—Why are you telling me this?
—Because you need to hear it, you little prick. You got the picture yet? It’s a business. The record company needed to give it a certain spin. Salvatore Massaro had to be Blind Willie Dunn because that’s the only way the product would sell. You and your buddy, mixing it up, trying to plug into the real like it’s some kind of amplifier. You’re the worst of them. Looking for that uncut hit. That pure. Fucking vampires! Why can’t you accept there ain’t no pure. There ain’t no real. It’s just people.
—Charlie Shaw is real.
—Now this comes out of his mouth. It’s a Greek fucking tragedy up in here. Yeah, I know. Big bad Charlie Shaw, coming at you out of the heart of darkness. Sold his soul to the devil, most probably, to learn to play guitar. So here’s where I get to break it to you that he’s also twenty-four-carat vaudeville.
—We didn’t make him up. He exists. He’s stalking me. He’s threatening my life.
—Sorry, does baby need to go to his safe space now?
—He’s messing with me. He’s going to kill me, if the thing in my chest doesn’t get me first.
—What thing?
—I have a burning. A thing in my chest. Like your friend.
—My what?
—Like Chester Bly. I know what happened to him. The same thing is happening to me. I’m in danger.
—Like Chester? Sure, like Chester. Well, I don’t think Charlie’s going to let you fry before he’s finished with you. That’d be a rookie move. But you need to know something about Charlie. He’s Wolfmouth Shaw, the Wolfmouth who toured with the medicine shows. Sure, he knew a lot of black people. That’s how he got it down so well. The voice, the guitar picking, the dance steps.
—What are you saying?
—You know what I’m saying.
—It’s not true.
—It is so. White as me and you.
—That cannot be true.
He imitated my voice, making it into a vile constipated whine.
—That cannot be true, that cannot be true. Fucking folk collectors, all the same. Let me tell you the trouble with you people. You hate the real music, the music that was actually happening, because you’re so hung up on what you like to call the authentic. A man plays a lick he learned from a record, you throw him out because he ain’t authentic enough for you. I arrive in your studio with a spear and a damn bone through my nose, you’d get down on your knees and pray to Jesus because there I was and I hadn’t been influenced.
—He can’t be a white man.
He paused, scratching at some eczematic patch buried in his chin stubble.
—Well, I admit I’m not a hundred percent. Never easy to tell what’s going on when they’re in the makeup.
He began to splutter with laughter. The laughter turned into a coughing fit, and he made another lunge for my water jug. I twisted round to keep it out of his reach. He recovered himself and looked at me sullenly.
—Fine, just my little joke. So he’s black. Where does that leave you? Charlie Shaw is a professional entertainer, is all I’m saying. Not some fucking mud man, crawling out of the primal ooze. And he ought to get paid.
—For what?
—What does anyone want to get paid for? For the work they’ve done.
—You act like you know everything, but you’re full of shit. You don’t know what he wants any more than I do. You don’t even know what’s on the other side of the record he made.
—About that.
—Yeah, who’s the bigshot collector, now? The one with all the information. You were desperate to know what was on the other side. You were begging me to tell you. Well, now I’ll tell you. It’s called “The Laughing Song.”
I thought he’d be impressed, or at least interested, but he just made a face and started fishing around in his pockets. Finally he uncrumpled a piece of paper, a photocopy of some kind of form or index card, filled in by hand in a scratchy ink pen. Dates, song titles, timings. On a line headed “location” were the letters SJH.
—What you have here is the log for a recording session that took place at the Saint James Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, in November of 1929. Look at the lineup. Slim Duckett and Pig Norwood. Emmett Charles. He was a minstrel too, by the way, worked with Daddy Stovepipe. And you see there, Charlie Shaw.
—His name’s scratched out.
—That’s right. And what does that tell you?
—I don’t know.
—That he didn’t make the session, dumbass. He was down to be recorded but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen.
—Well, he must have been recorded another time.
—There was no other time. That’s it. That’s the only time Key & Gate ever recorded in Jackson. All their other sessions were in New York. I’ve seen those session sheets. All of them. Every last one. I have a contact, a collector friend. I’ve seen every name, every date. This is the only time Charlie Shaw comes up anywhere.
—So the crossing out must be a mistake. He made the session. I’ve heard the record, for God’s sake.
—The record you told me you and your friend cooked up.
—I don’t know. I don’t know why we thought that. It seemed obvious at the time. I don’t know. I think he must have made the record. How else could I have heard it?
—Charlie Shaw went to Jackson but he never came back. He vanished. They scratched his name out of the session log and no one ever saw or heard of him again. Charlie Shaw never recorded.
—So what was it we put out?
—There’s a question. I got to warn you, when you eat at that breakfast place, go easy on the hot sauce.
I don’t remember anything after that. Night had long fallen. The lights in the bus were dimmed. I was exhausted. Headlights streamed past. Everything was a jumble. Eventually I slept. I was woken by the driver calling out a stop. The seat beside me was empty. It was the parting of the ways. JumpJim had gone.