LET ME BE CLEAR. I PLAY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC. God’s and the other kind. That is to say I play both sides. Sunday picnics and work camps. All the different kinds of camp. Logging camps, levee camps, places where they’ll kill a man and step over his body to get to the barrelhead. Ruled by the knife and the whip and the gun. Turpentine in Louisiana and coal in Alabama. Cane on the Brazos River in Texas. It’s all the same, the whole country one big camp. They are making dead men in camps all over this land. No one bats an eye.
Since I was a child I could always play, always find the thread of what I was feeling and follow it up and down the strings. I grew up playing rags and jigs and whatnot for Mister Billy, as he sat in a rocker on his porch and slapped his fat thigh in time. When you play music you don’t always have to work. I teamed up with a pianist in Memphis and we made money then. But I worked too. I picked on Mister Billy’s farm. I cut willow and drove a team. I did all those things at one time or another. There were years I stayed in one place. The Choctaw mounds by the river, the glitter of the water sliding by. Time slowed down. But I was a rounder, born to roam. I had a little girl in Greenville, another in Natchez. I found it easy to say goodbye, easier not to say goodbye at all. I rode buses and trains. On Farish Street I built a reputation as a slick young sheik, in any game you care to name, a winner. When I smiled, everyone smiled back because I was so damn pretty. Farish Street, the Black Mecca, the shining beacon of the race. My shiny shoes. I never stayed at the Saint James Hotel. I never shut one of those heavy wooden doors behind me, the doors with the brass numbers, never shut the door and lay down and went to sleep on clean white cotton sheets that smelled of lavender. There were black-owned boardinghouses around Farish Street. The musicians all stayed in those, when we came in to town.
Sometimes I played on street corners. I played outside a general store. I played outside a Chinese laundry.
Oh what a beautiful city
Oh what a beautiful city
Twelve gates to the city, hallelujah
There was a café. There was a furniture store. A tailor. A Frosty Freeze ice cream. People in from all over, farmers in their overalls, gawping at the windows. There was a music store. Speir, the man’s name was. H.C. Speir. A white man. It was a long dark narrow store. Four listening booths, two white, two colored. Racks and boxes of records behind the counter. In the front window, he’d fixed a black rubber snake to a phonograph turntable, so that when the handle was cranked, the snake jumped and juggled, rearing up like it was about to strike. Everybody loved the black snake. Kids, everyone. Speir knew how to draw people. Every day someone was out in front of his place with a guitar or a fiddle, trying to catch his eye. If he liked your music, he could get you twenty-five dollars to do a recording session. That was a generally known fact.
I played for Mr. Speir and he told me I was good and to come back in a month when he would give me an answer. In that time I rode clear to Birmingham and back, playing every night. The people loved me. They put money in my pocket and hollered for more. You’re in luck, Speir said, when I turned up at his door. You won’t have to go nowhere. They gone come to you. He showed me a telegram. HAVE SHAW AND PARTNER IF HE HAS ONE REPORT DIRECT TO SJH TEN AM TUE 6 AUGUST I CAN’T BE THERE COHN AND ENGLAND WILL HANDLE. Ten dollars, he said. Not twenty-five, but enough. And all the dreams of what might happen after that. The train car with my name on the side. The silk suits.
I did have a partner at one time. Went by Guitar Jimmy. Boy had talent. I never seen him learn a song, it was like he already knew. Any kind. Polka, Irish, you name it. He just had to put the hat down and they’d drop the money right in. Guitar Jimmy or Jimmy Clean. You could walk all day in the summer heat and he looked like he just stepped out of a limousine. Together we were free. No man to tell us where or when or how. You could finish playing at two and he’d wake you at three saying I heard a train, let’s get on it. And we would. We were under nobody’s command. One time we were staying at a boardinghouse in Evansville, burned down in the night with our guitars inside. Burned right to the ground. We started up Sixty-one, walking. He had a harmonica, started blowing it with me singing. People stopped their cars to give us dollar bills. By the time we reached Clarksdale we had enough to buy ourselves new guitars. That’s just how it was with me and Jimmy. But he liked pussy and that was his undoing. Some woman, her man found him, shot him with a forty-four right in the side. Right through his lung. I see him in the kingdom. I hope to see Jimmy there.