Nighthawk Blues Read online

  But it were his stubbornness that done him in all the same. One time the sheriff poking around for something to stick his nose into, little old country sheriff, he gotta get his share, just like everyone else, just like the policeman on his beat, and for some reason ol’ Doc Lewis ain’t coming across, I don’t know, maybe he got something on the sheriff. But he poking around for something, and he hit on Blind Arthur, say, That nigger ain’t blind. And the doc, he say, Oh yes, he is. You just fixing to deceive the people. Well, Arthur, he ain’t gonna stand for that, so he just say, Oh yassuh, I been blind from birth, and maybe you want to see my certificate from blind school to prove it. Well, the sheriff, he just a mean man, and he say, Well, sir, if this nigger’s blind, we’re just gonna prove it. If he blind, ain’t nothing going to bother him. And he take this lighted torch, metal poker actually, and he bring it closer and closer. But Blind Arthur don’t never blink, just keep staring straight ahead. Until finally he bring it so close that Blind Arthur don’t have no chance but to turn away or cry out. But Blind Arthur didn’t never cry out, not even when the poker went into his eye. So that’s how Blind Arthur really become blind, and he didn’t know naturally how to get along. So we had to leave him there in Senatobia. But that sheriff didn’t never find out what he done to Blind Arthur, cause that nigger too contrary to give him the satisfaction.

  That’s how I come to be the blues singer on the show, wasn’t no big deal like the books say. Didn’t teach me nothing neither, except don’t stick with a story too long. Sing a few songs, tell a few jokes, me and Chief Thunderbird, who wasn’t no more Indian than I was myself, except he begun to believe it, wearing them feathers and shit all the time. Chief Thunderbird say to me: We been friends a long time, ain’t we, Hawk? And I say to him: That’s right, Chief. Friends to the end. And he say: How about lending me a dollar, man? And I say: That’s the end. Been going on long enough now. All that kind of stuff. Simple country people, they couldn’t never get enough. They could hear the same old jokes a hundred times over, and they still couldn’t figure ’em out. Then I sing a song about the ’lixir.

  Lewis lixir fix you right up

  Lewis lixir, you drink it from the cup

  Tell all your neighbors, tell all your friends

  You drink it once, you’ll drink it again.

  Stupid-ass song. Yeah, I made it up. Then maybe I sing a blues-you know, “St. Louis Blues,” “Yellow Dog Blues,” “Mr. Crump Don’t Like It,” one of them old-time kind of songs—and then Dr. Lewis’ girls come out to do a dance. They had a piano player play along, man who wore red suspenders, I can’t call his name no more, I think he was a schoolteacher, just went out in the summertime—well, you see, that wasn’t where I met Teeno-chie, but that was the kind of thing Teenochie do, play for the shake dancers, which is why I always call him a honky-tonk piano player, which for some reason he don’t like—Teenochie always want to put on airs, that fool don’t care to remember, you know what I’m talking about, when he the one that wear that derby on his head, snap them suspenders and pretend he don’t notice nothing when them girls come over and hang all over him while he tickling them keys. Shee-it, them broads just shake their asses in your face, course you wouldn’t even notice it now with the costumes they wear out in the streets, them little bitty skirts that don’t even cover them up front or back, but back then it was really something! You can look, but you better not touch—cause they Dr. Lewis’.

  JERRY FOUND IT ALL fairly difficult to believe, but what was he to do? He knew those were colorful times, violent times, it was a different world. And it was a world that was all but gone, vanished, disappeared. He had seen a medicine show once, a moth-eaten, woebegone sort of an affair owned by an Indian and featuring a peg-legged harmonica player who traded jokes with a suspicious-looking Chinaman, all the while pitching some kind of snake oil as an all-purpose cure for warts, fleas, worms, and crabs, not to mention its usefulness as a venereal charm. It had attracted a motley crowd, but even the few who were present were turning away in disbelief when the police came along to disperse the show. It wasn’t anything like that, he knew. At least he didn’t think it was.

  He went back through some of the little country newspapers for advertisements and references. He tried to get a feel for the period, to imagine an era in which there was no television, no radio, no precise idea even of what was going on in the next town let alone halfway around the world. Hawk even had a picture, which for some inexplicable reason had survived all the moves and changes of circumstance and vagaries of a lifetime and showed the automobiles, the black comics in blackface, the doctor looking benign and paternal, and a young, slender Theodore Roosevelt Jefferson staring blankly into the camera. That was in fact the only thing that identified this visage from another age as Hawk, that unwavering, unsmiling, inscrutable stare. He stood there with his sleeves rolled up, galluses holding up sagging pants, the veins in his powerful forearms just barely showing in the faded photograph.

  “What were you thinking when they took the picture?” said Jerry, trying a new tack.

  “What was I thinking? I wasn’t thinking nothing. I was thinking how many days to payday. I was thinking, I been hauled around by this phony-ass doctor too long—” He spat disgustedly. “How the fuck do I know what I was thinking?”

  “Who took the pictures?” Jerry tried helplessly.

  Hawk just stared at him.

  There was no one else to turn to. Jerry found a few other survivors of the medicine shows, and they all had similar memories. The crowd. The pitch. The chorus girls. Parading through town to draw a crowd. Putting up a tent, if there was one. That didn’t tell him anything he didn’t know already. He tried to track down anyone who might have been with the Dr. Clarence Lewis Show. Dead. All dead, or disappeared. It must have been a traveling mortuary, he thought, almost beginning to doubt its very existence, though he had the clippings and the single photograph. Until he finally managed to locate a sister of Dr. Lewis, a Mrs. Hugh Pennington, in Elyria, Ohio. He spoke to her on the phone, and one time when Hawk was playing a gig at Oberlin he made it his business to seek her out. She lived in an old tree-lined section of town that probably hadn’t changed since Booth Tarkington wrote Penrod and Sam. Screened-in porches. Fanned-out elms. A girl on a swing. Automobiles moving at a leisurely pace. All benign and complacent and impossibly inviting. Mrs. Pennington was an old lady with a long pinched face, rimless glasses, and thin white hair that straggled out from under a knitted bonnet. The maid showed him in to a dark, slipcovered parlor, and Mrs. Pennington pursed her lips with a soft smacking sound as she took his measure. Nothing seemed to escape her notice.

  “Clarence was a friend to the colored,” she said. “I don’t know what it was. Very early in life he got the notion that he wanted to help his fellow man. Mother and Father would have liked it if he had gone into the ministry, but I suppose that’s why he became a doctor.”

  “Was he, uh, a medical doctor?”

  “Well, of course he was a medical doctor. What other kind is there? He attended the Oxford School of Osteopathy right out of high school. Clarence was always advanced for his years. But restless. He never married, you know. I could never understand it myself. I often asked him, ’Clarence, why don’t you settle down, start a family, you aren’t getting any younger, you know.’ My late husband, Mr. Pennington, was a little older than Clarence, naturally, and he’d sit him down for heart-to-heart talks—man-toman, I should say—well, Clarence would never disagree, he was too polite for that. But he would say, ’It wouldn’t be fair to a wife, to a family.’ He was a very scrupulous man. I suppose that’s why he started up with his traveling. He wanted to do something for somebody, and then he came in possession of the elixir formula.

  “He didn’t invent it, you know. Oh, no. The way it came about, he noticed an old colored man who was familiar to all of us on sight taking a drink from a bottle one day—only it was not an ordinary whiskey bottle, not that sort of thing at all. So he went up to this m
an and said, ’Say, Bub—Clarence would call everyone Bub, white and colored alike, it brings me back sometimes when I hear them use the word on television occasionally —’what’s that you’ve got there1?’ The colored man offered him a drink, and just to be polite Clarence sipped a bit. ’Edith,’ he told me afterwards, ’it was the damnedest sensation I ever felt in my life, excuse my language. It snapped my head back like I had been shot out of a cannon.’ Naturally he inquired from the colored man just what the ingredients were, but that poor man didn’t know. It was a home remedy that he made for himself, and as he said to Clarence, ’Sometimes it come out good; others I just don’t know.’

  “Clarence offered him five dollars for the bottle, but he wouldn’t take but two. Then Clarence took it down to the lab to be chemically analyzed. Even they couldn’t be certain of some of the ingredients. So Clarence began his experiments, he worked night and day—I’ve never seen a man so excited—until finally he thought he had duplicated the taste of that original home remedy. Not duplicated, really, improved. He left it to me, you know, the patent. Of course it’s worthless since the government stepped in. There’s too damn much government, if you ask me. But I attribute my good health to daily ingestion of Arthur’s elixir—I m ninety-two, you know, and I have a cellar full of the botdes, it never goes bad, you know. Would you like some?” She rang for the maid, who came back shortly with a brown stubby little bottle. “And yet I feel somehow as if I’ve let Clarence down. He wanted me to continue with the elixir. Those were practically his dying words. At least that’s what I’ve heard were his dying words.

  Clarence died on the road, you know, in 1959. I suppose that it was fated to be.”

  “Did you ever hear of a singer called Little Mose or the Screamin’ Nighthawk?” Jerry said. “I think he performed on your brother’s show.”

  The old lady squinted at him. “Oh my, no. I imagine you’re referring to the colored show? That was where Clarence’s heart really was, though I never understood why. In the end he sold the other—the white minstrel show—to a man named Claxton. I’m afraid I never saw either one. I may have been a bit of a snob, but I was always urging Clarence to put together a higher-class entertainment, something he could put on in Xenia. Like the circus. Oh my, I remember the excitement there used to be when the circus came to town. You don’t get that kind of excitement anymore, I don’t imagine. Everyone sitting in front of their own TV. Clarence wasn’t interested. He said the colored should get a litde pleasure in their lives, too. My brother was a saint. Some folks called him a nigger lover, you know—”

  Jerry pondered that one for a while. He even thought to tell Hawk, just to see if Hawk would get a laugh out of it. But for all he knew, it would just prompt Hawk to embark upon a new explosion of stories that were both unusable and unverifiable.

  He made one more attempt. He found a woman who remembered Blind Arthur Bell. She had a cousin who thought she remembered Blind Arthur’s daughter had moved to Buffalo or somewhere like that. “Last I seen of her, she had married a man name of Walter Jackson, I think it was. Something like that. Leastaways they said they was going to get married and move to Buffalo or maybe Baltimore. That was her second husband, poor child, her first got tore up in the saw mill.”

  It wasn’t much, but it was something. Jerry looked up the name in the phonebook when he got to Cleveland. He tried every permutation he could think of. Finally he found a W. L. Jaxon, tried the number, and got a suspicious-sounding voice at the other end of the line.

  “What you want with him for?” Jerry gave the reason. “Well, he dead. He been dead these four years.”

  “I wonder if I might speak to his widow, Mrs. Jaxon?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could I speak to her?”

  “This is her.”

  Jerry explained what he was calling about.

  “You got money from my daddy?” said the woman. “Am I gonna get money from my daddy?”

  “Well, no—” Jerry explained that basically all he wanted was a little information. Was her father always blind? There was a cold pause at the other end. “Of course my daddy blind. What you think they call him Blind Arthur for?”

  “No, but I mean, was he born blind, was he always blind, as far as you know?”

  “He blind from the day he come into this world.” There was the sound of the phone slamming down. Jerry scratched his beard. What would a sheriff be doing with a red-hot poker in the middle of July anyway?

  MAKING RECORDS

  The Screamin’ Nighthawk was recorded again on November 27, 1936, after the famous Paramount dates. He was in his early thirties, and while it might seem that his career had gone nowhere up to this time, his style was by now fully formed. He recorded in a hotel room “someplace in the Texas panhandle,” he remembers, and the dates of the session coincide with the end of Robert Johnson’s first landmark recording date in San Antonio. When pressed on the matter, Hawk professes to remember virtually nothing about the near-legendary Johnson. “I heard tell about him. They say he died of the black arts, down on his knees and barking like a dog. Of course I don’t believe none of that shit.”

  It is in any case a rather common, if fanciful, tale, and Hawk’s uncharacteristic memory lapse may very well stem from a kind of professional jealousy. “Robert Johnson, Robert Johnson, everybody woofing about Robert Johnson,” Hawk will mutter on occasion. Many times I have seen him confronted with the supposed similarity between his own “Hellhound on My Trail” and Johnson’s. Did he get the song from the great King of the Delta Blues Singers? eager students will inquire. Did he know Johnson personally? His response to this sort of question is to turn the tables on the questioner. “How you know Robert Johnson didn’t get it from me? Was you there, boy?” He was, of course, considerably older than Johnson, the heir to a very similar tradition, so perhaps he has a point. It is indeed possible that Nighthawk preceded Johnson, as we have found in so many parallel cases where the better-known bluesman is in fact carrying on the more obscure artist’s style (Blind Boy Fuller, for example, who took many of his most characteristic licks from Willie Walker and Reverend Gary Davis). Whatever the case, they were, of course, very difre ent bluesmen.

  How he came to record at all at this point has been a matter of some conjecture. According to Hawk, “I was just traveling through Texas. Passing through, you understand, had a little trouble with them Moore boys [these would appear to be the famous Moore brothers, of whom Lightnin’ Hopkins has sung so bitingly], spent a little time down in Huntsville, well it wasn’t actually Huntsville, they give me over to a farmer, we did chores and such, didn’t wear no ball and chain. That was where I met this fellow, Texas Alexander, had a great big voice, but he couldn’t play a lick. Well, he was in, don’t know how long he was in for, but he tole me to go up to San Antone—them Mexicans love to hear the blues, he said. So I done what he told me, least I was heading in that direction, when I run into the man from the Vocation Record Company, Ernie. He say, Hey, boy, I been looking all over for you. I say, You have? Well, I been here the whole time. I say, Why didn’t you let me know you was looking for me, bo, you shoulda just sent out an invitation. Just joking around, you know, but he was a big broad-shouldered man, and them shoulders start to shake, and he say, I can tell I’m gonna like you already, boy. Then he take me to this hotel room, big room, high ceiling, they hung blankets from the wall to deaden the sound, set up the microphone away from the window so you wouldn’t hear no traffic noise. Man just sit there with his earphones on his ears, wasn’t behind no glass wall like they do nowadays, and he say, You ready? Well, I didn’t waste no time, didn’t waste none of that man’s money neither, I just cut loose, wasn’t no second takes, just did it right off the top of my head. Cause they was all tunes I was familiar with, they was the songs I was known for, you might say. Got seventy-five dollars a side, six sides, I believe, and the man promise me more if the records actually sell. I be in touch, he say to me. We gonna make some more of these wham-bam recor
ds some day. She-it, I thought I was really going places then, but I ain’t heard from that man to this day. Reckon the records didn’t sell, maybe a car run him over, shoot, I don’t know. But the next man talk to me about making records was Mr. Melrose from Chicago, and that was a whole different story.”

  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?”)