Martin Scorsese Presents The Blues Read online

  In the late forties, following the war, my favorite spots for jazz and blues in Detroit were the Flame Show Bar, Sportree’s, and one or two others. I saw Anita O’Day, Red Allen, J.J. Johnson and Kai Winding. It was at Sportree’s that I met T-Bone Walker and joined him for drinks later, at an after-hours club.

  In 1955 in New York, I told Wild Bill Davison I’d always wanted to play the cornet but now, at thirty, felt I was too old to learn. Wild Bill said, “I can teach you how to play the fuckin’ horn in ten minutes.” I went home and bought a used cornet but never learned. A friend who was with me on the trip bought a new cornet and learned to play it but was never any good.

  About 1985, I heard Dizzy Gillespie up close at an outdoor venue and was moved to go home and write, practice my craft. Other jazz performers had the same effect on me. I was listening to Ben Webster one time and named a character in the story I was writing after him: a bull rider turned Hollywood stuntman. I make these references to jazz because, according to Count Basie, the blues is what jazz came out of, what it’s all about.

  The last time I saw Basie perform was in ‘69 at the Whiskey in L.A., sitting in with Carmen McRae, who prompted Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis during his solos to “Go, Jaw, Go!” Later, listening to Lorez Alexandria at another club, we sat close to the bandstand, and I got to watch Carmen nodding to the beat, chewing her gum in rhythm with Lorez’ timing.

  And in 1987 in a club in Detroit called All That Jazz, Kris Lynn, who sat at her piano turning show tunes into jazz, invited an older black guy to take the mike, and I heard “Tishamingo [sic] Blues” for the first time.

  I’m going to Tishamingo

  to have my hambone boiled

  These Atlanta women done

  let my hambone spoil.

  The song was recorded by Peg Leg Howell in Atlanta, November 8, 1926. In Freaky Deaky, published in ‘88, I wrote the song into a jazz club scene. Two years ago I began writing a book set in Mississippi and saw the chance to use “Tishomingo Blues” as the title; the main reason being I like the sound of it—Tisho-mingo.

  The rationale at first: A Civil War battle in the book is based somewhat on the Battle of Brice’s Cross Roads, a Confederate victory that took place in the vicinity of Tishomingo Creek, not far from Tishomingo County, Mississippi. But for the book’s setting I needed a town that would attract criminal activity, and for that I chose Tunica, “the Casino Capital of the South,” almost forty miles down Highway 61 from Memphis. What I didn’t realize—until my researcher for the past twenty years, Gregg Sutter, pointed it out—was the story took place in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, where blues styles were fashioned and fooled with until the 1930s when country blues had become a tradition, an American institution.

  Gregg said, “And you want Robert Taylor, the coolest guy in the book, to be driving around in his Jaguar, listening to jazz?” He was right. I told Gregg I’d better add some blues for color, and maybe some of its history.

  The next step was to become familiar with the lineage: how Charley Patton’s riffs influenced Son House, and Son House was the man until Robert Johnson “sold his soul to the Devil” and came up with a sound that got everybody excited, influencing not only the bluesmen who followed, but also the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Eric Clapton. Listen to Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain” and then the Stones’ coverage of it on their hit album of thirty years ago, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, and Clapton with Cream taking off on Johnson’s “Cross Roads Blues.”

  I came to the legend of Robert Johnson selling his soul at the famous crossroads in Clarksdale, where Highways 61 and 49 intersect, not far from Tunica, and for the first time in thirty-seven novels I detected a theme. Until now I’d had to wait for Scott Frank, an A-list Hollywood screenwriter, to tell me what my novels—SOON TO BE A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE!—were about. This time, during the actual writing of the book, the theme of Tishomingo Blues was staring me in the face.

  In reference to Robert Johnson’s “I Believe I’ll Dust My Broom,” along with Elmore James dusting his, I gave the character Robert Taylor a grandfather named Broom Taylor, a bluesman who moved his family to Detroit with John Lee Hooker.

  Writing the book took me into Delta blues for the good part of a year. On a video of a 1960s documentary called Legends of Bottleneck Blues Guitar, I saw the distinctive styles of Son House and Mississippi Fred McDowell, of Johnny Shines, Jesse Fuller, Mance Lipscomb, Furry Lewis. I listened to the recordings of Peg Leg Howell, Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, Elmore James, B.B. King, Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Buddy Guy. These bluesmen played with soul and you could feel it and have to nod, yeah, at spellbinding combinations of riffs.

  It’s the music that evolved to become the inspirational sounds that have played in my head. Anita O’Day letting me off uptown, or the Diz’ cool bop, or Brubeck’s “Take Five,” his piano enticing the drums to kick out, or the way Basie’s band comes in low on “Sweet Lorraine” and rises with one sound to blast you out of your chair.

  HOWLIN’ WOLF BY GREG TATE

  His was not a city sound. He never being one to be easily domesticated or taken out of his elementalness. He never being one to be so engaged with the cosmopolis as to lose sight of the outback’s verities or the sexual cornucopia of the barnyard. Therefore his bluesongs display the worst features of an amoral ark—an erotically amok animal farm of roosters, dogs, backdoor men, and coons shot to the moon. A countrified vision of morality and mortality. I asked for water, she gave me gasoline. He is speaking, really, of frontier romances, the kind handily capable of dispensing frontier justice. And that Wolferine yodel, a libertine’s sigh of release, which in actuality reflects a faith only in that lone gift of absolute comfort in this world. The only one we were left with after the fall and therefore worth every disaster that might ensue in, say, tasting the forbidden fruit of another man’s wife. Like the preachers say: On your tombstone will read two dates and a dash, and it’s only what you did with the dash that matters. So this man Chester Arthur Burnett, also known as Howlin’ Wolf, took to air on wings of song, grunt, and hoodooed holler, let the whole world know what a bad boy he had been, the kind of women he loved whether they were betrothed to him or another, and the mad dash from her married bed to leaping out the nearest window, and the gittin’ up the road apiece.

  “I was three years old and they started callin’ me Wolf. My grandfather gave me that name. He used to sit down and tell me tall stories about what the wolf would do. Because I was a bad boy, you know, and I was always in devilment. I’d say, ‘Well, what do the wolf do?’ He’d say, ‘Howl.’ You know, to scare me, you know, and I’d get mad about this. I didn’t know it would be a great name.”—Howlin’ Wolf

  There are all kinds of blues for all kinds of men, some regular in length and form, and others irregular and maybe more circular than anything. The Wolf favored those forms you could ride around in forever, like a well-built vehicle, and never feel trapped in a vicious cycle of recycled sentiments or mindless repetitions. There was room to breathe in his songs and all kinds of manly secrets got traded between the two guitars and the loping bass, the detonating drums, and the cavernous body of his lungs.

  He was known to crawl the floor in search of a note others might consider too raw for the human esophagus. Here we have a singer driven by the moonlight mile to acts too devilish in design for other men to even contemplate. So that there are times when you hear in him something of a kinship with Nietzsche—one man going it alone and wantonly shouldering the burden of surgically extracting the desire for hell’s gate from the human soul, only to then force us all to feast liberally on his hunger for the taboo, tawdry, unchristian, and transgressive.

  JIM DICKINSON AND HIS SON LUTHER ON COMING OF AGE IN THE NORTH MISSISSIPPI HILL COUNTRY

  Producer, session keyboardist, singer, and songwriter Jim Dickinson started his career in the 1950s, playing in rock & roll bands in Memphis. He became a member of Atlantic Records’ esteemed rhythm section in the 1960s
, and has played piano on sessions by the Rolling Stones, Aretha Franklin, and Bob Dylan. He produced albums by Big Star and the Replacements, among other bands, collaborated on recording projects with Ry Cooder, and has released several solo albums. His two sons, guitarist Luther and drummer Cody, formed the blues-rock combo the North Mississippi All Stars in 1997. Luther also produced two albums by Otha Turner, who died (the day before the death of Fred Rogers) a few months after this November 2002 conversation.

  JIM DICKINSON: I guess your memory all starts with seeing Otha Turner on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

  LUTHER DICKINSON: That’s the first thing I remember. Every day we’d watch Mister Rogers on TV, and one day they announced Otha Turner and the Rising Star Fife and Drum Band were going to be on.

  JD: And I said, “Whoa! We gotta check this out! These guys live just down the street.”

  LD: We grew up east of Memphis, in rural Tennessee, right on the state line, and our neighbors further down were in Marshall County, Mississippi. It was great because there was a juke joint—Parks’ Spot—a little ways down.

  JD: I liked to think y’all could hear the music in the night coming from Parks’ Spot.

  LD: I could. I remember. But I wish I could say that I snuck down there and peeked in the window.

  Jim Dickinson, 1956; Luther Dickinson, 2001

  There was a lake across the street where they’d have baptismal services.

  JD: A church next to the honky-tonk. They would walk down the gravel road from the church for baptism fully robed. They would have baptism in the stock pond, a farm lake, near Rossville, Tennessee, where Fred McDowell was born.

  LD: I remember way before I knew anything about country blues, I always liked Fred McDowell, because I read it on the back of your record that he was from Rossville. I was about thirteen when we moved to Mississippi, and Cody was ten. That summer we were really getting into music, and that was when Cody got his first drum kit. Dad borrowed an old drum kit from Stax—the second kit that belonged to Al Jackson [of Booker T. and the MG’s]. And we’ve been rockin’ ever since.

  JD: I had a great blues experience at our house. It was pretty isolated, on a gravel road. One time we were snowed in and they didn’t clear the roads. I was out there in the front yard digging snow and I heard somebody singing, somebody black, and it was getting closer. Finally, I saw an old black man walking down the middle of the road in the snow singing to himself. And I stood there; he never did see me. It was an existential moment, like Jean-Paul Sartre sitting alone feeling the burden of being alone, then he turns and sees somebody watching him. I didn’t violate the guy’s space. But I thoroughly enjoyed every note he sang. And I thought, We’re at the right place. This is where I want to be, where I want my family to be raised. In terms of you learning to play the guitar, you taught yourself. As I told you as a child, I think rock & roll is self-taught.

  LD: I remember. You showed me the chords, but you told me to teach myself. I was eighteen or nineteen when I met Otha Turner, and down the street is Junior Kimbrough’s juke joint and there’s R.L. Burnside playing shows in punk clubs in Memphis, and the whole world opened up to me. Of course, Fred McDowell was the godfather of the hills. He was a great influence on R.L. Burnside, Otha, and Junior Kimbrough. Right then I was just taken over. For a long period of time we still had our rock band, but all I was playing and studying was hill-country guitar music.

  JD: What you have to learn from somebody else, somebody black, if you wanna play the blues, is how to feel it. And that’s what Otha Turner taught you. I’ve heard those tapes of you playing for Otha where he’d just say, “No, no, no.” And then he’d throw his hat down on the floor and say, “That’s it! That’s it!” And there’s no apparent difference except that he could hear you feel it. That’s what he taught you. You were playing songs by Fred McDowell—who had been his friend—and you can hear the joy in his voice. That’s the thing you’ve got that nobody can ever take from you—what Otha taught you. The limited ability I have, I got from somebody black showing me.

  LD: Playing with Sleepy John Estes and Bukka White … ?

  JD: Before that. Butterfly and Dish Rag showed me when I was a little kid. It was like magic. My mother was a great piano player and she tried to teach me, but she couldn’t teach me what I wanted to know. They could. As limited as it was. It was the thing I needed, to know what I wanted to do.

  LD: Alec, the yardman you grew up with, he brought his friends over to teach you.

  JD: He couldn’t play an instrument but was a great singer. When he realized I wanted to play, he brought over musicians.

  LD: I remember when I got my first guitar. You tuned it to open E, then showed me Bo Diddley. You said, “Here ya go, this is it.”

  JD: Bo Diddley is the heart of the hill-country rhythm. Bo Diddley was from Greenville, Mississippi. As far as I’m concerned, Bo Diddley and John Lee Hooker are playing hill-country music because they’re outside the chord changes. And Bo Diddley—if that’s not the hypnotic groove or, as Jessie Mae Hemphill called it, the endless boogie, I don’t know what is.

  LD: It’s even in the fife-and-drum rhythm. They got a snare with the maracas.

  JD: The hill-country rhythm of fife and drum has changed and modernized. There’s three generations of musicians in Otha’s band, and when the older guys play the drums, they’re playing the old country version of the second line—Bo Diddley rhythm, hambone, body slappin’, all the way back to Africa. But when the kids play, they bring in the contemporary boogaloo pattern they heard in the high school football games. And it’s still all the same thing, a different beat emphasis but still the same polyrhythmic, all-the-way-back-to-Africa trip.

  LD: Otha’s grandsons are kinda hip-hop influenced, then there’s his granddaughter Sharde, who plays fife and is the future queen of the hill-country cane fife. When she gets on the drums, she brings her own thing. The blues here—the juke-joint, house-party foot-stompin’ blues—that’s what it’s about, enjoying yourself.

  JD: Celebration of life. Traditional music is either worshipful music in reverence of a deity, or it’s a celebration of life.

  LD: That’s what the hill-country blues is about. R.L. Burnside said blues is nothin’ but dance music. And that’s what it comes down to: You’re playing for Otha Turner or at Junior Kimbrough’s back in the day on Sunday nights sittin’ in, or if you’re at R.L. Burn-side’s wife’s birthday party playing on the porch. JD: Juke joint music is about empty glasses and shakin’ asses. The first time I heard R.L., it was this wonderful thing. He was doing “Bottle Up and Go.” It was definitive crazy blues—electric guitar and vocal, nothing but. I thought, This is so good, but maybe ten people on earth will ever get to hear this. And since then, R.L. Burnside opens for the Beastie Boys, plays for ten grand a night. That’s a miracle. Though I don’t agree with the marketing philosophy of his label, Fat Possum, it is nonetheless a miracle what they have done. And whether he wants to take the credit or not, Jon Spencer had an awful lot to do with it. And Robert Palmer, who I’d known since we were teenagers. When he moved to Holly Springs, I thought he was crazy. But he knew there was something going on there; he felt it first. And in his film, Deep Blues, there’s a lot of people who were all saying the blues is dead. But that was crap. It was alive in the hills. That’s what Robert Palmer figured out. There’s a spirit in Memphis that comes and goes. Right now that spirit is in north Mississippi.

  LD: Yes, Otha is a teacher. He’s so encouraging—passin’ it on, makin’ it happen. His music is not juke joint blues. It’s working songs, behind-the-mule cornfield blues, field hollers. But he can definitely rock the party. It wasn’t until I played guitar in Otha’s house or on his porch that I realized how an acoustic guitar juke joint party could happen. Acoustic guitar in any modern environment is gonna die, but if you’re in an old-fashioned house …

  JD: A wood-frame house with a hollow floor …

  LD: Up on cinder blocks, and a tin roof.

  God
father of the Mississippi hill country, Fred McDowell

  JD: In a juke joint you couldn’t hear the lyrics. The loudest thing you’d hear would be the feet stompin’. You’re not gonna be in there fingerpickin’, you’re gonna be thrashin’ it—like Son House or Bukka White, who literally beat it like a drum.

  JD: The relationship you and Otha had … one of the things he felt he needed to do in his life was teach young white boys, and that comes straight from plantation life. It’s a miracle to me that in this century a young white boy in the South can have that kind of relationship with an older black man, literally from another century. Maybe it’s bad, but to me it’s a beautiful thing. I know my life wouldn’t have very much meaning without it. And it brings up pictures of Uncle Remus, no doubt, and some people are offended by it.

  LD: I tell you what Otha Turner is offended by: tractors. Modernization.

  JD: What made life in the Delta bad was the damn mechanized cotton picker that put ‘em all out of business.

  LD: Otha says when you plant by hand, you plant a good foot into the ground and the soil is damp and fertile, but when the tractors came by, everybody started messin’ up the soil. He hates tractors. He remembers the first tractor he ever saw. It was a John Henry-like showdown in the D.C. area. A man and a mule and a plow against a tractor. And they went head to head. He saw that. Before the days of the tractor, he says, the mule was man’s best friend—your partner. You did everything together. You took care of your mule. But once the tractors came out, they put the mules out to pasture, and it was the saddest thing he ever saw. A whole country full of abandoned mules.