Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
There survive, as far as I can determine, no other images of people using atlatls, anywhere in the world, New or Old. This would be the only one. A weapon that kept our species in meat for thirty thousand years and has something to do with our dominance on the planet. The hunter who holds it is just releasing the missile from its shaft.
Two thousand years ago a Woodland explorer, a contemporary of the artists who made those intricate panels of birds, might have passed this little picture—farther from his own time even than he is from ours—and wondered who made it, or what it meant.
UNKNOWN BARDS
Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey. I was a junior editor at the
Oxford American
magazine, which at that time had its offices in Oxford, Mississippi; Fahey, then almost sixty and living in room 5 of a welfare motel outside Portland, Oregon, was himself, whatever that was: a channeler of some kind, certainly; a “pioneer” (as he once described his great hero, Charley Patton) “in the externalization through music of strange, weird, even ghastly emotional states.” He composed instrumental guitar collages from snatches of other, older songs. At their finest these could become harmonic chambers in which different dead styles spoke to one another. My father had told me stories of seeing him in Memphis in ’69. Fahey trotted out his “Blind Joe Death” routine at the fabled blues festival that summer, appearing to inhabit, as he approached the stage in dark glasses, the form of an aged sharecropper, hobbling and being led by the arm. He meant it as a postmodern prank at the expense of the all-white, authenticity-obsessed country-blues cognoscenti, and was at the time uniquely qualified to pull it. Five years earlier he’d helped lead one of the little bands of enthusiasts, a special-ops branch of the folk revival, who staged barnstorming road trips through the South in search of surviving notables from the prewar country blues or “folk blues” recording period (roughly 1925 to 1939).
Fahey was someone whose destiny followed the track of a deep inner flaw, like a twisted apple. He grew up comfortable in Washington, D.C., fixated from an early age on old guitar playing, fingerpicking. After college he went west to study philosophy at Berkeley, then transferred at a deciding moment to UCLA’s folklore program, a degree from which equipped him nicely to do what he wanted: hunt for old bluesmen. He took part personally in the tracking down and dragging back before the public glare of both Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White and, in a crowning moment, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James, the dark prince of the country blues, a thin black man with pale eyes and an alien falsetto who in 1931 recorded a batch of songs so sad and unsettling it’s said that people paid him on street corners not to sing. Fahey and two associates found him in a charity hospital in Tunica, Mississippi, in 1964, dying with cruel slowness of stomach cancer. We know you’re a genius, they told him. People are ready now. Play for us.
“I don’t know,” he supposedly answered. “Skippy tired.”
I’d been told to get hold of Fahey on a fact-checking matter. The magazine was running a piece about Geeshie Wiley (or Geechie, or Gitchie, and in any case that was likely only a nickname or stage moniker, signifying that she had Gullah blood, or that her skin and hair were red tinted). She’s perhaps the one contemporary of James’s who ever equaled him in the scary beauty department, his spiritual bride. All we know about Wiley is what we don’t know about her: where she was born, or when; what she looked like, where she lived, where she’s buried. She had a playing partner named Elvie Thomas concerning whom even less is known (about Elvie there are no rumors, even). Musicians who claimed to have seen Geeshie Wiley in Jackson, Mississippi, offered sketchy details to researchers over the years: that she could have been from Natchez, Mississippi (and was maybe part Indian), that she sang with a medicine show. In a sadistic tease on the part of fate, the Mississippi blues scholar and champion record collector Gayle Dean Wardlow (he who found Robert Johnson’s death certificate) did an interview in the late sixties with a white man named H. C. Speir, a onetime music store owner from Jackson who moonlighted as a talent scout for prewar labels dabbling in so-called race records (meaning simply music marketed to blacks). This Speir almost certainly met Wiley around 1930 and told his contacts at the Paramount company in Grafton, Wisconsin, about her—he may even have taken the train trip north with her and Elvie, as he was known to have done with other of his “finds”—but although at least two of Wiley and Thomas’s six surviving songs (or “sides,” in the favored jargon) had been rediscovered by collectors when Wardlow made his ’69 visit to Speir’s house, they were not yet accessible outside a clique of two or three aficionados in the East. Wardlow didn’t know to ask about her, in other words, although he was closer to her at that moment than anyone would ever get again, sitting half a mile from where she’d sung, talking with a man who’d seen her face and watched her tune her guitar.
Not many ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Geeshie Wiley’s. Three of the six songs Wiley and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest country-blues performances ever etched into shellac, and one of them, “Last Kind Words Blues,” is an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle.
People have argued that the song represents a lone survival of an older, already vanishing, minstrel style; others that it was a one-off spoor, an ephemeral hybrid that originated and died with Wiley and Thomas, their attempt to play a tune they’d heard by a fire somewhere. The verses don’t follow the AAB repeating pattern common to the blues, and the keening melody isn’t like any other recorded example from that or any period. Likewise with the song’s chords: “Last Kind Words Blues” opens with a big, plonking, menacing E but quickly withdraws into A minor and hovers there awhile (the early blues was almost never played in a minor key). The serpentine dual guitar interplay is no less startling, with little sliding lead parts, presumably Elvie’s, moving in and out of counterpoint. At times it sounds like four hands obeying a single mind and conjures scenes of endless practicing, the vast boredoms of the medicine-show world. The words begin,
The last kind words I heard my daddy say,
Lord, the last kind words I heard my daddy say,
“If I die, if I die, in the German War,
I want you to send my money,
Send it to my mother-in-law.
“If I get killed, if I get killed,
Please don’t bury my soul.
I cry, just leave me out, let the buzzards eat me whole.”
The subsequent verse had a couple of unintelligible words in it, whether from mumbling on Wiley’s part or from the heavily crackling static that comes along with deteriorated 78 rpm discs. One could hear her saying pretty clearly, “When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field,” after which it sounded like she might be saying, “If I don’t bring you flowers / I’ll bring you [a boutonniere?].” That verged on nonsense; more to the point, it seemed nonidiomatic. But the writer of the piece I was fact-checking needed to quote the line, and my job was to work it out, or prove to the satisfaction of my bosses that this couldn’t be done. It was Ed Komara, in those days keeper of the sacred B.B. King Blues Archive at Ole Miss, who suggested contacting Fahey. Actually, what I think he said was, “John Fahey knows shit like that.”
A front-desk attendant agreed to put a call through to Fahey’s room. From subsequent reading, I gather that at this time Fahey was making the weekly rent by scavenging and reselling rare classical music LPs, for which he must have developed an extraordinary eye, the profit margins being almost imperceptible. I pictured him prone on the bed, gray bearded and possibly naked, his overabundant corpus spread out like something that got up only to eat: that’s how interviewers discovered him, in the few profiles I’d read. He was hampered at this point by decades of addiction and the bad heart that would kill him two years later, but even before all that he’d been famously cranky, so it was strange to find him ramblingly familiar from the moment he picked up the phone. A friend of his to whom I later described this conversation said, “Of course he was nice; you didn’t want to talk about him.”
Fahey asked for fifteen minutes to get his “beatbox” hooked up and locate the tape with the song on it. I called him back at the appointed time.
“Man,” he said, “I can’t tell what she’s saying there. It’s definitely not ‘boutonniere.’”
“No guesses?”
“Nah.”
We switched to another mystery word, a couple of verses on: Wiley sings, “My mother told me, just before she died / Lord, [precious?] daughter, don’t you be so wild.” “Shit, I don’t have any fucking idea,” Fahey said. “It doesn’t really matter, anyway. They always just said any old shit.”
That seemed to be the end of our experiment. Fahey said, “Give me about an hour. I’m going to spend some time with it.”
I took the tape the magazine had loaned me and went to my car. Outside it was bleak north Mississippi cold, with the wind unchecked by the slight undulations of flatness they call hills down there; it formed little pockets of frozen air in your clothes that zapped you if you shifted your weight. I turned the bass all the way down on the car’s stereo and the treble all the way up, trying to isolate the frequency of Wiley’s voice, and drove around town for the better part of an hour, going the speed limit. The problem words refused to give themselves up, but as the tape ran, the song itself emerged around them, in spite of them, and I heard it for the first time.
“Last Kind Words Blues” is about a ghost lover. When Wiley says “kind,” as in, “The last kind words I heard my daddy say” she doesn’t mean it like we do; she doesn’t mean “nice”; she means the word in its older sense of natural (with the implication that everything her “daddy” says afterward is unnatural, is preternatural). Southern idiom has retained that usage, in phrases involving the word
kindly
, as in “I thank you kindly,” which, and the
OED
bears this out, represents a clinging vestige of the primary, archaic meaning: not “I thank you politely and sweetly” but “I thank you in a way that’s appropriate to your deed.” There’s nothing “kind,” in the everyday way, about the cold instructions her man gives for the disposal of his remains. That’s what I mean about the blues hewing to idiom. It doesn’t make mistakes like that.
Her old man has died, as he seems to have expected: the first three verses establish that, in tone if not in utterance. Now the song moves into a no-man’s-land. She’s lost. Her mother warned her about men, remember, “just before she died.” The daughter didn’t listen, and now it’s too late. She wanders.
I went to the depot, I looked up at the sun,
Cried, “Some train don’t come,
Gon’ be some walking done.”
Where does she have to get to so badly she can’t wait for another train? There’s a clue, because she’s still talking to him, or he to her, one isn’t sure. “When you see me coming, look ’cross the rich man’s field,” if I don’t bring you something, I’ll bring you something else, at least that much was clear, and part of an old story: if I don’t bring you silver, I’ll bring you gold, et cetera.
Only then, in the song’s third and last movement, does it become truly strange.
The Mississippi River, you know it’s deep and wide,
I can stand right here,
See my baby from the other side.
This is one of the countless stock, or “floating,” verses in the country blues, and players passed them around like gossip, much of the art to the music’s poetry lying in arrangement rather than invention, in an almost haiku approach, by which drama and even narrative could be generated through sheer purity of image and intensity of juxtaposition. What has Wiley done with these lines? Normally they run, “I can see my baby [or my “brownie”] / from this other side.” But there’s something spooky happening to the spatial relationships. If I’m standing right here, how am I seeing you from the other side? The preposition is off. Unless I’m slipping out of my body, of course, and joining you on the other side. Wiley closes off the song as if to confirm these suspicions:
What you do to me, baby,
it never gets out of me.
I believe I’ll see ya,
After I cross the deep blue sea.
It’s one of the oldest death metaphors and must have been ready to hand, thanks to Wiley’s nonsecular prewar peers. “Precious Jesus, gently guide me,” goes a 1926 gospel chorus, “o’er that ocean dark and wide.” Done gone over. That meant dead. Not up, over.
Greil Marcus, the writer of the piece I was fact-checking, mentioned the extraordinary “tenderness” of the “What you do to me, baby” line. It can’t be denied. There’s a tremendous weariness, too. “It never gets out of me,” and part of her wishes it would, this long disease, your memory. (“The blues is a low down achin’ heart disease,” sang Robert Johnson, echoing Kokomo Arnold echoing Clara Smith echoing a 1913 sheet music number written by a white minstrel performer and titled “Nigger Blues.”) There’s nothing to look forward to but the reunion death may bring. That’s the narrow, haunted cosmos of the song, which one hears as a kind of reverberation, and which keeps people up at night.