“The First Time I Met the Blues”: James Otis Williams

Born May 21, 1939 songwriter, singer, promoter, teacher and blues poet, J. Otis Williams grew up on the edge of the Delta in Grenada, Mississippi. As a child, he heard blues on local juke boxes and at his uncle’s barber shop where he worked shining shoes. Although he played some guitar, bass, and drums, he admittedly was limited an instrumentalist. His real instrument was the spoken, sung, or chanted word which he generally augmented with a boom box well stocked with Howlin’ Wolf’s deeper hits. His work echoed the sounds of blues culture and typically dwelt on blues subjects. Several of his poems were recorded by artists such as Sweet Honey in the Rock and John Cephas and Phil Wiggins. He also wrote fiction, children’s books and was one of the world champion emcees.

After attending school in Mississippi, he put in a tour in the service in Japan then moved to Baltimore where he attended Morgan State. In 1971, he joined the University of Maryland and was the key figure in developing the Nyumburu Cultural Center where he served as director, and mentor to the campus African American student population all the while teaching blues and jazz courses. He helped found the D.C. Blues Society and worked closely with the Blues Project and Bluebird Blues Festival. From his perspective blues was not about victims nor was it an art form that was dying out. He encapsulated his position in his song. “The blues is good news, pass it on.”

We worked together at the University of Maryland for over twenty years. During the 1990s I interviewed him several times about his life in Mississippi. An avid spokesperson for blues culture, he took great pride in his Delta roots. What follows is drawn from three separate interviews: 8 January 1993, 15 April 1995 and 18 June 1996.

I grew up in Grenada, Mississippi a few miles from the Delta. There was an old lady who lived up the street and around the corner. This old lady would pass my house everyday, carrying bundles on her head, and she would be singing the blues. And I guess that about the time I learned to talk, I learned the blues. I’m told I began singing the songs I would hear her sing. She wore long dresses that dragged the ground and this old lady never changed her style. She carried bundles in her hands and a bundle on her head. She had this kind of tradition about her and she would be walking by and she would be singing the blues. I can vaguely remember that she would always speak to me. But I remember the songs. I learned later that it was a Bessie Smith song. “High tone women sure got to bottle up and go, all you high tone women sure got to bottle up and go’ and that means that when moma comes around, high tone women pack that shit up and get out.”^l

I was told that my mom would discourage me and say “I don’t want my baby to sing those old reels.” “ Reels” that’s what they used to call the blues, “reels.”²She was a church woman and she didn’t want her little baby who’s supposed to be learning to talk, singing blues. My mother was an avid church woman but my father didn’t go to church. He’d hang around and shoot craps and stuff like that. So, the thing was for me not to do that. And I guess that’s when it started, because I’ve always been chasing after the blues.

My mother used to take me to the cotton field in various places in the Delta. We’d go on the truck. You had to get up before day in the morning get on the back of a truck and usually stand up all the way out there. And when you get to the field the dew would still be on. But one thing that a lot of good cotton choppers used to do would be singing. And this one guy who I patterned after had been on Parchman³and that means you can chop as fast as you can walk. So I used to be ashamed of myself because when I first started chopping cotton, my mother had to come back and catch my row up because I’d get way behind. And this guy started going to the field with us who hadn’t been long come out of Parchman. He wore a red bandanna around his neck and one on his head, and he would sing “Baby Please Don’t Go. “⁴And I realized that “Baby Please Don’t Go” gave the right beat; it had the right cadence.

My father, he’d tell me how to chop cotton, he said: “You got to get you a steady gait. If you get a steady gait, then it won’t be hard to you.” But I would hit a lick and stand up, hit a lick and stand up. But I followed this guy and he would sing “Baby Please Don’t Go,” and he put all these different verses in it. But he’d be rocking on it. He worked right with the beat. And I just started doing what he was doing ad I got to the point where I could chop as fast as I could walk almost. It’s all in the technique. I didn’t have the same kind of pressure that he had to learn to chop fast because, see, they would beat you at Parchman if you were too slow. But it was a habit of mine to get me a good song and just go at it. And I learned to chop cotton. I forgot it was work. And the section gang used to be right out of the back of my house. They’d be working on the railroad and they’d be singing and driving those spikes. But it just never was no special thing to me at the time. Later on when I learned about the work song and all this kind of stuff, you know it was a joke to me because this had been a reality.

There was a jook⁵ joint not far from us and you could hear the records playing all night long. You could hear the records playing especially in the summer time because you didn’t have any air-conditioning and because the windows were up. So late into the night you could hear the blues being played and I grew up on that stuff.

And another thing, right down the street from where I grew up was an area called “Jewquarters.” This was a little housing section owned by a Jewish family. I think in a small town like that, there weren’t many Jewish people there. Very few would come in. And most of them owned stores or were in some kind of commerce. And this particular area, and one thing, they call various areas “quarters”. There was a big lumber yard in my hometown called “Bell Grade” and they had these houses there where the workers lived. That was a holdover I guess, that whole custom was a holdover from slavery. So the people who worked, who lived in these houses also worked at the mill. And they call it Bell Grade quarters. And so this was “Jew quarters.”

And the houses were built way up off the ground because it flooded every spring. So we played under the house and until you got to a certain height, you could run up under the house and we shot marbles. These were just shotgun houses. And these quarters, also there’s something significant about these quarters, there’s always a house that’s selling liquor and musician will go in there and play the blues. And in the Bell Grade Quarters, they used to play a lot Georgia Skin and Pitty Pat and Coon Can and these are all good gambling games, card games. And there’s always some harp player or some guitar player hanging around in there, just playing for drinks and stuff.

Of course I couldn’t hang around in there. But there would be times when I ‘d be down there playing with somebody and then could hang around the window and listen. I didn’t realize it at the time what was going on, but I knew that these were musicians that were coming to see these ladies. These were a lot of single ladies lived over there, and these guys would come up in these cars, you know, you’ve seen these cars, they’re so tall you could walk up in them. The Chevrolets and Packards and stuff. And a lot of these musicians – and I did learn the name of some of the guys and a name that came up a lot was Big Boy Crudup. ⁶  So these guys would drive up in these big old cars, big straight eight Buicks, Model A Fords. They set the style. They dressed slick and everybody else would be working and these guys would be driving these big cars. So this whole image of the blues artist with straw hat on and straw in the mouth overalls on No! The ones who were making it as artists were sharp. There were other people who could play well, but farmed. But once they made it they got slick.

There is always a certain group of women who would run after musicians and stuff they just like camp followers so my uncle he would joke about it when some musician would be in there, he would say “I tell you musicians, in Grenada, don’t take nothing with you that you didn’t bring here.” He was talking about the women because they liked the musicians because they were dressed slick and had their hair gassed, conked, you know what I mean. It would just be laying there shining.

But a lot of time people just call them, say: “Hey, he ain’t nothing but an old tramp. He won’t work, he just messin’ around with that old guitar.” But the guys didn’t like them because these guys would be around home all day and they had to got to work. So, this meant that they had a chance to sneak in their houses and you know, be with their ladies. So, a guy who always had a guitar was never popular with men. When they refer to him they never just refer to him by his name, they call him “Old” so and so. That meant that he was “persona non-grata.”

The first real musical experiences that I had that really hooked me to music were from the Rabbit Foot shows, the Silas Green from New Orleans.⁷ See they had great blues bands. And when they came to town, it was like if they were going to be in town for tonight, for a couple nights Friday or Saturday, they would have a parade around noon down through downtown. And they would have the big band marching drums playing and they would be playing all this good music. And little kids, dogs and cats and everything would be following them and it was the best music that you ever wanted to hear. They had some great blues singers too in these shows. Like a lot of people, I didn’t know who they were when I heard them, but a lot of people played with the Rabbit Foot Minstrels or Silas Green. So we’d be following them. And man you would have to have the money to go to these shows. “O Lord I gotta go to the show.” Some way I got to the show. Sometime I would sneak under the tent to just hear that music and see those guys and hear them tell jokes. And some people would leave town and follow these guys. I wanted to leave and follow the show, but I when I looked, the guys, the youngsters, they would be so raggedy and dirty so I said no I better not do that. But I wanted to go because I wanted to learn how to tap dance, sing, and play instruments.

These bands were all black, so after the shows they would play in the local jook joints. And they would play time to time at a place called The Blue Moon Cafe. One of my cousin’s uncles owned it. When they had the Rabbit Foot Minstrel show or Silas Green from New Orleans, and they had these bad bands, we would follow them on down to West Ward, where these clubs were and stand in the window until somebody run you away and look at them. I remember one in particular, the room where they played was right on the level of the street. So, after the show instead of going on home, we’d go on down there to the joint and stand outside the window and listen to them play and sing. And they had people like Roy Brown⁸who sang that real classic blues. It was just, you couldn’t go home and you knew you were gonna get a whipping. But, it was just that, see, this was something that just never happened so you had to play it out.

My first instrument was a guitar made up against the wall with strings stretched against a nail. Put a snuff bottle in between them to pick them and make them vibrate. I used another snuff bottle to keep the vibrations across the top. It all depends on how you want to make it because it has to be tense. So glass keeps the sound. As a matter of fact, it give it a good ring and the wood vibrates it give a nice resonating sound. We used other pieces to slide up and down to give it the slide sound.⁹

We used to do the “hambone” and we would make up the rhymes to go with the “hambone” too. There were some standard rhymes like:

“Hambone, Hambone, where you been?
Been around the world and going again
Been around the world and going again.”¹⁰

But see if you were good you would just make up, and improvise and you would keep the rhythm going. We did all that stuff. You would take these various nursery rhymes and you would substitute the words for it but you keep your cadence the same, so a lot of times stuff was made up spontaneously. Then the next person would do it to see who could out do the other. And you always have to have an audience there because if you don’t have an audience you can’t ever prove that you won. So that if I told one that really gets you, then the others say:

“Yeah, yeah. He burned you.” And so we had all these various names and we would ridicule somebody else’s mother and stuff like that, all in fun. Occasionally you get too good and somebody will get mad and fight.

One thing, when I was in the military and we would march and do cadence and stuff, one of the things that I used to do all the time was call the cadence. Because of that kind of stuff, I was good at rhyming, and making up rhymes. And if we come up on an outfit that we wanted to mess with, then we see how they had to dig in and march, march that hard cadence. Then we started singing about them, we’re making fun of them. Then they’d be getting mad and you’d watch them. Their heads start bobbing, that means that somebody’s out of step. But that’s just the stuff that came from the games we used to play growing up.

My uncle was running a barber shop on Doak Street and what they used to do most of the time was sit there and drink corn liquor. He had two or three old guitars laying around there. After I started working at the barber shop at about eleven, you know, I’m exposed to all kind of things that are happening listening to these guys talk. See the barber shop is like the melting pot, the cradle of culture you might say. So I got to hear about all of the stuff that was going on. Being in a barbershop is like a blessing if you are gonna eventually get involved with African American culture because some kind of discussion is always going on and all kind of people come in there from preachers to the worst of hoodlums. There were people that came through who would come in to the barbershop and just tell jokes. They’d be cutting hair and people would be laughing and going on. It was like the community center.

He had a guy that would come in there and play guitar for him two or three days a week. He’d give him a few dollars and some corn liquor and he and his buddies would sit around there and drink corn liquor. Had their own little private blues session going. And I never knew, all those years that my uncle was so crazy about the blues. I know I was in there one day with my guitar messin’ around and sang a couple of songs for him and I thought it was the blues. I was picking and playing a little bit there and I thought I was rolling. He was smiling. So when I finished he says:

“Say Otis, do you know the blues?”

I said: “What do you think I been trying to do?”

My uncle was a great joke teller. He could just about take any situation and make it comical. For instance, the little store next to the barbershop was run by a man named Alex Murphy. The undertaker, he was named Mr. Fox. He was one of my uncle’s customers. So it was real hot one day and he happened to be over there in the store when Mr. Fox came in. So Mr. Fox, he bought a soda, a drink, so Mr. Fox asked the proprietor if he would like to have a drink. Now my uncle was standing there. He was his barber but he didn’t offer him a drink. So he came back over to the barbershop. He say: “Yeah, I’m standing in there and I cut his goddamn hair. He didn’t offer me no drink. Hell, I was hot too.” What he was implying was that he wasn’t in the status of the undertaker and the proprietor.

Well I guess I must have been about sixteen and Magic Sam^ll came in there. He had been living in Chicago. I didn’t really know him. And, it seemed he came back for something. I think he had to be examined for the military. But he came in there with his guitar. It wasn’t even in a case. I guess it was one that he had just picked up after he had got down there. An acoustic. And so he came in and somebody told him to play some and he started playing and singing sitting up in the shoe shine seat. I used to shine shoes in there. He was sitting up in the shoe shine seat playing and singing. And one number stands out in my mind:

“Baby come on down
Your daddy’s in the heart of town.”

But anyway, it blew my mind. The cat got so much music out of that acoustic guitar.

And he was friendly and we struck up a friendship. When he left the shop I followed him on down to what we call west ward. Which was on the other side of town where the joints are. And we would stop in the little corn liquor places. I would sneak in there. Later on, I would go back to those places and tell jokes and get free liquor. But at the time I was in there with Magic Sam, you know: “Come in here and play something.” And they set ajar up, you know, and it was a great experience. He was friendly and it was like a Pied Piper. People would just follow him. But that was my only encounter with Magic Sam, but I knew we were connected family-wise, distant. It was a great experience. I never forgot it. I was determined to be a guitar player, a blues singer after that. Of course, it never happened. But I never got to see him again.

On Saturdays, Doak Street would be just, like, crowded with black folks because it was right on the edge of the downtown area where all the stores were. So it was the closest place you could come to where the jook joints and the barber shop, a couple stores and a movie was right near there. So they had a lot of people come down there and get their hair cut on Saturday and their shoes shines. And then there was a couple of soul food places right there. Mary Lou’s Cafe, they were more or less just good soul food and next to that was Belle Sykes Cafe. But that was like, well it just doesn’t happen any more. It’s a lost era, but it was something to see.

And this jukebox, all these cats, Muddy Waters, John Lee Hooker, Little Walter, Lightning Hopkins, B.B. King, you name them, all these cuts were on the jukebox. I mean the best cuts in the world. And I’d be shining shoes, every so often I’d go down there and take a little break. Put a couple nickels in the jukebox but I usually didn’t have to because stuff was already going on.

Well surprisingly, the blues never made me sad. Listening to the blues gave me hope. It made me anticipate going to big cities and made me anticipate travel because they talked about trains, you know, and traveling out on the highway. “Bright lights, big city” – all these things made me want to go to see these things because I had never been on a train. I had never been to a big city.

You can imagine going to the train station, we would go to the train station and just look at the trains. People would just be sitting in the club car under the bright lights just eating and that whistle would blow and it would just start easing off, man, and you with your little raggedy self would just be standing there, just saying, “Damn, if I could just catch that train and go to Chicago or Memphis.” Just, you can’t imagine all these things, listening to the music it would give you a feeling of elation like this anticipation that these things were going to happen.

There was no television until I was approaching my teen years. There was radio but there were very few shows on the radio where we could hear the blues. One that I can think of, came out of Arkansas. I can’t think of the town now but it was the King Biscuit Hour. They sold flour that you made biscuits out of and King Biscuit Flour came in sacks with designs and people would make clothes for their little kids out of the sacks. And the King Biscuit Hour would play all kinds of blues music sometimes play live music, people like Sonny Boy Williamson, Robert Junior Lockwood, and all these people you know, came off that King Biscuit Hour. But that was you see all we heard off the radio.¹²

It was a good while before I realized how well people in my family loved the blues because it just wasn’t that much of a conversation about it. But I found out that when I started messing around with the harmonica a little bit. I just didn’t have the patience to learn to play it, but I found that my father could play the harmonica. And he would do little things like the “Freight Train.” The Foxes and stuff. He’d hit at it you know. He hadn’t messed with it since he was a child. But I found out that like in all families, there were two or three musicians that got together and did some things, sing and mess around. And he and a couple of my uncles would do that.

They had these house parties before I was born. But I hear them talking about it. They would clear a room out. My mother and the other women would cook up a lot of different sandwiches, pork chop sandwiches, sweet potato pies and fried apple pies. They’re kind of like turnovers best thing in the world. And my father would be running the game, the crap game. He’d be cuting the game because he used to like to shoot dice. He would take paper and wrap money around it and put it in ajar so you could see the money, and you would think that it’s a big jar of money and he would set this up there when they got ready to start playing. And they would have people to come in and play the harmonica and the violin and the guitars and stuff.

The purpose of a house party is to sell, you know, sandwiches, sweet potato pie, fried apple pies, stuff like that. So my mother would be selling the food and stuff and my father would be cutting the game. Now, the person selling the liquor may be someone else. And the liquor may not be on the premises. In most cases it’s kind of off in the woods hidden under stumps and stuff because it was a dry area. So you had to bootleg the whiskey, so you, if you wanted something to drink, they would go and get it you know and bring it on in there to you. But it couldn’t be just set out on the table because you’d risk getting busted. My parents never had them, the house parties after I was born, because we had moved in to the town. They had them in the rural area, prior to me being born. And my mother moved to the little town while she was carrying me. But they never had them while I was there.

But my brother was small when they did the parties. And one thing I remember my brother telling me was one time they were having a big party, and you know, they’d have wells, pumps, and they had cups there for the people to drink out of. This one guy, he went back in to the kitchen and got the dipper out of the bucket and was drinking out of the dipper that they dipped the water in it. He said my father cut him, cut his hand, almost cut his finger off for drinking out of the dipper. I never knew my father was a violent man. But they say he didn’t take any stuff in his young days.

They used to have big dances and people would come from two or three counties to go to a dance. And every fall they would have picnics after the harvest. And they’d cook up all kinds of stuff and they’d have lights out there. Buck dancing was the thing that they enjoyed most. The fiddle would be going and the buck dancing. ¹³That’s where I saw the playing was at the picnics like in the fall. I guess it was basically in the fall immediately after the crops were done before the weather got bad. People would kill hogs and there would be plenty of meat and stuff. They’d make cracklings, cook them up in these big pots and they’d also make crackling bread out of them. And people would come from the city and barbecue, everything going on. And they’d have the guys playing the music. And buck dancing. It was big stuff. I was only able to get to a couple of them. My brother, you met my brother, he’s sixty-three, he used to make it. He grew up there out in that area. So after he got up old enough, he would catch a ride or catch the bus back out there every year to the picnic. Because in the early part of the evening the girls and everything would be out there, teenage girls would be out there. Of course, after a certain time, they had to leave. It’s just the old folk out there. They’d be telling jokes and the music would be playing, buck dancing and it’s just a jolly time.

And it kind of struck me, this year during Kwanza, it’s an African American celebration for Christmas but it’s like celebration of the harvest. And for the first time I connected with that and the rural south because after they had made the cotton and everything and got their little settlement and everything, that was when they would kill hogs and the people would come home from Chicago and St. Louis and places and they would have this picnic. And I imagine they were having something like this in every area. People I know from Texas were telling me about big celebrations they would have around Juneteenth. But I didn’t know about Juneteenth when I was growing up. But once I found out about and heard about all of the festivities, I felt kind of cheated.

In the Delta there would be a house that nobody was living in. And so they gonna have little dance or something and somebody there is running a crap game and you might have some sandwiches. And of course you’re not close to any other houses. So they’d have, on those occasions, they’d hook up electricity and they’d have lights in there and they’d have the little dances. Somebody put out a song about it.

“No windows, no doors, just a hole in the wall.”

I believe it was Louis Jordan.¹⁴ But that was very true. They would just take abandoned shotgun house there on the plantation. And I’m pretty sure they had the permission of the overseer to do that. It’s the kind of place that Muddy Waters used to run. Because you know those shotgun houses, they may be two rooms, maybe three rooms and they’re straight back. No frills. And you’d be surprised at the people that would come out to those places just to have some fun.

A roadhouse might be adjacent to the highway or some thoroughfare. The difference is that these places that I talked about in the Delta they’d be way down in the field. So you go down the road, then you turn up in there and then you’re just way down in the fields, see cotton fields. The rows, cotton rows, would be a mile long. What I’m saying is they would be remote.

They’d be there all night bring in the daylight. It was something unique about it. I don’t know why but every chance I would get, I would get in the car and ride over anywhere in the

Delta just for the ride. And a lot of times I wouldn’t have any fun. Just stand around and look. There’s always a chance of having a whole lot of fun but a lot of times you just stand around and look. But in other parts see, guys didn’t like for you to come from another place and talk to the girls. That could be a no-no, and the way they would do, you see, sometimes they wouldn’t say anything to you but they would go outside and shoot up in the air two or three times. And they would answer each other. And they would get the message to you.

Grenada County was a dry county meaning you weren’t allowed to sell alcohol on a commercial basis. It had to be bootlegged. And the adjacent county was Carroll County and depending on who was in office, it was a wet county or a dry county. So the “Yellow Dog” was like right on the county line. The Yellow Dog seemed like a long way but actually it was ten or twelve miles from my house back up in the hills across the county line. So a lot of people would say: “Let’s go to the county line.” Because you could always go out there and buy beer in the quart, set it on the table and everything. You didn’t have to sneak it. So there were several joints across the county line but the Yellow dog was one of the main ones. Now I thought it was going to be something fabulous before I went out there because I had been to Greenwood to clubs there, some nice night clubs with juke boxes. You dress up and go there. But the Yellow Dog was just the opposite. It had dirt floors like sawdust on the floors. It had a little bar and stuff set up there and a little makeshift stage. There was nothing fabulous about the Yellow Dog. And cars would park all around the place and they had lights. And them guys, pulpwood was one of the main jobs in that area, pulpwood cutters. And the guys who cut pulpwood made pretty good money for that area. And they would always have the smell of this pulpwood in their clothes. And these guys would come in right off work with that money in their pockets on a Friday night, on a Saturday night and they wouldn’t change clothes. They were wearing their overalls. The women would be all hanging on to them. And they’d be, we called it “wrestling,” you know “slow dragging” to Muddy Waters and them. You know that beat, and they’d be hanging on to them for the money.

And if it gets a little rough, then you just got to get up and get on out of there. The bouncer, I can see this guy in my mind right now, he always carried a couple of pearl handled pistols, and occasionally people got shot out there. But the main thing about the Yellow Dog is that it was, if Carroll County went dry for a spell then they would have the liquor. They would move the liquor to the other side of the county line because the place was built right on the county line. But it didn’t even have windows. It had croaker sacks hanging, when the wind blows. It was nothing fabulous about the Yellow Dog but it was happening. People come in from the city. You see cars there, you know, tags from Michigan, Illinois and everywhere. I mean that was the place. Because people come home see, and they’d sit there. They’d have three, four quarts of beer on the table, big time, you know.

And I guess when I was about thirteen or fourteen I began following this blues band around and trying to sing or play the drums. I would do anything I had to do to be with them. And I sometimes would sneak and went places my mother didn’t know I was going following the blues band. And I was just a young fellow and would be scared of getting a whipping when I got home but the blues was just magnetic. Once you got hooked on it was just like you know, you had to be around it.

So the family attitudes, the only negativism I got in reference to the blues was that I was too young to be following this band around. Because they would be going over in the Delta and going out to the Yellow Dog and places like that. And I had to sneak and do it. But I don’t think there was any problem with the blues. It was the atmosphere and my age. Because these guys would be drinking wine and skocat whiskey, corn whiskey what we called it. And I was kind of young, they wanted to keep you out of that atmosphere as long as they can.

I started messing, following this little band around. It was a distant cousin of mine we called him Eeky. His name was Lee Mystic, last I heard he was living in Detroit. He called himself Blues Boy Eeky. He was, actually he played the drums and I was his relief because he sang. See he would stand up to the mike and sing. And he finally got hold of a trumpet and he would play the trumpet. Now bear in mind, we all were self-taught. One guy had a trombone and at various times we had various instruments, it was half hazard but we were getting jobs. At times I was the vocalist with the group. I just wanted to be with the group. I even got, I borrowed drums from the school. They didn’t know what I was doing. But it all came to light when they went to play a gig over the Delta. I didn’t go and this guy was playing the drums and drinking wine. He threw up on the head of the drums.

But I was just a hanger on. I remember playing, singing on a gig and the promoter didn’t want to pay me because, in essence, she really didn’t hire me. I was just hanging on with the band. But you know, I was stonewalling to try to get paid. And I guess I got two or three dollars.

But you know, you want to be a musician so bad until any chance you get, you’re gonna be hanging with the guys even though you’re not supposed to be doing it, or you’re sneaking and doing it. And one time I was out there with Blues boy Eeky and the group, a fight broke out.

And your first instinct is to run. But the man say keep on playing. And we were playing some kind of medium shuffle blues, some John Lee Hooker thing, and it was just a funny thing. You’re trying to sing and you’re looking and watching and wanting to run if someone starts shooting and stuff. It was a strange experience with me.

I recall one of our first good gigs because we may get seventy-five dollars to split between us and I would always get the smallest share because I wasn’t a regular in the band. I would just hang around and sing or play on the drums. But we played for this undertaker’s convention and they had some undertakers you know. We played on the second floor of this mortuary. We had these people sitting around drinking and partying and talking and we were playing this terrible music but it probably sounded pretty good because Eeky could sing pretty good and we could keep the beat and they liked us. And we played for school gigs. Eeky, he played with Magic Slim.¹⁵

When I knew Slim he was just Morris a little old lanky skinny guy. The thing I remember about him is that he used to never smile. I knew his mother. His mother was my father’s cousin. They call her Pinky. I don’t know what her real name is. But I was a couple years older than he was. But I remember when he first started playing the guitar.

My church was kind of a dead church. They didn’t have a lot of good music. That was at the sanctified church down the street. The Holiness Church. But this particular incident that I’m talking about is, I had been drinking that Sunday after church and everything and who do I meet, but the number one deacon, Mr. George Williams. He was a well-respected gentleman and he would always speak to me: “How you doing, young man?”

He thought a lot of me. And I was staggering. I can’t get straight. I say to myself, “Straighten up man, straighten up.” So I just had to lean against the fence and he walked by said:

“How you doing young man?”

I say:

“How you doing Mr. George Williams?”

He walked on by. He had a little smile on his face. I always will believe he knew I was drunk but he was gentleman enough not to say anything.

Quartet singing and blues were really my two great loves. And like when the groups would come to town and you go there and you hear them and you see them sing, and all the pageantry and the thing that really struck me about a lot of that quartet singing was that they dressed slick. And a lot of them had their hair gassed, you know. And the pastor of my church wouldn’t allow quartets in there. He said it was because of that reason. That they had their hair straightened and some of them drank liquor. But it was probably they just made the people shout so much, so he didn’t want them in there.

And a lot of the guys who played back up to quartets with the guitar also played with the little blues groups. So you see it was a kind of a mixed kind of thing. Luther “Guitar” Johnson told me he had started out with a gospel quartet as a young jitterbug. So this would be like the greatest thing to hit town at that time, to go out and hear these quartet singers sing. And even

today I’m hooked on it.

I used to see John Hurt¹⁶ a long time before I knew who he was. He would come to town on Saturdays and sit on the bench right next to this joint with the good juke box. And he would sit out there every Saturday and eat some cheese and crackers and sardines and stuff. And he was just an old man out there with that floppy hat on. And you know it was insignificant. And I spoke to a friend of mine, a cousin of mine who lived in Memphis, you know and he said:

“Yeah man, I used to see a old man sitting out there every Saturday. I didn’t know who he was.”

Well the same with me. Well in the chopping cotton, he was filing the hoes and that’s where I got to listen to him talk. And he talked about playing music and going different places. And we listened to him on the lunch break. We had about an hour for lunch. And he would lay his chair back on the two legs on the tree and talk in the shade. And I was intrigued by what he was saying but I never really believed it or disbelieved it. I just couldn’t conceive of it. But much to my surprise, a few years later I was in the military. I went in the military at eighteen. I used to get the Downbeatand the Metronome.magazine as soon as they got to the library. Wherever I was. I had a deal with the librarian and I would keep them. And I got one and he was on the cover of Downbeatmagazine and I don’t even know what year it was but it was the Newport Jazz Festival. Mississippi John Hurt. And I told the guys that I knew who he was, that I knew him. Nobody believed me. They did not believe that I knew him. But it all came back to me, what he said about him being a famous musician. He had been so called “rediscovered.”

Well I enjoyed the music of Muddy Waters and John Lee Hooker, but B.B. King was the one I loved the most. I would wait for his new records to come out and when they came out they never failed me it was better than the one before. This was early B.B. king when he was playing the Chittlin Circuit. The last time I picked cotton it was to go and see B.B. King. I wanted to see him real bad. So I didn’t have the money so I went to, they were paying three dollars a hundred for a hundred pounds. And it just cost about three or four dollars to see him. I just picked cotton to get the money to go. It just goes to show you how well I loved the blues. B.B. came out there with an orange colored suit on. I thought that was the sharpest thing I’d ever seen. Orange colored suit and white shoes. Yes yes.

And one time this uncle who lived in Bruce had also had infantile paralysis, so when he used his slippers he had to hold one hand with the other hand but he was an excellent barber and a super liar. He would tell this one about B.B. King. And he say: “Like that B.B. King. I started to end his career twenty years ago.”

I say: “What happened Uncle Cal?”

Say: “I gave this gal money to go back there and get me a pint of scotch and she stayed so long I went to see what was happening and she was sitting in B.B. King’s lap and he was drinking my scotch. I started to end his career right there.”

He’s a little old guy. He talked about B.B. though. He used to buy this Cutty Sark and they say that’s what B.B. likes. But I enjoyed going there. I went to visit him a few times up there in Bruce. He’d tell all these lies about how tough it was in Bruce.

I don’t know if you heard this one:

These guys were hitchhiking, three guys hitchhiking. And they were passing this place called Bruce, Mississippi. Bruce, Mississippi, they had the Bruce company. It’s a big lumber company and everybody in the areas worked for the Bruce company. They had these little company houses and stuff, you know. And these three black guys were hitchhiking down through there. And they got off of one vehicle, waiting to get on another one when the sheriff drove up and just looked at them and kept on going. So they thought everything was all right. Then they passed a sign.

And this one named John say: “Come on! Let’s go, let’s go, let’s run, let’s run!” And they took out running, you know. And they ran for about two or three miles. And the guy say:

“Man, what are we running for?”

Say: “Didn’t you see that sign?”

“Yeah, I saw that sign but I can’t read.”

“Well, 1 can read.”

“So what did the sign say?”

Say: “The sign say, ‘Nigger if you can read, run. If you can’t read, run anyway. “‘

I heard that one all my life.

They say in Bruce, Mississippi they kill something black there every Sunday, if it was nothing but a Dominick chicken. That was the tradition in Bruce. And they had a laughing barrel. The black guys couldn’t laugh. If they laugh around there, they have to stick their head in the barrel to try to stifle the laughs. That’s how tough it was in Bruce. My uncle used to live there, he was a barber there.

But you know a lot of it was lies.¹⁷

Let me see. I know so many lies, Mississippi lies. Let me tell you the one my uncle told me. I don’t know if I told you this one or not about Mississippi.

In Mississippi one of the worst things you could do back then was to kill a white man whether it was an accident or on purpose. Well this guy had grown up with this guy and they got to horsing around and some kind of way he threw him and killed him. And so he knew he had to check out, so he got to running. And he was running out through the valley, and the guy could flat out run.

You see when you run away from Mississippi you can’t run out on the highway you got

to run kind of down in the wood. So this guy was running and he ran upon this big deer with these antlers on his head. He say:

“Hey man. I see you’re checking out too.”

The deer didn’t say anything he was just hitting it, long strides. He was running right along beside him.

He say: “Well you don’t have to talk to me but I know you must be in a world of trouble running this fast.”

He say: “You must have killed a white man too.”

Deer didn’t say a word, just kept going.

He say: “Well, you’re doing better than me. I had to leave so quick I couldn’t get anything. I see you got a little furniture with you. On your head.”

He saw those antlers up there.

They ran on for a couple more miles. He said: “Well brother, you can be smart and not talk all you want to but if you know like I know, you would throw that damn furniture down and come on and go with me.”

So he took off and left the deer like he was standing still.

Let’s see, four of my uncles, five of my uncles, were barbers. I never thought of it until recently, it was alike a way to lift yourself from the farm. And one of them went blind and he stopped barbering. He couldn’t see well enough and he started shining shoes. And he made just about as much money shining shoes as he did when he was cutting hair. And he kept shining shoes until his sight got too bad to do that.

In my home town this lady sold corn liquor and home brew and so her kitchen, there would be plenty room, seats for about ten people to sit around in there. Usually she would be in with the local authorities. They may arrest her every once in a while but she was paying a kickback. She kept a nice record player. Good music going, good blues going all the time. But I could tell jokes, dirty jokes and even after I was in the military I would go back home and myself and a couple of buddies, we’d go in to these places and didn’t have to spend any money, just tell jokes. And she would give you free liquor or other people would buy liquor and you all would just get drunk. And this went on for years. Yeah, let’s go down to “Rose’s” or “Bea’s” or whoever it is. Guys would come in there, musicians one or two people. If a guy could play he could always get free drinks and a few dollars.

I had to be in a setting where somebody’s telling them and then they’ll come to me. The good ones. And it was one I used to know about Arkansas, it had all these different parts to it. I’m gonna have to think of one part and write it down and get it back because we used to just tell it all the time. Go in these corn liquor houses and just sit there and drink liquor and tell lies and in most cases the house lady would just, she’d put up bottle after bottle as long as you tell those lies. To get in the mood you have to have a glass of corn liquor there and a glass of water and you know, take a few. You see that used to be part of our culture in Mississippi. What we used to do, you see, is sit around the table or wherever– you’re sitting around, the yard or a log, or whatever–and number one, the jug with the liquor in it is directly followed by the water. So you tell a joke, then you take a drink then you chase it with the water. You had to chase it because that corn was so bad. Because sometimes when you take the cap off of it, gray smoke would come off the top of the bottle. But can stay with that too long. Think you’re OK by the time you get ready to get up and move. You can’t go anywhere.

My father is still a good joke teller and my uncle who moved to Michigan two years ago is, they’re both good. I don’t know who’s better. But I know that the poet Etheridge Knight went to my home and interviewed my uncle and another guy Oliver Parks. But I never saw the book.

As I think about it now it was a pretty enterprising family. But see, my great grandmother who was born six months a slave, became a midwife. She delivered children all out to the area where they lived and would go and live with the people for some time if the mother was having difficulties. Maybe a week or so until delivery time came. And she was famous. And then one of her daughters, which was my grandmother, became a midwife. I have a story about her in my next new manuscript. We call her “Doctor Woman” and she did the same thing but she took it a little farther because by that time it was kind of organized. She went across the state to meetings and stuff and she would wear her white dress uniform and the blues cape and the hat and everything. And one of my aunts took up the trade of midwifery. So we try to tell the youngsters in our family about their enterprising ancestors, because a lot of them just don’t know. They don’t know what they have in their heritage. And my grandfather, who was that grandmother’s husband was a great horsebreaker. As a matter of fact, he got kicked by a horse and that’s what he died from. But they say he was like a big man in the community because he was one of the few who had this certain kind of surrey which I guess was like having a Cadillac when cars became prominent. And he had this surrey with this strutting pony that pulled the surrey. So I take it that they were a pretty enterprising couple, her being a mid-wife and him being the man who broke horses for everybody around that area.

So I’m picking up bits and pieces about that. But I don’t know why I waited so long to get this information because my mother remembered everything but I just didn’t ask her a lot. I guess I was too busy doing other stuff. So I pick up stuff from my brother which he had found out, you know, because he grew up on the farm until he was almost a teenager.

And they moved to the city when I was born so I could get good medical help and stuff. My father said he left the best crop he ever had. He left it in the field. He didn’t even want to deal with it. That’s because the brother that would of been a year older than I had died from dehydration, which sounds very simple, but having no access to a doctor you have to go miles and miles to a doctor. By the time they got him to a doctor, it was too late. That’s the difference in it, in the deep rural, of Grenada County. That’s out in that area where the Staple Singers are from. My father used to talk about old man Sam Maghett who played fiddle and I guess he played some guitar too. So I had heard about these people while I was living. They lived out around a place called Redgrass. And this is out there where Pop Staples also came from. Redgrass is east of my home, Grenada. And that got displaced when they built the Grenada Dam. So there was a whole big settlement out there that was underwater. That’s basically where Magic Sam came from out that way. But most of that area out there where they were, most of that is under water now. They built the Grenada dam to stop that flooding, that flood they used to have all down through the Delta every year that Sunnyland Slim and them sang about. That dam was one of the dams they built to alleviate that problem. My grandfather had three hundred and some acres and most of that got taken up by eminent domain so that they could put that thing out there.

I think back on a lot of that stuff. I was really fortunate to grow up when I did and where

I did. I just, in a way I envied the people that lived in Greenwood because they got, the school gave them instruments to learn to play. So more of them became musicians. The ones in my hometown had to force themselves to do it, had to be really aggressive. I always wanted to be a musician but didn’t have the necessary discipline to stay with an instrument long enough to learn to play it. I could mess around with the drums a little bit but I found out after I got in the military that I couldn’t really play. But I taught myself the upright bass well enough to be in a band in the military and I sang. I was the vocalist. And people thought I was good.

The first time I met the blues I was liking this girl who was nineteen. I must have been fifteen. I knew I didn’t have a chance but she was so friendly and nice and so beautiful. And this Sunday afternoon I was hanging around up there in this cafe called Belle Sykes Cafe at the time. I’d hang around and talk with her. And she left and went to Greenwood with this grown man. He had a nice car with monotone gutted mufflers on it, Chevrolet, had that nice sound to it. And she came and told me say: “Well I’m fixing to go to Greenwood. I’ll be seeing you.”

And it was just like my world came to an end. And I remember standing at that juke box and at that time you could put a quarter in and get six plays. And I played Little Walter “This is a Mean Old World,” fifty cents worth. Stood there and listened to it over and over again.

“This is a mean old world to have to live in by yourself

Can’t get the one you loving, have to use somebody else.”

I’ll never forget that Sunday evening. Her name was Lily Frances. First time I met the blues was one Sunday about four o’clock. And the blues walked in and I said:

“Blues, why me?” And the blues say:

“Why not you?”

###

End Notes

1. The verse may be from the song “Bottle Up and Go,” generally associated with Delta blues artist Tommy McClennan. Numerous artists including Big Joe Williams, Leadbelly, Blind Boy Fuller also did versions of the song.
2. In this instance, the term “reels” is a common generic term for secular songs and pre-blues dance music. The older generation lumped blues in with reels as yet another “sinful” song form.
3. Easy to get in to, hard to get out of, Parchman State Penitentiary is a notorious Delta institution, a prison farm located in Sunflower County at the intersection of 49 West and State Road 32. Celebrated in song and legend its influence extends throughout the Delta and beyond to Chicago and Detroit.
4. “Baby Please Don’t Go” recorded by Mississippi artist Big Joe Williams became a staple in the Delta and Chicago blues tradition. It appears to be based on the prison worksong “Another Man Done Gone.”
5. I use the spelling jook because that’s the way older musicians such as Johnny Shines and Howard Armstrong spell it and adamantly argue that that’s the original and correct spelling. Zora Neale Hurston, the first scholar to write about the jook also spelled it that way. Later, with the appearance of the term “juke box,” a slang expression for the coin operated music vendors found in jook joints also called Seeburgs, Wurlitzers, Rockolas or Piccolos – the spelling shifted to juke. But there’s no reason we can’t return to the original traditional spelling.
6. Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup (1905-1974) was a Mississippi blues artist who recorded in Chicago for Bluebird and RCA. During the 1940s – 1950s he had a substantial number of hit records but quit recording. He was “rediscovered” in the 1960s.
7. Although called “minstrel” shows, the Rabbit Foot Minstrels and Silas Greene were traveling variety shows featuring African American entertainers as opposed to the earlier stereotypical portraits of plantation life.
8. Roy Brown (1925 – 1981) author of “Good Rockin Tonight” was a popular rhythm and blues singer during the 1940s and early 1950s.
9. The homemade one string guitar called a diddley bow, among other creative names was generally made with baling wire or a broom wire stretched “upside the house”. While found in various forms throughout the African Diaspora it is most commonly reported in the Delta.
10. Hambone and other rhyming games involved hand patting and are kin to Patting and dancing Juba. Williams also refers to competitive insult games called by various names, playing the dozens, etc.
11. Magic Sam AKA Sam Maghett (1937 – 1969) was a Mississippi born blues artist who moved to Chicago as a teenager. During the late 1950s he recorded for the Cobra label and during the 1960s became a widely respected blues guitarist with blues rock crossover appeal.
12. Harmonica player Alex Miller “Sonny Boy Williams” and guitarist Robert Junior Lockwood went on to be mainstays of Chicago’s Chess records. During the late 1930s through the 1940s, they and others played a live radio show broadcast from Helena, Arkansas on KFFA sponsored by King Biscuit Flour.
13. Buck dancing is a solo display dance akin to tap dancing.
14. Louis Jordan (1908-1975) was a major artist topping the charts through the 1940s.
15. Magic Slim, born Morris Holt in Grenada, Mississippi, 1937, moved to Chicago and became a popular blues artist through the 1960s up to the present day.
16. John Hurt, or Mississippi John Hurt (1893-1966) recorded in 1928 for Okeh records and was later an influential figure in the folk revival of the 1960s.
17. Both this folktale and the following one are deeply traditional. Commonly termed “lies,” they nevertheless exemplify what people thought of life in the Delta.

Dr. Barry Lee Pearson, Professor in the English Department at the University of Maryland stands as the most steadfast supporter of the local acoustic blues scene in the greater Washington, D.C., area and beyond. As a musician, author, college lecturer, folklorist, and personal friend to the musicians, he has been the voice of this regional blues scene.