d always come and hug you, and it would be all over.

  “He was always in the back of the school bus, fidgeting and drumming on things, playing the Jew’s harp, or beating pencils on his books. This continued in the classroom, and he was always being reprimanded because he laughed all the time. He loved the sound of people laughing. It was infectious; Lavon would laugh, and the whole class would start. You couldn’t help it. He’d get tickled, and everybody’d get tickled.

  “Well, Lavon quickly became the center of things. Wherever he was, that’s where the crowd would gather. Lavon may have been a big tease, but he was also very kind and would let you laugh at him too. I remember one May when we were kids, it rained all month. The water came up, and the Helms’ farm was isolated. Diamond got a boat, and they all stayed over at our house for a week. When the rain stopped, everything was clear and beautiful, and the flooded fields between our farms had become a temporary lake.

  “Lavon wanted to take me and my sisters out in the boat, and Momma said, ‘You kids aren’t going out in that!’ But when no one was looking, Lavon got the boat and took his sister Linda and me and my two sisters for a cruise. My little sister had cerebral palsy, so just getting in the boat took a lot of doing. Lavon had a paddle, which he somehow lost in the middle of this huge lake. The wind started to ripple the blue water, so it looked very deep. My little sister started crying because she was scared. Lavon’s maybe ten years old and can’t swim real well. ‘Don’t worry, sister,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna swim for help.’ Lavon looked at the expanse of water and gulped. He rolled up his pants and said, ‘If anything happens to me, just tell Momma that I died tryin’ to save y’all.’

  “Well, he jumped in, and the water came to his knees. He towed us home, and we’re still laughing about it.”

  * * *

  By the end of October we had picked our cotton, so we all had a little money. On Saturday afternoons we’d go into Marvell for the movie matinee at the Capitol Theater, next to the pool hall. We’d watch Zorro, Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, Lash La Rue, Hopalong Cassidy, whatever they had. I always sat in the front row and stayed through all the shows, until 11:00 P.M. (“That’s true,” Mary Cavette agrees. “Nell would have to go into the theater and get Lavon so we could go home.”)

  Marvell had two drugstores, Anderson’s and Ford’s, and two department stores, Hirsch Company and Davidson’s. The Rawley Salve man parked between them. He had a little panel truck with RAWLEY’S SALVE painted on the side. It was an ointment you could put on cuts, bruises, anything. People bought a lot of his tonics, cure-alls that came in little bottles. For all we knew, it was mostly alcohol and nearly pure morphine. Back then it could’ve had damn near anything in it. It damn sure made you feel better, though, and he did a lot of business, I know that. He’d diagnose you and prescribe right on the street.

  There was a darn good guitar player named Ralph DeJohnette, who played at the pool hall with Bubba Stewart on drums (the first time I ever saw a drummer use brushes) and some of the local boys. They were real good, and inspired me to ask my daddy for a guitar. He went over to Morris Gist’s music store in Helena, bought me an inexpensive Silvertone, and began to teach me a few chords and runs. It was my good fortune that Ralph DeJohnette happened to be our RFD mailman, because the Silvertone wouldn’t stay in tune. I used to meet Ralphie at the mailbox up on the hard road every day so he could retune my guitar. I’d hope it would stay in tune till Ralph came by next day with the mail.

  That’s how I started out. I was nine years old when I knew I wasn’t meant to be a cotton farmer.

  Like many farm families, we were dependent on the elements for our survival, and some years we had better luck than others.

  I’ll never forget one summer night when I was maybe ten. The whole family was at a ball game I was playing in when someone came and told us our farmhouse was on fire. We all piled into our pickup truck. Diamond was driving fast, and the truck was so full I was sitting on Mary Cavette’s lap. We rounded that old turn in the road and saw our house had burned completely down. There was nothing left. I started to cry with relief when I saw my dog Cinder running around. I couldn’t help it. (“That was the only time I ever saw Lavon cry,” Mary remembers.) Anyway, Diamond mov
ed us into Gotze’s store nearby, which was empty because the owners had moved away. We put in a kitchen and lived there until we got another house built up. This was the first of several trials by fire I’ve had in my life.

  In 1950 I won first place in our school’s talent contest with my hambone act, slapping my hands against my legs and rapping out “Little Body Rinktum Ti-mee-oh.” This routine came right from home and the family musicales around the supper table at the end of the day. I had my little guitar, J.D. had a mandolin, and everyone sang. When I was about twelve I made my sister Linda a string bass out of a washtub, a broomstick, and some cord. Right from the start Linda could really hold a bass line, and I slapped my thighs, played harmonica and Jew’s harp, and we both sang old songs we’d learned at home and new songs from the hit parade. Soon we started winning junior-high contests and county-fair talent shows. After a while I started playing my guitar, and soon “Lavon & Linda,” as we billed ourselves, started getting attention on the local music circuit. Between 1952 and 1955 Linda and I probably entertained every Kiwanis Club, Farm Bureau, Lions Club, Rotary Club, Future Farmers of America, and 4-H Club meeting in Phillips County. She’d sing “Dance With Me Henry,” and I’d do “No Help Wanted” or something by Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters.

  It was the Arkansas 4-H circuit that really helped us take off. Just about all the farm kids I knew were in the 4-H Club because it was the way country kids got to travel around. We’d raise livestock (I grew and shucked my own corn to feed to my projects) and take them to shows and fairs and get to meet other kids like ourselves. I’d usually bring a steer or a hog that I’d raised, and enter the tractor-driving contest and the talent show with my sister. By the time I was maybe thirteen we had our names painted on Linda’s tub, and we almost always won. One of the rewards from this was the chance to attend the 4-H summer camps in some of Arkansas’s cooler hill country.