A Man Called Destruction: The Life and Music of Alex Chilton, From Box Tops to Big Star to Backdoor Man (2 page)

William Alexander Chilton came from well-bred, aristocratic stock. When he reached fifty, Alex took a keen interest in his illustrious family history, tracing his lineage back to the seventeenth century, when a Chilton left England for the New World.
Alex proudly corrected one journalist who thought the Chiltons emigrated from England in the 1700s, telling him that it was actually 1660 when John Chilton sailed to America. Yet after this account of the Chilton family was published,
Alex cut off communication with its author for the sin of including the Chilton genealogy. Ambivalent about his pedigree, Alex both embraced it and disowned it. At various times, traveling to visit ancestral burial plots, he relished his forebears’ accomplishments; at others, such a patrician genetic code contradicted his self-image as a working-class musician, the kind who once said he
wanted his gravestone to read
SELF-MADE MAN
. Such dichotomies would dog Alex Chilton his entire life.

The “Chiltons of Virginia,” described in a 1907
William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine
, were “descended from an old English family, originally of French descent as the name indicates . . . [perhaps] derived from the Chalk Cliffs of Dover, near which the Chiltons are supposed to have settled on their first landing upon English shores. . . . In 1060 William of Normandy set sail for the conquest of England, and inscribed on his banner roll was the name of Sir John Chilton. This is the first mention we have of the name.”

In 1660 another John Chilton, possibly of Canterbury, emigrated to America to settle on land grants (bestowed to loyal subjects by King Charles II) in Lancaster County, Virginia; he added to his holdings by acquiring land in Westmoreland County. His son John Chilton II, like his father a planter, remained in the northern neck of Virginia, on the banks of the Potomac River, in an area he
called Currioman, the name of a neighboring creek that flowed into the Potomac. This part of Virginia became the seat of several wealthy families, including the Chiltons, whose tobacco plantations were manned by slave labor. The Chiltons, continuously buying more land, thrived in Virginia for more than four generations. The present-day hamlet of Chiltons, Virginia—once part of the Currioman estate—was named for the family.

Continuing the line to Alex’s direct descendants, John II’s youngest son,
Thomas Chilton, inherited his father’s plantation. He served as justice of the peace, sheriff, church warden, and major in the foot companies of Westmoreland County. At the time of his death, records show he owned sixty-two slaves.

Thomas’s son William participated in a major event precipitating the American Revolution. In 1765 he and other Virginians opposed to Britain’s new Stamp Act formed the first public association to resist the recently imposed tariff on printed paper. William and three other Chiltons were among those signing a document, later known as the Westmoreland Protest, denouncing the Stamp Act. Though William died on the eve of the American Revolution, his brothers
Thomas, Charles, and John served in the War of Independence.

In 1840 John Marshall Chilton, William’s grandson, born in December 1815, moved to Vicksburg, Mississippi. “
That’s how my branch of the Chilton family got to Mississippi and stayed there until two years before I was born,” Alex once related. A prominent attorney and an influential citizen in affairs of church and state, the Honorable John Marshall Chilton married Sarah Norton, of a distinguished, religious family in New Orleans. Sarah’s father, Charles N. Norton, had been appointed marshal of the state of Mississippi by John Quincy Adams in 1824. Norton, to whom James Madison had given a letter of introduction with which to travel abroad in 1806, was a professor and later president of Jefferson College in Washington, Mississippi.

Before the Civil War, the John Marshall Chilton family lived on a large cotton plantation with numerous slaves. There
John wrote a history of the colonial Mississippi territory (which Alex once said made for “pretty good reading”). In 1859, not long after a journey to Minnesota, Chilton died from unknown causes at age forty-three; his fourteen-year-old son, Charles, a prodigious correspondent,
wrote his Aunt Dory, “It is hard to bear this sudden seperation [sic] from Pa; but grieving cannot bring him back; and we must therefore endeavor to be reconciled to our hard lot.”

John Marshall Chilton’s younger brother, Robert Hall Chilton, graduated from the U.S. Military Academy and served in the Mexican-American War,
during which he rescued Jefferson Davis at the Battle of Buena Vista. In 1861 Major Chilton joined the Confederate Army, where he became chief of staff under General Robert E. Lee. After the war he settled in Columbus, Georgia, where he became president of a manufacturing company. His son Robert Lee Chilton married Sydney Norton Chilton, his first paternal cousin and the daughter of the Honorable John Chilton. Alex’s grandfather Howard Sidney Chilton may have been named after her.

Alex, no doubt, was dismayed that his ancestors fought for the South in the Civil War. He was
known to deride Confederate heroes; as he once said to a friend, “I hope your street isn’t named after the vicious war criminal/genocidal racist Nathan Bedford [Forrest]. How are these honors for these monsters allowed to continue?” Another time, while performing in Athens, Georgia, he blurted out, “
The South sucks! All those clichés about our racism and sleaziness are true!”

Alex may have felt more sympathy for John Marshall Chilton’s son Charles, who attended boarding school in Virginia prior to the war and became known as kind and generous toward the former slaves who continued to work on his family’s estate near Clinton, Mississippi. Charles wrote his grandmother in 1866, “
Things go on much as usual here, nothing to break the monotony of the week, except an occasional quarrel with some freedmen. I however have so far gotten along swimmingly with them, and have no reason to complain.”

Nine years later, however, Charles would fall victim to the turbulent period of Reconstruction. In September 1875 Democrats and Republicans were vying for votes in the upcoming November legislature election, with candidates organizing gatherings for their black and white constituents. On September 4
a picnic was held in a grove about a quarter mile from Charles Chilton’s home. Candidates from both parties gave speeches to an audience comprising sixty to seventy-five whites (Democrats and Republicans) and approximately a thousand to twelve hundred black Republicans. As the speechmaking ended, an altercation broke out between whites and blacks, guns were fired from both sides, and a melee erupted. During the ensuing violence, six blacks and three whites were shot and killed, at the picnic and in the neighboring cotton fields. The mob raced from the scene on horseback and on foot. When Charles Chilton, hearing what had happened, ran to his front gate to usher his hired hands into safety, a black man galloping by on a horse shot him in the back with a Winchester.

At a subsequent inquiry, reported nationally as the “Clinton Riot,” it was determined that “Chilton met his death while endeavoring to protect the colored
women and children, and had handed his gun to a colored man in his employ at the time he received his death wound. Chilton was well liked, well thought of by his neighbors and friends. A young man of fine family.” (After the killings, a vigilante group of whites took revenge, murdering a dozen black residents of the county.)

Charles’s mother, Sarah Norton Chilton, described the tragedy in a September 17, 1875, letter to her sister in New Orleans:

He died in the arms of his brother John. I was three miles distant from him and had to go all the way through an infuriated mob—with no one but a negro—in order to bid him farewell. It seems to me like a thousand years since then. I never have looked upon any human face so beautifully peaceful as was his dear dear face. He said in every look, “All is well.” The country is in a sad state of excitement—men never take off their weapons except when they go to bed and there they sleep on their pistols.

In her bereavement, Charles’s mother sought the help of spiritualists and then became one herself to contact her son, father, husband, and others and communicate their words from the afterlife.

•   •   •

Alex’s great-grandfather Harrison Randolph Chilton was Charles’s younger brother, born in December 1853. He was the first of the Chiltons to settle in the Mississippi Delta, the birthplace of the blues—music Alex would later embrace. Sometime in the late 1870s Harrison became the owner of a plantation in Issaquena County, across the Mississippi River from Louisiana. Just before the Civil War, Issaquena County had the highest concentration of slaves of any county in the state, with the enslaved constituting 92.5 percent of the population; records show that 115 owners held 7,244 slaves.
Harrison Chilton lost everything to heavy flooding in the late 1880s, according to Alex, so he sold what was left and became the county’s sheriff. Alex once visited the area and called it “the end of the world . . . way, way out there, the poorest place I’ve ever been in my life. I’ve read a statistic that around the turn of the twentieth century when [Harrison] was still sheriff . . . the ratio of black to white was 19 blacks to 1 white, in the height of the Jim Crow Era.”

The Chiltons moved to the county seat, Mayersville, which was once the heart of a plantation; approximately 11 percent of its residents were white and the rest black. (The great McKinley Morganfield, who later took the name Muddy
Waters, was born in Issaquena County in 1915.) Only one square mile in size, the poverty-stricken Mayersville is where Howard Sidney Chilton was born in 1882. Things have not changed much in the twenty-first century since Alex’s grandfather’s birth: In 2000, around the time Alex visited there, the median annual income for a household in the town was $10,962; about 49.9 percent of the population was living below the poverty line. Today Issaquena County, with its median income even less, has the lowest per capita income in Mississippi and the thirty-sixth lowest in the United States.

The Delta intrigued Alex. “
We talked a lot about books and history,” Mississippi native Dan Tyler, a songwriter and Alex’s longtime friend, remembers. “Alex loved history. I gave him a book called
Rising Tide,
and he said, ‘You’ll never know what this book meant to me.’ It was about the big Mississippi River flood of 1927, which kind of rearranged the South, and about race and class. Alex had almost a Marxist slant on history, so he was interested in those types of books. Toward the end of his life, he was starting to investigate his family history [in the light of such issues].”

“My grandfather grew up in the town of Mayersville with his brother and sister and married a woman from the town of Starkville where the state college [Mississippi State] was,” Alex told writer Bruce Eaton in 2007. “Her father, [William] Magruder, was kind of a big wheel around the college, the chairman of the English department.” According to Alex’s uncle Harrison Randolph “Jack” Chilton, “[
Magruder] was an interesting guy who once caused a strike by the whole student body. In those days, . . . boys were not supposed to be found with girls in the stacks of the library. Well, a young man and woman were found there together, and grandpap expelled the boy. . . . The whole college went on strike. He finally had to readmit the boy.” Professor Magruder was also vice president of the university; today an annual scholarship is given to a deserving English major at the university in his memory.

Howard Chilton must have been an impressive young man to have passed muster with Professor Magruder and marry his daughter. Jack Chilton, her son, said that his mother was one of the few female students admitted to what was then an agricultural college. “They made a special case for her to attend because of her father. But she wasn’t allowed to take animal husbandry!” Her name was Kate, but
no one ever called her that. “Her daddy called her ‘Daughter,’ so her sister called her ‘Daughter,’ and even her children called her ‘Daughter,’” according to Alex’s sister, Cecelia Chilton.

After their marriage, in 1906, Howard and “Daughter” Chilton became
boarders at the home of a widow who lived next door to Professor Magruder and his wife. The newlyweds had bought their own home by the time Alex’s father, Howard Sidney Chilton Jr. (always called Sidney), was born in Starkville on December 17, 1911, followed by Harrison Randolph “Jack” Chilton three years later. Both boys were musical and began learning to play instruments at a young age. The Chiltons then moved farther south, to Meridian, Mississippi. There, in the hometown of Jimmie Rodgers, later known as the Father of Country Music, Sidney and Jack became enthralled by music, and in particular the sound that emerged from New Orleans: jazz. Of his father and uncle’s musical training, Alex told Eaton in 2007:

My father was . . . a musician and played in the University of Mississippi jazz band. He . . . was in college around the early 1930s—he and his brother both. My dad was a sax player in those days although in my lifetime he was mostly a piano player. His brother plays guitar and still does—still going strong at age 93. I’m sure he studied in school a bit—he actually went to the state school [Mississippi State] for three years but as I’m told by Uncle Jack, for his last year he went over to Ole Miss [the University of Mississippi in Oxford]. I’m always confused by how that happened, but Uncle Jack says they wanted him in the jazz band there and that’s how he ended up at the more posh school for his last year of college.

Sidney graduated from Ole Miss in 1933. Later that year he married Mary Evelyn Reid, a striking and artistic brunette who hailed from another small Mississippi town, McComb (the birthplace of Bo Diddley). Though the Reids’ ancestry lacks the aristocratic lineage of the Chiltons, their American heritage dates back to Hugh Reid, who emigrated from Ireland in the mid-1700s. The Reids resided for two generations in South Carolina until Hugh’s grandson William S. Reid moved to Louisiana. His son, William Alexander Reid (b. 1843), a farmer for whom Alex was named, married Emma Gertrude Knott (b. 1848), who was living in Natchez, Mississippi, with her widowed, Virginia-born mother. William Alexander and Emma Reid settled in McComb, about 180 miles from New Orleans. One of eight children, their son Philip (b. 1885) married Nellie (b. 1890)—Alex’s maternal grandparents. The young couple moved in with Philip’s widowed mother, Emma, sharing living quarters with his sisters, Mary, a widow with two children, and Sally, an unmarried stenographer (who would later live with Alex’s family). Philip’s uncle operated a successful Main Street
store, Reid & Nance, which sold “pure drugs, toilet items, soda waters, sheet music, cigars and tobacco,” according to a 1914 advertisement. Philip worked for a time as a pharmacist at the store, then became a traveling salesman for the New-Brite Company, which made furniture polish. Philip and Nell still resided with Emma when Alex’s mother, Mary Evelyn, was born on July 8, 1911, followed by a sister, Annelle, in 1916. When Emma Reid died, Philip, Nellie, and their daughters moved out and rented a house for $50 a month, eventually buying a home in a beautiful neighborhood with large shade trees.