Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  B.B. went on to play a much bigger circuit. Bobby Rush is still playing the old circuit that B.B. played back in the early fifties.

  Bobby Rush and one of his stage dancers get down.

  Bobby Rush wasn’t actually from Memphis, but he was a living embodiment of what Howlin’ Wolf and all those guys had lived in the 1950s. Filming Bobby was a chance to show the world that circuit and do it in present-tense terms. The film crew loved Bobby. We made an arrangement to hook up with his band and his bus, and we had no idea what we were gonna get. We’d just had a couple phone conversations. We arrived at this gas station in Mississippi, and we just piled on the bus, took off, and he started telling stories and introducing us to the band members. This was a relief after dealing with musicians who were insulated by managers and handlers. This was a guy on his own, running his own show, and he loved the idea of us being on the bus with him.

  It was a world I’d never before had any experience with. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky. Like a lot of kids, by thirteen, I was playing a guitar, learning blues from other white boys. Bobby Rush plays to black audiences by going town to town through the South—it’s actually wider now than just the South. He goes from club to club, and audiences love him; they come back every night he plays. He has a huge loyal fan base. It doesn’t have anything to do with the recording industry as it currently exists.

  At one point we met Bobby outside Jackson, Mississippi, to ride the bus together to Tunica, Mississippi. If we had taken the interstate, it would’ve taken us two hours, but we asked Bobby if it was okay to instead go up Highway 61, and he said sure, and it took us an extra six or seven hours. We arrived at the concert about five minutes before it was to begin. It represented no problem to Bobby whatsoever. He said 61 is the right road, the road we should take. If we’re late, they’ll still be there. We were on the bus for an hour or two, and we just looked at each other and thought, This is why we want to make this movie. This is great; it beats dealing with managers. We’re in the middle of the real thing. It was exciting.

  Personally, I can remember in 1963 as a college student setting off with a bunch of friends in an open convertible to Mexico, and we got stopped and given a ticket somewhere outside Bowling Green and ended up in the courthouse waiting to adjudicate this fine. In back of the courthouse was this jail, near where we were sitting for hours, and suddenly out of this jail window came this singing. I’ll never forget it: some inmate singing his heart out.

  I always loved the blues: Jimmy Reed, Howlin’ Wolf. I remember in the mid-sixties hearing Jimmy Reed play. So it was exciting to be asked to make this film. I remember we saw Jeff Scheftel’s film Sounds of Memphis and said, “Uh-oh. It’s already been made. What’re we gonna do that’s different than telling a history of Memphis?” That’s why we decided to try to keep everything as much in the present tense as possible. That’s why Bobby was so great. You felt you could go back and tell the history, and yet Bobby’s still living that today. And someone like Rosco Gordon coming back to Memphis for the W.C. Handy Awards—he was someone who’d been a star in the 1950s, then was a dry cleaner in New York for twenty years. To see the blues world through his eyes today: That was our attempt to try to tell this story in a different way than most historical films usually tell stories.

  With B.B. King, his story includes his becoming an American institution. Part of the problem is: How do you get inside? How do you see the man beyond the handlers, managers, beyond the 250 concerts a year? B.B. is a lovely human being who likes to please people. We really tried to get an inner voice from B.B., and it’s not easy, because B.B. has been asked the same questions for fifty years. Sometimes you remember telling the stories more than you remember the stories themselves. It was difficult breaking through to get to an inner B.B., but I think our persistence paid off.

  Rosco Gordon rehearsing for the W.C. Handy Awards in Memphis, 2002

  Another challenge was: How do you limit the story you’re going to tell? Ultimately, you can only tell so much. Blues music, in effect, really told the story of the early fifties, so that’s the period we focused on. The blues, in a way, is extraordinarily simple. What makes it complicated is the character and the life experiences of the person who is singing it.

  —Richard Pearce

  “I’ve been doing this forty-nine years: 250, 300 shows a year. I’ve been off work six weeks, I think, in forty-one years. That make me be either hungry, crazy, or in love with the music.”—Bobby Rush

  FURRY’S BLUES (1966)

  By Stanley Booth

  [From Rythm Oil, 1991]

  After the Civil War, many former slaves came in from the country, trying to find their families. There were only about four thousand Negroes in Memphis in 1860, but by 1870 there were fifteen thousand. Beale Street drew them, it has been said, “like a lodestone.”

  The music the country Negroes brought, with its thumping rhythms, unorthodox harmonies, and earthy lyrics, combined with the city musicians’ more polished techniques and regular forms to produce, as all the world knows, the Beale Street blues. Furry [Lewis] cannot remember when he first heard the blues, nor is he certain when he started trying to play them.

  “I was eight or nine, I believe,” he said, “when I got the idea I wanted to have me a guitar.” We were at the Bitter Lemon now, Furry, [his wife] Versie, [my pal] Charlie, and I, waiting for the crowd to arrive. The waitresses, pretty girls with long straight hair, were lighting candles on the small round tables. We sat in the shadows, drinking bourbon brought from the liquor store on the corner, listening to Furry talk about the old days.

  He was coatless, wearing a white shirt with a dark blue tie, and he was smoking a wood-tipped cigar. “I taken a cigar box, cut a hole in the top, and nailed a piece of two-by-four on there for a neck. Then I got some screen wire for the strings and I tacked them to the box and twisted them around some bent nails on the end of the two-by-four. I could turn the nails and tune the strings like that, you see. I fooled around with it, got so I could make notes, but just on the one string. Couldn’t make no chords. The first real guitar I had, Mr.

  Cham Fields—who owned a roadhouse, gambling house—and W.C. Handy gave it to me. They brought it out to my mother’s and I was so proud to get it, I cried for a week. Them days, children wasn’t like they are now.” His cigar had gone out; he relit it from the candle on our table, puffing great gray clouds of smoke. “It was a Martin and I kept it twenty years.”

  “What happened to it?” Charlie asked.

  “It died.”

  Furry put the candle down and leaned back in his chair. “When I was eighteen, nineteen years old,” he said, “I was good. And when I was twenty, I had my own band, and we could all play. Had a boy named Ham, played jug. Willie Polk played the fiddle and another boy, call him Shoefus, played the guitar, like I did. All of us North Memphis boys. We’d meet at my house and walk down Brinkley to Poplar and go up Poplar to Dunlap or maybe all the way down to Main. People would stop us on the street and say, ‘Do you know so-and-so?’ And we’d play it and they’d give us a little something. Sometimes we’d pick up fifteen or twenty dollars before we got to Beale. Wouldn’t take no streetcar. Long as you walked, you’s making money; but if you took the streetcar, you didn’t make nothing and you’d be out the nickel for the ride.”

  “That was Furry’s wild days,” Versie said. “Drinking, staying out all night. He’d still do that way, if I let him.”

  Furry smiled. “We used to leave maybe noon Saturday and not get back home till Monday night. All the places we played—Pee Wee’s, Big Grundy’s, Cham Field’s, B.B. Anderson’s—when they opened up, they took the keys and tied them to a rabbit’s neck, told him to run off to the woods, ‘cause they never meant to close.”

  I asked Furry whether he had done much traveling.

  “A right smart,” he said. “But that was later on, when I was working with Gus Cannon, the banjo player, and Will Shade. Beale Street was commencing to change then. Had to go look
ing for work.” He rolled his cigar ash off against the side of an ashtray. “In the good times, though, you could find anything you could name on Beale. Gambling, girls; you could buy a pint of moonshine for a dime, store-bought whiskey for a quarter. We’d go from place to place, making music, and everywhere we’d go, they’d be glad to see us. We’d play awhile and then somebody would pass the hat. We didn’t make too much, but we didn’t need much back then. In them days, you could get two loaves of bread for a nickel. And some nights, when the people from down on the river came up, we’d make a batch of money. The roustabouts from the steamboats, and Kate Adams, the Idlewild, the Viney Swing—I’ve taken trips on all them boats, played up the river to St. Louis, down to New Orleans—white and colored, they’d all come to Beale. Got along fine, too, just like we doing now. ‘Course, folks had they squabbles, like they will, you know. I saw two or three get killed.”

  There were enough squabbles to make Memphis the murder capital of the country. In the first decade of the century, 556 homicides occurred, most of them involving Negroes. Appeals for reform were taken seriously only by those who made them. When E.H. Crump ran for mayor on a reform ticket, W.C. Handy recorded the Beale Streeters’ reaction: “We don’t care what Mr. Crump don’t allow, we goin’ barrelhouse anyhow.”

  But as the self-righteous Crump machine gained power, the street slowly began to change. Each year the red-light district grew smaller; each year, there were fewer gambling houses, fewer saloons, fewer places for musicians to play.

  Then came the Depression. Local newspapers carried accounts of starving Negroes swarming over garbage dumps, even eating the clay from the river bluffs. Many people left town, but Furry stayed. “Nothing else to do,” he said. “The Depression wasn’t just in Memphis, it was all over the country. A lot of my friends left, didn’t know what they was goin’ to. The boy we called Ham, from our band, he left, and nobody ever knew what became of him. I did have a little job with the city and I stuck with that. I had been working with them off and on, when there wasn’t anyplace to play. They didn’t even have no trucks at that time. Just had mules to pull the garbage carts. Didn’t have no incinerator; used to take the garbage down to the end of High Street, across the railroad tracks, and burn it.”

  Before Beale Street could recover from the Depression, World War II brought hundreds of boys in uniform to Memphis; and, for their protection, Boss Crump closed the last of the saloons and whorehouses. It was the final blow.

  Furry sat staring at the end of his cigar. “Beale Street really went down,” he said after a moment. “You know, old folks say, it’s a long lane don’t have no end and a bad wind don’t never change. But one day, back when Hoover was president, I was driving my cart down Beale Street and I seen a rat, sitting on top of a garbage can, eating a onion, crying.”

  Furry has been working for the City of Memphis Sanitation Department, since 1923. Shortly after two o’clock each weekday morning, he gets out of bed, straps on his artificial leg, dresses, and makes a fresh pot of coffee, which he drinks while reading the Memphis Press-Scimitar. The newspaper arrives in the afternoon, but Furry does not open it until morning. Versie is still asleep and the paper is company for him as he sits in the kitchen under the harsh light of the ceiling bulb, drinking the hot, sweet coffee. He does not eat breakfast; when the coffee is gone, he leaves for work…

  Furry Lewis hanging out at his home in Memphis

  The cafes, taverns, laundries, shoe-repair shops, and liquor stores are all closed. The houses, under shading trees, seem drawn into themselves. At the Clayborn Temple A.M.E. Church, the stained-glass windows gleam, jewel-like against the mass of blackened stone. A woman wearing a maid’s uniform passes on the other side of the street. Furry says good morning and she says good morning, their voices patiently weary. Beside the Scola Brothers’ Grocery is a sycamore, its branches silhouetted against the white wall. Furry walks slowly, hunched forward, as if sleep were a weight on his shoulders. Hand-painted posters at the Vance Avenue Market: CHICKEN BACKS 12 1/2C LB.; HOG MAWS, 15C; RUMPS, 19C.

  Behind Bertha’s Beauty Nook, under a large, pale-leafed elm, there are twelve garbage cans and two carts. Furry lifts one of the cans on to a cart, rolls the cart out into the street, and, taking the wide broom from its slot, begins to sweep the gutter. A large woman with her head tied in a kerchief, wearing a purple wrapper and gold house slippers, passes by on the sidewalk. Furry tells her good morning and she nods hello.

  When he has swept back to Vance, Furry leaves the trash in a pile at the corner and pushes the cart, with its empty can, to Beale Street. The sky is gray. The stiff brass figure of W.C. Handy stands, one foot slightly forward, the bell of his horn pointing down, under the manicured trees of his deserted park. The gutter is thick with debris: empty wine bottles, torn racing forms from the West Memphis dog track, flattened cigarette packs, scraps of paper, and one small die, white with black spots, which Furry puts into his pocket. An old bus, on the back of which is written, in yellow paint, LET NOT YOUR HEART BE TROUBLE, rumbles past; it is full of cotton choppers: Their dark solemn faces peer out the grimy windows. The bottles clink at the end of Furry’s broom. In a room above the Club Handy, two men are standing at an open window looking down at the street. One of them is smoking, the glowing end of his cigarette can be seen in the darkness. On the door to the club, there is a handbill: BLUES SPECTACULAR, CITY AUDITORIUM: JIMMY REED, JOHN LEE HOOKER, HOWLIN’ WOLF…

  When Furry has cleaned the rest of the block, the garbage can is full and he goes back to Bertha’s for another. The other cart is gone and there is a black Buick parked at the curb. Furry wheels to the corner and picks up the mound of trash he left there, A city bus rolls past; the driver gives up a greeting honk and Furry waves. He crosses the street and begins sweeping in front of the Sanitary Bedding Company. A woman’s high-heeled shoe is lying in the sidewalk. Furry throws it into the can. “First one-legged woman I see, I’ll give her that,” he says and, for the first time that day, he smiles.

  At Butler, the next cross street, there is a row of large, old-fashioned houses set behind picket fences and broad, thickly leafed trees. The sky is pale blue now, with pink-edged clouds, and old men and women have come out to sit on the porches. Some speak to Furry, some do not. Cars are becoming more frequent along the street. Furry reaches out quickly with his broom to catch a windblown scrap of paper. When he gets to Calhoun, he swaps cans again and walks a block—past Tina’s Beauty Shop, a tavern called the Section Playhouse, and another named Soul Heaven—to Fourth Street. He places his cart at the corner and starts pushing the trash toward it.

  From a second-story window of a rooming-house covered with red brick-patterned tarpaper comes the sound of a blues harmonica. Two old men are sitting on the steps in front of the open door. Furry tells them good morning. “When you goin’ make another record?” one of them asks. “Record?” the other man, in a straw hat, says. “That’s right,” says the first one. “He makes them big-time records. Used to.”

  Furry dumps a load into the cart, then leans against it, wiping his face and the back of his neck with a blue bandanna handkerchief.

  Down the stairs and through the door (the old men on the steps leaning out of his way, for he does not slow down) comes the harmonica player. He stands in the middle of the sidewalk, eyes closed, head tilted to one side, the harmonica cupped in his hands. A man wearing dark glasses and carrying a white cane before him like a divining rod turns the corner, aims at the music, says cheerfully, “Get out the way! Get off the sidewalk!” and bumps into the harmonica player, who spins away, like a good quarterback, and goes on playing.

  Furry puts the bandanna in his pocket and moves on, walking behind the cart. Past Mrs. Kelly’s Homemade Hot Tamales stand, the air is filled with a strong odor. Over a shop door, a sign reads: FRESH FISH DAILY.

  Now the sky is a hot, empty blue, and cars line the curb from Butler to Vance. Furry sweeps around them. Across the street, at the housing project, children
are playing outside the great blocks of apartments. One little girl is lying face down on the grass, quite still. Furry watches her. She has not moved. Two dogs are barking nearby. One of them, a small black cocker spaniel, trots up to the little girl and sniffs at her head; she grabs its forelegs and together they roll over and over. Furry starts sweeping and does not stop or look up again until he has reached the corner. He piles the trash into the can and stands in the gutter, waiting for the light to change.

  For the morning, his work is done. He rolls the cart down Fourth, across Pontotoc and Linden, to his own block, where he parks it at the curb, between two cars. Then he heads across the street toward Rothschild’s grocery, to try to get some beer on credit.

  RECALLING BEALE STREET IN ITS GLORY

  By Will Shade of the Memphis Jug Band

  [As told to Paul Oliver, from Conversation with the Blues, 1965]

  Beale Street, Memphis: There used to be a red light district, so forth like that. Used to be wide open houses in them days. You could used to walk down the street in days of 1900 and like that and you could find a man wit’ throat cut y’ear to ear. Also you could find people lyin’ dead wit’ not their throat cut, money took and everything in their pockets … and thrown outside the house.