The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  I said, Man, when Hortense Hightower told me what she told me about suggesting me as a stopgap replacement when the Bossman Himself called and just happened to mention in passing that Shag Phillips had given notice, I couldn’t believe it. But she said, Don’t worry about it because he doesn’t go around looking for superstars. He makes his own. Not because it’s a game or some kind of challenge to prove anything about his ingenuity as some kind of mentor either. She said, He hires his musicians because he has decided that he wants to find out what he can do with something he’s heard them playing. And that is when she also said, Believe me when I tell you that the very fact that he remembered you as soon as I mentioned you is what counts, because that means that you did something that caught his ear—not necessarily something musically technical either, something that goes with something he’s got filed away in that steel-trap mind of his. You’ve heard about those big-time college profs talking about those legendary linguistic experts that can listen to half a sentence and tell you where you come from? Well, that’s him when it comes to music. And then she also said, One thing is for sure, you can’t find a better way to spend a summer after four solid no-letup years on a college campus down here in central Alabama than hitting all those towns all across the country with those guys in that outfit. You just wait.

  I said, Man, the thing about it is that I don’t remember ever really touching, let alone trying to fool around with, the bass fiddle before Hortense Hightower gave me that one in the spring of my junior year. Man, or any other instrument, except for the toy snare drum I once got for Christmas because I wanted Santa Claus to bring me one like the ones in the Mardi Gras parade bands that I used to imitate on a tin bucket during my preschool days—and come to think of it, there was also a time when some of us, in spite of the fact that our main interests were cowboys and baseball and boxing, used to make ukuleles out of wooden Cuban cigar boxes, but I don’t remember that as something that I still had very much interest in doing by the time I reached junior high school. By that time it was track and field events and the Boy Scouts.

  I said, Man, the one who took me through my rudimentary exercises on that present from Hortense Hightower was a sophomore string major and chapel orchestra cellist from St. Augustine, Florida, named Willis Tucker and called what else but Pluck Tucker because he also played the string bass in one of the campus dance bands, whose fingers were even more nimble than those of old Tricky Lou Cartwright, the fanciest bull fiddle thumper I ever heard during all the time I was growing up on the outskirts of Mobile. I said, Now I’m pretty sure that old Tricky Lou started out on the tuba like the one I first heard him tooting in Papa Gladstone’s marching band in the Mardi Gras parades long before I found out that old Papa Gladstone also had the number one (and sometimes also the number two) dance band in town.

  Then I said, Which reminds me that Tricky Lou sometimes also used to play the tuba in the dance band, because I can still remember him tooting what I used to call the circus elephant parade tuba part in old Jelly Roll Morton’s “Kansas City Stomp” when the dance band used to set up in the front rows of the grandstand at the baseball field and play a few numbers to advertise the eight-o’clock dance that would follow the game after supper that evening.

  I said, But man, old Pluck Tucker was strictly a string man. I said, He was in the freshman class that checked in for the fall term of the year that you cut out. So my guess is that he’s at least about a year younger than I am, so he just might have started out on a cigar box ukulele, the four strings of which you tuned from top to bottom by playing the right tones for “My Dog Has Fleas.”

  That was when Taft Edison said what he said about how popular Hawaiian and Latin American music became for a while back during the early days of radio when I was just getting up to junior high school level and he was on his way out of it. And he said that was probably also when Spanish guitars, which had been becoming more and more popular ever since the Spanish-American War back in 1898 (and the Panama Canal project), became more widely used in dance bands than banjos. And when I asked him if he had ever played around with any of the south of the border high-note fiesta trumpet stuff, which sometimes we also used to think of as being bullring trumpet stuff, and also peanut vendor trumpet stuff, he shook his head, chuckling to himself.

  Then he said, Man, well do I remember when young trumpet players around my hometown used to find that stuff just about irresistible. But man, some of the strictest musical teachers around my hometown were also the very ones who had been directors and instrumentalists in military bands down in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and in the cavalry on the Mexican border in the teens.

  I had never thought of him as having ever had any serious personal professional interest in dance bands as such. As far as I knew, none of the music school courses of study had anything whatsoever to do with becoming bandleaders and arrangers/ composers like the Bossman Himself. There was no school of music as such at Alabama State Teachers College in Montgomery, but if you were mainly interested in becoming a dance band musician, that was your best bet so far as college was concerned in those days.

  My impression of Taft Edison from the very outset was that his ambition was to create compositions based on down-home sacred and secular music, including workaday chants and hollers, that would be performed in concert halls by concert hall–type instrumental and vocal groups and philharmonic orchestras. Because when I arrived on the campus as a freshman that fall, he was a junior who impressed me more than anybody else in the School of Music because he was the student who conducted the school’s widely popular college marching band when it took its place in the grandstand in Alumni Bowl to play for the cheerleaders during football games, and he also was the one who supervised the tune-up before the faculty bandmaster took over to direct the concerts in the bandstand on the promenade lawn across which the weather-green copper tower of the chime clock faced the rust red dome and the white Doric antebellum columns and eaves of the brick red dining hall, in the basement of which the student social center was located in those days.

  I can still remember how special the musical insignia on his nattily tailored ROTC cadet uniform looked compared with the plainness of those worn by most other cadets who were infantry privates without cadet NCO stripes or the Sam Browne belts and rank insignia that cadet officers used to wear. So he was obviously a very outstanding student musician.

  But although there were also two student-led dance bands on the campus at that time, I can’t remember having ever seen him playing with either of them. Not that I ever got the impression that he disliked or had no interest in that kind of music, or that his attitude was one of condescension, as was the case of many conservatory-oriented students at the time. Not at all. Because when you saw him at seasonal and fraternity and sorority socials and at benefit dances, he was not only very much in circulation, as we used to say, but was also always up-to-date on all the latest steps. And also when he stopped by the Mainstem Lounge, where you used to listen to the late-night radio broadcasts from such then famous nightspots as the Savoy Ballroom and the Cotton Club in Harlem and the Grand Terrace on the South Side of Chicago in those days, he could identify as many bands and sidemen as instantaneously as any of the dance band musicians, record collectors, and patent-leather avenue sharpies as happened to be there at the time.

  So when I told him what I told him about my stopgap gig with the band, I didn’t know what his response would be, but I did so because I had decided that I had better mention it myself rather than running the risk of having him find about it just incidentally somehow and wonder why I hadn’t mentioned it on my own and why I hadn’t yet said anything at all about ever having played any musical instrument, not even in junior high school. Not that I thought that he would think I was trying to impress him; however, I felt I was in an awkward position either way. And also what if he already knew about it?

  But as I should have remembered from his completely unsurprised and ever so casual response when I i
ntroduced myself to him on Fifth Avenue that day, he didn’t register any surprise at all. Not to avoid any embarrassing questions about my qualifications but because he also seemed to know almost as much about how the Bossman Himself picked musicians as Hortense Hightower did. Anyway, all he said was that he hadn’t heard the band during the period between Shag Phillips and Scratchy McFatrick.

  But, he said, I do remember hearing something about some college boy filling in for a while. So that was you! Which just goes to show you. If whoever it was that I heard it from had mentioned the name of the college boy’s school, I probably would have asked you if you happened to know him when we met that day down in the Forties. I must say that must have been something. Man, as definite as I was about moving out of music as a profession by that time, I myself would have had a hard time turning down the chance to hit the trail with that fabulous crew of thugs for a while. Man, I can just imagine it. Man, when I woke up every morning and realized why I was wherever I was I would have had to pinch myself.

  I didn’t say anything about me crossing my fingers, because then he changed the subject to what he had been planning to talk about when he called me the night before and invited me to come by that afternoon, and that was when he said what he said about how much talk about political issues, movements, organizations, involvements, and affiliations you heard among the people in the academic and literary circles he had begun to move into shortly after he decided to settle in New York for at least a while instead of going back down to the campus for his senior year.

  Look, man, he went on to say, I don’t know how politically active you are, or what your political affiliations, if any, may happen to be, but I was wondering about how much of that sort of thing you might have run into by now. Because, man, one of the first things that struck me about this town when I arrived and first started making the rounds was all the political recruitment I was forever running into. Somebody was forever trying to get me to join some political group or other, all of them calling themselves either liberal, left-wing, or downright radical if not outright revolutionary.

  Man, you’d see some very fly fay chippie and catch her eye or the sparkle that she’s aiming at you and you move in on her or she might move in on you and take her to your place or perhaps more often to hers, and the next morning you’d find out what the game is. She was the one that had you in her sights as soon as you hit the scene. Not because of all that ever ready automatically syncopated action she says you inherited from your stud horse male ancestors she was thanking you all night for laying on her. Man, all of that hair-trigger ecstatic response is subject to be the standard prelude to a bunch of political pamphlets that she’s going to lay on you. And if she doesn’t quiz you about them on the next tête-à-tête she’s definitely going to check you out on the third. Then if you become a recruit she might keep you in her stable for a while before passing you on to somebody closer to the inner circle.

  SOP, man, he said, chuckling again. Standard operating procedure. Standing revolutionary recruitment procedure for the ostracized minorities! Man, you’ve got to watch that stuff, or you’ll be well on you way to becoming a statistic on somebody’s revolutionary agenda. Man, that stuff used to be downright evangelical. But of course I don’t have to tell you that most down-home cats drop those pamphlets in the first trash can they came to en route to the subway. Man, you know as well as I do that what them down-home boots were out for was not some abstract political program but some unsegregated easily accessible living and breathing hot-to-trot body action for free, or at least for not more than a drink or two.

  He said, Man, a few jive artists might have tried to fake and cross talk their way through some of that stuff if reading it was what you had to do to get to the sack in the first place. But my guess is that not many were likely to work their way through that kind of stuff to get back to the sack for a second go-round. Because all they were out for was a one-night pickup in the first place. Man, as far as they were concerned, it was not a matter of how many times with the same chicks but how many chicks.

  But on the other hand, though, as you also know, there were and are also some splibs who figure that they have to read that stuff to prove that their formal education qualifies them to move in such exclusive, articulate and up-to-date company as they assume their present company represents—just in case there’s any question of basic intellectual eligibility. Hey, don’t play me cheap, Miss Lady Blueblood playgirl. Some of us may be from across the tracks, but here’s one who can dig this dialectic jive, too! Now, man, that’s a sitting duck.

  Which brings me around to why I’ve been meaning to get around to this topic in the first place: so here comes old Taft Woodrow Edison with his high grade-point average flashing like stop-look-and-listen at an express crossing. Not to mention three years of college earned through meritorious scholarship! So what does he on whom little in the weekly, monthly, and quarterly journals and critical reviews in the periodicals room of the campus library was lost—man, what does he do with those evangelical pamphlets? He reads them! Man, he reads them to satisfy his endemic Oklahoma suspicion that they are not worth reading. They are not worth the cornbread paper they are printed on. And then does he dump them in the nearest garbage drop? Absolutely not! Because he’s made so many marginal notes that he wants to argue about that he calls up his recruiter for another date! And man, that call led me into some stuff that is a part of what I’m still trying to come to terms with on my own as a writer.

  Then he said, Of course when I think back on it now I see it as something that turned out to be a sort of catalytic agent. Or let’s put it this way: I would not be going about this thing of being a writer in the way I’m going about it as of now if that encounter hadn’t turned out to be one of those encounters.

  That was why it was on the same afternoon that I told him about my time on the road with the band that I also told him what I told him about what happened when my roommate and I read André Malraux’s Man’s Fate during my sophomore year. I said, Man, the first thing I ever really heard about what that kind of recruitment was like was what my roommate told me about what he had already found out about the movement (meaning the underground movement) in Chicago by the time he finished junior high school. Before that the only kind of political recruitment I can remember hearing about was labor unionism, mainly the longshoremen’s union strikes and picket lines and scabs down on the Mobile, Alabama, waterfront, where Uncle Jerome worked for the United Fruit Company. Man, what my roommate told me about the movement in Chicago made it all sound like joining a very strict church whose members were always on the lookout for transgressors.

  I said, Incidentally, we also read Malraux’s The Conquerors, but he had transferred before I read Man’s Hope, and I didn’t get around to Karl Marx until my senior year, and by that time not only did dialectic materialism sound as much like the gospel as something you were reading in a political bible, but man, that was also when I realized that all political systems were run by politicians, just as all religions were run by preachers and preachers and deacons elected or self-designated.

  I said, Man, when I was a senior in high school, what I was mainly concerned with was getting to college. I said, Man, my preoccupation was not with changing the world. Man, I was still trying to find out what all this stuff was all about. And what I was eligible for. I said, Man, in the third grade there was geography along with all of those maps and the globe and the bulletin board windows on the world and peoples of many lands.

  I said, Then when I got to senior high school and started spending more and more time in the library I discovered world history and anthropology. And that was when I began to realize that I was going to have to be a schoolboy for some time to come. So man, I guess that’s where whatever immunity to political recruitment I’ve developed began. I said, Anyway, by the time I was halfway through college I was too wrapped up in doing what I was doing on my own to be recruited for any political movement. I said, Man, none of that theoretical
stuff I was also reading in those current political journals in the periodicals room added up to the magic keys I was looking for (mentioning Miss Lexine Metcalf, who said some golden, some silver, some platinum, and maybe some of some as yet undiscovered alloy. But not mentioning Jewel Templeton, who said some sharp, some flat, and some natural).

  Then I said, But to answer your question, as yet I haven’t run into the kind of recruitment you’re talking about. Not since I’ve been here and not anywhere on the road with the band. Not even in Hollywood. I said, Man, now that you bring up the subject, come to think of it, I don’t remember anybody in the band ever bringing up the subject of political recruitment at all. Maybe they thought that being a college boy I was already hip to all of that theoretical jive. But none of the fans I got to know in any of our stopping places ever asked me very much about anything except myself and my relationship to the band.

  But I didn’t go on to mention anything about people like the Marquis de Chaumienne and Jewel Templeton, and that was when he said what he said about down-home church folks and hypocrisy. There was all that Sunday church meeting singing and shouting and amen corner moaning and clapping. And for those who wished to express a more comprehensive devotion, there were midweek prayer meetings with hymn singing. But as often as not, when things came down to the nuts-and-bolts actualities of everyday goings-on and the situation added up to put up or shut up, you couldn’t tell a spoonful of difference between the most righteous church members and just plain old everyday looking-out-for-number-one folks. So man, you get my point about the folks. Down home it’s religious hypocrisy. Up here it’s political hypocrisy, which just might turn out to be a very crucial saving grace indeed, given the political temper of the times.