Waterboy! Hey, waterboy!
That’s my cue. It’s harvesttime, 1947, and I’m the seven-year-old waterboy on my daddy Diamond Helm’s cotton farm near Turkey Scratch, Arkansas. My dad and mom are working in the fields along with neighbors and black sharecropping families like the Tillmans and some migrant laborers we’d hired, seasonals up from Mexico. My older sister, Modena, is back at the house watching my younger sister, Linda, and my baby brother, Wheeler. Since I’m still too young for Diamond to sit me on the tractor, my job is to keep everyone hydrated. I got a couple of good metal pails, and I work that hand pump until the water runs clear and cold. I run back and forth between the pump house and the turn row, where the people drink their fill under a shady tree limb. I learned early on that the human body is a water-cooled engine.
It was hard work. The temperature was usually around a hundred degrees that time of year. But that’s how I started out, carrying water to relieve the scorching thirst that comes from picking cotton in the heat and rich delta dust.
I was born in the house my father rented on a cotton farm in the Mississippi Delta, near Elaine, Arkansas. The delta is a different landscape from the one you might be used to, so I want to draw you some sketches of the old-time southern farm communities I grew up in, when cotton was king and rock and roll wasn’t even born yet.
I’m talking about a low, flat water world of bayous, creeks, levees, and dikes, and some of the best agricultural land in the world for growing cotton, rice, and soybeans. When the first Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, the delta’s cypress forests sheltered Mississippian Indian tribes—Choctaw, Chickasaw, Natchez—who constructed giant burial mounds related to astronomy and magic. I’m descended from them through my grandmother Dolly Webb, whose own grandmother had Chickasaw blood, like many of us in Phillips County.
In the 1790s Sylvanus Phillips led the first English settlers across the Mississippi River into eastern Arkansas. They were mostly immigrants from North Carolina, the Helms probably among them. They laid out the town of Helena, seventy miles downriver from Memphis, in 1820. It grew overnight into a pioneer river port full of keelboats, flatboats, stockboats, and ferries. The river was a mixed blessing, rising and falling annually so that levees had to be built and maintained.
Helena rose in the steamboat age, along with Vicksburg and Natchez, Mississippi, and Memphis. The town earned a brawling reputation early on. In the 1840s Helena was described in the New York press as a notorious den “where all sorts of nigger runners, counterfeiters, horse stealers, murderers and sich like took shelter again the law.” An apprentice steamboat pilot named Sam Clemens, later better known as Mark Twain, saw Helena’s riverside slums and dark saloons filled with gamblers, idlers, and thugs. Tied to the landings were the boats of slavers, minstrel shows, itinerant doctors, whiskey dealers, brothel keepers, and other businessmen of the American frontier.
During the Civil War, Phillips County was ardent rebel country, producing seven Confederate generals, more than any other county in the South. To me that says a lot about the place. There’s a Confederate cemetery atop Crowley’s Ridge, overlooking Helena and the river. Union artillery controlled river traffic with four batteries of cannon on top of the ridge there. A few thousand poorly armed rebel farmboys tried to dislodge those Yankee guns during the Battle of Helena in 1863. Charging up the naked hill under withering fire, most of them died trying. I used to visit the quiet, leafy graveyard when I was a boy.
Think of endless cotton fields, gravel roads, groves of pecan trees, canebrakes, bayous, pump houses, kudzu vines, sharecroppers’ cabins, tenant farmhouses, flooded rice fields, the biggest sky in the world, and the nearby Mississippi, like an inland sea with its own weather system. Think 110 degrees in the shade in the summertime. Cotton country. We were cotton farmers.
Cotton was labor-intensive even after the Civil War, with the result that Phillips County lies in what used to be called the Black Belt, meaning the population is maybe 80 percent African-American. That’s why the delta is known for its music. The sound of the blues, rhythm and blues, country music, is what we lived for, black and white alike. It gave you strength to sit on one of those throbbing Allis-Chalmers tractors all day if you knew you were gonna hear something on the radio or maybe see a show that evening.
My father, Jasper Diamond “J.D.” Helm, was born in Monroe County, Arkansas, in 1910. The Helms were farming near Elaine in 1919 when the famous Elaine race riots broke out. Some black tenant sharecroppers around Elaine couldn’t live on low crop prices that amounted to peonage, so they started a union and withheld their cotton from the market. A bunch of Ku Kluxers from around Helena drove over and shot up one of their meetings. Things took off from there, and quite a few people from both races were killed before federal troops from Little Rock, Arkansas, put a stop to it. Someone put out a rumor that all the white farmers and their families were going to be murdered by the rioters. My daddy remembered waiting with his father and brother on the front porch of their farm, pistols and shotguns at the ready. “If they show up here,” my grandfather told his sons, “don’t shoot till I say so, and we’ll fight ’em as long as we live.” But the riot never did come down the road that day.
My grandfather Helm died when my father was just a boy, so I never knew him. But I was close to my mother’s father, Wheeler Wilson. He was a logger as a younger man, working for the Howe Lumber Company and Plantation. After they cut down that first-stand cypress forest after the turn of the century, there was nothing left except that rich delta soil, so many of the loggers became farmers. Wheeler kind of went back and forth between logging and farming for many years. He liked dirt farming, but he didn’t have any education except the kind you get from being pencil-whipped by the mortgage bank. Sometimes he’d prefer to stay in one of the lumber camps and work. There’d be a big corral of mules back in there, some tents, maybe a few small buildings. I’m talking about the country now, south of Elaine. The road finally stopped at a little place called Ferguson, where you had to turn around. It was the end of the line, Bubba! But Wheeler liked it in that timber camp. He’d trap and hunt on the side, file saws, make a pretty good living. Then in the spring, when they started turning that dirt over and the air was filled with it, he’d go back to farming.
Wheeler wasn’t afraid of anything and took nothing from nobody. One year when he was farming he got in a fight with a local man named Levy Doolittle over a crop. Mr. Doolittle had come to the farm to argue over a field of corn, and Wheeler told him, “There’s the damn crop. Go ahead and take it, or d’ye want me to cut ’n’ shuck it for ya too, ya damn fool!” Well, they took it a little farther than a cussfight. They done broke it down and started firing at each other. Luckily, no one got seriously hurt. Mr. Doolittle might have been grazed slightly; just a little birdshot from a distance, nothing meant to kill. Meanwhile, Mr. Doolittle was firing back at Grandpaw Wilson, who was standing in his doorway, and splinters and wood chips were flying. I guess it was something of a standoff, at least until Mr. Doolittle saw Grandmaw Agnes hand Wheeler a couple of double-ought buckshot cartridges, at which point Mr. Doolittle ran backward over the levee. They didn’t see him again until it was time to go to court, where they all ended up. The lawyers kept it up almost that whole winter. “Well, Mr. Wilson, you say you don’t recollect firing at Mr. Doolittle when he had his back toward you; just how do you explain this?” They held up some kind of jacket with the back shredded to ribbons by shotgun pellets. And Wheeler said, “Well, the only thing I can think of is, somebody hung it over a bush and shot the hell out of it.” Of course everyone hee-hawed, and the judge gaveled ’em all out of there. They’d wasted enough time with that bullshit anyway. So Wheeler told me to never get involved with a lawsuit. Even when you win, you lose.
He hated the Ku Klux Klan. I’m real proud of that. One day when he was farming he heard that some of them were trying to organize in the area. He put his shotgun in the back of his wagon and found a bunch of ’em on the porch of the general store. He went right up and said, “Excuse me, sirs, but have any of you all seen any of them goddamn Ku Kluxers?” No one said anything, so Grandpaw prompted ’em a little. “Those sorry sheet-wearin’ sons of bitches.” They still didn’t say a word. “Well, if you see any of them Ku Kluxers, you tell ’em Wheeler Wilson’s looking for ’em, and you can tell ’em where I live.”
Wheeler was a scrapper, damn sure was, and I like to think I might take after him a little. He came up just as pure as anyone came up in those parts and always noticed that when he wanted to get a loan for farming, he went through the same door as any black man, any yellow man, any kind of man. And he also noticed the banks would outpencil him every time, and he didn’t like it. Because he was white, he stood up to ’em more than once and ended up in court over it.
His attitude, and my mother’s, toward people is what gave me a big advantage in life. It saved me from having to wear that whole damn load of racism that a lot of people had to carry. My mom, God love her, she was one of those Bible people. She thought it was wrong to bother anybody, regardless of race, color, or religion. It just wasn’t a Christian thing to look down on anybody, and that’s what she taught us.
People called my daddy by his middle name, Diamond Helm. In 1932 he was a twenty-two year-old cotton farmer during the week and a musician and entertainer on the weekend. Diamond played guitar in a little band with some friends at house parties that charged two bits a head for dancing. They had white lightning in quart fruit jars—you only needed to inhale the vapors, and it’d make your hair hang down.
Diamond met Wheeler Wilson’s beautiful blond daughter Nell at one of these parties. They were married on June 9, 1933, at the Baptist church in Elaine. My sister Modena was born a year or so after that, and I came along in the spring of 1940. I was baptized Mark Lavon Helm.
Not long after that, Nell and Diamond moved to a tiny rural farming community called Midway, because our long dirt road intersected with the hard gravel road about midway between the village of Turkey Scratch and the town of Marvell, all about twenty miles west of Helena. My younger sister, Linda, was born two years after me, with my baby brother, Wheeler, waiting several years after that to make his appearance.
So that’s where we grew up, way back off the hard road, miles through the cotton fields, almost all the way to Big Creek. Don’t even think about electricity. We might have used a battery-powered radio until I was ten years old. Our nearest neighbors were Clyde and Arlena Cavette and their three girls, Mary, Tiny, and Jessie Mae. Their farm was just a couple of miles away, and our families shared two sets of intermarried relatives, so we were all raised together as closely as possible, and Mary is still my closest friend.
My earliest memories are of my mom. She was pretty, with blond, curly hair and piercing blue eyes. She was fun to be around, always joking and laughing. She was the disciplinarian of the family and kept an immaculate house. “Get out of my kitchen!” she’d yell, usually because she was working in there. She was a great cook, and that’s the way she raised us up. She felt the best you can really do for anybody is to set ’em down and feed ’em good. You may not be able to do anything else, but you’ll at least have ’em in a good holding pattern so life can go on. Nell (her real name was Emma) was basically a traditional farm housewife. She worked in the fields in spring and fall just like we all did. “Lavon, go bring me some stovewood and a bucket of water.” Mom didn’t believe in slapping me when I got into trouble, but she did have long fingernails, and if I really acted up, she’d drop her hand, fingers pointed down, onto the top of my head. “Don’t do that.” So I learned to cover my head when punishment was imminent, whereas other kids learned to cover their rears.
Her brother Herbert Wilson was a tractor mechanic who lived with his kids—my cousins—down in Crumrod, Arkansas, below Elaine. When I was a toddler we’d stay with them, and Uncle Herbert would clean out a tractor barn on Saturday nights and show movies. I remember those flickering images like it was yesterday: a little fat guy in a hat yelling at a skinnier guy in a suit and mustache. It must have been 1943. Years later I realized that’s where I first saw the comedy team of Abbott and Costello.
This was during the war, and cotton production was at its height. All day and night the freight trains carrying bales and cottonseed oil came rolling down the Cotton Belt, and I ran to see every freight that went by. My cousins would hold me down to teȧse me, and I’d fight ’em off just so I wouldn’t miss seeing that freight.
Back at home, we were a musical family. Mama sang in a clear alto voice, and Dad and I sang together as far back as I can remember. He liked all kinds of music and taught me “Sitting on Top of the World” when I was four years old. All us kids remember sitting on his lap in the evenings while he relaxed in his chair. He’d sing to us and affectionately rub our hands with his rough farmer’s fingers until we’d get calluses on our knuckles. My father knew so many songs, he was like a fountain of music. He was still teaching me songs when he passed away at age eighty-two in 1992. His mother, Grandmaw Dolly, was the bell cow of our family for a whole lot of years. She had remarried a gentleman named Luther Crawford and would organize family get-togethers at her house in West Helena or at Old Town Lake in Elaine. A beautiful old lady.
If I think back, I can still hear faint echoes of “Blue Moon of Kentucky” on our family radio. We’d have to buy a battery two and a half feet long and maybe eight inches thick; a big, heavy damn thing! I remember my dad pulling our tractor right up to the window of the house one night when the battery was down, and he plugged the radio into the tractor battery so we wouldn’t lose the Grand Ole Opry, The Shadow, The Creaking Door, Amos ’n’ Andy—those were the shows you couldn’t miss. Sky King. From about four-thirty in the afternoon on, I was so close to that radio that my memories are of the rest of the family behind me. That was our entertainment. My dad and Clyde Cavette would go into town and get two fifty-pound ice blocks that would fit in our iceboxes. You could chip off them for a week. They’d buy an extra fifty pounds of ice, and we’d get together that night and make freezers of ice cream. Mom and Arlena would bake up a couple of big cakes: one coconut, one pecan. On special occasions the two moms would collaborate on lemon icebox pies, their own invention. They’d beat two cans of Pet milk until it was whipped to foam, adding sugar and lemon juice until it congealed. Then they’d freeze it in the icebox. I loved this beyond belief. It was so sweet your mouth would pucker. After I was old enough to work, they’d have to make three pies: one for each family and one for Lavon. And I’d guard mine. Then we’d make the radio the main feature, maybe play cards, visit.
Going to music shows was high-level entertainment for our family. They’d set up tents at the edge of Marvell and have a stage, folding chairs, and refreshments. The first show I remember was Bill Monroe and His Blue Grass Boys on a summer evening in 1946, when I was six years old. Boy, this really tattooed my brain. I’ve never forgotten it: Bill had a real good five-piece band. They took that old hillbilly music, sped it up, and basically invented what is now known as bluegrass music: the bass in its place, the mandolin above it, the guitar tying the two together, and the violin on top, playing the long notes to make it sing. The banjo backed the whole thing up, answering everybody. We heard Bill Monroe regularly on the Grand Ole Opry, but here he was in the flesh. Lester Flatt and Earl Scruggs were in the band when I saw them.
That was the end of cowboys and Indians for me. When I got home I held the broom sideward and strutted past the barn, around the pump, and out to the watermelon patch, pretending to play the guitar. I was hooked.
After that I made it a point to soak up as much music as I could. I really liked Bill and the Carliles, a famous novelty group that performed funny songs that got into the country charts. My favorite was called “Knothole,” the chorus of which went: “Knothole, knothole, you oughta see what I saw through the old knothole.” Bill Carlile had his pretty wife playing in a band with stand-up bass and an electric guitar. Who else? Muddy Waters was extremely popular; he had the first real electric blues band and some hit records. We loved Lonzo and Oscar, Onie Wheeler, Homer and Jethro, Noble “Thin Man” Watts, whoever we could get on the radio from Memphis, Shreveport, or Nashville.
Whenever one of the big traveling shows came to town, the Helms would be there. Silas Green from New Orleans had a twelve-piece orchestra that we all liked, but everyone’s favorite was the F. S. Walcott Rabbits Foot Minstrels from, I believe, Biloxi, Mississippi. Posters and handbills announcing the shows would go up weeks in advance. They’d set up with the back of a big truck as their stage. They had a nine-piece house band down in front of the stage, a fast-talking master of ceremonies, a good-looking mulatto chorus line, blackface comedians, and singers. This was like another world for us kids.
I’d stare at the drummer all night because with those horns and that full rhythm section, the drums always looked like the best seat in the house. The sound of the cymbals and the snare drum popping was synonymous in my mind with Saturday night and good times. F. S. Walcott had a fantastic left-handed drummer, whom I’d study as closely as I could from my seat. This was a problem in those days of segregation, because the audience was split down the middle by an aisle. On the left were the black to light-skinned folks, while the light-skinned to people with red hair sat on the right. The left-handed drummer sat on my right, which put his tom-toms between me and him. So he’s working the snare drums in front of him, favoring the band, and as he’s getting ready to roll he’s coming right around toward me. I’m sitting two rows back at the most. I’m probably in the front row, in fact, studying what he’s doing for the whole two-hour show. I’m naturally right-handed, but people have always told me that I play left-handed. If I have any technique at all, that’s where it comes from.
Our favorite act was “The Lady with the Million Dollar Smile,” F. S. Walcott’s big featured singer, who’d come on in the third quarter of the show. She was an armful. She wore very bright dresses and had all her teeth filled with diamonds! She sang all those real get-down songs like “Shake a Hand.” Later on the master of ceremonies would announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, it’s been a great evening. We haven’t played a show this good since New Orleans! I sure wish every night could be this good. …
“Now it’s time for what we call the Midnight Ramble. I know a lot of you have to get up early and get to work, a lot of you have your families with you, and we want to thank all of you for coming and wish you well till next year. In the meantime, for those of you who can stay late and have a mind for more sophisticated entertainment …” He’d introduce one of the beautiful dancers from the four-girl chorus line and tell us how Caledonia would show us what made her famous down in Miami, Florida, where she hails from.
The Midnight Ramble cost another dollar, dollar and a half. You’d see what in those days was defined as a hootchy-kootchy show. The comedians would do some of their raunchier material, and people’d be holding their sides. The band would get into its louder rhumba-style things, and the dancers would come out in outfits that would be right in style today but were bare and outrageous back then. The master of ceremonies might get caught up in it and jig across the stage like a chicken or anything familiar from the barnyard, which always set the crowd off. That was the Midnight Ramble, so called because it usually ended at twelve o’clock.
Today, when folks ask me where rock and roll came from, I always think of our southern medicine shows and that wild Midnight Ramble. Chuck Berry’s duck walk, Elvis Presley’s rockabilly gyrations, Little Richard’s dancing on the piano, Jerry Lee Lewis’s antics, and Ronnie Hawkins’s camel walk could have come right off F. S. Walcott’s stage.
We got our supplies from A. B. Thompson’s grocery store in Turkey Scratch. Mr. Thompson was also our amateur country doctor; he’d bandage you up if you fell off your bicycle or stepped on a thorn. There was a one-room school at the Turkey Scratch church called the County Line School, with all the grades together. Our teacher, Miss Stella Harris, lived with the Thompsons during the school term. This is where I started my education.
Just getting to the bus stop on the hard road could be a problem when the fields were flooded. Sometimes Mary Cavette and I would be covered in mud from our trip by wagon and mule to that bus stop. Mary would be crying and I’d be laughing. Sometimes a tractor had to pull the bus through a mudhole. This went on for a couple of years until my father went before the school board and demanded a little panel truck so we and the Cavette sisters could be driven up to the hard road, where our neighbor Anna Lee Williams was usually waiting for us.
I loved school when I finally got to it. I met up with my right-hand man, Charles “Mutt” Cagle, whose family lived a stone’s throw from us. Mutt was my first pal, and we’ve buddied together ever since. I especially loved those school lunches, which changed every day, unusual for a little boy used to the routine of the farm. Things went pretty well for a couple of years until I hit the second grade. That’s when I got put off the school bus for fighting. I don’t remember the specifics, but I got into it with some older kids who went to the bigger school back in Marvell. After that I walked the few miles to school for a year or so. When that old yellow bus passed me on the road, I didn’t look at them, and they didn’t look at me. It was a standoff.
One of my most vivid memories of childhood is the sultry summer night in the late forties when they inoculated all the children for measles or diphtheria; whatever they were doing that night. Oh, God, that was a mess! The kids had gotten wind of it, and we were scared to death of those big glass syringes with the thick steel needles. They hung an old tarpaulin around the pump house. That was ugly. Us kids knew we were in trouble now. It was usually wide open, a nice place to sit and have your lunch. All of a sudden it was dusk, and the pump house was hidden by this tarpaulin lit by yellow kerosene lanterns inside. It was like a slaughterhouse, with farm folks holding their terrified children. I tried to hide out, but someone caught me and threw me in the wagon, and the mules pulled up to that pump house. It took a fight, but they eventually got us all.
Tornadoes were my other main childhood fear. We had two tornado seasons, spring and fall, but tornadoes could breed any time the warm breezes coming up the Mississippi Valley from the Gulf of Mexico collided with the cooler winds coming from the west over Oklahoma and Kansas. The storms would move east from there on a north/south axis with the Cotton Belt in the center—Tornado Alley. We all grew up with horror stories about brooms stuck into trees, straw end first, and baby chickens blown inside Coke bottles, and people and things simply disappearing forever. So we’d hurry to the storm house when the sky got dark and terribly still, with puffs of hot and cold winds alternating from different directions.
Tornado weather could turn a beautiful spring day into a hellish orange color that led all the way west to the heart of the approaching storm, dark blue and gray, rolling and churning eastward. Lightning bolts zigzagged across the whole mass with a sound like a hundred runaway trains. At night the sky turned blacker than Egypt, and lightning sent fiery bolts slamming to earth, setting big trees afire with a roar like a cannon going off. The lightning struck houses, barns, wire fences, mules—anything that didn’t have a lightning rod attached. We lost two coon-hunting dogs chained to a wire fence this way when lightning hit.
A tractor with its plow in the ground is a perfect lightning rod, and this proved fatal to my Big Creek fishing buddy Elmer Snyder. Elmer had more nerve than fear and thought he could squeeze out the last few rows of a cotton field before the rain started falling. He was on his last pass when the heavens opened and threw down a yellow bolt of electricity that hit midway between plow and tractor, melting the plow points, bending the frames, and blowing out the tires. God had called Elmer home.
The Helm family knew all about life in Tornado Alley. One summer night, after a big July Fourth family dinner, all hell broke loose. My older sister Modena was in my father’s arms, huddled with my mother, my aunt Geneva, and my cousin Eddie behind our kitchen door. There was leftover pecan pie and fried chicken on the table when the house started shaking. My father was about to tell everyone to run for the ditch when the whole house cartwheeled over and over, ending up in the cotton field as the wood stove, furniture, dishes, and people crashed around in a mess of broken glass and debris. When the house stopped rolling, they climbed out a window and walked over to the neighbors, using the light from the flickering lightning to find their way. The neighbors tried to get them cleaned up, and J.D. always remembered how he couldn’t get a comb through his hair for all the pecan pie stuck in it. Mom remembered that one little jar of mustard was smeared all over everyone in a thin film of goo.
After that we always had a storm house on our farm. A delta storm house was about six feet wide by eight feet long, dug into the ground to a depth of five feet. The roof was covered with planks and waterproofing, then mounded over with dirt and sown with Bermuda grass. Floorboards were laid above the seeping groundwater, and a vent out the top and a hand pump kept it dry and breathable. The door faced east, away from the weather. It was a dark, musty hole of a room, but with a tornado raging and a kerosene lantern hanging from the ceiling, it became a safe, bright, warm, and cozy place, friends and family crowded on low benches, the children asleep in the middle on piledup coats, protected from the wrath of the Almighty. The down side of these excursions to the storm house was walking home barefoot through the mud after the storm subsided. My mom was fussy about her clean home, and before I could slip between my cool cotton sheets, I’d have to pump a washpan full of water and wash my muddy feet. On bad nights in Tornado Alley, when we’d gone home before the storm had run its course, we’d be roused awake and led confused and stumbling back to the storm house. One night I had to wash my feet four times!
[Sound of a dinner bell over an old forties radio]:
“Clang! It’s King Biscuit Time, so pass the biscuits!”
It’s high noon on our farm, any day of the year, and the radio’s tuned to KFFA, 1250 AM, for our daily dose of the blues.
“King Biscuit Flour presents Sonny Boy Williamson and His King Biscuit Entertainers every day, Monday through Friday. Now friends, the King Biscuit Entertainers want to play your favorite song, so you can have a special request. Just write it down on a postcard or letter and mail it to King Biscuit Time, Post Office Box 409, Helena, Arkansas.”
Then Sonny Boy would play his harmonica and let it fly. He was the king of the delta blues in our area, a friend and disciple of the late Robert Johnson, though Sonny Boy was older. (His passport gave his birth date as 1909, but 1899 and 1894 have also been suggested.) Sonny Boy had traveled with Johnson during Robert’s brief delta stardom in the 1930s. They were regular performers on street corners and in the juke joints of Helena and Elaine, where Robert’s hit records like “Terraplane Blues” were well known, and passed through Marvell on the way to Helena. Robert lived there with a woman and her son.
After Robert Johnson was killed in 1938—allegedly poisoned by a jealous husband—Sonny Boy teamed up with Robert’s stepson, Robert Jr. Lockwood, and kept Johnson’s music alive. Around 1941 they began regular broadcasts on the Interstate Grocery Company’s King Biscuit Time show on KFFA in Helena. Sonny Boy blew harp and Robert Jr. played electric guitar. It was the first time many delta residents—and that might have included Muddy Waters—had ever heard the instrument. Sonny Boy’s singing became so popular in Arkansas and his native Mississippi that the company put out a new product: Sonny Boy Cornmeal (still sold in the South). For a while the program was called The Sonny Boy Cornmeal and King Biscuit Show.
“That was ‘West Memphis Blues,’” the announcer is saying. “Now, ladies and gentlemen, it’s a fact: To bake up delicious corn bread, you’ve got to have the freshest cornmeal. All good cooks know this. It’s a very simple job to turn out piping-hot corn bread dishes when you use famous Sonny Boy Meal. Just read the recipes on the back of any two-pound, five-pound, or ten-pound bag of Sonny Boy Meal and pick out the one you like; whether it’s corn muffins, corn sticks, hush puppies, or just plain skillet corn bread. So why not pick up a bag of Sonny Boy Meal and see all the delicious corn bread dishes you could bake up? And now, Sonny Boy is going to play ‘Crazy ’Bout You Baby.’”
“Thank you very much, my man,” Sonny Boy says. “This one is going out for Miz Pearly Mae and her husband. That’s down on Franklin Street, yassir!”
And they’d tear it up, raw country blues, while we sat listening to the radio at dinnertime.
Sometimes Sonny Boy and the band played in Marvell on Saturday afternoons. They’d set up on the loading dock behind the depot. It had a tin roof that created a good band-shell type of sound. Their old school bus had KING BISCUIT TIME written on it, and the logo with Sonny Boy sitting on a corncob, playing the harp. The first thing you noticed about Sonny Boy was his size: This was a big man. He’d lay out a tarpaulin on the ground and set his mike on it. Then he’d open the back door of the bus, and there’d be an upright piano. (Mutt Cagle and I would watch this carefully from a respectful distance, ever mindful of Sonny Boy’s notorious reputation as one tough son of a bitch.) His drummer, James “Peck” Curtis, would set up his cymbals, a big wooden snare, and a wooden bass drum hand-lettered KING BISCUIT TIME/KING BISCUIT ENTERTAINERS/J. P. CURTIS/KFFA/MONDAY THRU FRIDAY. Sonny Boy and the guitar player would set up some amplifiers and microphones, just plug in, and have a show and street dance. They knew all the big hits of the day, like “Eyesight to the Blind,” “Do It If You Want To,” and “Mighty Long Time.” They played what they knew their audience wanted to hear.
Sonny Boy in person was a powerful, extremely impressive man, in overalls and a straw hat. His huge mouth had calloused lips from years of playing the harp. When I first saw him, I noticed he sang into his harmonica. Sonny Boy’s voice passed through the metal harp and came out sharpened like a straight razor before it hit the microphone, giving the song an extra metallic jolt of energy. I remember the feel of that music vividly. It had a twang to it, a whip, punching straight ahead. Sonny Boy overpowered you with his amplified open-air country R&B.
When I was a little older, maybe ten or eleven, I’d make it my business to catch a ride on a farm truck into Helena whenever I could. First stop was Habib’s Cafe, where I’d buy three doughnuts for a dime. Then I’d run down Cherry Street to the KFFA studio, where they knew me as a young entertainer from 4-H Club shows. They’d let me sit in the corner and watch the King Biscuit boys do their show. Robert Jr. Lockwood might stop in, or Memphis Slim, or Robert Nighthawk, all from our area. I didn’t bother them, so I got to sit in that studio quite a few times. I’d try not to stare at Peck Curtis, but it was hard because he was a hell of a drummer. Between numbers, while the announcer was selling cornmeal, I’d watch Sonny Boy run the band in a raspy, low voice. “‘Stormy Monday’ in C,” he’d say. Peck or the guitar player couldn’t quite hear what he said, so Sonny Boy would whisper hoarsely, “C, goddamn it! I said play it in C, motherfucker!” (You just didn’t want to mess with Sonny Boy.) Or he’d call a tune but change the tempo at the last second as the commercial was ending: “‘Come Go With Me,’ in the same beat, same key—no, we’ll do it in eight; do an eight.” The band would scramble to adjust as the announcer turned the mike back over to Sonny Boy, who’d in turn pitch that evening’s show in nearby Clarksdale, Mississippi, before crashing into “Come Go With Me”—as a rhumba.
Boy, that was about as good as it got. I’d be buzzing all the way home to Turkey Scratch after one of those sessions. Sonny Boy Williamson—our local musical hero.
I was nine years old in 1949. That was the year I got my first guitar and started farming with my dad.
The land was our legacy. Most of my father’s generation spent a good part of their lives building levees just to keep the high water off us so we could farm. Most of the farm houses we lived in were raised up on stilts. My dad started me on the tractor that spring. I’d been riding with him for years, and now I got to drive it. We started in April, turned the fields over with the breaking plow, and then got on top of it again with a disk. Some years, if your soil demanded it, you went back and disked it over again into fine-tilled soil. Just before planting, you’d work the ground with a section harrow, a flat, metal-toothed rake that furrowed the ground, smoothed it, and broke up any clods of dirt. Clouds of birds whirled overhead and around the tractor, searching for worms and insects in the freshly plowed earth. Eventually you’d have big fields of fine delta soil in rows about four inches high.
Then we’d hitch a cotton planter to the tractor. It had a wheel that cut into the dirt and a spout that dropped the right amount of seed. The wheel rolled on an angle and pushed the dirt back on top of the cottonseed. You planted two rows at a time, and you needed to be done by the end of April, weather permitting, because the summer heat would follow you right into the shade. If your cotton was up by the middle of May, you wouldn’t have to be out in the field replanting on a tractor when it was 110 degrees.
We cultivated and chopped the cotton all summer. You went in with a hoe and thinned the crop from one solid row of plants to a lot of little mounds with maybe two stalks each, six to eight inches apart. Got the grass out of it, blocked out those extra plants; backbreaking work. We worked one row at a time with ten to fifteen choppers in a field.
You had to water those folks and keep ’em hydrated, or they’d all just drop. My first job on the farm was waterboy, but I wanted to hang with my dad and all that machinery, those tractors: Ford, John Deere, Allis-Chalmers. Dad would buy ’em through the bank. Each farmer had a connection with the John Deere distributor. By the time I was nine, I’d rode so many rounds I could cultivate on my own.
The cotton blooms into big yellow and purple blossoms in June. By the end of July you want to be “laid by.” That means all your cultivating is done. When the cotton loses its bloom, it’s left with a boll, which grows all summer and starts to pop open in September, bursting into four locks of snow-white cotton. Now it’s September, early October, and time to pick the cotton. The work was too much for the local people, so we’d hire Mexicans to help chop the cotton. There were always three or four big farmers who’d be farming 1,500, 2,000 acres of land—big sections of 640 acres each. They’d get together and hire a Texas contractor to bring up a load of workers, maybe sixty to eighty people. We’d go through one of the big farmers and subcontract a crew of laborers. They’d be with us for three or four weeks chopping and picking, then go pick cherries in Michigan. One of my first jobs off the farm was working at Vic Thompson’s grocery store in Marvell on Saturdays. I had to learn a little Spanish so I could help the Mexican customers with eggs, butter, and milk. They all wore their standard white shirts and big white hats, and a few of them were funny as hell. I liked ’em because they were just so interesting.
All of us—black people, white people, Mexicans—worked together in the fields. Our family worked side by side with the Tillmans, black neighbors who were important members of our little farm community. Our families were so close that Sam Tillman gave me a spanking when I needed it. My mother might cook dinner for as many as six or eight people working in the fields. If we had a truckload of Mexicans, Dad would round them up and take ’em to the grocery store or bring in bread, cheese, sandwich meat, some cold Pepsi-Colas, and maybe some apples. Then he’d gas up the tractor while we found some shade in the tree brakes. The older I got, the more I enjoyed those shade trees.
All this old-fashioned agriculture has vanished, of course. My youth in Arkansas was really the last of it. In the 1950s field hands were replaced by the big mechanical cotton pickers and choppers they came out with. That whole world of tenant farmers and sharecroppers, field hands and waterboys, is ancient history now. It exists only in the long memories of those of us who lived it.
For a kid like me, looking to have fun and raise a little hell on a cotton farm, resources were somewhat limited. You had to work with what you had. For my purposes, this proved to be my daddy’s AllisChalmers tractor. I’d take that old three-wheeler with the disk cutter on the back of it, put it in high gear, and had a hell of a lot of fun running tractor wheelies across a cotton field. That disk brought the tractor’s front end up in the air, so if you popped your clutch just right you could run for acres out there on two wheels.
High gear, wide open. You’d see that drainage ditch coming, so you picked up that disk nice and smooth. The side of the drainage ditch was the closest thing we had to a hill, and you’d hit it with that front end and force it in the air, bounce it up, run twenty yards on the back wheels. It couldn’t turn over because the disk was there.
I’d stand up during these stunts, just to make my dad crazy. I’d be coming around the corner, about to hit that turn row on two wheels, and I’d see J.D. jumping and waving by the gas tank, trying to get me to stop. Wide open: Hit the clutch, hit one of the brakes, and start skipping up to that gas tank where old J.D. is having a fit, and at the last moment flop that disk. Fooomp! All stop.
Bad things could happen too. You could hit that turn row and catch the axle of your disk on a fence post—there wasn’t much margin for errors of judgment—and find yourself heading into the thicket with your chains dragging so you couldn’t pick up the disk. If you weren’t careful, the chain could hook onto your back wheels, and you had an accident, Bubba. Throw that section harrow right on top of that tractor. In our area, a lot of people got hurt or killed outright in those days.
We were pretty fortunate in our section, because we had only one accident that I can remember. It was a late, wet spring, before I was old enough to work. The tractors had lights on them by then so they could work at night when it was cooler. One night they were refueling at the tank, a fire started, and one of the tractor drivers burned his leg pretty bad. There was a downside to farming, like anything. It was damn hard work. The tractors didn’t have umbrellas when I started, so we were out in the broiling sun. As soon as school let out, my dad made me get out there every day. I hit the fields in the morning and didn’t come in until late in the afternoon. There it is. A country childhood isn’t all running around barefoot and trips to Big Creek.
A few years later, when my dad was buying Allis-Chalmers equipment from the Helena dealership owned by my friend Eddie McCarty’s dad, I started to drive for Allis in tractor contests. Eddie’s dad would put out a WD for me, a big tractor circa 1945. Hand brakes, hand clutch, left-foot plunge; good tractor. The WD45 had a single wheel in front, and you’d turn that thing, hit your brake, and you could spin it right around. By the time I was a teenager, I was one of the tractor-driving champions of Arkansas.
Thank God you didn’t have to pick cotton until September. My folks insisted I get an education, so we had an understanding that as long as I stayed in school, my dad wouldn’t keep me home to work in the fields.
In September 1949 I started a new school. All the little country classrooms had been consolidated, so in fourth grade we were bused to Marvell to go to school out there with forty in a class. This was too scary, since I’d already been put off the bus for fighting with some of those kids. To us Marvell was the big town, and there were some real tough guys. Mutt Cagle and I had to stand back-to-back a couple of times and just fight ’em off. But there I met my lifelong friend Edward “Fireball” Carter, with whom I got into all sorts of trouble over the next nine years. You have to pity the poor souls who tried to teach us through high school, because if any two people didn’t know the answer, it was me and Ed.
Ask Mary Cavette if you don’t believe me.
She was a year ahead of us in school and remembers me well. Call her up; she lives in Tennessee.
“Oh, my word, was he a big tease,” she’ll say. “Lavon lived to pull jokes. He’d tease the girls until they’d cry. He was the worst! It was his whole life if he could pull a joke on you. He loved it. He’d get everyone involved, and everyone knew about it except you. Lavon was so good at it. He’d laugh and laugh, and you got so mad at him, but then he’d always come and hug you, and it would be all over.
“He was always in the back of the school bus, fidgeting and drumming on things, playing the Jew’s harp, or beating pencils on his books. This continued in the classroom, and he was always being reprimanded because he laughed all the time. He loved the sound of people laughing. It was infectious; Lavon would laugh, and the whole class would start. You couldn’t help it. He’d get tickled, and everybody’d get tickled.
“Well, Lavon quickly became the center of things. Wherever he was, that’s where the crowd would gather. Lavon may have been a big tease, but he was also very kind and would let you laugh at him too. I remember one May when we were kids, it rained all month. The water came up, and the Helms’ farm was isolated. Diamond got a boat, and they all stayed over at our house for a week. When the rain stopped, everything was clear and beautiful, and the flooded fields between our farms had become a temporary lake.
“Lavon wanted to take me and my sisters out in the boat, and Momma said, ‘You kids aren’t going out in that!’ But when no one was looking, Lavon got the boat and took his sister Linda and me and my two sisters for a cruise. My little sister had cerebral palsy, so just getting in the boat took a lot of doing. Lavon had a paddle, which he somehow lost in the middle of this huge lake. The wind started to ripple the blue water, so it looked very deep. My little sister started crying because she was scared. Lavon’s maybe ten years old and can’t swim real well. ‘Don’t worry, sister,’ he said. ‘I’m gonna swim for help.’ Lavon looked at the expanse of water and gulped. He rolled up his pants and said, ‘If anything happens to me, just tell Momma that I died tryin’ to save y’all.’
“Well, he jumped in, and the water came to his knees. He towed us home, and we’re still laughing about it.”
* * *
By the end of October we had picked our cotton, so we all had a little money. On Saturday afternoons we’d go into Marvell for the movie matinee at the Capitol Theater, next to the pool hall. We’d watch Zorro, Roy Rogers, Johnny Mack Brown, Lash La Rue, Hopalong Cassidy, whatever they had. I always sat in the front row and stayed through all the shows, until 11:00 P.M. (“That’s true,” Mary Cavette agrees. “Nell would have to go into the theater and get Lavon so we could go home.”)
Marvell had two drugstores, Anderson’s and Ford’s, and two department stores, Hirsch Company and Davidson’s. The Rawley Salve man parked between them. He had a little panel truck with RAWLEY’S SALVE painted on the side. It was an ointment you could put on cuts, bruises, anything. People bought a lot of his tonics, cure-alls that came in little bottles. For all we knew, it was mostly alcohol and nearly pure morphine. Back then it could’ve had damn near anything in it. It damn sure made you feel better, though, and he did a lot of business, I know that. He’d diagnose you and prescribe right on the street.
There was a darn good guitar player named Ralph DeJohnette, who played at the pool hall with Bubba Stewart on drums (the first time I ever saw a drummer use brushes) and some of the local boys. They were real good, and inspired me to ask my daddy for a guitar. He went over to Morris Gist’s music store in Helena, bought me an inexpensive Silvertone, and began to teach me a few chords and runs. It was my good fortune that Ralph DeJohnette happened to be our RFD mailman, because the Silvertone wouldn’t stay in tune. I used to meet Ralphie at the mailbox up on the hard road every day so he could retune my guitar. I’d hope it would stay in tune till Ralph came by next day with the mail.
That’s how I started out. I was nine years old when I knew I wasn’t meant to be a cotton farmer.
Like many farm families, we were dependent on the elements for our survival, and some years we had better luck than others.
I’ll never forget one summer night when I was maybe ten. The whole family was at a ball game I was playing in when someone came and told us our farmhouse was on fire. We all piled into our pickup truck. Diamond was driving fast, and the truck was so full I was sitting on Mary Cavette’s lap. We rounded that old turn in the road and saw our house had burned completely down. There was nothing left. I started to cry with relief when I saw my dog Cinder running around. I couldn’t help it. (“That was the only time I ever saw Lavon cry,” Mary remembers.) Anyway, Diamond moved us into Gotze’s store nearby, which was empty because the owners had moved away. We put in a kitchen and lived there until we got another house built up. This was the first of several trials by fire I’ve had in my life.
In 1950 I won first place in our school’s talent contest with my hambone act, slapping my hands against my legs and rapping out “Little Body Rinktum Ti-mee-oh.” This routine came right from home and the family musicales around the supper table at the end of the day. I had my little guitar, J.D. had a mandolin, and everyone sang. When I was about twelve I made my sister Linda a string bass out of a washtub, a broomstick, and some cord. Right from the start Linda could really hold a bass line, and I slapped my thighs, played harmonica and Jew’s harp, and we both sang old songs we’d learned at home and new songs from the hit parade. Soon we started winning junior-high contests and county-fair talent shows. After a while I started playing my guitar, and soon “Lavon & Linda,” as we billed ourselves, started getting attention on the local music circuit. Between 1952 and 1955 Linda and I probably entertained every Kiwanis Club, Farm Bureau, Lions Club, Rotary Club, Future Farmers of America, and 4-H Club meeting in Phillips County. She’d sing “Dance With Me Henry,” and I’d do “No Help Wanted” or something by Chuck Berry or Muddy Waters.
It was the Arkansas 4-H circuit that really helped us take off. Just about all the farm kids I knew were in the 4-H Club because it was the way country kids got to travel around. We’d raise livestock (I grew and shucked my own corn to feed to my projects) and take them to shows and fairs and get to meet other kids like ourselves. I’d usually bring a steer or a hog that I’d raised, and enter the tractor-driving contest and the talent show with my sister. By the time I was maybe thirteen we had our names painted on Linda’s tub, and we almost always won. One of the rewards from this was the chance to attend the 4-H summer camps in some of Arkansas’s cooler hill country.
Mary Cavette remembers us from those days, the early 1950s: “Lavon and Linda were unusual, and everyone loved them. They were blond, they were cute, and they were immaculate. Lavon was Jack Armstrong, the All-American Boy, with a Marvell Junior High letter sweater, slicked-down hair, all starched and ironed. Their momma, Nell, would use Faultless starch on Lavon’s blue jeans and hang them on the line till they could stand alone. Then she’d press ’em with a flat iron, and they stayed stiff. Linda was always smiling and would wear a crisp dress. They were exciting because Lavon had the natural ability to get everyone in the room going to his rhythm. It was like magic, that incredible talent. After ten seconds he had everyone clapping in time, and by the end of the song everyone’d be smiling and laughing. That was Lavon and Linda: personable, polite, good-looking, always well received.”
When I was fourteen my daddy took me back to Mr. Gist’s music store in Helena to get a real guitar. It was late on a Saturday afternoon, and the streets were packed with people in from the farms, migrants, and local people. Phillips County used to be the tenth most populous county in Arkansas, and you’d see all kinds of folks. When most people think of the Mississippi Delta, they think in terms of black and white, Anglo-Saxon and African-American. But it wasn’t completely like that. From its earliest days the area around Helena was more like a melting pot. Chinese families had grocery stores, Jewish families were in the cotton business, Lebanese people kept stores. Mexican farmhands meant you always heard Spanish. The delta was positively multicultural. Morris Gist’s music store was one of the places where all the various cultures met. Mr. Gist supplied instruments to several generations of musicians, maintained the jukeboxes in our area, and was then involved in distributing records cut by a hot young Memphis disc jockey on WDIA named B. B. King. Mr. Gist was also Sonny Boy Williamson’s landlord.
Daddy and I went up to the counter, greeted Mr. Gist, and I heard J.D. say, “Morris, we’d like to see the Martin guitar there for my boy Lavon.”
That was the day my credit history began. I got to take that nice little Martin home on a layaway plan. It was three-quarter size and all brown, and I just about slept with the thing. There was no stopping Lavon & Linda after that. When I was beginning high school we won the Phillips County Fair talent show, performing “Chattanooga Shoe Shine Boy.” Then we won at the Arkansas Livestock Exposition in Little Rock, which gave us a shot at the big Mid-South Fair in Memphis, where we somehow managed to win again.
I wish you could have heard that audience whoop it up that night in Memphis when the judges made their announcement. Words can’t express how proud my sister and I felt.
I think it was at one of these shows that we met the man who first put us on the road. I remember seeing J.D. talking to a well-dressed man, whom he introduced as Bob Evans. Of course I’d heard of him by reputation. Mr. Evans was a cotton farmer and buyer who had been a big-band singer with Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians. He was a sophisticated guy; probably the only person in Helena who had actually been to New York. Being an entertainer and knowledgeable in the music business, Bob would usually be the one to hire local talent like us to represent Arkansas at various events such as beauty pageants or political campaigns. (He eventually served as the director of the Arkansas Publicity and Parks Commission.)
“You kids don’t know how lucky you are,” Diamond told us after a show one night. “Mr. Evans thinks you’re great. He wants you to be part of the Bob Evans world!”
Bob managed a couple of novelty acts—people who pantomimed to records in crazy costumes, a pretty girl who could sing—and a circuit he booked in Arkansas and Louisiana. So Lavon & Linda found ourselves appearing at Miss Arkansas pageants and the Miss Louisiana contest, and campaigning for Democratic politicians Bob Evans supported. Here’s the scene: afternoon barbecue in West Helena on a Saturday afternoon in the fall of ’54. Linda and I do a couple of songs and get a real nice hand. Then Bob Evans announces that Orval Faubus, running for governor of Arkansas, is going to say a few words. After we’d done a few of these with Mr. Faubus, I began to listen to what he said. He was calling for hot lunches in the schools, raising taxes to support better education, better care for the handicapped and the retarded, and an end to crooked elections. Well, he won the election and did all those things he said he would. I can attest to those hot lunches, and the rest is history. You could look it up.
We made a little money (which is how I probably got the down payment for that Martin) and got a lot of experience playing shows all over our delta area.
Our early career coincided with the birth of rock and roll. We literally watched it happen in our part of the country. Traditionally, white people played country music, and black people played the blues. But in the thirties white musicians like my dad began to sing the blues with a twang, and it became something else with a different bump to it. That was the seed. Then in the late forties and early fifties Muddy Waters came out with the first electric R&B band and a string of R&B hits—“She Loves Me,” “I’m Your Hoochie Coochie Man,” “I Just Wanna Make Love to You,” “Got My Mojo Working”—that appealed to black and white people alike where we lived. Over at KFFA, the radio people noticed that telephone requests for Sonny Boy Williamson were as likely to come from the ladies at the white beauty parlor as from the black.
Cut to the chase: 1954 and seventy miles north in Memphis, where Sam Phillips, owner of Sun Records and Sun Studios, is looking for a white boy who can sing and move like a Negro. Within the space of two years, Elvis Presley, Carl Perkins, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and Jerry Lee Lewis had all recorded at Sun Studios, and a new era began. It was country music, all right, but it had that good black backbeat in there as well.
I’m pretty sure it was late 1954 when we first saw Elvis perform. Since he was from Memphis, we felt he was one of us. Everything stopped when his early record of “That’s All Right Mama” came over the radio. He’d appeared on the Louisiana Hayride radio show by then, and we’d all heard that audience screaming and shrieking when Elvis started to move to the rhythm with those suggestive, rubbery dances of his. Just the excitement of him coming to Helena was almost too much for some of our young ladies to bear.
I think Bob Evans took us to the Catholic Club in Helena to see Elvis’s show. It was just Elvis, Scotty Moore on guitar, and Bill Black on stand-up “doghouse” bass. No drums. There was a law that said you couldn’t have a drummer in a place where drinks were served. Well, it was just a madhouse. Johnny Cash and Carl Perkins and his band were also on the show, and they were great, but when the kids saw Elvis they went crazy. The girls were jumping up and down and squealing at Elvis in his pink jacket and jet-black hair, and he was wiggling and dancing during Scotty Moore’s electric guitar solos, played with thumb and finger on the bass strings while his other fingers picked the melody with lots of echo and reverb. It was fantastic, early rockabilly, always circling and real bouncy, with an almost jazz feel to it. The kids around us were screaming so loud it was hard to focus on what the musicians were doing; all I remember is they were rockin’ down. It was hot. It was crackin’. Bill Black was playing the downbeat on the pull of a bass string, then double-slapping the strings against the fretboard to hit the backbeat. At a break in the music he’d spin the bass and Elvis would kick out his leg as he delivered the punch line of “Good Rockin’ Tonight.” I remember Scotty’s grin as he helped Bill bring the song back in while my own feet were tapping the deck with a life of their own. Elvis was absolutely great. The only thing wrong was that it was over too early.
“Jesus,” Bob Evans remarked on the way out. “Those boys could get really big, you know that?”
Elvis came back a few months later, much changed. I think this must have been early 1955. We drove over to Marianna, Arkansas, where he was playing the high-school auditorium. Only this time Bill Black was playing an electric bass and D. J. Fontana was on drums. Boy, D.J. just about knocked the lights out. People wanted to dance, but they were sort of chained to their chairs, so they jumped up, rocked a few beats, sat back down, and stamped their feet.
This was about the best band I’d heard up to that time. D. J. Fontana planted those drums down and started stacking verses against one another with his fills, building up to the solos, riding the solos in and riding them out again. He had incredible technique and fast hands, so he could deploy those Buddy Rich press rolls whenever he wanted to. He played like a big-band drummer—full throttle. Now Elvis had a real foundation, some architecture, and he made the most of it. D.J. set Elvis free.
At the same time, that electric bass changed the whole rhythm section. Those two electric instruments really nailed that music down. Up till then, when Scotty wanted to bend his guitar strings to make them cry, the whole bottom fell out of the music. But with that electric bass carrying the load, Scotty could reach up and fill the gap during the solos. The effect was devastating, the birth of rock and roll. The other reason the electric bass caught on pretty quickly was that you didn’t have to tie that doghouse bass to the top of the Cadillac anymore. And suddenly your bass player wasn’t a cripple from trying to play that damn stand-up!
Later in 1955 Elvis left Sun Records to sign with RCA. Our opportunities to see him locally diminished as his growing fame took him farther afield. But there was no shortage of great bands to fill the gap. On any weekend you might have your pick of Jerry Lee’s band, Billy Riley, or our own Phillips County hero Harold Jenkins, before he was known under his stage name: Conway Twitty.
I met him for the first time in 1956 when I ran a grocery store in Midway for a friend named Mary Phipps, who became ill and let me manage the place while she recuperated. At the time, the Interstate Grocery Company was helping us renovate the store with a new counter and register, and after I painted the interior they hired our best local band, Harold Jenkins and the Rock Housers, to play for our grand opening. We set up microphones and speakers on the store’s front porch, and everyone in our area came by. Lavon & Linda opened with a couple of our songs. Then the Rock Housers played some rockabilly. They had a terrific guitar player, Jimmy Ray Paulman, whom everyone called Luke. Soon people were dancing, and our grand opening was judged a big success.
For me the best part came afterward, when I went over to thank the musicians for coming. “Son, I like what you’re doing,” Mr. Jenkins said, referring to our little opening number. “Why don’t you come by some night and sit in with us for a tune?”
I told him he could count on it.
Diamond was more than supportive of Lavon & Linda’s career, but as we got a little older Momma was less and less sure about the propriety of her younger daughter appearing in public with her bare leg hitched onto an upside-down washtub. One night after we’d performed, Momma told me, “Lavon, honey, your little sister is retiring from show business.” When my mother had a certain tone in her voice, you just didn’t argue with her, and I knew I was on my own.
But I didn’t mind that much, because I had a secret weapon: Thurlow Brown.
Thurlow was a cotton farmer and guitar player from down near Elaine. He was maybe ten, twelve years older than me. Thurlow was short of stature but so tough he could whip any man around. And take my word for it: He was the best electric-guitar player we had, an incredible musician. Whistle a tune to Thurlow, and he’d play it back in harmonies for you. Play it once, and he’d know it by heart forever. He was the first guitarist I knew who could run up the neck and hit all those bar chords and augmented and diminished chords. He could have been famous, but he didn’t like leaving his farm, so he never broke out of our area. But he backed up me and Linda on some of our contest victories, and by the time our mom made Linda quit, I was just about ready to see if Thurlow might form a little rock and roll band with me.
I went to see Thurlow about this possibility sometime in 1957, when I was a junior. My friend Fireball Carter and I drove down to see him, listening to “Great Balls of Fire” and Bo Diddley rap out the words to “Who Do You Love” on the car radio.
I drummed on the steering wheel to that unbelievable Bo Diddley jungle beat as we tried to find Thurlow’s hangout, Virgil’s Store, set behind a couple of levees in the southern part of the county. Virgil’s was a place where the regular rules just didn’t apply. You could always find a game of chance or ladies of the night if you wanted, and if moonshine interested you, step right up.
We got to Virgil’s, and Thurlow Brown was there, all right. He had his guitar plugged in, and he was playing along with the jukebox, one of his favorite pastimes. I had my guitar, and I asked him about Chuck Berry’s “School Days,” a current hit that I liked a lot. Thurlow played that intro lick perfectly; he had that augmented chord just from hearing it once or twice on the radio. I came in with the first line, and he played the answer line on his old Fender Broadcaster—solid body, no levers, no gears; just tone and volume knobs and that beautiful sound.
We got together with our two guitars, a kid from Marvell named Jennings Strother, who had a stand-up bass with a pickup and an amplifier, and a drummer we found at the high school. We called ourselves the Jungle Bush Beaters and proceeded to raise a little hell around Marvell and environs. It wasn’t much, but we played loud and had a hell of a lot of energy.
Thurlow was different from you and me. He was the only person I knew in Arkansas who owned a monkey. He’d ordered it by mail, and it arrived one day down at the Missouri Pacific Railroad depot on Missouri Street in Helena. Thurlow liked to bring the monkey over to the pool hall in Marvell so they could drink beer together. After two or three, one or both of ’em might get mad, and they’d have a fistfight. That should give you an idea what Thurlow was like. Another time he was called to the depot because he’d ordered a huge South American python, and it had arrived in a broken box. No one wanted to even touch that crate. Thurlow collected his snake and became quite close to it. He liked to visit the taverns with the snake wrapped around him, under his jacket, and introduce people to it. Surprised a lot of folks with his reptile, Thurlow did.
The Jungle Bush Beaters were a fairly typical high-school band, except that Thurlow could really play. We played Bo Diddley and Chuck Berry songs wherever we could, but didn’t work that much because you were supposed to be eighteen to play local joints like the Delta Supper Club in West Helena, or the Rebel Club in Osceola, or the Silver Moon in Newport, Arkansas.
In 1957 the rock and roll craze was at its explosive peak. In January we all watched Elvis sing “Don’t Be Cruel” on The Ed Sullivan Show. They let him be seen only from the waist up, but it changed America anyway. Elvis was tame compared to Little Richard or Jerry Lee Lewis, who had come up to Memphis from Louisiana as a piano player and emerged a rock and roll star. I’ll never forget the first time I heard that snare drum on “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” Jerry Lee’s drummer, Jimmy Van Eaton, had taped a cigar box to the top of the snare; he carried the backbeat and played his fills right on the cigar box without any metallic overring. That was Memphis tuning. If you tuned down that snare, you could play it loud without sounding like someone dropping a damn stove. It sounded so good, it made me want to start playing drums.
I was riding in a truck with Mutt Cagle and Fireball Carter the first time I heard Little Richard’s “Keep a Knockin’” on the radio. I almost drove off the road to Turkey Scratch because I was beating on the steering wheel so hard. That rhythm knocked me flat, and still does. The Jungle Bush Beaters were major Little Richard fans, and we had to learn all his hits—“Tutti-Frutti,” “Long Tall Sally,” “Rip It Up,” “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” “Ready Teddy,” “Jenny, Jenny,” “Lucille,” “Slippin’ and Slidin’”—because we got so many requests for them.
The most serious and conscientious member of my boyhood gang was Fireball. Tall and lanky, very strong, his task throughout high school was to try keeping me and Mutt out of trouble; not easy because my attitude at the time was: The goofier and funnier it is, the happier everybody’ll be. At all costs, let’s laugh. At all costs. If we’d driven up to Memphis to hear some music on Beale Street, Fireball would be the one to say that we’d better hit the road or we’d miss the last ferry across the river to Helena and be stranded in Mississippi with the mosquitoes all night. Sensible.
Ed came by his nickname via the gridiron. We’d been playing football together since junior high, when there weren’t enough cleats to go around, and they let little slotbacks like me run barefoot. In high school we played under the lights, usually in front of two whole towns. The entire population would turn out, seven or eight thousand people at a night game. The Marvell Mustangs’ bitter rivals included Elaine, Barton, the West Helena B-team, and Marianna, which had a Chinese quarterback named Fong who nearly bit off my thumb in a game one time.
One night we were playing the Hughes High Blue Devils. They had a hell of a good team, but we held ’em off pretty good. When it came time for them to punt, Ed Carter broke up the middle, and the punter kicked the ball right into Ed’s head. This knocked Ed down, but we recovered the ball and maybe even scored. Their punter, that old boy, said to Ed, “You’re gonna get your damn head kicked off!”
We were on this kid like dogs on meat.
“What the fuck do yew care? Do your goddamn job and shut your mouth! Mind your own fuckin’ business!”
Then we had a fistfight with ’em.
After the game Coach Leon Sharpe looked at Ed Carter in the locker room and said, “Son, you were a fireball out there today. Never seen anything like it in my life.”
That’s how Fireball got his name. Everybody forgot his real name. We’d cut school to meet willing young ladies down on the levee, and we’d make Ed come with us. He’d be off with his girl, kissing behind a bush, and we’d hear her yell, “Fireball! Where the hell do you think you’re goin’ with that hand of yours?” We be laughing so hard we couldn’t stop.
We had a nice school and some good teachers in Marvell, but my mind was usually elsewhere. I wanted to play music, and that’s it. It didn’t matter whether I was in class or driving a stinking tractor in one-hundred-degree heat after school let out in May. I knew that playing for people was a lot healthier than inhaling gasoline fumes to get high after a brutal day in the sun.
In the dark of night I’d lie in my bed and listen to the train whistles in the distance. I wanted—I needed—to go. To me the prettiest sight in the world was a ’57 Cadillac rolling down the road with a doghouse bass tied to the top. That looked like the car I wanted to be in.
Soon I’d get my chance. My day would come.