Part 2 of an essay that begins here.
It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”
Sam Phillips: The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll is Peter Guralnick’s latest contribution to “the memory of posterity.” His books on American music have been a national resource for decades as moderator Bill Flannigan recognized at the end of his interview with Guralnick last month at the Strand book store (on the occasion of the publication of Sam Phillips). He noted Guralnick was “writing from a time before there were rock critics…”
No matter how many books need to be written about Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones…—there’s plenty of material. Their lives are well-covered, they’ve been much interviewed. But from “Feel Like Going Home” and “Sweet Soul Music” to Elvis and Sam Cooke and this book, you’ve done us the incredible service of going back and getting the stories before they disappear. And the world’s gonna have that forever.
That tribute made me think of my son’s friend Gibson—who was named for the guitar and seems fated to rock ‘n’ roll. This 12 year old is already a fine boogie-woogie piano player. He’s now learning to play guitar, imitating blues greats and Hendrix for six hours a day. School has been a drag for this little rocker (who is small!). Last year, though, a teacher (serving as that providential mechanism?) gave him Keith Richards’ (not so great) Life and since then Gibson has been reading up on his favorite musicians. Earlier this fall he whipped through a biography of Howling Wolf. I’ve promised to pass on Sam Phillips to him soon. It’s bracing to know it will help Gibson claim a patrimony that might have been lost.
But it’s not only stories of America’s past musical peaks that are in danger of getting disappeared. A blurb on Sam Phillips’ inside cover by Lucinda Williams gives the threat of deracination a certain currency for me. You see my album of the season has been Williams’ rootsy Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone, yet I slept on that double CD when it was released in 2014. I’d stopped listening to Williams a while back because her Americana felt canned—the south in her mouth had begun to sound mannered. As it does when she sings Spirit’s awful folkie title track. But she and her band follow up that acoustic opener with one hundred minutes of truly electric guitar rock. My chagrin at nearly missing Spirit’s swampy, here-comes-that-rainy-night-in-Georgia-you-really-got-a-hold-on-me-and-your-Byrds-can-lift-up-over-soundings was amped up by a reviewer who noted Williams’ CD had been ignored by the rock press. He pointed out pop lifers (like me) had implicitly dissed the CD in part because Williams (who’s been making records for 30 years) couldn’t be the next big spurious thing:
“Pitchfork” didn’t review “Down Where the Spirit Meets the Bone.”“Rolling Stone” interviewed Williams and included “Spirit” in their list of the ye ar’s 40 best “country” records, but they too failed to rate it initially. “PopMatters” and “Wonndering Sound” both offered lengthy takes, but “The Quietus,” “Consequence of Sound,” “Drowned in Sound” and “The A.V. Club” never got around to the task. As best I can tell, “Spin”—the magazine that named Williams’ “Little Honey” the 30th best LP of 2008 and “Car Wheels” the fourth best of 1998—never even mentioned it.
It was shaming to know my soi disant knowingness had aligned me (for a time) with “enemies of rock ‘n’ roll…of soul” Williams wails against (on the track “Protection”). I’d been acting like that rosy-fingered child Weil invokes in the passage at the top of this essay—the one who threw it all away.
I should let on before I got Spirit, I’d been hearing William through (rock critic) Greil Marcus’s ears. He’s averred (repeatedly) she’s too enchanted with her own voice and Dixie tropes. If he listens to Spirit, though, it might do to him what he believes real art always does: “tell us, make us feel, that what we think we know, we don’t.” (Start with her cover of “Magnolia” Mr. Marcus—the J.J. Cale song about going down to New Orleans. Don’t be put off by Williams what’d-she-say opening. Long before she’s done, this ten-minute track defines a lost paradise of loving feeling: “Magnolia you sweet thing/You’re driving me mad/I’ve got to get back to you babe/You’re the best I ever had.” Williams earns her weaving guitarists’ evocations of “White Horses,” “Moonlight Mile,” and “Almost Independence Day.”)
Marcus, of course, shares Guralnick’s (and Williams’s) faith rock ‘n’ roll will stand. Though only if/when it entails self-invention as it did back in the 50s when…
[Y]ou had to try something new. You had to find something new. You had to listen to everything on the market and try to understand what wasn’t there—and what wasn’t there was you. So you asked yourself, as people have been asking themselves ever since, what’s different about me? How am I different from everybody else—and why am I different? Yes, you invent yourself to the point of stupidity, you give yourself a ridiculous new name, you appear in public in absurd clothes, you sing songs based on nursery rhymes or jokes or catchphrases or advertising slogans, and you do it for money, renown, to lift yourself up, to escape the life you were born to, to escape the poverty, the racism, the killing strictures of a life that you were raised to accept as fate, to make yourself a new person not only in the eyes of the world, but finally in your own eyes too.[2]
Marcus’s clarities might have their uses for that 12 year old Gibson or anyone who needs to know rock ‘n’ roll isn’t all about skills. Guralnick’s Sam Phillips pushes the program; telling how the process of putting something new in the world went down at Phillips’ Sun Records’ studio:
To Sam every session was meant to be like the making of “Gone with the Wind,” with all its epic grandeur—but at the time every session had to be fun, too. If it wasn’t fun, it wasn’t worth doing, he said, and if you weren’t doing something different, of course, then you weren’t doing anything at all.
Guralnick cites the “first” rock ‘n’ roll song—Ike Turner’s/Jackie Brenston’s “Rocket 88”—as an example of Phillips’ drive to “individuated self-expression”:
If Ike Turner’s guitarist’s amp fell off the car on the way up to Memphis to cut “Rocket 88,” well, stuff some paper where the speaker cone was ruptured and THEN YOU HAD AN ORIGNAL SOUND! If a telephone went off in the middle of a session, well, you kept that telephone in—just make sure it’s THE BEST-SOUNDING DAMN TELEPHONE IN THE WORLD.
Those all caps shout out the need to be noticed/heard that powered Sun Records’ 45s. Phillips was an engineer with an ear for sound but he was even more alive to human particularity. Guralnick becomes a dialectician as he riffs on Phillips’s nose for Being—“My mission was to bring out of a person what was in him, to recognize that individual’s unique quality and then to find the key to unlock it.”—and Nothingness: “This is the void…When they get out on the stage of life the first thing that starts in their mind is: am I going to be rejected?”
That void behind Sun distances Phillips’s rock ‘n’ roll from art-life in realms of high culture where creators seem more at ease with their personas, more “well-bred”—to quote a phrase applied to Chelsea artists in the 50s and 60s who disdained self-promotion. I don’t know from their Downtown, but the term flashed me back to the mind-set in stone at the Columbia end of Claremont Ave., which I once bumped into when I sat next to Diana Trilling as we listened to a panel featuring Leslie Fiedler at the 92nd St. Y. Mrs. Trilling derided Fiedler’s populism and his showman’s instinct (which made him pretty rock ‘n’ roll for a literateur). She wondered aloud after the event if children were still taught to scorn show-offs. I kept silent. While my own family could surely spot a blowhard, they wouldn’t have been on the side of that ref who called me for traveling when I went behind my back. Nor was I raised to assume inwardness was necessarily opposed to exteriority. (And, finally, there was the “Leslie Fiedler chair” in our fam’s dining room—a seat that had been a little shaky since the man himself had sat down too heavily on it during a home visit.)
Forget me, though. Numberless folks need to be noticed/heard more than any DeMott of my gen. Think of the uproar made by that kid who keened for his mom at our street fair—a sound that reminds me America’s three greatest wailers during the 20th C.—Aretha Franklin, James Brown and Howling Wolf all felt abandoned by their mothers. (And then there’s that other gone king of bawling, Johnny Rotten. He recently explained that a meningitis-induced coma wiped out his memory when he was seven years old and he didn’t know who his parents were when they took him home from the hospital after a year. No wonder he grew up to shout it loud: I’m Punk and I’m Proud.)
Not that an urgent need to be seen/heard is confined to those who’ve been motherless children. In our own time, it’s moving class-conscious low wage workers, Black Lives Matter protesters, feminists on the verge and Hispanics in and out of the shadows. Doubt their party of hope will be Trumped. In the year of the Donald, OTOH, only a jerk-off would pretend an ethos of showing out is unproblematic or that rock ‘n’ roll attitude is all good.
II
A song cut by Charlie Rich, “Feel Like Going Home,” which gave Peter Guralnick a title for one of his first back-to-roots testaments, amounts to an answer record to Trump’s dim triumphalism. You can hear an unadorned version here. Rich’s country-soul confession: “Lord I feel like going home/I tried and I failed and I’m tired and weary/Everything I ever done was wrong/And I feel like going home” puts a hurt on beamish American Dreams. He sings home the truth Trump’s winner-take-all shtick is a paltry thing.
Charlie Rich had a hit or two on Sun Records but he didn’t become a star until he recorded a treacly country track in the early 70s. (He became even more famous when he used his pocket lighter to torch the announcement faux-country boy John Denver had won Entertainer of the Year at 1975’s CMA Awards.) Sam Phillips always regretted he hadn’t got what there was to get out of Rich. The only other Sun artist he always wanted another go with was Howling Wolf whom he always regarded as his “greatest discovery.”[3]
Phillips, of course, is best known for being the Southern man who changed America by finding Elvis Presley and white country boys—Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, Roy Orbison etc.—who carried black music (with a bootleggers’ propulsion) to a massive new integrated audience of teens. Guralnick’s biography corrects commentators who have treated rock ‘n’ roll’s creation as a mysterious big bang, It backs up Phillips’ own insistence he was an Emersonian impresario who trusted himself and knew he was making history. Guralnick’s research proves no-one should deny Phillips’ near-messianic impulse to rock and roll away Jim Crow or peg him as a cynic because he’d been known to declare (pre-Elvis): “If I could find a white man with a Negro sound and a Negro feel, I could make a billion dollars.”
Yet it also cops to the fact black musicians came to doubt Phillips’s commitment to their causes. Once Sun’s white rockers began to have hits, Phillips’s interest in recording black musicians seemed to fade. Guralnick recalls a late-life meeting between Phillips and Ike Turner (filmed for a movie shown in the PBS Blues series) where Turner counters Phillips’ claim Sun’s white artists were originals even if they borrowed from African American style: “’No, no,’ [Turner] says with little regard for social niceties. ‘Just then you said they didn’t copy the black style—they dead on it.’” Though Turner goes on to reassure Phillips (“I love you”), acting (as Guralnick notes) “with a tenderness that not even his admirers might credit.” Sam Phillips is marked by other bits of straight talk that flip the white-over-black discourse of dis and cover implicit in the book’s subtitle: “The Man Who Invented Rock ‘n’ Roll” (a subtitle, per Guralnick, Phillips “would’ve claimed and disclaimed”). Guralnick recalls the uplifting sequence when The Million Dollar Quartet—Presley, Lewis, Cash and Perkins—all spontaneously adulate Chuck Berry (on the tape of their one-off recording session): “‘That’s a rolling stone,’ says one of them.” The Killer’s mom agreed:
“My mama,” [Jerry Lee Lewis] said, “thought Chuck Berry was the king of rock ‘n’ roll.” When he asked her, “What about me mama?” she gave him a skeptical look. He was good, she said. “You and Elvis are good, son—but you’re no Chuck Berry. Chuck Berry is rock ‘n’ roll from his head to his toes.”
If Phillips leaned away from black musicians once he started having hits with white rockers, he may have got something of a comeuppance when he was betrayed by Johnny Cash (among others). The story of how Cash lied to Phillips, denying he was leaving Sun for Capitol records is almost biblical. (The pathos of Cash’s regret—“it was the only time he could recall lying to anyone about a matter of substance”—as well as the possibility Phillips himself engaged in skin games underscores Simone Weil’s lucidity about bottom-lines: “Money destroys human roots wherever it is able to penetrate, by turning desire for gain into the sole motive. It easily manages to outweigh all other motives, because the effort it demands of the mind is so very much less. Nothing is so clear and so simple as a row of figures.”)
Phillips’s reign at Sun Records didn’t last into the 60s. After he was pushed out of the record business by major labels, he maintained radio silence for decades before recasting himself as a public sage. Guralnick links Phillips’s Second Act to Presley’s death. It was then Phillips sussed he’d have to step up or step out of history. Phillips’s impulse to reengage probably had something to do with the culture clash that came to the fore (again) When Elvis Died. To quote the title of a good little book covering what happened next. [4] Elvis’s end inspired extravagant expressions of public grief as well as creepy responses from elites and tight-thinkers who objected to deifiers of Presley. (I find it hard to understand, said one letter-writer, how “the President of the United States of America can pay tribute to a man who caused many parents distress.”) When Elvis split, the real-world conflict between gentility and populism emerged as a large moral drama. It engaged powerful human feelings. (This struggle shouldn’t be conflated with later, pettier disputes between academic apologists for pop culture and defenders of a high cultural canon.) Phillips’ felt need to protect Elvis’s legacy (and his own) led him to envision an American culture where climbing down wouldn’t be equated with dumbing down, where democratic talk banishes “forever the exclamation ‘That’s disgusting’ with reference to behavior with which we’re not familiar or of which we don’t approve, and substitute[s] instead the recognition That’s human.” Phillips’ ideal (which Guralnick fills in) is… dead on it. Though Phillips was prone to going over the top when he sensed well-bred types were spitting on Elvis’s grave. Elvis, he claimed (a few months after the star’s death), “was positively the greatest person to walk the earth since Jesus.”
Guralnick allows there were those who were put off by Phillips’ bluster. He’s aware Phillips’ oracular, post-70s persona sometimes did a “disservice” to the “watchful, reactive role he fashioned for himself” when he was helping originary rock and rollers find their sounds/selves in the 50s. Musician Jack Clement has offered one acute angle on the b.s.-to-profundity quotient in his ex-boss’s raps. For Clement, Memphis in the 50s was Oz and Phillips was the Wizard. Yet Clement is probably too locked on his buddy’s (and/or frenemy’s) knack for hype. Phillips may have come on like a fantast as he aged, but there were true acts of imagination in his back story. You could start with the Wiz’s lovely gloss of what Memphis once meant to a country boy: “lights up the river…”
When Guralnick channels Phillips rolling with the flow, he had me recurring to Simone Weil’s roots truths. Phillips, like the profound Frenchwoman, was out to provide inspiration for a nation. Though he realized America—“THIS BABY COUNTRY”—was much younger than Europe: “Two hundred and fifty years old. That’s a baby—with a bare butt!” Phillips insisted American culture must be founded on the fun of self-invention, yet he believed the past should always be close behind: “There’s not one single thing more important to the future than looking back.” This Alabama boy who came up during the Depression wasn’t hoping hard times would come again but they weren’t to be forgotten: “Do you know what this country has done through hardship? It’s become the seat of the greatest compositions and versatility in music this world has ever known…”
Phillips shared with Weil a capacity for imagining affliction from within and grasping how a sufferer was stamped for life. Though she was probably less able to see misery/marginality as a “seat” of cultural creativity. (Her idea of a classic, after all, was Racine’s Phèdre, not, say, Jimmy Rodgers’ “Waiting on a Train,” which Phillips apotheosized.) Stomping the blues, of course, wasn’t second nature to Weil. She preferred Gregorian chants to jazz of her own day. Yet I’ll allow I feel easier about linking Weil and Phillips since I found out she wasn’t deaf to the appeal of roots music. Weil wanted to run from America yet during her stay in New York she was elated when she went to Baptist church services in Harlem: “The religious fervor of the Minister and the congregation explodes into dances like the Charleston,” she wrote to a friend, “exclamations, shouts and the singing of spirituals…a true and moving expression of faith.”[5]
Phillips put a spiritual spin on Sun’s rock ‘n’ roll: “You know there was a deep-seated feeling for God with probably every artist that came into my studio.” His faith-based aesthetic fused with his patriotism in an act of resistance to rock ‘n’ roll’s haters. Back in the 50s the most dangerous ones were straight-up racists freaked by rock ‘n’ roll’s promise of integration/miscegenation. But “the wild-ass premise” of Sun Records will always be lost on certain class-bound prigs and/or wannabe urbane types. Perhaps because it was so exceptionally American. Where else (per Phillips’ world-view) could one imagine: “The infinite promise of untried, unproved talent and the dream of an egalitarian society.” Only in America:
This was the text of Sam’s lesson. All of it. Freedom. The Democratic process. The vast untapped talent of those who had been, ignored, set aside, scorned and reviled by a world that, without knowing, was waiting for the bestowal of their gifts. Most of all individualism, but individualism at any cost, individualism in the extreme.
Phillips’s extremism (like Weil’s) wasn’t notional. He himself underwent electro-shock therapy twice. Once in the 40s during the war and a second time after he had a break-down before he found the key to rock ‘n’ roll. Phillips had been a man on the edge (and maybe he always was). It’s no coincidence the white man who broke with the Mind of the South was one who’d nearly lost his own mental bearings.
III
From the beginning, Phillips’s responsiveness to black American culture went beyond the pity of it all. He picked up on the dignity of a cappella singing he heard in the fields where he worked as a child alongside black folks:
They found a way to worship. You could hear it. You could feel it. You didn’t have to be inside a building, you could participate in a cotton patch, picking four rows at a time, at 110 degrees! I mean, I saw the inequity. But even at five or six years old I found myself caught up in a type of emotional reaction that was, instead of depressing—I mean, these were some of the astutest people I’ve ever known, and they were in [most] cases almost totally overlooked, except as a beast of burden—but even at that age, I recognized that: Hey! The backs of these people aren’t broken, they [can] find it in their souls to live a life that is not going to take the joy of living away.
The lesson Phillips took away from the cotton patch was upheld again on Beale Street, which he visited as a teenager on a road trip from Alabama to Texas:
I’d heard about Beale Street all my life, pictured it in my mind what it was—I couldn’t wait! We arrived at four or five-o’clock in the morning in pouring-down rain, but I’m telling you, Broadway never looked that busy. It was like a beehive, a microcosm of humanity—you had a lot of sober people there, you had lot of people looking to have a good time. You had old black men from the Delta and young cats dressed fit to kill. But the most impressive thing to me about Beale Street was that nobody got in anybody’s way—because every damn one of them wanted to be right there. Beale Street represented for me, even at that age, something I hoped to see for all people. That sense of absolute freedom, that sense of no direction but the greatest direction in the world, of being able to feel, I’m part of this somehow. I may only be here a day or two, but I can tell everybody when I get back home what a wonderful time I had.
There was one black man at the source of the sense of possibility that shaped Phillips’ way in the world and in Sun Records’ recording studio. When Phillips was a child, his parents took in a blind African American elder, “Uncle Silas.” (Their hospitality to him was a sign they were more “fair-minded” than most of their white neighbors, though Phillips realized they were still caste-bound: “while there was no overt prejudice: whites were still whites, niggers niggers.”) Silas became a paragon of imagination and emotional freedom for Phillips—an exemplar who taught him “how to live and be happy no matter, what came along , [that] even when you’re feeling bad, you’re feeling good.”
He liked to sit in the kitchen and put me on his knee, grab me by my bony shoulder and say, ‘Samuel, you’re going to grow up and be a great man someday.’ I mean, I was just a sickly kid—physically, I don’t know, maybe spiritually—but somehow as much as I didn’t believe him, I did believe him. Because he sounded so confident. And he was a great storyteller—but [what I got from his stories] is that, number one you must have a belief in things that are unknown to you, that what you see and hear is really not all that important, except for the moment. I mean, Africa was just another way of him pointing to the things that were all over and available to us one way or another. Africa was a state of mind that he hoped everybody could see and be a part of or participate in.
That imagined Africa is available to anyone who listens to classic Sun recordings. And, forgive the stretch, but I think a version of it informs our state of mind on swinging days at the Tiemann street fair. This fall, though that black and tan fantasy has seemed most alive to me in the pages of Banjo—Claude McKay’s picaresque tale of black mariners and musicians in mid-20s Marseille.
Before I head there, I want to acknowledge I was steered to Banjo by a passage in Michael Denning’s new book Noise Uprising—a text that fits into this movement of mind as well since it focuses on the twinned rise of roots musics and the recording industry between 1925 and the Great Depression. Denning tells how vernacular musics—“Havana’s son, Rio’s samba, New Orleans’s jazz, Buenos Aires’ tango, Seville’s flamenco, Cairo’s tarab, Johannesburg’s marabi, Jakarta’s kroncong, and Honolulu’s hula” etc.—found local audiences and stimulated an anti-colonial “audio-politics.” These musics reverberated throughout the world, thanks largely to seamen bearing records and “the polyphony of colonial ports.” Denning cites Banjo’s tale of black musicians from the diaspora in Marseille as he investigates soundscapes by the sea in the uproaring 20s.
IV
Banjo is a worldly book, but, as Denning would likely allow, its angle isn’t as transnational as Noise Uprising’s. Claude McKay’s p.o.v. on his port of choice is a Black Atlantic one: “In no other port had he ever seen such a piquant variety of Negroes…It was as if every country of the world where Negroes lived had sent representatives…” He’s alive to race matters as he sets the scene for night—“between Square and the Ditch”—and day—“between breakwater and the docks”—in Marseille:
Most of the whites, especially the blond ones of northern countries, seemed to have gone down hopelessly under the strength of hard liquor, as if nothing mattered for them now but that. They were stinking dirty, and lousy, without any apparent desire to clean themselves. With the black boys it was different. It was as if they were just taking a holiday… They drank wine to make them lively and not sodden, washed their bodies and their clothes on the breakwater, and sometimes spent a panhandled ten-franc note to buy a second hand pair of pants.
The novel’s lead character is a vagabond Afro-American banjo player who’s “worked at all the easily picked up jobs.” He’s intent on putting together a Black Atlantic band that will bring together musicians from West Africa, the Caribbean, and down home America. He cares more about fun than money and the narrator hints he’ll never live large. Yet the bands he forms are always hot. The first ensemble jumps off when he and Malty (of the West Indies and New Orleans) —“the best drummer on the beach”—“walk into a dream”: “four music-making color boys with banjo, ukulele, mandolin, guitar, and horn” just off a cargo ship. They end up jamming in a “Senegalese” (i.e. Francophone West African) club where Banjo plays “Shake that Thing:”
Banjo picked it off and the boys from the boat quickly got it. Then Banjo keyed himself up and began playing in his own wonderful wild way.
“Old Uncle Jack, the jellyroll king
Just got back from shaking that thing
He can shake that thing, he can shake that thing
For he’s a jelly-roll king. Oh, shake that thing!”It roused an Arab-black girl from Algeria into a shaking-mad mood. And she jazzed right out into the center of the floor and shook herself in a low-down African shimmying way. The mandolin player, a stocky, cocky lad of brown-paper complexion, the lightest-skinned of the playing boys, had his eyes glued on her. Her hair was cropped and stood up shiny, crinkly like a curiously-wrought bird’s nest. She was big-boned and well-fleshed and her full lips were a savage challenge. Oh, shake that thing!
“Cointreau.” The Negroid girl called when, the music ceasing, the paper-brown boy asked her to take a drink.
One more sip from Banjo’s delicious scenes of musicking:
Taloufa had taught them a rollicking West African song, whose music was altogether more insinuating than that of “Shake that Thing.”
“Stay, Carolina, stay,
Oh, stay, Carolina, stay!”…The whole song—the words of it, the lilt, the patter, the color of it—seemed to be built up from that one word, Stay! When Taloufa sang, “Stay,” his eyes grew bigger and whiter in his charmingly carnal countenance, the sound came from his mouth like a caressing appealing command and reminded one of the beautiful rearing young filly of a pasture that a trainer is breaking in. Stay!
“Stay, Carolina, stay.”
“There isn’t much to it” said Goosey: “it’s so easy and the tune is so slight, just one bar repeating itself.”
“Why it’s splendid, you boob!” said Ray. “It’s got more real stuff in it than a music-hall full of American songs! The words are so wonderful.”
“I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
I took her on a swim and she swim more than me,
Stay, Carolina stay.
Stay, Carolina stay.”“Don’t blow on the flute so hard; you kinder kill the sound a the banjo,” said Banjo to Goosey.
“I can’t do it any other way. A flute is a flute. It mounts high every time above everything else.”
“I tell you what, Banjo,” said Ray. “Let Goosey play solo on the flute, and you fellows join in the chorus. The chorus is the big thing, anyway”…
So Goosey played the solo. And when Banjo, Taloufa, and Malty took up the refrain. Bugsy, stepping with Dengle, led the boys dancing. Bugsy was wiry and long-handed. Dengle, wiry, long-handed, and long-legged. And they made a striking pair as abruptly Dengle turned his back on Bugsy and started round the room in a bird hopping step, nodding his head and working his hands held against his sides, fists doubled, as if he were holding a guard. Bugsy and all the boys imitated him, forming a unique ring, doing the same simple thing, startlingly fresh in that atmosphere, with clacking of heels on the floor.
It was, perhaps, the nearest that Banjo, quite unconscious of it, ever came to an aesthetic realization of his orchestra. It if had been possible to transfer him and his playing pals and dancing boys just as they were to some Metropolitan stage, he might have made a bigger thing than any of his dreams.
Ray, the suggestive voice who helps the band find the groove above, is a writer who runs with Banjo’s crew. A stand-in for Banjo’s author, Claude McKay, his musings on race and class, “prejudice and business,” remain pertinent nearly a century on. Try this line on a Trumpish patriot who “loves not his nation, but the spiritual meannesses of his life around which he has created a frontier wall to hide the beauty of other horizons.” Or this meditation on double-consciousness of black intellects (still right on time in the Age of Obama) which elaborates on Ray’s own uncharitable—and overthought—response to a white British beggar:
Once in a moment of bitterness he’d said…“Civilization is rotten.” And the more he traveled and knew of it, the more he felt the truth of that outburst. He hated civilization because its general attitude toward the colored race was such as to rob him of his warm human instincts and make him inhuman. Under it, the thinking colored man could not function normally like his white brother, responsive and reacting spontaneously to the emotions of pleasure or pain, joy or sorrow, kindness or hardness, charity, anger and forgiveness. Only within the confines of his own world of color could he be his true self. But as soon as he entered the great white world, where of necessity he must work and roam and breathe the larger air to live, the entire world, high, low, middle, unclassed, all conspired to make him painfully conscious of color and race.
Should I do this or not? Be mean or kind? Accept, give, withhold? In determining his action he must be mindful of his complexion…Oh, it was hell to be a man of color, intellectual and naturally human in the white world. Except for a superman, almost impossible.
Ray’s choice to join Banjo’s crew is a roots move that’s instinctive and conscious. From West Africans he got “a positive feeling of wholesome contact with racial roots” but he feels even closer to American “working boys” like Banjo (though note how he distances himself from mucker poses below):
Ray loved to be with them in constant physical contact, keeping warm within. He loved their tricks with language, loved to pick up and feel and taste new words from their rich reservoir of niggerisms. He did not like rotten-egg stock words among rough people any more than he liked colorless refined phases among nice people. He did not even like to hear cultured people using the conventional stock words of the uncultured and thinking they were being free and modern. That sounded vulgar to him. But he admired the black boys’ unconscious artistic capacity for eliminating the rotten dead stock words of the proletariat and replacing them with startling new ones. There were no dots and dashes in their conversation—nothing that could not be frankly said and therefore decently—no act or fact of life for which they could not find a simple passable word. He gained from them finer nuances of the necromancy of language and the wisdom that any word may be right and magical in its proper setting.
Claude McKay was gay and those “tricks” in the passage above or the phrasing of “pick up and feel and taste” may prick the attention of queer theorists, but Ray’s aestheticism isn’t just a cover story for down low sexting. McKay/Ray was/is a writer after all. And, as a natural-born Tolstoyan [6], his art has a moral import even though it’s far from propaganda. Banjo’s messages to and from the grassroots are in tune with the one Uncle Silas taught Sam Phillips. Though McKay gets nearer to horrors in the “United Snakes.” One plot twist late in the novel leads, in turn, to the revelation happy-go-lucky Banjo witnessed the lynching of his younger brother—“a pink temptation kept right after him and wouldn’t let him be until he was got and pulled the way of the rope.” Ray reflects on Banjo’s (and his homies’) “gusto” in a summative passage:
Never had Ray guessed from Banjo’s general manner that he had known deep sorrow. Yet he when he heard him tell Goosey that he’d seen his own brother lynched, he was not surprised, he understood, because right there he had revealed the depths of his soul and the soul of his race—the true tropical African Negro. No Victorian-long period of featured grief and sable mourning, no mechanical-pale graveside face, but a luxuriant living up from it, like the great jungles growing perennially beautiful and green in the yellow blaze of the sun over the long life-breaking tragedy of Africa.
Banjo’s crew (and orchestra) breaks up in the course of the novel, though they hang tight again before the end when Banjo and Ray light out for (unknown) territories. But the group’s solidarity is always provisional. Even their best times together tend to be fraught. Clubbing is regularly interrupted by cuttings and shootings. Marseilles flics are corrupt racists so there’s no protection to be had from “official fists.” Something mean about the city is revealed to Ray through the novel’s good times, bad times segues. Beneath the sunny, Mediterranean vista of Desire, he feels the presence of a shadowy network of grasping cops and pimps, landlords and cabbies. One house-proud “chauffeur” becomes the representative of Marseille’s unbeautiful side. Ray had once been a friend to this driver, giving him tips about customers wanting rides/whores. But he’s grossed out when the man takes a petty, bourgie penny-saver’s stance toward the flesh trade:
What made the chauffeur so unbearably ugly to him now was that he was trafficking obscenely to scramble out of the proletarian world into that solid respectable life; whence he could look down on the Ditch and all such places with the mean, evil, and cynical eye of a respectable person.
Ray doesn’t confuse self-respect with respectability. But both he and Banjo refuse to make a spectacle of themselves when workers on a great ship of the line throw out food to the poor. Other brothers aren’t so proud. McKay pictures them in the garbage line:
Kitchen boys, two to each can, toted the garbage down a gangplank to dump it in the cart. The rank stuff was rushed and raided by the hungry black men. Out of the slime, the guts of game and poultry, the peelings of vegetables, they fished up pieces of ham, mutton, beef, poultry, and tore savagely at them with their teeth. They fought against one another for the best pieces. One mighty fellow sent a rival sprawling on his back from a can and dominated it, until he had extracted some precious knuckles of bones with flesh upon them. Another brought up a decomposed rat which he dashed into the water, and wiping his hand on the sand, dived back again into the can. There were also two white men in the rush. A small Southern European was worsted in the struggle and knocked down, while a big Swede, with the appearance of a great mass of hard mildewed putty, held his own.
“Look at the niggers! Look at the niggers!” the passengers on deck cried, and some of them went and got cameras to photograph the scene.
That hoot of contempt is echoed a few pages later by an Indian anti-colonialist intellectual who’s put out when West African musician Taloufa is lured away from a political discussion by a band who coax him into playing “a tormenting, tantalizing, tickling, tintinnanbulating thing he called ‘Hallejuah Jig.’” Michael Denning notes an “irreconcilable gap” between “jazzing” and “serious talk” in Banjo. But it’s clear McKay doesn’t identify with the Indian’s No-in-murmur to groovy Black Atlanticism—“‘Just like Niggers,’ he muttered, turning away.”
McKay’s politics co-existed with his aestheticism. And he had an eye not just an ear. As is apparent in this Fauvist scene where Ray and Banjo take a walk on the “Corniche”—a road cut into a bluff that looks out over Marseille’s harbor[7]:
Two ships were going down the Mediterranean out to the East, and another by the side of l’Estraque out to the Atlantic. A big Peninsular and Orient liner with three yellow-and-black funnels was coming in. The fishing-boats were little colored dots sailing into the long veil of the marge. A swarm of sea gulls gathered where one of the ships had passed, dipping suddenly down, shooting up and around joyously as if some prize had been thrown to them. In the basin of Joliet the ship’s funnels were vivid little splashes of many colors bunched together, and, close to them in perspective, an aggregate of gray factory chimneys spouted from their black mouths great columns of red-brown smoke into the indigo skies. Abruptly, as if it rose out of the heart of the town, a range of hills ran out in a gradual slope like a strong argent arm protecting the harbor, and merged its point in the far-away churning mist of sea and sky.
“It’s an eyeful all right,” said Banjo.
Ray said nothing. He was so happily moved. A delicious symphony was playing on the tendrils that linked his inner being to the world without, and he was afraid to break the spell. They walked the whole length of the Cornice down to the big park by the sea. They leaped over a wall and a murky stream, crossed the race track and came to rest and dozed in the shade of a magnolia.
V
My soundtrack for that walk on the Corniche has been Lucinda Williams’ “Magnolia.” And I was going to fade out of this essay by going back to New Orleans with her. Michael Denning’s account of links between seaport towns gave me a rationale beyond synchronic method. But I’ve been pushed by a…providential mechanism to another New Orleans song—Rambling Jack Elliot’s “912 Greens.” This love-song to NOLA tells the story of Ramblin’ Jack’s nights there in 1953, when he ran with a banjo picker “named Billy Fair” and his musician friends. Their beatific crew was close in spirit to Banjo’s vagabond “joy-spreaders.” Ramblin’ Jack “stayed around three weeks in New Orleans, never did see the light of day.” Nobody in his song seemed worried about making a living. (Thinking on Rambling Jack’s and McKay’s banjo players, I flashed on the punchline in Johnny Carson’s old joke about “the least spoken phrase in the English language: ‘that’s the banjo player’s Porsche.’”) Ramblin’ Jack revels in how his friends didn’t have enough sense to come out of the rain. When a tropical storm erupted, an ex-ballet dancer slid outside, took off her clothes and danced around the banana tree in Billy Fair’s front yard. Jack followed suit.
The friend who linked me to “912 Greens” a couple years back [8], figured the Greens in the song’s title was probably a pot reference. And that banana tree may be as upfront as the cover of the Velvet Underground’s first album. Then again, maybe Jack and his buddies were just drinking Billy Fair’s wine. Whatever was getting them high, though, the song conveys the same “heavenly inebriety” that suffuses Banjo’s mellow moods.
“912 Greens” is a talking blues. Or whatever you want to call those recitative numbers that amount to classical raps. But Ramblin’ Jack breaks into song for the last couplet. Claude McKay—and Sam Phillips—would’ve felt him when he sings:
“Did you ever stand and shiver
Just because you were looking at a river”
I miss his Mississippi (though I’ve never really seen it). Just like I miss Memphis and Marseilles (though I’ve never been to those cities). I ain’t dead yet, though. Hang on son. I know you deserve a vacation. And your mama does too. Some of these days we’ll get to that river and the sea.
Notes
1 http://www.robertchristgau.com/xg/bkrev/keil-96.php
2 Per Marcus’s The History of Rock ‘n’ Roll in Ten Songs.
3 From Moanin’ at Midnight: The Life and Times of Howling Wolf by James Segrest and Mark Hoffman:
Phillips was simply wild about the Wolf in the studio. “When I got the Wolf in there, I was just in love with the sound I heard from him,” he said. “And I can say to this day there is nobody I enjoyed recording more.” He was especially impressed by Wolf’s commitment to what he was singing: “When Wolf sat down in that little old chair with his big feet sticking out and began to sing, this guy didn’t know anything was around him! I mean, he was singing to exactly the thing we all want to make contact with—and that is the ears of the world. Maybe that’s one person; maybe it is everybody on the globe. But Wolf had nothing in his mind but just to make sure that he conveyed everything that was in his mind, and in his heart, and in his soul when he opened his mouth to sing…He was, boy, pouring out his soul, and you could just see it, in addition to feel it…He sung his ass off—and that was a big ass!” Phillips…sometimes spoke of Wolf as more than a mere mortal. “He wasn’t just a blues singer,” Phillips said. “I mean he was a commander of your soul…”
Wolf himself underscored his role as a “commander” when he described how he led the band in his early recording sessions: “I was the one who told the guys what to play, how the music was to go.”…[T]he songs, the sound—they are mine all the way out, from coming up playing the guitar. I always tried to play a different sound from the other fellow.”
4 “Now and then a memorial volume breaks out of mindlessness and invites serious response. When Elvis Died is such a work, and I found much of it provocative. . . . I’m struck by the book’s direct and indirect penetration of the inner life of the mass audience—the expressible beliefs and turbulent passions shaping pop-cultural response.” Benjamin DeMott, Atlantic Magazine
5 Simone Weil, Francine Du Plessix Gray, p. 188
6 “For Tolstoy was his ideal of the artist as a man and remained for him the most wonderful example of one who balanced his creative work by a life lived out to its full illogical end.”
7 Simone Weil lived in Marseille for a year before she left France for New York City. I wonder if she ever took in the view of the harbor from the Corniche.
8 Pace Bob Levin. [Editor’s note: Levin has corrected my version of his take on “912 Greens”:
“Hey, man, like, uhh… Call it ‘912 Blues.’“No, man, like, uhhh… uhhh…“Uhh…”“Uhhhh…. ‘912 GREENS. Like ‘greens,’ man, not ‘blues.’”]