Why Junior Loves The Blues
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My love of blues music started in my childhood, around 1950.
In those days my hometown, Tullos, Louisiana, was a thriving
oil-boom town with about four hundred resident souls and an even
larger transient population of drillers and roughnecks. Three
churches serviced those souls, including a dilapidated shack
where the few dark-skinned residents received the Word. To
service souls of a different persuasion, all those thirsty
oil-field workers, Tullos had thirteen bars. But of even more importance than those workers to the profits of the bars and the enrichment of the town treasury, my hometown was also a tiny wet oasis surrounded by dry towns and parishes. Outside Tullos, a cold beer or a hot six-pack was a twenty-five-mile drive to the east and a forty- to fifty-mile drive in the other directions. So along with the oil business, the beer business boomed in Tullos, much to the chagrin of those in the God business.
Years later, several oldtimers told me about the night Hank Williams's big Cadillac rolled into Moore's parking lot and ole Hank got out and walked inside. He had a powerful thirst, I imagine, having been fifty miles without a beer. He walked up to the bar and plopped down on a stool. "Play us something, Hank!" the crowd pleaded when they recovered from their shock. So off went the jukebox, out came Hank's guitar, and reality replaced reproduction. Hank played "Your Cheating Heart" to the delight of all. But Hank must have been depressed over a woman or the long dry drive, because he played it again. Then he played it again. "Damn, Hank," someone said, "can't you play something besides 'Your Cheating Heart'?" "Wanna hear me play it backwards?" Of course they did. So Hank turned around on his stool and played it again. Other boys the age of my brother and I also enjoyed watching the activities in and around Tullos's bars. Two friends once gleefully related to us that they watched a barmaid take a cut-off broom-stick black-jack and knock our father "cold as a wedge."
But my brother and I grew older, discovered girls, and 45s replaced 78s. One bright summer day we took that huge stack of dusty old 78s out in the back yard and sailed them across a thicket. Oh, we had fun that day. Those thin black discs looked like black flying-saucers and sailed for what looked to us like a mile. Then they slowed, arched down, and crashed in blackberry briars. I searched that thicket thirty years after that day. Pine trees had replaced the briars, and I found nothing, not even a fragment. Oh, the foolish things we do in our youth. I never knew racism in my childhood. My father was a pulpwood contractor with an all black crew, and he occasionally took his sons to work with him. I remember the greenness of the woods. I remember the oppressive heat in those woods. I remember those powerful black men, shirtless, their rippling muscles dripping sweat and a huge stick of pine wood on their shoulders and their glistening skin sprinkled with flakes of pine bark. With my brother on one end of a stick of that wood and me on the other end, we could barely move it. But those men, seemingly effortlessly, carried that wood to one of my father's trucks and then easily flipped it in the air where it landed in place on top of the stack. I remember one of those men in particular, the most powerful member of my father's crew. He was a tank-like man with a round face and hair so short it almost looked shaved. His name was Joe Lewis, and my brother and I thought he was Joe Louis, the boxer. A little cabin sat a few yards behind our house and Joe Lewis lived there for several months while my mother nursed him back to health from some illness. My brother and I asked our mother, "Is he really Joe Louis?" Our mother, either going along with the joke or not understanding what we meant, replied, "Yes, he's really Joe Lewis." And, so, when Joe recovered enough to get out of his bed, my brother and I, at perhaps eight years of age, had the largest playmate in Tullos. Our playmate was also the world's toughest man, or so we told our friends. The meanest bully in Tullos stepped aside when we walked down the sidewalk. Our friends stood around in awe as we played marbles with the toughest man alive, the Heavyweight Champion of the World. A few years later, we learned the truth about Joe Lewis, and, many years later, I learned that Joe's illness was a knife thrust in his stomach. My father soon lost his pulpwood business due to a combination of women, gambling, and loss of market. We lost our home with Joe Lewis's little cabin in back. And, so, I grew toward adulthood with blues as the first music I heard, without racism ever rearing its ugly head in my home, and with a far different attitude toward black people than any of my redneck peers. Then, in 1956, a monumental event happened in America. White men started singing black music, and white teenagers started screaming for more. Racial equality in America, I believe, began with music, black music renamed rock 'n' roll. When black music came out of the back rooms, so did the people. One morning in 1956, as I walked out of civics class at LaSalle High School, I noticed Carolyn Snody standing in front of a bulletin board, looking at something on the board. Carolyn had long blond hair and larger breasts that any three other girls at LaSalle High put together. Curious, and also wanting to get as close to Carolyn as I could, I stopped. "Oh, God," she murmured to no one, "isn't he gorgeous?" "Who?" I asked, wishing "he" was me. "Elvis," she answered. "Isn't he just gorrrrgeous?" Carolyn's eyes gazed at a black-and-white newspaper clipping tacked to the bulletin board. It was a picture of a white guy with long greasy black hair and wearing a loose, light-colored suit. The guitar hanging around his neck thrust out to his right side, and his arms and his hips and legs thrust out to his left side. The article below the picture mentioned a song called "Hound Dog." Thus, with a song I believe, began two revolutions, one about music, the other about equal rights.
I was surely damned, I decided, because I had listened to that music for years. When I turned seventeen in 1959, I started participating in the activities inside the bars in Tullos. I found my ears often straining to hear the music on the jukebox in back. But I could not go back there and listen. The Civil Rights Movement had reared its ugly head, or so most--no, almost all--of the white people thought, and attitudes had changed. One race determined to end its relegation to back seats and rooms, and the other race determined to keep them there. The race in back, listening to the music I wanted to hear, looked at me with suspicion. My race called me "n____r lover." Then a friend and classmate, Mike White, also at the ripe old age of seventeen, inherited a bar in Tullos. He and his friends partied down. How would you expect a teenager to act when he wakes up one morning and owns the most profitable bar in town? Black bootleggers from dry Jena, ten times the size of Tullos and sixteen miles away, and dry Winnfield, twenty times the size of Tullos and twenty miles away, met beer delivery trucks in my friend's parking lot. The bootleggers paid my friend; he paid the beer truck drivers, and the drivers' helpers filled the back of pick-up after pick-up with cases of beer. My friend touched nothing but the money. Several hundred thousand cases of beer left that parking lot, and several million dollars passed over the counter. That was heady stuff for a teenager. Other bootleggers loaded their pick-ups at other bars. A steady procession of black drivers in loaded pick-ups left Tullos, headed for much larger towns with many dry throats, both black and white. Since the 1920s there has been an oil well or two--or even three--in every vacant lot in Tullos, but more barrels of beer passed through Tullos than barrels of oil pumped from beneath Tullos. My friend's bar had a black bar in back. He had to close his beer business at the ridiculous hour of 10 p.m., even on weekends, thanks to those in the God business. He often locked the doors, turned off the outside lights, and a bunch of us drank and partied all night long. My friend made money hand over fist, so we drank free beer hand over fist. I immediately shut off the jukebox in front, opened the door that separated my culture from the other one, and turned up the volume on the jukebox in back. I woke many mornings with the sun glaring through plate-glass windows and piercing my blood-shot eyes, with my body on a cases-of-beer mattress, and with my aching head on a case-of-beer pillow. And with the other culture's music still ringing in my ears. I remember only one song from that jukebox: Junior Parker's "Driving Wheel."
She don't have to beg and steal. I give her everything she needs. I am her driving wheel. I played "Driving Wheel" so much my friend removed the record from his jukebox and gave it to me. "Take it home," he told me. "I don't want to ever hear it again." I lost it, probably in one of my divorces. Oh, the foolish things we do as adults. LaSalle High School honored me with a diploma in 1960, and I graduated number thirty-one out of a class of thirty-three. They probably gave me a diploma to get rid of me. I then moved to Chicago and spent the most miserable six-months of my life--held captive by Yankees. I encountered prejudice in Chicago, not only against black people but against me. Since I talked slow, I thought slow, or so they assumed. They called me "hillbilly" so often I finally started saying, "Listen, I ain't no hillbilly. Call me a swamp rat, tell me I got water marks around my legs, but I ain't no goddamned hillbilly!" That experience altered my way of thinking. I was never a racist, but before that experience, I saw the racism around me in Chicago and back in Louisiana as accepted behavior. To add to my misery, Chicago had a ridiculous drinking-age law. I called it the "Dirty Old Man Law" because I thought and still think a dirty old man wrote it to reduce the competition for women. It was eighteen for women and twenty-one for men. Unlike in Tullos, they enforced it, at least against the men. But that law gave me a milestone event in my life: an experience with the blues. One night a friend and I and four lovely girls sat at a table in a Chicago bar. The waiter had served me one drink, so I thought I had it made, with drinks and with the girls. We needed another round. The waiter approached the edge of our table, looked down at my babyface, and said, "Say, how old are you?" Lying did no good I knew from past sad experience. They always asked for an ID. "Eighteen," I replied. "You gotta go. Sorry." No amount of pleading from me, my friend, or the lovely girls changed the waiter's decision. My friend took pity on me and handed me the keys to his pride and joy--a sleek 1956 Ford Fairlane, then only four years old. He told me to drive around and look for a bar that might serve me and told me when to return and pick him up. So I left the bar and the lovely girls. Outside, I sat for a moment in my friend's beautiful car, looking longingly over at the neon lights in front of the bar. I started the car and drove away. Driving slowly, aimlessly, I circled block after block, not looking for a bar at all, wishing I was home in Louisiana. Then ahead--somewhere in Chicago, I do not remember--a blue neon sign blinked BLUES . . . BLUES . . . BLUES . . . BLUES . . . I stopped the car in the street outside the bar, again looking longingly at neon lights, but lights of a different color. A few people strolled down the sidewalk, and they were all black, a different color, a different culture. Then a couple opened the door of the bar and entered. When the door opened, the sound of the music I loved filled the air, live music. I had never heard that music live. The blue neon sign then seemingly blinked COME INSIDE . . . COME INSIDE . . . I parked my friend's car. I got out. I stood for a long, long moment in front of the door the couple had entered. This is the North, I considered, not the South. Things are different here. Aren't they? Maybe there's some white people in there. Maybe. . . . I opened the door and a rainbow of colors hit my eyes with all the impact of the fist I had half-way expected. Colourful posters and neon signs covered the walls of a large room. Couples filled the dance floor, the women dressed in red, green, blue, yellow, orange, purple, and every combination of those colors. The bar sprawled down the wall to my right, the bandstand sat straight ahead, far at the rear of the room. Five black musicians dressed in black occupied that bandstand and occupied themselves with the production of a slow, driving beat from guitars, drums, and a piano. Another black man there, also dressed in black, clutched a microphone. His voice poured out, no, moaned out, the lyrics of a blues song I can no longer remember. And the room was a sea of black faces, the ones near the door looking at me, some glaring at me. You could have cut my southern drawl with a knife. The same knife could just as easily slice through my skinny southern body. I went out the door like a bullet. Knowing what I know now about black juke joints, I could have gone inside that bar and had a marvelous time. But that was 1960 and I was just a kid. I returned to the original bar, parked my friend's pride and joy, and sat inside it and waited for him. I no longer wanted to go in any bar in Chicago. During that long wait, my mind replayed the events of the night, returning again and again to the bar with the blinking blue sign, what I saw when I opened the door and the enticing scrap of wonderful music I had heard. I thought of the girls with my friend in the bar beside me. I remembered the way they laughed at me and my southern drawl. At that very moment, I decided to return my skinny southern body to Louisiana. After a while, my friend walked out of the bar, arm in arm with a blond built like Carolyn Snody. In 1976, sixteen years after my captivity and subsequent escape from Chicago, the God business decided to eliminate the beer business in Tullos. They called a local-option election with the expressed purpose of voting out beer. Tullos's four hundred mostly God-fearing souls stepped in the voting booth, pulled the curtain closed, and, then, with only the eyes of God watching them and not the eyes of preachers, voted like they wanted. They kept beer in Tullos and voted in whiskey. So I opened a liquor store. Thus began my thirteen-year association with black bootleggers. I made money hand over fist, and, like my friend from years ago, I spent it hand over fist. The bootleggers could then buy whiskey in Tullos as well as beer. Before 1976, they bought whiskey in Alexandria or Monroe. Here is a typical Friday afternoon cash order from just one bootlegger: 25 cases of Miller beer; 10 cases of Budweiser beer; 4 cases of pints of Old California White Port Wine; 24 half-pints of Seagram's Seven Crown; 24 half-pints of Taaka Vodka; and 10 half-pints of Old Charter. He might top off the order with 5 half-pints of cognac and several fifths of bourbon, Scotch, brandy, or vodka. He also usually returned right before closing time, and I filled the entire order again. He certainly returned the following day, perhaps twice. More than enough beer and whiskey left my parking lot in Tullos to float any battleship ever made, any two battleships ever made. I never cheated those bootleggers or treated them as less than an equal. I eventually became friends with them all, especially Henry Wallace, owner of the Moon Walk Cafe in Jena. Henry was a big gruff-looking black man with a wife named Altonette and I-don't-know-how-many children. Altonette was taller, bigger, and even more gruff-looking than Henry. I would step into any dark alley with Altonette Wallace at my side. I can still hear her arguing with me over the price of a ready-made sandwich after she had just purchased about a thousand dollars' worth of beer and whiskey: "Shhiiiiit, that's too high. You ain't gittin' my money like that." Henry owned a pick-up and a long, red Lincoln Continental. When he pulled the Lincoln up to the front door, he only needed a few sacks of whiskey. When his pick-up pulled around back, he needed beer and whiskey. One afternoon the truck pulled around back, driven by Altonette and with the cab loaded with children. I unlocked the rear door of my store, walked out on the concrete slab, and prepared to fill the bed of the truck with beer. I reached the tail-gate, opened it, and looked down in the bed of the truck. There, sprawled out and passed out in the back of the truck, lay one of the older Wallace daughters. I gave Altonette a shrug of my shoulders and a What-do-we-do-about-this? look. She said, "Shhiiiiit, I'll git her outta there." Altonette climbed in the back of the truck between her daughter and the cab and "Whack!" went her foot and closer to the open tail-gate moved her daughter. "Smokin' that shit an' fuckin'!"--Whack!--"That's all you study!"--Whack!--"Smokin' that shit an' fuckin'!"--Whack!--and the daughter rolled out of the back of the truck and hit my concrete slab with a resounding "Splat!" She crawled in the shade beside the building, moaning and holding her head. I filled the back of the truck with beer and closed the tail-gate. When they drove away, the daughter was again in the back of the truck, in her original position but now sleeping on beer and with her dress-tail flapping in the breeze. Sometimes, on the pretense of seeing if they needed whiskey, I called one of those bootleggers, usually Henry, and offered to make a delivery. I really wanted to listen to their jukebox. I did that many times and sat at the bar, sipped a beer or a soft-drink, and talked to the owner and his customers--and listened to the blues play in the atmosphere in which it was born, where it has meanings going beyond mere music. I remember hearing Little Willie John sing about "Big Blue Diamonds" and Marvin Gaye crying "Let's Get it On." I heard Slim Harpo plead with his woman to "Come here, baby, and scratch my back." I listened to Jimmie Reed explain the blues in "Big Boss Man," a song about a white man. But above all others and again and again, I heard Bobby Blue Bland sing "St. James Infirmary."
My ears blocked out all other sounds, hearing nothing but Bobby Blue Bland's moaning voice.
But the money I made and the money Henry and the other bootleggers made came to a gradual halt. One by one towns and parishes voted wet. I slowly lost 80% of my white business and 95% of my black business. Henry and the other bootleggers lost all their white business and much of their black business. Although I spent several years under unbelievable stress trying to keep my doors open, the bootleggers had the same stress added to stress of a different kind: they had to turn legitimate. Sheriffs in every parish forced the bootleggers to buy beer licenses. Many had already applied, happily thinking about the prospects of buying beer wholesale. But with those beer licenses came the government in every form. And every form of government came with a stack of forms: a federal license, a state license, a parish license, a city license. After all that came a bewildering barrage of monthly, quarterly, semi-annual, and annual forms which must all be filled out and returned--with a check--to obscure and not-so-obscure government agencies everywhere. Men used to dealing in cash and banking out of their back pockets now had to get a checking account and hire an accountant. And, then, on top of the endless paperwork and checks, came an even greater problem: government men and women, all with the authority to yank beer licenses from walls and all invariably white and from middle-class white backgrounds. The health person: "You can't cook bar-b-que in your kitchen at home and sell it in your bar. You must stop the men from urinating outside in the back. You must build a men's restroom. You must vent both it and the women's restroom. You must either close your wooden doors and buy an air-conditioner or repair your screen doors so flies cannot get in your bar. You got all that? I will be back next month." The fire marshall person: "You must replace those rotting steps at the front door. You must install a back door. Your building leans to the left. Your roof leaks. Your floor dips to the right. You got all that? I will be back next month." Then, most dreaded of all, even more than the Internal Revenue Service person who soon arrived--the Alcoholic Beverage Control person: "I will send a seventeen-year-old boy in here who looks twenty-five. And if you think you are going to get away with selling whiskey and wine with only a beer license, you have another think coming. You got all that? I will be back when you least expect me." Some made the transition from bootlegger joint to legitimacy. Some did not. And some turned to a readily available but illegitimate source of profit: crack-cocaine. All of us, black, white, Yankee and southerner, lost something special when the South's bootlegger joints either closed down or came under the control of the dominate, majority culture, the white one. The eye peering over the shoulders of the owners and in their checkbooks and through the cracks in their walls has a white face behind it. And the laws tacked to the walls are white, not black, reflect the cultural norms of middle-class whites, not the people living outside the doors and up and down the street. Doors, by the way, which now open and close at times specified by a white man. Yes, we all lost something. When crack-cocaine came on the scene, many men well-trained in the art of dealing under the counter and evading white eyes seized the opportunity.
I can drive those streets and see ghostly images of people, both black and white. I can hear ghostly music echoing from sagging doors, both in the front and in the back. And the decline of Tullos began not with an oil bust as so many say, but with a beer bust. But I digress from the blues. In 1982, I lost my health due to a heart attack. In 1989, I lost my business and my wife, in that order. But Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, saved me from major depression and--I will admit now--from almost certain suicide. At the ripe old age of forty-eight, I entered college and poured myself into my studies. In 1992, heart attack number two and subsequent by-pass surgery interrupted my studies. But that heart attack gave me the most important blues experience of my life. After surgery in the Veterans Administration Hospital in New Orleans, I spent several days in ICU, then they moved me to a ward, a room with four beds. I was a miserable man, as anyone who has ever undergone the ordeal of open-heart surgery can testify. But my misery went beyond physical pain. I wallowed in depression and self-pity, exactly like I did when I lost my business and my wife. And now, I thought, I've even lost college. If there is a God, I asked that God, why put one man through so much torture? Why cause one man so much loss? And then, for the first time since childhood, I prayed to that God. And I prayed not for life but for death. Now, I have something to say, and I say it to God and to John Lee Hooker: the blues really is a healer. The man in the bed beside mine, a few feet away in distance and miles away in attitude, was an older black man named Wayne Bennett. A shiny plastic oxygen tube never left his nose. The tube led across both sides of his face, down his back, and ended in a green oxygen tank that never left his side. We soon became friends. I soon discovered he awaited a heart-lung transplant. How, I wondered, could he be so cheerful? At his age and surgery like that ahead of him. I suddenly felt like the person in a proverb: I complained because I had no shoes, and I met a man who had no feet. My mood improved. One day--I don't remember which day--I noticed the neck of a guitar on the other side of his bed and poking out from behind the curtain of the window there. I asked, "You play the guitar, Mister Bennett?" He was sitting on the edge of his bed. He looked over the ever-present tube in his nose, over at me, and he said, simply, "Some." I said, "Gosh, I hate to ask, but . . . but would you play something for me?" "Sure. What do you want to hear?" "Do you know any blues? In fact," I continued, "my favorite song is Bobby Blue Bland's version of 'St. James Infirmary.' Do you know that song?" If I had not had freshly by-passed arteries, I would have probably had heart attack number three then instead of two years later. He looked over the tube at me again and said, simply again, "I'm the bass guitarist on the original record." How can I remember what I then said, if I said anything? I only remember him telling me he played and toured with Bobby Blue Bland back in the '50s and '60s, and that the next time I listened to the record, if I listened closely, that was him on bass. Out came the guitar. He pulled the curtain aside and there on the window-sill sat a tiny amplifier. And he played. God, he played. The guitar talked; it sang to me, me, my mouth open in awe. I never heard anything like it--and I barely remember it. "You know the words to 'St. James'?" he asked me. "I play; I don't sing." "Yes . . . yes, but. . . ." The familiar melody started. He nodded his head at me. "I . . . I went down to . . . to St. James Infirmary. . . ." He nodded again, a nod that meant, Keep going. "And I heard-d my ba-a-by moan. And I felt so bro-o-ken hearted. She used to be my . . . my. . . ." And the words I knew so well escaped me. He helped me through the song, and we finished it. My daughter, a blues lover, of course, called, and I told her about Wayne Bennett. When she came to visit, her hands clutched my ragged Bobby Blue Bland albums. Wayne Bennett signed them:
And then my daughter had a blues experience. Out came the guitar. Wayne Bennett pointed to the chair between our beds and told my daughter, "Sit down, little lady." The familiar melody started. He nodded his head at me.
And I heard my baby moan. And I felt so broken hearted. She used to be my very own. And I tried so hard to keep from crying. My heart felt just like lead. She was all that I had to live for. Oh, I wish it was me instead. Now she's gone, she's gone and may God bless her Wherever she may be. She can search this wide world over And she'll never find a man like me. She's gone . . . She's gone . . . She's gone. Tears streamed down my daughter's cheeks and from my eyes. Today, I hope Wayne Bennett is alive and playing the blues somewhere and that he has new lungs and a new heart as big as his old one. If not, then God's blues band has a hell of a bass guitarist.
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