by Levon Helm
Mary Cavette remembers us from those days, the early 1950s: “Lavon and Linda were unusual, and everyone loved them. They were blond, they were cute, and they were immaculate. Lavon was Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, with a Marvell Junior High letter sweater, slicked-down hair, all starched and ironed. Their momma, Nell, would use Faultless starch on Lavon’s blue jeans and hang them on the line till they could stand alone. Then she’d press ’em with a flat iron, and they stayed stiff. Linda was always smiling and would wear a crisp dress. They were exciting because Lavon had the natural ability to get everyone in the room going to his rhythm. It was like magic, that incredible talent. After ten seconds he had everyone clapping in time, and by the end of the song everyone’d be smiling and laughing. That was Lavon and Linda: personable, polite, good-looking, always well received.”
When I was fourteen my daddy took me back to Mr. Gist’s music store in Helena to get a real guitar. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the streets were packed with people in from the farms, migrants, and local people. Phillips County used to be the tenth most populous county in Arkansas, and you’d see all kinds of folks. When most people think of the Mississippi Delta, they think in terms of black and white, Anglo-Saxon and African-American. But it wasn’t completely like that. From its earliest days the area around Helena was more like a melting pot. Chinese families had grocery stores, Jewish families were in the cotton business, Lebanese people kept stores. Mexican farmhands meant you always heard Spanish. The delta was positively multicultural. Morris Gist’s music store was one of the places where all the various cultures met. Mr. Gist supplied instruments to several generations of musicians, maintained the jukeboxes in our area, and was then involved in distributing records cut by a hot young Memphis disc jockey on WDIA named B. B. King. Mr. Gist was also Sonny Boy Williamson’s landlord.
Daddy and I went up to the counter, greeted Mr. Gist, and I heard J.D. say, “Morris, we’d like to see the Martin guitar there for my boy Lavon.”
That was the day my credit history began. I got to take that nice little Martin home on a layaway plan. It was three-quarter size and all brown, and I just about slept with the thing. There was no stopping Lavon & Linda after that. When I was beginning high school we won the Phillips County Fair talent show, performing “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.” Then we won at the Arkansas Livestock Exposition in Little Rock, which gave us a shot at the big Mid-South Fair in Memphis, where we somehow managed to win again.
I wish you could have heard that audience whoop it up that night in Memphis when the judges made their announcement. Words can’t express how proud my sister and I felt.
I think it was at one of these shows that we met the man who first put us on the road. I remember seeing J.D. talking to a well-dressed man, whom he introduced as Bob Evans. Of course I’d heard of him by reputation. Mr. Evans was a cotton farmer and buyer who had been a big-band singer with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. He was a sophisticated guy; probably the only person in Helena who had actually been to New York. Being an entertainer and knowledgeable in the music business, Bob would usually be the one to hire local talent like us to represent Arkansas at various events such as beauty pageants or political campaigns. (He eventually served as the director of the Arkansas Publicity and Parks Commission.)
“You kids don’t know how lucky you are,” Diamond told us after a show one night. “Mr. Evans thinks you’re great. He wants you to be part of the Bob Evans world!”
Bob managed a couple of novelty acts—people who pantomimed to records in crazy costumes, a pretty girl who could sing—and a circuit he booked in Arkansas and Louisiana. So Lavon & Linda found ourselves appearing at Miss Arkansas pageants and the Miss Louisiana contest, and campaigning for Democratic politicians Bob Evans supported. Here’s the scene: afternoon barbecue in West Helena on a Saturday afternoon in the fall of ’54. Linda and I do a couple of songs and get a real nice hand. Then Bob Evans announces that Orval Faubus, running for governor of Arkansas, is going to say a few words. After we’d done a few of these with Mr. Faubus, I began to listen to what he said. He was calling for hot lunches in the schools, raising taxes to support better education, better care for the handicapped and the retarded, and an end to crooked elections. Well, he won the election and did all those things he said he would. I can attest to those hot lunches, and the rest is history. You could look it up.
We made a little money (which is how I probably got the down payment for that Martin) and got a lot of experience playing shows all over our delta area.
Our early career coincided with the birth of rock and roll. We literally watched it happen in our part of the country. Traditionally, white people played country music, and black people played the blues. But in the thirties white musicians like my dad began to sing the blues with a twang, and it became something else with a different bump to it. That was the seed. Then in the late forties and early fifties Muddy Waters came out with the first electric R&B band and a string of R&B hits—“She Loves Me,” “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” “Got My Mojo Working”—that appealed to black and white people alike where we lived. Over at KFFA, the radio people noticed that telephone requests for Sonny Boy Williamson were as likely to come from the ladies at the white beauty parlor as from the black.
Cut to the chase: 1954 and seventy miles north in Memphis, where Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records and Sun Studios, is looking for a white boy who can sing and move like a Negro. Within the space of two years, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis had all recorded at Sun Studios, and a new era began. It was country music, all right, but it had that good black backbeat in there as well.
I’m pretty sure it was late 1954 when we first saw Elvis perform. Since he was from Memphis, we felt he was one of us. Everything stopped when his early record of “That’s All Right Mama” came over the radio. He’d appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show by then, and we’d all heard that audience screaming and shrieking when Elvis started to move to the rhythm with those suggestive, rubbery dances of his. Just the excitement of him coming to Helena was almost too much for some of our young ladies to bear.
I think Bob Evans took us to the Catholic Club in Helena to see Elvis’s show. It was just Elvis, Scotty Moore on guitar, and Bill Black on stand-up “doghouse” bass. No drums. There was a law that said you couldn’t have a drummer in a place where drinks were served. Well, it was just a madhouse. Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and his band were also on the show, and they were great, but when the kids saw Elvis they went crazy. The girls were jumping up and down and squealing at Elvis in his pink jacket and jet-black hair, and he was wiggling and dancing during Scotty Moore’s electric guitar solos, played with thumb and finger on the bass strings while his other fingers picked the melody with lots of echo and reverb. It was fantastic, early rockabilly, always circling and real bouncy, with an almost jazz feel to it. The kids around us were screaming so loud it was hard to focus on what the musicians were doing; all I remember is they were rockin’ down. It was hot. It was crackin’. Bill Black was playing the downbeat on the pull of a bass string, then double-slapping the strings against the fretboard to hit the backbeat. At a break in the music he’d spin the bass and Elvis would kick out his leg as he delivered the punch line of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” I remember Scotty’s grin as he helped Bill bring the song back in while my own feet were tapping the deck with a life of their own. Elvis was absolutely great. The only thing wrong was that it was over too early.
“Jesus,” Bob Evans remarked on the way out. “Those boys could get really big, you know that?”
Elvis came back a few months later, much changed. I think this must have been early 1955. We drove over to Marianna, Arkansas, where he was playing the high-school auditorium. Only this time Bill Black was playing an electric bass and D. J. Fontana was on drums. Boy, D.J. just about knocked the lights out. People wanted to dance, but they were sort of chained to thei
r chairs, so they jumped up, rocked a few beats, sat back down, and stamped their feet.
This was about the best band I’d heard up to that time. D. J. Fontana planted those drums down and started stacking verses against one another with his fills, building up to the solos, riding the solos in and riding them out again. He had incredible technique and fast hands, so he could deploy those Buddy Rich press rolls whenever he wanted to. He played like a big-band drummer—full throttle. Now Elvis had a real foundation, some architecture, and he made the most of it. D.J. set Elvis free.
At the same time, that electric bass changed the whole rhythm section. Those two electric instruments really nailed that music down. Up till then, when Scotty wanted to bend his guitar strings to make them cry, the whole bottom fell out of the music. But with that electric bass carrying the load, Scotty could reach up and fill the gap during the solos. The effect was devastating, the birth of rock and roll. The other reason the electric bass caught on pretty quickly was that you didn’t have to tie that doghouse bass to the top of the Cadillac anymore. And suddenly your bass player wasn’t a cripple from trying to play that damn stand-up!
Later in 1955 Elvis left Sun Records to sign with RCA. Our opportunities to see him locally diminished as his growing fame took him farther afield. But there was no shortage of great bands to fill the gap. On any weekend you might have your pick of Jerry Lee’s band, Billy Riley, or our own Phillips County hero Harold Jenkins, before he was known under his stage name: Conway Twitty.
I met him for the first time in 1956 when I ran a grocery store in Midway for a friend named Mary Phipps, who became ill and let me manage the place while she recuperated. At the time, the Interstate Grocery Company was helping us renovate the store with a new counter and register, and after I painted the interior they hired our best local band, Harold Jenkins and the Rock Housers, to play for our grand opening. We set up microphones and speakers on the store’s front porch, and everyone in our area came by. Lavon & Linda opened with a couple of our songs. Then the Rock Housers played some rockabilly. They had a terrific guitar player, Jimmy Ray Paulman, whom everyone called Luke. Soon people were dancing, and our grand opening was judged a big success.
For me the best part came afterward, when I went over to thank the musicians for coming. “Son, I like what you’re doing,” Mr. Jenkins said, referring to our little opening number. “Why don’t you come by some night and sit in with us for a tune?”
I told him he could count on it.
Diamond was more than supportive of Lavon & Linda’s career, but as we got a little older Momma was less and less sure about the propriety of her younger daughter appearing in public with her bare leg hitched onto an upside-down washtub. One night after we’d performed, Momma told me, “Lavon, honey, your little sister is retiring from show business.” When my mother had a certain tone in her voice, you just didn’t argue with her, and I knew I was on my own.
But I didn’t mind that much, because I had a secret weapon: Thurlow Brown.
Thurlow was a cotton farmer and guitar player from down near Elaine. He was maybe ten, twelve years older than me. Thurlow was short of stature but so tough he could whip any man around. And take my word for it: He was the best electric-guitar player we had, an incredible musician. Whistle a tune to Thurlow, and he’d play it back in harmonies for you. Play it once, and he’d know it by heart forever. He was the first guitarist I knew who could run up the neck and hit all those bar chords and augmented and diminished chords. He could have been famous, but he didn’t like leaving his farm, so he never broke out of our area. But he backed up me and Linda on some of our contest victories, and by the time our mom made Linda quit, I was just about ready to see if Thurlow might form a little rock and roll band with me.
I went to see Thurlow about this possibility sometime in 1957, when I was a junior. My friend Fireball Carter and I drove down to see him, listening to “Great Balls of Fire” and Bo Diddley rap out the words to “Who Do You Love” on the car radio.
I drummed on the steering wheel to that unbelievable Bo Diddley jungle beat as we tried to find Thurlow’s hangout, Virgil’s Store, set behind a couple of levees in the southern part of the county. Virgil’s was a place where the regular rules just didn’t apply. You could always find a game of chance or ladies of the night if you wanted, and if moonshine interested you, step right up.
We got to Virgil’s, and Thurlow Brown was there, all right. He had his guitar plugged in, and he was playing along with the jukebox, one of his favorite pastimes. I had my guitar, and I asked him about Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” a current hit that I liked a lot. Thurlow played that intro lick perfectly; he had that augmented chord just from hearing it once or twice on the radio. I came in with the first line, and he played the answer line on his old Fender Broadcaster—solid body, no levers, no gears; just tone and volume knobs and that beautiful sound.
We got together with our two guitars, a kid from Marvell named Jennings Strother, who had a stand-up bass with a pickup and an amplifier, and a drummer we found at the high school. We called ourselves the Jungle Bush Beaters and proceeded to raise a little hell around Marvell and environs. It wasn’t much, but we played loud and had a hell of a lot of energy.
Thurlow was different from you and me. He was the only person I knew in Arkansas who owned a monkey. He’d ordered it by mail, and it arrived one day down at the Missouri Pacific Railroad depot on Missouri Street in Helena. Thurlow liked to bring the monkey over to the pool hall in Marvell so they could drink beer together. After two or three, one or both of ’em might get mad, and they’d have a fistfight. That should give you an idea what Thurlow was like. Another time he was called to the depot because he’d ordered a huge South American python, and it had arrived in a broken box. No one wanted to even touch that crate. Thurlow collected his snake and became quite close to it. He liked to visit the taverns with the snake wrapped around him, under his jacket, and introduce people to it. Surprised a lot of folks with his reptile, Thurlow did.
The Jungle Bush Beaters were a fairly typical high-school band, except that Thurlow could really play. We played Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry songs wherever we could, but didn’t work that much because you were supposed to be eighteen to play local joints like the Delta Supper Club in West Helena, or the Rebel Club in Osceola, or the Silver Moon in Newport, Arkansas.
In 1957 the rock and roll craze was at its explosive peak. In January we all watched Elvis sing “Don’t Be Cruel” on The Ed Sullivan Show. They let him be seen only from the waist up, but it changed America anyway. Elvis was tame compared to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, who had come up to Memphis from Louisiana as a piano player and emerged a rock and roll star. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that snare drum on “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” Jerry Lee’s drummer, Jimmy Van Eaton, had taped a cigar box to the top of the snare; he carried the backbeat and played his fills right on the cigar box without any metallic overring. That was Memphis tuning. If you tuned down that snare, you could play it loud without sounding like someone dropping a damn stove. It sounded so good, it made me want to start playing drums.
I was riding in a truck with Mutt Cagle and Fireball Carter the first time I heard Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’” on the radio. I almost drove off the road to Turkey Scratch because I was beating on the steering wheel so hard. That rhythm knocked me flat, and still does. The Jungle Bush Beaters were major Little Richard fans, and we had to learn all his hits—“Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Ready Teddy,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “Lucille,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’”—because we got so many requests for them.
The most serious and conscientious member of my boyhood gang was Fireball. Tall and lanky, very strong, his task throughout high school was to try keeping me and Mutt out of trouble; not easy because my attitude at the time was: The goofier and funnier it is, the happier everybody’ll be. At all costs, let’s laugh. At all costs. If we’d d
riven up to Memphis to hear some music on Beale Street, Fireball would be the one to say that we’d better hit the road or we’d miss the last ferry across the river to Helena and be stranded in Mississippi with the mosquitoes all night. Sensible.
Ed came by his nickname via the gridiron. We’d been playing football together since junior high, when there weren’t enough cleats to go around, and they let little slotbacks like me run barefoot. In high school we played under the lights, usually in front of two whole towns. The entire population would turn out, seven or eight thousand people at a night game. The Marvell Mustangs’ bitter rivals included Elaine, Barton, the West Helena B-team, and Marianna, which had a Chinese quarterback named Fong who nearly bit off my thumb in a game one time.
One night we were playing the Hughes High Blue Devils. They had a hell of a good team, but we held ’em off pretty good. When it came time for them to punt, Ed Carter broke up the middle, and the punter kicked the ball right into Ed’s head. This knocked Ed down, but we recovered the ball and maybe even scored. Their punter, that old boy, said to Ed, “You’re gonna get your damn head kicked off!”
We were on this kid like dogs on meat.
“What the fuck do yew care? Do your goddamn job and shut your mouth! Mind your own fuckin’ business!”
Then we had a fistfight with ’em.
After the game Coach Leon Sharpe looked at Ed Carter in the locker room and said, “Son, you were a fireball out there today. Never seen anything like it in my life.”
That’s how Fireball got his name. Everybody forgot his real name. We’d cut school to meet willing young ladies down on the levee, and we’d make Ed come with us. He’d be off with his girl, kissing behind a bush, and we’d hear her yell, “Fireball! Where the hell do you think you’re goin’ with that hand of yours?” We be laughing so hard we couldn’t stop.
We had a nice school and some good teachers in Marvell, but my mind was usually elsewhere. I wanted to play music, and that’s it. It didn’t matter whether I was in class or driving a stinking tractor in one-hundred-degree heat after school let out in May. I knew that playing for people was a lot healthier than inhaling gasoline fumes to get high after a brutal day in the sun.
