One day, doesn’t matter how, I tumbled to the idea that what I loved didn’t come from Davenport, Iowa. As my tastes changed, I started take the subway uptown to Apollo Music at 125th and Lenox, on the hunt for King Oliver or Louis Armstrong and his Hot Five. New Orleans became my city, New Orleans and its great founding myth, the sound of the drummers in Congo Square vibrating through young Buddy Bolden’s ears and on into the pulse of America. It was my fantasy to hear Bolden, the one who came before King Oliver and all the other bandleaders, the one who was never recorded, whose sound was the missing link to the past. Buddy Bolden, vanished into the silence. I dreamed of being the one who uncovered, in some dusty basement or thrift store backroom, a cache of wax cylinders, my ears the first in fifty years to receive the gift of Bolden’s cornet, its sweet high tone piercing the veil.
I know that by that time I’d heard some blues—by which I mean country blues, not commercial female nightclub singers backed by jazz bands, your Ma Raineys and Mamie Smiths and so forth. What I’d heard I hadn’t found too interesting. To me, Lead Belly sounded corny. All that “goddamighty-I-kin-pick-a-bale-o’-cotton” horseshit. You want the truth, he was still in the pen, metaphorically speaking, while Lomax père was leading him round those so-called progressive New York parties. I mean, making him perform in his prison stripes? The poor bastard was still doing time. Point is I didn’t care about the blues. Not many collectors did. We were troubled by its lack of sophistication. You have to remember, a lot of people thought the worst of the Negro in those days. We thought that kind of rough, low-down music only served to confirm color prejudice. A lot of Negroes thought so too, I might add. Church people wouldn’t have it in their houses.
Anyhow, one Saturday I was loitering by the counter at the Apollo and one of the clerks put on a Charley Patton Paramount. Number 12792, “Pony Blues” with “Banty Rooster Blues” on the flip.
You can catch my pony, saddle up my black mare
I’m going to find a rider, baby in the world somewhere
That sound, my God. Like it had come out of the earth. It made my jazz records seem like child’s play, like people fooling around in the antechamber, in the vestibule. I asked to hear it again. They sold it to me for a dollar. That’s how much the Paramounts cost. A dollar apiece, all new. The Victors were fifty cents. I took it home and played it twenty times, trying to decipher Patton’s words, to hear every eccentric phrase he played on his guitar.
Right away I sold every damn Bix and Paul Whiteman I owned. All I wanted was blues, blues. But the sound I craved wasn’t easy to come by. Patton, Son House, Willie McTell, Robert Johnson, Willie Johnson, Skip James, John Hurt…The names were traded by collectors, but no one seemed to know a thing about them. No information, not a scrap. They were like ghosts at the edges of American consciousness. You have to understand, when I say no one knew, I mean no one. You couldn’t just look something up in a book. Things were hidden. Things got lost. Musicians got lost.
I subscribed to record collecting magazines. There was Down Beat and Record Changer. I forget the others. Collectors would run want lists, mostly for jazz. Their contact details were printed on the inside cover. There was one guy with a New York address who only wanted blues, name after name I’d never heard of, recorded on labels I knew little or nothing about. C Bly, 179 Division Ave, Brooklyn 11, NY. Sometimes he wrote letters to the editors, correcting some point or offering additional information. His letters were usually more interesting than the articles they responded to. I wrote to him, at the address given, saying very humbly that I was a young collector and wanted guidance. What should I listen to? What was out there? He wrote back, enclosing a three-page typewritten list. Its title was Chester Bly Worthwhile Blues Records April 195—. I corresponded with him for some months before he mentioned an extraordinary thing: he also worked at the Herald Tribune. Of all the people in that warren of a building, the sports reporters and the city reporters and the compositors and copy takers and the rewrite men and the columnists and the printers and the drivers who loaded the papers into their trucks and drove away, we two were the most alike.
The next day I got in to work early, asked round in the newsroom. Did anyone know a Chester Bly? We smoked in those days. Some afternoons the newsroom looked as if dry ice was billowing through it. Rows of men, hunkered down over coffee-stained desks, battering at ancient typewriters in the haze. These men worked in a slum of spiked paper and cigarette ash, and I had to run between them, taking paper from one to another, from writer to editor and back and forth and over to a sub to write a headline and downstairs to be set. A monkey could have done it but they had me, and it was hard work. To get a break, you had to devise strategies, get yourself sent on long errands, that kind of thing. It was late before I had a moment to myself, a moment to walk through the haze to the jumble of desks where the copy editors sat. Mister Bly? A gaunt man looked up at me from under a green celluloid eyeshade. In front of him was a blank sheet of paper, and an empty wire basket. Otherwise the desk was completely clear. That was not normal. I introduced myself. If he was surprised, he didn’t show it.
—I have a lot of corrections to do, he said, but if you’re available this evening, perhaps you would care to come by and listen to some music.
Of all the people in the building, we two were the most alike.
WE RODE THE SUBWAY into Brooklyn, getting out in a neighborhood I’d never been in before. As I followed him down a block of dingy tenements, I saw how tall he was, how thin. He was dressed with a sort of threadbare immaculateness. His suit jacket was shiny at the shoulders, but still appeared perfectly pressed, even in the heat.
We entered a hostel for single men, of a class just a hair above the flophouses on the Bowery. No chow line, no dormitory rooms, but when you opened the front door your nostrils were hooked by that bread-line smell of urine and disinfectant and the first thing you saw was a chapel door with some oppressive motto about repentance written over the lintel. Bly was living in a room like a cell. He had nothing in there, not a thing but three wooden crates under his bed filled with records. No pictures, no personal objects. A plate and a knife and a fork on the dish rack. A pair of metal chairs pushed under either side of a card table. A turntable, an amp and a speaker. The man lived like a monk.
He offered me a chair and took the other. We sat, looking over at the turntable.