BUTTERFLY AND DISHRAG
(1955–67)
Alec saw I wanted to play music, and wanted to help. He was a great singer and always sang while he worked, but could play no instrument. On Saturday mornings, when he came to wash my father’s company car and get paid for the week, he brought me piano teachers.
Butterfly was the first guy. He was the stepson of the man who owned the George Washington Broad Street Cafe, where Alec hung out and Frankie Lane tipped a cop car over by hand. Butterfly had just gotten off the penal farm; his heavily processed hair was shaved clean an inch above his ears. Alec explained he had to pay off the barber to save the top of his rooster-tail hairdo. I watched as his huge hands danced over my mother’s piano keys. He played “Three O’clock in the Morning,” one of Alec’s favorites, and tried to show me the “blues scale,” with the flat third and seventh. I didn’t get it.
The second teacher Alec brought me was better. Alec called him “Piano Red,” which seemed to make him mad. He was not Piano Red. I knew that and tried to look sympathetic. He was older, hunched over, and wore an old gray overcoat and snap brim. He was obviously drunk. He sat at the piano and coughed deep in his chest.
“What chew wants to hear, boss?” he grumbled.
I asked if he knew “Come On Down to My House,” the song I had heard the Jug Band play in Whiskey Chute.
He laughed and said, “How does you know that song? Man, that song’s older than yo’ Daddy.” He played through the melody once and spoke to me solemnly. “I’m gonna show you somethin’. Pay attention to this,” he said. “Everything in music is made up out of codes….” I thought, “Codes…. Secret codes!!! Like Captain Midnight. No wonder I couldn’t understand it. It’s in codes!! Why didn’t my mother tell me that??!!”
“This is how you makes a code. You take one note, any note. Then you goes three up and four down, just like in poker. Three up and four down and you gots a code.”
Of course he meant chord. It works anywhere on the piano. Not steps and half steps like the music teacher told me, but keys on the keyboard. Three notes up and four notes down and you have a major triad, tonic root note on the bottom, first inversion. Say you start on an E note, the pattern leads you to notes C, E, and G which make a C major chord. Using the new “code” I could teach myself major triads up and down the piano. That was what I needed to know. A triad on top and an octave on the bottom could open into a boogie-woogie pattern in the blues scale. Apply to that appropriate rhythm and syncopation, and you are playing rock ’n’ roll piano, pal!
So I learned the music’s secret from the Phantom, unknown to me by any other name until a rainy afternoon years later. I was hanging out in Melody Music store on Poplar Avenue by the viaduct when the Phantom stepped out of the storm.
He took off ragged work gloves, shoved them in his overcoat pocket, and ran his hands over one of the keyboards in the showroom floor stock. I was afraid the owner would run him off. He played “Sophisticated Lady” without sitting down. He saw me watching and stopped. He looked up. “Come on down to my house …” he rumbled in recognition.
“Thanks for what you showed me,” I said, trying to think of something better to say.
He shrugged, waved his hand goodbye, and shuffled back into the rain. Ferguson, the old black guy who did the maintenance on band instruments back in the workshop, came over to me and said, “Man, how does you know that ol’ man? That was Dishrag. He used to be somebody. That was Dishrag.”