GHOST STORY
In July of 1999, business
brought me to Nashville for three days and I decided to take a long weekend and
visit Memphis. I hadn't been there in almost twenty years, not since the
funeral of my old friend and co-conspirator, Walter "Furry" Lewis.
Furry was a charter member of the Memphis Blues Caravan (MBC), a group of
geriatric blues men whom I had the pleasure of booking and managing in the
Seventies.
On a Friday morning I
headed southwest out of Nashville on I-40 (The Music Highway, as the sign said)
across the Tennessee River, through the rolling Cumberlands, on down to the
brown and wide Mississippi. I had promised myself this trip for years. I had
fantasized about it. Obsessed over it. It was like a reverse Vision Quest. I
wanted to go back, to recapture scenes that had been an important part of my
life, but knowing all the while that was not possible. Most of the folks I had
known were now gone. But they had stayed with me - and I thought…who knows what
I thought. I knew it was a trip I had to take.
I arrived early afternoon.
The first stop was the Cozy Corner Café, BBQ ribs and chicken (with a side of
beans), just to get in the right frame of mind. Then up Poplar Avenue to the
intersection of Manassas, where sat the global headquarters of Capitol Loans.
Capitol was the pawnshop where Furry would hock his guitar every time he came
off the road. When it was time to go back out again, it was up to me to
"un-hock" it so that he could play the dates.
Turning on Manassas I
drove one short block to Mosby Street where Furry had once lived at number 811.
The house is gone, having burned down a month before he died of complications
from the fire. But standing next door was its duplicate. A four-room shotgun
style house. Six or eight folks were sitting on the front porch. I asked if any
of them knew Furry Lewis who used to live next door. An old woman volunteered,
"the gittar picker?" I nodded. "You know he gone. Passed some
time ago." Yes, I know.
I looked over at the empty
lot and remembered walking up on the porch, through the front door, into main
room where Furry sat on his bed. A whiskey glass stood on the table next to him
covered by a saucer. "Spiders" he said, "can't see too good.
Don't want no surprises." That was in 1973.
Big Daddy's
Office
Bukka White's
"office" consisted of a chair leaned against a brick wall. Next to
the chair was a wooden crate. Both sat on the shady side of the street beside
Triune Sundry. This is where I first met him, having been told earlier by his
wife that "Big Daddy ain't home. He's at his office." Cruising the
streets near Mosby, I knew it was around the area somewhere. Suddenly something
told me to turn right at the corner of Leath. There it was.
It was a hot day in 1973
when I had first stood on that corner and shook hands with a legend. He was B.
B. King's big cousin and had given B. B. his first guitar, a Stella. Muddy
Waters would later tell me that there were licks Bukka did that he (Muddy) was
still trying to figure out. And Bukka was the man who literally sang his way
out of Parchman Farm Prison. I stood on the corner for a while. I took a few
pictures. I could hear the rolling thunder of Aberdeen Blues and see his hands,
hopping back on forth on the guitar. I got in the car and headed for Beale.
Daddy's Dogma
At the back of 333 Beale
Street is the photo studio of Dr. Ernest Withers (an honorary degree from
Memphis State University). He's an ex-Memphis cop, one of nine who were the
first black cops in town, circa 1946. The studio consists of two rooms; each piled
high with stacks and stacks of photos, in no particular order. There wasn't a
camera in sight. My “tour guide,” Denise Tapp, introduced me to him and I told
him that we had a mutual "acquaintance" in Steve LaVere. (LaVere got
hold of some Withers negatives years ago and the beef eventually ended up in
court.) He told me to take my time and look around. I did. There were pictures
of MLK, et al, the whole Memphis civil rights thing, old shots of Beale (like
the Review that used to play the Palace Theatre in the Twenties and Thirties),
street shots of Beale from 1919, pictures of Johnny Ace driving his
"touring car" and shots of every musician of note in Memphis. On the
wall over Dr. Withers' desk stood the following legend:
Daddy's Dogma
I'll appeal to your intellect
Then I'll appeal to your pride,
If that don't get it,
I'll get to your hide.
Alfred Earl
Withers
1889 - 1969
I stayed two hours.
Sid, Mose,
Judy, Carol
That evening I saw my old
buddy Sid Selvridge play (he's the producer of the Beale Street Caravan blues
show, syndicated on about two-hundred-fifty PBS radio stations coast to coast).
Sid, by the way, played at Furry Lewis's funeral accompanied by Lee Baker. They
rolled the old man out to "When I Lay My Burden Down." Listening to
Sid, I couldn't believe that this man didn't have a "deal."
Everything about the guy is perfect - from pitch to picking to presence.
The next night caught Mose
Vinson (the last surviving cat who played on the Memphis Blues Caravan)
performing at the Center For Southern Folklore. The Center is run by Judy
Peiser, a one-woman perpetual motion machine. "Judy, you're like
crabgrass…you're everywhere." She laughed. Then she disappeared. Mose is
84 (but claims to be 105) and still plays a mean piano. I told him I always thought
he had the best left hand in the business. He smiled...he was trying to
remember who I was. I don't know if it ever got through.
Listening to Mose, I sat
at a table with Carol Baker and one of her three sons. Carol is the widow of
Lee Baker, Memphis musical powerhouse and co-founder of such influential bands
as Mud Boy & The Neutrons and Moloch. Two teenaged boys murdered Lee in a
botched robbery attempt. The world lost a treasure. I told Lee's son that I
knew his Daddy and that he should be very proud. "I am," he said,
"everyday."
One Kind
Favor…
On Saturday I drove myself
down into the Delta, straight down Highway 61. But first I had to pay my
respects and headed for the Hollywood Cemetery out by the Freeway. The grave of
Furry Lewis lay toward the back. Not knowing exactly where, I looked for some
landmark from memory (I had been there once before, when he was laid to rest in
1981). Many of the headstones were hand-carved and the names that stood on them
were classic. Lots of Jackson's and Washington's, Willie's and Burtie Mae's.
The ground was uneven, with definite depressions outlining the wooden boxes
that had decayed, six feet deeper in the earth. There were few concrete
sarcophagi, as found in the white folks' graveyards. When nature consumed what
was left in it, the ground above sank. I parked near the back of the cemetery
and slowing walked toward the gate. It had started to rain a bit and my pant
legs began to darken as I walked among the graves.
And finally, there it was.
Walter "Furry" Lewis, Blues Man. My pal. Wise and funny. A songster and
storyteller. I stood there for a while - surrounded by ghosts - reliving an
incident that occurred many, many years ago.
Furry was playing a solo
date at a college. I was in the dressing room during part of his last set that
night. Suddenly, I heard my name being called from the stage. I stumbled out of
the dressing room and ran to the lip of the wing. Furry sat with one arm draped
across his guitar; he had a gleam in his eye. "Arne," he said,
"seeee that my grave is kept clean." And then went into the Blind
Lemon Jefferson tune. The audience howled.
I placed a small stone on
top of the marker. Then I walked back to the car.
61 Highway
Rolling south out of
Memphis, down Third Street, the famous US 61 sign suddenly appeared on my
right. It was a sign I was very familiar with. I grew up only a few miles from
its northern extension. It paralleled the river up from the Iowa, Minnesota,
and Wisconsin tri-corner, wound through Minneapolis and then snaked north to
the Canadian border some four hundred miles away. Another fellow Minnesotan,
and University of Minnesota attendee, Bob Zimmerman, was equally familiar with
this road. It tracked to the east of his hometown of Hibbing, Minnesota (but
straight through the city of his birth, Duluth). He would later change his
name. And he would write a song about it. "Highway 61."
As I crossed the
Mississippi State line, some 20 miles outside downtown Memphis, I began to see
billboards advertising various casinos. The frequency of these signs grew as I
approach Tunica. At one point, they appeared virtually every fifty yards. Just
north of the Tunica Corp. Limit, to my right I could see some of the casinos
themselves, peeking above the levee, next to the mile-wide Mississippi.
The River
Dark brown, wider than
wide, it was not the river I knew as a kid. Contained by steep banks, the
Mississippi flows through Minneapolis and St. Paul; the Twin Cities are
situated just above Lock & Dam Number 1. All barge traffic ends about three
or four miles upstream from the Lock at St. Anthony Falls. Just below the Falls
stands what was left of the docks and buildings that at one time comprised the
Pillsbury A Mill. At the turn of the century, from these docks wheat and flour
reaped from the vast Minnesota and Dakota Plains floated south to the railheads
of St. Louis. Two blocks from my childhood front door one could put a boat in
the water and cruise south, like the huge flour barges of long ago, all the way
to the Gulf of Mexico.
The Delta
Passing the outskirts of
Tunica, the landscape flattened. Cotton fields spread out to the right and
left. I was entering the great Mississippi Delta.
The Delta is
bordered on the west by the Mississippi River and some 70 miles to the east by
the Choctaw Ridge, the beginning of the Mississippi hill country. The Yazoo
Delta, as this section is known, sits atop some fifty feet of rich, black soil,
deposited by eons of flooding by the Mississippi, before it was contained by
the levees. These levees were built at about the same time that the flour,
milled fourteen hundred miles north, shipped off the docks at the Pillsbury A
Mill. Both the flour and the levees were the product of strenuous physical
labor - labor that was voluntary and remunerative at the Northern end of the
river and completely the opposite at the Southern end.
When I first met the
Artists who would comprise the Memphis Blues Caravan, my experience with black
Americans was limited, in the extreme. I was a blue eyed white boy (literally,
age about 25 or 26) from the Minnesota. I knew that what they did as musicians
was magical and powerful – moving me on levels I could scares express. I had no
concept, however, of where they came from, what shaped them, what they had been
through.
The vast farms of both
western Minnesota and the flat plains of the Dakotas were peopled largely by
Scandinavian and German immigrants. Having sold virtually all they had in order
to start a new life, these folks were just beginning to enjoy the rewards and
benefits that flowed from hard work and equal opportunity. No one gave them
anything - but no one took anything from them either. They spoke English, just
barely, and when they did, it was through a heavy accent. They were largely
illiterate and could not read or write the language of their new country. But
they were among their fellows, their countrymen, some a generation removed from
the homeland. The freedom assured by the laws and Constitution their new
country allowed them to help and encourage one another and to prosper. And they
were all, every one of them, white.
In the levee camps, the
workers too, were illiterate. But they were not aided or encouraged in their
efforts to build better lives, as were their neighbors to the north. And they
were all, virtually every one of them, black.
The Black Code
After the defeat of
Reconstruction in the mid-to-late 1800's, the State of Mississippi was the
first to enact a set of laws that became to be known as The Black Code. These
were laws which specifically spelled out offences which, when committed by a
person of color, could be punished by an equally specific sentence. No
distinctions were made as to age or gender. These laws were applied universally
across the entire non-white population. Offences ranged from Insolence (as seen
in the eye of the beholder) to Theft to Rape and Murder. The latter two, if
committed against a member of the white population, were summarily dealt with
via a common and accepted practice - lynch law. Cause of death always read the
same, "death at the hands of unknown parties." Every non-white was at
constant risk. For more on this subject, read David Oshinsky's excellent book: Worse
Than Slavery--Parchment Farm and the Ordeal
of Jim Crow Justice (Free Press Paperbacks/Simon
& Schuster, ISBN 0-684-83095-7)
"They
worked us like rented mules…"
What the Black Code
accomplished was a reinstitution of slavery via an ingenious phenomenon called
Prisoner Leasing. Lacking facilities to house and manage a large and growing
convict population, the State allowed the "leasing" of these
prisoners to various business enterprises in need of labor. It was the
responsibility of the enterprise to guard, maintain and direct those prisoners
it had under lease. In the antebellum South, the most valuable property a
landowner had, aside from the land itself, was the slave. As chattel, they had
a high value. Owners had incentive to house, feed and maintain them in as
healthy a condition as economically possible so that they could deliver the
labor they were intended to supply. With the advent of prisoner leasing, all
this changed. Not being "owned," but merely leased, and with a ready
supply of replacements, prisoners could literally be worked to death. Records
show annual mortality rates exceeding forty-five per cent.
The levees that rose to my
right, huge earthen berms dug out of the heavy black bottomland, were the
product of this system of labor. And as I headed for Clarksdale and the Delta
Blues Museum, my plan was to visit later the source of much of that labor, the
infamous Parchman Farm Prison.
The Museum
I arrived in Clarksdale (a
guy named Muddy-something used to live and work around there), and followed the
signs to the Delta Blues Museum. The Museum was housed (since moved to it’s own
building) on the second floor of what was once the Clarksdale Library. As you
enter, on the left is the cash register and counter stacked with CDs. Along the
walls are posters advertising long- past appearances of various blues
performers (some legendary, some not) and in the center of the room are library
stacks containing reference books on blues and blues history. I prowled around,
looking at various old guitars - BB King's Lucille, old Stellas, a National
Steel, looked at pictures, thumbed through some books. I spent an hour. Signed
the guest book. It was wonderful. Then I headed for Parchman Farm (a/k/a the
Mississippi State Penitentiary).
"…where
the Southern cross the Dog"
On the way to Parchman I
drove through Tutwiler, MS. When I saw the sign, I wheeled off the road and
headed into town, looking for the railroad crossing. It was in the train
station in Tutwiler that W.C. Handy first heard the real-deal blues, played by
some guy with a guitar using a jack knife for a slide. It was 1903. Handy was
blown away. "…I'm goin' where the Southern cross the Dog…" the only
verse Handy remembered from the tune he heard, was a reference to the
intersection of the Southern Railway and the YMV (Yazoo Mississippi Valley
Railroad), which was known variously as the Yellow Dog or just The Dog. Maybe I
wasn't alone in the car, but for some reason I thought of a verse Furry Lewis
used in his version of John Henry, "…That Big Bend Tunnel on the YMV,
gonna be the death of me" as I headed down Front Street, past The White
Front Café & Joe's Hot Tomalleys, and the Tutwiler Funeral Home (a former garage),
straight to the crossing. No station any more. No trains either. Not for thirty
years. I took a picture of the overgrown, crooked tracks, northbound, headed
for Memphis, the tracks that carried Mr. Handy, his head spinning with a new
sound, on up to play a date somewhere, 96 years ago.
The Shooters
Leaving Tutwieler I drove
on to Parchman Farm, where Bukka White served time for manslaughter
("...sef defense," he told me) and literally sang his way to freedom
- the Governor dug it and pardoned him. Coincidentally, Vernon Presley also
served time at Parchman, and may well have been co-resident with Bukka.
Vernon’s crime – “uttering a false instrument” – he changed $2 to $4 on a check
given him in payment for a pig he’d sold to a local court official.
There are no fences around Parchman, just
twenty thousand acres of cotton fields covering some forty-six square miles.
Cotton farming there is now pretty much all mechanized. But up until about
fifteen years ago, inmates worked the fields, divided into gangs of one hundred
each (The Long Line). They were guarded by six groups-of-two of their fellows,
Trustee Guards, who were picked from the population because of their bad
attitude, toughness and brutality. They were armed. One carried a shotgun and
the other carried a 30-30 Winchester. They were called the Shooters. If someone
tried to cut and run, the first shot was fired by the shotgun Shooter, aimed
low, at the legs. If he missed, or the escapee kept going, the next shot came
from the 30-30 and was a shoot-to-kill round. If the runner died, the Shooters
were given a pardon for "meritorious service" (God's truth...). Running six feet parallel to the two
outermost Long Lines lay the ill-defined Dead Line. Cross it – and you were
dead. The men in the work gang were called Gunmen (because they worked
"under the gun"). Each gang had a lead man known as the Caller. He
set the rhythm and pace of the work with call-and-response verses. A
newspaperman who heard this reported that the hundred-voice response was
"…a sound that could literally knock you off your feet."
Parchman Farm
About a mile from the
Parchman front gate, a sign on the highway warns, "No Stopping Next Two
Miles - State Prison." Of course, I stopped at the gate, got out of the
car and took pictures. Two guards expressed to me that this wasn’t such a good
idea. Before arriving at the gate, on that mile or so of highway, I could see
buildings in the distance across a vast cotton field. Low-slung and sinister,
they were ringed by ribbon wire. These were the "camps." There were
fifteen of them and they consisted of dormitories (called The Cages) and
various outbuildings, the laundry, a mechanical shop, a canning facility, etc.
Through the main gate, and well into the compound, stood the Superintendent's House
(known as Front Camp), shielded from view by a copse of trees. The job of
Superintendent was a patronage appointment and, very early on, it was decided
that the Mississippi needed "a farmer" not a "penologist"
to run the place. Parchman was to be run at a profit. And it was. In 1908, four
years after it opened, it showed a profit of $800 per man, woman and child in
residence (children were indeed in residence at Parchman - records show that
the Black Code was blind to age, with a six- year old girl serving five years
for "stealing a hat" and a ten-year old boy serving life for murder).
By 1917, Parchman Farm was the single largest revenue source for the State of
Mississippi. It was big business.
But no longer. Parchman's
acreage is now leased to farmers and cultivation is completely mechanized.
Prisoner's no longer "work the long line" and are largely confined to
barracks in the "camps" spread through the institution. The sight of
the Shooters and the call-and-response rhythm of the Caller are no more. At the
guard’s urging, I drove quickly on. And swung west on Highway 8.
Dockery,
Rosedale & Stovall
The Dockery Plantation and
the Stovall Plantation two produced well over eighty per cent of anybody who is
anybody in Delta Blues. I passed Dockery first and found the famous sign,
painted on the side of a barn, announcing to the world that Will and Joe Rice
Dockery once owned the place. More cotton, thousands of acres. It was a virtual
hothouse for seminal Delta Blues. Leaving Dockery, I was bound for the river
and Rosedale (fabled in Robert Johnson lyrics).
Rosedale was quite, small
and green. Kudzu crept up the water tower that stood across the street from the
shuttered Texas Ladies Juke.
The old Town Hall stood on
the corner, its windows broken, obviously empty. I tried to imagine what it was
like in the 30's when Johnson went "…to Rosedale with my rider by my
side…," the hot Delta nights where he "barrel-housed on the
riverside." Maybe he played in some forerunner of the old Texas Ladies
Juke. Maybe not. I stood in the middle of the street. A lone white guy with a
camera in his hand. Looking for ghosts.
Leaving Rosedale, I headed
up Highway 1 to Stovall and Friars Point.
The sky began to darken.
About ten miles from Stovall, just past Gunnison, MS, it opened and rain came
down in sheets (anyone who’s ‘enjoyed’ a southern downpour, can relate). I
slowed from fifty down to forty, then to thirty and finally pulled over, unable
to see. I sat for fifteen minutes, listening to pounding Delta rain pour on to
the roof of the rented Buick. Finally, it eased and I pulled back on the
highway. Fifteen minutes later, a sign said Stovall, MS; a gas station/store
next to a cotton gin. An arrow pointed down a dirt road, over it read
"Stovall Farms."
The Stovall Plantation, like
the Dockery, was home to some of the Delta's greatest performers. Muddy Waters
and Charlie Patton both drove tractors on this plantation. I wanted to
know what living conditions were like, what the place "felt" like.
Where they lived, where they worked. I didn't know what I wanted.
All I could find was a
Manager's office and the crisp signage indicative of a big, corporate,
agricultural enterprise. No "choppin' cotton" here. Just big
machinery and mechanized farming - and no ghosts. I headed for Friars Point.
Friars Point
Rolling into Friars Point,
I found a truly pretty little town nestled against the levee on the west and
the Stovall Plantation to the south. Its streets wind, mirroring the bending
river a half-mile to the west. Main Street ends at the levee itself. It was the
place where Joe Willie Wilkins and Houston Stackhouse, MBC charter members,
used to occasionally hang when they were playing KFFA’s King Biscuit Blues Show
with Sonny Boy Williamson in Helena, Arkansas, just across the river. Both Joe
and Stack can be seen as young men in the famous King Biscuit photo of
Williamson and band taken outdoors in front of the radio station. Stack
standing to Sonny Boy’s right, Joe to the right of Stack.
Defying a sign prohibiting
any motor traffic on the levee, I drove up and parked on the top. Facing the
river, to my right and left, the levee stretched on and on, broad as a city
street. I was situated about thirty feet above the town that lay at my back.
Standing there, I got a
sense of the tremendous size of the thing and thought of all the effort that
went into its original construction. And it was most all done by hand. I turned
from the river and looked back into the town. I thought of Joe Willie and
Stackhouse and our days on the road together. I imagined them as young men,
strolling down Main Street in Friars Point, guitars in their hands. Women
giving them shy looks. More ghosts.
Then back east, toward 61
and up to Memphis.
Bessie
About sixteen miles out of
Friars Point, heading toward Highway 61, I came to a stop sign. The road sign
above it read Old Highway 61. Across the road was a sign for the "Corp.
Limit" of Coahoma, MS. It dawned on me where I was. I made a right turn
and pulled the Buick over to the shoulder about a mile and a half down - where
the road takes a sharp bend to the right, then to the left and straightens as
it heads south toward Clarksdale. There was no sign marking the spot, but I
felt I knew exactly where I was - the spot where Bessie Smith's car went off
the road. She was heading for Clarksdale. She finally made it - and died in the
Colored Hospital (now a rooming house). The story about how she died because
the White hospital wouldn't take her is
untrue. The first vehicle on the scene was the Colored ambulance and she was so
far gone at that point that nothing could have saved her.
I retraced and then
continued east, turning left on Highway 61, headed north to Memphis.
That's - 30 -
The rains had stopped. It
was late in the day and the afternoon sun broke low out of the western sky.
Across a cotton field on my right hung a rainbow. It rose up out of the cotton
on the far horizon and disappeared half way up its arc into the scudding
clouds. I had one picture left in the camera. I pulled off the road and walked
out into the cotton. The air was damp and heavy, full of the smell of rich
loam. I stood there a full minute - just breathing.
The rainbow was fading as
I framed the shot. The shutter clicked. The camera issued a low hum as the film
rewound. And then it was quiet. I stood there a while longer. Me and the
cotton… and a few ghosts.
