Nighthawk Blues (25 page)

The records which he cut that day remain classics of the genre, the cornerstone on which the Screamin’ Nighthawk’s reputation is firmly based. “Screamin’ Nighthawk Blues.” “Loving You All the Time.” “President Roosevelt Help the Poor.” “Travelin This Old Highway All the Years of My Life (Highway Blues).” “What’s the Matter with This World (We in a Terrible Mess).” Just Hawk and his guitar, each number featuring shimmering bottleneck playing, each number without question identifiably part of the Mississippi tradition but also demonstrably original and rich in associations.

It’s hard to say why this session, too, turned out to be something of a dead end. Certainly Hawk was one of the most talented blues singers of his generation. He was also, it was swiftly becoming apparent, one of the most
determined,
a fact which is borne out not only by the number of recordings he was able to make over the years but the number of different
connections
he made solely on the basis of his own persistence. It is scarcely ironic, for example, that the Screamin’ Nighthawk should still have been looking for a recording contract in the early 1960s, peddling worn demos and battered testimonials from office to office while a host of folklorists were anxiously seeking for any clue to his existence.
(Surely a little exaggerated?”)

And yet the records didn’t sell, the $450 which he received for the recording session was soon gone (“My mama was having a terrible time at home, and the little girls was pestering at me all the time, so that money just burned right out”), and the Vocalion representative for whatever reason (for all we know he was never able to locate the peripatetic Hawk again) never fulfilled his promise to be in touch. Perhaps it was simply that this kind of primitive musical style was an anachronism by now, a thing of the past. Like Bukka White’s celebrated 1940 sessions (also for Vocalion), Hawk’s recordings may well have represented one last fling in the grand manner. Certainly Hawk’s heavy voice and ringing bottleneck guitar were reminiscent of an earlier era, at a time when people generally were looking for a lighter, more “swinging” sound (this is perhaps the principal distinction between Robert Johnson’s “Hellhound” on which Johnson sang in a pinched, clear, slightly nasal tone, while Hawk boomed out the same message in his characteristically chesty bass—there was no existential hesitation or compromise in that voice). In addition, Hawk may well have been difficult to record. Contrary to his own claims, according to the Vocalion logbook of the time, every song in fact required at least five or six takes, sometimes more. Having been present at many subsequent Screamin’ Nighthawk sessions (I am, of course, speaking of the Screamin’ Nighthawk of the ’60s and ’70s), I can safely say that Hawk is indeed a perfectionist when it comes to recording, but on the other hand I have never seen him require more than one or two takes on any one song. Indeed he sometimes will flatly refuse to repeat himself, unless he receives extra payment for his effort. Perhaps this original session is the genesis for that attitude. It would appear that this is one of those vexed questions, the answer to which we shall never know.

(Skip Lester Melrose Chicago sessions for time being.’)

The next time he would record was for the Library of Congress in 1942. The war was on, and Hawk, nearly forty now, was working as a tractor driver at the time. (“Practically living in bondage, man, we wasn’t no better than the beasts of the field. They wouldn’t let us off the farm for nothing. Mr. HolJoway, he was fit to be tied when he found out I’d gone and enlisted. Tried to get it reversed, but he couldn’t, cause I’d already filled out my questionnary. Y’see, it was just a racket to them, keep colored down on the farm. They didn’t pay us nothing, said it was necessary for the war effort. Necessary, shit. It wasn’t necessary for old man Holloway to cut his patriotic profits. And we was raising peanuts then, man. Peanuts!”) When John Fairchild, a tall, bespectacled and distinguished-looking man with a bowler hat and a British accent, came into the Delta seeking to preserve yet another endangered species in the unsullied Afro-American tradition
(Plant? Animal? African violet?),
the purebred Mississippi blues. Fairchild, who retains the slightly aristocratic air of the Shropshire countryside where he grew up, remembered the occasion well when he included a long pseudonymous account in his landmark of field research,
Roots and Branches: On the Trail of the Vanishing Folk Song.

“We had been in the area for some time, recording harmonica players, colorful folk preachers who chanted out their ’sermons’ to the equally vivid response of an aroused congregation, string bands, work gangs, and the like, when word came to us that there was in the vicinity a commercial blues singer whose name and legend were on the tip of every ethnomusicologist’s tongue. It was difficult to believe for, so far as we knew, the Rootin’ Groundhog, as I shall call him here (the name, like all others in this volume, has been changed to protect certain confidentialities), had vanished, been “done in” or poisoned by a jealous woman after his last Chicago recording sessions. It had even been speculated by many otherwise well-informed sources that the Rootin’ Groundhog was merely another name variant for the even more mysterious Robert Johnson, who, it was theorized, wishing to disappear and escape his doomed legacy, had roughened his voice, taken on another name, even duplicated his own recordings—though in an altogether different style—all to no avail. For we knew, of course, that Johnson was dead, a fact which had hideously assaulted us over and over again in the pursuit of our current field research. So it was with great trepidation that we approached a burly-looking man in overalls and straw hat, momentarily ’taking a breather behind old Bessie at the plow, an altogether imposing and slightly menacing figure who was obviously displeased to be ’caught napping.’ He eyed us as we approached him across the furrowed rows. ’I understand that you gentlemens are looking for a blues singer,’ he said with simplicity.”

T
HAT MAN
couldn’t tell the truth plain if it jumped out and squatted on his face
(Hawk grumbled).
I was driving a tractor, not no doggone mule. Little colored fellow name of Perdue in spats and a derby hat come walking out across that field, getting his feet all covered with shit. Mr. Fairchild, he sit in the car. 1941 Olds, it was. Bright yellow. I never will forget that car. Perdue I never did like, he was a sneaky little devil, going around all the time with his mouth poked out, looking like some kind of a golliwog. And, see, he was connected up with Mr. Fairchild. Got him some kind of a bounty for every nigger he brung in. See, he’d been to a year or two of college at that time, and he was already putting on airs, I believe he a professor at one of them Northern schools today. Well, he’d talked to me several times already about making some records for Mr. Fairchild, but I told him I didn’t want to have nothing to do with it. I knowed you didn’t get nothing for it. Nothing but a bottle of corn whiskey and a chance to be remembered, that little weasel Perdue say to me. Remembered, shit; let em forget, I just wants my money, I told Perdue. Anyways he stand there jabbering away, and I didn’t hear nothing about it, cause I can’t hear a word that fool be saying, with the tractor running and all. And finally he reach over and cut the engine. And I say, What you do that for? Because, you see, that tractor wasn’t no easy thing to start up again, it as
stubborn
as a mule. And he say, I been telling you, nigger, Mr. Fairchild want to speak to you, cause he could get down just like the rest of them when he loosen his JittJe tie. Say, Listen here, you pig-ass motherfucker, Mr. Calloway gonna give you the afternoon off if you cooperates, and I ain’t gonna tell you what he gonna do if you don’t. Well, somehow that Mr. Fairchild must’ve got on the good side of old Calloway, though I don’t know as he had a good side, truthfully speaking, and I should’ve knowed that. But anyways I goes over to the car, and Mr. Fair-child just sitting there just as pretty as you please—he was what we called a pretty boy back in them days, all dolled up and neat as a pin, talked funny, too, with one of them funny accents—naw, I don’t just mean he from across the water, tell you the truth, I always wondered what him and Perdue was up to, cause that Perdue, he do anything to get ahead. So he sitting there, and he say, I understand you are a
blues
singer. Well, that seem like a pretty dumb thing to say. We all
knows
I’m a blues singer, otherwise what the fuck is he doing here in the first place? And he say, I have recorded Mayfield Brown and I have recorded Litde Eddie Simson. And Sugar Bear Wylie. And I making a complete record of the Mississippi Delta blues. And if you don’t record for me, we just gonna wipe your name off the history book.

Well, that didn’t make much of a stir with me. And I believe he knowed that. And Perdue, he knowed that. Professor-he always used to refer to hisself as Professor. Even when he was a little kid, it was Professor do this and Professor do that, like he was some kind of visitor from outer space or something. Only ones that liked him was white folks, and I think that was because he talk so much all the time, they don’t know how rat-ass sneaky that little squealer could be. Anyways, he whisper something to this Fairchild and Fairchild, he nod, and Perdue say, Not only have Mr. Fairchild gotten Mr. Calloway to agree to let you have the rest of the day off, but he has generously agreed to pay you for it, too. Like I was supposed to fall down and drop dead or something, for the two dollars wartime wages we was getting paid.

Mushmouth smile. I don’t say nothing. Furthermore, Mr. Fairchild have agreed to pay you eight dollars besides, he go on, which is more than he have paid to any other nigger, he say under his breath. Still I don’t say nothing. And Mushmouth whisper in Fairchild’s ear, and then he nod again and say like he coming up with their final offer, And Mr. Calloway have agreed besides to give you an extra day off, with pay, to recover from the
hard work
of recording. He say it real sarcastic-like, and then he add like as if I still don’t understand, The recording don’t take but a few hours if you cooperates. That mean you got another forty-eight to carouse or have yourself a ball or even go into Jackson when the stores and places of business are open.

You see, he knowed I wanted to enlist, that had been in my mind ever since I go back on the farm with that old redneck Calloway. And, see, I could never get to the recruiting station when they was open, cause we was working six days a week, no time off except Sundays. And Calloway, that scalawag, practically keeps us in bondage. So that done it, I say, Yes, suh, Mr. Fairchild, I plays you whatsoever you want to hear. …

The titles which he recorded that day were somewhat uncharacteristic of the generally known repertoire of the Screamin’ Nighthawk. For the most part they were not the conventional blues fare but topical blues, and patriotic numbers, both original and familiar (“Yankee Doodle Dandy” is just one of the unlikely titles that come to mind). There were in addition a multitude of recollections, most, I’m sorry to say, undoubtedly apocryphal, reprises of old unrecorded pre-blues numbers, and even one solo excursion on mouth harp. Although one suspects that this material had to be coaxed from Hawk
(.dragged out of him, might he the better description),
it is nonetheless of invaluable documentary importance (and John Fairchild deserves our undying gratitude and praise for his singular pioneering efforts) both for the light it sheds on Hawk’s fertile creative process and for the wealth of allusive material it clearly shows to have been at the blues singer’s beck and call. …

T
HIS WAS WHERE JERRY
broke off. That was the end of the ill-fated attempt at biography. Three chapters begun, all sunk in a bottomless morass of indifferent memory and provocative tale-telling. He was no longer able (if he ever had been) to separate the wheat from the chaff; he despaired of ever making a coherent progression out of what was obviously a trackless waste. It was the music, after all, that was going to preserve Hawk’s reputation, Jerry decided; his life would just have to be given up as a bad business.

VI

MOON GOIN’ DOWN

T
HEY WERE
JUST finishing up supper when Hawk came in, leaning heavily on his stick and still seemingly lurching to one side. “Aww, no, Hawk,” said Mattie, half rising, but Hawk dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Feel pretty good,” he said, sinking into the heavy padded chair that he reserved for himself. “Need a change of scene.” With that he lapsed into a glowering silence, as the TV blared, the baby dozed in front of it, and Lori continued to regale them with tales of hoodoo and New Orleans. Jerry watched her carefully for signs, he distrusted what she was getting herself into, but she seemed neither high nor desperate, her nose wasn’t running and her eyes were burning no more or less brightly than ever, so he began to dismiss some of the stories he had heard or imagined—for the time being.

“I used to know a feller played boogie-woogie piano in all the best sporting houses in town,” said Hawk. “This fella so smart they call him Dr. Rhythm, cause what he was playing wasn’t even in most people’s
minds.
He could rock the joint, and he could speak three languages, too—English, French, and I think a little guinea Spanish, and in the summer when it get too hot for him he go up to Canada or maybe New England to take his vacation. Man, he was something to listen to, there ain’t nobody like that no more. Sometimes late at night he get to playing classical, you know Chopin or Lieberstram, all that kind of junk. The girls that wasn’t occupied, they just come out and listen, and everything get real quiet-like and nobody say a word. Then he stomp right into a boogie-woogie, cause nobody likes it when the girls gets all quiet and ain’t full of fun, it ain’t good for
business.
But that boy could play-Never did hear what happen to him. He travel up and down that Gulf Coast, and people knowed him near and far, even down to Cuba, they probably dig him because they was half-breeds, too—you know what I mean, too dark to go in the front door but too proud to go around the back.”