The more I learned about the great jazz siblings Phineas and Calvin Newborn (and about their bandleader father, Phineas Sr.), the more I realized what a force their mother was. Both Phineases were dead—her husband and her son—and I realized Mama Rose (as everyone called her) was living quietly in the South Memphis house that Phineas Jr. bought her in 1956. I knew she had stories, so I got her number from her surviving son, Calvin. She invited me by.
I wrote this piece but never submitted it for publication. It’s hard enough to find a magazine interested in obscure musicians; an article about the mother of obscure musicians? I couldn’t face the odds. I wrote it for myself, then tucked it away. I paid her an honorarium for her time, which was the honor I cared about, and the one she did too, since publicity couldn’t help with her heating bill.
Previously unpublished, 1993
The sun came up on the morning of May 26, 1989, and when, around six A.M., it illuminated the sagging front porch of 588 East Alston Avenue in a crumbling South Memphis neighborhood, it shone like the spotlight that had always eluded Phineas Newborn Jr., seated in a chair outdoors and dead. Junior—as he was known to friends and family—had that night, as most recent nights, haunted the doorways of nearby Beale Street, then returned to the house he’d purchased for his parents more than three decades earlier, when his musical star was ascending. That was before he’d recorded his first album and when word of his awesome talent was being spread by awestruck musicians like Count Basie and Lionel Hampton. This night, he returned to his mother’s upright piano and then retired to a porch chair in the pleasant Memphis dawn, where his soul departed from his fifty-seven-year-old body.
A few nights before his brother died, Calvin Newborn was awakened during the wee hours to hear Junior sitting at the piano. “I lay there and tried to figure out what he was playing and how he got that sound,” Calvin recalls. “It was so eerie because it sounded like single notes, but he was playing fourths. The notes were so together it took me a long time to figure out what he was playing. He just played it once, that was all he played.
“Later, my mother said he was playing ‘Going Home,’ and I knew he was sending a message. He knew he was going.”
“It’s some rough sides to these mountains, I’m telling you,” says Mama Rose Newborn, wife of the late Phineas Newborn Sr., mother of Junior and Calvin. “Yeah, man, I’ve come up some rough sides of the mountain, but I’m a happy old lady.” Mama Rose is a petite woman, diminutive in body but gigantic in spirit. She is not a bitter woman, though she mourns the loss of her husband and her firstborn son—and each before their time. Phineas Sr.’s orchestra was, beginning in the 1940s, one of the most influential in Memphis. Among the artists who went through his band were saxophonist Hank Crawford, who became band director for Ray Charles during both “What’d I Say” and Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music; trumpeter Bowlegs Miller, whose own band became a starting point for many Memphis soul greats (including the Hi Rhythm Section, who would eventually be the core of Al Green’s hits); Robert “Honeymoon” Garner, a stalwart Memphis jazz organist; and Herman Green, who played behind a young B. B. King and alongside John Coltrane. About his father, Calvin said, “He made Elvis dance and elephants dance. If you had a heart, he’d make you dance.”
Junior, who was fluent on tenor sax, trumpet, and vibes, in addition to the piano, began touring at the age of sixteen. As a teenager, he joined Lionel Hampton’s band. At twenty-five he made his album debut with Atlantic Records and that same year he stole the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival; he collaborated with Charles Mingus on the soundtrack to the 1959 John Cassavetes film Shadows. Before he was thirty, he suffered his first nervous breakdown, and thereafter, mental hospitals became as routine in his life as recording studios.
Phineas Newborn Jr., circa 1956. (Courtesy of Preservation and Special Collections Department, University Libraries, University of Memphis)
Mama Rose, as she is known even to people whom she’s never met, is seated in the living room of the small Alston Avenue home. There are handkerchiefs drying over the gas heaters, a couple crumpled one-dollar bills stuffed for all the world to see into the stockings that she wears. She has on a housedress and a colorful African hat with vertical stripes. “There is so much you don’t know,” she says, referring both to people in general and to me specifically, “could make another world.”
The front room to Mama Rose Newborn’s home is filled with posters, awards, citations, photographs, album jackets, a piano, and other memorabilia of her husband’s and sons’ careers. This assemblage is for herself, because she is proud. “The public don’t recognize them like they should,” she says, “but I don’t worry about it. I would like for them to, but I know how the trends and things are.” She reaches to a table beside her chair and pulls down a large Bible, turns to the inside cover, and reads aloud the following notation, one among many: “Bill Monroe, fifty years ago got a prize on Grand Ole Opry. August 1991.” Then she adds, “They still honor him. Things like that is something that a lot of people forget. People ain’t thinking about what was. Thinking about what is.”
Calvin Newborn has a gig in Memphis. He is seated on a stool so near the front door of the soul food restaurant that when customers walk in for dinner, the door almost bangs his guitar. The restaurant seats about twenty-five people. Calvin’s accompaniment is a boom box. A karaoke version of “Feelings” comes on and Calvin shuts his eyes and plays mellifluous jazz guitar, singing the words so softly that not everybody in the small place can hear. He gives the song his all, much like he will at a gig in Chicago a few months later, where he will command a nice fee and draw a sold out crowd, and much like he will every night for a year when he’s playing show tunes on a tour of Europe in the orchestra of a Broadway musical.
Unlike his brother, Calvin was not a prodigy. He knows the ticking of years that precedes proficiency, a knowledge that helped him falter not at all in his more recent pursuits of painting and writing. His book of his family’s history, As Quiet as It’s Kept!, includes some reproductions of his paintings. He also recorded some of his finest guitar work ever on what will surely be a hard-to-find and underappreciated CD by Herman Green, Who Is Herman Green? His Music, Worthy of Note.
Calvin, who has lived all around the world but keeps a room at his mother’s house, now also has a studio apartment of his own in public housing at the end of Beale Street. He can be seen on some evenings darkening the same doors his father and brother passed through decades ago, occasionally playing on the bandstands where their legends still cast a shadow. Some of the club owners know who he is, but many of the bouncers see him as part of the rabble they’re paid to keep out. One young band, FreeWorld, often honors him with a spot on the stage next to his old friend Herman Green. Calvin’s legend is widely known, but he himself almost always requires an introduction.
“My husband and I came to Memphis with nothing but traveling trunks,” says Mama Rose. “Up from Whiteville, Tennessee, where we were born, and we got a room in Orange Mound [Memphis’s first suburban development built for African Americans]. We were poor people, and my husband had a bike. The trolleys was running on Southern Avenue, and he would take that bike up there and catch that streetcar, let it pull that bike all the way to State Normal [now the University of Memphis]. My husband was the cook’s helper there; he was a good cook. And on his way back, he’d do the same thing. Later we moved from Orange Mound because he wanted to get uptown, close to the music.”
Calvin Newborn at home, 2002. (Courtesy of Chris Floyd)
Memphis was a place where, with a little ingenuity, small means could be grafted onto bigger ideas. Each family had been musical, the Murphys—Mama Rose’s side—in the small farming community of Whiteville, fifty miles northeast of Memphis. And near Jackson, Tennessee, Phineas Sr.—he pronounced it with a long i and spelled it Finas on his bandstand and bus—and his brothers played in the high school band and at church, where they also sang.
The legacy began at least one generation prior, with Mama Rose’s father playing guitar in the Church of God in Christ. With a long cord between his guitar and amp, he could wander all over the room. “Calvin’s grandaddy would play gospel songs in church,” says Mama Rose. “He didn’t play this other music. He had the guitar, and you know how sanctified folks do, he’d be jumping up, hollering ‘Glory!’ and ‘Hallelujah!’
“That’s where Calvin got his movements from. He never seen him, because their grandaddy passed away a long time ago. But that’s why Calvin’s got to move. It was just in ’em both to move! And it was in their daddy and me too. I used to dance and play the piano, played organ at church. Just music lovers.”
Just music lovers, loose in Beale Street heaven: block after block of clubs, filled at night with big bands and small combos, a mix of local musicians and touring acts like the Brown Skin Models, which was a medicine show with long legs as the cure-all.
Beale Street was a place for jam sessions, for cutting heads. If you thought you could do better than someone on stage, then the bandleader, the band, everyone in the audience wanted to know. Because no one was settling for second best. Finas’s route into the coterie of players—and ultimately to the superior position of bandleader—began by challenging another drummer to let him beat the skins. He also worked as a roadie for the bigger shows that played the grand Malco Theatre at the corner of Beale and Main (now the Orpheum). Finas was a man who wanted to immerse himself in music.
“We’d keep up with who was coming to town and we would come uptown. He had a cousin lived up here; we would stay overnight, and, honey, Count Basie, Jimmie Lunceford, all them old musicians, my husband would help take out their instruments and get us some passes. He played drums with lots of ’em. I met ’em all.
“We didn’t have no babysitter, we didn’t have money hardly to pay the rent. We would have to carry Junior with us. I’d stay in the ladies’ room until time for the music to start because I nursed by breast and didn’t have no Pampers. When I’d get him dry, their daddy would take him and put him over behind the drums. He’d have to play or keep up some music, or else Junior would start to cry. Count [Basie] looked at Junior and said, ‘Hey bright eyes!’ ”
Calvin was born a year behind Junior, and as their father got deeper into music, the kids kept up. They never knew otherwise. Finas turned down touring offers from Jimmie Lunceford and Lionel Hampton, opting instead to help raise his family. Calvin remembers, “I was about five years old and Junior was six, and we walked from Orange Mound to Beale Street for the first time. We had heard about the Midnight Rambles from my dad, he used to play those shows. So we followed the railroad tracks all the way to Beale Street, and we went in the theater and saw the shoot-’em-ups, cartoons, and all that stuff until midnight when the lights came on and everybody was supposed to leave. We ducked down under the seats, and when the lights went back out and the stage show started, two heads popped up with eyes big as teacups. But we saw the stage show, and it was exciting. That was the beginning. After that I knew that I was supposed to be in show business.” Their proximity to Satan’s music was confirmed when they were walking home from Beale and Calvin’s foot got caught in a root across the path; he stumbled and hollered to his brother, “Help me, the devil’s got my leg!”
Calvin and Junior were different kinds of players, different kinds of people. Calvin identifies himself as an extrovert and Junior an introvert. At the age of four, Calvin suffered a severe burn on his back, resulting in six months on his stomach beneath an infrared lamp. “The doctor told my mother I wasn’t going to be as strong as other boys my age, but I refused to be weak. I played with the biggest boys, I did the dangerous things, I refused to be pampered. My brother was just the opposite. He practiced more or less eight hours a day. I concentrated on being more of a showman, and he concentrated on playing.”
“Calvin would throw papers, shine shoes, chop cotton,” Mama Rose remembers. “Junior would be sitting up on that piano, ding dong bong bong bing! And Calvin would come home, Junior still practicing, not loud, just practicing. He’d say, ‘You need to come and go with us. Essie Mae—’ Calvin named the girls ‘—and all them were on the bus and we had our sodies and ice and wet our handkerchiefs and put them on our heads. You should come go, man, we’ll have a lot of fun.’ Junior would say, ‘No, I’ll take your word.’ Bing bong ding dong ding. So Junior didn’t do nothing but play music. He went into the army and his job was to get that trumpet and wake the soldiers. And after that, he’d go to the marching band. After that, to the officer’s club. So Junior never done no kinda work but play music.”
The extent to which this applies to Junior is illustrated by an anecdote told by his acquaintance, Memphis musician and producer Jim Dickinson. “One of Phineas’s wives wanted him to pick up the laundry that was on the bed, get it out of the way. He said, ‘My name is Phineas Newborn, piano player. Not Phineas Newborn, laundry mover.’ ”
In the collection of photos through which Mama Rose seems to be constantly browsing, she finds one of a young Junior in a bathing suit at the swimming pool. Phineas looks awkward, like maybe the sunlight and the outdoors are foreign to him. “Yeah,” she says, “they stole his clothes that day. He came home with some pants on big enough for that dresser. I said, ‘Whaaat,’ and he said, ‘Well I went swimming and I come out and I didn’t have no clothes and I just went in the junk room at the swimming pool and put on something.’ I said, ‘Oh man!’ ”
Finas had been playing drums with the prominent Memphis band Tuff Green and the Rocketeers. As his kids grew older, he made them professional musicians as well. “When Junior and Calvin were in high school, they started playing with the old man,” says Mama Rose. “They was at the Plantation Inn when they were children and going to Booker Washington High School in the daytime.”
The Plantation Inn was across the river in West Memphis, Arkansas, and it featured black bands playing for a white crowd. Across the bridge, outside the city limits, all the rules were looser. “I started to high school in ’48,” says Calvin. “My brother had been there a year, and it was pretty tough going to school every day and playing from nine until two at night—even for teenagers. On weekends, we used to come from the Plantation Inn and stop sometimes at Mitchell’s on Beale Street, where they jammed ’til daybreak.
“But I enjoyed it because my pockets stayed full and I was able to buy nice clothes at Lansky Brothers on Beale Street and Julius Lewis even [the high-end store for whites]. And I wore the best shoes. I would stop on the way to school and get my stumps shined every morning. There was a shoe shop right on the corner of Alston and Lauderdale, going toward the railroad track. My shoes stayed clean every day. They stayed clean.”
Both Mama Rose and Calvin remember the diversity of the Finas Newborn Orchestra. “They played what y’all call blues, jazz, folk music,” says Mama Rose. “They played all kind of music. That’s the difference in music now and music then. My husband’s band, they could read that music and they played any kind. At the Plantation Inn, they played ‘Tennessee Waltz,’ just like on the Grand Ole Opry, every night, and the owner and his wife would dance to it. My husband would teach them kids that you’re supposed to satisfy the customers. That’s the reason Calvin gets on his knees and all that. His daddy would tell him to play to the crowd. He’d keep guitar strings in his drum case, because when Calvin get through stomping and carrying on, he’d probably broke a string. His daddy was a drum beater, boy, and he taught ’em to play what the audience wants.”
“My dad had a way with playing drums where he would lock you in,” says Calvin, “and you couldn’t go nowhere—you had to play right! And he had the foresight to see that television was going to be the thing. He had us play good music and give the people something to see at the same time. There was usually ten of us: four horns, four rhythms, a vocalist, and a dancer. You think James Brown is bad, you should have seen Baby Ray dance. He would line up chairs on the dance floor as long as a truck and turn somersaults over them.
“My dad also insisted that we stay abreast of everything new. Bebop was pretty hot on the East Coast, Charlie Parker and Dizzy and Miles. ‘Moody’s Mood for Love’ was one of the first songs that lyrics were put to a jazz solo, and it was taboo, really. They were doing it on the East Coast, but people here weren’t accepting it. I sang it with Wanda Jones, and we only did it when my dad knew he wouldn’t make the audience angry by playing bebop.
“And we had a family quartet within the band. Wanda, whom I married, was the vocalist. She also played trombone and piano. I arranged the music, my brother arranged, and my father arranged. We had quite a show.
“A lot of people think that there is no such thing as wrong notes. Dissonance can be beautiful—Monk proved that—but there is a certain way to play dissonance. And silence is beautiful. But if you’re looking for it to be silent and all of a sudden”— he makes sounds like a pantry emptying—“it’s a little much. Something too abrupt aggravates me. My brother was such a genius with putting music together so I guess I got spoiled. We did a lot of improvising; it was like spontaneous combustion. To create spontaneously is the highest art form on the face of the earth. And creative intelligence is very spiritual. I think that’s as close to God as you can get.”
Upon Junior’s 1955 release from the army, he returned to Memphis. His father had opened the Newborn Music Shop on Beale Street at a time when gods would meander through the door. “What was that boy’s name?” says Mama Rose. “Howling Wolf! He came in the shop and Finas had his head on that little desk in the back. Howling Wolf came in talking, called me some sweet name. He said, ‘You know what? You just would fit around—’ Finas raised up, picked up his pistol, and said, ‘Your head will just fit this thirty-eight too!’ Howling Wolf said—” and here eighty-year-old Mama Rose Newborn howls like the Wolf in “Smokestack Lightnin’.”
With Junior home, Senior was anxious to restart the family band. But Junior’s designs were on broader horizons; Count Basie had promised him an introduction to his New York City booking agent. Calvin states, “When we shattered our dad’s dream of having a family band by going to New York and forming the Phineas Newborn Jr. Quartet, we also broke his heart.”
Before departing, Junior bought his parents the home on Alston. “I asked whose name should I put on this house,” Mama Rose remembers, “and Junior said, ‘Put Phineas Newborn Senior and Rosie Murphy Newborn, because as long as you and daddy got a floor and a door, I believe I got a place to live.’ ”
Junior and Calvin set out and latched their dreams onto Manhattan. Their playing was tight. Since they’d been kids, the Newborn brothers “could feel one another’s emotions from afar, like mental telepathy,” writes Calvin in As Quiet As It’s Kept! “I stepped on a nail in the backyard and though he was inside the house, Junior said he felt it too. And when a window slammed down on his arm inside the house, though I was outside, I felt it.” The tight synchronicity got them gigs. Promptly, they were booked to open Count Basie’s run at Birdland. They sent for Memphis bassist George Joyner (later known as Jamil Nasser). “The toughest thing we had was keeping a drummer,” says Calvin, “because my brother played so fast and had such intricate arrangements. We changed drummers very often.”
Rosie Murphy Newborn and Calvin Newborn. (Courtesy of Calvin Newborn)
When the quartet played the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, Phineas Sr. was introduced in the audience. “Our dad stood up while the audience applauded, and as I stood on stage holding my guitar ready to play, I could feel his sadness,” writes Calvin. “I knew he wanted more than anything to be playing drums with us.” Sadness and disappointment would shadow Finas for the rest of his days.
The Phineas Newborn Jr. Quartet was included on the 1957 Birdland tour, along with Count Basie, Sarah Vaughan, Lester Young, and others. Calvin was asked to keep his eye on pianist Bud Powell, who was not well. “Our quartet came on before the Bud Powell Trio at the concert hall in Toronto, Canada. We finished our set, and on the way to our dressing room backstage I noticed that Bud was butting his head against the wall and stopped him. I went into the dressing room and put down my guitar and when I came back out, Bud was on stage playing his opener, ‘Un Poco Loco.’ After that he played the most prolific interpretation of the standard ‘Like Someone in Love’ I’d ever heard. It was supernatural! I knew how Junior loved Bud’s piano playing, and though my heart was bleeding when chaperoning Bud, I’d missed something. Suddenly I knew why Junior dug Bud so. Though I had no way of knowing it then, some years later my heart would bleed for Junior just as it had for Bud.”
Though the prominent critic Leonard Feather would soon proclaim him “the greatest living jazz pianist,” Junior’s talent provoked a heated debate among jazz fans. He was always praised for his technique, though some critics said his skill overpowered his emotion; they said the opposite about Calvin. “When I got to New York, I realized what I had been missing by not practicing. On the first record, they wouldn’t give me a solo. We were with Atlantic, and they said when Junior got through playing there was nothing left to play. Someone suggested that I take some lessons from a CBS staff guitarist, Barry Galbraith, and I learned a lot from him. I learned how to relax mostly, because it was hard for me to stay still and play. I was used to doing like Magic Johnson—flying.” The showman and the perfectionist; the extrovert and the introvert.
There is a picture of Calvin as a young man, his face contorted and intent on his playing; it is clear that this man is deep into what he’s doing. And upon closer inspection, one sees that he is airborne, his legs pulled up higher than the nearby tabletops. “I was about six feet in the air,” he says, “playing the guitar.”
He pauses, then reveals, “As a matter of fact, I used to think I could fly.”
He lets that image sink in, then continues: “I felt like I could make myself as light as I wanted to. I have jumped off a two-story building and never really hurt myself. I saw a lot of movies and I thought I was a stuntman. Even today, sometimes I dream that I’m just walking down the street and spread my arms and just take off and fly.”
His father must have felt the same as that trolley pulled him through the streets of Memphis. And his brother’s music reflects the same sense of freedom: Junior untethered the left hand, making it as integral to the melody as the right. It’s clear in his arrangement of “Dahoud” from his first album, Here is Phineas, and it’s clear in later original compositions, such as “Blues Theme for Left Hand Only.” “Junior wrote a lot of contrapuntal stuff,” says Calvin. “He had a lot of parts with me playing contrary to him, and it took a lot of practice to play together. Harmonically, he did a lot of things. Even before the Modern Jazz Quartet, he was doing that swing. He always believed in swinging hard.”
Phineas Newborn Jr. performs at the University of Memphis for a class taught by visiting writer Robert Palmer. Randall Lyon, right, on Porta Pak for Televista Productions, circa 1976. (Courtesy of Pat Rainer)
Junior’s little brother was right at his side, citing his own swinging influences. “Charlie Christian was a big inspiration to me,” he says, “but my main inspiration was Wes Montgomery. The first guitarist who really impressed me as a kid was Nat King Cole’s guitarist, Oscar Moore. Dad had some records of Nat; I used to hear his trio all the time and it just impressed me. Nat was in Memphis with Norman Granz’s Jazz at the Philharmonic when we were little, and our dad played with Nat. Nat Cole’s feel influenced me and my brother. Junior said that the reason he and Oscar Peterson sound so much alike is because they were influenced by the same people—Nat Cole and Art Tatum.”
With his kids grown and gone, Finas finally accepted an offer to tour. This time he was not with the greats he’d known in his younger days. “When the children went on,” says Mama Rose about her husband, “he started working for Paul A. Miller’s Circus. My husband would be on the drums with that brush, and that lion tamer would be saying, ‘Go on, Annie,’ and the lion would get near that hoop. The old man knew when she got close enough, he’d hit that cymbal—POW—pow pow! Annie would jump through that hoop over that fire.” When he quit the circus, just before he died, Mama Rose says they had to hire two drummers to take his place.
He never got over the idea of the family reunion, his pride in his children always tinged with an unfulfilled yearning. Junior left New York for Los Angeles in 1960 and his father came out to visit. “One night our dad sat in with Junior at John T. McClain’s It Club,” Calvin says. “When he finished playing, he had to be helped off the drum stool. The next day, with a firm grip on the monkey wrench he was using to repair the kitchen sink in his apartment, Phineas Newborn Sr. suffered his seventh heart attack. It was fatal.”
Junior’s health was also fragile. He’d endured the pressure of skyrocketing fame in his youth, then suffered through two failed marriages. In the early 1960s, he had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized in California. Upon returning to Memphis, his diagnosis and medication were changed, resulting in another lengthy hospital stay. Ultimately, under the care of his family and close friends, like Memphis saxophonist Fred Ford, he achieved some stability.
His fondness for the ladies never changed. His standard pickup line for total strangers was “Do you like music? Give me a kiss.” Mama Rose remembers how people would take advantage of him. “All these pictures setting up there on the piano, I came home one day and all the pictures was gone, frames and all. Junior was sitting in here alone, and there was a pile of stuff on the floor where this woman had emptied a box out. I said, ‘Junior, what?’ He said, ‘I was around the corner there and they was playing the jukebox and somebody said, “This is one of the greatest piano players in the world, got all kinds of records.” This woman said, “Can I go around there and play some?”’ She got around here and she wanted a drink. He goes to the whiskey store, left her in here and when he come back she done took pictures, frames and all. He was just that kind of person, he didn’t think. But I won’t complain, because he’s the one that fought the battle. I knew his condition and I just rolled with his conditions. But he didn’t think. He just trusted.”
Junior’s love of the ladies nearly cost him his life. “Somebody beat him up once,” Mama Rose says, and her countenance darkens during this story, as if she bears responsibility, as if his mugging is a tear in her matriarchal fabric because it was preceded by a fight with her. “They had him—well I had him really—put away. He’d drank this liquor, I guess it went to his brain quick. I cut the light out or something and he had nerve enough to get up and he slapped me. Honey, I hit him with this left and he hit that chair. I went next door and called the folks and they put him in the VA. He was already taking medicine. They told me, ‘Don’t tell him about it now.’ After he got pretty settled, they told him. He said, ‘Well if I done that to my mama, find me a new place.’
“They found him one, near some of them ofay brothers. Them white gals would be meddling with him and doing him. It had snowed and he had went down to one of them joints. And on his way back, a gang of them got him. They broke his fingers and messed him all up. Broke his fingers.”
Mama Rose visited him in the hospital. “I told Junior, ‘Work your fingers. Play CDEFG.’ Junior worked C, D, E, F, G. I said, ‘Junior, them fingers’ gonna be all right.’ ” During his recuperation, Fred Ford arranged for him to be released evenings, and they recorded his Grammy-nominated album, Solo Piano.
Junior was better, but not well. Jim Dickinson recalls picking him up for a gig in the late 1970s, around five thirty in the afternoon. “He was asleep with his overcoat on. He gets up and puts his hat on, sits down at the kitchen table. Mama Rose is cooking him a fish for breakfast. She’s had to deal with three generations of crazy musicians, Junior ain’t nothing to her. She says, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’
“ ‘I want a pistol.’
“ ‘Well, you ain’t getting nothing then.’
“He says, ‘You got a pistol.’
“ ‘Yeah,’ she responded, ‘I’ve got a pistol, but I don’t run down the street going, ‘Yeah yeah yeah.’ ”
Not only that, Mama Rose doesn’t run down the street going, “No no no.” Despite all she’s seen, all she’s heard, all she’s endured, she still greets visitors at her small home, still sees it as a palace gifted to her by her gifted son. “I been all around, not just riding up and down the road,” she says. “Music—I’m like my husband about that. Music ain’t gonna lose nobody and it ain’t gonna find nobody. You got to find it, and if you don’t get it, that’s your fault.”
Calvin and Mama Rose live in the present, haunted by the past. “The other day, Calvin brought me flowers when he come by,” Mama Rose says. “I sang, ‘Give them the flowers while they live / trying to cheer them on / Useless the flowers that you give / after the soul is gone.’ ”