Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Joe needed a ride, as usual, and asked if I wanted to go along. Well, I’d begun to have doubts and trepidations about taking these field trips with Joe, because once outside Chicago my friends and I were pretty much at his mercy, and you could get into some strange situations with the guy. But St. Louis was new territory for me, and I knew there were supposed to be some famous old bluesmen living down there, so I said okay. I called up another pal of mine, George Mitchell, and asked him to join us. George was a college student, originally from Atlanta, and had once worked at the record store [where Joe lived]. He wore those Kingston Trio-type button-down shirts and had a real neat Ivy League haircut. He really dug blues, and while in his teens had gotten to know many artists in the South. He got along well with older black people, and especially well with Big Joe, so I thought he’d be an ideal guy to have along.

  The drive to St. Louis was real nice. Wonderful, in fact. Joe talked to George and me about things from thirty years ago as though they’d happened that morning. He reminisced about Robert Johnson and Willie McTell and Blind Boy Fuller, he told how Sunnyland Slim had helped Muddy Waters get a record contract, and explained how Big Bill [Broonzy] had gotten rich. Being with Joe was being with a history of the blues—you could see him as a man and you could see him as a legend. He couldn’t read a word of English and he couldn’t write a word, but he had America memorized. He was a wise man in so many ways—from forty years of hiking roads and riding rails he was wise to every highway and byway and roadbed in the country, and wise to every city and country and township they led to. Joe was part of a rare and vanished breed—he was a wanderer and a hobo and a blues singer, and he was an awesome man.

  It was nightfall when we got to St. Louis. It was a Fourth of July weekend and it was hot… I couldn’t imagine what the days would be like. The first place we stopped was the home of joe’s sister, or sister-in-law, or stepsister, or something. When we walked in, there were little kids sleeping on every available surface, so we all sat down in the kitchen and Joe said to his relative, “Now, you know I play the guitar, and this boy Michael do too, so we’ll play some while we visit.” He brought out his guitar and, with it, a bottle of schnapps. I took George aside and said, “Man, we better not let this guy start drinking. It’s a long weekend, and if he starts now his brains’ll fly right out the window—we’ll have a lunatic on our hands the whole time!” But Joe was set on drinking, and when he said, “Michael, why don’t you have a little taste?” I went ahead and put some down. I figured if Joe was going to get drunk and go crazy, I was going to get drunk and be crazy right along with him. So I drank as much gin and schnapps and beer and wine as I could get in me that night, and I sat with Joe and played the blues. And man, I got sick. For the first time in my life I got king-hill, shit-faced, tore-up drunk. I puked all over that house. I puked in the kitchen, I puked in the hall, I puked on the sofa, and I puked on the wall. I was just rolling in puke—I was sick, sick, sick.

  I woke up on a bed the next morning to find Joe standing over me. He had stayed up all night drinking and he was more than drunk—he was on a bender. His nostrils were flared and his eyes were red and runny. A barbeque fork was in his hand and on it was a pig nose, and hot grease from the nose was dripping on my chest. He opened his mouth and his schnapps breath hit me in a wave. “Snoots, snoots,” he shouted, “I promised you fine barbeque, an’ snoots is what we got!” My head was throbbing and my stomach still queasy, and when I looked up and saw this horribly fat and greasy pig nose an inch from my face, I lurched out of bed and threw up again. Joe began to curse me. “Man, you done puked all the damn night and into the mornin’ an’ now you pukin’ up again! Can’t you hold that stomach down?!” And I slunk out of the house with George, who wasn’t on top of the world himself, to try to find something to settle my stomach. Joe stood roaring at us as we left. “Where do you think you is, you home in Chicago now? You ain’t home in Chicago now, an’ those niggers out there’ll kill ya!” But my head and stomach were already killing me, so I took my chances on the street. And it was the funkiest street I’d ever seen… But we found a drugstore with no trouble and got some aspirin and bicarbonate and Coca-Cola, and they seemed to help a little, but they sure didn’t help a lot.

  When George and I got back to the house, Joe was on the porch with his relatives and their friends, strumming his guitar. And he was crazy. Every woman who came by he clawed at, and every man who passed he argued with. If there was a woman in the street he’d shout, “Say sweet mama—come on over sweet mama, an’ set down your daddy’s knee!” And she’d look around and see a seventy-year-old, three-hundred-pound man yelling at her, and she’d get a funny look on her face and keep on walking, maybe a little faster than before. Finally, I said, “Joe, I thought we came down here to do some scouting and find us some singers. Let’s do it!” But Joe just said, “Now, don’t you rush me—it’s the Fourth of July and I want to spend some time with my people!”

  But his people got put out by his rowdy behavior, and an older woman, a church woman, finally threw him away. “You can’t act this way around here,” she said. “Just where do you think you is? You nothing but a damn crazy animal what ought to be in a cage! Now, why don’t you up an’ leave an’ let us right folks be?!”

  PHOTOGRAPHER PETER AMFT

  ON CHICAGO BLUESMEN

  I knew Big Joe Williams when he was sleeping in his car—a beat-up vintage Buick Terraplane. The guy I worked for, Joel Harlib, was Michael Bloom-field’s manager and also managed the Fickle Pickle; he got the idea to make Wednesday nights “blues night,” and he let Bloomfield run that as a very enthusiastic and hyper MC. Michael was the house guitarist, and he would feature Big Joe, who would sleep in the club’s basement after the gig. I photographed Big Joe for the poster for the show.

  When B.B. King first played The Tonight Show—around 1969—Johnny Carson was talking to him, and B.B. said, “You all wouldn’t know about me if it wasn’t for a white boy in Chicago named Michael Bloomfield.” One day, Michael wanted me to go with him to Maxwell Street so that he could buy a little leather bag with a black cat bone in it. Back then, supposedly, on Maxwell Street you could buy those little charms, like a John the Conqueror root. Then we went to see Muddy at his auntie’s house. We went into the kitchen and there was this big pot of steaming red beans and rice—it was really sweltering in there. Mike goes over and grabs Muddy’s Telecaster. Muddy was sitting very regal-like there in his undershirt. He’d just had his hair unconked and he had this long black waterfall of glistening pompadour, and he looked like an Egyptian prince, muscular and wearing a pencil-thin mustache. He had a Benevolent Highness look to him. He looked at Mike, and blang, Mike breaks the big E string, and Muddy just smiles. They were friends. Mike was a liaison between the white and black worlds.

  So much wouldn’t have happened without Chess Records, too. But when the blues musicians made records, they didn’t make much money from them. They made them in small numbers, and by the skin of their teeth. When Bruce Iglauer started Alligator Records, he put out Hound Dog Taylor’s very first release. Bruce had been working for Delmark as a shipping clerk because he loved the music. He’d come down from Wisconsin, and he loved Hound Dog, but Bob Koester, who owned Delmark Records, wasn’t interested in recording Hound Dog. When one of Bruce’s aunts died and left him five thousand bucks, Bruce said, “I’ll record him myself.” Around ‘71, Bruce asked me to shoot that first Hound Dog Taylor jacket cover. Hound Dog was born with six fingers on each hand, but one night at Theresa’s nightclub, he was drunk and he was like, “That thing is getting caught in the strings!” So he cut the sixth finger off his right hand with a razor blade and damn near bled to death. When I met him, he was very shy and didn’t want me to do a photograph of his six fingers, but I told him I wouldn’t publish it till he died. Now, all these years later, it’s on a T-shirt with his hand in the background, and over it, it says,

  WHEN I DIE, THEY’LL SAY HE COULDN’T PLAY SHIT, BUT HE SURE MADE
IT SOUND GOOD!

  Hound Dog Taylor, 1971

  BUDDY GUY ARRIVES IN CHICAGO

  [From Portrait of the Blues, by Paul Trynka, 1996]

  When I was a kid I would listen to the music on the radio station, Rambling Records, out of Memphis, Tennessee, and they’d be playing John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, and early Howlin’ Wolf—and it seemed like all of that stuff was coming out of Chicago. It seemed like there was nowhere else you could go if you wanted to play music.

  I was a sharecropper’s son in Louisiana, and those were bad days. We couldn’t afford any air conditioning or anything like that, but my mother had a screen on one door to keep the insects out, and that’s what I made my guitar strings out of. I’d take a kerosene can, nail a stick in and stretch the wires across there. You couldn’t finger it, but I’d just bang away on it. Now my daddy and his friends would see me play this thing and they’d say to themselves, Well, if that boy had a guitar, I’m sure he would learn to play. Then when I was about sixteen my daddy saw a relative who sold him a guitar that only had two strings on it, for around a couple of dollars…

  After that I would play with a lot of guys who would come to Louisiana, Lazy Lester, Slim Harpo, and some more, but I knew I had to do something better. So I explained to my mom and dad, I’m gonna take off and go to Chicago. Seems to me it’s better there.

  So I took off on the train, and when I got off the train I just had my guitar and two suits of clothes. I didn’t know anybody there. So I would walk around, didn’t have nothing to eat, and stayed hungry into my third day, so hungry I was about to cry when … this stranger came up to me and said, “You got a guitar there—can you play that thing?” I said yeah, and he said, “Well, if you play me a song we’ll get some drinking done.” I said, “If you buy me a hamburger or something to eat I’ll play all night for you.” And he said, “I don’t buy no food, man—I don’t know where you from but we’re just gonna drink now!”

  So I tote my bag and I’m trying not to cry, and I knew my mother was going to worry if she knew what shape I was in. But I’d seen those old Western movies and thought, Well, if I take this drink of whiskey at least I’ll have some strength, something to keep me going for another day. So I took the first drink of whiskey I ever had, and man, my eyes flipped around four or five times, and every song I ever knew, and some I didn’t, I could play. So we’re at this man’s house, and we’s just jammin’, and this guy says, “Jesus Christ, man, we got to go where someone can hear us.” So we walked to this club about four or five blocks away. This particular night was Otis Rush night, and evidently this guy knew Otis. Now, the guy who owned the club was in to pick up the take, and on his way out I played him “The Things I Used to Do” by Guitar Slim, and this guy turned around and said to the manager, “Whoever that guy is, hire him.” So the manager says, “You can come in Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday—have you got a band?” I said, “Sure,” I was that desperate to play. I had to go back the next night and say to the manager, “Look, I’m just new from Louisiana, and I ain’t got a band.” He told me, “We’ll get a band, you just be here,” and he came over with Fred Below, a drummer. I didn’t have a bass player or nothing.

  Then the second night I was playing there I looks out in the audience, and there is Muddy Waters, and Little Walter, and I thought, Oh Jesus, what am I going to do now? But I knew I had to do something good, ‘cause now that I’d seen these guys, I was never going to go back to Louisiana.

  THE GIFT BY PAUL OSCHER

  [From The Gift, forthcoming by Paul Oscher]

  When I was a kid in Brooklyn in the late fifties, I worked in a grocery store. I would hang around after school, waiting to make a delivery. My uncle had given me a Marine Band harmonica, and one day, outside the store, I was trying to play “Red River Valley” from the directions that came with the harmonica. Jimmy Johnson worked in the store as a stockboy. He wasn’t a boy—he was about twenty-eight years old, a stocky, dark-skinned man from Georgia with a processed hairdo. I was twelve. He said to me, “Let me see that whistle you got, son.” I said, “It’s a harmonica.” He took the harp from me and tried to play it. Not much was coming out. He was jiving, making believe he couldn’t play. Then he turned the harp around with the numbers of the holes reading backwards and played it, Wah! Wah! Wak!, some cool blues lick. I couldn’t believe the sounds coming out of that harp. The tone was so loud and strong you could almost touch it. He could play all that country stuff like “The Fox Chase” and “The Train” but with a huge sound. He’d do this little dance while he played, and he had a trick where he’d be blowing two different licks at the same time, playing out of each side of his mouth. He was a pro. It turned out he used to play in medicine shows down South.

  I had heard harmonica on records, but this was the first time I really heard it in person. I just fell in love with the sound of a blues harmonica. I had to learn how to play it. Jimmy showed me a lot, and he also hipped me to a lot of blues records. I’ve always said that the gift of talent is the fact that you fell in love with the music; that mad love you have for the music is what makes you learn. That’s what takes you over the hurdles. Love—that’s the real gift. For me, it was the gift of a lifetime.

  There were two black clubs in Brooklyn I used to walk past all the time, the Seville and the Nite Cap. The Seville was the fancier place, had a round bar with a fountain in the middle with colored lights. The Seville served food, had a real stage, and a real show. Charlie Lucas and the Thrillers were the house band. They had a horn section, all the guys in the band wore gold jackets, and when they played, the whole band would be rockin’ back and forth in time with the music.

  The Nite Cap was a little bit rundown. No fountain—Pabst Blue Ribbon beer. Christmas decorations stayed on the wall all year. The Nite Cap didn’t serve any food unless it was someone’s birthday party and they brought in their own food: homemade potato salad, pigs feet, collard greens, cornbread, fried chicken, black-eyed peas. The Nite Cap had a band but they didn’t all dress alike. The leader of the band was guitarist/singer Little Jimmy May. These guys played more blues than at the Seville, and when the band quit at about three or four o’clock in the morning they would head out to an after-hours joint and play some more. Smilin’ Pretty Eddie was the MC and host in the club. This is the club where I got my start playing for a live audience. Pretty Eddie was standing outside the club one night, and I asked him if I could blow my harp for the people. He brought me right in and put me on the stage: “Ladies and gentlemen, put your hands together for our little blue-eyed soul brother.” Then I played a blues—the band backed me up and the people loved it.

  There was a shake dancer working there that night, Little Egypt, and she asked me to help her to press on her pasties. Man, I was hooked on this place, the people, and the scene. I got tight with Little Jimmy May and we used to go out to different clubs and sit in on the shows for tips. Jimmy knew all the blues clubs and local musicians: Little Buster, Elmore Parker, Bo Diddley Jr. Jimmy May was the guy who introduced me to Muddy Waters at the Apollo in 1965, at a great blues show: Jimmy Reed, Lightnin’ Hopkins, John Lee Hooker, Bobby “Blue” Bland, T-Bone Walker, and Muddy Waters.

  Me and Jimmy had seats in the balcony. I think I was the only white person in the house. T-Bone stole the show. He had a big band, and he came out dressed in a white suit. He played a couple of licks on the guitar, then started singing “Stormy Monday.” He held the guitar out with one hand and played it one-handed. The people went nuts. T-Bone was a real entertainer. He did splits and played the guitar behind his back too. After the show, me and Jimmy went backstage. Jimmy knew Otis Spann, who invited us back to the Theresa Hotel, where the band was staying. We hung out with the guys, drank, and shot dice. That’s when I met Muddy. I had played a little for him in the stairwell at the Apollo. He told me he liked my sound.

  One day I got a phone call that really changed my life. Luther “Georgia Boy Snake” Johnson, one of Muddy’s guitar players, called me in New
York and told me to come down to this gig where Muddy needed a harp player. Big Walter was supposed to be on the gig, but he never showed up at Muddy’s house in Chicago when they were leaving town. I sat in, played two numbers, and Muddy asked me, “Can you travel?” I said, “Yeah,” and Muddy said, “Then you got a job!”

  Soon after that, I took the train to Chicago, then got a cab from the train station to the South Side. When I got out at Muddy’s house, the cab driver told me I’d better watch myself. I opened the gate to his house, 4339 South Lake Park Avenue, and saw the name MUDDY WATERS on the screen door. I rang the bell. Muddy’s granddaughter Cookie answered the door. I told her who I was, and she shouted to the back, “Daddy, one of your band members here.” Muddy came to the door wearing a robe. His head was tied up in a do-rag. He told me to come in and introduced me to his wife Geneva. “This is my wife, we call her Grandma.” We all went in the kitchen. Muddy’s stepson Charles had been drinkin’, and Muddy and Charles had been arguing. When I walked in, the argument stopped. Muddy pointed to me and told everybody, “This is my white son.” Then he pointed to Charles and told me, “That’s your brother.” I sat down, and Grandma fixed me a plate of chicken and dumplings from a big pot on the stove. Grandma then reached up over the sink and took a pint of J&B out of the cupboard and poured herself a little drink, then told Charles that he had to go to the store to get some more.

  Muddy went into the bedroom and laid down. I spent the rest of the day sitting on his porch hanging out with Cookie and Charles, checking out the neighborhood and people that passed by, and they were checking me out.