Time Done Been Won't Be No More (18 page)

“I believe I'll buy me a graveyard of my own”, he sings in
Furry's Blues
, his tone confiding, as if he's passing on hard-won knowledge, “I'm gonna kill everybody that have done me wrong.”

Impending violence fuels his songs. Frustration and anger seethe just under the surface and there is a feeling that things could go south at a moment's notice. “If you want to go to Nashville men and they ain't got no fare”, he sings, “Cut your good girl's throat and the judge will send you there”.

When things get too heavy, there's dark humor: “I went down to the I.C. train, laid my head on the I.C. tracks,” he sings in Cannon Ball Blues. “Seen the I.C. comin', Lord, and I snatched it back.”

Furry's masterpiece is Kassie Jones, a long, imaginative reworking of the traditional song about the death of engineer Casey Jones in a 1900 train wreck in Canton, Mississippi. But Furry makes it his own, literally. The song begins typically enough with an account of Casey as a folk hero, but takes a trip to the surreal when Furry himself emerges as a character: Chased to his woman's gate by the police, welcomed to her folding bed, then on the road again, his name on the back of his shirt, “he's a natural-born Eastman don't have to work.”

Driven by Furry's hypnotic percussive bass strings, the song sounds like something Sam Phillips would have recorded at Sun Studio thirty years later.

In the 1970's, age had enfeebled his musicianship to the point that he was forced to get by on the tricks and showmanship of his medicine-show days, but, paradoxically, a brief fame touched him. In 1975, he opened in Memphis for the Rolling Stones, and in 1976 Joni Mitchell wrote Furry Sings the Blues about him. He even appeared in a movie that stars Burt Reynolds, W.W. and the Dixie Dancekings.

Furry had attended John Hurt's funeral in Greenwood, and most of the other country bluesmen were in the ground, too. By the time of his death in 1981, he had outlived most of his contemporaries. The strife and hard times Furry had written about were still around but they were being addressed by a different kind of music. The blues had gone Big City, and the acoustic country blues were practiced mostly by purists and academicians.

Maybe Furry himself said it best, in his reworking of St. Louis Blues, Time done been/Won't be no more.

W
HEN EMISSARIES OF THE
BBC showed up at the Ryman Auditorium in 1946 to record performances by country musicians no doubt to allow perplexed Londoners back home to hear what the rustic folks in the colonies considered entertainment. One of the first musicians they spotlighted was the Dixie Dewdrop. That would be Uncle Dave Macon, David Harrison Macon from Rutherford County, Tennessee, already seventy-six years old in 1946 and as unlikely a superstar as country music has ever seen.

But no one at the Opry was surprised. How could they not have chosen him? Who could compare to Uncle Dave? Macon in full-tilt abandon was like a natural force unleashed, and when he got unwound and release arrived it would be like watching destruction from the eye of a hurricane. He buckdanced and flashed his gold-toothed grin and twirled his banjo like a baton, brought it to his shoulder with the neck pointed at the audience and sprayed notes like a musical Gatling gun. His stamping and percussive rapping on his instrument rendered the idea of a rhythm section laughable: You couldn't duplicate this pandemonium, any effort would be the palest echo of the seemingly infinite energy he expended. Uncle Dave must have been hard on banjos.

He had arrived at the Ryman by a circuitous route, and in his quieter moments of reflection, late at night and winding down and alone in the Nashville Hotel where he finished out his days, he must have pondered the string of coincidences and singularities that had moved his life in so peculiar a direction.

Macon traveled a path that was to become familiar to the rural musicians who made it to the recording studios in the late 1920's their names are legion. But that path is now lost, it was unique to its time and place and simply does not exist anymore, no one will travel it again.

The Macons were a prosperous family before the Civil War. They owned upward of two thousand acres and various businesses, including distilleries and sawmills. But the cards fell wrong for prosperous farmers in the South, and by the time David Harrison Macon was born in 1870, things weren't looking so optimistic. Yankee Reconstruction had its foot on the region's neck and was pushing hard. Dave's father, John, struggled until 1883, and then decided, like a lot of other folks, that better times lay in the cities instead of the hardscrabble countryside. So he sold the house and what was left of the land, far fewer than two thousand acres, and loaded furniture and children onto the wagon, hitched up the mules, and started out the long sixty miles to Nashville. Dave was thirteen years old.

They went into the hotel business, and this, in retrospect, looks like the making of Uncle Dave the entertainer. The place they ran was the Broadway House. This was a time when a motley of entertainers would play the line of theaters on Broadway in downtown Nashville, and all these traveling performers had to stay somewhere. A lot of them chose the Broadway House, partly because they could use the huge open basement for rehearsals. These were performers of various stripes, jugglers and acrobats and musicians and magicians, animal acts and blackface minstrels and rube comedians.

These were also the days when audiences demanded showmanship. They'd come to be entertained, to be taken out of the ordinariness of their lives for the duration of the show, and they would settle for nothing less. Style weighed as heavily as content. Incertitude rang hollow, and mediocre showmen didn't last too long. Dave saw a lot of rehearsals, and he was soaking up influences from all of them.

About this time a circus turned up in Nashville and pitched its tents in a vacant field. There Macon saw a comedian banjoist named Joel Davidson. The experience must have been revelatory, for Macon himself later wrote, in the often overblown language of the times:

By 1887 all this had changed by a pocket knife: Macon's father lay dead in a street altercation and the trial ended in an acquittal for the assailant. Soon the family had abandoned Nashville and the widow Macon headed them for Readyville, a town between McMinnville and Murfreesboro where there was a waystation for stage coaches. She figured that travelers would always need food and a place to sleep. Essentially, they were still in the hotel business.

It is probably here that the idea of becoming a professional musician first entered young Dave's mind, for he built a makeshift stage atop a barn from which he could give impromptu shows for the travelers who were staying over. One can imagine this: A teenage boy with his open backed banjo and apparently boundless confidence, the end of the day and a skeptical crowd, Dave up there in the falling dark tuning his banjo while the nighthawks dart and check, the audience gauging him and Dave gauging them right back, trying to figure what will work and what won't for an embryonic repertoire he doesn't even know he needs yet.

All this time he kept learning songs, collecting them, writing them, stealing them. He also developed a distinctive introductory roll, almost like an invitation, a quiet caesura before the action starts, a musical hand gesturing you inside the song where the story commences, that would kick off most of his later songs.

At the age of twenty-nine, Dave married Matilda Richardson, who over the next twenty years would bear him seven sons. In 1900, with a child on the way, he looked about for a way to make a living. Ever a mule man, he went into the freight business. With a double team of mules, he hauled wagonloads of provisions and building materials and whiskey into towns the railroads did not accommodate. He was barely ahead of the internal combustion engine, but he wasn't put off by its arrival. He didn't trust the horseless carriage and he didn't expect it to last. In From Earth to Heaven, a song he wrote about the freight business, he sings: I'll bet a hundred dollars to a half a ginger cake/I'll be here when the trucks is gone.

When he became a more prolific writer of protest songs, this was a theme he returned to again and again: Change is not always for the better, and change for the sake of change is never better. He seems like an early agrarian or one of Robert Penn Warren's Fugitives, trying to hold on to a mythic South that had been slipping through Southern fingers ever since the War. He believed in flesh and blood. He had more faith in a beast of burden he could talk to rather than some mechanical contrivance that would not do his bidding. In days to come he would own cars and even write a paean to Henry Ford's invention, but he never learned to drive one and he was always a little surprised when they performed as they were supposed to.

Now here's a stop on the road that doesn't exist anymore. Fiddlin' John Carson had a Victrola record released that sold way beyond expectations. It was the first country-music hit. Folks scraped up the money to buy it and hoped later they could scrape up the money to buy a phonograph to play it on. It seemed an occasion of country people embracing one of their own who'd in some manner made good and transcended them but managed to keep intact the roots they held in common.

The record companies were amazed, but they were not stupid. They began to look around for other rural musicians.

Records were largely a sideline then, carried in furniture stores rather than music shops. The Sterchi brothers owned a chain of furniture stores that carried a line of Vocalion recordings. Dave had hauled a lot of furniture, and by now he was the best-known musician in the region. He'd been performing informally (one can't imagine a formal performance by Uncle Dave Macon) for years at dances and private parties or wherever anybody wanted to hear a banjo played. He even had a partner now, a young man named Sid Harkreader who played guitar and fiddle and sang harmony with him. So when Vocalion asked the Sterchi brothers to help line up new talent, the first name out of the hat was Dave Macon's.

It must have been a potent moment: He'd been making music for free all his life and now he had the chance to perhaps get paid for it and lay everything else aside. But he was already fifty-three years old, a little late in life to be changing careers. But there seemed little choice. The freight business he knew had been supplanted by automobiles and he still had children at home to feed. He signed with Vicalion and headed for New York, not knowing that he was blazing a trail that countless musicians would follow: Jimmie Rodgers and the Carter Family, Dock Boggs and Mississippi John Hurt, plus scores of others whose epitaphs are just names on old phonograph records.

His first recording was Keep My Skillet Good and Greasy, a song that in later years he would say he learned from a black man named Tom Davis, but history has forgotten Davis's story and no one knows where he learned it or how close to the original (if such a thing exists) Macon's version is. By making it his first record, Macon must have considered it his best shot at launching a new career and it is a song he returned to again and again and recorded numerous times, as if striving toward some ideal of musical perfection.

All the versions have the same feel of not only lost landscapes and lost times but a lost people, a race supplanted. The banjo rolls hollowly out and it seems to be coming from some place enormously distant, from some alternate world outside time itself, and the voice when it comes, conspiratorial and amused, jerks you abruptly into a plot that's already started: There's stolen meat in your knapsack, hounds on your track, and you're pulling for your shanty home where Mandy is waiting. The song is all motion and action, there's no time for rationalization or introspection but, above all, it is so caught up in the joy of life that everything else seems incidental.

In this song and in songs like Way Down the Old Plank Road and Buddy Won't You Roll Down the Line (both included by Harry Smith, no slouch in taste, on his
Anthology of American Folk Music
), the music creates a visceral three-dimensional world then draws you in to a time that doesn't exist anymore but stills feels prescient. Times and circumstances alter, the music says, but the eternal human frailties and verities remain the same. There's always that sense of being vividly alive. In Way Down the Old Plank Road, the feeling of desperate abandon when Macon cries KILL YOURSELF! sounds as if the words could be either a command or a mental note to himself. Hard times or good times, there is a stoic, dark-humored core that seems to render qualifiers or modifiers irrelevant. It is not the good times or the bad times that matter but the experience of living itself.

The reaction to these first recordings was immediate. There seemed to have been an audience already poised and waiting on Uncle Dave, and all that was needed was this connection to bind them together.

When he was booked into the Loews Theater in Birmingham, Alabama, there weren't enough seats for all the folks who wanted to sit in them. A two-week engagement extended to five, and still the place was packed. The theater manager was arrested by the fire marshal for permitting too many fans inside.

Soon Macon was playing the Loews chain from Boston to Florida and beyond. At an age when most men are contemplating retirement, Uncle Dave Macon was on the road to becoming country music's newest superstar.

Macon was far luckier than most: The crash of 1929 sent most rural musicians back to sharecropping and coal mining, but Macon had a job on the Grand Ole Opry, and he always had a label willing to release his music.

He wrote protest songs about prohibition (Dave took it personal that it had become so hard to buy a decent drink of whiskey), about the downtrodden farmer (Eleven Cent Cotton), and about whatever peeved him at the moment always with a stoic humor that regarded the world with a sort of sardonic fatalism.