I'm Tom Rini, host of the Jazz Beat Podcast and of Jazz on the Mode at Knowing the Public Media. And my guest today is Peter Gerouenek, Peter is the author of the definitive two-volume biography of Ildas Presley, Last Train of Memphis and Careless Love, and biographies of Sam Cook, Dream Boogie, and Sam Phillips, the man who invented rock and roll. Gerouenek is also the author of Sweet Soul Music, Searching for Robert Johnson, and two volumes of essays and profiles feel like going home and lost highway. Actually, Peter is the author of now a third anthology of essays and profiles, which is the prime purpose of our meeting today.
And that new book is entitled Looking to Get Lost Adventures in Music and Writing. Peter, it's wonderful to speak with you today. Congratulations, of course, on this beautiful collection of essays and profiles and interviews, and it's been nice to see you getting attention from a lot of other quarters since the publication of the book, and really nice to have you today for the Jazz Beat. Well, thanks, Tom.
It's good to see you again. However remote, however virtual it's great to see you. Likewise, thanks, Peter. As I understand it, you met, and in some cases got to know everyone in this book except one, and that's Robert Johnson.
Why is the chapter on Johnson in the book, and why is he so prominent in your experience? Well, I mean, he's prominent in my experience because hearing that first Robert Johnson album in 1961 when I was a freshman in Columbia, and it came so unexpectedly, was just a complete turning point in a sense in my life. It was so extraordinary. It was such an extraordinary experience.
Let me cut it right away, and ask what was it that prompted you in that day to buy that album? Well, I was totally into the blues. I mean, when I was 15 or 16, I just fell into the blues. A friend of mine and I discovered it through a series of accidental encounters, and then we just became totally immersed and obsessed.
And so by the time the Robert Johnson came out in 1961, I had been listening to the blues to whatever was available, whatever I could find like in Hopkins, Muddy Waters, Alan Wolf, Ronnie McGinn, Sonny Terry, Josh White, Ledbelly. I mean, it was pretty much, it wasn't a lot available. And maybe I'd heard one cut by Robert Johnson at that point, which had been put on an anthology that Sam Charters put out. But I just wasn't prepared for the breaths, for the, I don't want to say virtuosity, for the intensity of the experience.
And I went and walked into Sam Goodies, which was, I don't know, 49th or 50th Street in New York. And there it was, in the blues bin. There was Robert Johnson, and there was Big Joe Williams, Piney Woods Blues. And I got both of them and took them back to my dorm room when I listened over and over and over and over.
But the reason for that I wanted to include it in the, in a sense the book, this collection is framed by several, not theoreticals, but by contextualizing chapters. And it ends with chapters about my father and his father and my other grandfather, Philip Morrison, who was such an inspiration to me in terms of wanting to write and read and everything. But they were all inspirations to me. And it begins with my own experiences.
But the Robert Johnson, in a certain sense, for me sets a marker about how we to come to this music, how we to come to art in general. And I felt like I wanted to say it just doesn't matter that we came to Robert Johnson. There's no cause for self-congratulation that we discovered this music. When all these great blues singers were rediscovered in the 60s, like Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James and people like Joe Calicott and Sleepy John Estes, that was great.
But I mean their music existed. We either without this audience rediscovering them and what I wanted to stress, and it was a theme that runs through the book without ever being articulated, is that it's the music, it's the art, it's the books that are important. People can go in, writers can go in and out of fashion. Somebody like Henry Green, whom I write about in this, and it was the first person I ever interviewed, just before I interviewed Skip James when I was 19 years old, I think.
He has been in and out of fashion over and over again. And sometimes he's been totally forgotten. As John Dunn was forgotten for 300 years, as Robert Johnson was forgotten for 50 years. But it doesn't matter.
The work exists, the work persists, and it's up to us to find the reasons to appreciate it. But it makes not the slightest difference on the impact of the work. In other words, Johnson matters because of who he was in his time, and how he continues to speak to listeners today. But less so, and this often frustrates me to hear how much he influenced rock and roll.
Well, I think it's very important. It matters a great deal to influence Muddy Waters and Robert Jr. Lockwood and Elmore James and Sonny Boy Williamson because the music came down to us through that. Nor do I think the music is set in its time anymore than I think Moby Dick is set in its time.
I mean these are all sorts of or Henry Green's work or John Dunn's. In other words, the greatest art is timeless, and it existed to be appreciated and discovered in different ways and in different contexts by later generations. But it isn't in any way set in its time. And that's what is so remarkable about Robert Johnson's blues is that he conceived of this music in such precise and just emotionally expansive ways that it continues to have resonance, it continues to have meaning, and it continues to have ever growing significance.
Now in describing the experience you had listening to the Johnson album, King of the Delta Blue Singers, you say that amidst its mysteriousness you felt the unmistakable familiarity of its emotional terrain. Do you think that familiarity was grounded in you? Well it must have been. I mean this is the thing, you can't really assign a reason why should the blues have made such an impact or be of such significance in Japan say, or in other countries, other places which don't even speak the language.
And I can't really begin to assess that. But it seems to me, it just, when I first heard the blues, not just Robert Johnson, but discovering the blues, his friend of mine, his brother went down to the Newport Folk Festival, came back with some records, and out of those records, and a lot of them continued to mean something. You guys read Cisco Houston, Jimmy Rogers. I mean it wasn't, Bluegrass, all of those things made some impact, but it was the blues just spoke to me directly and why that was, I can't really say.
But one of the things about Robert Johnson is that he wrote songs, he composed blues that had a consistent, not just message, but that had an overall overarching intent, like a poem. Like, I mean I wrote it as I think a senior in college, I wrote a paper called Catullus and the Blues, and it was linking Catullus with Sunny Boy Williamson, let's say. And I'm sure that the, well I know, I know that the classics professor who read it, found it in one that was pretentious, and I bet that all half the blues fans, if they were to read it, they would find the same thing. But to me, all of these poets, these lyric poets, and Robert Johnson, and sleepy Don S.
these and all these other artists were seeking an emotional core, which they might express in different ways, but which had a commonality. And one of the things that I discovered in writing this new book, in writing, looking to get lost, was in a sense the democratic impulse that existed among everybody I'd written about. That's something I was spending a lot of time thinking about when I was interviewing Bill Monroe or Jerry Lee Lewis, but what struck me so forcibly as I wrote new pieces for this and rewrote old ones, was how open all of the people I wrote about were to every kind of music. There were no categories, they were no, they weren't breaking it down into, well I want this kind of court, I want this, you have Howlin Wolf talking about how high the moon, and celebrating the success of Elvis Presley, and this is the most, you know, the purest of African-American blues singers, and pointing to Jimmy Rogers as a formative influence on his music, Jimmy Rogers, the father of country music.
And you have it going the opposite way, where you have somebody like Bobby Bluebland, who will cite a Rita Franklin's father, C.L. Franklin, the Reverend C.L. Franklin, as the source of his, I always lose track of, not his gargle, but you know, the sort of the squall, the squall, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I don't know what the source of my squall is today, but Bobby Bluebland would point to Reverend C.L.
Franklin as the source of his squall, then he would point to somebody like Perry Combo for the smoothness of his singing, which he also admired, and then he would cite country in Western as an equally significant influence in the way it told the story. So I just, I'm not pointing to the politics of anybody I'm writing about, but I don't think a single person I've written about, you know, whose reach has not been vast, who hasn't had what Sam Phillips called, ears all around his head, who wasn't open to every type of music. It's funny, Peter, the tuba player, Howard Johnson, who led the Saturday Night Live band, among other things over the course of his career, died a day or two ago. And I was watching an interview with him earlier this morning, and he talked about discovering an album, Madame A Butterfly, at a neighbor's home, and he thought it was a blues singer named Madame Butterfly, and he was so excited to bring it home and listen to it.
But from there, he leaped into making sort of distinctions between what whites and blacks listen to, what they were attracted to, and he cited Perry Como as kind of the epitome of a whites only voice and sound, but of course we do know that Bobby Bland, among others, cited him. Well, I mean, you know, Ray Charles, whom I write about extensively in the new book, I don't have this in the book, but when I asked him what he was listening to nowadays, at the time we went out, he said, well, I love these Jackie Gleason presents albums, which I think maybe might have been sold to supermarkets at the time, I'm not sure. And I started to laugh, and you never want to laugh if you're not sure somebody's telling a joke, you know, that's a dangerous thing to do. But then I, he said, I love the sweet sound of Bobby Hackett's trumpet, and I realized he can listen to it with ears that are far less prejudiced than mine.
I say, well, what's he talking about? But he actually heard something in that that reached him that inspired him in some way, and it may not have inspired him as much as Archie Brownlee, the lead singer for the Five Blind Boys, who was his model really when he started finding his own voice. But it definitely reached him, and I stifled my life then. Many of the musicians you write about and have gotten to know in some cases, profess a strong sense of distinction between the sacred and the secular in music.
And that's often driven by their faith, their faith-rounded and Christian fundamentalism. Do you have a field challenge to respect a musician's outspoken religious leanings? Not really, no. I might feel challenged if the conversation veered off into politics.
I don't know that. I'm not assigning a political intent to anybody I'm talking about, but that I might have a difficulty with, but basically, I'm not interested in how I feel. I'm interested in who the person I'm talking to is and how they feel. And the whole Pentecostal movement on the black side and on the white side is such a root cause of so much of the music that means so much to me, whether it's Elvis or Jerry Lee Lewis, Sister Rosanna Tharpa is a foundation.
And no, I feel like what I want to do is to present the world as a person I'm writing about and the person, you know, and the individuality of the person I'm writing about without prejudice and without anything that attaches to my own belief system. So yeah, I've spent a lot of time in black churches in particular, and I feel out of place to some extent. To that extent, it may be it's a challenge, but I don't feel, I mean, the music just reaches me so it's again, it's so familiar. And you know, somebody like Jerry Lee Lewis, for example, doesn't see any dichotomy.
I mean, Sleepy would have liked, and Sleepy didn't see an dichotomy. He had a system of belief and he had music to which he signed and conferred every drop of emotion he had to offer. And I think in some ways, Sleepy kind of would have liked to have ended up being a preacher and many of the musicians who played with him did end up doing that. And he was just proud of him, inwardly proud of them.
But he didn't see a contradiction between making this music, this joyful music, and the faith that he adhered to so strongly. And Jerry Lee Lewis too, I mean, he's had a belief that he has never left the church and he will come back to it and I think he has. Peter, you record most of the music you write about the status of art and describe the players themselves as artists. I wonder if you ever feel a conflict in swearing the unique vision or achievement of an artist, especially in the context of the blues, which even in Robert Johnson's case is deeply rooted in tradition.
Well, I mean, look how somebody like Hemingway schooled himself on all the writers who went before, whether they were the Russian writers or Sherwood Anderson who was kind of a mentor to them, or Aldi or Gertrude Stein or Joyce. There are all these writers who go before or somebody like Lee Smith who I write about in the new book, how it was Eudora Welty who set her free and set her free to find her own voice and to find her own expression of that voice. So I think we're all a product of everything that's gone before. Johnny Shines talked to me and I'm sure there's a lot of other people about his belief that we're standing on, you know, just that whole thing, we're standing on the shoulders of everyone who went before and if we forget that, we can't find our way to the future.
So I think the main thing is, was Dwight Mcdonald who wrote a book about Middlebrow, I think Middlebrow culture, but I don't see a distinction between highbrow, middlebrow or low. I feel like everybody's trying to find the best way they have to express what's, you know, most inside them. The thing that's most, one of the things that's most remarkable about Robert Johnson is he took, I mean, if you listen to the music let's say of Howlin' Wolf or Sun House or of Muddy Waters, in many ways the music is often made up of floating verses what you're talking about, the shared culture. What Zorane El-Hirsdon writes about quite a bit and what she considers the reason that, you know, that African-American, African-American's in general and African-American artists should never look to white culture, they should glory in their own culture, which exists.
Now the thing about Robert Johnson is he takes those commonalities, he takes the musical commonalities, he will cite, he'll lift a verse from one song or from another, but basically he's composing music and composing a form of expression that's his original in his own way, you know, Beethoven or Mozart or Brahms, a thing like me in the devil or standing with the crossroads I tried to flag a righty, nobody seemed to know me, everybody passed me by. And it's wonderful, which everybody can understand, but it probably stems from his own experience, and it's not unique, that maybe that verse is unique to his music, but the point is he builds a song that comes to an emotional climax, whether it's something like Come on in My Kitchen, which is full of all kinds of sexual innuendo, but as Johnny Shine said, when he finished that song, when they would play it out on the street from an audience of men and women, he says, everybody there, men and women alike will cry when he reached the end of that song. And when he does a song like Hellhound on my Trail, which is such an extraordinary song, the imagery of it is something that is so unique to him and the build of that song and the way in which not only the music, but his vocal expression and the words all join together to form a single effect, this is a very different form of self-expression or expression. It's the expression of genius, and you run into this occasionally, and you run into all sorts of different forms of expression and forms of genius, and I wouldn't give anything for the emotional impact of howling was music, but I don't think it has that kind of compactness or that kind of centeredness that Robert Johnson has, it has something else, and I'll value that just as much too.
Sure. So, it's a great way to be a part of the music that is meant to be shared, but music is a commercial product, and the history of blues is fraught with stories of theft of copyright infringement of record labels ripping off musicians. Annie C. Anderson's new book, Brother Robert, which includes a brief conversation with you and Elijah Wald and Mrs.
Anderson is divided between her narrative of growing up in Memphis in a household in which her step-brother, Robert Johnson, was often present. And the later saga that she and her step-s sister, Carrie Thompson, went through as Johnson prospectors came along in the 60s and 70s seeking a significant piece of the commercial action of the music. How do you see the effect of this conflict between art and commerce in the worlds of blues and country music? Well, I think it's stifling in all respects, and I don't limit it to the world I'm writing about.
I think, you know, when you talk about intellectual property, the emphasis is on one word, and that's not intellectual. I mean, the point is this is a product of capitalism, it's a product of law schools, it's a product of people seeing an opportunity to make money for themselves who go to school for four years, trained to be lawyers, not to do, you know, I mean, many people may want to do good in the world, but many people are really out for themselves. And this whole branch of law, you know, called intellectual property first emerged in music, I would say in the 50s, but in a very mild way, and it's really the last, I don't know, 30 or 40 years where it's become big business. And I don't know how you adjudicate it, I don't know how you deal with it.
But the point is, it's something all art is theft. It just, there is all art is borrowing. There's no such thing as original art. There's nobody who goes out there and is free of the influences of either previous mentors or previous generations.
And you can go through the work of, you know, the classics, I mean, for whatever reason, maybe it's the pandemic, I was reading David Copperfield and Great Expectations. And all through that, you see borrowings on Dickens as part, maybe from other authors, but also from his own experience and what might be considered falsifications of that experience by people who will be in portrait. And this is what art is. It isn't anything different.
I mean, it's come up again and again with Bob Dylan, for example. And in some cases, you know, maybe it's true. Maybe it's, you know, there are borrowings. But you probably know the quote about, you know, genius borrows and...
A Genius deals mediocrity borrows. Yeah, yeah. But I feel like it's, for the most part, it's something it has to do with commerce. The whole basis on which the music industry is set up has to do with ownership and it has to do with publishing.
It was a system that was established in, I think, in the 1870s or 1880s in Europe and it's a system which obtains to this day in which the people who own the music are generally speaking, the people who own the publishing. And they, up until quite recently, they've always been, they've not generally been the songwriters. And that's where the theft takes place. But it doesn't have to do, you know, in particular with race, although it has a big race can have a big impact, but it has hugely to do with class, education, and the obfuscation that is really endemic to the practice of the law.
Oh, that's me, boys. That's it, dear Markham. That is a crossrope. I believe I'm slacking down.
Peter, in addition to Robert Johnson, you write of another Delta Bluesman, Skip James. And you describe the experience of the first interview you conducted with him as one that drew you out of what you called your immediate circle of acquaintance. Skip James is a fairly obscure figure that I found your chapter on him to be one of your most impassioned pieces of writing. What drew you to Skip James?
Oh, just again, the uniqueness of his sound, the oddity of his sound, the inner compulsion of his sound, the way in which he's just communicating something so unlike anything that I ever heard before. I mean, it's quite different from Robert Johnson in the sense that as original he is, and he's highly original, you can trace the sources of his music, and you can trace the things that are conventional within it. In the case of Skip James, he came from a tradition which, as it turned out, it existed within the small hometown circle in which he grew up with Antonio Mississippi. But you've never heard it anywhere else except Antonio.
Nobody else had ever been recorded in quite that fashion. So it was just, I had heard the early records. It was a label called Origin Jazz Library, run by Pete Whalen and Bill Givens of Brooklyn and they put out their first album, it was called Really the Country Blues, to indicate that it was going into the blues that people hadn't heard, the blues of Charlie Pat and the blues of Ishma and Gracie, the blues of Skip James. And so, and then when he was rediscovered, and I saw him sing those first notes at Newport in 1964, just the notes just carrying across the field.
I mean, you know, my friends and I, and speculated, well, how did he get that sound? You know, what kind of a guitar, he must have had a guitar that had been made by, you know, some kind of craftsman who made only three guitars in his life and you couldn't get there. There he is playing, I think, a borrowed guitar, you know, who made it was a Martin, you know, it was like any other guitar and getting the same sound in his voice, just sailing and soaring across the field. And that was in 64.
And I just felt like it was the same impulses with Henry Green, the English writer who made interview a couple of years before. I mean, I was 20 in 64. And I just, I've come up with a quote, and I don't know where it comes from now. You may be, you'll know, but it's great in such as this will not pass my way again.
I keep thinking it's a biblical quote, but I don't know what it is. But in any case, that was what crossed my mind. And when he was staying with a guy that I sort of knew, who became a very good friend and a friend for life, Dick Waterman, a great photographer, his book, which is called, what is it called, Blues like Showers of Rain maybe? Dick Waterman, you remember Dick Waterman and everybody needs this book, there's a combination of words and images.
But and I sort of knew him, I really didn't know him. And, but Skip was staying in the 11th, 11th, 11th, 47th, where I went to see him every night. And so I called up and I said, you know, with my teeth shattering and I hearted my mouth and said, you know, I want to do a story for a magazine called Blues Unlimited, which I had yet to see, I'd subscribe to it by a year before, but I still hadn't seen an issue. And Dick said, hmm, that's strange, I just ran a three-part series on Skip James.
So I sort of adjusted myself as best I could, I mean I was just mortified and ended up doing the story for the second English, Blues magazine, Blues World, which was edited by a guy named Bob Groom, who I became good friends with. But the point was I didn't care who was for it, it was for me. And that's what I went over to Dick's apartment in Cambridge. Between midnight and day, I think that's what it's called, the book.
And I went over and, you know, forced myself out of the car across the street with many false steps and my teeth shattering. And I interviewed him and you know, he was very kind to me, he took pity on me. And that became, I wrote it up for myself right away within days, I think. I just found the original draft.
And then I got that published in Blues World a while later. And then I completely re-wrote it, I feel like I'm at home. And then the chapter I'm looking to get lost is revisiting the whole story and looking at it from a somewhat different perspective. Yes, I was impressed to see you taking on Stephen Colts book on Skip James, I'd rather be the devil.
I don't recall anything else in your writing that amounts to such a sharp critique of someone else's work. And I was thrilled to see it. What drove you to address Stephen Colts in that way? Well, it was the same thing that led me to, I've written very, very few negative pieces in my life.
But it was the same thing that led me to take on or to review Albert Goldman's biography of Elvis long before I, you know, wrote the last train of Memphis. And I already had any thought of doing that. I was just so offended that anybody, forget about whether Elvis Presley or Skip James or you or me should be reduced to their worst elements, should be reduced to their most and should be treated with this dripping contempt almost. So but the reason that I wanted to include it and rewrite it somewhat for this new book, for looking to get lost was because in a way it's set forth my own creed for not just for biography but for writing profiles, which is basically you treat everyone, you know, you're writing about with dignity and respect and with respect for their dignity.
I mean, and the last chapter, the next last chapter in the book is learning this lesson from my father and his father who were both physicians and the way in which they treated. I mean, again, these are the lessons that, and one of the gifts to me of writing this book was the lessons that became more overt were far from overt at the time that I experienced them. But became, you know, I recognize we're part of the belief system that I grew up with. And in writing about my father and my grandfather, I wrote about the respect with which they treated their patients, the patients that they showed different spelling, you know, to their patients, the way in which they, the center of their concern was not never their own dignity but the well-being of the people they were treating and not making those people feel small, making those people feel that they were the most important thing.
And that's, you know, again, in retrospect, I've come to recognize that Whitney Ballyat's profiles in the New Yorker of jazz musicians exerted a considerable influence on me because what he did was he found a language, he was writing, let's say about Charles Mangus or Florone Esmond, go to Gallatin, or you would know better than I, I remember. But he wrote about them in language that didn't condescend in any way and it didn't forfeit any of his own literary capabilities but didn't focus the spotlight on the way. And simply from my point of view, and again, your UFI more expertise and you may have a different perspective, but from my point of view, it treated those musicians with, you know, with the respect that they deserved and in a way that didn't differ from the way you would write about high art or the way you would write about high culture, it was, you know, it courted them in dignity and at the same time, or at least what I tried to do, and I haven't read Whitney Ballyat's profile in quite a while, but what I tried to do was define an idiom that was not contemporary, but to find a voice that was idiomatic that I was writing about them. So it wasn't so highfalutin and elevated, but at the same time, it didn't forfeit any of the, I could come back to respect, but that I would show to, you know, writers that I admired the most.
It meant that their art was just as significant as any other and it deserved language that was just as respectful. Well Whitney Ballyat made extensive use of interviews and some of his profiles read like beautiful unbroken monologues, but if you read him enough, he began to recognize that he's editing and stylizing what his subjects have to say about their lives and careers as musicians and that no one really speaks ecsteveraneously with such eloquence. Well, you know, I should say, I mean, I remember years and years ago talking with Stanley Booth, who wrote the Great Book about the Rolling Stones. Oh yeah, I know his book about Memphis.
Yeah, which was a collection of his early pieces, but in the true adventures of the Rolling Stones, that was how it was originally called. But he and I would talk about the writing, and we would point to quotes from the people we were writing about as being, you know, in a sense, the pinnacle of anything we could ever write. And we would have each of us had editors who would occasionally say, look, you've got to cut down on, you know, on Skip James quote, you've got to cut down, you know, that mighty water, you could tell it just as well. And my point was not that I wanted to have every word of every interview and all of the interviews, they never presented, you know, just with all the repetitions and the urs and the aisne yums, you know, that real life includes.
But the point was is that the voice and the language and the manner in which people express themselves is just so significant in terms of communicating what they're all about. And so Stanley and I would talk about it and just, we didn't check our heads. We were much more indignant about it, you know, but there's editorial misunderstanding and the failure to recognize the beauty and the eloquence of everyday speech. It wasn't everyday speech of this particular speech.
What do you think of more recent books by writers like Mary Beth Hamilton and Elijah Wald, they questioned the work of earlier writers and folklorists and record collectors who rediscovered country blues artists and came to establish the canon of essential country blues records? I wouldn't equate Elijah with Mary. Mary Beth Hamilton. Mary Beth Hamilton.
I wouldn't equate the two. I mean, I think what Elijah is writing about is that idolization never brings true reward. And he is simply saying that we ought to have language and perception to back up our opinions, the assertion. And this I should say on the edge of the internet is a radical view.
But the assertion is not truth and that what you want to ask. And so when he puts Robert Johnson in context and describes what his roots are, I don't think it's with any disrespect for Robert Johnson or for people who have written about him and other people who will find fault with others who have written without, I mean, somebody like Samuel Charters, who was his book, first book, the country blues was such a huge influence on me and on the whole generation. But it doesn't mean that it stands as literal truth and he was writing rhapsodically and that's the way I take it. But with Mary Beth Hamilton and other revisionists, I think what they're failing to take into account is the context of the music.
So it really doesn't make any difference. That's one of the points about my chapter on Robert Johnson. It doesn't make any difference what the record collector saw about Robert Johnson. It's the impact with music itself.
And it's not record collectors or critics who elevate the music in any way, shape or form. It is the persistence of the music and the fact that one of the arguments of, let's say, where these revisionist historians as well, Robert Johnson was never popular in his time. He didn't, you know, why should we be talking about him? Let's talk about Bumblebee Slim who was the equivalent of a million seller.
And I don't know about Bumblebee Slim to talk about him here. And I don't think he wants to talk about him. But the point about Robert Johnson is his music made a huge, huge, huge impact as did Charlie Patton's. I mean, Alan Wolf was singing the praise and singing the songs of Charlie Patton until the day he died.
And if Alan Wolf is significant, you know, Charlie Patton is the underpinning. And in the case of Robert Johnson, the generations that followed kept his music alive. They didn't know about white record collectors. They didn't know about, you know, critics of the music.
They didn't know about raps of this or, you know, allergic poets or anything. They kept the music alive because of its impact on them and somebody like Marty Waters, Wolf himself, Elmore James, Robert J. Lockwood. The music persisted.
And if nobody had ever discovered that that music had come from Robert Johnson, it wouldn't invalidate the music in the slightest. It would only go to show. So I just feel like people lose sight of, you know, the main issue, which is hell out on my trail, me and the devil blows. Come on in my kitchen, you know, when you've got a good friend.
I mean, these are those of Robert Johnson's songs. That's my broom. I mean, it's, it becomes foolish to set up these Baton wires in a sense. So these are what you come red, maybe they're red herrings, the best somewhere between them.
And to say, Oh, look, this collector, collective Charlie Patton records. And that's the reason we listen to Charlie Patton today. No, it isn't. The reason we listen to Charlie Patton today is because his music persisted through the music of fire better known blues singers who were not reading blues journals or, you know, critical journals or anything of the sort.
The experience you relate about your first encounter with Helen Wolf, the Club 47 in Cambridge, would make any writer shake in their boots. How do you recall that today? Well, I, I, what I was writing, as soon as I got the opportunity to write about the music, I took, seize the opportunity because I was invited to by people who didn't know anything about it, or care much about it, but who had to fill space. So with the Boston Phoenix, it was largely an advertising journal.
But they needed content. And a friend of mine was a drama critic who said, how would you like to write about music? And I said, great, but I want to write about, you know, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lewis, Helen Wolf, Mighty Waters, the Mighty Clouds of Joy, stuff like that. And that's what I said to the editor and the editor said, fine.
But what I wrote were previews of the performances. There was no point in writing a reviewer from performance that nobody was going to go to. You know, when I was trying to bring people, this was my evangelical. This is why I can't understand the evangelical mission.
But this was my evangelical. And they were always about people I had seen. So one of the first things I wrote was about the James Brown Show, which I remember writing, that this was the greatest theory you'll ever see. This was the age of, oh God, what was called, what John Arden did, and not live in, it's not beings.
But anyways, it was kind of the, it was participatory theater. And I said, you know, it doesn't matter what you've seen. This is the greatest theater you'll ever see. It's the James Brown Show.
And that's how I wrote about Helen Wolf as having seen Wolf a number of times. He was coming to town. He was going to be playing at the club 47 for several nights. And I wanted to get people out to see him.
I wanted to expose him to, you know, to the music of Helen Wolf. So I described the kind of performance he gave him. You know, as best I could. And then I went, I must have gone, it wasn't backstage.
It was actually helped by where they sold tickets. But whether I went to say a lot of them or not, there was a kid there and he says, oh, look, this guy wrote an article about you and Wolf says, you know, oh, yeah, well, yeah, I left my reading glasses back. Don't take it. Wolf actually had, you know, many of the people that I've written about didn't know how to read or write.
Wolf did. Wolf learned in the army and was, and Wolf was a consistent self-improvement despite a kind of appearance of, you know, he's kind of an appearance, which could scare off people. I mean, he had sort of, he was a menace to it, but he was a very kind person, a very thoughtful person. But in any case, so he left his, and he said, would you read it to me?
And I'm saying, me, no, not this other kid reads it to him. And it has things like his lumbering dance, elephantine dance and writes about, you know, you know, you know, the Wolf doesn't. The Wolf doesn't jive. Right, right.
You know, the Wolf doesn't jive and I'm just going through the floor. I mean, my life has been a series of embarrassments, you know, so this was one of them. And then I'm quoting lyrics of his, and he's like, well, you get that from boy, you make that up about your own head and I'm thinking, no, it's your song, you know, he wasn't saying, I don't know why he was saying it, but he wasn't saying it out of either lack of perception or anything else. Maybe he was putting me on.
He listened to it and, you know, he seemed to like it and I got through it and found my way back to my seat and hope I never had to face anybody ever again. And he gets up on stage and he does every single thing that I had written about. You know, and he first said it had been, every set was great, but the first set had been by Wolf standard. It's kind of just profundary only by Wolf standards.
Anybody else who says it would have been considered superb. And then after this article, he's out there and he's rolling around on the floor and falling to his knees. And then at some point he says, you know, the Wolf don't jive. His friends know that.
And I'm thinking, oh my God, I'm his friend. I would have given anything to him. I mean, and I didn't consider him not my friend, but no, I never achieved that stature or status. But anyway, so that's what happened.
But one of the reasons that I put it in the profile that's been looking to get lost and I've used it before is the idea that I want the reader to understand who's telling the story. I don't want people to think that I'm the ultimate hipster or I'm the person who knows everything or the author of this or that, you know, I'm some kind of, you know, I just felt like this really describes who's telling the story and the context in which you can understand the story. In some ways, it may be an answers the very best Hamilton question, although I don't know if she would accept that. But you know, I'm trying to depretance the story and make the narrative voice and the person who is in the story is unquestionably me.
But it's a persona. It isn't all of me. You know, it isn't, it's using myself as a way to give Wolf, to frame Wolf and also to, in some way, to recognize the limitations. I mean, if I had come out of the blues world, if I were another blues singer, I would have come out completely differently and I didn't want to pretend to be anything else than what I was and I didn't want, and I wanted people to be able to see the portrait in terms of a realistic.
Holler Wolf's Holland from Adarlin concludes part one of this interview with Peter Garoundek. Join us on Jazbeat 55 to hear Garoundek discussing Johnny Cash, Dick Curlers and Ray Charles.