Nighthawk Blues (17 page)

“What do you mean?” said his companion, a long-haired Radcliffe student in purple tights. “The concert hasn’t even started yet.”

“I don’t even know if I want to stay,” said the boy, obviously distraught. “Don’t you see what he’s doing? He’s amplified his guitar.”

The combination of the amp buzzing and Hawk tuning up was deafening. A piercing whistle fed back from the mike. “Good evening, everybody,” said Hawk and without further preamble launched into “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues,” the ringing notes instandy identifiable, the stomping feet inviting an audience to respond with energy of its own. This audience was transfixed; silence hung over the room until at the conclusion of the song it exploded with applause. Hawk glared out balefully at the young white boys and girls, stomped his heavy-booted feet, and launched into one song after another, seemingly challenging the audience to come up with another kind of response. But the angrier he got the more respectful was the silence that greeted his efforts. There was no badinage, there were no pauses for breath, there was no ingratiating small talk, just the music itself going out in Hawk’s booming voice without preface or apology. Finally, after about an hour and a half, Jerry gave a signal which Hawk either did not see or chose to ignore. So Jerry was forced to jump up on stage himself in the middle of a number and commandeer the mike at the end of the song to announce an intermission. In between sets the students all gathered around a punch bowl and Jerry went to talk to the boy who had organized the concert, leaving Hawk on stage stiff and proud, cradling his guitar, the intermittent hum of the amplifier providing inconspicuous response to all the conversation and social chatter in the room. When Jerry came back, an earnest-looking boy in horn-rimmed glasses was sitting next to Hawk, a pad of paper in his hand, pencil poised. “Do you ever do any protest songs, Mr. Jefferson?”

Hawk shook his head.

“Well, wouldn’t you say the blues are the original protest songs in a way? As I understand it, they provided a kind of code language that enabled Negroes to speak to each other about the conditions under which they lived, without the white man really knowing just what they were saying—”

Hawk mumbled something.

“What? Excuse me. I don’t understand.”

“Back in slavery times,” said Hawk, “there was a whole different kind of junk. Spirituals and such. ’I gonna be free from this burdensome world some old day.’ All that kind of racket. Blues just tells the truth, don’t do nothing more than that, you know.”

“Yes, yes, I see, but blues goes back to slavery times—”

Hawk shook his head vehemently.

“Surely the work songs—when did blues first come into being then?”

” 1904,” said Hawk.

” 1904?”

Jerry felt sorry for the boy.

“Did you ever write any protest songs yourself? You know, like Leadbelly or Big Bill? ’Bourgeois Blues’—that kind of thing?”

“Yeah, Leadbelly,” said Hawk, eyes lighting up. “I met that gal-boy down in Angola, wouldn’t let that motherfucker near me. Course I ain’t saying what I was doing down there, but they had him in for some bad shit, man. Everybody knowed the white man bought his freedom, just to get hold of the rights to his songs. Leadbelly told me so hisself. Except they never were his songs anyways. Got ’em off a cat name Shorty George—you know that song he used to sing, yeah. Well, ain’t that the way it always is, though? They pay you just exactly what they think you gonna take—”

The boy was obviously shaken. “Well, how about the war? It seems as if Vietnam has become a symbol to many black people—”

“Yeah, I think we ought to bomb the shit out of them motherfuckers,” said Hawk pleasantly. “Well, I better get back to work, my manager over here say I better start earning some of that money you nice white boys and girls is paying.”

The second half of the concert was the same as the first, only longer. The amplifier buzzed louder than ever, and Hawk fiddled with it some but wasn’t able to fix it. A few of the audience, evidently emboldened by Hawk’s scrofulousness, started shouting out encouragement (“Play it a long time!” “Put it in the alley!”), which only encouraged others to shush them indig-nandy. In this atmosphere of warring expectations, Jerry became uncomfortably aware, people were starting to leave, discreet, on tiptoe, but leaving nonetheless. Hawk just seemed to play louder, more intensely, his eyes following the departing students, his voice booming in the silent hall, seemingly calling out after them. He went through some more of his repertoire, introducing standards like “Shake ’Em On Down” or “Bluebird” with a note that “I remember Sonny Boy when he first cut this tune” or “This one was Tommy’s best,” mosdy in open tuning, sometimes with a slide, sometimes without, performing with a single-minded ferocity. Then without warning Hawk started talking in his rumbling raspy voice. “I want to dedicate this next song to the late President Kennedy. He was a friend to all the people, black and white, he even helped the Chinese.

“Ohhh, ohhh”—Hawk launched into yet another familiar-sounding melody in the key of D. “President Kennedy dead and gone/ Gone away and left me here to sing this song.

Well, President Kennedy, he work for the young, he work for the old Peoples,

we just can’t let his dream go cold

Well-uh, President Kennedy dead and gone Ain’t nothing for it, just gotta sing this song.

Well, President Kennedy, he loved throughout the land

Eeh-hyah, he loved through all the land

Well, they taken him away, hoy, ain’t nobody raisin’ sand.

Ooh-ooh, President Kennedy

Oh yeah, President Kennedy

Well, his whole life, he just work to set mankind free.

The room was silent for the longest time, then reverberated with applause. They cheered and cheered, and Hawk was induced to sing one more verse. At the end everyone in the room was on his feet wildly applauding, and the next day the
Crimson
had a piece on Hawk’s triumphant debut, particularly noting the continued topicality of the blues.

In the car on the way back to Jerry’s apartment on Walden Street in North Cambridge, Jerry remarked on how moved he had been. “I didn’t know you wrote anything like that,” he said.

Hawk stared straight ahead. “She-it,” he said, “what did that sucker ever do for me? I just take the Roosevelt thing I cut back in ’46, put another name to it. Mr. Melrose practically beg me to cut that record, say it gonna sell a million. Well, maybe it did, but they ain’t paid me two cents for it yet.”

From there they played Cornell, Gerde’s Folk City, an almost empty Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hunter College, Club 47, and any number of other colleges and small rooms. It wasn’t long before the novelty had worn off, and even Jerry grew tired of the uncritical adulation, the almost mindless credulity which greeted them everywhere they went. Hawk stayed the same. He scowled in the same bleak way at all the dumb questions endlessly repeated; he kept on-stage talk to a bare minimum; he just kept playing his music with the same uncompromising sternness, the same relentless fury. And yet something seemed to have changed, there was a subtle shift of attitude, and Jerry sensed that Hawk was growing somehow dispirited in an indefinable sort of way. For Jerry it was still flattering to be asked his opinion on every blues issue of the day, to be rewarded with the favors of pretty girls who suddenly found him charming, however false the pretenses. Hawk scarcely even spoke to him, though. He sat in silence the whole way down to a concert, arms folded across his chest, as the radio played Dylan, Peter, Paul, and Mary, the Rolling Stones, the Beatles. He had no interest in discussing the show on the ride back. It was culture shock, Jerry supposed. It was only to be expected.

But then Hawk, too, began to change. First he discarded the suit, wearing the black jacket and tie, then the jacket alone, finally shirtsleeves and baggy brown pants. Then he began to paw at every woman who came near him and make crude jokes at those who kept their distance. At first Jerry thought he was just loosening up, seeking some appropriate way of showing that he, too, wanted to join the festivities. Then gradually he realized that there was an element of both contempt and self-contempt in Hawk’s posturing. Finally it all came to a head when Hawk showed up for a concert at Yale wearing faded overalls and an old straw hat. Jerry tried to persuade him that nothing was to be gained by this unseemly charade, but Hawk refused even to speak about it. At the concert Jerry noted that his demeanor, too, was somehow changed. He didn’t seem so commanding; perhaps, Jerry thought, he was no longer so intimidated because he was more used to Hawk. When they met their hosts, though, Hawk seemed to shrink into himself rather than puff up with indignation and pride. When they encountered the eager interviewer, whose questions they had both heard a thousand times by now, Hawk responded not with his characteristic impatience but was instead relatively meek—for Hawk—slandering only one other blues singer in the course of the conversation and not bothering to correct even the boy’s most obvious misconceptions about the blues singer and the blues. Jerry made the standard introduction, laying it on if anything a little thicker than usual, and Hawk started off with the obligatory “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues.” This time it was different, though. Even as he strummed the opening chords, Hawk leaned forward and murmured into the microphone, “I want to thank all you nice kind people for coming out here tonight. I only hope I can do something to merit your appreciation and deserve your applause.”

Jerry almost fell out of his seat. He couldn’t remember ever hearing Hawk say more than one or two words between songs, and this kind of acknowledgment was wholly uncharacteristic. When he finished the song, Hawk leaned forward again. “You know, it’s quite a thrill and a honor for a country boy like me just off the farm to perform for a bunch of fine young ladies and gentlemens like yourselves. And if my speech is not so good, I hope you will kindly bear with me, because I never did have the benefit of a education like you kind peoples is lucky enough to get. Where I growed up you got your education behind a mule, and that’s all I knowed until my manager, Mr. Jerry Lip—schitz, discovered me and instructed me that there was people who was waiting to
hear
from me. And so I took him at his word, and that’s why I’m here in front of you all today, and I hope you will kindly accept my music in the spirit in which it is offered.”

Jerry cringed. During intermission he took Hawk aside. “What are you doing?” he said in a fierce undertone.

Hawk just played dumb. “Don’t know what you talking about.”

“I mean all this country-boy shit. The overalls. All that talk about how you’ve never been off the farm. At this point you wouldn’t know the front end of a mule from its hindquarters. That’s what I’m talking about.”

“Oh, that,” said Hawk innocently, still not looking Jerry in the eye but at the well-dressed boys and girls instead. “You know, man, I didn’t mean nothing—”

“No? Well, I’ll tell you something,” said Jerry, surprising even himself, “if you ever do anything like this again, that’s it. I quit.”

“No shit?” said Hawk, looking almost amused.

But evidently he took Jerry seriously, because he did bounce back, he may not have liked it, he frequendy vented his spleen (he wouldn’t have been Hawk if he had grown all of a sudden meek), but it seemed as if they had come to an understanding. Not that Hawk be refined, just that he be himself.

By the standards of the day Hawk was not particularly successful. He was on a par perhaps with Skip James, not as lovable as Mississippi John Hurt, not as intensely emotional as Son House. They all existed in an uneasy alliance, competing for the few openings there were for ancient bluesmen, these survivors of thirty years of historical neglect who had reemerged strangely to satisfy a new white audience that needed them. It was indeed ironic, Jerry reflected as he walked about the Newport Festival grounds with his performer’s badge giving him free passage, to see convicted murderers, long-haired folksingers, Irish dancers, and Scottish bagpipers all mingling under the apparent guise of shared art and good fellowship. The night before there had been a party at the Blues House at which everyone had gotten outrageously drunk, the old men and their younger followers, and Hawk had ended up with a red-headed girl from Sarah Lawrence. That he could actually have screwed her Jerry couldn’t imagine, but in the morning he was talking about “these white bitches with their milky skin and little no-account titties and slits ain’t deep enough to even dip your wick in.” Jerry tried to quiet him down and finally managed to get him out the door while the blues legends lay sprawled across cots and on the floor amid the clutter of bottles and debris from last night. With Hawk he walked around the festival grounds and told him about the proposed European tour.

“I ain’t interested in no European countries,” Hawk said emphatically, maintaining so brisk a pace that Jerry had to trot to keep up. “Man, I just want to go home. I don’t want to hear no more of this racket. Just don’t dust me with no broom, man, cause I ain’t for it, you know what I’m talking about? All them broken-down old jitterbugs, can’t even see straight no more—I ain’t never heard so much caterwauling in my life before. I’ll tell you the truth, man, and they say the truth may hurt but personally I don’t give a shit, I’m sick and tired of you paddies.”

Yes, yes, Jerry agreed, as they trotted along, past the deserted stages and concession stands, past the kids in sleeping bags and the few maintenance people who were up and about at this hour. Yes, sure, Jerry said, he understood, it was frustrating, it was humiliating, it was dumb. It was just that this was one chance in a million, the money was good, it might never come again. “You can bank it,” Jerry said, “for your kids. You can piss it away if you want—”

“Oh man, you just like all the rest,” Hawk said with a shrewd appraising glance. “How come this thing’s so important to you?”

Jerry shrugged. “I don’t know—”

“You want to go to Europe so bad?”