During the wee early morning hours of September 25, 1961, two African-American jazz pianists, Walter Davis Jr. and Frank Hewitt, walked up Sixth Avenue toward Twenty-eighth Street. In the center of Manhattan, the neighborhood was shut down and desolate. The flower district’s sidewalk storefronts kept daylight hours and commercial zones prohibited upstairs residency. The sleepy Sixth Avenue bus scattered stray hot dog wrappers, cigarette butts, and paper cups under the streetlamps. Davis and Hewitt crossed Twenty-eighth Street and stopped in front of a five-floor brick-and-plank loft structure that dated to 1853. One of them whistled the call of a chuck-will’s-widow, a nocturnal, ground-dwelling swamp bird kin to the whippoorwill.
The door of 821 Sixth Avenue was often open. Sometimes there was no door at all, just a dark, open stairwell shaft. Those unaccustomed to the loft—midtown magazine editors and downtown art impresarios—were afraid of it. Davis and Hewitt were dropping by to see if there was a jam session.
On this night a door was installed and it was locked. The temperature had reached over seventy degrees earlier in the day, over ninety degrees on other days that week. The windows upstairs were wide open. The sidewalk whistle was a signal to somebody—anybody—to drop a key down so Davis and Hewitt could let themselves in. Smith was forty-two and living on the fourth floor of the building. He had wires running like veins through walls and floors, connected to microphones on one end and a reel-to-reel tape machine in his darkroom on the other end. He recorded the comings and goings all night. His mics caught the mimicked chuck-will’s-widow around 2:00 a.m.
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Forty-seven years later, in 2008, I was listening through headphones to this particular recording one night in my home in North Carolina. I was jerked to attention by the recorded birdcall. What was that? Reverse fifteen seconds, play. Reverse, play. Reverse, play.
The chuck-will’s-widow spends summers in the wooded swamps of the American South and winters in northern South America and the Caribbean. Its call is a click or “chuck” followed by two quick boomeranging loops, an intricate, siren-like melody. Only a practiced whistler familiar with the sound could mimic it. The birdcall was familiar to me, from my life on the shores of the Pamlico River in North Carolina’s rural coastal plains, where I grew up in the 1970s and where I still spend a lot of time today.
Hewitt was born in New York to parents from Trinidad. Davis was from Richmond, Virginia. Either man could have whistled the chuck-will’s-widow call, but I believe it was Davis, who later in his life said he saw the ghost of the dead Thelonious Monk walk into his recording studio. It would be like Davis to value, practice, and preserve a birdcall from his childhood on the James River, in the same manner that he preserved Southern gospel and blues traditions in his jazz.
What still puzzles me about this tape, though, is that Smith recognized the birdcall instantly. He was on the fifth floor of the building, disassembling microphones and cords he had installed to catch jazz jam sessions that could happen there on any night and early morning. He was storing his equipment in preparation for his absence; the next afternoon he would fly to Japan from Idlewild Airport (now JFK). He left one microphone live, connected by wire to his tape machine a floor below. After hearing the whistle, Smith recorded himself on tape, mumbling, Frank, there’s a chuck-will’s-widow out there.
“Frank” was Frank Amoss, a young jazz drummer who had moved into a space on the fifth floor of the building earlier in the summer.
Amoss responded, Oh, somebody’s out there? He walked to the window, leaned out and looked down to the sidewalk, recognized Davis and Hewitt, said hello, and told them there weren’t any jam sessions happening that night. Forget it, man, it’s too late. That’s all I can tell you.
According to the 1960 bulletin of the Kansas Ornithological Society, the chuck-will’s-widow was known to sometimes migrate up the Arkansas River from the Mississippi as far as Wichita, the farthest west that bird was known to go. Maybe that’s how Smith knew it, from growing up on the Arkansas. But he also collected vinyl LPs with recorded insect, animal, and bird sounds, which could explain how he knew it. Or maybe it was because Davis or Hewitt made that call each time they came to the loft and Smith discussed it with them. It’s hard to believe that there were numerous visitors to the loft who could whistle that intricate sound, especially loud enough to be heard five floors up through a window.
Later in 2008, I visited Frank Amoss at his home in Santa Ana, California, and I played him this clip of tape. He was amused and baffled. He had no recollection of hearing the birdcall whistled by anybody during the six months he lived in the building in 1961.
This particular piece of tape says much about the isolation and desolation of this neighborhood in the center of Manhattan. It made the location perfect for a late-night jazz haven—a place easy to stop by on your way to somewhere else, where nobody was around to complain about noise at three in the morning. It also made the place a hole.
Davis and Hewitt disappeared into the New York night and an hour or so later Smith began packing for his first trip to Japan since he was carried off a battlefield on a stretcher in Okinawa during World War II. What unfolded over the next few hours was the most harrowing scene in Smith’s entire collection of recorded sound.