ALL UP IN SONNY’S BED
(1962)
Checking out!
Making tracks
Waco, you’re gonna be something
In my rear view mirror
Goin’ home
Cross Ol’ Man River one more time
And be where
I should have stayed
Imagine my surprise when my GPA and various probations converged and I could not transfer to Memphis State, sending me back Waco, into the beast’s mouth, just barely getting my ass in summer school with one last chance. No room at the Inn dormitory, which was fine with me. I had my car and I found a two-room shack in a multiracial slum on the border area between school and city. A sign over the front door read SIN INN. I could only hope. I signed up for a medium load first semester: journalism and logic.
This was the first time I had lived alone. The little shack was surrounded by bushes and a driveway, making it feel isolated. The main room was all windows on three sides. I hung bedsheets over them. There was no AC but a “swamp fan” that blew hot air over tap water. It helped at night and made the air wet.
I picked up afternoon gigs with Dickerman (the jazz player from Where’s Charley?), Louie, the drummer who showed me the pickup licks at dress rehearsal, and Ike, a Mexican trumpet player. Some gigs were on James Connally Air Force Base; others were at a roadhouse in Elm Mott. I saw the worst barroom fight I ever witnessed at that roadhouse. Two Mexican couples were dressed up like characters in the dance scene from West Side Story; he-men in peg-legged zoot suits, women in crinoline petticoats and teased lacquered hair in French rolls. They drank, danced, and had a high time until something went wrong. The two women scratched, bit, and pulled each other’s hair. Then the straight razors came out. Blood everywhere. Somebody screamed the cops were coming. The two couples fled together. The dance floor was crimson with blood.
I was faking it on guitar with the three or four jazz chords I learned from Ricky. If I didn’t know the song, I moved my hands with the volume down on my guitar. The gigs were fun but it wasn’t my thing.
I embraced a solitary lifestyle of retrospective thinking, and started keeping a journal of random dark thoughts. Maybe it was the logic class’s effect. I continued to correspond with Barbara, writing long lonesome letters that helped fill the hours after midnight. I invited her to visit me in my desert island domain.
Sunday night I had to study for a big logic test, essentially a midterm, which in the shortened summer school semester was a big part of the final grade. I listened to Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar at sundown and settled down to work. It was too hot. No rain for weeks. The heat had built up like a pressure cooker. The swamp fan blew the dry heat over the stagnant tap water in the trough below the spinning blades. Next day I blew the logic exam.
The rest of the summer was hot and uneventful except for one Saturday afternoon. Tex Campbell wrote he had something important for me to hear. He wouldn’t be more specific, only issuing an invitation. I drove to Austin Saturday morning, not knowing what to expect. Tex had turned me on to some very hip stuff, not just music but literature as well. He was an English literature major and smart as a fox. He had a wife and son from high school, and was strictly blue-collar.
With tears in my eyes I sat and listened to the voice coming out of Floyd “Tex” Campbell’s record player. There it was. So obvious.
The answer:
Voice like a twisted
Rambling Jack
Language and words like
Nothing else
Leaking Ferlinghetti and Ezra Pound
Equal parts Charlie, Mingus, and Monk
I could hear Blind
Willie, Tex Ritter, Phil Harris, and Almeda Riddle.
A child’s voice and the croaking of an ancient wise man
With glowing
Yellow eyes
It was all there.
The voice, guitar, and harmonica.
Flat in your face
Like seeing Elvis
At Ellis Auditorium
Or Will Shade
In Whiskey “Shoot.”
There were old songs from the dawn of time
Talking blues
The ghost of Woody Guthrie
Alive in a new world
New songs he wrote himself sounded straight out of the Ozarks
Songs sung in box cars and barrooms
By nameless gypsy hoboes
In the midst of this music, what does he sing from its obscurity?
“I got one kind favor to ask of you
Won’t you see that my grave is kept
Clean?”
I could feel the cold wind blowing
Across the Texas badlands
And see the nameless grave in the frozen ground.
Drawn there like the pilgrims
That put the ridiculous brooms
In the graveyard pitcher
What drew us there?
The crazy white boys
A story, a legend, an out of focus
Photograph in a text book
Yet there we were
In not choosing,
I was drawn
To the path
I was once again
On the road
I had followed it here
I would follow it home
The music had been all around me
Though I had failed to consciously see it
I had soaked it up
The Sam Charters book
Where I had discovered
Blind Lemon
Was half about Memphis
What was I missing??
Who else was playing down
In the alley?
Or on the
West Memphis radio station?
Where was Will Shade?
Furry Lewis?
Thomas Pinkston, for God’s sake?
It was all in the magic voice on the miraculous record
That Tex played for me that Austin afternoon.
On the back of the record jacket
Bob Dylan
Snarled into the microphone like Elvis or Hank
A look of resolute defiance, lip curled in contempt
This kid had the angel face of the corn belt heartland
The snap bill cap
The sheep herders’ jacket
The turtleneck
The total package.
This was the missing piece of the puzzle—
Pointing the way to the future—
To the rest of my life.