Sam Myers, The Blues is my Story

by Jeff Horton

  let me hold it. I said, “I sure would like to be able to blow like you’re blowing, one day.”

  I never will forget, she said, “If you come tomorrow, I’ll let you

  play this horn. It’s a school horn; I’ll bring my own horn and we’ll blow along together. But you can’t blow too loud because you don’t

  know the song.” I went back to the dormitory, and that stayed in my

  head the whole time. I couldn’t wait until the next day came. Jonas

  Brown told the headmaster, “Well, music is what he likes. He likes the band.” J. B. came to me that night and said, “What you’ve got to do, if you want to play in the band, you’ve got to learn something else to go along with that. So whatever they tell you to do about your books and your lessons, you’ve got to do it. Then you’ll be all right.” I said, “I will.

  I’ll do that.” He said, “It’s not enough just to play in the band, you’ve got to learn your other lessons and let it stay with you.” I started getting my lessons real good after that. This was a test to see what I really enjoyed in school, and it was the music. But I had to get my other

  things together before I could really do what I wanted to do.

  Anna Mae brought the horn the next day and do you know,

  instead of just learning, I found that it was a gift that I had, to be in music. She showed me how to focus my lips on the mouthpiece; she

  showed me how to make the different keys and notes and how to

  shape my fingers. They started playing a song called “White Heat.”

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  I messed up that one. The next one was called “Symphony C.” It had a big-band sound and I almost got that one. Mr. McGilvery said, “Well, what are we going to do next?” I hollered out, “ ‘ The Stars and Stripes Forever’!” and I thought to myself, “Oh, my goodness, I messed up.”

  They all looked and said, “Oh yeah, we can do that.” They thought I

  was just saying something, that I was just going to listen. Then, somehow, when they started, “Da-da-da, da-da-da, da-da-da,” I was playing that on the trumpet, and they all tricked me. Everybody looked right at me, but they started playing quiet. I was being heard by all of them, and after I played that part down, they all came up with a big, strong rhythm and played their parts, and then they started laughing. I said to myself, “Oh, they’re laughing at me.” Mr. McGilvery walked over to me and tapped me on the shoulder and said, “My dear boy, you did

  good.” And from then on I got in the swing with the rest of them. And I thank that girl, Anna Mae Williams, wherever she is, right today, for me to be able to do that. She was a real good friend. That part of my schooling was where I really learnt the scales of music, listening to it by ear since I couldn’t read the notes on the sheet music.

  We used to hear a lot of radio there at the school. Jonas Brown

  had a radio that we would listen to. Jackson had one radio station we would listen to in the evenings. It was called WJDX. They had a show called In the Groove. Woodie Assaf used to broadcast that show every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday at 5:15. And then they had another

  one that would come on Tuesdays and Thursdays called Jive Parade, done by a guy called Alan B. Keaton. We would listen to this on J. B.’s radio just before we went to supper in the evenings. We couldn’t wait to hear all these old standards. Jonas Brown would take another student, Andrew Oliver, and me to Jackson to buy records. They had a big record store on Farish Street called Hardwell and Cook’s. We would

  go and get records for twenty-five cents back then, 45s and 78s. They didn’t have the 331/3s, the long-play albums, yet.

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  We would get a lot of those records and come back and listen to

  them, even during the daytime between our classes. I was blowing

  trumpet pretty good by then, I thought, and I went and got a har-

  monica, one of the plastic ones. I would listen to some of the music by John Lee Williamson, who was the original Sonny Boy Williamson.

  And the Big Three Trio, Calvin Boze, T-Bone Walker, Louis Jordan, all that music, we’d listen to it. I would take a harmonica, and with what I already knew about music at the time, I would try to find the key that that song was in. I’d find a harp with that key, and I would try to blow along with the songs. It took a long time. I’d collected a lot of them, because I would just go and buy a bunch of them and try to find a key for a particular song. So that worked for a while, and that’s how I happen to blow the harmonica today.

  Piney Woods was just like it says, Piney Woods Country Life

  School. You didn’t have to be a special ed person to attend there. Some people looked at it as being like a prison, and I heard a lot of parents tell their kids, “All right, if you keep doing this or that, I’m going to send you to Piney Woods.” Well, that’s disgusting. It wasn’t like that at all. Piney Woods was a school of higher learning. The reason I say that was because during those times a lot of public schools had their trials and tribulations and kids were going to school and really not learning nothing, just like today’s kids.

  At the time when I started, Piney Woods was also a place that

  housed people who were blind. They didn’t get no state funding or

  nothing. The gentleman who founded the school, Dr. Laurence C.

  Jones, he would go and make speeches for Piney Woods projects.

  That’s what they were supported on. It was more like a boarding

  school instead of a state school. And where I fit in, being visually impaired, that’s what was happening at Piney Woods before the state

  took over the school for the blind. Now they have the workshops at

  the Mississippi Industries for the Blind in Jackson for the people

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  who are visually impaired. Back during that time a lot of handicapped people would be on the streets shaking a cup as I would call it,

  what panhandlers do today. I get pretty angry when I see people

  do that.

  Piney Woods always has been integrated. You had white, you had

  the Jewish, you had gentiles, you had Mexicans. In Piney Woods,

  they had everybody. It wasn’t a white and black thing, and it wasn’t a Mexican and a Jewish thing. Everybody was declared as one. But here’s what a lot of people put a blanket over Piney Woods about. You went

  there to school, you did your studies, and the boys didn’t mingle with the girls like a lot of schools let do. The girls had their social gatherings, and the boys had theirs. They had what were called matrons who did their job as they were supposed to have done, and it’s the only

  school that I know of where there wasn’t any babies born like you have in a lot of schools today. You pick up your paper or you turn on your TV and watch your six o’clock news, and you see where some girl at a school, it sounds sick, but she had a little boy or girl and stuffed it in the trashcan. You didn’t see that there at Piney Woods. My mother’s

  cousin, Ella Pearl Gant, was a matron of girls at Piney Woods for many years. She’s buried right there at the school’s cemetery, over by where Dr. Jones and his wife are buried.

  They had a few teachers who said, “I’m doing this just because

  it’s a job.” But it was tough to find a job back then, and you had more people of differing nationalities to compete with. If you are a graduate of Piney Woods and you had it in your résumé or if you just

  mentioned the name “Piney Woods,” you got a job. It was a school

  of higher learning that was recognized in music, like the schools of music at Berklee and Juilliard and North Texas State and the American Conservatory in Chicago. When you went to hear the commencement

  exercise, you would see the girls in their blue skirts and white blouses and the guys in their khaki suits with black ties and shined shoes, like

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  the military. The athletic director, he had been in the military; his name was Lieutenant Colonel Payne.

  All the kids, they loved him because he wasn’t one of those

  instructors who was there just because it was a job. He would play

  and have fun with the kids. He’d be thinking about stuff he did in the military. He may call the guys out about four o’clock in the afternoon, between classes and dinner, and have them marching, or he might

  have all 250 boys lined up in front of the dormitory, counting, saying the numbers, like “One,” and the next guy, “Two,” and then “Three,”

  and the next guy “Four,” on like that, sounding off. He’d walk up and one might be standing there like he didn’t want to be bothered, and

  he’d say to him, “What’re you doing, looking all sour for?” He may

  grab him and whirl him around the shoulders and kick him in his

  behind, and they’d do the same thing to him. They’d all jump and

  grab him and do the same thing. He was happy most when they’d do

  that. Like a guy’d be standing up, talking to a girl, and he’d walk up and, he ate ice cream all the time, he’d have an ice cream cone in his hand, and he’d walk up and just stand there and say, “You wonder why I’m standing here? Well, you know, trouble me.” And then they’d all

  just grab him, take their belts and whip him, and just kick him.

  And do you know, that Mister Tough Guy, the kids knew what he

  was about. He was crazy about the kids. He’d always be playing and

  going on with them, and then, they knew when he meant business

  as an instructor. He boxed and wrestled with the kids, and some of

  them was just as good as he was at that sort of thing. That was just his lifestyle. I don’t know whether he’s living now or not. Last I heard, he had married a girl from Kosciusko named Anna Bee Foster, and they

  moved to Memphis. They had separated and he was operating a shoe-

  shine stand in Memphis, the last I heard.

  Colonel Payne showed us how to go through a belt line. The way

  he had it set up, he had about eight or ten guys, standing and have

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  belts, and they send you through the belt line, but if a man hit you more than once, they pulled his behind out of the line, and they’d

  have fifteen guys to give him a belt lashing. Boy, he was a tough guy.

  And that’s why, when I went to Chicago, besides music, that’s what

  gave me the idea of taking defense training for myself. I used to work out at the Joe Louis Gym, doing all this judo and all these different fancy handholds and stuff. Not that I’ve ever had to use it in any kind of way, but it’s better to know it and not need it than to need it and not have it.

  I had a bunch of sweethearts when I was coming up at Piney

  Woods. Even though music was my main thing at Piney Woods, I was

  playing football, trying to prove to a girl that I was a hero. She wound up marrying some guy that was studying to be a cement mason. I did

  all right through practice, then when we got out on the field for the first game, I like to got my neck broke. When the guy tackled me, they fell down on my behind. I was a running back. Boy, oh, boy, I was supposed to be pretty fast, but I was slow that day.

  During the summer some of the band would travel all across the

  country as an all-girls orchestra, as part of their education. I was the only guy in the group, there to help out with things. We were traveling to Washington State, and while we were in Oregon, there was a guy who shot at a deer. It was up in the mountains, and just as he cracked that rifle, the bus went by. The girls was getting ready for bed, and he shot this girl, Willie Christine Jackson. Shot her in the leg. That man had a Jeep. That’s the way they hunt out in Oregon, they have those Jeeps in the woods. I was sitting up in the cab with the driver, George Bishop.

  It was one of those big rigs, pulling a trailer bus, and them girls was crying, hollering, and going on, and that man know he had shot somebody, but he didn’t know who it was. He must have known that moun-

  tain road, because he came by us, and when we got down the mountain

  he was there waiting, he had blockaded the road with his Jeep.

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  The first thing he did, he opened up the trailer wanting to know

  who it was that he shot. And the girl who got shot kept trying to get ready for bed, she didn’t even know she was shot herself, and boy, that was a sad time for all of us. He told us he was going to contact her parents and let them know who he was and said whatever it would cost,

  he would take care of her hospital and medical bills. He told us what hospital to take her to, and better yet, he would lead us there. And boy, the girls was crying and going on and wondering was she going to live.

  But she just got shot in the leg. The bullet didn’t stop and went all the way through. It would have broke her bones if it had lodged, but it was the soft part of the flesh where it went in. After we got to the hospital he said, “I want her to be able to walk just as good or better than she did before this happened.” Whatever she wanted while she was in the

  hospital, she didn’t have nothing to worry about.

  He was some kind of owner of a chemical company or maybe a

  mill that did redwood and timber. He must have been a wealthy man,

  because he paid for every day that she was in the hospital. He always stayed in touch and made sure that the girls who was traveling with

  us and the bus driver knew how she was doing. And when we saw her

  again, it was about two weeks after school was set back in. She came back to school and everybody was glad to see her. She was telling us all how she missed us. Could you imagine, if you were a little person, about a hundred pounds and all these people were hugging you and

  going on, so glad to see you? I said, “Well, heck, this is the first time y’all have ever been this close together when you wasn’t on stage.” Boy, they ruled me out then!

  My first great love was Anna Mae Williams. She was my dear

  sweetheart. She was older than me, but I had a crush on her then, and when we could get the drop on the teacher, we would be together like a hot date. Her parents lived in Jackson and she finished Piney Woods and started working at the Smith Robertson School in Jackson. Now

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  it’s a museum for a lot of historic people, but back then it was the first school for black students in Jackson. After I had been to Chicago and all around there and overseas I came back to Jackson. I used to live on Davis Street and she was up the street from me. And boy, when I heard she had gotten married and moved to Gary, Indiana, I said, “Now

  what can you say? She should have been my wife.” But, heck, I wasn’t into getting married or nothing like that then. But I had a crush on her from day one. I haven’t heard from her now in quite a while.

  But she had taught me something. If it hadn’t been for her, I never

  would have been a trumpet player. In 2002 we played the Medgar

  Evers Homecoming for Charles Evers down in Mississippi, and I

  looked high and low for that girl. I hadn’t seen her in about forty-five years or longer. I liked her because she was real tall and pretty. But I wound up being a bachelor, and I’ve been one ever since. Course, I’ve had my share of shacking up with women, though. That was just the

  way it was for me.

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  C H A P T E R 4

  GOING TO CHICAGO

  The lure of playing music soon called to Sam from the big city of Chicago, as it had called to so many black musicians from Mississippi.

  But by 1951, when Sam was ready to move north to attend the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, the scene had
changed, and new opportunities abounded for the postwar generation of southern

  blacks. Unlike his elder relatives, Sam wasn’t looking for work to escape from the plantations and mills of the Deep South. Instead he planned to further his music education in two ways: by studying in the classroom and by going to school in the clubs and on the rough streets of the South Side.

  Sam learned his chops from watching legends of Maxwell Street like Buddy Guy, Howlin’ Wolf, Muddy Waters, Little Walter, Wayne Bennett, and a man who remains to this day a great friend of Sam’s, Robert Lockwood, Jr. Sam soon matured to the point where he was sitting in with local bands. And then in 1952, he met a man who would loom large in his life for the next ten years. That man was Elmore James.

  When I left Mississippi for Chicago I was about fifteen. I had finished my studies at Piney Woods and considered myself to be one of the

  blessed in my time and area, to have received a scholarship to attend

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  the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago. That’s where I met a

  lot of the musicians who are heroic to a lot of the newcomers of today.

  I lived with a cousin of mine first off, but you know how young-

  sters are, you want to get out and be making your own money and get

  your own place, and that’s what I did. I was a music major, so while I attended school there, I went through a lot of instruments that I had dealt with at Piney Woods. For me, it was just a brush-up on them. I played piano and trombone a little bit, but drums and trumpet was

  my main influences in music. I played the drums for a while, and then trumpet too, and took the other two instruments along as a general

  music thing. It worked out pretty good for a while, and then I just