Long Time Leaving (31 page)

“A music fan” from Birmingham says:

I don't know which of those reviews is more depressing. I do know that Brother Dave deserves them both. The first reviewer would seem to be unbalanced by a chip on the shoulder, but Brother Dave was all for cashing in those chips. The second reviewer's taste is a lot closer to mine—in particular with regard to Jerry Clower, a finer and funnier conscious artist (and more sympathetic portrayer of rednecks) than Brother Dave—but I am not about to throw away any of my Brother Dave albums. He's embarrassing, all right, and toward the end of his career he was worse than that. But he'll drive some resounding nails into your head.

He wasn't a traditional Southern storyteller like Clower; he was a far-out, polyphonic spritzer, in the urban, jazzy, stoner tradition of his predecessor Lord Buckley and his contemporary Lenny Bruce. He was way out there, like the more inventive but less trenchant Jonathan Winters. Like Robin” Williams's, Brother Dave's rap is often more sound than sense. Williams has considerably more range vocally, but Brother Dave had more theme. Alas.

In the anthology of Southern humor I edited a few years back, I made a point of including several Brother Dave bits that might, in fact, be called liberal. For instance, the one about a man who went to hell and saw the horror of people forced to sit at dinner with nothing to eat with but spoons, permanently affixed to their arms, that were too long for their mouths to reach. Then he went to heaven and saw that the blessed were limited to the same long spoons—the only difference being that they were feeding each other.

Brother Dave can be delightful, though, without being charitable. From his second album,
Kick Thy Own Self
(1960):

He dwells so intently upon generally taken-for-granted words (one of his albums was called
It's All in How You Look at “It”)
that you wonder whether he didn't have a formative influence on Bill Clinton. But that's not what is enduringly embarrassing about him.

Brother Dave was born poor in Jackson, Tennessee, in 1926. Though ordained as a minister in his youth, he found his vocation while moonlighting as a drummer in nightclubs. The comedy lines he would toss out from time to time—giving himself his own rimshots, presumably—were so well received that he developed a stand-up act that he honed for a decade in Southern strip joints and bottle clubs until, in 1957, he suddenly hit the high national cotton on Jack Paar's
Tonight Show.
He did Paar and
The Ed Sullivan Show
a number of times and in 1959 came out with a groundbreaking comedy LP,
Rejoice, Dear Hearts.
It was a big hit. He followed it with several more albums, and college audiences embraced him North and South. During the early sixties he made enough money to set himself up in a twenty-three-room Hollywood mansion, with a boomerang-shaped swimming pool.

You probably ought not to shape your first swimming pool like a boomerang. But it wasn't just sudden wealth, and lots of drugs, and chain-smoking (“I'd smoke in my sleep if I had somebody to hold 'em”) that brought Gardner low, it was politics. In 1970, Larry L. King published a great piece in
Harper's
Magazine entitled “Whatever Happened to Brother Dave?” King had been a long time tracking him down. His mansion was boarded up, he was off the celebrity-search map, and the companies that had put out his records had no idea where he was. Finally King found him at the Pecan Grove Club in Charlotte, North Carolina. He was still doing his classic bits: Davy slaying Goliath with a smooth stone “wrapped up in a blue-suede tennis-shoe tongue,” Brutus stabbing Caesar with a knife so sharp it “cut the little microbes in two, and they screamed as they fell on each side,
eek, eek,
” and death on the highway
for the Alabama motorcyclists Mr. Chuck and Miss Baby. He was titillating the home folks, as always, with remarks like “I ain't got nothing against sex education in the schools, dear hearts, except it makes us parents feel like we didn't do it right.”

But now he was mixing off-color with disdain for the aspirations of colored folk: “Can you imagine the vanity of that civil wrongs song, ‘We Shall Overcome’? Now, beloved, how can any mortal do
that?”
He had always moved in and out of various exaggerated Southern accents black and white, and that had bothered a lot of people. (Flip Wilson's Geraldine character sounded a lot like Brother Dave's basic female African American voice, but Wilson was black himself, and Geraldine was triumphantly sassy, whereas Brother Dave's black women tended—like his white characters—to be none too swift.) Now, in Charlotte, he was saying things like “The ole Yankee newspapers put the ugly mouth on those good people down in Lamar, South Carolina. Yeah, man, said they'd beat up on some New Citizens’ little schoolchildren. Naw, beloved, that ain't true! They didn't hurt them lovely children—all they did was take some chains and whip up on some old school buses.”

And some of his Charlotte fans were whooping and cheering, and others, thank God, were walking out. Before his week-long gig at the Pecan Grove club was over, he was working crowds recruited by Ku Kluxers of his acquaintance. He was referring to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., as “Dr. Junior,” and going so far as to say, two years after King's assassination, “God, wasn't that a clean hit on Dr. Junior?” He apparently never repented of such sentiments, but in 1983 efforts were being made to revive his career when he died of a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven, on the set of a movie he was to appear in called
Chain Gang.

You won't hear anything that Klan-pleasing on the CDs you can order from Amazon.com. But let's just run through the last couple of minutes of
Kick Thy Own Self,
which is available on a double-album CD with
Rejoice, Dear Hearts:

The panther's voice is what you would call Southern black. The other animals sound sort of generic-country-Southern. The tone of that
Hawnh?
is a mixture of prelapsarian innocence and invincible ignorance. The
Awwwww
sounds a genuinely poignant note of innocent disappointment.

Then Brother Dave goes off on a series of tangents:

Done in his voices, the material is dazzling. It also reeks with a deep feeling for, and just as deep a fear of, poverty and ignorance and primitivity. The roots of po-white racism. Brother Dave has a lot of the violinist in him and a lot of the panther.

I have a vinyl album on the Capitol label,
It Don't Make No Difference-undated,
but you can tell from the Kennedy-administration references that it's from the early sixties—on which Brother Dave lays down some friendly racism. “Out in California I miss 'em, you know what I mean? There ain't no way that you can grow up with anybody and not miss 'em sometimes.” He says he was up in the Hollywood Hills recently when “There he was, bless my soul, an Afro-American citizen—I just got elated, flipped outa my skull. Said Oh, happy day, here's somebody to talk some trash with. I say, ‘Yeah, man, how you is?’ He say, ‘Very well, thank you, and how are you?’ ” And Brother Dave is disappointed. And that is his whole point.

When I first began to travel in the North, back in the early sixties, black people reminded me of home, and it struck me as unnatural when some of them sounded like Yankees. Articulated more distinctly than I did. (In 1853, in Philadelphia on his first trip away from home, Mark Twain wrote to his brother Orion that he would “like amazingly to see a good, old-fashioned negro.”) But it wasn't too long before I began to think to myself: Well, maybe I better expand my sense of what's natural. I guess some people would call that my first step down the slippery slope of PC. But how about the first time Brother Dave stood up in front of an audience and referred to black people as “ 'em”—as if there were no chance that any of “ 'em” might be listening, and if they were listening, who cared? What if somebody from that audience had come up to him afterward and said, “Man, you need some diversity training”? Might have averted a lot of deep ugliness down the road.

“You know,” says Brother Dave on one of his albums, “I don't know what I'm doing half the time…. I figure if I did figure out what I was doing, I'd prob'ly go hide.” He didn't hide, and that made him embarrassing in the way of an artist. But he didn't do much constructive figuring, either, and that made him embarrassing in the way of a crazy dumb-ass from home.

Members of New York's Gambino crime family are distancing themselves from the Clinton pardon scandal, calling the former president's family “low-rent, trailer-park trash.” Thomas Gambino, 72, son of the late mob boss Carlo Gambino, is fuming at reports his family had something to do with Roger Clinton's effort to get a pardon for a New Jersey heroin dealer named Rosario “Sal” Gambino.

—New York Post

O
kay, now I am going to do a little impression, of sorts, in which—I don't usually do this. I believe in quoting people the way they actually said it, or the way they actually would have said it if I weren't making it up. But in this case, I am going to euphemize something. It is something that people where I come from do right often, thank you very much, but they don't rely upon it quite so much in conversation. I am going to replace that with something that people in the South would do even more often than the other thing, if they had time, and which has the same number of letters and begins with the same one. Here we go.

(That last is my best effort to spell the sound of the “here” that often ends a sentence in
The Sopranos.
As in, “Waddayathink, that's going to
impress me, a fishin’ bullet in the eyeball, hee'y?” It's not so much like the affirmative “hee” in “hee-haw” as it is like the derogatory middle portion of “peee-yew.” By the way, in
The Sopranos
nobody ever says “there.” Everybody says “over hee'y,” with a thumb point, as in, when somebody tries to make a serious sociopolitical point, “Oh, listen to Mr. C. Vann fishin’ Woodward over hee'y.”)

I have seen every episode of
The Sopranos
and wish it would go on for years and years. I just wonder why, if a Mafia clan can become “America's favorite crime family,” to quote the billing for that popular Home Box Office series, how come a Ku Klux Klan family can't? Mafia guys are just as dumb as Kluxers, they don't like people of different races either, and they are every bit as vicious. They are just as likely to have an Uncle Junior, and the outfits they wear are, if anything, tackier. Yet they have cachet.