Long Time Leaving (37 page)
Authors: Roy Blount Jr.
But no. I've already tried out a theory along those lines: that the first Mississippi towboats were side-wheelers so they pulled barges, but then when they became stern-wheelers you couldn't hook anything on to the back, so …Everyone I have tried that theory out on has pooh-poohed it.
And do you know what I found just now when I “rewound” that song Elvis was singing?
It was a song from Elvis's fi
lm Kissin’ Cousins.
A song called “Barefoot Ballad.”
Elvis sings, “Big toe connected to the two-toe, two-toe connected to the three-toe, three-toe connected to the four-toe, four-toe connected to the five-toe,” and the Jordanaires come in with “That's a live toe. What's a live toe? That's a jive toe. What's a jive toe? That's a drive toe.”
My people, my people.
“Ironically,” according to the liner notes in this CD, “the producer of ‘Kissin’ Cousins’ wanted the soundtrack to be recorded in Nashville to re-create the authentic ‘country’ sound. However, the songs were pure Hollywood and could have been recorded anywhere.” You can say that again. The musicians included the great Boots Randolph and Floyd Cramer. I don't know how long it took them to plow through such profound portrayals of their culture as “Barefoot Ballad” and “Catchin On Fast.” It took just over two weeks to shoot the movie.
“This new Presley concoction,” said a reviewer in
Variety,
“is a pretty
dreary effort…. He needs and merits more substantial material than this.” You can say that again. Included in the liner notes is a drawing that was used to publicize the movie: old Elvis skipping along with one hound dog and seven, count 'em, Daisy Maes, six of them barefooted as yard dogs.
That movie came out in September of 1963. That was right when I was arriving at Harvard Graduate School. Is it any wonder that two or three of my fellow students expressed jovial surprise that I showed up in shoes?
Elvis didn't have to do that to me. I have been thinking of starting a Dixie Hall of Dumb, featuring otherwise distinguished Southerners who played into stereotypes by getting off into various kinds of bad dumbness—D. W. Griffiths (scapegoat-seeking dumbness), Shoeless Joe Jackson (mooncalf dumbness), Lewis Grizzard (mean-spirited dumbness), Newt Gingrich (smarty-pants dumbness), Bill Clinton (gotta-have-it dumbness), and, yes, Elvis. Southerners have an honorable affinity for certain kinds of dumbness—quixotic, salt-of-the-earth, hardheaded, crazy-ass, open-handed, over-the-top (or under-the-bottom) dumb. But then there's weak, lame, unnecessary dumb. Elvis had the world by the tail, and when they gave him songs to sing about his bare toes right out in front of everybody, he sang 'em.
So now I have an ethnic burden. People in New York may not expect me to be barefooted, but when New York beats Atlanta in the World Series, they do expect me to be a Braves fan. I explain to them that I am from Decatur, which, to be sure, has become enfolded by metropolitan Atlanta, but Decatur was there first, so I think of Atlanta as an embarrassing rich family that moved in next door. If it hadn't been for Atlanta, Decatur wouldn't have been subjected to General Sherman or Mariano Rivera. Furthermore, the Braves didn't move to Atlanta until I was in my twenties—growing up, I was a fan of the Atlanta Crackers. If the Crackers had ever played the Yankees, I would have been in the stands doing the chicken-leg chop. The Crackers were a powerhouse in the Southern Association, and incidentally several Southerners who had been Brooklyn Dodgers—Dixie “Walker, Whitlow “Wyatt, Hugh Casey—were Cracker managers and coaches. That doesn't satisfy people in New York. They want me to be heartbroken. They think I'm a turncoat.
In fact, I have something to confess: when I was a kid, I kind of liked the Yankees. Not the
army,
the ballplayers. Hey, the closest big-league team to me geographically was the Senators, yuck, and the Yankees won all the time. They had the great Joe DiMaggio. The eponymous Cuban of Hemingway's
Old Man and the Sea
loved DiMaggio, why couldn't I?
Many years later, when I tried to interview DiMaggio, he was as aloof
as Lee would have been (well, more aloof—he pretty much told me to piss off). I wrote something balanced about him: what a great player he was, the jerk. And classy—which he was, he was classy, as a player, certainly, and classy in the sense that he could get away with not talking to anybody who might get, and convey, the impression that in certain nonbaseball respects Joe was, maybe, a little …dumb.
When DiMaggio died, I was quoted in his obituary on the front page of
The New York Times:
“He was the class of the Yankees when the Yankees outclassed everybody else.” I thought that was cool. A boy from Georgia with the last word on the greatest New York sports icon. It would have been more gratifying, of course, if I had died and DiMaggio had been quoted, but I felt pretty good about our close association.
You could, of course, accuse me of sucking up to New York. I haven't forgotten where I come from, though. When I told a New Yorker that I was biographing Lee, she said, “Isn't he the one they trot out to show they weren't all bad?” I said, “What do you mean, ‘they’?”
A New York publisher is putting out a series of brief biographies of icons. Penguin Lives, the series is called. Larry McMurtry on Crazy Horse, Edmund White on Proust, Peter Gay on Mozart. Cool. I was asked to do Mark Twain. Cool, except I couldn't think of anything new to say about Mark Twain. “How about another Southern icon?” I was asked.
Who would pop into
your
head, if you heard “Southern icon”? (Bobbie Ann Mason already had dibs on Elvis.)
“How about Robert E. Lee?” I said.
There comes a time for every Southern boy when he has to deal with Robert E. Lee. And you know what, Robert E. Lee is hard to deal with. Robert E. Lee's fellow students at West Point called him the Marble Model. How can I get my teeth into somebody like that? Edmund Morris, struggling for years to pull off a biography of the Teflon president, Ronald Reagan, finally turned himself into a fictional character Reagan's age. It got the book written, but …dumb.
After Lee surrendered at Appomattox, John Wilkes Booth was offered a drink. He said, “Yes, anything to drive away the blues.” I guess that drink didn't get the job done. And Booth was a Shakespearean, too high-flown to write a blues
song.
So, hey, here's an idea: shoot Abraham Lincoln! That'll show 'em! Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Lee stuck with his home state when he knew it was on the losing side, but that's a gallant kind of dumb. He was dumb at Gettysburg, but he was tired. After the war, he had sense enough not to write a biography of himself. He'd have been as hung up as I am.
Ulysses S. Grant was just dumb enough, in the sense of hardheadedness,
not to be spooked by Lee, but then he was dumb enough, in the sense of softheadedness, to surround his presidency with thieves and then to lose all his own money on “Wall Street. While dying from the effects of cigar addiction, he heroically saved his family's fortunes by writing his memoirs. Mark Twain published them, to enormous success. As far as I can determine, Mark Twain in all his myriad writings mentioned Robert E. Lee only once, an offhand humorous reference to a famous painting of Lee and Stonewall Jackson. Mark Twain, after two weeks in the Confederate army, turned squarely against the South, but at the height of his popularity he refrained from publishing his long fulmi-nation against lynching for fear of alienating Southern book buyers. Twain got great effects out of various kinds of dumbness, but sometimes he was smart in the sense of chicken.
I'm just dumb enough to think I can deal with the Marble Model. As soon as I get a handle on this towboat thing.
P.S.:
As to how the
tug
got in
tugboat:
Greg Jaynes says that “a barge is so much wider in the beam than a towboat it is more efficient to let the barge make the wake. If the skipper towed the barge, the barge would have to override the wake of the tug, thus burdening the engines unnecessarily, burning more fuel, and taking longer to reach the destination.” Okay, that's why they push instead of pulling, but why are they called towboats? “I have no proof,” says Jaynes, “but my guess is the barge used to be skinnier. Take a look at your Erie Canal, which transformed New York City by opening up the bounty of the nation's breadbasket to the East Coast. But the canal, now: not wide today. I suspect even narrower in the beginning.” The
Oxford American
ran a letter to the editor from a Captain D. Greer suggesting that I was dumb for not being able to get to the bottom of this matter. “They still ‘towed’ barges in our grandfathers’ day, when the boats were made of wood and the men were made of steel. The bow of the boat went into a notch, towed from the quarter, and had a void space, or ‘duck pond,’ the boat and the tow—you would not have wanted to run a coal tow hard aground with a wooden boat pushing directly against it at full throttle.”
I
wish I could write about music like some people. Nick Hornby on Steely Dan in
The New Yorker:
Rather than opting for some sort of phony bebop Beat shtick, they adapted contemporary music—the pseudo-sophisticated jazz-funk that gave such a sheen to “Aja,” their best album, and ‘Gaucho.’ This, they seemed to be saying—once one has gone backward and forward through all the retro-futurism—is what the faux-luxe late fifties would have sounded like now. Or something like that. Of course, the levels of irony were lost on some people….
All I know is, the Boswell Sisters tickle me no end. And I have done some research. Though many a musical reference book will tell you differently, the facts are that the eldest sister, Martha, and the middle one, Connie, were born in Kansas City in 1905 and 1907, respectively, and baby sister Helvetia (called Vet) in Birmingham in 1911. “When they were still girls, and already well-trained classical musicians on various instruments, they moved with their white middle-class parents to New Orleans, where they heard jazz and went for it. With Connie as the lead singer and principal arranger, they became in their teens a good enough close-harmony trio to win local talent contests, entertain flood victims, impress local jazz musicians, and get a weekly gig on a local radio station. Then in their twenties—Vet in her teens—they went on the road. “Oklahoma, Texas—Indian country,” said Vet. “We'd be catching a train at 2 or 3 a.m., nobody there but a potbellied stove. Have to flag the train down.” A childhood spinal injury, caused by a fall from a wagon, had left Connie unable to stand or walk unsupported—and then on their first performance tour, recalled Vet, “she fell out of a window playing hide-and-go-seek in a hotel in Kansas City, and we had to carry her all the way to the coast—didn't have a [wheel]chair then, couldn't afford one.” After the first take of their first professional recording session, the band stood and burst into applause.
By 1930 they were enormously popular national radio stars, but in 1935 the trio broke up, harmoniously. One reason their mother had encouraged the sisters to go professional early on, Vet recalled after Connie died, was to provide the handicapped Connie with something to hold on to. After Connie married the group's manager, who wanted to focus on her career, Martha and Vet married outside the business and retired. Connie changed the spelling of her name to Connee, for some reason, and went on for many years as a highly regarded solo act.
The sisters’ distinctive sound had something to do with their trying, as a threesome, to capture all the harmonies that their parents and their aunt and uncle (who all lived under the same roof, two sisters married to two brothers) achieved as a barbershop quartet. Connee would cite Enrico Caruso (from whose records she learned breath control) and the blues singer Mamie Smith as individual influences. Louis Armstrong undoubtedly had an impact, and Louis Prima was a childhood friend. But the sister trio's great formative moment came early on when they were in a California hotel room recording themselves for their radio show back in New Orleans. As Connee recalled it, “We were going to cut our transcription one week, and I had a terrible cold and couldn't hit the high notes strongly and clearly enough, so Martha covered the piano with burlap, I dropped all the songs an octave or two and the three of us got very close around the mike and sang, sweet and low, into it. Of course, we had no idea what we sounded like, but the next week we heard the playback and knew we were onto something that no one else was doing.”
In time the Andrews Sisters and the McGuire Sisters would do very well by copying, but never equaling, the Boswells’ blend. The Bozzies and Bing Crosby influenced each other in developing intimate ways with a microphone. And Ella Fitzgerald would cite Connie as the only singer who ever influenced her. But their place in musical history aside, there is something about how much fun the Bozzies sound like they are getting out of weaving their voices together, amicably and niftily, that makes me want to jump up on the table and wave my hat. (I have thought of them as the Bozzies ever since I heard the bandleader Jimmie Grier say, on one of their recordings, “That's mighty fine, Bozzies.”)
Sometimes they sound like bees. They sing pop songs mostly, but they turn them into jazz by—well, here's what Fitzgerald's biographer, Stuart Nicholas, says about Connie's arranging:
In the space of a three-minute arrangement she might completely recast a tune by altering its harmonic
framework, change its rhythm characteristics with up to six or seven tempo changes, insert completely new interludes of her own, and introduce an infinite number of highly original vocal devices that might include the “instrumental” use of voices, scat singing, and elements of blues and gospel music. The Boswells were so far ahead of their time that the breakthrough quality of their art is still apparent from their recordings today.
We can thank the Bozzies for Ella Fitzgerald's debut as a singer, in 1932, when she was fifteen. Young Ella lived with her mother, who signed her up for amateur night at the Apollo Theater in Harlem—as a dancer. Then the mother jumped in front of a car to save a kid from being run over and was hospitalized with a brain injury. So Ella had to go to the Apollo alone. When she went out onto the stage, she froze. “You're up there, do something!” someone said. So she sang. She and her mother loved the Boswell Sisters and often sang their songs around the house. Already an excellent mimic (she could do Louis Armstrong, too), Ella sang like Connie on “Judy,” “The Object of My Affection” (“can change my complexion / From white to a rosy red”), and “Believe It, Beloved.” She won the contest. Her mother died. Her professional career began.