Nighthawk Blues (21 page)

Why another book on this subject, though? Why more words on what is essentially an emotive offering, one which demands not a sociological but a
soulful
response? Well, it is precisely for that reason that I want to avoid most of the conventions
(strictures?)
of this form. Over the last few years I have had the rare opportunity to be associated with one of the great blues legends, a man I think I can call my friend. We have lived together, worked together, traveled together, cursed each other out, and fallen into each other’s arms
(figuratively speaking? God, what hullshii)
when we got the news that Hawk had won the 1969
downbeat
award for his historic double album
A Man And His Roots.
We’ve had good times and we’ve had bad times together. I’ve witnessed Hawk paying his dues, playing the little clubs and back-country juke joints where his appreciative audience has numbered no more than twenty or thirty day laborers. We’ve been through a lot together. I’ve even seen Hawk recognized in his own home town (how many times does a prophet live to enjoy that kind of acclaim?), as December 27, 1972, was declared Screamin’ Nighthawk Day in the drowsy little town of Yola, Mississippi, and the mayor presented this last of the itinerant blues singers with a key to the city in which he had grown up and lived most of his long life.
(How could he have lived there if he was traveling all the time? Re-phrase.)
It’s been a long journey for Hawk, from a backwoods cabin to the modest home he has been able to build in the last few years on the basis of royalties and concert fees; from the rough, no-holds-barred world in which he grew up to the polite applause of the college campus. I think that’s why it occurred to me, as it occurred to Hawk, too, as more and more of this world is dying off—not only the men and women who remember it, but the world itself, disrupted by interstates and television and all the creature comforts of twentieth-century progress—it occurred to us that the true story of this world has never been told. The brutal day-to-day existence which the blues singer of necessity has always led, the almost existential acceptance of the vicissitudes brought on by fate and character
(oh shit, merde, Meurseult, God, more fucking existentialism).
. . In short, my aim in these pages is to do something no one else has done, to communicate the plain unvarnished truth about the blues singer’s life simply in terms of one individual. This is oral history, and you must remember it is all dependent on the memory of one man, now past seventy. An effort has been made to check facts and provide documentation, but, as in so many memoirs of this sort, you run up against the impenetrable wall of conflicting memories, vaguely recollected scenes (due to either real or selective memory gaps), and a haze of names (phonetically spelled out, with no written records to check against), dates, places that have forever retreated into the miasma past. With these qualifications, then, herein begins the unlikely collaboration of an amateur historian (who didn’t know what he was getting into) and one of the great repositories of the oral culture of our time, as well as one of the most remarkable men I have ever met, the Screamin’ Nighthawk.

MISSISSIPPI ROOTS

The Screamin’ Nighthawk was born Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson on December 27, 1902 (1901? draft card says 1907), in Issaquena County on the Holloway Plantation just outside of Yola, Mississippi, to William “Ollie” Jefferson and his common-law wife, Ruth Mae Johnson. Ollie was a sharecropper who had been born on the Holloway Plantation to parents who had worked the fields as slaves—

R
IGHT THERE
you got two things wrong
(Hawk’s voice intrudes rudely on the first of several dozen reels of tape).
My draft card say 1907, but that was just so’s they could take me for the Big War. Shit, they didn’t have no records on me at all till they made them up, how many times I got to tell you that? Fact is, I was born in 1899, reason I know, that was the year they all talking about Teddy Roosevelt gonna be president or some shit like that. But that wasn’t why my mama named me no Theodore Roosevelt, it was because that dude run his troops up San Juan Hill, a-whoop-ing and a-hollering, with a colored man in the lead. I even made up a blues about it, but you don’t want to hear that sucker, cause it ain’t got nothing to do with nothing.

Other thing you got wrong, my daddy wasn’t no sharecropper. Course you could call him a sharecropper, that’s what old man Holloway thought he was, but my daddy just lay up in the bed all day, didn’t do no work at all, leastaways that’s what my mama told me. Say, he bad, he bad like Jesse James. He was a bootlegger, he was a gambler, he was a musician—can’t get no worse than that. If he’d just been one or the other, might have been all right, but it was the combination, see, that finally caused him to leave. I wasn’t no more than five or six, there was just the three of us, everybody else grown up and moved out, me, my big sister Lavalle, and Litde Ollie—we called him Pigmeat, or Ham-bone sometimes—that was my daddy’s from his outside woman, but we treated him just like one of our’n, wasn’t no different, every Saturday he go to see his mama, every Sunday we’d all see her in church. My mama and his mama—that was Miss Ida Bee Tarrant that was, later on she married the deacon, Mr. Lacy—everybody call him ol’ Gatemouth cause he get his jaw to flapping all the time, but she wouldn’t tolerate none of that foolishness, “You call him Mr. Lacy,” she say, she get herself so stuck up in the air she didn’t even notice Pigmeat no more, and he was a sad little creature, always needing to be told what to do. “Wipe your nose, Pigmeat.” “Don’t play with no Tarwaters.” Tell him he was just as good as anybody else, but he didn’t believe it, and then he up and died in the influenza epidemic of 1918. You know, Ham and me was down in New Orleans then, man it was a fearful sight to see, women screaming and crying, grown men, too, they carried the bodies out and piled ’em up in the streets for the wagons to come. Preachers standing in the corner claiming it was the second coming, day of the judgment, sinners flinging themselves forward saying, “Have mercy, Lawd. Oh Lawd, save me.” Me and Ham call each other Deacon This and Brother That, singing nothing but them way-back raggedy old hymns and the people just throwing their nickels and dimes at us, didn’t mean nothing, they figured they wasn’t going to need no money where they was going, and they was right. Churches and sporting houses doing a full business, me and Pig was just working the streets by day, well, Pig blowed a little harp and he could sing some, too, even though his voice wasn’t never too strong. One night these two sisters, they offer to go home with us—well, they look like they about sixty, and kind of scurvy, too. So Pigmeat go home with them, but I stay out on the streets playing. Well, Pigmeat was the one they wrote the song about—if he didn’t have bad luck, wouldn’t have no luck at all? Wouldn’t you know that them two sisters had the influenza—carried them off, carried him off, too, in three or four days. Well, you see, he really didn’t have no luck!
(Hawk laughs—chortle of fiction or chortle of fact? But your father, he is reminded.)

Oh yeah, well, my daddy was a gambling fool. He bet on anything. He bet on the weather. He bet on the sunrise. He bet on whether you open your eyes one at a time when you wakes up, and if you do which one you opens first.

But one time he got in deeper than he meant to. See, he bet this big buck nigger he could drink any three men under the table, didn’t matter who they was, get anybody he like. So this Big Nigger—that what they called him, only other name I knowed him by was Hooks—he get these two friends of his, even bigger than him, and they all set up in a row while my daddy go and get him three or four jugs of that old moonshine. Well, the first nigger that took a pop, he just stare at my daddy until his eyes bug out and then he fall down to the ground, not dead, just passed out like. Well, next fella, naturally he don’t want to take a drink, but Big Nigger, he stand over him till that fool just naturally have to swallow it down, and
he
fall over. Well, Hooks looking at my daddy mighty suspicious now, and my daddy talking fast, trying to get him to go along with it, but Hooks, he may be big, but he ain’t stupid, and he say, Lookahere, Jeff, you go ahead and take your drink out of the same botde, ain’t no need to stand on politeness, I let you go first. And anybody could see, he didn’t want to do that, he trying to act like it nothing but nerves, but finally he take a drink, and then Hooks make him take another and another, and when he seed that my daddy ain’t gonna take any more he poured the rest of it down his throat. So, regardless, he won his bet, but poison whiskey, that’s what got him in the end.
(Hawk laughs again, a hig chortling laugh, and Jerry wonders how this squares with the coroner’s report—if indeed there was a coroner’s report—on the death of Ollie Jefferson.’)

Only thing that was left after the funeral was his git-tar. When he was living home, my daddy never even allowed me to touch it—that’s how jealous-minded he was of that box, I think he loved it more than he did my mama, I know he did. Course I would sneak off anyway late at night when my daddy too drunk to notice, and I creep across the fields down to the creek all among the crickets and frogs making their noises, and I be plunking away and they be plunking away—man, we was all making a racket. Naw, this wasn’t the first git-tar I had. First git-tar I had was a piece of baling wire I strung up side the wall, pull it tight so it be just right, make all kinds of different sounds on that wire, sound like a cat screaming when little boys start to pull it apart —she-it, yes, I think everybody make their start somehow or nother like that. See, I had the feel for music from a baby on, didn’t never need nobody to tell me nothing, didn’t make no difference if you give me a tune, cause I could make up my own, didn’t matter what kind of music it was, I liked it all.

My daddy didn’t play no blues songs, really, didn’t really pick no git-tar, just frailed on it, old-time songs like “Working on the Railroad,” “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain,” “Bicycle Built for Two”—oh, all that kind of junk. Course he play anything you pay him to play, don’t make no difference, if he don’t know it he try it anyway. Like I said my daddy was a gambler. And my uncles all played, too, they played git-tar some, and my Uncle Roebuck he play banjo, my Uncle Ferris play the fiddle, and together with my daddy they make up a string band that was known far and wide, far and wide, man, play jigs, play reels, sing them old-time story songs, oh oncet in a while they might have did a blues.

That’s why it so peculiar in a fashion, I mean it wasn’t nothing I was brought up to, my mama just want me to sing church songs, and my daddy, he just an entertainer like Sammy Davis Jr. or somebody, but for me first time I heard that man, they call him Alabama Red, don’t know why, cause he was from around Greenville, sing the blues down by the railroad track—oh my, people standing around throwing money at him—well, I tell you, the blues turn me every way but loose. Couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, and I knowed that was what I wanted to play.

Well, of course, it’s 01’ Man Mose that everybody connected up with me, and really he the one that done it if the truth be told —Alabama Red the first, but 01’ Man Mose the man when it come to the blues. Shit, yeah, he even git the chickens to dancing, my mama say he could just about make a preacher lay his Bible down, that’s how powerful Ole Man Mose was. In his prime, I’m talking about, not later on after the whiskey got him. Moses Chatman—I believe he an off cousin to old Sam and Bo that used to play that old “Sittin’ On Top of the World”—well, anyways, Mose played with a bottleneck, and he made that git-tar sing. Lawd have mercy—that’s what that git-tar be saying, Lawd have mercy—he could play so sweet, and he could play hard, too, and I be pestering him, jawing at him all the time so’s he could show me how to do, cause he was like a god to me to start off with, even though he wasn’t no more than fifteen or so years older than me probably.

Well, it seem like finally he start to show me a few things just to get me off his back, keep me from pestering him all the time. Course by then he was courting my mother, I suspect, leastaways that’s what I think now, but at the time, ten-year-old kid, I never thought nothing about it. He just give me a chord to play, and he say, Youngster, you go off and practice, and I go off by myself for two, three hours, don’t come back till I got that sucker right, say, Lookahere, Mose, I got it now, and he say, Naw, you don’t, gotta go and practice it up some more. So that was just the way it goes, although it never struck me what was going on at the time, see, I was just a kid, really, I did a grown man’s work, but I don’t think I even knew what a pecker was for. Course I found out a little later on when I started in with Mattie, Mose’s wife, that I run away with to St. Louis. And I thought about it some at that time—sure did.

Well, Mose wasn’t no nice man. Shit, might as well be honest about it, he was a motherfucker, just as soon cut you as look at you, and that’s the truth. No, you can’t get me to say nothing nice about him. Course he was a good blues singer, till the whiskey drag him down, towards the end he was just a sorry-ass feebleminded old man, and he wasn’t no more than fifty years old when he died in ’32. But he was always mean. Never let nobody else play on his set. Take you out to a gig sometimes, and if he feeling real good he let you second him on guitar—maybe!—but just so you don’t get any ideas he mess you up so you look foolish, change the time, or make a change that you ain’t expecting, just deliberately fuck you up and then point it out to the peoples, saying, Well, I tried to train this boy right, but how’s a body gonna play when he laying down all this racket behind me? Well, get him off then, they say, and I slink off that stage —well, it wasn’t hardly a stage, most of the time we just standing at one end of the room, pushed over in a corner like, little cabin, chimney smoking, people dancing in their bare feet, all that kind of stuff, and me feeling like I’m the worst piece of shit in the world, I feel like I really made a disgrace. I tell you, boy, it was an education, but I wouldn’t do that kind of shit to nobody, cause I know, that’s just the way I came up, and it wasn’t no good way.